Cup of Coffee: July 12, 2024

Good morning!

We have a home run derby field if you care, baseball is having big headaches trying to schedule around the A’s dumb move to Sacramento, and we got some sad news about the death of Sean Burroughs.

In Other Stuff we have the latest Biden vibe check, watch the formation of America’s own brownshirt brigade, make a slow, assisted walk for the border, learn what 129 degrees feels like, and we bid farewell to Shelley Duvall.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Pirates 1, Brewers 0: Paul Skenes is making this game look too easy. All he did was pitch seven no-hit innings while striking out 11 and walking just one while lighting up the radar gun as usual. The actual no-hitter was never on the table given that he was at 99 pitches at the end of those seven frames and it’s the year 2024, but whatever. Skenes had to be that good given that he had zero run support until the top of the seventh when Yasmani Grandal doubled in a run. And I’ll be damned, it held up.

Reds 8, Rockies 1: Tyler Stephenson went hog wild, hitting a three-run homer in the third and a two-run homer in the eighth. Santiago Espinal also went deep and Jeimer Candelario hit a two-run double. Hunter Greene had a nice afternoon too, striking out ten in six innings of one-run ball. The Reds take three of four in the series.

Tigers 10, Guardians 1: Riley Greene drove in three runs on three hits and Carson Kelly went deep. Jack Flaherty had a nice solid six innings which, per the AP gamer headline, “added to his trade value.” Which is a hell of a thing to put in a headline, even if it is true. That’s fourth or fifth paragraph stuff. Either way, find a way to give the Tigers some props, man. They just took three of four from the division leaders and have won six of seven overall.

Mets 7, Nationals 0: The three-game sweep. David Peterson was excellent (6 IP, 4 H, 0 ER) and four relievers completed the six-hitter. Brandon Nimmo — who the National League powers that be somehow think isn’t All-Star worthy — hit a three-run double in the Mets’ five-run fifth. The rest of the runs scored on singles in both the fifth and the eighth.

Blue Jays 5, Giants 3: Danny Jansen and Spencer Horwitz each homered, Kevin Gausman allowed two runs over seven innings. The Jays take two of three from the Giants in San Francisco.

Phillies 5, Dodgers 1: Brandon Marsh homered and tripled in a run while Kyle Schwarber and Trea Turner each went deep as well. Aaron Nola was solid, allowing one run over six. The Phillies sweep the three-game set between the NL’s two best teams.

Cubs 8, Orioles 0: Seven shutout innings with just three hits allowed for Justin Steele and a five-hit shutout in all. Seiya Suzuki had two RBI doubles and an RBI triple. Dansby Swanson homered. That made it a three-game sweep for the Cubs in which they outscored the usually big-hitting O’s 21-2. Dang.

Rays 5, Yankees 4: Randy Arozarena’s two-run homer in the first and the Rays’ three-run third proved to be enough. The Rays take two of three. The Yankees have either lost or split their last eight series.

Red Sox 7, Athletics 0: Tanner Houck tossed six shutout frames and Chase Anderson blanked the A’s for the final three. Masataka Yoshida had a two-run single and a two-run homer. Connor Wong and Wilyer Abreu also went deep. The Red Sox have won eight of their last 10. Not bad for a team which many figured would bring up the rear of the AL East this year.

Astros 6, Marlins 3: Jake Meyers hit an RBI double and most of the rest of Houston’s runs came on sac flies and groundouts and stuff. No matter, though, as the ‘Stros complete the three-game sweep. They’ve won nine of 12 overall.

Mariners 11, Angels 0: Cal Raleigh had his second two-homer game in three days, hitting one from the right side and one from the left in this rout. J.P. Crawford had a two-run homer as part of his three-hit, three RBI night. Jorge Polanco had a two-run single in the M’s four-run first which really ruined the major league debut of Angels starter Jack Kochanowicz (3 IP, 7 H, 5 R, 4 ER).

Diamondbacks 1, Atlanta 0: Brandon Pfaadt allowed just three hits over six innings, three relievers finished the five-hitter, and Eugenio Suárez's fifth-inning solo home run held up. Also helping out: Jake McCarthy making a leaping grab at the wall in the ninth to rob Matt Olson of what at least looked on the replays like it was going to go out, even if McCarthy downplayed it after the game.

The Daily Briefing

The Home Run Derby field is set

The All-Star break gives us the two most exciting events a baseball fan can imagine: batting practice and a bullpen game!

Sorry. I’ll spare you my old man stuff about how I really can’t excited about the Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game anymore, but that’s generally how I feel about them.

I mention that, though, because the field for the Home Run Derby is set and here it is:

• Pete Alonso
• Adolis García
• Marcell Ozuna
• Gunnar Henderson
• Bobby Witt Jr.
• José Ramírez
• Teoscar Hernández
• Alec Bohm

Going by the oddsmakers, Alonso, the 2019 and 2021 champ, is the favorite, followed by García and Ozuna. Of course if you’re betting on the goddamn Home Run Derby there’s no helping your poor, sorry, soul.

