Cup of Coffee: July 17, 2024

Good morning!

They played the All-Star Game last night. Maybe next year the players will wear their actual uniforms. Also: what do we think of the cowboy aesthetic, an update on that bad Home Run Derby Anthem, Vegas-based players think the Vegas A’s are a bad idea, and the best selling uniforms of the year so far.

In Other Stuff I talk about what happens when beloved regional chains cease to be regional, Columbus, Ohio police take their deadly show on the road, what is really meant by threats of so-called “retaliatory attacks” in response to the Trump shooting, and a deep dive on J.D. Vance’s fascist ideology.

And That Happened

American League 5, National League 3: The high points:

• Flanked by Nolan Ryan and Fergie Jenkins, Adrián Beltré threw out the first pitch to Pudge Rodríguez. Despite the fact that he was the third best pitcher on that hill, he fired that bad boy in at like 85 mph. Not bad!
• Juan Soto drew a walk off of Paul Skenes in the first inning so we did at least get to see a Skenes-Aaron Judge matchup. Judge swung at the first pitch he saw and grounded into a 5-4 fielder’s choice to end the inning. Skenes, once again, gets pulled from a game in which he had a no-hitter going. We’ve gotten too soft, everyone.
• The NL put two on to lead off the top of the third — one on an error on what could’ve been a double play ball — and then Shohei Ohtani hit a 400-foot homer to right center off Tanner Houck to make it 3-0. The AL got them all back from Logan Webb and the NL in the bottom half, with two-men reaching, Soto doubling them in, and David Fry singling in Soto. Back to a deadlock.
• The next fun thing came in the top of the fifth when Mason Miller of the A’s faced Shohei Ohtani with one out. He started Ohtani off with a 101 mph fastball, went ahead 1-2 with a 102 mph fastball, and then struck him out with an 89 mph slider. Then he got Trea Turner looking on an 88 mph pitch just after busting him on the hands with a 103 mph number. That was pretty sick.
• Jarren Duran’s two-run homer off of Hunter Greene in the bottom of the fifth was pretty sick too. It put the AL up 5-3 and led to a streak of several innings in which we got (a) three minute commercial breaks; followed by (b) some insane reliever pumping gas and retiring the side in a minute and a half, after which it was (c) thrown back to three minutes worth of commercials.

So the game started with some bangs and ended with a whimper. Jarren Duran won the MVP Award.

And of course the uniforms sucked:

Multiple players complained about the dumb and uninspiring uniforms in the leadup to last night’s game. Just as they have complained about them every year since Nike mandated them in 2021 and Major League Baseball agreed because, hey, Nike is paying them a lot of money.

But in addition to being ugly, they’re just bad for the game as well. Baseball is always getting crap for not marketing its stars. So what does it do for the biggest midseason showcase? It anonymizes them in generic-ass uniforms which keeps a national audience from matching the stars to their team. But hey, Nike is happy because, like, a dozen marks might buy one of those abominations.

At least yesterday Rob Manfred acknowledged reality to some degree, saying that there "will be conversations" about returning to teams individual jerseys for the All-Star Game next year. "I'm aware of the sentiment," Rob Manfred said. Of course he was also aware of it over the past few years but simply ignored it, so we’ll see.

A couple of days off now for the players and then back to the grind.

The Daily Briefing

Howdy!

Saw a lot of this yesterday:

And then there was the starting lineup introduction thing with the players bringing out cowboy hats to the kids and the twirling lasso dudes and the video montage of players riding mechanical bulls and crap.

The cowboy/western thing is pretty typical imagery when sporting events take place down in Texas. Just as beaches/surfing stuff is always featured when events take place in L.A., cheesesteaks and the Rocky statue in Philly, cable cars in San Francisco, etc.

When I see this I always wonder if locals get annoyed at it. Like, do people who live in Dallas/Ft. Worth area — a metropolitan area with over eight million people which serves as a huge business/financial center and which is as cosmopolitan as any major city can be — get annoyed when they're constantly reduced to old west stereotypes? Or do they lean into it?

Manfred holds court

As he always does at the All-Star Game, and at the Winter Meetings, Rob Manfred met the press and talked about a lot of stuff. One topic he spoke about was the All-Star uniforms thing I mentioned above. Also:

The Olympics: Several players have said that they’d like a chance to play in the 2028 Olympics, where baseball will return as a medal sport. Manfred said that negotiations are ongoing between MLB, the union, and the Olympic committee about how that could work. Some players have suggested just bagging the All-Star Game that year and incorporating the break into the Games among other one-off schedule adjustments. Manfred: “When you’re in L.A., it is an opportunity we need to think about.”

