Cup of Coffee: January 31, 2024

Good morning!

We’re back to normal around here today and not a moment too soon, as a lot went down yesterday.

The biggest news: the Angelos family is selling the Orioles. Or so Orioles fans hope. The World Series MVP had unexpected surgery. The Jays signed a bat, the Twins and M’s made a trade the Angels signed a guy someone else is paying, the stolen Jackie Robinson statue has been found, I have another Jimy Williams story, and I get all kinds of cranky about someone defending Sports Illustrated’s irresponsible private equity owners.

In Other Stuff Cup of Coffee now has a Slack, and nothing has made me feel more old. We also have items about Elon Musk, Roger Goodell, and Donald Trump, so it must be Rich Asshole Day here at Cup of Coffee. Imagine if I had done what I was gonna do and had written an item about some Les Wexner stuff I had tweeted about. I guess I reached my Rich Asshole limit sometime yesterday evening. It’s a defense mechanism you see. One that in Modern America, is critical if one wants to keep one’s sanity.

 The Daily Briefing

The Orioles are being sold to private equity billionaires 

John Ourand of Puck Sports reports that the Angelos family has agreed to sell the Baltimore Orioles to two private equity billionaires: Baltimore native David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, and Mike Arougheti, co-founder of Ares Management. Franchise legend Cal Ripken Jr. is also reportedly in the potential ownership group as well. The sale price: $1.725 billion.

There is a twist here, though: Rubenstein’s group would only purchase a 40% stake in the club until family patriarch Peter Angelos' death, after which they will purchase the remainder from the Angelos family. Peter Angelos purchased the Orioles for $173 million in 1993 and his son John has been the team’s control person since Peter became medically incapacitated several years ago.

You may remember Rubenstein’s name from a couple of years ago when he was rumored to be part of a group led by Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis to purchase the Washington Nationals. That went away for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Rubenstein did not want to be a junior partner to the Angelos family in the whole MASN mess. At worst this sale would make him the senior partner of the mess but, more likely, it could lead to its resolution. Or could serve as a signal that the mess is in the process of being resolved.

There is obviously a lot of work ahead before this sort of deal can be done. MLB approval, which would likely not come until at least the second quarter of the year, ensuring that the financing is in place and all of that. But in the meantime it does give hope to Orioles fans who are more than tired of John Angelos’ baloney, his crying poor, and everything else that goes with being a second-generation failson owner who inherited the club from his father. I mean, I’m obviously not a fan of private equity guys like Rubenstein either, but we’ve seen at least seen that lot have some success in baseball with the Dodgers and, to some extent, the Mets.

If the new guys come in, close the deal, and treat the team like a toy/civic asset and do absolutely everything they can to excite the fan base and win — including locking up the great young core the team has rather than trading it away or watching it walk when it gets expensive — it’ll be amazing. If they come and and treat the team as a profit/asset-growth machine, less so. But that goes for every team sale of course.

Corey Seager had hernia surgery

Here’s a surprise: Rangers shortstop Corey Seager underwent surgery yesterday for a sports hernia. The injury had first occurred in the postseason, and the club’s initial thought was rest would heal him up nicely, but that has not been born out so under the knife he went.

First thought: dude had a sports hernia in the postseason and STILL won the World Series MVP Award? That’s pretty damn impressive.

Second thought: that’s a hell of a long time to wait for surgery, as he’s blown almost all of the offseason at this point and the Rangers are saying that he’ll most most of spring training. But the club is also saying they are holding out hope that Seager will be ready for Opening Day and that they don’t plan to acquire anyone to cover short, so maybe it’s not a big deal. Guess we’ll see.

Blue Jays sign Justin Turner 

Justin Turner has reached an agreement with the Toronto Blue Jays on a one-year contract worth $13 million plus $1.5 million in potential bonuses. The best part: “Carlos Baerga and MLB Network’s Jon Paul Morosi first reported news of the signing.” Go Carlos Baerga.

Turner could play third base for Toronto — at the moment utilityman Isiah Kiner-Falefa is listed at the top of the depth chart — but at age 39 one figures he’ll spend more time in the DH role, with occasional starts at third and first, much like he did for the Red Sox last year. And, for that matter, not radically unlike what Brandon Belt did for the Jays last year. The key here is that the glove has declined considerably but Turner’s bat is still holding up, as he hit .276/.345/.455 (114 OPS+) with 23 homers in 626 plate appearances for the Red Sox last year.

