Cup of Coffee: January 29, 2024

Good morning!

Today we talk about a minor leaguer who is now set for life, four minor signings (all the signings are minor lately, it seems), and the Nationals making some minor uniform changes. A bit more major: some jackwagons committed a particularly irksome baseball-related crime.

In Other Stuff, the Gator Family says thank you, I talk some about Marvel movies in China, and something old is new again: train robberies.

 The Daily Briefing

Tigers, prospect Colt Keith agree to a long-term deal

The Detroit Tigers and top prospect Colt Keith have agreed to a six-year contract extension with three club options. The deal is worth just under $29 million guaranteed, but it can max out at nine years and $82 million if all the options are exercised. Keith, by the way, has not yet made his big league debut.

Keith, 22, was a fifth-round draft pick in 2020. He is a lefty infielder who has played both second and third base, though he has not demonstrated particularly great shakes at either position. It’s possible that first base is in his future. He has, however, pretty much raked at each of his minor league stops, with a line of .300/.382/.512 over three seasons. Last year he hit .287/.369/.521 with 13 homers in 67 games at Triple-A Toledo and .306/.380/.552 with 27 home runs in 126 games between Double-A and Triple-A. Even if his glove relegates him to first base or DH duties, it would seem that his bat would make that worth it.

The Tigers have obviously concluded that Keith has nothing left to prove in the minors, at least with that bat. And now that he is locked up and service time is irrelevant, he’ll almost certainly begin the 2024 season on the big league roster, probably as the Tigers starting second baseman. At least at first.

Cubs sign Héctor Neris

The Chicago Cubs have signed reliever Héctor Neris to a one-year, $9 million deal. There’s also a $9 million team option for 2025 that converts to a player option if he makes 60 appearances.

Neris, 34, posted a strong 1.71 ERA (246 ERA+) in 68.1 innings over 71 games last year for Houston. That was something of an outlier for him, however. I mean, he’s good, but he’s not that good. And considering that he got those results despite his walk rate going up pretty significantly, it’s fair to say that he was likely pitching in some pretty good luck.

All of that said, this is a nice signing for the Cubbies, who will likely slot Neris in as a setup man for closer Adbert Alzolay. Or, if Alzolay falters, they can give save opportunities to Neris.

Mets re-sign Adam Ottavino

The New York Mets re-signed free agent reliever Adam Ottavino to a one-year, $4.5 million contract.

This will be Ottavino’s third season as a Metropolitan, having posting a solid 2.62 ERA (155 ERA+) and 141/45 K/BB ratio across 84.2 innings in 97 appearances over the last two years. The 38 year-old righty figures to serve as Edwin Díaz’s setup man in 2024.

The Royals sign Adam Frazier

The Kansas City Royals have signed utilityman Adam Frazier to a one-year, $4.5 million contract. Frazier will make $2 million this season with an $8.5 million mutual option for next season and a $2.5 million buyout.

Frazier, 32, will be joining his fifth team in four seasons, having spent last season with the Orioles, 2022 with the Mariners, and splitting 2021 between the Pirates and the Padres. Last year in Baltimore he hit .240/.300/.396 (94 OPS+) with 13 homers and 60 RBI over 141 games. He was mostly a second baseman for the O’s, but he has played short, third, and all three outfield positions and figures to be a utilityman for Kansas City.

Carlos Carrasco returns to Cleveland 

Or maybe Columbus as it’s a minor league deal, but either way, Cookie is Ohio bound. If he makes the Guardians his base salary will be $2 million with incentives.

Carrasco, 36, pitched for Cleveland for 11 years, leading the American League with 18 wins in 2017. He went 88-73 with a 3.77 ERA in 242 games (195 starts) with Cleveland from 2009 to 2020 before being shipped to the Mets in the Francisco Lindor deal. He went 19-20 in three seasons with the Mets, posting a pretty ugly 5.21 ERA (77 ERA+) in 61 starts, all while battling a number of injuries.

Now he goes home again where we’ll see if he has anything left in the tank.

The Nationals made some uniform tweaks 

The Washington Nationals revealed some uniform updates on Friday. The standard home uni is staying the same, but they are changing their road uniforms and are getting a new home alternate. Also: they’re getting rid of their cherry blossom-themed City Connect uniform after this season because, apparently, no one is allowed to have nice things anymore.

Here is the new roadie and home alternate:

The one on the left with the block "Washington" lettering will now be the primary road jersey. It replaces the script “Washington” they wore beginning in 2011 and on through last year. On the right is the pullover home alternate with the cool Capitol building logo that I’ve always liked, even if I’d rather see it on a regular jersey instead of a pullover, which is a bit too casual for my baseball uniform tastes.

