Cup of Coffee: August 7, 2024
Speedway baseball, Billy Bean, Tim Walz, the blurb, buzzy Chicago, and all hail short kings
Good morning!
They’re gonna be doing documentaries about the summer of 2024 one day. It’s been nuts. But, finally, the White Sox did win last night, ending their losing streak at 21.
Today we talk about last night’s games and reports of a new gimmick game in a gimmick location that, I presume, makes sense to someone. We also mark the passing of former player and MLB Vice President Billy Bean.
In Other Stuff I talk about the Tim Walz selection, about the mainstream media finally catching on to a troublesome book blurb, an adjective I’d never think would be applied to Chicago, and we hail our short kings.
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Astros 4, Rangers 2: Framber Valdez took a no-hitter into the ninth and then recorded two outs. A walk to Josh Smith brought up Corey Seager who . . . hit a two-run homer to right and that was that. Framber was yanked at that point and Josh Hader walked a guy but then got the third out to save it. Before all of that two RBI singles from Jake Meyers gave Valdez a 2-0 cushion and then Yordan Álvarez smacked a two-run homer in the top of the ninth — his 150th career jack — to provide what, in hindsight, was necessary insurance.
The game ended around 10:30 Eastern, and even I was awake to watch it and take a few minutes to write this recap. But some people felt it necessary to get ahead of the game and clock out early. Like, say, whoever’s Dewey-Defeats-Truman ass was in charge of ESPN’s front page around that time:
Reds 8, Marlins 2: A day after hitting two homers and two doubles, Elly De La Cruz went 4-for-5 with a couple of doubles, a couple of RBI, he scored twice and he swiped his 58th bag of the year. When the man is on he is on. Tyler Stephenson homered and drove in two and TJ Friedl drove in two as well. Starter Nick Lodolo gave up two runs on two hits in six innings while striking out seven.
Nationals 11, Giants 5: San Francisco jumped out to a 4-0 lead before the Nats got to bat but then, unfortunately for the Giants, the Nats got to bat and outscored them 11-1 the rest of the way. James Wood did the most damage, homering, tripling and scoring four runs. CJ Abrams hit a three-run homer and Keibert Ruiz had three hits including a solo shot. Three Washington relievers combined to pitch four scoreless innings of one-hit ball to close things out.
Blue Jays 5, Orioles 2: Chris Bassitt allowed two runs on three hits over seven innings while stricking out nine and Alejandro Kirk hit a three-run bomb and Addison Barger hit a two-run double in Toronto’s five-run sixth inning. Bad news for the O’s: scheduled starter Grayson Rodriguez was scratched due to what the club later announced as “right lat/teres discomfort.” He’s heading back to Baltimore for imaging.
Brewers 10, Atlanta 0: The Brewers jumped all over Bryce Elder, to the tune of seven runs on eight hits in three and two-thirds. Willy Adames hit two two-run homers in the first three innings. He knocked in William Contreras on both of those dingers. For his part Contreras knocked in four of his own with a first inning RBI triple, a two-run double in the sixth and an RBI double in the ninth. Atlanta has been outscored 17-0 in its last two games.
Cardinals 4, Rays 3: Brandon Lowe hit a two-run homer in the first but Victor Scott II and Tommy Pham each hit two-run shots in the second and that’d be all St. Louis would need. Sonny Gray went seven and allowed just those two on four hits to pick up his 11th win.
Cubs 7, Twins 3: Isaac Paredes hit a three-run homer in the first and an RBI single in the third and it was off to the races for the Cubs. Later Dansby Swanson tripled in a run and scored on a wild pitch and Pete Crow-Armstrong singled in a run. Shōta Imanaga went seven, allowing two runs on two hits and striking out seven.
Padres 6, Pirates 0: An early, three-hour rain delay turned this one into an impromptu bullpen game. Which, hey, if you knew that was comin’ — and we have radar and shit these days — why did you start it and let each team burn their starters for nothin’ rather than delay it? Oh well. As it was, the Padres’ six pitchers turned it into a five-hit shutout and Donovan Solano had four hits and four RBI. The Friars who have won 12 of 14 games to move into the first NL Wild Card spot.
Red Sox 6, Royals 5: Masataka Yoshida homered to give Boston a 3-1 lead in the third but the Royals plated two in the fifth to tie things up. In the sixth Dom Smith scored on a wild pitch — he was initially called out but replay saved his bacon — and then later in the inning, Yoshida singled with two outs and the bases loaded, driving in two more runs. The Royals added one in the eighth to make it a one-run game but Kenley Jansen shut it down in the ninth. The Sox have won three in a row and five of six.
