Cup of Coffee: February 6, 2024
A superstar shortstop extension, relievers, spring training caps, the World Cup Final venue and Twitter keeps Twittering
Good morning!
A superstar shortstop has negotiated a massive extension. Some relievers have signed. The spring training caps have dropped. A lawsuit trying to stop taxpayer money going to a new A’s stadium in Las Vegas has been filed. There’s a rare bit of good sports media news. The 2026 World Cup Final venue was announced. Twitter keeps Twittering. And I go a bit loopy on a movie pitch.
The Daily Briefing
The Royals sign Bobby Witt Jr. to an 11-year, $288.7 million contract extension
Shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. and the Kansas City Royals have agreed to an 11-year, $288.7 million contract extension. Witt gets four player opt-outs after years seven, eight, nine, and ten. If he does not exercise those, multiple team options kick in following year 11. If all of the team options are exercised Witt will make $377.7 million over 14 years.
This is easily the largest contract in Royals franchise history, surpassing Salvador Pérez's four-year, $82 million deal that was signed back in March 2021. It is the second biggest contract extension ever given to a player with only two years’ worth of service time, following only Fernando Tatis Jr., who inked a 14-year, $340 million deal before the 2022 season.
The deal starts small, as Witt — who made less than 750 grand in 2023 — will make $2 million plus a $7.7 million signing bonus. He’ll make $7 million in 2025 and 2026, $13 million in 2027, and $19 million in 2028. It jumps up to $30 million in 2029 and then $35 million in 2030. Witt’s option years — 2031-34 — are all $35 million as well. The club options from 2035-2037 are for $33 million, $28 million, and $28 million, respectively. Got all that?
Witt, who is just 23, was a 2019 draft pick who made his debut on Opening Day 2022. He broke out big last season, hitting .276/.319/.496 (120 OPS+) with 30 home runs, a league-leading 11 triples, and 49 stolen bases while playing excellent defense. The Royals clearly see him as the centerpiece of the franchise and they are paying him as such.
But they are doing a bit more than that here as well.
Kansas City has been pretty damn active this offseason, signing free agents Adam Frazier, Seth Lugo, Hunter Renfroe, Will Smith, and Michael Wacha. They now have the highest payroll in the AL Central. While that’s not too much of a trick — being the biggest-spending team in the AL Central is sort of like being the most powerful football team in Alaska — it’s not nothing. One possible reason for the Royals being aggressive this year is that they’ve looked around, noticed that no one looks all that hot in the Central, and are going for it.
Another reason, which is not mutually exclusive with the first, is that the Royals want a new ballpark in downtown Kansas City and there’s a ballot referendum on a tax that would help fund it coming up in two months. Stoking this kind of excitement about the team in the runup to that election can’t hurt. And hey, if it fails, they can just slash payroll again and Witt will eventually opt-out or agree to a trade. Not that I’m trying to be cynical here. Just noting the notable, that’s all.
That caveat aside, this is a big signing. The biggest in franchise history. It’s real money committed to a great player who, based on all of his public statements, really likes playing for the Royals and who will be the face of the franchise for years and years to come. It’s a deal that should not only excite Royals fans but one that should make fans of teams that are sitting on their wallets this winter ask what the hell the deal is. Because if the Royals can do this, anyone can.
Yankees acquire Caleb Ferguson from the Dodgers
The New York Yankees have acquired lefty reliever Caleb Ferguson from the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers will be receiving two pitchers in return: lefty Matt Gage and righty Christian Zazueta.
Ferguson is a five-year veteran who has spent his entire career with the Dodgers. In that time he’s appeared in 201 games and sports a 3.43 ERA (121 ERA+) with a K/BB ratio of 247/82 in 207.1 innings pitched. He’s a lefty but he actually pitches better against righties, which is unusual. He’ll be a matchup middle reliever of some sort for New York. How he matches up will be Aaron Boone’s problem. Which, if you’re a Yankees fan probably doesn’t make you feel very good.
Gage, 30, pitched for the Blue Jays in 2022 and the Astros last year, with the Yankees just claiming him off waivers a week ago. He only has 16 appearances under his belt, but they were 16 decent appearances. Zazueta is only 19 and has spent two seasons in the Dominican Summer League.
Dodgers re-sign Ryan Brasier
Right after the Ferguson trade was announced the Dodgers re-signed free agent reliever Ryan Brasier to a two-year, $9 million deal with incentives that could lead to him making $13 million in total.
Brasier, who pitched for six years with the Red Sox, had quite an odyssey in 2023. He began the year in Boston, stunk up the joint with an ERA north of 7, and was released in late May. In early June the Dodgers picked him up, taught him to throw a cutter, and he tore off 39 appearances in which he posted a 0.70 ERA. Often times stuff like that is a matter of luck and blessings from the BABIP gods, but based on this deal the Dodgers believe that they helped him figure something out.
The Spring Training caps have dropped
Gentlemen . . . BEHOLD!
There have certainly been worse models over the years. The Twins cap — the one with the two flags in the middle of the second to the last row, with an “M” for Minneapolis and “StP” for Saint Paul — is unique. I dig the Nats cap too, there on the far bottom right. The Reds, Angels, and Yankees aren’t exactly thinking outside of the box, but whatever. There’s certainly a lot of yellow.