The Nats also announced that 2024 will be the last year for their cool-ass City Connect uniforms:

I don’t know if this because Nike is winding down City Connects in general or if the early, 2022 City Connect adopters are getting a second generation eventually or what. All I know is that while some of the City Connects are cool and others are less-than-cool, Washington’s is really, really great and it’s shame they aren’t gonna hold on to ‘em after this year.

Some jackwagons stole a Jackie Robinson statue 

Vandals/thieves stole a statue of Jackie Robinson from a youth baseball complex in Wichita, Kansas, early Friday. They just cut the thing off at the ankles, loaded it into a pickup truck, and drove away with it.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

The statue, which was erected in 2021, was commissioned by a nonprofit Little League organization called League 42, which was not shockingly named after Robinson's number with the Dodgers. It cost them $50,000. They are offering a $2,500 reward for its return and a $5,000 reward for the apprehension of the jackwagons who took it.

Other Stuff

A thank you from Old Gator and Rowena Gator

The GoFundMe for Old Gator to go to the Cormac McCarthy conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico next month was a rousing success, with Cup of Coffee subscribers giving it the final push over the top.

Which has inspired this note of thanks from the Gator Family:

Nice bearded dragon.

Happy to lend a hand, folks.

U.S. films didn’t crack the top-10 in the Chinese market in 2023

The New York Times reports that 2023 was a bad year for Hollywood at the Chinese box office, in that no American movie broke the list of top 10 highest-grossing movies. That also happened in 2020, but that was chalked up to the pandemic. The last time it happened before 2020 was well over a decade prior. In some years seven or eight of the top-ten movies in China have been U.S. films.

According to the Times story the box office slump for U.S. movies is mostly a function of political tensions between the U.S. and China combined with a maturing Chinese movie industry that has done a much better job of making films the domestic audience likes and which reflect Chinese values more than the U.S. product which was previously being lapped up.

I don’t have much intelligent to say about all of that, but, I am in the process of reading that big book about the MCU which came out last fall and, over the weekend, I happened to read the chapter about all of the things Marvel did to try to crack the Chinese market starting around 2011-12. What they have done is in keeping what most of the other American studios have done to appease Chinese authorities in order to gain access to their market, often changing scripts, adding Chinese characters and actors, and shoehorning in Chinese product placements to do so. Some various nuggets from that chapter:

• China delays the release of most American movies for as much as a month or two after their international openings, and limits the profit take of American studios. They lift these restrictions, however, if a movie checks a number of boxes which please the government. Part of this involves production credits and whether Chinese companies took part in the actual making of the movie. It can also involve the inclusion of Chinese actors, characters, settings and the like and, of course, it prefers political content that reflects Chinese sensibilities and moves to block those films which offend those sensibilities;
• The first “Avengers” movie in 2012 did extremely well in China, but it wasn’t specifically calibrated for that market and Marvel only got a fraction of the profits it made there. Between that movie and “Iron Man 3,” however, Marvel forged a relationship with a consultancy that specifically helps U.S. studios get movies placed in China without the blackout period or profit restrictions, and it took that consultancy’s advice to heart;
• The version of “Iron Man 3” released in China contained four extra minutes of footage, all of it aimed at pleasing Chinese authorities. The character of Dr. Wu, who fixes Tony Stark’s shrapnel-threatened heart, was played by a major Chinese movie star and gets a lot more screen time in their version than the fleeting appearance we saw. He is also given a Chinese assistant who is wholly absent from the version of the movie released elsewhere;
• There is added footage of Chinese citizens cheering on Iron Man, which is pretty damn gratuitous considering that the movie takes place primarily in California, Tennessee, Florida, and in the air somewhere in U.S. airspace;
• There are also scenes in which Tony Stark and other characters conspicuously drink something called Gu Li Duo, which is a Chinese milk drink. The scenes are both product placement and propaganda, as there had been a major scandal in which a Chinese dairy was found to have sold mercury-tainted baby formula. The Chinese government wanted to bolster consumer confidence in milk, asked Marvel to help it, and Marvel obliged;
• While “Iron Man 3” did great business in China, Chinese audiences actually reacted pretty negatively to it. They correctly identified that Dr. Wu — who was played up big in Chinese trailers — was a throwaway character tossed in to help the film market Chinese products and pander to the government’s interests. The key here was that, for as much as China restricts internet access, a lot of people there know how to work around it and could see the version of the movie the rest of the world saw. When they noticed just how small Dr. Wu's role was in the U.S. and international versions, and how there was no milk propaganda either, they, quite correctly, felt condescended to and manipulated; and
• Because I read that chapter over the weekend, on Saturday I re-watched “Iron Man 3” for the first time in many years. It really, really sucks, y’all. I and a lot of people thought that at the time, but then it somehow started to get talked up by people as being good. No, it is not good. Those people are wrong. It has so many flaws and so many lazy storytelling techniques that I was actually getting angry. I’ll save that rant for another day, however.