Rockies 6, Mets 3: Jake Cave hit a home run as part of a three-run fourth inning and Elias Díaz had two hits and two RBI. The Mets, playing their third game in three days in three different cities in three different time zones, have lost four of six.
White Sox 5, Athletics 1: Chisox starter Jonathan Cannon pitched six innings of one-run ball, Andrew Benintendi hit a two-run homer and later doubled and scored, and with that the losing streak ends at 21. But don’t fret, folks: the White Sox are still on pace to surpass the 1962 Mets. They just have to want it bad enough and, yeah, I think they got that dog in ‘em.
Oh, and a thing I didn’t realize until I saw someone tweet about it: Larry Sheets was on that 1988 Orioles team that last 21 in a row and his son Gavin is on this White Sox club. At least Gavin has someone to talk to about it.
In other news, A’s fans chanted “FUCK JOHN FISHER” during the top of the ninth and it got picked up on the broadcast, so good job all around everyone.
Tigers 4, Mariners 2: Tigers starter Keider Montero had a nice night, going six, allowing just one and striking out eight. Three RBI singles between the fourth and fifth and an Parker Meadows homer in the eighth proved enough. With their loss and the Astros win, the M’s cling to a half game lead in the West.
Phillies 6, Dodgers 2: This game had everything. Possums. Earthquakes. Cristopher Sánchez allowing one over six and Kyle Schwarber and Edmundo Sosa homering late to give Philly some late breathing room. But this sucks: Brusdar Graterol, one of the Dodgers top relievers, had missed the entire season rehabbing from a shoulder injury before making his 2024 debut last night. Then, eight pitches in, he suffered what seems to be a pretty damn significant hamstring injury that will end his season before it even really began. Tough break. This game will kill ya sometimes, even if rabies and earthquakes don’t.
Angels vs. Yankees; Diamondbacks vs. Guardians — POSTPONED:
🎶 Another rainy day in New York City
Softly sweet, so silently it falls
As crosstown traffic crawls
Memories in my way in New York City
Tender, tough, too tragic to be true
And nothing i can do
City workers cheer
The taxis disappear
Another rainy day in New York City 🎶
The Daily Briefing
Atlanta, Reds to play a game at a NASCAR track next year for some reason
Bristol Motor Speedway, one of NASCAR’s most iconic tracks, will host a regular season MLB game between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds in 2025, multiple sources briefed on the plans told The Athletic on Tuesday.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and Speedway Motorsports CEO Marcus Smith, whose family has long owned and operated Bristol, are set to make an announcement at the track in Tennessee on Friday. MLB declined comment.
Ok.
Sorry, I know I usually have more to say, but all I can muster right now is “OK.” Well, that and a question: “who is this for, exactly?” I mean, besides baseball fans in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and the Carolinas who are generally blacked out of Reds and Atlanta games despite the fact that their games aren’t broadcast there. “Come out to the race track to see the teams we never let you see!” is marketing of a sort, I suppose.
OK, one more question: how is the field gonna work?
I suppose the scale of even a short-track infield is bigger than your typical football or soccer stadium, so they could probably put in a close-to-regulation-sized field there, but I don’t know for sure. If not, we’re gonna have a Wally Moon/L.A. Coliseum-style big net in there. Or London Stadium-style short porches. And even if it does fit the seating configuration is gonna look dumb.
Oh well. It probably isn’t something worth thinking too hard about, really, as everything that happens in baseball under Rob Manfred that cannot be immediately explained comes down to "someone wrote MLB a giant check." If it results in a rather weird-looking gimmick of a game, well, so be it. This league is about making money. Everything else is secondary. Even the games.
Billy Bean: 1964-2024
Former big leaguer Billy Bean, who had served as Major League Baseball’s Senior Vice President for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and a Special Assistant to the Commissioner since 2014, died yesterday at the age of 60. Bean was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia for most of the the past year.
Major League Baseball issued the following statement upon his passing:
We are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend and colleague Billy Bean, MLB’s Senior VP for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion and Special Assistant to the Commissioner. Billy, who fought a heroic year-long battle with Acute Myeloid Leukemia, was 60.
Over the last 10 years, Billy worked passionately and tirelessly with MLB and all 30 Clubs, focusing on player education, LGBTQ inclusion, and social justice initiatives to advance equality in the game for all. Billy’s 10-year playing career included six Major League seasons with the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres. Commissioner Rob Manfred called Billy “one of the kindest and most respected individuals I have ever known” and someone who “made Baseball a better institution, both on and off the field.”