RSNs/Streaming: Manfred said MLB would like to develop a streaming package for local games involving roughly half the league, not unlike what exists for the three clubs for which MLB handles local broadcasting in the wake of the Bally’s implosion. Manfred said that the Padres, for example, have nearly 40,000 subscribers for their streaming live broadcasts, and that he can see it working on a larger scale. The problem is that big market clubs like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Red Sox, whose local broadcasting is lucrative and profitable may not have any incentive to join in with such a scheme which would almost certainly require a split of local revenue. The “half the league” no doubt refers to the clubs still tied up with Bally’s or whatever its successor is called at the moment, all of which stands on shaky ground. 

Robot umpires: Manfred said MLB could potentially test the use of robot umpires — which would be employed in the challenge system format — during spring training next year, with an eye toward actually implementing it in 2026. He said he definitely wants a test period first. 

Draft picks: Manfred said there is growing support for the idea of teams being able to trade draft picks. Such a shift, however, would need to be collectively bargained with the union, so it’s just talk at the moment. Manfred said, however, “the clubs are really sophisticated now . . . I do think that there’s a really good argument for allowing them to decide how to use their resources.”

Hot Sacramento: Last week the MLBPA expressed concern about the A’s games taking place in Sacramento, where it’s hot as Hell, and where artificial turf is going to be installed next year. Manfred was asked about that and said “We are obviously aware and concerned about the player health and safety issues.” He added that there are talks afoot between MLB and the MLBPA which will make it so that “a vast, vast majority of the games can be played at night when it’s cooler.” This no doubt means that the negotiations are about waiving the day/night game requirements for getaway days which require long travel. Not that it’s all that cool at 7PM in Sacramento anyway.

Now, presumably, they put Manfred back in his box until December.

Manfred tells us what matters to him

Later in the day Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post asked Rob Manfred why the All-Star Game — a coveted jewel event which generates real revenue and prestige to the recipient ballclub — was given to the Texas Rangers despite the fact that they’re the only team in Major League Baseball to not host a Pride event. Manfred:

“Look, there are a whole lot of factors that go into deciding who gets an All-Star Game. I don’t view whether you hold a Pride Night or not as an outcome-determinant issue. It’s an issue. We look at all those issues and try to give it to the place that we think is going to be the best. And it’s really important here to remember there’s a massive public investment in terms of creating a great new facility. And, honestly, that’s an important consideration in terms of awarding All-Star Games.”

He could’ve just said “there are a lot of factors” and given a non-answer. He could’ve even done that while giving the most superficial of support for teams which do hold Pride nights. But he’s Rob Manfred and he had to make it clear to everyone that not only does a team getting taxpayer money to build it a new ballpark matter, but that it matters more than anything else.

Guy is just a total dick. A total tone-deaf dick.

About that Home Run Derby anthem . . .

Country singer Ingrid Andress, who botched the National Anthem pretty badly before the Home Run Derby on Monday, released this statement yesterday afternoon:

It’s gotta be a hell of a thing for one’s low point to be as public as hers was. Hats off for owning it, as that could not have been easy. Here’s hoping she gets healthy and can put this all behind her one day.

Players with Vegas ties think the A’s in Vegas is a bad idea

Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times talked to some of the many ballplayers who are from Las Vegas to get their take on the A’s proposed move there. The reviews are not great, Bob!

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Arizona Diamondbacks closer Paul Sewald said. “The whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster . . .They are all Dodgers fans,” he said. “Ninety percent of the people there are from California. That’s how my dad got there. That’s how I became a Dodger fan growing up. They’re not leaving the Dodgers fan base, just because you have a team . . . “No one in Vegas is an A’s fan,” Sewald said. “Why are they going to change allegiances to a team that is not trying to win?”

Sewald said he would prefer the public funding be used for schools and roads.

Bryce Harper, always happy to boost his hometown, is likewise skeptical:

“It’s a tough thing to see the A’s go away from Oakland. They have so much tradition and history there: the green, the yellow, the white cleats, Eric Chavez and all those guys that played there, Barry Zito, [Mark] Mulder, Huddy [Tim Hudson], the teams they had.

“I see it in Oakland. I don’t see it in Vegas.”

Harper thinks an expansion team, like the NHL’s Golden Knights, would be a better bet so everyone could get in on the ground floor.

Shaikin spoke to others from Las Vegas, such as Tommy Pham, who are more optimistic, but only if the A’s ownership spends money, which he and everyone else acknowledges is in no way a given in light of how John Fisher has run the team. The only person Shaikin spoke to who seems optimistic is Mike Maddux, who thinks people will go because they like going to Las Vegas anyway so any excuse to get people to go will be well received.

Of course, all of that presumes the A’s will actually make it to Las Vegas. The deal for them to move there still isn’t finalized over a year after the announcement.