Despite Chinese moviegoers being irked about “Iron Man 3,” it and the next several Marvel movies that were released, most of which were geared and/or censored for the Chinese market, did big business in China. That began to change with 2021’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which was put in blackout/profit restriction by the Chinese government because its star, Simu Liu, had given an interview in which he was critical of the Chinese government a few years prior. “The Eternals” was also blacked out partially because its director, Chloé Zhao, had done the same back in 2013 and partially because the movie features a gay couple. The same thing happened with “Thor: Love and Thunder” (which was a fairly gay movie by Marvel’s standards) Even The World’s Biggest Marvel Mark™ acknowledges that Marvel’s product has gone pretty far downhill since 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” so maybe that has played a role, but it’s also pretty clear that China is no longer super happy with the MCU.

I don’t offer any of that as support for a refutation of anything in the New York Times story. I just mention it because I happened to read that bit recently. I also do not offer it as some sort of singular example of how Marvel or any other movie studio has compromised its product for political reasons, because it happens a hell of a lot.

Indeed, earlier in the MCU book there’s some stuff about how, immediately after 9/11, the Bush Administration took meetings with Hollywood executives, encouraging them to play up certain themes and play down certain themes in the interest of supporting the then nascent War on Terror. And guess what: Hollywood has happily complied for a couple of decades now. So much so that even the MCU, which did not officially begin until nearly seven years later, incorporated many of those ideas and continues to catch a lot of reasonable flak for its pro-military stuff to this day.

I’ll have more on that and all manner of other MCU thoughts when I eventually finish this book and get around to organizing my thoughts. It could be a bit as I’m sort of dipping in and dipping out of it for various reasons. Either way, it’s a pretty fascinating read that neither cheerleads for the MCU nor fails to fairly acknowledge its successes. Including, at times, artistic ones. But, boy howdy, after reading how the Marvel approach to moviemaking has so completely flipped the usual cinematic creative process on its head and, in some cases, discarded it altogether, I totally get why folks like Martin Scorsese get crabby about it.

The return of train robberies 

Back in 2022 this photo and some later video footage of train tracks near downtown Los Angeles went viral:

All of that trash came from packages that were pillaged from of freight trains that had been sitting in the area. It was huge, glaring evidence of just how much damn stuff was being stolen off of trains in the Brave New Amazon Era.

The photo and what spun out of it also led to a lot of political jibber jabber, with some people arguing that law and order was breaking down and others using it to lambast income inequality, homelessness, and our consumerist age. I had some feelings about that too, but I was mostly taken with it because I’m an old timey guy who sees almost everything through a lens of 20th century pop culture. As such, my first thought was “hey, cool, train robberies are back!”

I’m not the only one. The latest New York Times magazine has a long, in-depth story this new era of cargo and package theft, some of the brazen outlaws behind it, and the economics which both drive the theft and prevent it from being reined-in (note: that should be a free link).

There are a lot of fascinating aspects to this story, ranging from the changes in consumer and retailer habits and the global supply chain which have driven the surge in cargo theft to the the logistics of said theft. One key takeaway: this new era of train robberies is just as wild as the Wild West:

Up in the cab, Hall told me, he regularly passed stopped trains and saw people clambering up ladders or loading cargo into their trucks pulled up alongside the tracks. Sometimes he saw people breaking into moving trains too. He would call the rail police dispatcher and keep going. Those container doors, meanwhile, stayed open, he said, trailing boxes as the train rolled on. Hall saw all kinds of merchandise spread out across the tracks, including tires and televisions. Engineers don’t stop for this flotsam of global capitalism; they run over it. Once, near the Dragoon Mountains, in southeast Arizona, Hall drove a train through a desolate quarter-mile of track littered with hundreds of pairs of Nike sneakers. “Between L.A. and Tucson is where I know a lot of theft happens,” Hall said.

The most extreme type of modern train theft occurs when thieves cut the air-compression brake hoses that run between train cars, thereby triggering an emergency braking system. When that happens, the engineer stays in the cab and the conductor walks the length of the stopped train, trying to locate the source of the problem. (Thieves can also stop a train by decoupling some of its cars.) Of course, if a train is miles long, that walk takes a while. In the meantime, the pilferers unload.

Again, I don’t have much to say about this other than to note that it is a very good read which touches on all manner of current social, political, and economic trends. And, as with the Marvel item, it reminds me of something else I read recently. In this case, a Wikipedia dive into the 1963 Great Train Robbery in the UK. I get lost in stuff like that fairly frequently, but I can’t remember the last time I spent as much as I did on that. I mean, it almost makes me wanna watch the Phil Collins movie “Buster.” It’s just a groovy kind of . . . reading.

Anyway, you should spend some time reading about train robberies today. You’ll be glad you did.

Have a great day everyone.

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