Cup of Coffee: January 17, 2024

Good morning!

We continue the shakedown cruise of the U.S.S. Cup of Coffee on Beehiiv this week. Here are today’s release notes:

• Yesterday was the first day I sent out a paywalled, subscriber-only newsletter. Unfortunately, a small handful of y’all who are paid-up Cup of Coffee customers were hit with the paywall and found yourselves listed as free subscribers due to glitches in the migration matrix which I have yet to figure out. Thankfully, though, it doesn’t seem like that many of you were affected. If you are one of those people and if you reached out to me about it yesterday, I fixed it last night and sent you an email explaining it. At least I think I fixed. If you are still having issues, or if this affects you and you haven’t reached out to me, please email me at ccalcaterra@gmail.com and we’ll get it sorted;
• For your information, the manner in which I have chosen to sort it all out is to confirm your payment information on Stripe — you don’t need to send proof to me; if I have your email address I can see it — see when you last renewed, and then comp you a gift subscription until, roughly, your old sub would’ve expired (I am rounding up to the next month in your favor). My hope is that Beehiiv will tell you when your “gift” ends and prompt you to renew, just as it does when paid subs end. If you’re one of those folks and I comped you a month or four months or eight months what have you and you’re NOT prompted to renew, please let me know;
• In yesterday’s newsletter I said I fixed blockquote and bullet fonts. Dear readers, as you saw yesterday, I did not, in fact, fix blockquote and bullet fonts. But today I think I did. You may still hate the serif font, but at least they’re all the same size now throughout the newsletter;
• As for that font: one of you said yesterday that it “looks like it came out of a typewriter.” Another one of you, in a totally different context, said to me the other day that they “refuse to give up the 20th century.” I’m with the latter guy, at least in most aesthetic respects, so I’ll need a more compelling argument than “I don’t like it” to consider changing it.
• Finally, you’ll see that, at the end of the email today . . . there is a button linking you to the comments! One of Beehiiv’s product people told me how to do it. I’ll note, though, that it’s a button I have to code with a link to each day’s web post, so there is a BIG chance that I’ll either (a) forget to do it some days; or (b) I’ll code it with yesterday’s post or something very dumb and Craig-like. If it happens it happens, and you all can mock me in the comments once you find the proper way there.

OK, I think that’s all I got for today. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

 The Daily Briefing

Kendall Graveman is out for the year 

The Houston Astros announced yesterday that reliever Kendall Graveman underwent right shoulder surgery last week and will miss the 2024 season.

Graveman missed both the ALDS and the ALCS this past fall because of right shoulder discomfort. At the time he said that he had hoped to pitch if the Astros advanced to the World Series, but the problems were obviously more serious than he thought at the time. They flared up good last week when he started his ramp-up for spring training.

Graveman, who was acquired in a trade with the White Sox last July, was 2-2 with a 2.42 ERA (176 ERA+) in 23 appearances after moving on to Houston. He pitched 68 games in all last year, posting an ERA of 3.12 (141 ERA+). His loss will be a pretty significant one for the Houston pen.

The Giants picked up someone off the Mets scrap heap

The Mets traded catcher/outfielder Cooper Hummel to the Giants in exchange for cash considerations. The Mets had designated him for assignment last week.

This is about as minor a transaction as I’ll ever mention here. Someone, for the love of God, sign Cody Bellinger. Or Josh Hader. Or Blake Snell. Or Matt Chapman. Or even J.D. Martinez or Justin Turner for that matter. We’re bored.

Dusty Baker taking Giants front-office role

I guess Dusty Baker was not as deterred by the “bloggers and tweeters” as he let on back in October, because the recently-retired manager has taken a front office job with the San Francisco Giants. The team is expected to make a formal announcement about it sometime this week.

This will be Baker’s fourth stint with the Giants, after having played 100 games for them in 1984, having managed the team from 1993-2002, and having worked as an advisor from 2018-19 while he cooled his heels between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros gigs. He is from Sacramento, owns a winery there, and has lived in the area basically forever, so having a professional home base down the highway in San Francisco is probably pretty good for his semi-retired Northern California lifestyle.

