Cup of Coffee: April 8, 2024

Good morning!

We’re having an eclipse today, so that’s fun. We also talk about a bloodbath of pitcher injuries and the pitcher injury discourse that went down over the weekend. Less fun, that. Otherwise: Stephen Strasburg hangs ‘em up, Trevor Story is hurt, the wife of Royals owner John Sherman had some interesting things to say, and the Philly City Connect jerseys are definitely something.

In Other Stuff, apart from a little eclipse talk, we look at a fake, AI-generated law firm sending out threat letters and we discuss the rise in the honeybee population. That should be a good thing. At least I think. I dunno. It’s complicated.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Yankees 8, Blue Jays 3: It was the monthly Britpop night, “Cool Britannia,” at this bar not far from me on Saturday night so Allison and I went dancin’. It was a late night, especially by my standards, and I wasn’t asleep until the wee hours. But because I’m me, and I’m incapable of sleeping in, I was awake by like 7AM yesterday and dragged ass through a monster sleep deficit yesterday. I was so tired all day that I didn’t turn on any ballgames because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay attention. I did, however, halfway pay attention to social media, and the Yankees fans I follow spent a long, long time complaining about Angel Hernández during this one. And I have no doubt that he sucked. But based on the level of complaining I saw I assumed it meant that the Yankees were losing badly. Nah. They had the game in hand by the third inning thanks to Giancarlo Stanton’s grand slam. I cannot even imagine what it would’ve looked like if Hernández cost the Yankees the game.

To be clear, I went back and looked at what everyone was complaining about and it was an absolute disgrace of a call both in terms of Hernández allowing a pitch from a pitcher who stepped off the rubber in mid-windup AND calling the obviously out-of-the-zone pitch he delivered a strike. But reading the reactions in real time, not knowing what the call was about, you’d think Hernández shot Derek Jeter’s dog or something.

Anyway: Cool Britannia night was fun, but they should do these things on Fridays instead of Saturdays so old people like me have more time to recover.

Nationals 3, Phillies 2: MacKenzie Gore is listed in the box score as “M. Gore.” That, combined with me being less than a day removed from Britpop night, made me think “Martin Gore” but, obviously, the co-founder and primary songwriter of Depeche Mode did not get the start for the Nationals. Anyone suggesting otherwise is spreading blasphemous rumors. The M. Gore who did get the start allowed two while pitching into the sixth. I won’t say he’ll never let the Nats down again but he’s a pretty good pitcher.

Pirates 3, Orioles 2: Dean Kremer allowed one over seven and the O’s took a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth. But the Bucco bats got to closer Yennier Canó, with Ke'Bryan Hayes and Jack Suwinski singling and Connor Joe walking to load the bases. After Rowdy Tellez grounded into a fielder’s choice, Edward Edward Olivares hit a groundball that should’ve been a game-ending double play but Gunnar Henderson threw the ball away allowing the tying and winning runs to score. We’ll call it a walkoff oopsie. Or something. The Pirates take two of three and are 8-2.

Atlanta 5, Diamondbacks 2: The sweep. Homers from Matt Olson, Michael Harris II, and Austin Riley. Chris Sale put in his second good start to start his Barves career and got shutdown work from the bullpen. Indeed, the Atlanta bullpen didn’t give up a single run all series long. Given what’s going down with Spencer Strider — see The Daily Briefing below if you’re unaware — they’ll probably have to be good all summer long.

Athletics 7, Tigers 1: Zack Gelof had four hits, including a three-run homer while driving in four. Now that he’s had a good game maybe John Fisher will shout him out to the team’s fans rather than Aaron Judge or some other opposing player. The A’s take two of three.

Mets 3, Reds 1: Sean Manaea allowed one over five and was backed by runs on an error, a bases-loaded plunking, and a Francisco Lindor homer. That homer snapped an 0-for-24 skid by Lindor. The Mets take two of three and now face off against Atlanta.

Royals 5, White Sox 3: Chicago was up 3-0 heading into the bottom of the fifth but the Royals scored five unanswered runs to win it going away and to complete the four-game sweep. Hunter Renfroe hit a two-run homer in that fifth inning. MJ Melendez hit a two-run drive in a three-run seventh. The White Sox’ 1-8 start is their worst start since they went 0-10 to begin the 1968 season.

Brewers 12, Mariners 4: William Contreras led the hit parade with two home runs, four hits overall and five driven in. Willy Adames went deep as well. Oliver Dunn and Jake Bauers each had two hits with an RBI and Sal Frelick had two hits and two RBI.The Brewers had 14 hits in all and took two of three from the M’s.