Bean was a fourth round selection by the Detroit Tigers in 1986. He appeared in parts of six MLB seasons for the Tigers, Padres, and Dodgers as an outfielder and first baseman, retiring in 1995 with a career line of .226/.266/.308 in 272 games.
He gained much greater notoriety in 1999, however, when he came out as gay in an interview with the Miami Herald. In so doing Bean became only the second major leaguer to ever to come out, following Dodgers and A’s outfielder Glenn Burke. In 2003 Bean wrote a memoir called Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life in and out of Major League Baseball. In it he talked about his life as a gay man — a closeted gay man until he was 35 — and his journey in what was then and what to no small amount remains the famously unenlightened world of professional sports. Among many other things he wrote movingly of his partner dying of AIDS but his having to skip the funeral for fear of being outed.
Fifteen years after publicly coming out Bean was appointed by Major League Baseball as its first ever Ambassador for Inclusion, which was subsequently elevated to a vice president position. In that role Bean worked with clubs to, in the words of Major League Baseball, "advance equality for all players, coaches, managers, umpires, employees, and stakeholders throughout baseball to ensure an equitable, inclusive, and supportive workplace for everyone."
In practice, Bean was the face of Major League Baseball’s efforts to both reach out to the LGBTQ+ community and to serve as a counselor, advisor, and — let’s be honest here — a public face for the league and for clubs when players, coaches, or executives demonstrated something less than enlightened attitudes toward the gay community. Such a role could’ve been an exercise in empty tokenism or pure P.R. in someone else’s hands, but Bean received high praise for the work he did from virtually everyone who knew him. When someone in and around baseball would say or do something which projected bigotry or homophobia, Bean would make a point to connect with them. It, invariably, resulted in a positive outcome for all involved. Many players who had stepped in it demonstrated genuine growth and demonstrated genuine enlightenment by virtue of their conversations with Bean. No doubt Bean’s having been a player himself gave him greater legitimacy in players’ eyes and made such interactions more effective.
Bean’s loss is a big one for baseball. He leaves behind some very big shoes to fill.
Rest in peace, Billy Bean.
Other Stuff
It’s Walz
Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Let’s go crazy:
I cannot overstate how much I like this choice. And that’s without even getting into just how easily and satisfyingly he’ll stuff J.D. Vance in a locker for the next three months. I mean, Vance is the guy who, just last week, bragged to a podcaster about how he told his seven year old son to “shut the hell up.” Walz is the guy who signed free school lunches into law and then this happened:
No politician is perfect as politics is ultimately all about compromise (and, to be honest, photo ops), but Walz has helped enact a decidedly positive set of policies which he has explained and advocated for in plain, morally-clear terms. Stuff like supporting and helping enact stronger labor protections and stronger LGBTQ+ protections. Enacting better paid leave/sick leave policies. Committing the state to a greater clean energy policy. He’s signed gun safety bills into law and under his leadership Minnesota has cut child poverty by about a third.
The best part: he hasn’t done these things in the service of careerism or because some think tank has been giving him orders and paying his way. He hasn’t done this in furtherance of some Clinton/Obama-style triangulation strategy. By all appearances he’s backed and enacted good policies because he honestly believes that government can and should try to make life better and easier for the governed. What a crazy concept.
Not that we can dispatch with calculation here. Indeed, we must acknowledge that on a basic tactical/strategic level Walz was a good choice as well. I don’t want to overstate that because even if she had picked the other reported finalist, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, she’d be picking a governor of a swing state with 60% approval ratings who shares roughly 95% of the policy positions that Walz does and that’s not a bad thing.
But it’s also the case that Shaprio was catching hell from the left for being too pro-Israel/anti-protests and catching hell from the right for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. I’m not gonna weigh-in on the legitimacy of such attacks, but the fact is that litigating all of that — like litigating everything related to Israel these days — would’ve taken up all the oxygen in a campaign that first and foremost needs to be a referendum on Donald Trump. And on the articulation of a vision for a positive way forward after nearly a decade of political strife. There will still, obviously, be all manner of bad faith, contradictory attacks on Walz as there would’ve been on anyone Harris chose, but by choosing Walz she minimizes having the agenda taken out of her hands and ensures that the campaign will continue to be focused on things that are better for the Democratic ticket.
It’s also the case that right wing chuds have no idea how to go after him yet:
"Haha, look at that Democrat who I have compared to a beloved and dearly-missed comedian while invoking perhaps his best-loved sketch ever.” -- Ben Shapiro, thinking that’ll make Walz LESS appealing for some reason. The dude really has his finger on the pulse of America.
