Cup of Coffee: July 9, 2024
Raúl Mondesi's crimes, a minor trade, glove repair, Fotomats, Alice Munro, why the fascists aren't conservatives, and revolutionary garbage bins
Good morning!
Today we Remember a Guy, though we do so for dubious reasons, there was a minor trade, and we talk about glove repair.
In Other Stuff we talk about repurposed Fotomat booths, learn some dark news about the late Alice Munro, talk about why we should stop using the word “conservative” to describe Trump and the Republicans, look at a scary poll, share a good quote from the Spanish Prime Minister, and watch a revolution take place in New York City.
And That Happened
Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:
Pirates 8, Mets 2: Mitch Keller went eight innings allowing just two runs and a five-run sixth inning gave him all the cushion he’d need to pick up his tenth win on the season. Oneil Cruz and Joshua Palacios homered for the Buccos. The clubs split the four-game set.
Cardinals 6, Nationals 0: Miles Mikolas (6.1 IP, 6H, 0 ER) and two relievers combined for an eight-hit shutout. Paul Goldschmidt homered and Alec Burleson singled in two late and drove in three in all.
Tigers 1, Guardians 0: The rare Guardians game I could watch without being blacked out thanks to FS1. The only real drawback was having to listen to studio host Chris Myers say “welcome to The MLB on FS1” before the game got going. Sigh. As for the game itself, it was scoreless through seven as the Tigers’ Keider Montero (6.1 IP, 3 H, 0 ER) and Cleveland’s Gavin Williams (5.1 IP, 4 H, 0 ER) were on top of things. Two Tigers relievers completed the three-hit shutout. Detroit’s lone run scored on an error from Guardians shortstop Brayan Rocchio in the eighth.
Reds 6, Rockies 0: Andrew Abbot (7 IP, 3, H, 0 ER, 8K) was fantastic and he and two relievers tossed a four-hit shutout. Reds right fielder Rece Hinds homered and doubled in his MLB debut. Elly De La Cruz had an RBI double, stole two bases, and scored twice. This, from the AP game story was fun:
After Rockies starter Ryan Feltner threw a pitch in the fourth, the return toss from catcher Elias Díaz deflected off Feltner's glove, allowing Jeimer Candelario to score from third to put Reds ahead 2-0. Díaz was charged with an error.
“That was frustrating,” Colorado manager Bud Black said. “Catchable ball that (Feltner) looked a touch lackadaisical on. We talked about it down in the tunnel. In that type of game, one run can make a difference.”
It can make a difference, but dude, you lost 6-0.
Twins 8, White Sox 6: Brooks Lee and Manuel Margot each drove in runs in the tenth inning, one via an RBI single which scored the Manfred Man, one a groundout that scored Byron Buxton, who had led off the inning with a single. Lee, by the way, is 11 for 24 since being called up last Wednesday. Earlier Carlos Correa and Trevor Larnach. The Twins have homered in 26 straight games. The White Sox are now 41 games under .500.
Rangers 9, Angels 4: Corey Seager and Wyatt Langford each went deep — Seager’s was a 457-foot number — and a five-run fourth inning broke things open to give Texas its fourth straight win. For the Angels Anthony Rendon returned to action for the first time in 69 games and had an RBI single.
Atlanta 5, Diamondbacks 4: Sean Murphy’s two-out, two-run homer in the ninth forced extras, an Ozzie Albies sac fly in the tenth kept kept the party going, and Marcell Ozuna’s sac fly in the 11th completed the game’s scoring and gave the win to Atlanta. Dbacks closer Paul Sewald gave up that homer to Murphy. It was his third blown save in as many chances.
The Daily Briefing
Remembering Some Guys
I’ve decided that whenever a ballplayer of yore from whom we have not heard much for many years makes the news for criminal and/or infamous and/or dubious purposes, I will put it under the heading Remembering Some Guys. Because hey, remembering some guys is not just reserved for thinkin’ about the good old days.