Marlins 10, Cardinals 3: Miami finally wins a damn game. It was never in doubt either, as they scored six in the first thanks to three-run homers from both Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Nick Gordon. Starter Max Meyer allowed one run and three hits in six innings, striking out three and walking one.

In other Marlins news yesterday, the club reportedly voided the 2025 club option they had on Skip Schumaker, turning him into a lame duck/pending free agent. I can’t remember a club ever doing something like that to a manger in-season, and my first thought was that Schumaker had to feel pretty disrespected by that. But then I thought about it more and decided that given how little talent the Miami front office provided him with for this season and given the fact that the people who hired him are now gone anyway, Schumaker should probably view this as an act of mercy. Because they’re almost certainly going to fire him this year or, at the very least, not exercise that option, so clubs who will be looking for a new manager later in the season might think of him months earlier than they may have otherwise. Hell, it could lead to one of those rare instances in which a guy manages two teams in the same season. That’d be fun.

Rays 3, Rockies 2: Tampa Bay starter Ryan Pepiot tossed six shutout innings, striking out 11 batters. That’s his career high. His previous high came last fall when he struck out nine. That was also against the Rockies. He probably wishes they could make the whole schedule out of games against the Rockies. But honestly, who wouldn’t want that?

Giants 3, Padres 2: San Diego led 2-0 heading into the bottom of the sixth and the Giants got one back in the bottom half on a Matt Chapman fielder’s choice. That score held until the bottom of the eighth when the Giants put runners on the corners and the Padres committed an error on a Michael Conforto grounder which tied things up. Matt Chapman came up next and singled home Jorge Soler for the go-ahead run.

Red Sox 12, Angels 2: Chase McGuire had a three-run homer in the sixth and drove in runs with a grounder in the eighth and base hit in the ninth for a five-RBI day. Tyler O'Neill, who went deep twice in Friday’s game, hit is league-leading fifth homer. It was a shutout until Mike Trout jacked his fourth homer of the year but it’s not like that fundamentally changed anything. Trout is probably used to that after all of these years.

Astros 3, Rangers 1: We were on Johnny Vander Meer watch for this one as Ronel Blanco, fresh off his no-hitter, took a no-no into the sixth inning. An Adolis García single ended that. Not that he could’ve gone the distance even if he hadn’t given up the hit as he was at 90 pitches through six shutout frames. Yordan Alvarez’s third inning three-run shot gave Blanco the cushion and Texas only managed a single run in the ninth. The Astros avoided the sweep in the three-game set.

Cubs 8, Dodgers 1: The Cubs took a 7-0 lead in the fourth as the rain poured down. It seemed pretty clear that the umps were hoping to get through the fifth so the game could become official and they could just call it but the rain came too hard and the game progressed too slowly to make that happen. After a nearly three-hour rain delay the game resumed but nothing really changed and Chicago cruised to victory. Michael Busch hit a three-run double in the first. Cody Bellinger homered for the Cubs. They took two of three from the Dodgers and then hopped a late flight to San Diego. The Dodgers had a short hop up to equally rain-soaked Minnesota where yesterday . . .

Guardians vs. Twins — POSTPONED:

🎶 'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm 🎶

The Daily Briefing

The Pitching Bloodbath

We had an avalanche of pitcher injury news over the weekend. To wit:

• Cleveland Guardians ace Shane Bieber has a torn UCL and will undergo season-ending surgery. In their announcement the Guardians did not specify whether Bieber will have Tommy John surgery or an internal brace procedure, but he will miss the rest of the 2024 season regardless;
• Yankees reliever Jonathan Loáisiga has a torn UCL and he will have season-ending surgery. Loáisiga said that it was not actually Tommy John surgery, but his time on the shelf will still be the same;
• Atlanta ace Spencer Strider was diagnosed with a UCL sprain and placed on the 15-day IL. Strider will soon be evaluated by an orthopedic surgeon. Though it’s too early to say, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Strider will eventually have to undergo Tommy John surgery. If so, it’ll be the second time he’s undergone the procedure.

That all of this is bad news goes without saying. Bieber is a former Cy Young winner who hadn’t allowed an earned run in his first two starts of the season. What’s more, he’s in his free agency walk year, so the timing couldn’t be worse for him personally. Loáisiga is a key member of a Yankees bullpen which was already dealing with a number of injuries. Strider was predicted by many to be a top candidate for this year’s NL Cy Young and was expected to be Atlanta’s top starter in a year when the only real question about the club involves its pitching depth. The Guardians, Yankees, and Atlanta are all worse off because of this and baseball is as well.

