Cup of Coffee: July 10, 2024
Rainouts, the history of the box score, America's King Lear, more on Alice Munro and New York trash, cockroaches in coffee, Ohio, Oklahoma, and "A Fistful of Dollars"
Good morning!
We had a couple of rainouts last night and my timeline was filled with Yankees fans being angry, so that was fun. Tyler Glasnow is on the IL. And, due to the lack of any really substantive baseball news, I decided to write about the history of the box score.
In Other Stuff I am being driven increasingly insane at how Democrats are continuing to defer to our King Lear. I have some more on the Alice Munro and New York trash stuff from yesterday. Also, Great Moments in Out of Context Science Writing, weirdness from Ohio, Americanness from Oklahoma, and a remake of a classic movie that, for once, I don’t care if it’s remade.
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Phillies 10, Dodgers 1: Trea Turner hit a grand slam and Bryson Stott and Brandon Marsh went deep in this rout. Also good for Philly: Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber were activated. Harper took an 0’fer but Schwarber knocked in a couple. The bad news was Philly losing Zack Wheeler to back tightness. Whether that’s serious or a case of pre-All-Star-itis is TBD. The only fun thing in this game for the Dodgers was Kiké Hernández pitching an inning and a third and retiring all four of the batters he faced with his 54 m.p.h. gas. Due to a punch of pinch-hitting and switching people out of a blowout, he also had occasion to take a turn at the plate after his time on the mound, making him what I presume to be the first pitcher who has batted in some time.
Rays 5, Yankees 3: Carlos Rodón laid a four-run egg in the first inning — egged on by Isaac Paredes hitting a three-run homer — and the Yankees couldn’t recover. This despite the fact that the Rays only had two hits after the third inning. Not a great day to do it given that Brian Cashman made the trip down and Hal Steinbrenner showed up at the game as well. New York has dropped 17 of their last 23 games.
Mariners 8, Padres 3: Cal Raleigh homered from both sides of the plate on a 3-for-5, four-RBI evening. Julio Rodríguez went 4-for-4 with a homer of his own, drove in two and scored three time. Logan Gilbert allowed just the three while pitching into the eighth. Scott Servais, after the game, talking about Rodríguez’s good game, which comes after he’s struggled for most of the season:
“He's playing a little angry right now,” manager Scott Servais said. "There's some payback here. Some people have gotten away with some things in the first half of the season. Hopefully he can continue it.”
It’s always weird when one gets a glimpse into the high-level athlete competitive mindset. When one learns that you sucking is not, actually, you sucking, but other people having done things to you which were out of line and which require anger and payback. As I always say, whatever motivates you, dude, but this sort of thinking is profoundly odd to we civilians.
Reds 12, Rockies 6: Will Benson hit a three-run homer in the Reds’ five-run second inning and Reds rookie Rece Hinds hit a 458-foot shot later in the game. Hinds just debuted the night before and hit a 421-shot that night. Given that such patterns never change and ballplayers are unwaveringly consistent, I predict great things for him. Brenton Doyle hit two solo homers for the Rockies in the loss.
[Editor: Craig, speaking of unwavering consistency from rookies who come up and begin to immediately rake, I just saw here that today is the 15th anniversary of Atlanta trading Jeff Francoeur to the Mets for Ryan Church. Shall I have the celebratory champagne wheeled in now or later?]
Oh, now. Mimosas all around, hold the orange juice.
Mets 7, Nationals 5: José Quintanta was excellent (7 IP, 1 H, 0 ER, 5 K) and was backed by a three-run homer from Brandon Nimmo and a two-run shot from Francisco Lindor, which helped build up a 6-0 lead that lasted until the eighth. The Mets pen at least looked like it had designs on throwing this one away but fell short of doing so.
Cubs 9, Orioles 2: Michael Busch and Ian Happ homered while Jameson Taillon and three relievers combined for a five-hitter on a night the Cubbies cruised. Orioles rookie Jordan Westburg homered mere hours after being named as an All-Star Game replacement for Rafael Devers.
