Cup of Coffee: July 24, 2024
Skenes day doesn't go as planned, four shutouts, bad Mike Trout news, MAGA Walls, J.D. Vance flounders, a one-Euro Italian villa, and "Homicide: Life on the Streets" finally streams
Good morning!
It was Paul Skenes day, and something that has never happened before on Paul Skenes day occurred: he lost. There were four shutouts around baseball last night. There’s some not great Mike Trout news, some not great news for the skidding Mariners, and Taylor Walls tries to explain how his pretending to be Donald Trump out on the base paths does not mean he is supporting Donald Trump even though he’s totally supporting Donald Trump.
In Other Stuff, J.D. Vance is not impressing anyone, the Black lady is making the Republicans be racist, Nate Silver’s ethics seem a bit shaky, you can buy an Italian villa for one Euro, and a great show is, at long last, going to be available for streaming.
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Padres 4, Nationals 0: If you follow me on Instagram you know that I’m actually in San Diego this week. It’s a quick trip with my kids — Monday through Thursday — to visit my brother and have some California fun. For a lot of reasons relating to schedules, returns to college next month, and the availability of the place we’re renting, the trip had to happen now. The only downside to that is that the Padres are out of town so it’s the rare California trip without us going to a ballgame. I did catch like an inning of this one at a bar while we were waiting for a table at a restaurant at least. Absolutely nothing of consequence happened in the inning I saw. And for the Nationals nothing of consequence — at least good consequence — happened all game long. Four Padres pitchers, led by Randy Vásquez who blanked the Nationals for six innings, combined on a five-hit shoutout. It took them all of 102 pitches to complete. Luis Arráez and Jurickson Profar hit back-to-back homers. Jackson Merrill knocked in two.
In other news: Carlo got a pretty gnarly sunburn at the beach yesterday because he insisted on spray sunscreen which is total horseshit. We’re all going to the zoo today. It’s weird doing recaps at night before bed instead of in the morning and it’s even weirder still waking up at like 5:30AM but finding everyone else in the world awake and active and commenting on the newsletter and stuff. All of that being said, I could get used to California. Of course I say that every time I’m in California.
Marlins 6, Orioles 3: A four-run second inning featuring a Jesús Sánchez homer set the tone here. Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit a two-run double that frame as well and Nick Gordon drove in two on the evening. Worse for Baltimore than just the loss was the fact that they lost both second baseman Jorge Mateo and starting pitcher Albert Suárez in the third inning due to injuries. Mateo collided with Gunnar Henderson as they both dove to field a grounder behind second base and left the game due to left elbow pain. He will undergo an MRI on Wednesday. Suárez was hit on the shin by an Otto López comebacker. he was diagnosed with a contusion and is probably fine.
Guardians 5, Tigers 4: José Ramírez homered and had an RBI single and Steven Kwan and Jhonkensy Noel added solo homers to help the Guardians end a three-game skid. It’s amazing what happens when you score more than a run or two.
Cardinals 2, Pirates 1: Paul Skenes pitched into the ninth and allowed just two runs on four hits but . . . lost for the first time in his 12-start big league career. The loss came courtesy of Alec Burleson’s tie-breaking single in the ninth. Well, that and a lack of run support. The Cards’ other run came on a Nolan Arenado homer in the fifth. Sucks that he took the L, but even Cy Young lost over 300 games. It happens.
Mets 3, Yankees 2: Luis Severino was right: the Yankees have only two hitters. Except here it happened to be Gleyber Torres and Alex Verdugo, the former of whom homered and the latter of whom doubled in a run. Otherwise, not much offense from the Yankees. Well, Aaron Judge walked his first four times up but no one could make the Mets pay for it. The visitors didn’t have a ton of offense themselves but there was enough via a two-run homer from Jeff McNeill and Francisco Lindor getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. José Quintana allowed one over five.
Rays 4, Blue Jays 2: Brandon Lowe hit a two-run home run, Josh Lowe singled in a run, and six Rays pitchers combined to strike out ten Toronto batters while scattering six hits. The Rays have won three of four. The Jays have lost five of seven.
Phillies 3, Twins 0: Zack Wheeler tossed seven shutout innings and three relievers finished the three hitter. Thing was, Simeon Woods Richardson tossed six shutout innings of his own and the pen held Philly scoreless for two more. The bats finally broke through in the ninth when Brandon Marsh hit a sac fly that scored Bryce Harper and then Nick Castellanos doubled in two to provide the insurance.
Rangers 3, White Sox 2: Jon Gray allowed one run in the third but then settled down, worked into the eighth having given up just that run, and retired the last 15 batters he faced to pick up the W. Adolis García had an RBI single, the Rangers scored on a double steal/steal of home, and Josh Smith had an RBI double.