All of that news, coming a couple of days after Marlins starter Eury Pérez was set for TJ surgery, led to a whole hell of a lot of chatter over the weekend about the prevalence of pitcher injuries, what is to blame for them, and what, if anything, can be done about them.

Most prominent in that conversation were dueling statements from the MLBPA and Major League Baseball. First, from Tony Clark, who is blaming the pitch clock:

"Despite unanimous player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the commissioner's office reduced the length of the pitch clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades. Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified. The league's unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset -- the players."

Major League Baseball fired back with a statement of their own, claiming "empirical evidence" which showed that the pitch clock wasn't to blame and attributing pitcher injuries to broader, long-term trends:

"This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries.

In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not."

This is a rare instance in which I tend to agree with Major League Baseball more than I agree with the MLBPA’s assessment. I think it’s both unreasonably reductive and, frankly, intentionally myopic, for Clark to be throwing all of the blame on the pitch clock here. To be sure, I don’t think anyone should count out the pitch clock as a possible contributing factor — that would itself be unreasonable — but serious pitcher injuries have been on the rise for a very long time.

Indeed, experts such as recently retired TJ specialist Dr. James Andrews have been talking about this stuff for years and their thinking is that it’s the massive uptick in velocity and emphasis on spin that is shredding elbows. This is particularly the case for young pitchers. Andrews:

Andrews says the obsession with velocity and spin at the youth level is having a devastating impact on arms and the game itself.

“These kids are throwing 90 mph their junior year of high school,” he says. “The ligament itself can’t withstand that kind of force. We’ve learned in our research lab that baseball is a developmental sport. The Tommy John ligament matures at about age 26. In high school, the red line where the forces go beyond the tensile properties of the ligament is about 80 mph.”

Andrews has met countless parents who think that if their sons have Tommy John at age 14 or 15, it will improve their chances of reaching the Major Leagues.

“It’s just the opposite, believe me,” he says. “When they get hurt early in their baseball career, they miss a lot of development, and the parents don’t have a clue about how that affects their career and their ability to move up the ladder.”

Andrews has previously said that a pitchers’ elbow ligaments aren’t really fully mature and at full strength until they’re in their mid 20s. These guys are throwing harder as teenagers than most veteran pitchers ever did some 25 or 30 years ago. Guys like Strider are getting TJ surgery at 20 or 21 years old, coming back, throwing even harder, and doing even more damage. The pitch clock had nothing to do with his or any other pitcher’s injury prior to the last couple of seasons. It’s all about today’s focus on max velocity, max spin, and overall max effort on every single damn pitch. And most of these guys haven’t let up on that even with the pitch clock which, one would think, would encourage pitchers to ease off a little bit and focus on rhythm and stamina rather than going balls-out on every pitch.

Not that we should absolve Major League Baseball here. For a number of reasons.

For starters, I am going to greatly discount anything the league says about studies to which only it is privy. Whether it’s the economics of the sport, performance-enhancing drug use, the composition of the baseballs, or any other matter, MLB has zero credibility when it comes to any form of research it claims to have done on its own. I largely agree with its statement regarding the long term trends with respect to pitcher injuries and I agree with experts like Andrews who back the league’s claim that velocity and spin are the most likely culprit here, but the league always — always — puts its thumb on the scale to support whatever interest it has at a given moment.

More significantly, however, the league bears a lot of responsibility for where pitching has gone over the past couple of decades and for not doing anything to help change the long-term trends which it claims to be the problem.

Baseball operations departments are really, really good at figuring out what helps teams score the most runs and what helps teams prevent the most runs. They long ago figured out that in today’s game maximizing velocity and spin are the best ways to prevent them. Those things have always been important, of course, but teams’ and trainers’ ability to help pitchers achieve the highest velocity and spin rates are far more advanced now than it ever has been.

Baseball operations departments are also really, really good at exploiting whatever rules are in place to make sure that there is always a fresh arm to come in and pump gas. The rise in emphasis on relief pitching is part of this. So too are expanded pitching staffs and liberal use of the option and IL rules which have created a carousel of always-at-the-ready pitchers. When one goes down there’s another arm to max out until it too is blown out. In an age in which no effort is made to encourage durability or pacing — quite the opposite actually! — teams have come to treat pitchers as largely fungible commodities that they can ride hard until the moment they can’t ride them anymore. Then they just change horses. Indeed, all of the focus on pitching depth is, in reality, a focus on making sure that pitching injuries don’t really matter, at least on the organizational level. There are always fresh horses. Preventing injuries is much harder than just calling up a new one.

