Cup of Coffee: August 23, 2024
The Mariners fire their manager, the Angels extend their GM, Jerry Reinsdorf is a menace, sad Joey Votto, Don McLean, Martin Short, Dick Ebersol, and oversharing
Good morning!
Let’s roll on into the weekend feelin’ good, yeah?
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Yankees 6, Guardians 0: Gerrit Cole gave up a leadoff single to Steven Kwan. Then neither he nor any other Yankees pitcher allowed a hit for the rest of the game. That, folks, is gonna get ‘er done. Cole picked up his 150th career win, Aaron Judge hit his 48th homer of the year, and Giancarlo Stanton hit a three-run shot. The Yankees take two of three and win their 75th game of the year. They’re just a game behind the Dodgers for the best record in baseball.
Nationals 8, Rockies 3: Gerrit Cole got a milestone win and so too did Patrick Corbin with his 100th win after allowing one over six. It took him six tries to do it, but viva persistence. Juan Yepez hit a three-run home run and Luis García Jr. and José Tena had two hits each. Nats take two of three.
Pirates 7, Reds 0: Paul Skenes won his eighth game thanks to six shutout innings in which he gave up only two hits and punched out nine. Not literally. If he punched out nine Reds players he’d probably get arrested. Yasmani Grandal homered and Bryan De La Cruz had three hits and knocked in three on a bases-loaded double. He actually had two doubles, which were his first two extra-base hits in the 17 games since the Pirates acquired him at the deadline. They basically fell out of contention during that run but I suppose better late than never.
Blue Jays 5, Angels 3: The Jays had a five-run second featuring an Ernie Clement two-run homer — his third dinger in as many games — and that 5-0 lead held until the ninth when Niko Kavadas hit a three-run shot for the Halos. The ball Clement hit out was at his eyes. In fact, it was the third highest pitch hit for a home run since they began tracking such things 16 years ago. Great swing, kid. Don’t do it again.
Cardinals 3, Brewers 0: Mikes Mikolas blanked the Brewers for six on two hits and three relievers finished the three-hitter. It was still 0-0 until the seventh, but the Cards scored three that inning on a bases-loaded walk, a fielder’s choice and an RBI single. Two of three for the Redbirds.
Cubs 10, Tigers 2: Cubs catcher Miguel Amaya hit a second inning grand slam and knocked in five and Justin Steele struck out ten Tigers over seven. Cubs take two of three.
Athletics 3, Rays 1: A’s starter Osvaldo Bido gave up one in five to win his third straight start and the A’s pen tossed four shutout innings to make sure it was locked down. Lawrence Butler, Miguel Andújar and Darell Hernáiz had two hits apiece as the A’s force the split of the four-game set.
Astros 6, Orioles 0: Spencer Arrighetti tossed six shutout frames and the pen helped him complete a three-hitter. Which sounds like three other games from yesterday, but that’s just how MLB is rolling these days. The Astros’ six runs came via five RBI singles, two of which came from Ben Gamel. O’s starter Corbin Burnes allowed five earned runs in five and two-thirds. He allowed a career-worst eight runs in his previous start. Yikes.
Atlanta 3, Phillies 2: Rookie starter Spencer Schwellenbach gave up a hit in the first and then retired the next 19 batters he faced between then and the seventh. In between then Gio Urshela and Matt Olson doubled in runs and Adam Duvall hit a dinger. Atlanta takes two of three from Philly.
Mets 8, Padres 3: Mark Vientos doubled in a run in the first and singled in two more in the top of the ninth. Indeed, the Mets went hog wild in the top of the ninth, with Pete Alonso, Jesse Winker, and José Iglesias knocking in runs as well to turn a two-run lead into a seven-run lead. Luis Severino went five and gave up one run after which the Mets bullpen blanked the Dads most of the rest of the way, though they added a couple of meaningless runs late.
The Daily Briefing
Mariners fire Scott Servais
The Seattle Mariners fired manager Scott Servais yesterday. It was handled in a completely professional manner, of course:
Woof. Not sure I go on to the meeting if I were Servais. That’s just horseshit, really.
The M’’s named former Mariners catcher, team special assistant, and sometimes broadcaster Dan Wilson as their new manager. It’s not just an interim thing, either. He’s the man, dog. He has no managerial or coaching experience on any level, but hey, he’s an ex-catcher and those guys get all the managerial gigs.