Sean Doolittle takes a coaching job with the Nationals 

Longtime reliever Sean Dootlittle recently retired but he’s got a new job: “pitching strategist” for the Washington Nationals.

In this role, the Nats’ press release says, Doolittle will serve as a liaison between the club’s analytics department and pitching staff. I’m going to choose to believe that if they ever try to fire him that he’ll go on some baseball variation of Tom Smykowski’s “I already told you! I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills!” rant from “Office Space.”

Nats GM Mike Rizzo had this to say about Doolittle’s hiring:

“Sean Doolittle was always an extremely talented pitcher, but he is also one of the most intelligent baseball minds you can find. We’re incredibly excited to have him on our staff to help guide our talented group of young pitchers.”

Someone let me know who where to find this “talented group of young pitchers” Rizzo is talking about here, because I’m at a loss.

Other Stuff

Knock me over with a feather

From ESPN:

A Tennessee woman filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing James Dolan, chairman of Madison Square Garden and governor of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, of pressuring her into unwanted sex nearly a decade ago while also facilitating an encounter with disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who she also claimed sexually assaulted her.

Since he’s not a baseball guy I haven’t really followed the drama that has always surrounded James Dolan. But I will say that everything about that dude’s vibe screams “pressuring a woman into unwanted sex” so I’m inclined to listen to what the plaintiff has to say here.

Far-right extremism in upstate New York

North Country Public Radio has an in-depth report on far-right extremism in upstate New York. The Proud Boy groups and, more concerning, the armed militia groups which thrive in the rural areas north of the Thruway.

Last fall, signs for a far-right group known as Patriot Front were posted in the Adirondack communities of Keene and Upper Jay. The group also hung signs in Plattsburgh in 2018.

Another group that’s tried to recruit in the area is the Ku Klux Klan. Over the years there have been reports of KKK flyers in Fulton, Montgomery, and Oneida counties.

In 2021, a data leak from a Three Percenters group showed that about a third of its registered members were from St. Lawrence County.

There are also “sovereign citizens” around the region, people who believe laws don’t apply to them. “I’ve had more issues with sovereign citizens than I have with Oath Keepers or other individuals,” said Fulton County Sheriff Rich Giardino, who himself has been part of a far-right sheriffs’ group. “Sovereign citizens are resistant and say that they're not compliant with the laws. Those lead to more high-risk confrontations with police,” Giardino said.

I’ve driven through that country several times since my daughter decided to go to the University of Vermont. I get off of the freeway at Rome, New York and head northeast until I hit the southern end of Lake Champlain and cross the state line. Intellectually I knew that, outside of the major cities, New York is just as rural and red as anyplace, but I really was not prepared for the sheer number of Gadsden flags, Confederate battle flags, Three Percenters flags, and “Trump won!” and “Fuck Joe Biden” signs. You get a break from them when you go through some of the tiny lake towns with tourist cabins, fudge shops, and boat launches, but they return less than a mile away from the village centers. If you didn’t know any better you’d think you were in the deep south.

But that’s the thing about it: the idea of a north-south divide when it comes to this kind of thing these days is profoundly ignorant. Some of the most odious and dangerous militias, hate groups, and far-right instigators have been found in Michigan. Ohio. Even Canada. And, per this article, upstate New York.

The common denominator is not north-south geography. It’s the presence of resentment-filled white men with few prospects in predominantly white rural areas. People who have been told that something has been taken away from them, with that “something” usually being “the existence of a society run by straight white men.” These are people who truly believe that America’s increasingly diverse and multicultural society is a personal attack upon them which, in turn, inspires aggrieved entitlement and moral outrage. If they are given some sort of a permission structure to openly express this resentment — say, from someone like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik in upstate New York, Jim Jordan or J.D. Vance in Ohio or, more broadly, a person like Donald Trump — there’s really nothing to rein them in. That becomes painfully obvious as you read just how openly these militiamen and their ilk parade around these small towns and even find friendship and favor with local law enforcement.