No team is going to ratchet back on this stuff unilaterally. That, in theory at least, is why you have a league office that makes rules. To encourage things that, even if they are not the best for a given team’s baseball operations department, is best for the game as whole. You make rules that force or, at the very least, strongly encourage teams to back off of the meat grinder approach to pitching and focus instead on a pitching approach that is not as certain to shred arms. One in which stamina and durability is encouraged. One in which guys don’t have to dial it up to 98 m.p.h. to be effective. One in which it’s not so easy to just discard a broken pitcher in favor of another one who will also inevitably break.

I don’t have some perfect solution to that problem. Indeed, it’s probably more likely that a number of things, taken together, could address it. Mandating smaller pitching staffs and tightening up option/IL rules to keep teams from using a taxi squad of arms like they do might help. We could explore deadening the baseball or widening the zone in a way that will reward guys who pitch to contact. I’ve seen some suggest that we encourage, rather than discourage, the use of sticky substances or perhaps even making the ball itself tackier so that spin requires less effort and velocity is not as singularly important as it is now.

I don’t know if any of that would work or even if it’s workable. But it’s abundantly clear that what is currently incentivized in pitching is destroying pitchers arms. It’s also taking away what I have long considered to be the essence of a good baseball game both narratively and aesthetically speaking: a battle between two starting pitchers who actually pitch deep into ballgames. We’re in a world now in which teams routinely trot out six pitchers a game, half of whom will have some serious arm or shoulder injuries in the next year or two. I don’t think that’s sustainable. Actually, it’s even worse if it is sustainable because it just means more guys going under the knife. More treatment of pitchers as cannon fodder.

I know for certain that the current state of affairs sucks, though. And that the only way to address this is on a league-wide level. I have very, very little confidence that Rob Manfred and the men he has running this game are willing to do anything about it, though, as doing so will (a) be hard; and (b) isn’t profit-motivated and Major League Baseball in the Rob Manfred Era doesn’t do hard things and doesn’t do things that don’t make it money.

In the meantime, expect the majority of decent pitchers to lose chunks of their career to a surgeon’s knife. That’s the game we have. That’s the game which has developed over the past couple of decades. There’s no real way out of it unless the league is willing to make some fairly radical changes.

Stephen Strasburg retires. For real this time. 

Last August a report came out that Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg was retiring. Then some time later it was reported that, actually, he and the Nationals could not agree on how to handle the details of it all, including the winding up of his contract, which runs through 2026. At that point everything went quiet. Then, back in February, a report came out that the Nationals expected Strasburg to be at spring training even if they and everyone else knew he couldn’t pitch anymore. It was all very weird. It suggested at least some degree of acrimony between Strasburg and the only club for which he ever pitched.

Whatever all of that was, however, it has been cast aside. Yesterday Strasburg formally announced his retirement and the Nationals chimed in in agreement. This came a day after someone with the Nationals listed him as “retired” on the transaction wire which, hey, way to ruin the moment, but I suppose the Nationals have never really grasped the notion of “the moment.”

As for the financial details, the Washington Post reports that, per his settlement with the Nationals, Strasburg will be paid the entirety of his contract, though he did agree to defer some of his remaining salary. He was slated to make $35 million this year, next year, and in 2026. It is expected that there will soon be a press conference. One presumes that there will, at some point this season, be a “Stephen Strasburg” day at Nats park. They should retire his number. It’d be unique for a Nationals team which has retired five players’ numbers, none of whom ever played their home games in Washington.

Strasburg hasn't thrown a pitch in the majors since June of 2022 and has thrown a total of 31.1 innings in just eight starts since the beginning of the 2020 season due first to carpal tunnel surgery and then thoracic outlet syndrome surgery. He started to tentatively rehab in the spring of 2023 but he was completely shut down from physical activity last summer due to what has been described as “severe nerve damage.” Reports have suggested that the problems he has been suffering are not merely things which impact his ability to play baseball. Rather, they risk seriously impacting his day to day health, rendering the continuation of his playing career a secondary concern.

