Cup of Coffee: February 2, 2024
More on the O's sale, Steve Garvey is a bad padre, homerism, how NOT to bet on baseball, luggage combinations, malice, and trash
Good morning!
Today we talk even more about the Orioles sale, talk about Steve Garvey being a bad padre, laud Gary Cohen for not being a homer, explain how NOT to bet against your own baseball team, and respond extraordinarily weirdly to a basic Black History Month post.
In Other Stuff, I fear for the air supply on Druidia, I marvel at the craven maliciousness of a U.S. Senator, even if said craven maliciousness is not at all surprising, and we take out the trash. Try not to get too excited, New Yorkers.
The Daily Briefing
Milwaukee trades Corbin Burnes to the Orioles
The Baltimore Orioles have acquired starter Corbin Burnes from the Milwaukee Brewers. Milwaukee gets back shortstop Joey Ortiz and left-handed pitcher D.L. Hall as well as competitive balance draft pick.
Burnes is a really big pickup for Baltimore. He’s a three-time All-Star and the winner of the 2021 NL Cy Young Award. Last year he made 32 starts for the Brewers, going 10-8 with a 3.39 ERA (127 ERA+) while striking out out 200 batters and walking 66 in 193.2 innings. Burnes would seem to provide the finishing touches on an O’s rotation featuring Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, John Means and Dean Kremer in the other four slots. Not too bad.
Ortiz had a cup of coffee with the Orioles last year, appearing in 15 games and making 34 plate appearances. He hit well in 88 games at Triple-A last season, putting up a line of .321/.378/.507 with 30 doubles, four triples, nine homers, 58 RBI, 66 runs and 11 stolen bases. Hall, a first-round pick in 2017, has appeared in 29 games over the past two seasons in the majors. Nothing to write home about yet, but he’s started a lot and could maybe be something.
I don’t think that this has anything to do with the O’s ownership news — it probably has nothing to do with it, in fact, given that the new guys won’t actually be running the team for months — but it sure has been a good week for O’s fans, eh?
Keep an eye on this
In The Athletic yesterday Ken Rosenthal and Brittany Ghiroli reported that the sale price of the Baltimore Orioles — $1.725 billion — seems to be on the low side, at least in the view of “Seven industry analysts and rival officials” who were granted anonymity for purposes of the story. They note that the Nationals were made, and rejected, an offer north of $2 billion a couple of years ago. They likewise compare the price to recent sales of the Guardians and Royals, each of which were sold for only a bit less than what Angelos is getting, but each of which you would assume would sell for quite a bit less than the Orioles for a number of reasons.
There are, as Rosenthal and Ghiroli note, a lot of possible reasons why John Angelos would agree to the sale price he did, and many of them make sense. It’s also worth remembering that, for as much as super rich people like to insulate themselves from actual market forces in an effort to extract maximal dollars on any given transaction, the “price” of something is what a buyer and seller agree it’s worth and, in this case, Angelos and Rubenstein agreed the O’s were worth $1.725 billion.
But the key thing here is that, in the decidedly non-free market that is Major League Baseball, the sale price also has to make sense to three-fourths of the other owners who must approve the deal. As the story ends: “The deal might work for Angelos. The question is whether it will create a downward ripple effect on the valuations of other teams going forward.”
If the other owners think that the price Rubenstein has agreed to unduly drags down other teams’ valuation, well, the deal might have a problem.
Steve Garvey continues to not be his children's padre
The Los Angeles Times continues to cover former Dodgers and Padres star Steve Garvey’s U.S. Senate bid. Yesterday it examined his repeated claim to be all about “family values.” Except, as his own personal example makes clear, family is not his priority.
Garvey famously made tabloid headlines in 1989 when he got two women pregnant, one of whom he was engaged to, and them ditched both of them and married a third woman. As the scandal broke Garvey promised that he would “accept the moral and financial responsibility” for his children because “there is a right way and wrong way to deal with moral situations, and I believe this is the right thing to do.”