Makes you wonder why Boston, who doesn’t have a better option than Turner at DH at the moment, didn’t re-sign him. Then again, who knows what Boston is doing.

Twins trade Jorge Polanco to the Mariners for four players and cash

The Minnesota Twins traded second baseman Jorge Polanco to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for reliever Justin Topa, starter Anthony DeSclafani, outfield prospect Gabriel González, and Low-A pitcher Darren Bowen on Monday night. The Twins also got $8 million in cash in the deal.

Minnesota has a good deal of infield depth behind Polanco, including Edouard Julien and Royce Lewis and prospect Brooks Leeso, so he was pretty obviously expendable. In return they get DeSclafani who, if he’s healthy this year, can help bolster a rotation that has lost Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda, and a reliever in Topa who went 5-4 with a 2.61 ERA in 69 innings in 2023. The biggest get long-term is González, however. He’s a top-100 prospect who hit .298/.361/.476 with 18 home runs and 84 RBI between Low-A and High-A last season, when he was only 19 years old.

Well, maybe the biggest get is the $8 million Seattle sent on in the deal, as the Twins have been cutting payroll and will see a reduction in broadcast revenue due to Bally’s bailing on them. Team president Derek Falvey said on Monday night that that money would go toward acquisitions for 2024. Here’s hoping for Twins fans’ sake that he means it.

Polanco hit .255/.335/.454 (115 OPS+) over 343 plate appearances in 2023. His arrival in Seattle will bolster a position that was shaky for the M’s last season, featuring an anemic Kolten Wong early and ending with a not that much less anemic Josh Rojas late. The addition of the switch-hitting Polanco will eliminate what had been planned to be a platoon at that position this year.

Long term I feel like the addition of González will give the Twins the better end of this deal but in the short term this is a trade that helps both teams. But probably the Twins a bit more.

Aaron Hicks signs with the Angels

The Los Angeles Angels signed outfielder Aaron Hicks to a one-year deal on Monday. It’s a cheap signing for them as Hicks is still under the seven-year, $70 million contract he signed with the New York Yankees before the 2019 season. That deal pays Hicks $9.5 million in 2024, again in 2025, and includes a $1 million buyout for a club option in 2026. The Yankees are still responsible for all of it minus the major league minimum of $740,000 the Angels will have to pay Hicks this year.

Hicks, 34, was released by the Yankees after stinkin’ up the joint through the first two months of the 2023 season but he improved dramatically after signing in Baltimore, where he hit .275/.381/.425 over the remaining 65 games of the campaign. That seemed pretty flukey, and Anaheim is where almost all players not named Trout or Ohtani go to die, but it won’t cost the Angels much to see if Hicks can give them anything.

Well, it does cost them one thing: seeing whether or not Jo Adell, the Mayor of Salt Lake City, who no longer has minor league options, can be an everyday big leaguer. To be fair, he’s simply not produced with the Angels yet, and perhaps they have soured on him for good. With Hicks in town it seems like he’ll be the odd man out of the outfield mix, and will likely be used as trade bait. That seems at least a bit shortsighted to me given that there is almost no chance that Hicks will be part of the next contending Angles club and that, in theory at least, Adell could be.

Of course maybe Adell just doesn’t have it and the Angels know it. Or maybe the Angels are deluding themselves that they’re in win-now mode.

Stolen Jackie Robinson statue found destroyed

You’ll recall the story from the other day about the Jackie Robinson statue from the Little League field in Wichita, Kansas being stolen by jackwagons. Well, we have an update. A rather sad one, but an update all the same: it was found “charred and in pieces” in a nearby park:

First responders were called to a trash can fire at the park around 8:38 a.m. and found the statue. When firefighters extinguished the flames, they found pieces of the bronze statue.

So it goes.

The good news: the Little League still has the original mold from the statue and will have another one cast. There is a fundraiser afoot aimed at paying for that.

