Cup of Coffee: June 26, 2024

Good morning!

Today we talk about benches-clearing in San Diego, a bad Gerrit Cole start, and how, when it comes to Vlad Guerrero Jr.’s take on the Yankees, things can change. We also discuss a trade of a guy I didn’t realize was still playing, a can of poop, the company that is gobbling up minor league teams, a possible new name for an elbow procedure, Jesse Winker forgetting where he’s supposed to be, and the Mets catching a stray in a new pop song.

In Other Stuff I rant a bit about the New York Times’ approach to tomorrow’s debate, express my extreme disappointment at the guy from Jamiroquai, think of how, um, seductive (?) Rosa Parks was, consider an underrated tourist destination, and bear witness to an anti-labor gambit that really takes some beans.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Pirates 9 Reds 5: Let’s see how the first inning began for Reds starter Hunter Greene:

That was six pitches into the the game. Seven pitches later Bryan Reynolds there would homer to extend his hitting streak to 22 games and to make it 2-0 Pittsburgh. Greene would then walk a guy who stole second and scored on a Nick Gonzales single. He’d last three more innings after that but the Pirates strung together five straight singles to begin the third and Greene eventually gave up six runs on seven hits with two walks. Hopefully his night ended with some Alka-Seltzer.

Mets 9, Yankees 7: It was not Gerrit Cole’s night as he gave up six runs on seven hits — four of which were home runs — in four innings, walked four dudes and didn’t strike out anyone. Kinda concerning. Two of the dingers came from Mark Vientos with Harrison Bader and Brandon Nimmo also taking Cole downtown. The Mets extended their lead to 9-1 by the sixth and then held on as the Yankees attempted to mount a late comeback.

I read like three different game stories from this one and every one referred to feats and events like “most home runs from a player in a Subway Series game” as if the Subway Series was the World Series or something with its own separate record-keeping system. I’m pretty sure that the players mostly consider Mets-Yankees meetups the same as matchups between any other teams but the media, man, it still thinks that such meetings are special 30 years into it.

Diamondbacks 5, Twins 4: Ketel Marte hit a two-run homer in the first and Eugenio Suárez tripled in a run in the second as the Snakes built an early 4-0 lead. The Twins fought back to tie it but Marte struck again with a slow-rolling RBI single that put Arizona ahead for good in the seventh. “What can you say about Marte?” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said after the game. “It was an emotional win, I'm proud of these guys fighting back.” I get it, Torey, but that’s a lot for a Tuesday, man. Let’s dial it back. Still a lot of week to get through.

Padres 9, Nationals 7: Benches cleared in the first inning in the weirdest way. Jurickson Profar, who hit the walkoff single in Monday night’s wild-ass game, was coming to bat. Nats catcher Keibert Ruiz jawed at him some and then and put a hand on Profar’s shoulder as Profar was digging in before his at-bat. At that point Manny Machado, who was on the on-deck circle, walked up to the plate and put his hand on Ruiz’s shoulder, which caused the benches to clear. No one threw any punches or anything. I’m guessing today we’ll hear about the unwritten rules relating to touching opposing players.

As soon as that settled down plate umpire Brian Walsh warned both teams, and then Nationals pitcher MacKenzie Gore promptly plunked Profar but wasn’t ejected for some reason. Padres manager Mike Shildt was ejected, however, after he came onto the field, asking why Gore was not ejected, albeit not too politely. Still, good question, Mike. I guess warnings aren’t binding these days. Machado then came to the plate, this time when he was supposed to, and knocked Profar and himself in with a two-run homer. Then in the sxith Profar then hit a grand slam which turned a 5-4 game into a 9-4 game. These crazy kids play one more this afternoon. Let’s hope we get some more chaos.

Dodgers 4, White Sox 3: Shohei Ohtani homered in the top of the first, the White Sox responded with three in the bottom of the first, Freddie Freeman tied it up with a two-run shot in the third, and then Ohtani put the Dodgers up for good with a fourth inning RBI single. It was a bullpen game for Los Angeles and seven Dodgers pitchers held Chicago scoreless for the final eight frames of the contest. At the exact halfway point the White Sox are 21-60. The 1962 Mets are officially on notice.

Tigers 4, Phillies 1. Tarik Skubal was dominant, allowing just three hits over seven shutout frames while striking out seven. Ranger Suárez was just as good for his first four innings but the wheels fell off in the fifth, with the Tigers loading the bases with no one out and eventually plating four.

