Cup of Coffee: February 7, 2024

Good morning!

In today’s newsletter: Clayton’s back. The A’s get even MORE shade in response to their move to Las Vegas and you won’t believe who is throwing it now. And, not to be outdone, John Angelos continues to be the worst, even as he’s on his way out the door.

In Other Stuff BlueSky is now open for everyone, even without an invite. A court finally says that Trump is not above the law. Let’s see if that holds. The absolute last movie I ever thought would or could be adapted into a TV show is about to be adapted into a TV show. And a famous play is being adapted into . . . a play? OK, good for them.

Finally, before we get going today, I wanted to handle a bit of housekeeping.

There’s been a pretty big uptick in recent days of people contacting me to tell me that they’re not getting the newsletter delivered. Invariably, I am finding that it either has been delivered but it has, for some reason, been sent to the person’s spam or junk folder, or that it was sent but that the person’s email server has bounced it back for unknown reasons.

If you’re someone who is not getting the newsletter in your inbox, I’d ask you to do a couple of things:

• First: check junk/spam folders. I know that seems basic, but it is happening more frequently than at Substack, so at least give it a look first;
• Second: Consider whitelisting the email address which sends this newsletter: cupofcoffee@mail.beehiiv.com. Different email servers have different methods for doing so, but the upshot is that you are telling your email server that, yes, you want to receive this newsletter and that you do not want it going into junk or getting bounced.

Again, while there aren’t a ton of people experiencing this problem, I’m finding that this is a much bigger issue for people who have their own custom servers or who use more obscure servers than for people who use the big ones like Gmail. If it happens to you, these steps are the quickest way to deal with it. If none of that works after a day or two, shoot me an email and we’ll try to suss it out.

OK, on with the show.

 The Daily Briefing

Jose Altuve, Astros agree to a five-year extension

Jose Altuve and the Astros have agreed to a five-year, $125 million contract extension that basically guarantees he’ll be a Houston Astro for the rest of his career.

Altuve, who will turn 34 early this coming season, is heading into the final year of his old deal, which will pay him $26 million. The new deal begins in 2025 and takes him through 2029. It will pay him a $15 million signing bonus, then salaries of $30 million in 2025, 2026 and 2027 and $10 million in both 2029 and 2030. He’ll be 39 years old when the deal concludes.

Altuve has played 13 years in the big leagues and has a career line of .307/.364/.471 (129 OPS+). He has 2,047 hits, 295 stolen bases and 209 home runs. He’s made eight All-Star teams, has won six Silver Slugger awards, three batting titles, a Gold Glove and and he was the 2017 AL MVP.

Beyond all of that, he has been the leader of an Astros club that has gone from losing 324 games in his first three seasons as a big leaguer to winning two World Series and four American League pennants in the past seven years. As a result, I am confident that, around five years after this deal ends, he’ll be heading to the Hall of Fame. And there will be no debate about what’s on the cap on his plaque.

Clayton Kershaw signs with the Dodgers

We all probably knew this was gonna happen. It was simply a matter of when. The when is now, though, as Clayton Kershaw has re-signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers on a one-year deal with a player option for 2025. This will be his 17th year in Dodger blue.

The deal won’t be official until Thursday because that’s the first day the Dodgers can put someone on the 60-day injured list, which is where Kershaw is bound due to the fact that he had major shoulder surgery last fall. As such, Kershaw won’t pitch until the second half of the season in all likelihood.

You know the story with Kershaw by now: he’s still highly effective when healthy, but at this point in his career the health tends to fade pretty quickly, at which point he continues to claim he’s fine, gets shelled in an important game or two down the stretch, and then, a couple of weeks later, says “actually, I was super injured, dudes.” Then everyone forgets about it and they do it all again.

Is it the most inspiring baseball tradition? No, but a tradition it is, and we should honor it.

Las Vegas mayor: the A’s plans “don’t make sense”

Yesterday morning I talked about how no one in Las Vegas seems to be all that enthused with the Oakland A’s relocation. I had no idea how far and wide that sentiment was held until I heard Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman go on the Front Office Sports Today podcast yesterday and say that even she thinks the A’s should stay in Oakland.

"I thought, this does not make sense, and so why is it happening?" Goodman said. "And then I thought, well, because they really want to stay in Oakland, they want to be on the water, they have that magnificent dream. Yet they can't get it done . . . I personally think they've gotta figure out a way to stay in Oakland and make their dream come true.” She added that A’s owner John Fisher, “in my opinion, needs to listen to the people that are up there. It's their team.”