Flash forward 35 years to see how well he accepted that moral and financial responsibility:
Speaking publicly for the first time, the two children involved in the paternity imbroglio, now adults, told The Times that their mothers repeatedly tried to arrange meetings and phone calls for the children with Garvey, but he declined to communicate . . . Now both 34, the two children Steve Garvey had with the two different women in 1989 said in a joint statement that they have no partisan or ideological position on the Senate race. They have moved forward with their lives without the father they’ve never known.
“In our childhoods, multiple efforts were made through attorneys to arrange a meeting or even a phone call with Mr. Garvey, but he declined every opportunity,” Slade Mendenhall and Ashleigh Young wrote. “Thus, we have never known him, and our only relationships with him were through the family court system.”
Oh, and about 15 years ago he also cut off contact, without any explanation, with Krisha Garvey, the daughter he had back in the 1970s with his first wife. She characterizes Garvey’s behavior as “complete abandonment” of her and Gravey’s three grandchildren.
In my book there is nothing worse than a parent not being there for their children. As such, I believe that Steve Garvey is an unmitigated piece of shit. Just a total loser. I hope he gets whupped by 80 points in the election and then gets his nutsack stuck in his zipper. Actually, I don’t care about the order as long as both of those things happen.
Team Cohen
Former Mets third baseman Todd Frazier was on the videocast/podcast/whatever it is “Foul Territory” earlier this week and he talked about how he didn’t like that Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen wasn’t as big a homer as Frazier would like him to be. His words, via the New York Post:
Todd Frazier found legendary Mets voice Gary Cohen to be too negative for his liking.
The former Mets third baseman shared that he confronted the SNY play-by-player over what he perceived to be critical analysis and implored Cohen to “start rooting” for the team.
“People kept telling me back home, this guy is cutting you up, he’s cutting the Mets up. I’m like, ‘Ah, that’s what they do, you know?'” Frazier said on “Foul Territory” earlier this week. “I start looking into it. Players are like, ‘He’s always done this. Man, We can’t stand it.’
“I went up to him one time and said, ‘Gary, I gotta talk to you man.’ I said, ‘What the heck is going on here, dude? I thought you’re a Mets fan.’ He’s like, ‘I am,’ and he kind of got pissed off at me and I said, ‘Well, start rooting for us.’”
Per the story, Cohen talked to Frazier about it, and Frazier says that by the end of the conversation “I respected him for his comments back.” But folks, if you’ve listened to Cohen and his broadcast partners Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling, you know the last thing they’re gonna do is openly root the way Frazier wants them to. And they’re certainly not gonna pull punches when punches are owed.
Which is one of the many reasons they are the best in the business. Fans aren’t idiots and they don’t like being condescended to. If the on-the-field product is lacking, they know it. And if the broadcasters aren’t at least attempting to acknowledge that reality, they’ve lost credibility. Gary, Mex, and Darling have never failed the fans in that way.
But it does make me wonder how this works on other teams. Teams with less-established broadcasters than the Mets have. If Frazier, who was only a Met for a couple of years, felt comfortable going to his team’s very well-established broadcaster and demanding homerism, imagine what bigger stars on teams with less-established broadcasters do. We know that some broadcasters have been disciplined or even forced out for being critical of the club. How many of them censor themselves and boost the home squad because they fear the third baseman or an outfielder might light them up otherwise?
Good for Cohen for not backing down. Screw all the ballplayers whose skins are so thin that they can’t handle fair criticism.
The truth is, these are not very bright guys . . .
You’ll recall that Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was fired last year after it was revealed that he, using an intermediary, bet against his own team in a game against LSU because he knew that his would-be starting pitcher was injured. Basically, he called up his buddy, who was inside the casino at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, and had him attempt to place a $100,000 wager on the Tigers to beat the Crimson Tide. The casino wouldn’t take the bet, though, because it was “suspicious” and the whole scheme was sussed out in very short order.