Strasburg burst onto the scene nearly 15 years ago when he was chosen number one overall in the 2009 draft and made a huge splash as a rookie in 2010 when each of his starts was celebrated as “Strasmas.” That initial run ended rather quickly due to his needing Tommy John surgery, but when he came back he went on an eight-season run in which he was consistently one of the league’s stronger starters. His career culminated in him giving absolutely everything he had to help carry the Nationals to the 2019 World Series title over the heavily favored Houston Astros, earning the World Series MVP Award in the process.

Strasburg’s career ends with a record of 113-62, an ERA of 3.24 (127 ERA+), and a K/BB ratio of 1,723/394 in 1,470 innings across 247 games, all of which were starts. He led the league in starts and strikeouts in 2014, led the league in wins and innings pitched in 2019, had three top-10 finishes in the Cy Young voting, and was selected to three All-Star teams.

Happy trails, Stephen Strasburg.

Trevor Story is going to miss a lot of time

Boston Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story dislocated his left shoulder while making a diving stop on a Mike Trout hit in Anaheim on Friday night. The Sox placed him on the 10-day injured list, but on Saturday night Story told the press that the injury was “significant” and that while he wants to return this season — “there’s always a hope for that” he said — it’s a very real possibility that he’s out for the year.

Story will be reexamined in Boston today, but the odds of him playing any significant role for the Sox this season seem dashed. It’s just the latest in a long line of injuries which have limited him to 145 games over the past three seasons.

Wife of Royals owner warns that the team might move to Kansas 

The day after the Jackson County, Missouri sales tax referendum failed, Marny Sherman, the wife of Royals owner John Sherman, took to Facebook to (a) whine; and (b) apparently threaten that the team will move out of Missouri in its entirety.

First the whining, which took the form of infantilizing the voters of Kansas City and claiming they didn’t understand what it was they were doing in saying no to billion dollar handouts to billionaire sports owners:

I fully believe that the voters did, in fact, understand what it was they were doing. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that Marny and her friend Kathleen here are right and that they didn’t. That there was widespread misunderstanding in the electorate about what a “no” vote meant. If that’s the case, does that not mean that the proponents of the measure failed to communicate it effectively? I get why these people don’t go there — it would require rich and powerful people to demonstrate at least a shred of accountability — but that seems to me to be the inescapable conclusion of their position.

Marny Sherman had more to say. Specifically, she said that the teams are almost certainly going to leave now:

"Unfortunately neither team will work with Jackson County again. They had been working behind the scenes for two years attempting to get a location approved. Which was I think Frank White’s plan all along. In any case most unfortunate for sports fans in KC. The lack of leadership has lost the city two treasured assets. I mean if you don’t support the Chiefs after 3 Super Bowl wins why would they stay? We will be lucky if both teams wind up in Kansas. At least still in the area!”

Neither of the actual team owners said that, but you have to figure Sherman and her husband and their friends and colleagues have been discussing that. That the tax vote was basically an ultimatum in which the teams said, “give us a billion bucks for new/renovated stadiums or else we’re bolting!” without explicitly saying it.

I say we take them at their implicit word.

The Philly City Connects

The Philadelphia Phillies unveiled their new Nike City Connect uniforms on Friday. We knew what they were going to look like because someone had leaked a photo of them on social media a couple months back, but this is them, officially speaking:

To each their own, but these look like the cans of off-brand, Aldi-ass energy drinks my son and his roommates have littered all over their dorm room floor.

Other Stuff

As you surely now, a total eclipse will cross over North America today.

In ancient times people believed such things to be a sign that the gods were unhappy or that great beasts were trying to destroy the sun. We don’t believe such things today, of course. We’ve gone in the complete opposite direction, actually, as we’re now a people who actively ignore existential threats. I wish there was a happy medium between what we used to do and what we do now, but it I’m being honest, humanity has only properly assessed and reasonably addressed threats for about eleven minutes in the 1940s and that was about it.

All of which is to say that I don’t think we’ll all die when the eclipse goes down this afternoon. But if we do — if it’s a “Night of the Comet” situaish and all but a small handful of survivors are turned to dust — we’re gonna look super dumb to whatever is left of posterity, even if we’ll remain on-brand. Which rather amuses me, I’ll be honest.

Anyway, enjoy today’s eclipse.

Fake law firm sends threats as part of an SEO scam

Am I too blasé about the slight possibility that the world will end today due to the sun being consumer by, let’s say, a giant cosmic turtle that we once foolishly thought to be mythical? Maybe. But then again, whenever I read literally anything about the state of the world anymore the idea of death-by-sun-consuming-cosmic-turtle seems more than fair.