I don’t know how best to deal with this poison, but I don’t suspect it involves trying to understand and find empathy for Proud Boys, militiamen, Nazis, toxic deniers of reality, and those politicians who provide that permission structure I talked about. I think it involves clear, unambiguous pushback. And that pushback might require punching back.

Sure this is a great idea

Yesterday two state senators from the Great State of Ohio and Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor, who is currently the frontrunner to be the next governor come 2026, introduced a bill that would require people in the state to provide age verification in order to watch pornographic material. If the bill passes into law, it would seem that people will need to upload their ID or provide other personal information in order to watch porn.

Nothing says “I love small government” more than requiring private citizens to give out vital personal details to a porn website. Which, because it would no doubt require auditing and oversight to enforce, means that the porn sites will be obligated to tell the government what porn sites you access as well.

But hey, I’m sure we can trust the Republicans who run Ohio to be responsible with this sort of sensitive personal information. I mean, it’s not like the state’s top law enforcement official did something crazily irresponsible like publicly calling a ten year-old rape victim who went to another state to get an abortion a liar in order to score political points. And it’s not like a Republican prosecutor attempted to throw a woman in prison for having a miscarriage. I am sure the men — and it’s almost all men — who run this state are not going to attempt to unduly pry into our personal lives.

In related news, these same people will continue to cry “tyranny” if it’s even suggested that someone should be subject to a cursory background check before buying a semi-automatic weapon.

Looking back at “Happy Days”

The TV show “Happy Days” debuted 50 years ago this past Monday. The New York Times has a story talking to surviving cast members who look back at the extraordinarily popular show that, along with “American Graffiti,” “Grease,” the group “Sha Na Na” and a bunch of other things defined the 1950s nostalgia boom which took over the 1970s. Well, “American Graffiti” took place in the early 60s, but you get the idea. Also: Marion Ross is still alive at 95!

I loved “Happy Days” when I was a little kid and it was in its first run. I suspect that was because, on some level, it was a superhero show with The Fonz as a comic book-style hero. Once I got older, however, and watched it in syndication, it became obvious just how cringey so much of it was. This was before the phrase “Jump the Shark” entered the cultural lexicon, but the concept behind it was pretty obvious and it applied to “Happy Days” more than almost any other show.

The thing about it though: as I watched the reruns I came to love the first two seasons of the show even as I came to loathe the far more popular nine seasons which followed.

In those first two years “Happy Days” was a single-camera production shot on film as opposed to the three-camera thing taped live before a studio audience that it became in season three and would remain until the end of its run. In those early seasons they actually attempted to tell stories from the 1950s — Richie meets a beatnik chick! The gang campaigns for Adlai Stevenson! Richie and Potsie scheme to get a photo of Clarabell the Clown from “The Howdy Doody Show” without his makeup! — complete with accurate-to-the-period costumes, hairstyles, and production design. They moved off of that pretty quickly, though, and it soon became the most broadly 1970s show imaginable in spite of its putative setting. There were long holds for applause when a main character entered the scene. There were overused catchphrases. The show featured some of the most hacky plot lines imaginable which, no, I will not forgive even if one of them did lay the groundwork for Robin Williams to become a star. 

Even if I don’t look back super fondly on “Happy Days,” the New York Times story does make me happy, however. Mostly because I had long assumed that the cast all resented Henry Winkler for Fonzie becoming a breakout, gimmick character. And hell, maybe they did resent it at the time. Now though, with Ron Howard being a massively successful director and producer and Donny Most and Anson Williams getting to an age in which well-balanced people stop holding old grudges, they seem to be pretty zen about it. Indeed, the best line of the interview comes when the reporter asks Williams about the whole Fonzie craze sidelining his Potsie character who, originally, was second banana to Richie. He said “people ask me that question and I’d say, ‘Are you kidding? The Fonz bought me a house.’”

Correctamundo!

Yeah, the original theme was way better too.

Have a great day everyone.

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