The best selling uniforms of 2024

Every All-Star break Major League Baseball releases the list of the best-selling player uniforms up to that point of the season. Here’s the list for the first half of 2024, based on sales from the MLB store:

1. Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers                                                        
2. Bryce Harper, Philadelphia Phillies      
3. Aaron Judge, New York Yankees
4. Mookie Betts, Los Angeles Dodgers
5. Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta
6. Juan Soto, New York Yankees
7. Francisco Lindor, New York Mets
8. Fernando Tatis Jr., San Diego Padres
9. Corey Seager, Texas Rangers
10. Jose Altuve, Houston Astros
11. Nolan Arenado, St. Louis Cardinals
12. Pete Alonso, New York Mets
13. Trea Turner, Philadelphia Phillies
14. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Toronto Blue Jays
15. Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds
16. Adley Rutschman, Baltimore Orioles
17. Matt Olson, Atlanta
18. Manny Machado, San Diego Padres
19. Bo Bichette, Toronto Blue Jays
20. Freddie Freeman, Los Angeles Dodgers

They’ve probably sold a lot more of each of these than usual too, what with the 2024 jerseys falling apart like toilet paper at the slightest bit of wear.

Other Stuff

When regional chains cease to be regional

I read a story last week about how so many beloved regional chains have become decidedly non-regional and even national in recent years. About how, “smaller chains, long-time emblems of hyperlocal pride and fixtures on overly sincere fast-food listicles, have grown up and out after decades of staying relatively close to home” and how that has caused mixed feelings on the part of some:

Though some diners may literally weep with joy at these rapid-fire expansions, it’s hard to ignore that a certain sense of novelty is being erased. In-N-Out, with its palm-tree motif, seems all but designed for sunshine and open sunroofs, much in the way that a Dr Pepper shake from Whataburger seems like a drink built for wide highways strewn with armadillo carcasses. “If, suddenly, there are In-N-Out Burger locations everywhere, it's not as special,” Jason Aten wrote last year. “If you're used to swinging by the Sepulveda location when you land at Los Angeles International Airport, and eating a Double-Double while watching planes land, it's not quite as special an experience if you can get one on your way home from work.”  

Indeed, the days of landmark regional fast-food chains operating in cosseted semi-obscurity appear to be over. Massholes used to claim Dunkin’ as their own, and now America apparently runs on it. (That includes Yankee-loving New York, which has the highest number of Dunkin’ locations in the country.) 

The article also cites Whataburger, Bojangles, Portillo’s, Raising Cane’s. It could add many others, too, including gas station/food chains like Wawa and Buc-ee’s.

Whenever I read about this kind of thing — or whenever I experience a once-local phenomenon in a non-native area — I think about Coors beer. Coors, you may or may not realize, was not available east of the Mississippi until the 1980s because it’s not pasteurized and because, before the 1980s, it had no distribution centers outside of the west. This scarcity made it desirable to many. President Gerald Ford and actors like Paul Newman were said to have hoarded it. The entire plot to the movie “Smoky and the Bandit” was based on Coors being bootleg merchandise that rich, crooked types would pay big money to have illegal imported back to Georgia.

And now . . . it’s just kinda crappy mass market beer that no one gets too worked up about. Its availability made it less desirable because its unavailability was the real basis for its desire. The same thing held with Yeungling in places like Ohio, where it was not sold until 2011. The same no doubt goes for In-N-Out, Whataburger, and all the other chains mentioned here. Hell, White Castle used to run national ads about people ordering White Castle burgers in bulk simply because they lived in places without White Castle restaurants now. White Castle!

Some of these places are better than others, no question. But the enthusiasm for regional chains is almost always stoked by the fact that, at least at one time, you could only get the stuff while on vacation. Or because, while your friends and neighbors had never had it, you had. When everything is available, always, nothing is particularly special.

Columbus, Ohio police “dialogue” teams shoots and kills a homeless man in Milwaukee

How it started:

As a long-anticipated march against the Republican National Convention stepped off Monday, a group of police officers in baby-blue vests could be seen casually walking alongside the protesters. They weren't from the Milwaukee Police Department. And they weren't ordinary officers. They came from the Columbus Division of Police, a 13-member "Police Dialogue Team" that was formed a couple of years ago to approach protests differently. The goal is to facilitate people's demonstration rights while avoiding the kind of violent conflict with police that marked the 2020 protests.

How it’s going:

An out-of-town police officer shot and killed an individual early Tuesday afternoon in Milwaukee, said two Milwaukee law enforcement sources. Brian Steel, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Capitol City Lodge No. 9, confirmed that Columbus police were involved in a shooting in Milwaukee.

