Cup of Coffee: February 21, 2024
Devers calls out the Sox' brass, the Dbacks threaten to relocate, Hyun Jin Ryu heads home, Mr. Mayor, Caray the Fourth, a leg, a hateful charlatan, a bogus university, and The Beatles
Good morning!
In today’s newsletter Rafael Devers calls out the Sox’ brass, the Dbacks owner threatens to leave Phoenix, Hyun Jin Ryu heads home, Kelvin Herrera got elected mayor, and a fourth-generation broadcaster got hired.
In Other Stuff: they say New York costs an arm and a leg but this is ridiculous, someone died and I’m glad they’re dead, we get a look inside a bogus university, and we prepare ourselves for the Beatles Cinematic Universe.
The Daily Briefing
Rafael Devers calls out Red Sox over timid offseason moves
Soon after the Boston Red Sox completed their third last place finish in the past four years, team chairman Tom Werner said the club would go "full throttle" to improve the roster in the offseason. That didn’t happen. Their payroll is now $10 million lower than it was last Opening Day and while they rearranged some deck chairs, it does not appear that the club was much improved over the winter.
Yesterday third baseman Rafael Devers made it clear he wasn’t pleased with the meager changes. Speaking through an interpreter, he said this:
"Everybody knows what we need. You know what we need and they know what we need. It's just some things I can't say. I'm not allowed . . . Everybody that knows our organization, that knows the game, knows what we need. They need to make an adjustment to help us players be in a better position to win . . . everybody in this organization wants to win. We, as players, want to win. I think they need to make adjustments to help us win. I'm not saying the team is not OK right now but they need to be conscious of what are the weaknesses and what we need right now.”
Make no mistake. Devers is DEFINITELY saying that the team is not OK right now. And while he didn’t elaborate, it’s pretty obvious that the Red Sox need pitching and that they’ve done very little in the way of improving that department apart from acquiring Lucas Giolito. The same Lucas Giolito who posted a 91 ERA+ while pitching for three different teams. He’s better than that, but he alone is not going to turn around what has been a pretty woeful staff.
Maybe you can do as little as the Red Sox did this past offseason and hope that the wheel of fortune spins around your way if you’re in some other division, but with the Orioles, Rays, Jays, and Yankees all looking stronger than Boston, another last place finish seems more likely than not.
Man, that Netflix special is gonna be riveting.
Dbacks owner threatens to leave Phoenix
Monday was the first day of full-squad workouts for the Arizona Diamondbacks. An exciting day! A day when baseball fans dream of the season ahead and hope that their team achieves something glorious! A day when the rich and greedy team owner threatens to move the club to another city if he doesn’t get a free handout from the state!
Here’s Dbacks owner Ken Kendrick who, with team president Derrick Hall standing beside him, expressed his frustration that the State of Arizona won’t pay for upgrades to Chase Field that will benefit, basically, only Ken Kendrick:
“We’re at the point where we’re just trying to figure out the best possible partnership, public-private, we can have that would keep us at Chase Field. That’s been our preference, to stay at Chase and invest in Chase . . . There’s a bit of frustration on my part because we thought we’d be at a position now where we could announce exactly what’s happening . . . “We may run out of time in Phoenix. We hope that won't happen.”
The best part: Kendrick said he was not trying to issue a threat to the state about the team moving. But he also said this:
“There is likely to be, in time, an expansion of our sport to a couple of additional cities. Cities are letting MLB know their interest; their interest in getting a team is specific. They would be happy with a brand new franchise, but they would certainly be very happy, you know, with, frankly, a successful, existing franchise.
My dude, that is a threat that you’ll move the team if you don’t get what you want.
As for what he wants: renovations to Chase Field that have an estimated price tag of between $400-500 million. He says that his ownership group is willing to chip in but he did not say how much. We know how these things go, however. He no doubt wants the state to pick up most of the tab.
The Dbacks lease for Chase Field expires in 2027. And, I presume, the state or the county will end up ponying up a ton of money for the ballpark given that it’s county-owned. But this is just the latest example of why governments should not get into the business of stadium ownership or subsidies. For the public these things are money pits. For the private owners they’re cash registers. All of the upside to them, none of the upside for the people.
Hyun Jin Ryu signs with his old KBO team
Ten-year MLB veteran Hyun Jin Ryu has decided to sign back with his old KBO team, the Hanwha Eagles, for whom he hurled from 2006 through 2012. In so doing he will become the highest-paid player in KBO history.
Ryu, 36, was the first player in KBO history to win the Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season when he went 18-6 with a 2.23 ERA in 201.2 innings as a 19 year-old in 2006. After seven All-Star seasons there he played six seasons for the Dodgers and four for the Toronto Blue Jays. He underwent Tommy John surgery after just six starts in 2022 but came back for 11 starts last season.
Ryu is certainly a diminished pitcher at this point in his career, but he likely could’ve landed a deal with an MLB club had he wanted to. Going back to end his career at home, however, has got to feel pretty good.
