Cup of Coffee: August 2, 2024

Good morning!

Today we talk about a new twist to the postseason schedule, some bad news about a superstar, a noted bookie copping a plea deal, and the latest stadium grift.

In Other Stuff, Evan Gershkovich is a badass, Project 2025 isn’t going anywhere, at least one scientist is a big fan of Mr. Burns’ crazy idea, and shopping in the the year 2024 sucks.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

The White Sox did not play yesterday, which meant that they could not lose. But it also meant that they could not win, which meant that they tied the record for the longest calendar-day stretch without winning a game at 25 days. The only team that has ever gone longer is the 1889 Louisville Colonels at 31 days. Do you think the White Sox have it in them? I do! But I suppose we’ll see.

I didn’t watch any games last night. I’m doing an off-and-on rewatch of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and was really feeling “Chain of Command Part 1 and 2” instead. I was inspired by Evan Gershkovich’s release, really, as becomes clear down in the first item in Other Stuff. But that’s later. Here’s now:

Guardians 10, Orioles 3: David Fry hit a three-run homer, so too did Bo Naylor, and José Ramírez had a two-run shot. Naylor’s came in a five-run seventh which pretty much ended things.

Royals 7, Tigers 1: Vinnie Pasquantino homered twice — a three-run homer and a solo shot — and Seth Lugo allowed one run on four hits over eight. Bobby Witt Jr. will almost certainly be the AL Player of the Month for July but he kept it going into August, going 2-for-4 with an RBI double and a homer. That’s four wins in a row for Kansas City.

Atlanta 4, Marlins 2: Austin Riley and Matt Olson hit homers in the first — Olson’s was a two-run shot — and Orlando Arcia added a shot in the third. That was sufficient for Charlie Morton, who allowed an unearned run over six. Atlanta has won five of six.

Cubs 5, Cardinals 4: A home run from Masyn Winn and an RBI single from Nolan Arenado in the seventh put the Cards up 4-2 but the Cubs rallied in the bottom of the ninth. Cody Bellinger hit a one-hout solo homer to make it 4-3, Nico Hoerner singled, stole second, and then was doubled in by Dansby Swanson to tie things up and then Michael Tauchman doubled in Swanson for the walkoff win.

Rockies 5, Angels 4: Carson Fulmer allowed two over six while Logan O’Hoppe and Mickey Moniak homered and Taylor Ward doubled in a run to put the Angels up 4-2 heading into the the ninth. The Rockies had some fight in ‘em still, however, with Ryan McMahon drawing a leadoff walk and Jake Cave hitting a homer to tie things up and send it to extras. The Rockies plated what would be the winning run in the top of the tenth when they tried to bunt the Manfred Man over and he was allowed to score on a throwing error. Just like they drew it up.

In related news, don’t the Angels look great in this kit?

If I was the Czar of Baseball I’d order Arte Moreno to sell the team to someone who (a) will actually run them competently; and (b) return their name to the California Angels, complete with these rad old school uniforms. I don’t ask for much, but I want that.

Anyway: Captain Jellico should’ve gotten his own show. Yeah, he rubbed people the wrong way but the TNG Enterprise crew needed him to light a fire under their asses, frankly. The man was an unheralded hero in my book.

The Daily Briefing

MLB moves to reduce the possibility of long layoffs before the World Series 

Yesterday Major League Baseball released the postseason schedule. For the most part it’s the usual sort of thing. The Wild Card games begin on Tuesday, October 1, the Division Series begin on Saturday October 5, and the NLCS and ALCS begin on October 13 and October 14, respectively.

But there is one change: MLB has made for a flexible World Series schedule. Specifically, if the NLCS and ALCS each end by October. 19 — meaning they go no longer than five games — the World Series will be moved up three days to October 22 to avoid the long layoffs. If either of them are still going on on after October 19, the World Series will begin on October 25. Worth noting that since the LCS went to a best-of-seven format in 1985, both series have been over in four or five games five times: 1989, 2001, 2002, 2014 and 2022.