Today’s Guy to be Remembered is Raúl Mondesi, who played for 13 seasons, most notably with the Dodgers but with stops in Toronto, New York, Arizona, Anaheim, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta. He was the NL Rookie of the Year in 1994. He was an All-Star in 1995 and won two Gold Gloves. Had a HELL of an arm, hit 271 homers, and had a career line of .273/.331/.485 (113 OPS+) which is pretty dang good all things considered.
And now he’s been officially adjudged to be a corrupt mayor:
Former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Raúl Mondesi was sentenced Friday by a Dominican court to six years and nine months in jail and fined $507,000 for corruption during his time as mayor in the city of San Cristobal.
Prosecutors accused the 53-year-old Mondesi of embezzling $5 million during his time as mayor between 2010 and 2016. The sentence came after a deal with the prosecutors' office . . . Dominican prosecutors brought several charges against Mondesi, including falsification of documents, criminal association and malfeasance.
Mondesi made around $66 million in his big league career, so the fact that he felt it necessary to embezzle $5 million is curious. Of course a lot of white collar crime isn’t about need. It’s about opportunity and a perverse sense of entitlement and self-justification by people in power.
Mondesi won’t be doing any time, however, because that six years and nine months sentence is exactly how long he spent on house arrest while investigating his malfeasance in office between 2006 and 2010. So, time served and off you pop. Congratulations, Raúl!
Giants traded Austin Slater to the Reds
This happened in the wee hours yesterday morning so I missed it before publication, but the Reds acquired outfielder/DH Austin Slater and cash considerations from the Giants for lefty pitcher Alex Young.
Slater is hitting a mere .200/.333/.224 (72 OPS+) in 112 plate appearances, but the Reds are short right-handed bats and they’re short an outfielder/DH in Nick Martini, who went on the injured list over the weekend. Slater will likely get starts against lefties and he should get some better results after leaving from the worst hitter’s park in the game to one of the best.
Young has made only three big league appearances this year and 23 at Triple-A. The reliever, who has a career ERA of 4.40 (101 ERA+) in 163 games, spent the 2022 season with the Giants so he’s heading back to familiar territory and will likely enjoy the change of hitting environment in his new home just as much as Slater does.
Glove Repair
When I was a kid, if something was amiss with your baseball glove, you probably either fixed it yourself, your little league coach fixed it for you, or he gave it to some older kid who hung around the fields whom you did not know but, I’ll be damned, he managed to rig something, with the fix often involving shoelaces. There were dedicated businesses which handled that kind of thing — usually shoe repair shops which could work on baseball gloves if you asked them — but I don’t remember any in the places I lived.
These days, however, I couldn’t even imagine one existing at all. A quick search reveals that there are tons of places you can send your glove away to get fixed, but real estate is expensive so the storefronts are all online and the businesses are probably out of people’s homes and things. Per the Star-Tribune, however, we learn of at least one storefront glove repair business in Minneapolis which still opens up shop like the olden days. It’s called D&J Glove Repair and it’s run by a guy named Jimmy Lonetti. And yep, you can just walk right in and plop your glove down on the counter:
A typical job includes relacing a glove and massaging it with Pecard Antique Leather Dressing. But Lonetti can replace padding, sew on patches and soften "stingers" by gluing an extra layer of leather inside the pocket.
In the thousands of gloves they've repaired, the Lonettis have seen it all. One customer asked them to revive a waterlogged, smoke-damaged Wilson, his only possession saved in a house fire. They've encountered many a "janky" repair, Lonetti said, made with cable ties, wire or shoelaces. But pets are gloves' ultimate nemesis. "Dogs create a lot of business," he noted.
Lonetti has revived a glove belonging to a woman's late husband, intended for their son; a grandfather's glove being passed to his grandson. One day, Twins Hall of Famer Paul Molitor walked into D&J, looking to have his son's glove repaired.
You figure that Molitor knows some guys who will do it for him for free, so if he’s going to this place, it has to be quality.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, this story has inspired me to go run my errands. I’m off to the haberdashery, the appliance repair shop, and then I’m going to swing by the Fotomat to pick up my most recent snapshots. If I have time I’ll grab a bite at the Woolworth’s lunch counter.