Guardians 10, Orioles 8: Pitching was AWOL in this one, but José Ramírez and Gabriel Arias each drove in three — Ramírez on a three-run jack, Arias on a two-run double and an RBI single — to out-bash the O’s. Cleveland runs its winning streak to seven games.

Rays 11, Mariners 3: Ben Rortvedt hit a two-run homer and knocked in four. Just before that homer Taylor Walls tripled in a pair of runs during a four-run sixth. Isaac Paredes also drove in two as the Rays win their seventh game in nine tries and drag themselves back to .500.

Blue Jays 9, Red Sox 4: Toronto ends its seven-game losing streak thanks to Vladimir Guerrero hitting pair of two-run doubles and George Springer hitting a two-run homer. The Red Sox throwing the ball around also helped the Blue Jay cause.

Astros 5, Rockies 2: Hunter Brown shut the Rockies out for six innings, striking out seven. The Astros hitters gave him a 5-0 first inning lead, all from RBI singles, that held up the whole way. That’s six straight wins for Houston.

Marlins 2, Royals 1: Seth Lugo held the Marlins to just two singles in six scoreless innings but the Fish had four hits in the seventh, scoring both of their runs with two out against Royals relievers. One came after Otto López doubled and then scored when second baseman Maikel Garcia threw away a ground ball. The second came on a combo Jazz Chisholm infield single/Will Smith throwing error. Doesn’t sound like a game one would wanna sit through in the Kansas City heat.

Brewers 3, Rangers 1: Milwaukee did the old opener/bulk guy thing and the bulk guy, Bryse Wilson, shut the Rangers out between the second and the eighth. Jackson Chourio had an RBI single in the third, Joey Ortiz homered to give the Brewers a 2-1 lead in the fifth, and Rhys Hoskins singled in an insurance run in the seventh.

Angels 7, Athletics 5: Mickey Moniak hit a wall-scraping grand slam in the fourth inning and walked and was doubled in by Jo Adell in the sixth. Tyler Ward’s seventh inning homer was icing on top. The Angels have won three of four.

Giants 5, Cubs 1: Kyle Hendricks pitched well again, allowing just two over seven, but the Chicago offense didn’t feel like getting out of bed yesterday, with six Giants pitchers combining to allow just four hits all evening. Matt Chapman's two-run single highlighted a three-run eighth inning that put this one away for San Francisco.

Atlanta vs. Cardinals — POSTPONED:

🎵 Looking out the door I see the rain
Fall upon the funeral mourners
Parading in a wake of sad relations
As their shoes fill up with water

Maybe I'm too young
To keep good love from going wrong
But tonight you're on my mind
So... you'll never know 🎵

The Daily Briefing

Things change

A couple of years ago Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said he would never sign with the New York Yankees. He said "I like to play in New York. I like to kill the Yankees. I would never sign with the Yankees, not even (when I'm) dead.” Back in April he doubled down on those sentiments, saying “It’s a personal thing. It goes back with my family. That’s my decision, and I will never change that.”

What a difference a really bad first half of the season for the Blue Jays — and some big Yankees injuries — makes. I say that because before Monday's game, Guerrero spoke with the Spanish language outlet Virus Deportivo and said this:

"I'm a worker, professional, and I go out on the field and play . . . Sometimes you say things -- it's not that I am trying to take back what I said about the Yankees, what do I say, I don't hold back what I said about the Yankees -- but this is a business. I sat down and spoke with my dad and my family, and this is a business . . . Like I tell you, I'm a player and if a team picks me or if they do something, it's because they need it, obviously, and I'll be happy to help any team. But right now, I'm just focused on helping my team try to get out of this bad streak."

Not that anyone should give Vlad a hard time about this. When you’re primed to compete against the big dogs — and when you want to stir up some excitement in the fan base — you say one thing. When the situation on the ground changes, you say another. And he’s right: it is a business. None of the clubs adhere to some sort of competitive code in which they won’t do whatever is best for them at any given time — hell, the Yankees and Red Sox have made some trades in recent years — so it’d be naive to think that players shouldn’t be allowed to take the same approach to things.

And really, Vlad would be a perfect fit in New York, even if it’d make Jays fans crazy. I sorta wanna see it.