I, and I figure most people, assumed that the flag for suspiciousness was primarily a function of just how large the attempted bet was on a college baseball game that would normally not get much if any action, especially up in Ohio. But a report of the entire affair came out yesterday and it was way, way worse than that:
Look, you should all be smart enough to know that you shouldn’t place extremely large bets against your own team based on inside information using an intermediary. But if you do: please find an intermediary that is not gonna say things like “IF YOU ONLY KNEW WHAT I KNEW!” after which he shows your inside information emails to the people at the sports book. Because folks, that’s not gonna go well for ya.
That escalated quickly
Yesterday the Mets, like all manner of other sports teams and businesses, began using their social media channels to promote the beginning of Black History Month. Sometimes such efforts can be dicey or cringey with the business in question either coming off as pandering, completely missing the point, or worse, but the Mets seemed to do it pretty basically and uncontroversially.
At least until you see the first response below it.
Everyone says I should quit Twitter, but folks, you’re gonna have to drag me off of that site in a straightjacket. And I’ll be kicking and screaming the entire time because this is the good stuff.
Other Stuff
Hold on to your luggage
It was reported the other day that John Podesta will replace John Kerry as Biden’s top climate envoy.
Podesta, you may recall, was the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, during which he was victimized by Russian hackers via a very simple phishing technique, the kind of which most of us see coming a million miles away. Podesta’s irresponsibility, however, massively compromised the Clinton campaign by causing the release of scads of internal campaign emails, many of which were sensitive and embarrassing. There were many reasons why Trump beat Clinton, but this episode did not help, that’s for damn sure.
I suppose one could say that making this boob a top climate envoy is fairly harmless. But as those of us who grew up in the 1980s know, if you are not serious about climate security, bad things can happen:
If you need me, I’ll be hanging out near baggage claim in the next airport Podesta flies into. I have a good feeling about the combination to his luggage.
Great Moments in Malice
On Wednesday the House passed a bill that would expand the child tax credit and revive Trump-era corporate tax breaks. One of those things is good and the other not-so-good but when you have political polarization the likes of which we have these days you take what you can get. Honestly, this is the closest thing to a compromise in the name of the greater good as we can hope for in this fallen age.
But, sorry, that’s not good enough for some folks. From the Washington Post:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) criticized the measure, which nonpartisan estimates say could lift 400,000 children out of poverty, because it could help Biden’s reelection campaign. He said he would evaluate the bill after the House vote.
“I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” Grassley said.
Look, ensuring that nearly half a million children remain in poverty may seem bad, but it’s far, far preferable to marginally helping Joe Biden, so what can be done?
In other news, there are days when even an atheist like me wishes that Hell were real. Short of that, I’m happy for there to be more of those nutsacks-in-zippers situations I mentioned up in the Steve Garvey item.
Takin’ out the trash
This made me do a double take:
It’s boggling my mind that not only is this sort of trash collection new technology for the largest city in the country, but that it’s something for which the media has turned out en masse. Trash collection in my old suburb (population 10,854) has featured trucks and bins like this for over 20 years. So too do a lot of tiny towns nearby that have like one stoplight. Yet, in the Big Apple, an automatic side-dumping trash truck is a stop-the-presses moment.
The best part of this side-load stuff, New Yorkers: when the bin slips off of the robot arm and falls into the truck along with the trash, the driver is unaware of it, and he drives off with your bin. That happened to me twice when I lived in New Albany. Each time I just made a phone call about it and a new bin magically appeared at my house a day or two later. They didn’t require proof or documentation or anything. They just took my word for it.
I was too dumb, however, to think of a way to use this clear inefficiency to my advantage. Maybe New Yorkers will have better luck. They’re easily impressed when it comes to garbage, it seems, but I know that they’re an otherwise savvy lot so they might figure something out.
Also, yer man just showed up:
Have a great weekend everyone.
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