Cup of Coffee: August 9, 2024

Good morning!

First, a bit of housekeeping.

Among my many issues with Beehiiv is that it does not, I am told, give people a warning email that their subscriptions are about to renew. Which, in addition to being a surprise to people who have understandably lost track, also does not give them the heads up to make sure their credit card information is up to date.

I mention that because the fourth anniversary of this newsletter is Monday and a large number of O.G. readers who subscribed early will thus have their annual subscriptions renew that day or in the days soon after. If that applies to you, and if you plan to keep subscribing to this publication (please do!), now would be a good time to make sure the card you have on file hasn’t expired or hasn’t been replaced or what have you, as that will cause your renewal to fail and will put you in the free subscriber group. Again, without you getting a heads up because Beehiiv sucks, which will in turn cause you and me to have a lot of annoying email correspondence.

Thanks for understanding. And for subscribing. And, yes, I am exploring getting off of Beehiiv, but if I do it won’t be until the dark days of the offseason so as to minimize disruption.

Now, on with today’s stuff.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Brewers 16, Atlanta 7: Atlanta’s downward spiral continues, as they lose their fifth straight. And once again they were not competitive, as they found themselves down 8-0 by the third inning and were eventually in a 14-3 hole before clawing back some late, meaningless runs. Jackson Chourio hit two two-run home runs and William Contreras, Garrett Mitchell, Willy Adames and Jake Bauers all went deep as well. Atlanta gave up 36 hits over the past two games and were outscored 34-12 while getting swept in the three-game set and won their fifth straight.

Padres 7, Pirates 6: Pittsburgh came back from an early 4-0 hole to take a 5-4 lead on a two-run shot from Joey Bart in the seventh. San Diego rallied for three in the ninth, loading up the bases and then plating two on an Oneil Cruz throwing error to take the lead after which Luis Arraez doubled in Kyle Higashioka to make it 7-5. The Pirates got one back in the bottom half but that was that and with that the Padres swept the three-game set.

Giants 9, Nationals 5: There were two rain delays thanks to Tropical Storm Debby but they got this one somehow. And there was a lot of action late. Mark Canha hit a bases loaded double that plated all three runners thanks to a Nats error in the top of the ninth. That put the Giants up 5-2, but in the bottom half Luis García Jr. hit a three run homer with two outs to tie things up and force extras. Michael Conforto's two-run single in the top of the tenth was part of a four-run rally which gave San Francisco the game and the series. It also put the Giants a game above .500. It’s the first time they’ve been above .500 since they were 29-28 on May 29. Which, given how this summer has gone, feels like a thousand years ago.

Mets 9, Rockies 1: Pete Alonso homered twice while going 3-for-5 with three RBI, Mark Vientos hit a two-run homer, Jose Iglesias had two RBI, and Francisco Lindor had two hits and an RBI en route to a rout. And though it was in a losing effort, the Rockies turned a fun double play in which a liner was hit right back to the pitcher, hit him and kept going, the shortstop caught it on the fly to retire the batter, and then doubled off the runner on first. That aside, a good day for the Mets as their win and Atlanta’s loss puts New York in second place in the NL East, into the third Wild Card position, and takes Atlanta out of a playoff slot, at least for now.

Reds 10, Marlins 4: I know that the Manfred Man rule has made extra innings something akin to Calvinball, but this may be the nutsiest 10th inning I can ever recall. The Reds scored seven runs thanks to a bases-loaded walk, a bases-loaded plunking, a couple of RBI singles, a run-scoring error, and a sac fly. TJ Friedl was the one who was plunked and earlier in the game he hit a homer and singled in a run. The Reds take three of four.

Angels 9, Yankees 4: Jo Adell hit a bases-clearing double in a six-run fifth, Nolan Schanuel homered, and Tyler Anderson allowed one run and three hits over six and he retired Aaron Judge three times. The Angels take two of three. In those two wins they outscored the Yankees 17-6 and totaled 27 hits in all.