This does not fully eliminate the possibility of a layoff for one team. If, say, the NLCS winner sweeps and the ALCS goes to seven games, the NLCS winner would have eight days off, and lord knows we’ve heard teams whine about that in the past. But at the very least this new plan does eliminate the possibility of there being no baseball for up to a week, which could happen in previous years and under this year’s schedule without the flexibility built in.

Mike Trout has another meniscus tear, he’s out for the year

Awful news: Mike Trout suffered another meniscus tear in his surgically repaired left knee and will not play the remainder of this season. He posted to Twitter that an MRI a day earlier "showed a tear in my meniscus that will require surgery again -- ending my hopes of returning this season."

Not sure what else to say at this point. It’s so damn sad seeing this happen to the best baseball player of his generation.

Ippei Mizuhara’s bookie cops a plea deal

Matthew Bowyer, the illegal bookie with whom Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, placed bets using Ohtani’s money has copped a plea deal. Specifically, Bowyer will plead guilty to operating an illegal gambling business, money laundering, and filing a false tax return. He will likewise forfeit more than $250,000 and cooperate with authorities as investigations into illegal bookmaking continue.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I feel like a guy who raked in millions from just the one client we know about only forfeiting $250,000 seems to be a pretty good advertisement for illegal bookmaking!

[Editor: You do realize he’s going to jail, right?]

Look, there was a time when I was raising my children that I fantasized about having no responsibilities apart from sleeping, eating, exercising, and reading. If you would’ve told me that I could do that for a few years and have a bunch of money waiting for me in some numbered bank account in Luxembourg on the other end, well . . .

[Editor: Stop it]

Hey, it’s a slow news day.

Seems like a great idea

Yesterday Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb went public with a $461 million taxpayer-funded offer to Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to renovate the stadium in which the Browns play. The package involves all manner of goodies like handing over city parking garage revenue to the team and waiving rent payments which they’ve been paying since the existing stadium was built. To be sure, there are some givebacks in there as well. It’s hard to put exact numbers on it, but Neil deMause is calculating it as a net $240 million handout to the Browns’ billionaire owners under this proposal.

This all comes as the Haslams are quite successfully playing the city of Cleveland off of a suburb called Brook Park, which is promising to build the Browns a brand new domed stadium. I’ve not paid close enough attention to which municipality is the bigger sucker here — my guess is that the Haslams would prefer a shiny new stadium in the burbs and are using Cleveland to get it — but I sure as hell can say that Cleveland has no business whatsoever subsidizing the Haslams and their NFL team.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is currently facing a budget deficit in the hundreds of millions. The city itself has budget problems of its own and is carrying way, way too much debt. Pensions for city workers are severely underfunded. And while I bristle when out-of-town folks talk shit about the infrastructure problems and general decay of rust belt cities because usually those people are just mocking them, one need not spend too much time driving around Cleveland to realize that, yeah, there are way bigger needs in the Forest City than upgrades to an NFL stadium.

But, as noted, I strongly suspect that the Haslams are using Cleveland to get Brook Park to give them a sweeter deal. They know way more gameday fans are coming from the suburbs anyway. And they also know that some fancy domed place will land them stuff like the Super Bowl eventually, which even a gussied-up, open-air lakefront stadium won’t. It’s all a grift, from every conceivable angle.

Other Stuff

Badass

As you no doubt saw yesterday, Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in Russia and tried and convicted under false charges as a part of Vladimir Putin’s criminal hostage-taking initiative, was freed yesterday. Freed alongside him were former Marine Paul Whelan, several Russian dissidents and others from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia and Belarus. It was accomplished through some complicated Cold War-style international diplomacy and effected via a mass prisoner swap.

There are all manner of things one could say about this. About Putin’s gangster regime. About the efficacy of President Biden’s diplomatic skills, which showed both Donald Trump’s “only I can get Putin to free Gershkovich!” bluster and the belief that Biden was somehow unfit to do his job to be foolish. About how international diplomacy and security is super complicated business that should be he handled by the competent rather than political suck-ups. About, all of that aside, how good it is when those wrongfully confined anywhere are set free.