Diamondbacks 6, Royals 2: Jordan Montgomery missed a month on the injured list but came back to allow one run over five innings. Ketel Marte had his back by hitting a two-run homer and scoring three runs. The Royals’ four-game winning streak comes to an end.
Red Sox 6, Rockies 0: Cooper Criswell shut out Colorado for seven frames and two relievers finished the six-hitter. Tyler O’Neill hit two homers — a two-run blast and a solo shot — while Rafael Devers and Rob Refsnyder each doubled in runs. The Sox end their four-game skid.
Brewers 1, Cubs 0: Another shutout. This one was Colin Rea (5 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 8K) and four relievers on a seven-hitter with 11 total strikeouts. The game’s only run came on a Bruce Turang RBI single in the eighth. A tough luck loss for Jameson Taillon, who had blanked the Brewers for seven before putting two runners on to start the eighth and then watched Turang’s base knock from the dugout after getting lifted.
Angels 5, Mariners 1: José Soriano worked into the eighth and Luis Rengifo hit a two-run single. The Mariners are reeling. They’ve lose seven of eight and they’ve scored two runs or fewer in six of those seven losses. The only thing saving them right now is the fact that the Astros aren’t winning much.
Athletics 8, Astros 2: Oakland hit five homers, with Lawrence Butler, Brent Rooker, Seth Brown, Zack Gelof and Shea Langeliers doing the honors. Butler doubled and tripled as well. The A’s have won five of six. Houston, as alluded to above, has lost three straight.
Dodgers 5, Giants 2: A nice thing about being on the west coast is that, after we got home from dinner, I could listen to this one while hanging out in the pool and watching a pretty sunset. Giants rookie Tyler Fitzgerald homered for his fifth straight game — that ties a rookie record with several players — and he singled in a late run. But Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani each hit two-run doubles, Ohtani added an RBI single, and five is more than what a rookie’s solo homer and RBI single brings ya. San Francisco has lost four of five on what was being characterized as a make-or-break road trip in the leadup to the trade deadline. So “break” it is, then.
Reds vs. Atlanta — POSTPONED
🎶 Barefoot in the bed of your truck
On a blanket lookin' up
Half a moon peekin' down at us
From underneath the clouds
Teenage kids sneakin' out again
Heard the thunder rollin' in
We were fallin' the moment when
It all came pourin' down
The Georgia Rain on the Jasper County clay
Couldn't wash away what I felt for you that day
Just you and me down an old dirt road
Nothin' in our way
Except for the Georgia Rain 🎶
The Daily Briefing
Mike Trout starts rehabs, stops rehab
Mike Trout has not played a big league game since April 29 after he tore the meniscus in his left knee. Good news: he began a rehab assignment yesterday! Bad news: he left after one at bat and two innings of play due to soreness in his knee. He is considered day-to-day.
Trout was the greatest player in the game for over a decade, and he’s already a Hall of Famer, but the way in which his body has broken down these past few years is really damn sad.
Mariners place Rodríguez, Crawford on the IL
The Seattle Mariners have had a hell of a few days and things got worse yesterday when they placed both Julio Rodríguez and J.P. Crawford on the injured list.
Rodríguez was initially listed as day-to-day with a high ankle sprain which he suffered while trying to make a play at the wall in Sunday’s game. He was not responding well to treatment, however, so the club decided to shelve him. Crawford was hit by a pitch on Monday and fractured his pinky finger. Rodríguez has had a generally disappointing season at the plate but had heated up over the past couple of weeks. This will be Crawford’s second stint on the IL following an oblique strain that cost him 26 games in April and May and there’s no timeline yet for his return.
Seattle lost again last night. They remain in a virtual tie for first in the AL West with the Astros, who also lost yesterday.
Taylor Walls says he wasn’t doing a Donald Trump thing but basically admits he was doing a Donald Trump thing
The other day Rays shortstop Taylor Walls pumped his fist and shouted, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" after hitting a double in the game against the Yankees. In so doing he was pretty obviously aping Donald Trump’s actions after that bullet just missed him back on July 13. Walls was asked about that yesterday and claimed that it wasn’t a pro-Trump thing but his comments made it pretty clear it was a pro-Trump thing:
"I think it's pretty inspirational when any person, in the blink of an eye, their life could be taken from them. They don't really know what's going on in the heat of the moment . . . To immediately stand up and show strength, to me, speaks pretty loudly. Anyone in that situation or that type of event, when it happens, it's strong. It kind of represents character to me, and something that similarly I feel like I've faced those challenges in baseball, but on a much suppressed level."