Guardians 9, Tigers 8: Cleveland blew an early 6-0 lead but one the game in extras. Josh Naylor hit a two-run homer in the first, drove in a third run in the sixth, and then hit the tie-breaking RBI single in the tenth. José Ramírez played a big, somewhat weird part here: he was intentionally walked three times but he also had three hits. That’s only happened one other time in the 69 years since MLB has kept track of free passes (Paul Goldschmidt in 2015). Rookie Ángel Martínez homered.
Red Sox 12, Athletics 9: Brayan Bello did not shut down the A’s — they scored five runs off of him in five innings — but he did record his first ten outs of the game via strikeout, and that’s a hell of a thing. he fanned 11 in all and, lackluster overall performance notwithstanding, picked up his ninth win of the season. An eight-run second inning featuring back-to-back homers from Wilyer Abreu and Dominic Smith helped matters. Rafael Devers — who begged out of the All-Star Game earlier in the day to rest various ailments had two hits and a walk, drove in three runs and scored twice. The Athletics’ Zack Gelof homered and drove in four in the loss.
Astros 4, Marlins 3: Alex Bregman hit a tie-breaking two-run homer in the seventh inning of his three RBI game. Ronel Blanco allowed four hits and two runs with seven strikeouts over seven innings for the win. The Astros remain two behind the M’s in the West.
Pirates 12, Brewers 2: A lot of teams scored 12 runs last night, eh? In this one the 12 came via Joey Bart’s grand slam and homers from Bryan Reynolds, Rowdy Tellez, Jack Suwinski and Joshua Palacios. RBI singles from Nick Gonzales and Jack Suwinski also contributed to the shellacking. Still, homers have been the name of the game for the Pirates, as they’ve hit 15 of ‘em in their last five games.
Rangers 5, Angels 4: That’s five wins in a row for the Rangers. Adolis García’s solo shot in the eighth broke a 4-4 tie. Josh Smith homered earlier in the game and a 3-for-4 two-RBI night. Max Scherzer worked into the seventh, allowing four runs, though three were earned. Logan O'Hoppe hit two solo homers for the Angels in the loss.
Atlanta 6, Diamondbacks 2: Adam Duvall hit a three-run homer and Chris Sale worked into the sixth, allowing two runs, to pick up his league-leading 12th win of the year. Eli White tripled in a run late. That’s four straight wins for Atlanta.
Giants 4, Blue Jays 3: Blake Snell returned from yet another IL stint and tossed five shutout innings, allowing just one hit. The Jays’ Yusei Kikuchi’s fantastic outing (7.1 IP, 6 H, 2 ER, 13 K) kept things close but not close enough on a night when Toronto only mustered three hits in all. Heliot Ramos and Tyler Fitzgerald homered from San Francisco.
Royals vs. Cardinals; Twins vs. White Sox — POSTPONED:
🎶 You shatter me, your grip on me
A hold on me so dull it kills
You stifle me
Infectious sense of Hopelessness and prayers for rain
I suffocate, I breathe in dirt
And nowhere shines but desolate
And drab the hours all spent on killing time
Again all waiting for the rain 🎶
The Daily Briefing
Wander Franco formally charged
Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco has been formally charged with sexual abuse and sexual exploitation against a minor in the Dominican Republic. As has long been reported, the minor in question was a then-14 year old girl.
Franco, who had been arrested and charged several months ago before a judge suggested lesser charges which have now been formally lodged, has been under investigation for the past year. There was a two-step deadline for authorities to bring formal charges, the first of which passed last week and the second was a few days away.
Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association recently extended Franco's administrative leave, on which he was first placed last August, through July 14, to buy more time while the Dominican authorities worked on the criminal case. It will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future, with a suspension coming later, regardless of whether he is criminally convicted.
Tyler Glasnow goes on the injured list
Yesterday the Los Angeles Dodgers placed starter Tyler Glasnow on the 15-day injured list, saying he’s experiencing back tightness. The Dodgers expect him to be able to rejoin the rotation after the All-Star break.
I know Glasnow has a long injury history and that you gotta be careful with your top starters, but this sort of smells like a phantom IL situation. Like the Dodgers would prefer that he not pitch in the All-Star Game and that they’d otherwise like to manage his load and, effectively, give him a week and change off in the middle of a long season.
Which, sure, I get it, but I feel like that’s what’s going on.