Hours after that interview starting making waves Goodman walked back those comments and professed excitement for the A’s coming to Las Vegas. You don’t have to be an expert in politics or public relations to know that the podcast comments were her genuine thoughts on the matter and the walkback was a function of her aides or state or county government officials or John Fisher or Rob Manfred or some combination of all of them leaning on her and feeding her the approved talking points.

Whatever. It’s not like we can genuinely except Oakland officials to talk to Fisher again given that they told him to pound salt. And you can’t blame them for that, really, given how he negotiated with them in bad faith and dropped them for a worse deal in Vegas, seemingly out of spite. There have been no talks between Oakland and the A’s for nearly a year and at this point one cannot imagine that relationship repairing itself.

Of course if baseball had an actual commissioner, he or she would be leaning on John Fisher to either re-engage with Oakland or to sell the damn team rather than create an utter embarrassment in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, all we have is Rob Manfred.

John Angelos was going to sell the naming rights for Camden Yards

Speaking of crappy owners, Lindsey Adler and Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal report that, before he agreed to sell the Orioles to David Rubenstein, John Angelos made a deal to sell the naming rights to Oriole Park at Camden Yards to an unknown corporation. The new name — which was to be “[Something] Park at Camden Yards” — was supposed to be announced yesterday, but the sale put the kibosh on that, at least for now.

The best thing about it: the corporate sponsor in question didn't find out about the sale until the rest of us did when the news broke last week. Angelos didn’t bother to say anything. Just as he didn’t tell Maryland officials that he was shopping the team while negotiating a new Camden Yards lease. Negotiations during which he explicitly told said officials that he was not selling the team, after which they took the unusual step of calling Angelos out as a bald-faced liar in the media.

What a jackwagon that guy is.

Everything old is new again

From Variety:

It’s a game-changer.

Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are set to launch a new streaming joint venture that will make all of their sports programming available under a single broadband roof, a move that will put content from ESPN, TNT and Fox Sports on a new standalone app and, in the process, likely shake up the world of TV sports.

The three media giants are slated to launch the new service in the fall. Subscribers would get access to linear sports networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV and ESPN+, as well as hundreds of hours from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL and many top college divisions. Pricing will be announced at a later date.

I’m not sure I’d call a bundle with that many different networks made available all at one price a “game-changer.” It’d call it “cable.” Congratulations on re-inventing that, guys.

Other Stuff

BlueSky is open for anyone now

I stopped sharing BlueSky codes in this space a few weeks back because the codes weren’t being used. My take on that was that any organic enthusiasm people had for the new platform was petering out and that BlueSky sorta missed the moment by taking way too long to open up to everyone. I feel their doing so would’ve gone over way better a few months ago when people were still truly freaking out about Twitter becoming enshittified. Now, however, I think a hell of a lot of people have simply accepted the fact that Twitter sucks, that these sorts of social media platforms aren’t truly necessary for most people, and that a great many people have moved on to other things.

That suspicion will be tested now, as BlueSky dropped the whole invite thing yesterday and is now open to anyone.

Apparently this opening up is going to be occasioned by BlueSky allowing users to create their own feeds — or “instances” to use the Mastodon terminology — which will decentralize the platform as opposed to having a single feed in which users can only curate who they do and do not follow.

Which, well, whatever. I didn’t much care for that when I briefly farted around with Mastodon because I use these sorts of platforms for news and commentary — to know, broadly, what’s going on and what people are talking about — and I don’t think that’s very compatible with the siloing-off that decentralized instances encourages.

But like I said, maybe that era is truly over and trying to recreate it is a sucker’s bet. Maybe I just need to go back to my old browser bookmarks and do the media rounds each day like it’s 2005 or something. It worked then. I suppose it’ll work now.

A court finally says that Trump is not above the law

Of all the crazy shit that has been unleashed on American society since the emergence of Donald Trump as a political leader, the craziest has probably been the realization that there aren’t many actual laws and rules in place protecting the ongoing existence of democracy. What we’ve really had for a couple of centuries are non-binding, agreed-upon norms that were enforced by nothing more than our leaders’ sense of decency and/or sense of shame. Indeed, before Trump very few if any of our leaders would ever think to cross any number of lines because doing so would be morally and ethically wrong. And if they did cross them they immediately became political pariahs, forced into resignation and/or political exile.

Trump certainly showed us the folly of a shame-based regime. He did whatever he wanted and didn’t care that doing so was simply not done. He has conditioned the entire Republican Party to behave the same way, to the point where it is now the official policy of the entire political right to ignore election results if possible, to ignore ethics laws and other forms of legitimate government authority, and to encourage the use of violence as a political tool whenever it can. That’s just how it is these days.