Brewers acquire Dallas Keuchel from the Mariners

The Milwaukee Brewers have acquired Dallas Keuchel from the Seattle Mariners.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize that Keuchel is still pitching. I sure as hell was when this crossed the wire. But he is. Indeed, he’s made 13 starts for the Tacoma Rainers this season, posting a 7-4 record, a 3.93 ERA, and a K/BB ratio of 45/22 in 71 innings. Not great, but not terrible for a hitter-friendly league. And at least he’s showing he’s healthy and still pretty competent at age 36.

The M’s are getting Cash Considerations. That guy must be a head case. He’s been traded sooo many times. Clubhouse cancer if you ask me.

A can of . . . what now?

Adam Duvall spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how he’s been hitting the ball just as hard as he ever has, with the same launch angle that he always has, yet the balls keep falling short of the wall. Duvall:

“If you look at the numbers, they’re very similar. It’s just completely different results. I could easily have 13, 14 homers right now, and I would enjoy looking up at the scoreboard. I hit a ball in Baltimore, 106 (mph) at (a 35-degree launch angle), can of poop. Can of poop. Like, why is that a can of poop now? I don’t know. Then I hit a ball to right field, (101 mph with a 26-degree launch angle), it was an out. It’s like, why are those balls outs? Why are those balls outs? I don’t know. I can’t explain that.”

I’ve heard “can of corn” before, but I’ll admit “can of poop” is a new one to me. Well, apart from Pringles cans, but I’m petty sure that’s not what Duvall is talking about.

I’m sure this is fine

Yesterday the company which owns 34 of the 120 affiliated minor league baseball teams, Diamond Baseball Holdings, announced that it has reached an agreement to buy a 35th: the Triple-A Charlotte Knights. The deal is pending MLB approval, but there is a 100% probability that Major League Baseball will approve it. Indeed, there is little reason to believe that MLB won’t eventually let DBH max out at the 56 teams — 14 per minor league level — which the current rules allow for multi-team ownership groups.

When DBH first started snapping up minor league clubs a few years ago my immediate suspicion would be that it’d gut the teams’ front offices, run them in a centralized fashion, and do the sort of value-mining that private equity typically does when it acquires newspapers or what have you. That, it should be noted, has not come to pass.

As Baseball America noted in a profile of DBH last month, it has kept existing front office staff on the payroll, it has paid for stadium improvements, it has helped local management book events and entertainment at their parks which it might not have been able to do before, and it has otherwise taken a basically taken a hands-off approach. When asked by BA about the end-game — because private equity always has an end-game — DBH representatives said that the baseball side of things tends to do just fine but that it wanted to make more money with these clubs primarily by using the minor league parks to host non-baseball events like concerts and things. The tapping of revenues that individual ownership groups — most of which are small, family operations — can’t tap as easily.

Which, OK. I get that. I’m the last guy who is gonna romanticize minor league baseball like it so often gets romanticized. And if I’m ever tempted to, I remind myself that the Governor of Ohio and his family owns the Asheville Tourists and a great many of the other independent minor league owners have been shifty car salesman-types, the sort of which I don’t usually go to bat for. There’s nothing pure in this world, especially the stuff that gets explicitly sold to you as pure.

But I can’t shake the notion that an arm of a massive private equity concern coming in and gobbling up half of the minor leagues is gonna lead to bad things. I’d love to be surprised in this regard, but if it doesn’t lead to bad things it’ll be a first.

Nomenclature

Yesterday I said that we needed a pithier name for the internal brace procedure that is increasingly being used for UCL tears. If the older surgery gets “Tommy John,” what can we call the newer one that is less clunky than “internal brace procedure?”

Subscriber Rich M posted this comment yesterday which I think gets us on the right track:

According to a fangraphs article, Seth Maness and Mitch Harris were the 1st MLB players to get the brace procedure. Maybe combine there names, you could call it the Mitch Maness procedure?

I like that thinking. I’ll try to remember to go with that as much as possible.

What are you doing Jesse Winker?

I missed this before posting yesterday but in the bottom of the tenth of Monday night’s nail-biter between the Nationals and the Padres, Nats outfielder Jesse Winker decided that the best use of his time was to walk into the crowd and start barking at a 66 year-old fan who was giving the Nats pitcher hell. He didn’t go all Anthony Rendon and put hands on the guy, but he did engage in some back and forth. It’s hard to hear the exchange but at the end you do hear the fan say “I’m 66, what are you, 26?” which at least sort of implies that Winker was challenging the guy somehow.

Whatever the case, and no matter what was said, someone with the Nationals probably needs to have a sit-down with Jesse Winker because that was a total horseshit look for him. Especially given the game situation.