I don’t have many errands to run these days, but the ones I do all take place in 1965.
Other Stuff
Speaking of Fotomats . . .
While writing that last item I fell into a Wikihole about defunct businesses and this pic/caption crossed my path:
I can almost hear my mom pulling up to that bad boy in 1979 and asking for a pack of Virginia Slims.
For more on both the history of Fotomats and some other repurposed Fotomat booths, check this out.
Dark news about Alice Munro
When the Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro died back in May at age 92, she was widely celebrated as one of the greatest if not the greatest short story writer in the English language. Over the weekend, however, we learned, once again, that being good at one’s work does not make one a good person.
That news came via Andrea Skinner, Munro’s daughter, who revealed in an essay in the Toronto Star that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her as a child, that her mother learned about it after the fact, and that she chose to stay with him anyway. There is an accompanying news story which reports on the matter.
Munro’s decision to stand by her daughter’s abuser was not, as often happens in cases like these, Munro was in denial or because she didn’t believe the assaults had happened. To the contrary, when Andrea revealed the abuse to her mother in 1992, 16 years after it took place, it led to a brief separation between Munro and Fremlin. In response, Fremlin admitted what happened in graphic detail in letters, but he was not at all remorseful. To the contrary, he defended himself in those letters and blamed Andrea — who was nine years old at the time of the abuse — for coming on to him and being a sexually aggressive “Lolita” figure/homewrecker. He then threatened to kill Andrea if she ever told the police about the abuse. Munro essentially accepted this, treating the abuse as an act of infidelity, and moved back in with her husband. From Andrea’s essay:
In spite of the letters and threats, my mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.
It’s also worth noting that Andrea’s father and stepmother, with whom Andrea lived during the school year, were made aware of the abuse at the time it happened back in 1976. Her father chose to do and to say nothing, however, and he continued to send Andrea to spend her summers with Munro and Fremlin, where she continued to be sexually abused.
The family carried on for the next decade, basically pretending the abuse never happened. But in 2002 Andrea had children of her own and told Munro that she did not want them anywhere near Fremlin. Munro considered this to be an annoyance and an inconvenience to her, personally, and she and her daughter argued. The next day Munro called Andrea back, not to apologize, but to attempt to forgive Andrea for speaking to her angrily. At that point Andrea cut her mother out of her life. Three years later, after Munro gave an interview in which she falsely claimed she was still close with all of her children, Andrea reported Fremlin to the police. sharing the letters in which he admitted his abuse of her. Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault. He received probation and was ordered to stay away from children, playgrounds, and schools for two years. Munro never spoke to Andrea again.
Parents have one job above all others: keep their children safe. The failure of both of Andrea Skinner’s parents to do that, and Munro’s subsequent defense of and loyalty to her own daughter’s abuser, is absolutely unfathomable to me. What a horrible story. What an awful way to be reminded, once again, that a person’s work, however admirable, says nothing about their character.
Stop using the word “conservative” to describe Trump and the Republicans
I’ve increasingly used the words “fascist” and “authoritarian” to describe the modern political right in this country. A few people have chided me for that, but I’m struggling to understand why using inaccurate terms is preferable to using accurate terms. If you want to use a proper noun, sure, they’re Republicans. But if you are trying to use a descriptive term to characterize Republican politics, there could not be anything less accurate than the term “conservative.”
A good essay about that can be found over at Mark Jacob’s newsletter, in which he explains how there is absolutely nothing conservative about Trump and the Republicans’ political positions and ambitions. Indeed, they are extraordinarily radical to their core:
The modern right wing is not trying to “conserve” American values. Instead, it’s attempting to trash bedrock principles established over two and a half centuries. It seeks to create an America that has never existed before. An America whose president has the powers of a king . . . The Heritage Foundation’s definition of conservatism is “an ideology rooted in American founding principles. It prioritizes individual choice and rights over big government, one-size-fits-all solutions and viewpoints.” Yet what could be more “big government” and less “rooted in American founding principles” than a Supreme Court decision giving the president sweeping immunity from our laws? Trump and the Heritage Foundation applauded that court ruling because they’re not really conservatives.