Another thing Trump has attempted to do is to claim that he is not subject to legal process of any kind. The fact that he’s been able to to stop said legal process against him for a substantial amount of time simply by making that assertion is pretty amazing, actually. I mean, one would hope that someone getting indicted for something and then saying “sorry, I’m totally immune because I was president” would be met by laughter and a summary rejection of the claim, but that hasn’t been the case with Trump. His audacious and frankly ridiculous claim that presidents are above the law has been successful, practically speaking, for many months now simply by virtue of his assertion of it. It has stopped three separate criminal cases against him in their tracks as a result.

Yesterday, however, someone finally told him that that shit won’t fly:

A federal appeals court has unanimously ruled that Donald Trump can be put on trial for trying to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, rejecting Trump’s sweeping claim of presidential immunity and moving the case one step closer to a jury.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the panel of three judges wrote. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.”

Trump will now appeal to the Supreme Court, one presumes, as I believe an intermediary delaying tactic of appealing to the D.C. Circuit en banc is off the table given the timeline placed on the ruling by the three-judge panel (if I’m wrong about that someone tell me). Of course I have very little faith in the current Supreme Court given that six of its nine members are hellbent on advancing Republican political priorities above all other things, the law included, but I suppose even a couple of them might stop short of giving presidents an open-ended license to commit crimes.

Even if they do the right thing, of course, they’ll probably take long enough to get there to where any actual prosecution of Trump will be delayed until after the 2024 election. Which, if Trump wins, he’ll simply once again assert immunity on the grounds that he’s now the president again or, in the federal cases, simply order that the prosecutions be dropped. He’s first and foremost an autocrat and he’ll behave like one if given the chance again.

For now, though, I’m just happy that some authority has decided, even temporarily, that up is not down, black is not white, and that people who do crimes in the United States of America are accountable for said crimes, even if they happen to be politically powerful. It’s almost as if that was the entire point of this friggin’ country in the first place, eh?

They’ll kill everything if they get the chance

One of you shot me this after reading the Gene Hackman stuff on Monday:

Paramount is reportedly developing a TV series remake of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic and influential 1974 feature “The Conversation” with MRC producing after having optioned the remake rights from the Coppola estate . . . the lead role will be gender-flipped from the original . . . this will not be a limited series as first reported, rather an ongoing one with MRC set to take the project to market.

MRC is the production company behind quality shows like “Poker Face” and “Ozark” so I suppose it could be good. And I won’t dismiss a TV remake of a movie out of hand because the mediums are so different that it’s basically impossible to just regurgitate the film. Indeed, there are some great successes in this realm, including “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Fargo,” each of which took an idea or, in the latter’s case, a vibe, from a movie and ran with it to great effect in its own unique way.

That said, I do not understand why someone would buy the rights to “The Conversation” for these purposes, as it’s neither a uniquely original idea nor is it a particularly marketable bit of IP.

“The Conversation” was Coppola’s riff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up.” DePalma later used the same basic idea for “Blow Out.” The central idea — building a thriller around a fleetingly captured image or a fleetingly captured bit of audio — is no more proprietary than a murder mystery set in a large country estate or a crime picture set around a morally ambiguous cop. The quality of these specific movies was rooted not in the plot or the premise but in their makers’ artistic vision, execution, and in the actors’ performances. Which is to say, if you have an idea rooted in the same stuff as “The Conversation,” hell, just run with it on your own. It’s really OK!

Of course there are reasons someone might want to have a given movie’s name attached to their TV project, with marketability being the usual case. But how marketable is “The Conversation” as a piece of intellectual property? Weirdos like me like it, of course, and its stature remains high in the world of movie critics and film scholars, but it’s not exactly something that will excite the populace and ensure high ratings. Indeed, the idea that “The Conversation” is the stuff of franchise-building immediately puts me in mind of Martin Prince playing the “My Dinner with Andre” video game on “The Simpsons.” It’s far closer to a joke than a commercial reality.

But hey, maybe it’s just a love letter from whoever is behind the idea to Coppola’s film. Maybe they just can’t not set the thing in San Francisco and build the story around a paranoid surveillance expert named “Harriett Caul” or whatever, thereby requiring that they possess the rights. If so, good luck, I suppose. I’ll probably watch two episodes of it and then stop watching it. Much like I do almost every show that comes out these days.

Crazy, but it just might work!

Seen in the wild:

Imagine “Romeo and Juliet” being adapted for the stage! What’s next? “Hamlet” on stage? “The Iceman Cometh?” “Death of a Salesman?”

All of these could be production challenges in a theater setting, but I have faith in directors’ ability to make such material translate to the new medium!

Have a great day everyone.

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