Bells and Whistles

The band Bright Eyes released a new single yesterday. It’s called “Bells and Whistles.” It has this verse:

🎵 No you shouldn't go home with the SoHo girl
'Cause she only wants materials
And you shouldn't place bets on the New York Mets
'Cause at best it's hypothetical
Expensive seats in a field of dreams
U-turns in limousines
Got to get around the detour when it's blocked
Bells and whistles, fancy cheap thrills cost a lot🎵

I’m not sure what that means exactly but I feel like if your ballclub is catching strays from Conor Oberst like this you should probably reassess things.

Other Stuff

The New York Times’ approach to fact-checking

I read in the New York Times newsletter yesterday that The Paper of Record has assigned 60 reporters — 60! — to cover tomorrow night’s presidential debate. That’s a hell of a lot of people. I realize that I run a one-man shop that focuses primarily on ranting about whatever it is that came into my mind five minutes ago, but I’m struggling to think how one might deploy 60 damn reporters to cover what is, essentially, a meaningless beauty contest in which most people only wanna see if one or both of the candidates literally soil their drawers while on camera (God, I hope one of them does).

But off the top of my head, it seems like you could have pretty thorough coverage of this jawn by assigning one person — or, hey, let’s say two people working together — to write the main newser. Then figure you have a couple of people sourced with one camp to process their spin and/or insider information about how the debate went and a couple sourced with the other camp for the same purpose. Get someone to cover it from a historical angle. That should be easy as those types have been recycling the same Lloyd Bentsen/Dan Quayle lede for the past 36 years, so the thing is partially written already. Then, fine, you can put a pollster type on it. That leaves you with, what, 50+ people to talk to morons who are somehow still undecided?

OK, not really. They’ll likely only have a couple of reporters assigned to Midwestern diner duty. They’re devoting eight main reporters to broad coverage. The rest of it breaks down like this:

They will be joined by three dozen Times reporters and editors in New York, in Washington and across the country to provide deeper insight on the issues. This includes a team of 29 Times reporters to check the facts live, led by Linda Qiu, a reporter who fact-checks statements from politicians.

That’s a lot of fact-checkers! But I can see it. A lot of claims get thrown around in a debate and if you put a big team of trusted bullshit detectors on the case you should be lookin’ pretty good.

Except that’s not really what the Times does with fact-checking, it seems. In their dedicated article in which they explain their fact-checking processes, they make it clear just how complicated they think it is to check facts. Indeed, they explain that they have six different categories of truth and/or lies, and they spend most of the time talking about the subtle differences between claims which are “exaggerated,” claims which are “misleading,” and claims which “need context,” and so on.

If you read a lot of national news you quickly become aware that national media outlets almost never call a lie a lie. This is why. It’s because they bend over backwards and use 47-step boolean processes, watered down with nuance, to sort what any average person on the street would know to be a lie into five of the six boxes in which lies, magically, are no longer lies. This despite the fact that some politicians — particularly Trump — lie constantly. Lie baldly. Lie shamelessly. The Times’ 29 fact-checkers will see to it that no one really lies on Thursday night and that to suggest otherwise is simplistic.

At this point you may think that I’m being overly dramatic or overly pessimistic here. And yeah, I get that I can be prone to that. But in this case I don’t think so. I say that because the Times’ lead fact-checker, Linda Qiu, explicitly says here that New York Times fact-checkers aren’t really in the business of letting readers know who was lying:

“The point isn’t to criticize the politician, like, Hey, gotcha — you lied,” Qiu said. “It’s to tell readers why something is the way it is. If someone is making a claim about the economy, I think it’s important for people to understand the numbers behind it. It’s about the claim and not about the person.”

This, I feel, fundamentally misunderstands what most voters care about. Indeed, it has it exactly backwards.

Most specific facts about any one thing are unimportant to almost all voters. ALL voters, however, want to know if a candidate is bullshitting them. If one of them says something went up 5% on their watch but it really went down 3%, the big takeaway is not “Candidate X was wrong on the MacGuffin Metric.” The takeaway is “Candidate X attempted to lie about his MacGuffin record.” Which then demands analysis of why they were lying about it, what they were trying to hide, why, and things like that. It gets to the nut of the issue and circumvents the process — perfected by Trump — in which carpet-bombing a news cycle with lies overwhelms the system.