Servais, 59, was in his ninth season as the Mariners manager. In that time he compiled a 680-642 record (.514), but the team only made the postseason once during his tenure. That came in 2022, when Seattle beat the Blue Jays in the Wild Card series but lost to the Astros in the ALDS.
The Mariners looked like a lock to make their second postseason under Servais in the early going. On June 18 the M’s beat Cleveland to put their record at 44-31 and to give them a ten-game lead in the AL West. Since then the Mariners have gone 20-33. They woke up yesterday morning to find themselves five back of the Astros and seven and a half back in the Wild Card race. Now they’re five and a half back thanks to Houston winning last night.
The offense has been the problem for the Mariners. They’re 27th in scoring, dead last in batting average, 26th in on-base percentage, 29th in slugging percentage, and their batters have struck out 1,308 times which leads all of baseball. That’s obviously on the hitters and on GM Jerry Dipoto who put this roster together, but when teams crater in the middle of the season it’s the manager who usually gets axed first. Often by the GM who is looking to point the finger at someone else.
Not that I’m gonna die on Scott Servais-Was-Done-Wrong Hill or anything. This is the business he chose and we all know how it works. The Mariners completely fit the profile of a team that could use a new manager, if for no other reason than to change the tone and the vibe surrounding the club.
The Angels extend GM Perry Minasian’s contract for some reason
The Los Angeles Angels and general manager Perry Minasian have agreed to a contract extension. His current deal was set to expire at the end of the season. He’s now under contract through 2026.
Minasian was hired away from Atlanta following the 2020 season. In his three full seasons with the Angels they finished fourth twice and in third place once. As we greet the day today they’re in last place in the West, a game behind Oakland.
More tellingly, the Angels entered 2024 with what was widely agreed to be the worst farm system in the major leagues. The team does have a very large crop of international signees, many of whom might turn into something good, but building on the back of teenagers from Latin America is a risky approach. Their drafts have been pretty terrible and their player development system is seen as severely lacking. But hey, Arte Moreno is calling the shots, and who can argue with his success?
handed a note from his assistant
Oh— oh dear. Oh my. That’s really terrible. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Angels fans.
Dodgers DFA Jason Heyward
The Dodgers have designated Jason Heyward for assignment. Heyward’s last at bat for the Dodgers was a dramatic, pinch-hit home run in the team’s Tuesday night win, so at least he went out with a nice memory, but with utilityman Chris Taylor coming off the IL the club had a roster crunch and Heyward is the odd man out.
Heyward has hit .208/.289/.393 (91 OPS+) in 197 plate appearances this year. Not horrible but not great and the Dodgers are instead going with a bench consisting of plus defender Kevin Kiermaier and the more versatile Kiké Hernández and Taylor. Maybe there’d be more of a use for Heyward if Mookie Betts had returned to shortstop after his IL stint instead of going back to the outfield, but it didn’t work out that way and now Heyward is in the wind.
The Astros to sign Héctor Neris
Earlier this week the Chicago Cubs DFA’d and then released reliever Héctor Neris. There was an argument that it was performance-based, as Neris has been no great shakes this year. But he wasn’t terrible and it seems just as likely that Chicago DFA’d Neris because he had some games and games-finished incentives in his contract that he seemed likely to hit with regular use and the Cubs didn’t want any part of that. Sort of suspicious, I suppose, but probably a close enough call on the performance side to where no one was gonna raise a fuss about it.
A division-leading team thinks Neris is good enough to pitch, however. That’s the Houston Astros, for whom Neris pitched passably in 2022 and excellently in 2023. They signed him to a major league deal yesterday. As the Cubs are on the hook for what remains of his one-year $9 million deal, Houston will only have to pay him the prorated league minimum salary. Those incentives disappeared once he was released.
Neris has appeared in 46 games this season and has posted a 3.89 ERA (107 ERA+) with 17 saves and 46 strikeouts against 26 walks in 44 innings. Again, not exactly inspiring, but probably useful for Houston down the stretch.
Dayn Perry dissects Jerry Reinsdorf’s pathetic reign as owner of the Chicago White Sox
It’s always worth reading when Dayn Perry of CBS Sports does a deep dive on something. That goes doubly so when that deep dive is on a cretin like Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf:
Reinsdorf is of course not being subjected to any of that aforementioned accountability. That's how it goes with owners. Yes, the buck stops with them but so do the consequences. That's especially the case these days. Teams have so many guaranteed income streams that they enjoy just by virtue of existing that they can still achieve profitability even if the turnstiles aren't clicking and the parking passes and concessions aren't being purchased. All of it breeds a state of indolence and assumption on the part of the ownership class – a demographic already predisposed toward such flaws. That's evident in Reinsdorf . . . Survey his more than four decades helming the White Sox and you find failure, a foundational lie, and cynicism as a guiding principle.