Also: they’re likely to arrest someone soon, as they found the truck in which the statue was hauled away and they have Ring camera footage relevant to the theft. I’m sure this wasn’t some sophisticated operation, after all. Like, I don’t think the Yakuza were consulted.

One more thing about Jimy Williams 

Yesterday I shared that story about the late Jimy Williams giving Steve Avery a start in a meaningless game back in 1997 in order to trigger his 1998 option. Well, I have an interesting update to that.

A Twitter correspondent named Stewart Joyce hipped me to the fact that this was not Williams’ first rodeo when it came to this sort of thing. Specifically, back in 1986, during Williams’ first year as manager of the Blue Jays, pitcher Dennis Lamp had an appearance-based vesting option as well. Lamp was a reliever so any appearances, not just starts, could’ve qualified him for this option. Lamp needed 44 of them in order to trigger hia 1987 option, which was for $600,000, but when he got to 38 games on September 2, Williams and the Jays sat him down for nearly four weeks, giving him two more appearances on September 28 and September 29, meaning he finished with only 40 appearances.

Lamp took the Blue Jays to arbitration, claiming that the club was trying to bone him. And there was good evidence for that, as the front office approached him during September and asked him to drop the incentive clause in exchange for increasing the buyout on the next year’s option. Basically, they offered him $125,000 in order to avoid the $600,000 he would’ve otherwise been guaranteed. Lamp didn’t take kindly to the team trying to get him to renegotiate and refused. Despite all of that, Lamp still lost his arbitration.

I suspect Williams was ordered to sit Lamp by the Jays front office and that he didn’t much care for it. I further suspect that the example with Lamp didn’t sit well with him and that it influenced the approach he took with Avery 11 years later, when Williams had more juice and confidence to call B.S. on that kind of manipulation from the suits.

Finance dude: finance dudes were not to blame for killing Sports Illustrated

I’m not sure why, because I never knowingly signed up for it, but I receive the sports business newsletter “John WallStreet” each day. It’s pretty much what you’d expect. A lot of stuff about the interaction of the world of finance and sports, TV deal stuff, marketing and licensing stuff and the like. Sometimes it’s somewhat interesting but it often focuses on things I don’t care a hell of a lot about. Like, a year or two ago it was THE place to learn about sports-related NFTs and weird sports-related capital funds fronted by athletes. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.

The other day an issue hit my inbox which caught my eye:

You can read the entry here. It’s certainly thought provoking. Except those thoughts are “laughter,” “annoyance” and something bordering on “rage” but no one ever said “thought provoking” meant it had to be good.

The irksome content in question involves the newsletter’s fierce defense of Authentic Brand Group, or ABG, which is the private equity concern which owns Sports Illustrated and licenses its name to Arena Group to actually publish SI. Basically, JohnWallStreet argues, ABG has done everything it can to squeeze money out of the Sports Illustrated brand from everything except publishing, but since that wasn’t why it bought the magazine in the first place, why is everyone mad?

There’s an argument to be made ABG could have elected a better steward for the media property. Maven/Arena has made some highly controversial decisions (see: use of independent contracts, accusations of AI generated articles). But it’s difficult to fault the publisher for emphasizing clicks and traffic over investigative and long-form journalism. It’s happening across the digital landscape. Legacy brands are doing what is needed to survive and appeal to today’s consumer . . .

. . . ABG has since introduced an SI branded sportsbook, ticketing platform, premium hospitality concept, and it is reportedly working on several hotel projects (including: Ann Arbor, Michigan). Those efforts do not even have to pan out for them to be worth ABG’s involvement. Licensing companies typically structure deals to include minimum guarantees (there may be success-based kickers to create upside opportunity). ABG is building a high-end ticketed events business with the SI brand too . . . ABG has seemingly cracked the code on how to extract maximum value from a brand in a business that is in secular decline–minimizing the content side of the house from business decisions. Arena is solely responsible for writing, editing, publishing, and distribution.

“They don’t get a seat at the table for licensing deals, events, [partnerships], or any of the other things they get to weigh in on at other places that they have no expertise to weigh in on,” the media executive said.

ABG handles all the omni-channel opportunities demanded by today’s consumer as the licensor. 