Otherwise, the right seems to be at least attempting to make a case that Harris not picking Shapiro means that Democrats are antisemitic. Good luck with that one, party of “The Jews will not replace us.” Good luck with that, party of “George Soros and (((the globalists))) are puppet masters of the world!” Keep going with such attacks and you’re libel to lose the Nazis in your constituency, and that’s a big deal given that they represent a non-trivial number of Republican voters. I’ll forgive them for their flailing, however. They’re obviously at a loss right now because Walz is a remarkably normal dude who talks like a normal person and Republican politicians tend to come off as if they have not encountered a normal person in ages.
Mostly, though, I’m impressed with just how loudly Republicans who moaned after the Biden/Harris switch that they’d rather face Biden and who are now moaning that they’d rather face Shapiro than Waltz. For a bunch of folks who like to brag about how immersed they are in Sun Tzu’s Art of War, GOP operatives sure as hell don’t understand the bits about hiding one’s vulnerabilities.
Good luck guys. Walz seems like a solid pick. And Republicans’ bad faith efforts to paint this standard Midwestern dad/husband/coach/veteran as some sort of out-of-touch extremist will only make them look weirder than they already looked.
Welcome to the party, pal
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote an op-ed piece yesterday about that “Unhumans” book J.D. Vance endorsed:
Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.
Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.
As you may recall, I raised this alarm last week, but it's good to see a major newspaper throw light on the fact that J.D. Vance has endorsed a new book that openly praises violent dictators, the abolition of democracy, and claims that such things should point the way forward for the United States. Before 2016, a V.P. candidate endorsing such a book would be headline news the moment it was discovered and the candidate would be immediately shamed, shunned, and removed from the ticket. And while I realize things have gone completely sideways in this country since then, the fact that it’s just now starting to be noticed by the political press is inexplicable and, frankly, alarming.
I’ve been to Chicago. You’ve probably never heard of it.
I read the majority of my news via the Apple News app. Apart from getting you around pay walls that add up to way, way more than the cost of Apple News itself, it’s pretty clutter-free and intuitive as well. If, while using it, I’m actively choosing which publication I’m reading or actively searching out stories on a specific topic, it’s like browsing news sites the way we always have. But like just about every other app, it also likes to feed you things it thinks you’d like based on your habits. For reasons that are obvious if you know me, Apple News feeds me a lot of stuff from the BBC and the Times and other publications from the UK, Ireland, and Europe.
All of which can be fun, especially when it comes to lifestyle/science/travel stuff, which tends to get pretty samey if all you read are U.S. papers. But sometimes it does present things in such a way it makes me laugh out loud. Stuff Like this from the Times:
That “buzzy” city is Chicago. Which, sure. If you’re from England or Europe and the only U.S. travel you’ve done, if any, is to New York or Disney World, Chicago might seem like a trendy, hidden gem of a place. But it sounds so weird to American ears to say such a thing. Especially Midwestern ears, as Chicago is the capital of this entire part of the country.
Perhaps it’s like my thing with Manchester, maybe? Not a lot of Americans are using vacation time to go to Manchester. If they go to the British Isles and go anywhere but London it’s usually Edinburgh or Dublin. But it’s not like Americans haven’t heard of Manchester, right? It’s not like someone would describe it as a “buzzy English city that’s a fun alternative to London.” Even if, actually, I suppose it is.
I dunno, I just laughed at someone describing Chicago as if it were some hot band that only the cool kids know about.
All Hail Short Kings
A million years ago, some of our most intrepid ancestors made it to an isolated Indonesian island and decided to stay. Over the ensuing millennia they shrank in size, evolving into a tiny species of “hobbit” human found nowhere else on Earth. This is the story told by a fossil discovery on the island of Flores, revealing the smallest adult of any human species in history, reaching a height of only one metre, or about 3ft 3in, when fully grown — smaller than previously thought.
We’ve known, generally, about these smaller hominids, Homo floresiensis, since 2003. New fossil discoveries, however, reveal that they were even smaller than we first understood. And, for the first time, researchers now believe that they arrived on Flores as larger hominids — the Homo erectus species — via rafts from Java over a million years ago, after which they evolved to be shorter and shorter. They died out after Homo sapiens (i.e. us) arrived on Flores roughly 50,000 years ago.
This item is brought to you by the part of Craig’s brain and heart which often wishes he had followed through on the impulse he had in 1993 to change majors and become a paleoanthropologist.
Have a great day everyone.
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