For instance, there’s a new scam going on in which emails are being sent by a law firm to various websites claiming that the website has posted copyright infringing work. But rather than being either (a) a legitimate legal warning; or (b) a questionable financial shakedown, it’s actually an SEO scam. And the emails don’t come from real lawyers. Rather they come from a non-existent law firm that has been totally faked via AI. From 404:

In this case, though, the email didn’t demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a “visible and clickable link” beneath the photo in question to a website called “tech4gods” or the law firm would “take action.” Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its “lawyers” are AI generated . . . Commonwealth Legal’s website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though I’ve seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to “use AI to generate people online that don’t exist, change clothing and modify face and body traits. Download generated people in different postures.”

The address of the law firm, which is purportedly on the fourth floor of an office building, actually corresponds with a rather shabby and possibly even abandoned one story insurance office in what appears to be the less-than-glamorous part of some California city.

The point of the scam: simply to get people to put links to this Tech4Gods website so as to help it climb up search engines. 404 actually spoke to the guy who owns Tech4Gods and he claims he knows nothing about the fake law firm scam. I’m not sure I believe him, but I question whether anyone will even bother to go after him. Assuming any laws are actually being broken here.

I feel like I should get in on this kind of thing. I don’t want to scam anyone, of course, but if people are going to go to the trouble of using AI to create phony law firms at the very least they can pay people like me as consultants to make their law firms and their websites seem more realistic.

They can start by not making everyone look so clean cut and well put together. We need a senior partner with gin blossoms on his nose and a middle aged Of Counsel who hasn’t bought a new suit in eight years because, eh, who cares. And they need to fill the web page up with all of the stock phrases real law firms use. Stuff like “small firm service, large firm expertise.” Or verbiage about how “clients are our number one priority.” Something about “236 combined years of experience” would be nice too.

I mean, that’s all dumb, but it’ll certainly make the fake firms seem more real.

Are bees making a comeback?

For several years we’ve heard stories about bee colony collapse. About mites and fungi and pesticides killing off honeybees and other pollinators in a way that ranges from “troublesome” to “apocalyptic” depending on who is telling the story. As an armchair adherent to apocalypticism I tend to follow this sort of news pretty closely.

Something is happening, however: bees are making a comeback. At least according to a new U.S. agriculture census showing that we’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years and that America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

Rarely is any putatively good news that straightforward, however, so you will not be surprised to hear that there are many caveats to those numbers.

Most notably, while honeybee populations are up, honey production is down. This comports with numbers that show that large scale honeybee operations are not doing that well and that all of the increase in the bee population are coming from smaller operators. That has a lot of implications, some good, some bad, that only bee industry people really care about, but I’m fascinated by the primary explanation for all of the small operators. Particularly in Texas, where more small beekeeping operations exist than any other place by a pretty significant margin.

Here’s what Texas did:

Dennis Herbert wouldn’t strike you as a political mover and shaker. A retired wildlife biologist, Herbert, 75, boasts of no fancy connections and drops no names. But in 2011, after keeping bees for a few years, he went to the Texas legislature and laid out a simple hypothetical.

“You own 200 acres on the other side of the fence from me, and you raise cotton for a living. You get your ag valuation and cheaper taxes on your property. I have 10 acres on the other side of the fence and raise bees, and I don’t receive my ag valuation. And yet my bees are flying across the fence and pollinating your crops and making a living for you,” Herbert said. “Well, I just never thought that quite fair.”

In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.

These sorts of “fool the tax authorities into thinking you’re a farm” laws are more common than you think. Besides bees I know that Texas has something similar for livestock, which leads people who are not farmers to build large exurban homes on five-acre plots and throw some sheep onto them in order to get the tax break. It’s also why billionaire weirdo Mark Zuckerberg has taken to talking a lot about the cattle he has on a compound he owns in Hawaii. He may or may not actually think raising cows is fun and cool but he’s almost certainly doing it so his land is taxed at a different, much lower rate.

To be clear, I have no strong, let alone informed opinions about this kind of thing. My gut tells me that it’s sort of scammy and that, from an agricultural perspective I could see the impacts of these tax break farms being good, neutral, or bad for any number of reasons. If car dealers and insurance guys living in the Texas exurbs are putting a few beehives on their property and not really doing honey right it’s probably fine. It may very well be that the pollinating effects of these hobby hives outweigh everything else. But it probably says a lot more about taxes and tax breaks being motivators than it does about the health of the bee population going forward.

Have a great day everyone.

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