The only issue with ABG’s model is that it is reliant on a publisher, which it does not employ, to uphold the brand’s editorial product and to manage the team who produces the content and sells the ads. And contract stipulations can only ensure so much. 

Again: the beef I and many others have about what happened to Sports Illustrated is that a private equity group bought it, not because it wanted to publish Sports Illustrated, but because it wanted to wring whatever money it can out of its good name, while going cheap and shoddy as hell on the actual editorial content of Sports Illustrated which is what built that good name in the first place. My beef is that ABG focusing on all of the bullshit subsidiary value propositions — the “omni-channel opportunities!” — and wholly ignoring the quality of the publication itself was greedy and shortsighted and ensured the downfall of a once prestigious media brand in the name of easy and lazy short-term profit.

JohnWallStreet’s defense to my beef: “hey, ABG did EVERYTHING it could to squeeze money out of SI and it did a GREAT job of it! Sure, the publication itself suffered because the company to which ABG farmed out the publishing sucked ass, but that wasn’t ABG’s fault! ABG didn’t really care about the publication, which we believe is in a crap business anyway, so hey, don’t blame the private equity company!”

Which is to say:

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. I feel as though I’m actually going insane.

Other Stuff

Announcing Cuppagentsia on Slack

I know that the comments on Beehiiv are lacking compared to Substack. You can’t reply to replies and there are no notifications when you receive replies to your comments, all of which makes actual interactive conversations difficult if not impossible. I’ve asked Beehiiv folks about upgrading that but — shocker! — I haven’t gotten any sort of substantive reply yet. So who knows if and when things will get better in that regard. All I know for sure is that it kinda stinks.

However, subscriber DMCj has set up a Cup of Coffee Slack called Cuppagentsia for those of you who are interested. I think that link goes to the sign-up page. I dunno. I have not had a real job in 15 years so I’ve never used Slack. I may be doing it wrong. If I am, someone will correct me in the comments before 7AM and you’ll be pointed in the right direction.

While I will likely dip in and out of the Slack from time to time, this is a decidedly not-Craig production, so if you have any questions about how the Slack works, direct questions to the group in general and I’m sure someone will figure it out. In the meantime, I hope is that it’s a decent chatting solution for those of you who want to spend more time doing that than the current Beehiiv comments allow.

We’re just taking his word for it, eh?

You may or may not know that Elon Musk owns a company called Neuralink which intends to implant computer chips into people’s brains so they can directly interface with computers. He talks it up as something that will serve as important tools for people suffering from paralysis or ALS or whatever, but I feel like it will ultimately just be used to monitor employees to make sure they’re not engaging in WrongThought or something.

Sorry if that’s pessimistic of me, but (a) Musk has a long and rich history of spewing unadulterated horseshit about what he or his companies intend to do; and (b) to the extent we had heard much of anything about Neuralink over the years it’s been connected with the frightening number of monkeys it has had to euthanize after its testing went gruesomely sideways. In light of that, the company could easily be a scam, it could be a pipe dream, and it definitely could be a slowly-unfolding dystopian nightmare. What it is not, however, is anything approaching a success yet because it has not yet done anything except kill a bunch of monkeys and suck up venture capital money. Which is to say: par for the course for Elon Musk.

A funny thing happened the other day, though. Musk tweeted this:

The tweet is not what was funny. The funny thing was that the media just ran with it, reporting on Musk’s tweet uncritically and basically saying, “yep, this happened!” This despite the fact that there was zero documentation or evidence of any kind provided supporting what Musk said about the human receiving an implant. More to the point, they ran with it despite the fact that Musk is notorious for blatantly lying on his social media accounts in order to boost his companies and his investments. Indeed, he’s been pursued by the SEC for tweets exactly like this on multiple occasions.

Yet here, with the most audacious claim Musk has ever made regarding the most audacious company of which he has ever been a part — a company which intends to do some of the most audacious things medicine and technology can imagine! — journalists are simply nodding their heads, saying “thank you for the information, Mr. Musk!” and are acting as stenographers.

For the second time today I have to ask: have I taken crazy pills?

Roger that, Roger

In 2012 a class consisting of over 4,000 former NFL players sued the league claiming that it knew about the long-term health risks associated with concussions and that it ignored and concealed this information to protect the economic value of the National Football League. In 2015, the NFL settled the case for more than $1 billion, creating a fund from which affected players can collect.