Kelvin Herrera elected mayor
The Kansas City Star reports that Ex-Royals reliever Kelvin Herrera has been elected mayor of his hometown in the Dominican Republic. The Star is paywalled and I don’t pay for it so I don’t know any other details. Based on Herrera’s biographical info, however, he’s probably the mayor-elect of Tenares, D.R., which is a town of about 30,000 people in the north-central part of the country.
I also assume that if Herrera is unable to finish his term in office, it will be completed by some combination of Greg Holland and Wade Davis.
Yet another Caray announcer
Yesterday it was announced that Chris Caray, son of Chip Caray, grandson of Skip Caray, and great-grandson of Harry Caray, is joining the Oakland A’s broadcast team. He will be the backup play-by-play person behind Jenny Cavnar who was just named the primary play-by-play announcer for the Athletics just last week.
I don’t know anything about Chris Caray. He may be a fine young man and a crackerjack broadcaster. But what are the effin’ odds that, at any given time for the past 80 years, one of the top 30 or so baseball announcers in the world just happened to come from the same family?
You know what? I’m beginning to believe that nepotism plays a role in these matters. Must investigate further.
Other Stuff
Meanwhile, in New York . . .
News:
A human leg has been found abandoned on a New York subway track, police said, sparking an investigation into who it once belonged to and how they lost it.
“Found abandoned.” Like someone was carrying it around and just decided to toss it over their shoulder as they got off the subway rather than find a proper human leg receptacle. Not that the story itself does anything to shake one of that notion as it adds context a couple of grafs down:
Thousands of items are lost across the city's sprawling transport network every month, including all manner of more common things such a funeral urns, a welder's mask and a blender.
I’m sure there is some sort of tragedy behind this story, and I in no way want to make light of it. That said, if I lived in New York and I only had one leg, I think it’d be hilarious to go down to the Transit Authority lost and found and make an inquiry with a straight face. Not sure I’d be able to get out the “Oh, not mine, never mind” without laughing, but if someone could they’d be a legend.
Rest in Piss, David Irving
A senior research fellow for the Anti-defamation League reported yesterday that the British author and “historian” David Irving has died. I haven’t seen other confirmation of it but if so, he died at the age of 85.
I put the word “historian” in quotes because, outside of some generally well-received work he did in the early 1960s on some limited topics, Irving was never truly an historian because he was not interested in truth. He was interested in spreading hate and lies. He was a virulently antisemitic and racist Nazi-apologist who was perhaps the most notorious Holocaust denier in history. He wrote book after book and gave speech after speech in which he claimed the Holocaust never happened, whitewashed and attempted to absolve Adolf Hiter of wrongdoing, claimed that the Jews were responsible for their own persecution and murder, claimed that the UK was the true aggressor in World War II, and made just about any other odious assertion imaginable in a vain effort to support those utterly unsupportable claims.
Irving and his work were widely derided — and he himself was banned from entering multiple countries — for years and years before the notorious and ultimately disastrous-for-him defamation case he launched in 2000, but that case was definitely the zenith of his fame.
In that case Irving sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books, claiming Lipstadt defamed him by calling him a Holocaust denier in a book she wrote in 1993. He brought the suit in the UK, where plaintiffs have a distinct advantage in defamation cases. In the course of the trial one of Lipstadt’s expert witnesses, a Cambridge professor named Richard J. Evans issued a report that read in part as follows:
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
Beyond that, Lipstadt and Penguin marshaled overwhelming evidence that Irving was, in fact, a Holocaust denier, a Hitler apologist, and an abject charlatan, proving to the court’s satisfaction that Irving regularly falsified documents and other historical sources in order to make his bogus claims. Irving lost the case and was ordered to pay Lipstadt millions. He’d continue to give speeches and make money on the seedy lecture circuit that caters to far-right extremists, but his name, which was already mud, was sullied even more.
If Irving had died eight or nine years ago I likely would not have even mentioned him, let alone gone on for so long about him. But in the past eight or nine years we’ve learned just how eager some people — including some very powerful people — are to embrace the most hateful and erroneous things imaginable if doing so might advance their political or economic agenda. These people are enabled by writers, commentators, radio hosts, TV news personalities, podcasters, and academics who happily follow in Irving’s hateful and mendacious shoes, fueling an entire alternative media and faux-academic ecosystem that has arisen to support all manner of dangerous and disingenuous views.
We tend to laugh these people off as entertainers or blowhards or petty grifters, but we do so at our peril. They, like David Irving, are fueled by hate and nothing would make them happier to see such hate ascendant. We should punch them square in the face wherever we encounter them. Figuratively or rhetorically if that’s something with which you are more comfortable. But literally would be OK by me too.
Rest in piss, David Irving. I hope your death was anything but an easy one.
Inside the University of Austin
Speaking of dubious scholarship . . .
The University of Austin is not in Austin. It’s in a Dallas office park. And it’s not really a university as much as it’s a right wing think tank/grifting factory disguised as an institution of higher learning.