The origin of the box score
The other day subscriber David Ford sent me an email asking me what I knew about the history of box scores. How they came about, who invented them, and all of that. I was convinced I had written about that once in the past back in my NBC days but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I wrote it up and neglected to publish it. Maybe it got chewed up by one of NBC’s many content management systems I used over the years. Doesn’t matter, it’s gone.
But it’s still a good question, so I’ll give it a brief answer!
The short answer: the box score was not invented by British-American sports writer, statistician, and historian Henry Chadwick. At least not strictly speaking. You’ll see him credited with that a lot — and for good reason, which I’ll get to in a minute — but it’s not 100% accurate to say he “invented” the box score as opposed to perfecting it.
Before there was baseball on TV there was baseball on the radio. Before there was baseball on the radio, we merely had brief silent films of baseball being played. Before the films all we had were photographs but baseball was being played even before photographs were popular features in newspapers. So, if you wanted to capture the game in anything other than a writer’s narrative writing, you had to see the statistics. And yes, statistics, such as the score and who got hits and who scored runs, had existed basically since baseball had existed. Certainly before Henry Chadwick did what he did. People would talk about seeing the scores in the paper, referring to the varied way in which statistical information was presented to them, often in lists or supplements to the game stories and such.
So what did Chadwick do? In 1859, in the publication the New York Clipper, he documented a game between the Brooklyn Excelsiors and the Brooklyn Stars via the now ubiquitous nine columns for the innings and, above that, a grid with nine rows for players along with their runs, hits, putouts, assists, and errors. He did not, notably, include batters’ walks, because he considered walks to be functions of pitchers’ mistakes as opposed to batters’ patience and skill. This, more than anything, contributed to the idea that batters walking wasn’t all that valuable. Thankfully we’ve beaten that notion out of most baseball folks, old coots like Marty Brennaman and some aging east coast columnists notwithstanding.
The first box score looked like this (sorry if it’s blurry; I couldn’t find a clear reproduction of it online of any size):
Anyway, as you can see, Chadwick’s grid, which he adapted from a similar grid-based scoring system that had long been used in cricket — remember, Chadwick was from England and he was also a cricket reporter at this time — looked an awful lot like what know to be box scores today. We have a few more columns on ours now. We put strikeouts up top now as opposed to a narrative line item down low. Chadwick, by the way, is responsible for “K” being the abbreviation for “strikeout,” as he preferred to say that a batter was “struck” when he went down on strikes, and he had a thing for abbreviations using last letters.
I suppose Chadwick’s putting things together like that in such a new and lasting form might cause one to say that he invented the box score. The Baseball Hall of Fame credits him with that at least. I’m picky and stubborn about a lot of things, so maybe I’m being picky and stubborn about this too. But baseball has a pretty bad history of crediting people with having invented things that were not invented as opposed to having involved — including the game itself — so I feel OK with taking a harder line here.
Other Stuff
Madness
Congressional Democrats caucused yesterday on the matter of President Biden and his continued viability as the party’s nominee for president. Based on the statements, both on and off the record, that filtered out in the hours following that meeting, this much seems clear: (a) no one is super confident in Biden’s health, vitality, and ability to be an effective candidate; but (b) they are uniformly choosing to ignore that and rally around him as the nominee all the same.
One example of this sentiment, and there were several examples, came from New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, who on Monday was reported to have said on a private call that Biden needed to withdraw but who, yesterday, said that while he still has concerns about Biden, such concerns are “beside the point” now. “He's going to be our nominee, and we all have to support him.” Which are, obviously, the words of a person advancing an agreed upon consensus, not someone speaking their actual mind.
Another example comes from Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who desperately needs a strong presidential candidate at the top of the ticket if he is to win what will no doubt be a tight race in a reelection bid that is critical for Democrats if they want to hold on to the Senate. Here’s what he said post-meeting:
"I'm not going to judge people in my party, what they're saying or what Republicans are saying. I'm not a pundit. I've talked to people across Ohio. They have legitimate questions about whether the president should continue his campaign, and I'll keep listening to people."
That’s among the sharpest anti-Biden comments yet, but it’s still a punt. It’s still a waiting-and-seeing stance that contrasts sharply with his reported comments from behind closed doors in which he’s told his colleagues that he does not believe that President Biden can win the election.