There is nothing “conservative” — nothing in keeping with “America’s founding principles” — about wanting to conduct mass arrests and to throw people into internment camps. There is nothing “conservative” about purging the apolitical civil service and staffing government with political lackeys. There is nothing “conservative” about idolizing a leader who is a convicted felon and adjudged rapist who plans to pardon thousands of people who attempted to overthrow the American political system. There is especially nothing “conservative” about championing a Supreme Court decision that gives an American president the powers of a monarch. Indeed, opposition to that last one is America’s original founding principle.
The media likes to use the word “conservative” because it keeps Republicans from getting mad at them. People in general dislike the term “fascist” or “authoritarian” because they somehow believe that America cannot, by definition, have fascists and authoritarians because, um, well, we’re America and that’s not what we do.
But as Jacob notes, the dictionary definition of “fascism” far more closely describes what Donald Trump and the Republicans stand for than the word “conservative” does. Given that we should always strive for accuracy, I can’t see a reason to stop using that word.
And the word is looking like it will matter more come January 2025
Until pretty recently I was at least cautiously optimistic that however bad a second Trump term would be, and no matter how flawed a candidate Joe Biden might be, the balance of probabilities favored us avoiding disaster because this country simply doesn’t have the appetite to put Trump back in office. Since the whole debate fiasco and the discourse which spun out of it, however, I’ve grown direly pessimistic. That pessimism increases with every poll that gets released. Like this one from Emerson college yesterday:
Obviously one poll is not the world, but Emerson College’s polling operation is considered solid and this trend has been seen for over a week now.
We can argue all day about whether Joe Biden should drop out and why, and whether it’s fair to him or democracy or whatever the hell we want to argue about. But all of that is secondary to “if Biden can’t win, we’re fucked,” and it looks increasingly like Biden can’t win. Chalk that up to unfairness or media bias or whatever you want to chalk it up to, but the whys of it really don’t matter when it’s all said and done.
These numbers have to change and they have to change fast or else this country is in deep, deep shit.
Quote of the Day: “There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”
“This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies. The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, dropping an objective truth.
Welcome to the 20th century, New York
Back in April there were stories about how New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, was going to take some time out of his schedule, which is normally dominated by him being the weirdest damn dude in the world, in order to try to solve an actual municipal problem: the piles of trash and the rats who love them. As the city’s official website put it:
The days are numbered, officials hope, for two ubiquitous features of New York’s sidewalks: towering piles of trash and scurrying rats. The city is making moves toward complete trash “containerization,” the long-held dream of garbage management experts and city planners. If implemented correctly, it could transform your curbside. But there is a long way to go, and lots of logistics to sort out.
“Containerization” is literally just . . . people and businesses using trash bins. The sort of which basically every city adopted decades ago in order to keep people from just setting thin, stinky, garbage-filled trash bags/rat buffets directly out on the curb. Hell, if you count old-school metal trash cans as “containers” most places were requiring them close to a century ago, not just decades.
But not New York! There, in The Year Of Our Lord 2024, putting trash in anything more substantial than a Hefty is apparently revolutionary. So revolutionary that Mayor Weirdo actually had a press event about using bins yesterday and, yes, he used the word “revolution”:
Again, this is just the beginning of this plan. It applies only to certain small apartment buildings, no doubt because of those “logistics” mentioned on the city’s website, and it’s still apparently “a long way to go” before New York has the trash management capabilities of literally everywhere else.
Which is kinda nuts! As Marc Normandin put it on Twitter, “it's difficult to reconcile ‘New York, it's the greatest city in the world!’ with ‘some of our buildings don't throw their trash right on the sidewalk, but most do.’” And even that’s only since yesterday!
It’s always kind of dumb to get into arguments about how one city is better than another because qualitatively ranking cities is inherently subjective and everyplace has its pros and cons. But if you do get into it with a New Yorker some day, and they pull that whole weird “where else but New York can you get an egg sandwich with bacon and cheese!” thing, be sure to ask them what in the hell is so hard about trash bins.
Have a great day everyone.
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