That’s just the intro. If you’re interested in knowing how the White Sox got where they got, or if you’re more broadly interested in the degeneracy of the sports ownership class, you’ll definitely wanna check out Perry’s article.
Excesses from the stadium grift
The governments of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, Florida recently approved a big development package that will result in the Tampa Bay Rays getting a new ballpark. But before the ink on that deal is even dry, a St. Pete official has been suspended for misusing public funds in furtherance of the effort. From the Tampa Bay Times:
The St. Petersburg human resources director who approved $250,000 in bonuses for city employees involved in the deal for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium has been suspended, according to city records obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.
City Administrator Rob Gerdes suspended Christopher Guella on Tuesday, a day after Mayor Ken Welch announced he’d ordered 17 employees to return the payouts they received last week. Guella will begin serving a five-day suspension without pay on Monday, according to a memo from Gerdes.
These were all high-ranking city officials and attorneys who were basically given a “thanks” for spending public dollars on something which will primarily benefit the billionaire owner of the Tampa Bay Rays. And that thanks came from taxpayer funds, including a fund that was supposed to be dedicated to paying a crew of city workers and volunteers that helps elderly, disabled and low-income homeowners fix problems that can lead to code enforcement violations.
Public servants love publicly-funded stadium deals because it gives them access to tickets and luxury boxes and all of the other sorts of perks and warm-fuzzies associated with professional sports. Sometimes that’s not enough, apparently. Sometimes they need to be “rewarded” for effecting massive corporate welfare schemes with public dollars too.
No, I am not shocked
If only anyone had anticipated such a thing.
The saddest tweet
Joey Votto posted his retirement announcement early Wednesday evening. That night the Reds were playing the Blue Jays in Toronto and Votto headed up to the stadium to say hello to his old teammates. He posted this after his announcement but before he got to the stadium:
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Other Stuff
Stop teasing me
I saw that, after Tim Walz spoke at the DNC on Wednesday night, Fox News had indicted insurrectionist Rudy Giuliani on the air. During his trenchant commentary he said that Walz was trained and programmed by the Chinese Communist Party then sent back into the U.S. to brainwash kids in school as a teacher.
Why is it that every time Republicans try to attack Democrats these days they make them sound 100 times cooler than they actually are? I really feel like that’s a tactical error on their part but, also, it’s just kind of deflating.
Stick to the whiskey and rye, Don
Seventy-eight year old singer-songwriter Don McLean was recently asked about current events for some reason. Here’s what he said, while referencing his hit song “American Pie”:
“This song talks about the fact that things are going somewhat in the wrong direction, and I think that they’re still going in the wrong direction. I think most people looking at America now kind of think that too.
“I mean, we certainly have a wonderful country, and we do wonderful things, but we also are in the middle of all this woke bullshit, you know? And all this other stuff that there is absolutely no point to, as far as I can see, other than to undermine people’s beliefs in the country. That’s very bad . . . There’s so much anger out there. So many of these college students have been given everything, and they’re just angry. They don’t know why they’re angry. They don’t even know what to be angry about. It’s really a symptom of the fact that they’re frustrated. They don’t have a path that they can tread in life that leads to a better life.”
Call me crazy, but I feel like asking for a state-of-the-world take from a man whose last hit — of the musical variety at least — was released 53 years ago and which is about how everything has gone to hell since something which happened 65 years ago is not the best idea.
Besides, there’s way better Don McLean-related content out there.
Martin Short
It’s hard not to love Martin Short. He comes off as almost impossibly good-natured and kind yet his funniest stuff — Jiminy Glick, his touring show and various talk show appearances with Steve Martin, etc. — almost always consists of brutal, skewering jokes that make Friar’s Club roasts look like a holiday pageant. That he makes those jokes with a smile which makes you think he’s the sweetest thing going is a trick I don’t think anyone else can pull off.