But after reading through a zillion words about this deal across multiple publications yesterday, I have to say my favorite detail comes form the Wall Street Journal’s own ticktock about the negotiations which set Gershkovich and the others free. The final two paragraphs, specifically:

The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prison could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

Balls the size of church bells on that one. A real “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS” moment. Welcome home, Evan Gershkovich.

Project 2025 pretends to shut down

The person in charge of the right wing think tank collaboration known as Project 2025 — the 900-page outline which promises to replace thousands of federal workers with partisan loyalists, to ban abortion, to encourage child labor, and to disband the Department of Education, among other awful things — has stepped down. What’s more, the group says it will stop creating policies.

All of this comes after outlets began reporting on Project 2025 which caused the public to learn just how odious a plan Republicans have for the country if Donald Trump were to be reelected. Trump, no doubt realizing how toxic the Project 2025 proposals are, has attempted to distance himself from the group, saying he had no idea what it was and had no connection to it.

I do hope, however, that this bit of news is seen as the sham it so clearly is. Project 2025 is not something that is just going to go away. It’s inextricably linked to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s campaign and one person stepping down and a public claim of “OK, we’re done with this” means absolutely nothing.

Ask yourself: if Trump has no connection to Project 2025 and its architects, how did his campaign’s public disapproval of it cause it to close up shop? I mean, the people behind it have put years of work into this. They are true believers. If they are independent of Trump they’re not going to disavow it just because his campaign attempted to distance itself from it. The answer is obvious: for all practical purposes they work for him.

Indeed, many associated with Project 2025 did work for him. The Heritage Foundation and the other think tanks which contributed to Project 2025 are staffed with scores if not hundreds of former Trump administration officials. High-ranking ones, too, most of whom would immediately find themselves back in positions of power if Trump retakes office and who would no doubt run his transition back into power. A press release saying “OK, we’re not doing this anymore” does nothing to change that or their political ambitions and agenda. The formalities of Project 2025 mean nothing. The people behind it and their fascist plans are what matter and they’re not going anywhere.

And it’s not just the people who would staff the administration. J.D. Vance, the man who would be Vice President — and given Trump’s age and health, stands a good chance of becoming president sooner rather than later if Trump wins — adores Project 2025 and the people associated with it. He has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation. Particularly Kevin Roberts, the man who has been president of the Heritage Foundation since 2021 and who is the architect of Project 2025. He’s so close to Roberts and Project 2025 that he wrote the foreword to Roberts’ upcoming book. From the New Republic:

Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

Roberts and his publisher — no doubt under pressure from the Trump campaign — have tried to file off the sharp edges of the book, changing the subtitle from its original “Burning Down Washington to Save America” to “Taking Back Washington to Save America.” Vance’s foreword, however, was no doubt written before that effort and it includes all kinds of revolutionary rhetoric, including calling for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Kevin Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

Vance is a product of this stuff. He’s a true believer. The people involved with Project 2025, ranging from former and future Trump adviser Stephen Miller — an American fascist if there ever was one — on down to the hundreds of writers and researchers who put the thing together, will fill a new Trump administration and they will not be abandoning the ideas and plans they have spent years concocting when they do.

Tuesday’s announcement was a P.R. move aimed at trying to stop bad publicity for Trump’s campaign. That’s all it was. Any media outlet who treats it as an actual abandonment of Project 2025 by Trump and Republicans in general is an absolute sucker.

Following in Mr. Burns’ footsteps

There have been countless instances in which current events have reflected — or we have sort of imagined them to reflect — things that happened on “The Simpsons” at some point over the past 35 years. Donald Trump becoming president. Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox. The Siegfried and Roy tiger attack. There’s a whole bunch of ‘em.

But I’ll be damned if there aren’t some people trying to make Mr. Burns’ plan to block out the sun a reality:

David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space.

Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the stratosphere, reflecting some of the sun’s energy away from Earth. The result was a drop in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by roughly one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed.

Today, Dr. Keith cites that event as validation of an idea that has become his life’s work: He believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.

The scientific term for that is “stratospheric solar geoengineering,” and while some believe it has promise, many believe it presents dangers. Dangers ranging from moral hazard (i.e. if people, corporations, and governments think there’s a end-run around climate change they won’t reduce fossil fuel consumption ) to tangible, immediate hazards as far as pollution and unexpected climate effects which could be disastrous.