That was kind of more of a joke that we have with guys in the locker room . . . Joke may not be the right word. It was kind of just something that we had together that we thought was kind of funny, that we thought would be all right. I don't really see that going much further than that. I don't foresee myself doing it again.”
My guess: it was totally a pro-Trump thing, and when he’s inside his bubble among other ballplayers that’s not thought of as anything notable because they’re all about that MAGA life. But when he put his political leanings out in public like he did on Sunday, and people asked about them, he was a bit taken aback, quickly realized that it’s something that could be polarizing, and then felt it necessary to back off and attempt to explain it away.
And if you doubt that he’s a Trumper, he had this to say when specifically asked who he was voting for:
The four-year veteran from Georgia said the values he was brought up with are important to him and typically inform his political choices.
"You can read between the lines of how I carry myself, how I was raised, how me and my family coordinate, how we're going to go about things and do things," Walls said. "That's kind of what I base my vote on and my view on."
That’s not something your average Kamala Harris voter is gonna say, I don’t think.
Other Stuff
You hate to see it
Except you love to see it:
The conventional wisdom here seems to be coalescing around the idea that Trump picked Vance because he’s so taken with just how deeply and debasingly Vance has bent the knee over the past couple of years. And to no small degree out of cockiness. The idea is that, sensing victory, he wanted to run up his margins in red states with a cultural conservative dickbag like Vance rather than try to moderate his message by picking someone swing voters may like. Now that the race has changed, however, that’s looking like a bad news, and that’s before the country really gets a look at how odious and jerky Vance is.
I understand why that’s the conventional wisdom but it seems to ignore a couple of things.
For one thing it ignores the fact that Trump never has and never will try to do something moderate as a means of appealing to swing voters. People forget it now because Trump turned on him, but Mike Pence was also an extreme red-meat-for-the-base selection as a hardcore cultural/religious conservative. And, like Vance, he has no personality and is generally off-putting. In Vance, Trump was choosing a guy he thought of as a more pliable Pence. To think otherwise is to overthink it.
Also: the idea that Trump will admit that he’s wrong and choose someone else seems unlikely. I almost feel like he’d be much happier losing with Vance and blaming it all on him than acknowledging his own mistake. So, yeah, I sorta doubt that Trump will switch out Vance at this point.
But oh my God how amazing would it be if he did? It’d be in the running for the most thorough humiliation of a politician in recent history. It’d also functionally end J.D. Vance’s political career. So really, this is all win-win as far as I’m concerned.
How dare she do that
A New York Times headline from yesterday:
As I wrote the other day, Donald Trump and his backers are almost certainly going to turn to racism and misogyny in an effort to defeat Kamala Harris. Indeed, GOP leaders are already begging Republican Members of Congress to stop doing that. If you’re the New York Times, however, you couch that as something that the Black/Asian woman causes the racist white people to do. Like she’s provoking them or something by her very existence. Unreal.
Sure, seems ethical
I understand that it’s not super important in the grand scheme of things, but this strikes me as pretty damn shady:
As the U.S. presidential election enters its final stretch, crypto-based prediction market platform Polymarket has struck while the iron is hot by hiring well-known statistician and writer Nate Silver as an adviser, according to an Axios report.
Silver has for years provided forecasts on U.S. elections, initially through his FiveThirtyEight service (that he subsequently sold and no longer works for). And Polymarket has seen big business on this year's presidential race, with $265 million already placed on the election. Its prediction market shows Donald Trump as a resounding favorite with a 70% chance of winning the vote.
The acquisition of Silver means users can expect a diversified range of prediction markets based on news events.
Silver is pretty damn prominent in the world of election forecasting. His whole public image is tied up in that and, though I’ve come to think he’s full of shit in 100 ways, a ton of people still take him pretty seriously when it comes to predicting the outcomes of elections. In this cycle he’s been out there doing his usual thing, talking about polling and being a pundit and all of that. There’s no question that by doing so he has influenced the gambling market which he’s now working for.
Silver is also a pretty big gambler himself. It makes me wonder how much he, personally, has bet on election prediction markets that he has played no small role in influencing. And whether he’ll go silent on that now that he’s known to be working in that world. I seriously doubt he will.
One Euro Houses
My ex-wife’s father’s family is Italian. Piedmontese, to be exact. The Peraldos — and a whole bunch of other Italians who settled in Beckley, West Virginia — are from a tiny village way, way up north called Piedicavallo.