MLB will have big headaches trying to schedule for the A’s once they’re in Sacramento

As most of you know, the Oakland A’s will cease playing in Oakland after this season. For the next three seasons they plan to play in the Triple-A park in Sacramento during what they hope will be the construction of their new ballpark in Las Vegas. There’s an option for a fourth Sacramento season if the construction schedule gets delayed.

That interim move was already being widely criticized by many, as it puts a big league team in a bush league park. But, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, it may create more problems than just bad optics. It may create a huge scheduling/weather problem.

The scheduling problem comes in because the A’s would have to work around the Sacramento River Cats, and Triple-A teams uniformly have Mondays off with six-game homestands and six-game road trips between Tuesday and Sunday. MLB teams, however, usually open homestands or trips on a Friday. But now, since the A’s and River Cats will have to work around each other, it means every A’s homestand or road trip will need to begin on a Monday or a Tuesday. The Chronicle:

In other words, the 29 other teams are catering to the A’s because of owner John Fisher’s preference to leave the Coliseum, where scheduling would have been routine, for a temporary home in Sacramento, where the scheduling is complex, the heat is overwhelming and the facilities in need of major upgrades.

And yeah, that heat is a huge factor. Sacramento — which can “enjoy” triple-digit heat even when it’s not, properly, a heat wave, — will immediately become the hottest park in major league baseball. As the Chron notes, MLB and the A’s are trying to schedule as many night games as possible to diminish the effects of that, but it’s impossible to avoid day games due to TV restrictions on Sundays. For TV, all Sunday games besides the ESPN game have to begin before 1:45PM Pacific time. Oh, and because of the CBA, games in which one of the teams has to play the next day after a longer than two and a half hour flight also have to be day games, so they’ll have to happen on the occasional Wednesday or Thursday.

And, as we learned a few months ago, Sacramento plans to install artificial turf before the A’s arrive in order to compensate for the wear and tear of two teams playing there. MLB has not had a park with a fake turf field and no roof for years, specifically because those places — most notably in St. Louis and Kansas City, but also for hot days in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Philly — were absolutely brutal and even dangerous when temperatures rose. But that’s what the A’s and their opponents will have in Sacramento.

All of this assumes it’d be temporary and the the Las Vegas plan will work out. As we’ve noted several times in the past, however, there are no guarantees yet that Las Vegas is going to actually happen the way John Fisher wants it to. If it doesn’t, it creates a whole new set of headaches and puts the A’s actually behind where they were for over a decade while trying to get a new ballpark someplace in the Bay Area.

John Fisher is an incompetent, greedy moron, that much most people can agree on. It’s amazing to me, however, that Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball have just sat back and let Fisher create this mess. Just complete malpractice on their part.

Sean Burroughs died of fentanyl intoxication

As you’ll recall, former major leaguer and famed Little League World Series champ Sean Burroughs died in May after collapsing in a parking lot after dropping his son off at Little League practice. The medical report on his death has come in and his cause of death came under sad yet, unfortunately, not wholly unpredictable circumstances in this day and age:

Former major leaguer Sean Burroughs suffered fentanyl intoxication when he died in the parking lot at a Long Beach, California, baseball field in May, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner.

The medical examiner released its findings into Burroughs' death this week and ruled it as an accident.

Burroughs said several years ago that he had a substance abuse problem during his playing career. So sad.

Other Stuff

OK, but I’m not sure what this would really tell us 

I did not watch the Biden news conference last night. I read that he made a few not-so-great flubs but that he also handled foreign policy questions fairly adroitly. I’m not sure it changes anything really. No one who is worried about him was given definitive proof that their worry was unfounded. Neither Biden nor those in his corner were given a definitive reason to change their view about staying in. It seems we’ll be in this worrisome purgatory for some time.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported yesterday that the Biden campaign is “quietly assessing the viability of Vice President Kamala Harris' candidacy against Donald Trump” via a new head-to-head poll.

My two thoughts on this:

1. That’s understandable. One hopes that Biden can show he can campaign, everyone settles down, and he goes forward confidently and competently, because that’s easily the best-case scenario; but
2. If he cannot do that and stronger consideration is given to him dropping out, I’m not sure that pre-dropout polling should be considered a decisive factor or even a significant one in making the ultimate decision.

That may seem counterintuitive, but I honestly don’t think a pre-dropout poll can or would capture what might happen if a monumental event like a sitting president dropping out in July were to go down. People may have hypothetical views on such a thing, but in the actual event it’ll represent a massive shift of, well, basically everything and I can see anything happening. Like:

• Maybe such an event creates a huge goodwill/enthusiasm bump for the Democrats and Harris in particular, snaps the electorate out of the “both of our choices are old people who have been around forever” doom-loop, causes everyone to turn the election into a referendum on the old person remaining, Donald Trump, everyone remembers “oh yeah, he’s the worst” and Harris goes on to an easy victory;
• On the other hand, I could also see it turning into the validation of the “Democrats in disarray” narrative, and re-awakening America’s shitty strain of misogyny and racism, hobbling the new campaign before it can even get running.

We really have no idea how it’ll cut. It’d be one of those truly electric jolts that hits the American body politic from time to time, and if history has shown us anything, it’s shown us that it’s hard to predict the fallout of major, watershed historical happenings.