Thoughts?
Nevada teachers have another go at public funding for the A’s
The PAC representing the Nevada teachers union, having failed to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to underwrite the A’s new Las Vegas stadium via political means, is now attempting to do so via legal means. From Evan Drellich:
A teacher-backed political action committee on Monday sued the state and Gov. Joe Lombardo, challenging the legality of the bill that last year granted $380 million in public money to a new Las Vegas stadium for the A’s. The lawsuit, which also names state treasurer Zach Conine, is the second effort aimed at the A’s brought by the Nevada State Education Association, one of Nevada’s teachers’ unions.
The first, a ballot initiative, sought to bring the stadium’s funding bill, known as “SB1,” to a public vote. The teachers lost in court in November, but an appeal is pending.
Now, the teachers are going after the bill on technical grounds, alleging it violates the state’s constitution.
I don’t know what the teachers’ legal argument is. I don’t know if it’s strong. I sorta feel like it won’t win because challenges to state spending authority from the outside rarely win. But that’s sorta beside the point. I say that because I’m mostly just impressed by how overwhelmingly negatively the A’s proposed relocation to Vegas has been received.
There has been no rah-rah’ing from baseball fans. There hasn’t even been much if any rah-rah’ing from the business community and chamber of commerce types. There doesn’t seem to be any excitement about the A’s moving at all! To the extent there’s even been a scintilla of it, it’s been massively outweighed by the overtly hostile reactions to it such as what we’re seeing from the teachers here.
No one seems to give a single crap about the A’s moving to Las Vegas except John Fisher. It’s absolutely amazing. If they do end up moving there they’re gonna flop so, so bad.
I don’t understand sports media, but this is good anyway
A week or two ago I ripped the Los Angeles Times for laying off a bunch of people. I was particularly annoyed and confused about them laying off Jack Harris, their Dodgers beat writer. Partially because Harris is great at what he does but mostly because the Dodgers are THE story in baseball right now and coverage of them is gonna get a ton of traffic, so why on Earth would the top Los Angeles newspaper lay off its Dodgers beat writer?
Welp, turns out that the L.A. Times has reconsidered:
Now if we can just figure out how to get every other dumb decision that gets made in this damn world reversed. Someone get on that please.
Other Stuff
The Big Garden State Apple: My Kind of Town!
FIFA is so mad with power that they’re putting the World Cup Final in a place that doesn’t exist! “New York New Jersey”:
Everyone who knows about such things is saying that MetLife stadium sucks and that it would’ve been way better to put the final in Los Angeles or Dallas or someplace, but who knows what goes into these decisions? Besides graft, of course. At least one good thing will spin out of this: since FIFA mandates grass, the extremely problematic turf in this joint will be going away in a year or two.
The bigger issue is gonna be getting 80,000+ visiting soccer fans who live in countries with real mass transit to get their brains around just how hard it is to get to this stadium from New York, where almost all of them will be staying. Defector had a good discussion on that yesterday. But just know that this was a real sign that appeared in a hotel lobby when the Super Bowl was played there:
Cannot wait for our country to put its best foot forward in two years!
Masterful gambit, sir!
From the New York Times yesterday: “X, formerly Twitter, is investing in original video content — paying celebrities and influencers to try to revive the platform.” Sub hed: “Linda Yaccarino, the chief executive of the platform formerly known as Twitter, is relying on her TV industry ties to recruit established stars to the site.”
The hilarious part of all of this is that the celebrities were there before, posting stuff ALL THE TIME. And they were doing it for free! Then Elon Musk decided that he wanted to get $8 a month from some white supremacists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs, took away all kinds of functionality people liked for no apparent reason, and alienated all of the big names, most of whom left. Now they’re gonna try paying them to get them to come back.
This tweet remains the most trenchant thing every written about that dude:
Inspirational
I got this spam message on LInkedIn last night:
I’m not at all interested in this fake job, but I gotta tell ya: this would be the amazing starting point for a screenplay.
A writer can’t find work. Or maybe they’re having some sort of personal crisis. They say “screw it!” and go to work for some creepy or mysterious or unsettlingly utopian AI company teaching computers how to write because the whole machine learning thing is simply not getting believable or marketable results.
If you wanted to go straight drama/thriller you could make it one of those classic “things weren’t what they seemed” plots. Or you could do a heartwarming thing in which the burned out writer, in resignedly trying to make themselves obsolete, rediscovers their love of writing and what it means to be human. With the help, of course, of some special man or woman who was hired to teach the computers fiction or poetry and . . . they fall in looooooove.
Actually, I think both of those are boring. I’d have our protagonist find the process of teaching computers to write to be blurring their very sense of humanity and identity at which point they must fight their way back from the psychological brink in some sort of mind-fucking Charlie Kaufman-esque way. Or they fall in love with the computer and we’re just re-doing “Electric Dreams,” “Her,” or parts of “Blade Runner: 2049.” Either way.
Did I mention I’ve been having a weird couple of weeks?
Have a great day everyone.
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