Blue Jays 7, Orioles 6: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homered, tripled, singled, and drove in four. In so doing he extended his hitting streak to 20. In those 20 games Vlad is batting .507 (37 for 73) with 11 doubles, 10 home runs and 22 RBI. Dang.

Rays 6, Cardinals 4: Brandon Lowe, who has been hot as hell lately, hit a two-run homer, Dylan Carlson drove in two, and Brent Rortvedt had three hits to help the Rays avoid the sweep.

Mariners 4, Tigers 3: Detroit took a 3-0 lead into the sixth inning when Luke Raley homered to put Seattle on the board. It remained 3-1 into the bottom of the ninth when the M’s loaded the bases and Mitch Haniger doubled to clear them for the walkoff win. That double was enabled by Tigers right fielder Ryan Vilade diving for the shallowly-hit ball and missing it, allowing it to skitter away. You have one job as an outfielder in that situation: dont’t let a ball get past you. If Vilade lets that ball drop and fields it cleanly on the bounce, the game would’ve continued with two outs and either a Tigers lead or, at worst, a tie. Crazy.

Phillies 6, Diamondbacks 4: Philly’s four-run sixth inning, featuring Trea Turner’s go-ahead, two-run single, was the deciding factor. Bryce Harper had three hits including an RBI single in the sixth inning of his own. J.T. Realmuto homered. Philadelphia has won four of its last five, bouncing back from a six-game losing streak.

The Daily Briefing

White Sox fire Pedro Grifol

The White Sox fired manager Pedro Grifol yesterday. This was inevitable, as the team is currently on pace to finish with the worst record in modern baseball history. The only question was whether they’d can him before the season ended or let the club limp on through September and do it then. Well, it’s now.

As for a replacement, the White Sox named former big leaguer Grady Sizemore as their interim manager. Sizemore was hired to a sort of a minister-without-portfolio coach, advising on base running and fielding mostly before the 2024 season by virtue of his friendship and working relationship with White Sox assistant GM Josh Barfield, both of whom worked for the Diamondbacks last year. The team said its next full-time manager is "expected to be announced after the conclusion of the 2024 season." Which is understandable given how hard it will be to find someone desperate enough to take what will almost certainly be a dead end gig for them. Someone is on the phone talking to a customer about some whitewalls now, however, and I suppose they’ll agree to do it for a year or two. Or hell, maybe Sizemore will finish strong and they’ll just give him the gig. If so, I may have to bring the Most Handsome Managers rankings out of mothballs.

Grifol was hired before the 2023 season and lost 190 of his 279 games for a winning percentage of .319. Per a Jayson Stark-retweeted factoid I saw yesterday morning, 391 managers have managed at least 279 games and Grifol's .319 winning percentage is the third-worst among them. Only John McCloskey (Louisville Colonels, 1895-1896; St. Louis Cardinals, 1906-1908) and Doc Prothro (Philadelphia Phillies, 1939-1941) were worse. I’d never heard of those guys and, unless he goes on a crime spree, I suspect no one not realted to Pedro Grifol will remember him 100 years from now either.

Often in these situations I’ll say “not that it was his fault, because his team was terrible.” And in the White Sox’ case that was certainly true. The teams Jerry Reinsdorf and his GMs, Rick Hahn and Chris Getz, have put together these past couple of years are horrifyingly lacking in talent, no question. But it’s also the case that Grifol got even less out of them than any replacement-level manager probably would’ve and he served as an antagonizing force to boot. He was overmatched by every manager he faced and his temperament left a lot to be desired as well. It seems pretty obvious that he lost the clubhouse weeks if not months ago. Jerry Reinsdorf wanted a yes-man in the role and got one, with predictable results.

Anyway, good luck to Grady Sizemore. A guy who will always be venerated here at Cup of Coffee given his relationship to coffee cups. And no, I’m not gonna tell you why. You’ll have to Google it.

Atlanta DFA’s Eddie Rosario

The Atlanta Baseball Club designated outfielder Eddie Rosario for assignment yesterday.