Around the time of the settlement a group of insurance companies sued the NFL, arguing that they should not have to pay the settlement because the NFL settled prematurely. The insurance companies argue that there isn’t proof that concussions cause long-term health problems like CTE, so the NFL should’ve continued fighting the suit. As part of that latter suit, the insurance companies took the deposition of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell back in 2022.

The transcript of Big Rog’s deposition was just unsealed and, as Daniel Kaplan of Front Office Sports Reports, it was wild:

In the nearly nine-hour deposition from July 13, 2022, which was sealed until Saturday, when it appeared on a court docket, the commissioner said that there was a positive for the league when a player leaves his brain to science after committing suicide; he compared the risks associated with playing contact sports to walking down the street; and he expressed great frustration with the media’s coverage of head injuries, saying, “They misstate, they misrepresent things, and when they do that, they add to a narrative that I think is unfair and unfounded.”

To be sure, Goodell said that NFL player suicides, of which there have been an alarming number, are “tragic” but he truly does think it was a good thing for them to leave notes asking for their brains to be donated. Which is a very special thing to say in a deposition.

As for the specific issue of causation:

“As you sit here today, sir, do you know whether there is any medical consensus regarding whether concussions result in long-term damage to NFL players who sustain concussions while playing in the NFL?” the insurers’ counsel asked Goodell, to which he replied, “I think there’s still a great deal of uncertainty about the causation issue, if that’s what you’re referring to.”

Which (a) is an appalling thing to say given what we do, in fact, know about the link between head injuries and long-term brain damage; and (b) actually helps make the insurance companies’ case against the NFL for them, because they’re arguing that exact point, even if it’s a stupid point. For what it’s worth, Kaplan reports that the NFL’s general counsel, apparently far more aware of both reality and the NFL’s legal position in this litigation, contradicted Goodell and said, yes, we all know that concussions and long-term damage are linked.

In other news, Roger Goodell makes something like $70 million a year to run the National Football League, so if you’re still somehow under the impression that we live in a meritocracy — or that the health and safety of players is, as the NFL’s P.R. people constantly claim, its “highest priority” — it’s time for you to come up with a different world view.

Excellent plan, Donald. Go all-in with this, please

I have almost no interest in the current Taylor Swift/NFL discourse. While I’m not a Taylor Swift fan, I find it totally bizarre that anyone at all is getting worked up about her going to her boyfriend’s football games. I’ve gone to Allison’s horse shows. My ex came to a couple of my appellate arguments. People do that kind of thing when their significant other has a job or pursuit that’s open to the public.

No one that I know of has even made a moderately coherent argument about why anyone should be upset by it. At best you hear “they show her on TV too much.” But, dudes, she’s probably the most famous celebrity in North America if not the entire world right now, so what do you expect? She probably gets a grand total of three minutes of screen time in a three-hour game, if that.

All of which makes me think that ultimately, the Taylor Swift complaints boil down to something close to “I hate that this woman exists and I hate that I am occasionally reminded of her existence” and that’s just a bunch of misogynist garbage. The fact that that sentiment has morphed into a MAGA-fueled conspiracy theory about how the NFL season has been rigged to boost the Biden campaign does absolutely nothing to dissuade me of that belief. It’s just ugly, hateful, and profoundly stupid stuff.

I do find this funny, though:

NEW: Trump aides pledge a "holy war" on Taylor Swift as the former president privately grouses that he's "more popular" than her🔗7:08 PM • Jan 30, 20243.15K Likes   885 Retweets  1.12K Replies

I do not think for one second that an endorsement from a pop star — even one as big as Taylor Swift is right now — has the power to change the outcome of a presidential election. I do think, however, that Donald Trump getting high on his own right wing echo chamber supply and believing that making Taylor Swift a campaign issue can lose the election for him. Not necessarily because she’s popular and it would therefore make a lot of people mad. But because it would just be the latest and highest-profile evidence that Trump is not a well man and that he’s completely disconnected from anything approaching reality.

So keep it up, Donald. Launch your “holy war” on Taylor Swift. I think it’s a great strategy.

Have a great day everyone.

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