The University of Austin was founded by one-time New York Times columnist Bari Weiss who styles herself as a free speech advocate yet, 100% of the time, only supports free speech with which she agrees politically while she is all for the silencing or firing of those with whom she disagrees. In league with her in this endeavor are all manner of likeminded media and media-adjacent jackasses and some of the more ethically and morally questionably characters from the world of finance and Silicon Valley. Most notably Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has been corrupting a United States Supreme Court Justice for the past couple of decades.
The University of Austin was founded, at least to hear Weiss tell it, as a corrective to what she and her likeminded colleagues believe is the unhinged woke leftism of the higher education world and they spend a lot of time railing against the “elites” of that world. Never mind that almost everyone involved with this undertaking went to Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and other, well, I suppose they can’t say “elite” institutions because the whole game would be up, but you get the idea. You will not be surprised to learn that the primary curriculum of the place is reactionary right wing grievance politics dressed up as “classical” education.
Normally we wouldn’t know much more about the University of Austin beyond these broad characterizations gleaned from the few public comments its founders have made and what we knew about those founders beforehand. But a writer named Noah Rawlings infiltrated a summer seminar program put on by Weiss and her colleagues, posing as an interested student, and wrote an expose of it that dropped on Monday. It’s an amazingly illuminating read.
The upshot: the University of Austin is the putatively respectable, putatively intellectual arm of the overarching right wing white grievance industrial complex. Whereas unabashed racists and fascists may march in the streets, loudly chanting about how Blacks, immigrants, women, trans people, and other marginalized groups are usurping the established order, the people associated with the University of Austin will go on about the very same things in an academic setting:
At lunch or between class sessions, you could hear them say interesting things. Consider the remarks of a single afternoon. One student, bravely reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, said that if your index finger was longer than your ring finger, that probably meant you were gay. Someone else claimed that 20% of Gen Z identified as LGTBQ. “There’s no way a society can evolve if 20% of its population is gay,” another student added, shaking his head. “Evolve,” in this case, seemed to mean “stay the same” or “turn back the historical clock.” Later, yet another statistic was cited: “7% of France is Muslim.” “Yeah,” a peer replied, “that’s a problem because they don’t want to integrate.”
The subtext of these remarks was simple. The social capital, political influence, and access to wealth that was formerly the uncontested and exclusive prerogative of straight white men was now under question. They felt it at school. They saw it in the media. They were here, at UATX, to live out a dying dream, to vent their frustration at its loss, and to help one another cling to it as long as possible. They recommended internships in finance and tech to each other. They recommended books. “Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?” one student asked, referring to Douglas Murray’s 2017 political text which propagates the ethnonationalist Great Replacement Theory. “That’s a great book,” he heard in reply.
There is all kinds of ugliness floating around American politics and political discourse these days. It takes many different forms, and comes from many different sorts of actors, but it’s all rooted in the same basic idea: straight white wealthy men and those who happily subordinate themselves to them are worried about no longer running everything and they are hellbent on turning back the clock in order to stop social and political progress. That’s the root of it all. It’s certainly the root of the University of Austin, no matter how much they try to dress it up as some grander, intellectual exercise.
The Beatles Cinematic Universe
In a move that ought to make fans of The Beatles twist and shout, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes and his Neal Street Productions have set plans to make four separate theatrical films, one on each of the members of music’s most famous and enduring band.
Mendes will direct all four of the films, and this marks the first time Apple Corps Ltd. and The Beatles – Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison – have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.
I love the Beatles. Always have. But I am struggling mightily to understand what the purpose of this is.
The Beatles were given wall-to-wall press coverage in real time in the 1960s and, unlike most of their contemporaries, that has continued on through the rest of their lives. There have been hundreds, possibly thousands of books written about them. There have been multiple documentaries, several of which featured the complete cooperation of the surviving Beatles and many of which were several hours long and went into greater depth than any documentaries of any other musical stars, Elvis included. And though they didn’t have “full life story and music rights” there have been multiple scripted films about them already as well. “Backbeat” is a great one, by the way. Go check it out if you haven’t seen it.
In light of all of that I cannot imagine a single fact, event, or insight regarding the lives of John, Paul, George, or Ringo that could be portrayed in any of these movies that has not already been handled elsewhere, likely dozens if not scores, if not hundreds of times. Anyone interested enough in the Beatles to sit through four separate biopics of them either already knows everything that will appear on screen or else has access to every bit of that information many times over.
Which makes me think that these films are best thought of not as biopics in the traditional sense but as vehicles for the exploitation of Beatles IP. The Beatles as comic book or sci-fi characters who are now getting an obligatory reboot. The creation of the Beatles Cinematic Universe. A BCU which will be characterized by the same balance between art, commerce, and necessity as all the other IP-driven cinematic universes. Marvel initially hoped that its movies would help move toys and t-shirts and pajamas and things. The BCU will help sell special edition Beatles albums and other merch.
Not to say these movies won’t be enjoyable. They may very well be. I mean, there are LOADS of ideas if you wanna turn the Beatles into scripted characters:
But given what these movies will truly be, I hope that we can dispense with that whole dance in which we treat every Beatles project that comes out these days as weighty and serious as opposed to the fan service that it is.
Have a great day everyone.
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