The person they killed was described as a homeless, mentally ill Black man, well known in the neighborhood, who was arguing with someone else and pulled out a couple of steak knives. Local witnesses claim that it was a minor thing that would have been deescalated with “maybe a black eye” but Columbus, Ohio police — who are pretty damn trigger happy when they’re at home — decided that (a) this was their business; and (b) it required the use of deadly force, so they open fired. Hundreds of miles outside of their jurisdiction.

Insane.

“Retaliatory attacks?” Against who?

From POLITICO:

U.S. authorities are concerned about possible attacks in retaliation to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said Monday in a rare joint intelligence bulletin.

Violent extremists or others “may attempt follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence” in response to the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally over the weekend in Pennsylvania, the agencies said in the bulletin obtained by POLITICO.

“Retaliation?” Against who? The shooter, a Republican with no apparent connection to anyone or anything, and whose motivation is still not known, is dead. If someone is wanting to commit violence in response to what happened on Saturday, they’re just looking for an excuse to commit violence. In which case they should just warn of "pretextual attacks,” not “retaliatory attacks.”

All of this is just question-begging, of course. As I said many times before Saturday’s shooting and will continue to say, to the extent anyone in this country is in favor of political violence, it’s the political right. Violence has been both employed and encouraged by right wing figures and political violence has flowed almost exclusively from that direction for some time.

They’re just looking for an excuse. Now they think they have one.

J.D. Vance’s fascist ideology

Yesterday I talked about how J.D. Vance was a fraud from the get-go. Today I’d just like to remind people that, separate and apart from my takedowns of his book and general persona back in 2016-17, I’ve been covering Vance as a political figure for several years. Particularly between 2020-22 when I was writing about Ohio politics for the alternative paper Columbus Alive and Columbus Monthly magazine and Vance was campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

I bring that up because I think it’s pretty important for people to know — particularly national reporters who are awed by the pageantry of a convention and the knighting of a would-be Trump successor — that Vance has a long and consistent history of advocating fascist ideology.

From July 2021, here’s what I wrote about Vance’s fixation on people without children and his belief that they should have no say about the direction of the country:

Vance railed against "the childless left” — singling out Vice President Kamala Harris, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — as people who, because they do not have children, have "no physical commitment to the future of this country” and instead offer an “elite model” for the American business and political class. Of those four figures he asked, "Why is this just a normal fact of life for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?"

Harris, of course, has two step children with her husband, Doug Emhoff, and Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, have been trying to adopt a child for a year now via a program that would allow them to receive a baby who has been abandoned or surrendered at very little notice. Vance's devaluation of step-parenting and adoption — or his basic ignorance of the lives of those whom he is attacking — is beside the point, however. The point here is that Vance is engaging in some venerable right-wing, nationalistic rhetoric related to birth rates and the health of a country.

Vance then pivoted to advocacy for a policy of encouraging childbirth that he nicked from Hungary’s fascist president Viktor Orbán who, in turn, copped it directly from Benito Mussolini and his infamous “Battle for Births” policies.

In the spring of 2022 Vance took things further, mainstreaming the "Great Replacement" conspiracy, which is a fascist theory which states that non-whites are being brought into the United States and other western countries to "replace" white voters in an effort to advance a liberal progressive political agenda that is, allegedly, destructive to western society and which will lead to the extinction of the white race. As I wrote at the time:

[Vance’s] invocation of a "border invasion" was positively subtle compared to what Vance had to say a month earlier while appearing on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. There, he explicitly invoked the great replacement conspiracy, referring to "Democrat politicians who have decided that they can’t win re-election in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here." In a campaign stop in Portsmouth last month, Vance said, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again."

Vance has spent years preoccupied with birth rates and the dilution of native-born citizens' voting power, and that preoccupation falls in line with the ideas motivating the great replacement conspiracy.

It should also be noted that it falls in line with the motivation of (a) the mass shooter who killed ten people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022; (b) the man who opened fire on shoppers inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, killing 23; (c) the Australian white supremacist who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques in 2019; (d) the mass shooter who massacred 11 people at the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and (e) the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists chanted "Jews will not replace us," and resulted in one participant murdering a woman by mowing her down with his car.

The extent to which extreme-right concepts such as birthrate panic and the Great Replacement conspiracy animates J.D. Vance’s politics is frankly shocking. Vance, however, has yet to talk about any of that, let alone repudiate these toxic views. People want to talk about Hillbilly Elegy and his change of opinion about Donald Trump, but not the issues which he cares about and, if put in a position of real power, will no doubt seek to advance.

Not that he ever will repudiate these things, at least not in a genuine manner. That’s because it’s very clear that he believes these things to his bones. Indeed, he has based his entire political career on these toxic ideas. And now he stands to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Have a great day everyone.

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