Atlanta’s reunion with their 2021 NLCS MVP did not go as planned, with the veteran outfielder hitting .154/.181/.282 (26 OPS+) in 24 games. With him gone Adam Duvall will likely take over in left, at least until Michael Harris II comes back, reclaims center, and moves Jarred Kelenic to left.

Watch this space once the reunion with their other 2021 postseason hero, Jorge Soler, arrives at its inevitable denouement as well. I give it a week or two tops.

Telling

The Oakland A’s tweeted this yesterday:

And they made it so that no one could reply to it because they know people would be excoriating them in response. Feels like if you’re gonna give the whole place the middle finger and than blow out of town because you wanna make more money that you should do so more quietly. Just go and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, John Fisher.

Other Stuff

Update from the legal profession

I’ve never regretted leaving the practice of law. Sometimes, though, as an intellectual exercise, I ask myself if I could go back to it. Inevitably, however, that one-party conversation leads to me saying to myself that, no, I could never do it.

Separate and apart from the desire — of which I have a negative amount — I don’t know if I could even do it anymore. I’ve been out of the law longer than I was even in it. I remain confident I could be dropped into a deposition, a trial, or an appellate argument tomorrow and, with some basic factual prep, hold my own because some skills never goes away, but I’d be horribly out of my depth when it comes to substantive law. And I’m pretty sure I couldn’t even begin to be able to get my brain around e-discovery, which was just getting going when I was just leaving. No, if this writing gig ever ends I’m better off tending bar or something.

Then I’m reminded of the people who somehow seem to make it work in the legal profession and think, “well, sure, I could probably make a go of it if necessary”:

And hey, from the looks of it, there seems to be a job opening.

Things are going great

Donald Trump held a press conference yesterday. Much of the time was spent by him either not hearing questions or pretending not to hear questions. He also doubled down on racist attacks about Kamala Harris’ biracial identity, saying that he finds it “disrespectful” to both Black and Indian people, which means that he’s still saying it’s illegitimate to be biracial. He once again refused to commit to accepting election results, falsely claiming that Democrats are encouraging millions of undocumented immigrants to come into the country and vote illegally. He falsely claimed that no one died on January 6. He also either could not remember or refused to acknowledge Tim Walz’s name.

Also: he just looked worn out and tired and could barely speak coherently at times. He did that back in June at the debate but no one really said anything about it because Biden was worse, but it’s pretty obvious now. The guy has lost his fastball and I legitimately believe he’s in poor health. I suppose we’ll see if even a fraction of the political press that spent weeks hand-wringing over Biden’s ability to campaign will do the same about Trump. Not holding my breath, of course.

The attempted Swift Boating of Tim Walz is total horseshit 

You may have seen that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are trying to go after Tim Walz's military record. As this article demonstrates, however, Trump/Vance's mendacious attempt to Swift Boat Walz is pure fabrication. Complete and total horseshit.

Of course, degenerate lies are expected from them, but the New York Times and Washington Post joining in with them is shameful.

My Year of Flops: “Hillbilly Elegy”

Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club has a recurring feature called, “My Year of Flops,” in which he analyzes unsuccessful movies to see if they’re merely a failure, an absolute fiasco, or an unfairly unheralded and misunderstood success. Yesterday he took up Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and, not surprisingly, finds it to be a fiasco:

Hillbilly Elegy is pure hagiography, an oblivious love letter to a secret and not-so-secret deplorable. It’s an origin story about how a poor white boy who is more self-disciplined and, consequently, morally better than everyone around him (particularly his mother), grew up to have a seat at the table with the wealthiest, most destructive assholes in the world. 

Ron Howard spent $45 million of Netflix’s money to make a superhero origin story for a man who turned out to be a supervillain. Even that’s too kind. Vance isn’t a supervillain; he’s the lunkheaded henchman who yells, “And stay down!” after the bully has knocked a geek to the ground. Vance is not Lex Luthor: he’s Jimbo to Donald Trump’s Nelson Muntz . . . Will someone who desperately wants to be a rich white asshole convince older, established white assholes who are already rich that he’s one of them and consequently deserves a seat at the table? Perversely, those are the stakes of Hillbilly Elegy.