But the New York Times does not seem particularly interested in doing that. They don’t want to write a story about how one candidate spent his Thursday evening keeping his nine-year streak of unadulterated bullshit alive while the other one falls, generally, within the normal parameters of politician behavior. They seem really interested, however, in (a) identifying when one guy misleads about 14 discrete factoids, fails to provide context about 11 more, and exaggerates a few others; (b) the other guy does the same thing on a far smaller scale, after which (c) they can run a story about how “both sides played fast-and-loose with the facts during Thursday night’s debate.”

To hell with it. I’ll probably be binging Season 3 of “The Bear” anyway.

Literal Insanity

There are things I could’ve gone my whole life not knowing. Now at the top of that list is that the guy from Jamiroquai broke up with Winona Ryder in part because her breasts were large and she liked to have sex all the time.

Really.

I was just alerted to this yesterday, but it was from a long-ago magazine article in which he talked about their relationship from circa 2003. But however old the comments were, he is on the damn record saying of Ryder, “She has these enormous breasts. Bigger than they look on film. She did have this habit of constantly wanting to play hide the sausage. It was exhausting.”

Look: no one knows what goes on in anyone’s relationship, nothing complicated can ever be accurately reduced to a few brief words, and sexual incompatibility can stem from all manner of dynamics — not least of which is when one partner refers to sex as “hiding the sausage” — but I hope Jay Kay goes to his grave knowing how very disappointed the entirety of Gen-X is in him.

Rosa Parks would’ve loved this bikini

I saw someone post this on Twitter and could not believe it was real, so I went to the website itself and, I’ll be damned, it was real. The website: what appears to be a Guatemalan-based online clothing store called Divino Seas. The product: bikini separates — available in sea salt and light pink! — that they are sure an American civil rights icon would love!

If you can’t read the product description, it says:

Inspired by the woman whose righteous rebellion against apartheid style segregation in the United States sparked the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. In honor of Rosa Parks, DivinoSeas has included this artesian inspired salute to haute couture in the domain of luxury swimwear. ROSA is meticulously designed with divinity in the details. Every element in the constellation of her composition contributes to the sets’ seductive yet stately gravitas. Available in sea salt and light pink.

There are tops too.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about Rosa Parks, the first word that comes to mind is “seductive.” So yeah, I’m sold. Please order me two sets of these kinda trashy bikini sets. For equality.

Sure, I guess it’s underrated

The Points Guy website ran an article of 12 underrated summer travel destinations for 2024. Among them were Alesund, Norway, Niseko, Japan, Mendoza, Argentina, and . . . Columbus, Ohio?

A quick, easy and affordable summer vacation is waiting for you in Columbus, right in the heart of Ohio. Sure, it might not have the glamour of Los Angeles or the cosmopolitan energy of New York, but what it lacks in those ways it certainly makes up for with friendly people, family-friendly activities and lots of ways to get outdoors . . . Columbus is also home to great breweries and restaurants, various sporting teams and a historic German village.

I talk a lot of crap about Ohio but Columbus is a pretty nice place to live all things considered. Indeed, I live in that “historic German village” and like it quite a lot. But I can’t say that I’d ever recommend it to people as a “summer travel destination.” Maybe if you’re from a small town and you want a weekend of some city stuff without going someplace that terrifies you because they expect you to use mass transit or something. We sure as hell don’t expect that here. Nor do we offer it any truly effective way.

But hey, if you plan on vacationing in Columbus, let me know. I’ll tell everyone to clean up and stuff before you get here.

This sure takes some beans

There’s a local coffee chain in the Washington D.C. area called Compass Coffee. At the moment its staff is mounting a unionization effort. Like bosses everywhere, the management of Compass doesn’t want its workers to unionize. But rather than send in hired goons or to otherwise implicitly or overtly threaten workers to make them cut it out, it found a new way to try to head off the organization efforts:

A coffee chain in the Washington DC area is accused of hiring dozens of friends of management, including other local food service executives and an Uber lobbyist, in an effort to defeat a union election scheduled for 16 July . . . In a post on Twitter/X, Compass Coffee United accused the coffee chain of hiring 124 additional people at cafes that are attempting to unionize. The union has also accused the company of manipulating worker schedules retroactively to try to make the new employees eligible to vote in the union election.

Seriously: they just hired their white collar friends, fudged schedules to make it look like they worked at the coffee shops, and is now trying to pass them off as eligible to participate in the unionization vote next week.

It’d be positively brilliant if it weren’t hella illegal and hella transparent.

Have a great day everyone.

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