It seems abundantly clear at this point that most Democrats in Washington agree with Sherrod Brown that Biden can’t win — or, at the very least, that he does not present Democrats’ best chance of winning — but they’re unwilling to rock the boat or upset Biden or do anything that they believe would risk their careers, regardless of what they actually think. Indeed, the mushiest of feelings are what seem to be animating this whole drama:
Fox further quoted a member of Congress who said the sadness is a function of “talking about someone you love who is in obvious decline." Yet, despite this acknowledgment — despite the fact that every new bit of data we’ve received suggests that, no, Biden is not OK — they are circling the wagons and backing Biden.
I’m not going to pretend I understand the personal dynamics between and among Washington types who have worked together and played this game for years, but all I can think about right now is a phrase Republicans like to use that I genuinely hate but, in this case, seems apt: fuck your feelings. Don’t get me wrong: I like Joe Biden. I voted for him and I’d vote for him again if the only choice is him or Donald Trump. But there are more important things at stake right now than our sentiments for our very own King Lear and, especially, for Democrats’ fear of professional fallout for taking a hard line, which I suspect is also operating here.
Donald Trump and the Republicans pose a grave threat to our democracy and they must be defeated. If Democratic leadership believes that Biden cannot win the election given his current condition and are not attempting to get him to step down or are otherwise moving to replace him, they are choosing to hand the country over to Donald Trump. That’s it. That’s the alpha and omega of this entire situation. Winning this election is all that matters and people in positions of power seem to think that’s secondary or tertiary at best to their feelings or decorum or professional preservation or whatever.
It leaves me no choice but to believe that we’re watching a catastrophe unfold in real time.
More on Alice Munro
Yesterday the Washington Post spoke to people who knew and worked with Alice Munro during her life and asked them if they were aware of her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter in the 1970s, Munro’s unsympathetic response to her daughter when she was told about it in 1992, Munro’s standing by her daughter’s abuser, and the estrangement between her and her daughter until Munro’s death in May.
There is some pretty obvious wagon circling around the celebrated figure on display in that article, but this, from Robert Thacker, the author of what stands as the definitive biography of Munro is pretty goddamn galling.
Background: Andrea Skinner, Munro’s daughter, sought out Thacker twice, telling him about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Munro’s husband and Munro’s indifference to it, both in 2005 and in 2011, just before Thacker’s biography came out. Thacker did not mention it in his book. His comments in the article:
“I knew this day was going to come. I knew that it was going to come out, and I knew that I would be having conversations like this . . . Clearly she hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public. I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”
That answer sucks on its face, but it’s made way worse by this:
According to Thacker, it was broadly understood that she drew from events in her life for her 1993 story “Vandals,” about a woman who represses the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children: “Those of us who [study] Alice, or have [studied] Alice, have always thought that this story directly connected to this whole issue.”
You’d think that’d be something relevant to those reading her biography, eh? Especially a biography, the publisher/jacket copy of which describes as a book “which shows how her life and her stories intertwine.” Unless “the motivations and inspirations for the work of the author about whose work I am explicitly writing about” is also inappropriate for “that kind of book.”
I get that book deals are hard to get and that no one wants to upset a cooperative subject while working on something that might make their name. But it’s not like Thacker was protecting any victims here. Indeed, the victim herself wanted him to know this and wanted him to write about it. Munro was an after-the-fact apologist/defender for her daughter’s abuser. One who advanced her career, at least in small part, by writing a story based on her daughter’s abuse. Yet this guy felt it necessary to hide that.
It’s such total bullshit. In that situation the moral and ethical thing to do would be to tell Munro you know about it and that you plan on writing about it, with or without her own comments or explanation and let the chips fall where they may. Anything less than that is obfuscatory cowardice. Worse, it’s fucking cowardice which served to protect the perpetrator of sexual abuse of a minor and the woman who took his side against her own child.
More on New York Trash
Yesterday I poked fun at New York for thinking that trash bins were “revolutionary” in the year 2024. There’s obviously a lot more to that story, of course, and about how New York’s trash problem became so big.