The review goes on to note just how hypocritical/ironic it is that someone who overcame poverty and bad circumstances has made it their life’s mission to pull up the ladders and make it virtually impossible for anyone else to do it. “[J.D. Vance's] legacy involves making the already hard lives of the working poor even harder," Rabin notes, and it may be the kindest thing he says about Vance or the movie in the review. Not that anything he says is inaccurate. Well, he made a reference to the couch-fucking without noting that it’s just an internet shitpost, not the truth, but I’ll allow it.

If anything, Rabin is much harder on Ron Howard for making the movie than he is on Vance for, well, being Vance. Which I think is fair. At first I thought it was surprising that someone who is as normally astute a filmmaker as Howard is got suckered into that job, but then I remembered that a whole lot of coastal liberals got suckered into the book, so it tracks. There are few things as powerful as a piece of culture that allows rich white people to say “oh, those problems are bad; thank goodness they’re not at all my fault and that no one is asking me to do anything to help fix it.” Which, as I wrote many years ago, is what Hillbilly Elegy is all about.

J.D. Vance in two tweets

I showed some restraint in not talking about Vance yesterday but, screw it, it’s Friday and I don’t care.

Here’s a perfect encapsulation of the J.D. Vance Experience of the past few weeks:

The most amazing thing about it is that his performance since being tapped as the V.P. candidate has even surprised me, a man who is perhaps The World’s Foremost J.D. Vance Hater.™

I mean, my beefs with Vance over the past eight years have primarily been philosophical/political. I've not talked much if at all about his deportment, the quality of his speechmaking skills, or his general personality or anything, as all of that was fairly unremarkable. I’ve hated the substance of what he’s had to say from the get-go, but it’s not as if he came off like an alien in a human suit when he was a Senate candidate or when he was out doing book press or whatever. He was a normal enough person who, like a lot of people, espoused odious views and associated with odious people.

But the way he's just frozen in the national spotlight — the way he has so thoroughly shown himself to be unprepared for the moment — is crazy and genuinely surprising. I’d say you hate to see it but, as always, you love to see it.

Airbnb hopping

Over at 404 Media yesterday I read a story about how hackers who steal cryptocurrency from others are, in turn, getting doxxed and are finding themselves under threat of robbery and, often, retributive violence. In response, they’ve taken to going into hiding in Airbnbs, one or two nights at a time before moving on, often under false identities. The practice is known as Aribnb hopping:

Hackers are renting Airbnbs under false identities after they’ve been doxed in a now common practice known as “Airbnb hopping,” according to multiple chat logs and screenshots reviewed by 404 Media. The hackers are constantly changing locations to stay one step ahead of violent criminals who hunt out targets to rob or physically assault.

The practice highlights the sharp increase of violence in the digital underground, with young criminals often hiring accomplices to steal cryptocurrency from one another, throw bricks or shoot weapons at targets’ homes, or even kidnap them. It also shows how the multibillion dollar accommodation giant Airbnb has become an unwitting piece of infrastructure for serious criminals.

On one level, this is just the modern version of 20th century mob shit. Steal from The Outfit and you’re either on the move from flop to flop for the rest of your life or you’re getting whacked. I guess the difference is that, in this analogy, large tech companies, influential entrepreneurs, and no small number of Republican political figures are in the shoes of The Outfit, what’s being stolen is being considered by many to be legitimate assets, and the flops are considered to be the vanguard of modern temporary accommodation. Whatever the case, if there’s a more perfect encapsulation of 21st century digital dystopia I’ve yet to see it.

Also: don’t you dare start calling this web of online gangsterdom the “digital underground,” 404 Media. That name is already taken and you get it out of your damn dirty mouths.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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