Rather than it being a “Come to America And Don’t Look Back” thing, there was a lot of back-and-forth immigration in my ex’s family. My wife’s grandfather was born in Piedicavallo, moved to America for a bit, moved back to Italy until after World War I was over, then came to West Virginia for good in the 1920s. My ex-father in law, Carlo (yes, our son was named after him), was born and raised in West Virginia but after he got out of the army he just stayed in Europe and lived in Italy for several years.
While in Italy Carlo got married and had a daughter. When a job opportunity opened up the family moved back to West Virginia. His Italian wife hated it there, however, they got divorced, and she took the daughter and went back to Italy to raise her. Which worked out for me because Carlo then married a West Virginia woman and they had my ex-wife who would eventually become the mother of the children I would not have if his first wife hadn’t hated West Virginia. Life is full of those sliding doors moments.
I mention all of that because there’s this house. It’s a four or five story villa kind of deal in Piedicavallo called Villa Giulia. Here it is Via Google Street View, which I am frankly shocked bothered to go the hell up to Piedicavallo. It’s the one on the left:
Villa Giulia was my ex-wife’s family house going back to whenever it was built, which I assume was the mid 19th century maybe. Carlo inherited it after his father died. Some aunts or cousins or whatever of his lived in it until they died in the early 2000s. When Carlo died in 2005 he left the house to his first daughter, Gianna. Which was totally fair given that (a) she lives in Italy; and (b) my ex-wife, while not getting the house, got to grow up with her father, unlike Gianna. For what it’s worth all of that was and remains amicable. We even stayed with Carlo’s first wife at her house in Venice when we visited Italy in 2001. I figure not many kids of the second wife are welcome in the home of the first wife, but they’re all chill about that stuff, likely because they all ended up making the right decisions for themselves in the end.
Anyway, Gianna lives nowhere near Piedicavallo, but for a while she and her family used it as a mountain/country getaway place. Her son is grown now, though, and they don’t go there much anymore, so she put some money into it for some renovations with the idea of it being a Vrbo/Airbnb thing. It’s been kinda OK in that regard, but it’s mostly just been them using it, and then only sporadically.
The problem is that Piedicavallo is dying. It’s in the middle of nowhere and there aren’t any tourist attractions anywhere close. When the Peraldos started immigrating to the United States there were something like 1,500 people in Piedicavallo and now there are 187 residents, most of them old, and there’s no real chance of new blood given how far away the place is from real jobs and places where you’d want to raise kids and stuff. And all of that’s before you take Italy’s overall demographic collapse into account. Gianna says the house doesn’t cost her much to keep so she’ll keep it but, honestly, I’m not sure who would buy it even if she changed her mind. There’s no real reason to go there.
I got to thinking about Piedicavallo and Villa Giulia after reading this article in the Sunday Times about how, for the past several years, authorities in many small Italian villages have been selling old villas for €1 in order to try to get people to move there. These are usually houses which have been uninhabited for a while and need major work. The idea being that someone might buy the place basically for free, the cost of making it livable would still be far less than buying a nicer, newer place closer to a city, and these opportunities may help save the small dying towns. The program has been modestly successful, primarily in small villages in Tuscany. Part of what is making it work is that a lot of people are coming to look at the €1 houses, are deciding that’s too big an undertaking for them, but they like the village enough that they decide “hey, we don’t want to renovate that place, but we’ll happily buy the nicer place down the lane for € 150K or something.” All of this is made easier by how much more common remote work is these days.
After all of these years I’m guessing Gianna has absorbed the costs of the renovations she put into Villa Giulia so it’s no big deal, but I wonder if she’s kicking herself for not just letting the roof cave in after which she could unload it for €1 and save herself the hassle. Of course, given that that family has a demonstrated track record of people being chill with ex-wives and second families and all of that stuff, I bet she’d let Allison and me move into it at this point. I’d pay her more than €1 for it, but given what has happened to Piedicavallo, I bet I could get it for a song.
“Homicide: Life on the Streets” is finally hitting streaming
I don’t believe in God, but sometimes I do believe that there is some sort of higher power that wants good things for me:
One of the more critically acclaimed dramas of the past 30 years has at last found a streaming home.
Starting Aug. 19, Peacock will feature Homicide: Life on the Street. All seven seasons and 122 episodes of the former NBC show, as well as the series-wrapping Homicide: The Movie from 2000, will be available, remastered for HD and 4K viewing.
I’m guessing it won’t do Olympics or Premier League numbers, but between this and “Poker Face” eventually coming back, Peacock is becoming a more and more attractive service all the time.
I don’t know if that video is my absolute favorite sequence from that series, but if it’s not, it’s in the top three. It’s the original Shut The Fuck Up Friday. It’s glorious.
Have a great day everyone.
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