In the runup to the new season of “Only Murders in the Building,” Short sat for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. There are some deep observations in it along with some hilarious one-liners. This anecdote about when he was unhappy during the season on which he appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” however, made me smile for a personal reason:
“So then we had a week off and I went back to our house in Toronto, and we had a new little baby and I remember on Sunday, I had to start the next week of SNL, and I didn’t want to go back. Dick Ebersol was very, very smart. I went in during the fourth show to quit, and he just said, “If you want to leave at Christmas, you can leave.” He also said, “Hey, you want to have dinner with me and my wife, Susan Saint James?” I thought, “Susan Saint James!” My God, she was on McMillan & Wife. “Yeah, I do!”
So he used the wife as an enticement?
Absolutely
Dick Ebersol was still the head of NBC Sports when I was hired to run HardballTalk in 2009. I didn’t interview with him, but he was my bosses’ boss and when I made my first trip to New York after joining NBC I was taken to his office at 30 Rock to meet him. I was told that he was specifically interested in meeting me, actually, because he’s a huge baseball fan and the launch of HardballTalk was the first real step back into baseball for NBC in the several years after it had lost baseball broadcast rights. He liked having some baseball people in-house, I was told, so he wanted to see what I was all about.
I knew all about Ebersol from both his work in TV sports and from his time handling entertainment projects at NBC, including his years running “Saturday Night Live” during Lorne Michaels’ time away from the show. I also knew that he was married to Susan Saint James, who I knew about from watching the sitcom “Kate & Allie” in the 1980s and, later, from watching a lot of “MacMillan & Wife” reruns on cable in the 1990s.
My boss and I took the train down from NBC Sports’ offices in Connecticut to Manhattan to meet Ebersol. On the train ride there my boss was giving me a briefing about Ebersol but, as noted above, I knew the general stuff about him. He mentioned “Susan” too and, again, I knew who he was talking about. All of the prep he was offering gave me the sense that my boss was a bit worried about the impression I’d make on Ebersol and that he was making sure I wouldn’t act like a weirdo basement blogger or something. When I sensed that I decided to mess with him a bit.
Me: “Yeah, I like Susan Saint James. Especially in MacMillan & Wife.”
Boss: “Mmm hmm.”
Me: “She was beautiful in that, man. Not gonna lie, I had a thing for her for a while because of that show.”
Boss: “. . . “
Me: “I should probably tell Ebersol that I have the hots for his wife. You know, just being honest and getting it all out there so it’s not weird if I ever meet her.”
At that point my boss looked at me for a beat, figured out I was joking, and then gave a nervous laugh while likely regretting that he flew a half-feral idiot like me to New York. For what it’s worth, I was on my best behavior with Ebersol who I found to be a very nice man who seemed to genuinely love baseball and, unlike a lot of important people, actually seemed to be interested in me and what my whole deal was. That was the only time I’d end up meeting him in person, but I’m glad I did.
But man, if I had known that he was not above dangling the idea of meeting Susan Saint James as an enticement for the talent under his employ I TOTALLY would’ve sulked to him in order to snag an invite for lunch or something at his place. Missed opportunities!
Not everything is content
I share a lot about my personal life in this newsletter and on social media. Probably more than most people in my position do. Still, even an over-sharer like me has his limits.
There are some things that are too personal to share. There are many other things that, since they involve my non-online friends, family, and acquaintances, are not my business to share. The key to drawing from your personal life for writing is to (a) know what the reasonable limits are; and (b) even within those limits, to only share if there’s a point to be made in doing so, be it a laugh, or a relatable anecdote or an explanation for something or what have you. Just spilling tea for the sake of things is, at best, useless and can make you or someone you care about look bad.
Not everyone feels this way. For example, business influencer types often use their own private lives as a springboard for some business talk that, more often than not, has nothing to do with the personal story shared. This post, which went viral after it appeared on LinkedIn recently, might be my favorite example ever:
I’m sure she loved that.
We have a new contender for the top spot, however. Or, at least we did until the guy deleted this several hours later, but the Internet is forever:
That was followed up with general advice about how to deal with toxic workplaces and supervisors, and wrapped up with a link to his Substack which basically sets forth the same information under the headline “My CEO Seduced My Wife.” And no, he has NOT deleted that yet. It’s clearly the sort of thing this dude is using as a means of advancing a consulting/influencer life, not to mention getting him some subscriptions to this newsletter.
I feel bad about what happened to you man, but take it from an over-sharer: not everything needs to be content. Especially business consulting content. Some things should just stay in-house, you know?
Have a great weekend everyone.
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