As one of you pointed out to me yesterday, back in March the New York Times wrote about it (gift article). It’s a pretty fascinating story about poor planning, poor priorities, and inertia that have kept one of the world’s capitals in the 19th century when it comes to trash collection.
Great Moments in Out of Context Science Writing
From BBC Science Focus magazine:
. . . The borer beetle is the only insect that can feed solely on coffee beans without being poisoned by caffeine, thanks to detoxifying bacteria in its guts . . .
Same.
If you’re curious about the context, know that it’s from an article about how, while it’s an urban myth that pre-ground coffee often has cockroach parts in it, it’d be totally OK if it did because, “the insects are packed full of nutrients, including calcium, magnesium and iron.”
There’s nothing that makes you open your eyes more quickly and makes you more enthusiastically reassess your assumptions than a good science article.
Meanwhile, in Columbus . . .
From the early Tuesday morning police blotter:
A man is in custody after reportedly breaking into several businesses in the far west side of Columbus, including a Petland where multiple animals were set loose early Tuesday morning . . . The man was located about an hour later in the parking area of a Big Lots on Roberts Road. Police said several gerbils were found unharmed inside the man’s pants.
This is why I’m always telling people on Facebook and NextDoor that I’m too afraid to go to the far west side. Crime is just out of control.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma . . .
Remember when Homer Simpson wanted to buy a gun, but when he was told that there was a mandatory waiting period he replied, “Five days?! But I’m mad NOW!” Yeah, anyway:
Automated ammunition vending machines have recently been installed inside several grocery stores across Oklahoma and Alabama. The machines, created by American Rounds, offer ammo to be purchased without engaging with a store clerk. They “are accessible 24/7, ensuring that you can buy ammunition on your own schedule, free from the constraints of store hours and long lines,” according to the company’s website.
If a European comedy writer proposed a satirical sketch about “ammo vending machines for Americans who simply cannot wait to buy bullets,” it’d be rejected as being an unfair stereotype. Yet here we are, doin’ it all the same.
And people wonder why I have a powerful urge to leave this country.
For many dollars more
They’re remaking “A Fistful of Dollars.” No doubt because they wanna earn a few dollars more:
Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood classic A Fistful Of Dollars is set for a movie remake from Euro Gang Entertainment, the company founded by Hollywood vet Gianni Nunnari (300) and Simon Horsman (Magazine Dreams), alongside Italian production vet Enzo Sisti (Ripley) of FPC, and Rome-based Jolly Film, which produced the original movie.
Hit western A Fistful of Dollars is the story of a wandering gunfighter with no name who plays two rival families against each other in a town torn apart by greed, pride, and revenge.
I usually get grumpy when perfect movies get remade for no reason other than greed, but it’s not like the otherwise perfect “A Fistful of Dollars” was original either. It was an unofficial remake of the perfect Kurosawa film “Yojimbo,” and “Yojimbo,” in turn, was explicitly based on the work of Dashiell Hammett. Specifically, the perfect novel Red Harvest, in which a nameless loner comes into a small town and pits warring factions against one another.
For his part Kurosawa said that with “Yojimbo” he was more directly inspired by Hammett’s The Glass Key, which has a few similar elements in its plotting — one guy playing sides off against the other, etc. — but that book’s plot is more complicated than that. The most direct riff on The Glass Key — apart from the two pretty meh film versions of it from the 30s and 40s — was actually the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing” which takes a lot of elements directly from it and does it extraordinarily well.
Anyway, that’s a long way to get to the notion that, at this point, I’ll pretty much give a pass to anyone doing some version of Red Harvest — which is one of my all-time favorite novels and which introduced me to the world of hardboiled detective fiction — or “Yojimbo” or “A Fistful of Dollars” because it’s all the same basic stew. Indeed, I’ll watch basically anything that features a savvy loner playing a bunch of awful people off against each other, resulting in dozens of bodies hitting the floor.
Well, except for the 1996 Walter Hill/Bruce Willis movie “Last Man Standing,” which is maybe the closest someone has tried to come to “Red Harvest,” at least as far as setting/era and stuff go. That movie sucked eggs, though. Like, it was aggressively bad and actually made me angry, so the less said about it the better.
Have a great day everyone.
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