Like, what if the particles we release to dim solar radiation accidentally disrupt weather patterns leading to widespread drought and famine? Some believe that if the process begins, and then abruptly ends, it could lead to something called “termination shock” which would immediately skyrocket global temperatures way above what they were before the process started. Given that there has been sharp environmentalist opposition to even preliminary testing of some of the processes which are necessary to even begin thinking about stratospheric solar geoengineering, no one really knows.

I’m just a dumb writer with a liberal arts education so I can’t say anything super intelligent about such things. But I am dispositionally uneasy with humans trying to mess with nature on this sort of scale. And that’s before you get into the problems with doing things that Mr. Burns things to be a good idea. And which led to the whole Snowpiercer deal. Just seems like . . . a lot.

Locking up store shelves has been a disaster

Over at Bloomberg Amanda Mull writes about the effects of major retailers — most notably Target, CVS, and Walgreen’s — locking up most of their damn shelves and requiring people to ask for assistance to unlock items they want to buy.

As Mull notes, the push to do that arose out of the mass shoplifting panic of 2021 which, it turns out, was mostly bogus moral panic/hysteria based on some well-circulated videos of some isolated incidents which retailers used as a cover for their business failings. In reality, retail “shrink” — losses occasioned by theft, damage, returns, and other forms of waste — has held steady for decades.

Yet here we are, three years later, and a great number of stores in major cities continue to lock up their merchandise. And guess what? It’s been a disaster. For one thing, customers absolutely hate it, for pretty obvious reasons:

If stores lock up too much stuff, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money. Impulse purchases are thwarted. You can’t browse, because you can’t pick up anything to examine it more closely. If you hit the buzzer to summon an employee, you have to be sure you actually want something, otherwise you’ll waste their time as well as your own. You can’t dither and compare your options once the cabinet is opened, because whoever unlocked the door for you is likely being pulled away. Saunders recounted a recent experience at a chain pharmacy in which even the chocolate bars and bags of nuts were locked up—products that drugstores, by definition, carry for people to spontaneously toss on the counter at the last second.

This dynamic has, not surprisingly, led to reduced sales. Which is obvious, because people would rather now shop online for things rather than go into an understaffed Target or CVS where finding an actual employee to open the locked cases so they can buy some deodorant or laundry detergent is next to impossible. And the vicious cycle continues: constantly opening locked shelves makes employees miserable, so they leave the job quicker, worse employees are hired and/or stores become understaffed, which degrades the experience further. It’s almost as if the entire plan was designed by Amazon to boost its own sales.

I’ve been lucky in that, for the most part, stores in Columbus, Ohio have avoided this. There’s a hardware store not too far from me in a high crime area that has a lot of stuff locked up. That’s annoying because it’s the closest hardware store to me and my ticket to avoiding Home Depot and Lowes out in the burbs, but I suppose I get it given both the kinds of stuff it carries and the area it’s in. Thankfully, the drug stores aren’t doing it, even in the same high crime area. And neither are the couple of Targets or whatever that are near the center of the city.

When I was in San Diego last week, however, we needed to buy some body wash, as the Airbnb we rented, surprisingly, didn’t have any and we didn’t bring any. We decided that the smart move would be to buy a real, full-sized bottle of body wash we could all share and that we’d give what was left to my brother since we didn’t wanna check bags going back due to oversized liquids.

So we went to Target on Sports Arena Boulevard and went to the body wash aisle. Everything was locked up. We looked for an employee and couldn’t find one. We looked for a buzzer and, eventually, found one. We buzzed it but no one showed up in what seemed like a reasonable amount of time. So, rather than buy a $7 bottle of whatever it was we were going to buy, we went to the travel-sized products where things weren’t locked up and bought a couple of 99 cent bottles of Dove and made do.

It was an unpleasant experience for the customers and resulted in lower sales than the store would’ve otherwise realized. I’m sure that happens every single day. And that it will do wonders for retail sales over time.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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