Which brings me back to where I’ve been since all of this began: make the decision based on an honest assessment of whether or not Biden can carry through with the job in an effective manner. If he can, keep him. If he can’t, he needs to step aside. And yes, such a decision would require people Biden trusts being straight with him and counseling him to stand down. None of this weasel stuff we’ve heard from Democratic officials over the past several days.

Polls can be interesting. In this case, however, I don’t think they can be particularly helpful. The right decision needs to be made based on the reality on the ground. Not on calculation and prediction about what would be damn nigh impossible-to-assess fallout.

America’s very own brownshirts 

This country has long had groups of disaffected young men forming up in militias and/or white supremacist cells which range from “genuinely quite disturbing” to “objectively pathetic and rather sad.” But they’ve all sort of operated as outsider, almost secret societies which were both physically and ideologically on the fringes.

The New York Times reports on a group in Nassau County, Long Island which is different and, because of it, far more frightening:

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who has allied himself with former President Donald J. Trump and thrust himself into the culture wars, posted a call in March for residents with gun permits and an interest in becoming “provisional emergency special deputy sheriffs.”

The posting called the initiative a strategy to assist in the “protection of human life and property during an emergency” such as a hurricane or blackout — and perhaps, Mr. Blakeman later added, “a riot.”

This is an extremist government official attempting to create his very own right-wing paramilitary unit, answerable only to himself. Indeed, given that he’s wanting to populate the group with former police officers, you can bet the mortgage on the actual, active police force turning the other way if and when this little secret police force begins committing illegal and violent acts of vigilanteism.

It’s no accident that this is occurring at the same time Donald Trump and his fascist supporters are promising to carry out mass internments and deportations and to weaponize the Justice Department to go after Trump’s political enemies. Having off-book, unofficial foot soldiers/thugs to bust heads and terrorize people while the government pursues its violent and nefarious campaign against the vulnerable is textbook authoritarianism. It’s the creation and activation of shock troops. It’s the stuff of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Stalinist Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellite states.

But this is America. In 2024. And the person encouraging and enabling all of this — the person who would activate these shock troops when the time is right — is leading in the polls.

Live Menos

If you’re old enough to remember when Taco Bell had a 59/79/99-cent value menu, I have a place for you:

Early morning golf? Afternoon pickleball? Dinner at 6 p.m.? For one weekend in the dog days of summer 2024, this could be your life. In San Diego, between August 17–18, Taco Bell (yes, that Taco Bell) will open an early retirement community for the “old at heart.”

The Cantinas is a temporary pop-up neighborhood coming to California where people 21 years and older can live like retirees. It will open at La Valle Coastal Club, a golf course community about 30 minutes from San Diego’s airport. The affair is marketed specifically toward “Taco Bell super fans” who are “tired of turning up” and want to be in bed by 8 p.m.

I’m not sure about any of that, but I if they bring back loaded grillers and the double chalupa I’d at least sit for the orientation session/sales pitch.

If your definition of “experience tourism” includes a temporary Taco Bell-themed community “where everyone can live like a retiree,” I suggest you make a run for the border. Or, well, 20-30 miles north of the border. Details are here.

What 129 degrees feels like 

Last Sunday Death Valley threatened to set the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Ross Anderson of Atlantic Monthly went there to feel what it was like. Having family in the southern Utah desert made him used to triple-digit temperatures . . .

But 129 hits different. When you emerge into that kind of heat from an air-conditioned space, you feel its intensity before the door even closes behind you. It sets upon you from above. It is as though a clingy gargoyle made of flame has landed atop your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing, to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It goes for your soft spots first, reaching into the corners of your eyes, singeing your nostrils. After a few minutes pass, it tries to pull moisture straight through your skin. You feel its pinches and prickles on your forearms and calves. The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur. Only eight minutes in, I looked down at my phone. It had shut down entirely. I chose to view that as an act of solidarity.

It’s not a super long read but it adds some good history and color to a place white folks dubbed “Death Valley” because we couldn’t handle it and didn’t really try to learn how to, but which indigenous people have inhabited and understood for over a thousand years.

Shelley Duvall 1949-2024

Shelley Duvall died in her sleep yesterday at her home in Blanco, Texas yesterday. The cause: complications from diabetes. She was 75.

Most people probably know Duvall from “The Shining” and, maybe, from “Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre” or “Tall Tales and Legends” which appeared on Showtime back in the 80s. Beyond those notable roles she was a particularly alluring muse for writer/directer Robert Altman who cast her in “Brewster McCloud,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “3 Women,” and “Popeye.”

Duvall retired from acting over 20 years ago, moved back to her home state of Texas and basically disappeared. She reappeared a few years ago amid reports that she was suffering from mental illness and took part in an interview with Dr. Phil which was blatantly exploitative and, frankly, sad. Thankfully, her last major interview — a profile from Seth Abramovitch of The Hollywood Reporter from early 2021 — provided a more accurate picture of her life — a somewhat weird, somewhat rough-around-the-edges life — in voluntary exile from Hollywood.

Rest in peace, Shelley Duvall.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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