Cup of Coffee: March 11, 2024
Mookie to short, Joey to T.O., a prospect gets popped, the O’s sale, Ángel Hernández is in midseason form, Rudy has a point, when racism was allegedly fixed, and cabbage rolls
Good morning!
Mookie to short, Joey to Toronto, a prospect gets popped, the O’s sale progresses, Ángel Hernández is in midseason form, and “Field of Dreams” got an extended shoutout at the Oscars last night.
In Other Stuff: Stoking the conspiracy theories, Rudy Gobert implies that gambling impacts referee decisions, it was cold in Kansas City for that Wild Card Game, we somehow “fixed” racism in the 1990s but I guess I missed it, and I tell you a story about why I don’t like stuffed cabbage. Because it’s important that you know this.
The Daily Briefing
The Dodgers have moved Mookie Betts to shortstop
It was a big deal when the Dodgers moved Mookie Betts out of the outfield and into the infield last season to cover for a number of infielder injuries. It was a bigger deal when they announced over the winter that he would be the club’s full-time second baseman in 2024. Guys usually don’t just move to the right on the defensive spectrum, especially after a decade in the league.
Now, though, he’s moving to the right again, as the guy projected to be the Dodgers shortstop, Gavin Lux, has struggled mightily with the yips all spring. As a result the club has swapped Betts and Lux, making Betts the everyday shortstop. When asked on Friday evening if that was a permanent move, Dave Roberts said it’s “Permanent, for now.” I can’t decide if that turn of phrase is funny or, rather, the perfect title for an Oasis reunion album.
Betts was a second baseman in the minors and played there a little bit in the bigs before the Red Sox made him a full-time outfielder. He won six Gold Gloves playing out in the grass and, before last season’s 16 emergency appearances, he hadn’t played at shortstop since he was a senior in high school. As I sit here right now the closest analog I can think of to Betts moving to short at this point in his career is Sparky Anderson moving Pete Rose to third base for the 1975 season after he had spent a decade in the outfield. Even then, Rose had played a great deal of second base as a young big leaguer, so it’s not like he was being asked to play a more challenging defensive position than anything he had done in the majors before.
Betts is a fantastic athlete, of course, and he has never failed to excel at seemingly anything. But even he seems to understand that this was not supposed to be the plan:
“Everything is tough about playing shortstop. but somebody’s got to do it . . . it is what it is. It’s the task put in front of me and nobody cares. Nobody cares what I gotta go through. I don’t care what I gotta go through. On whatever day we are in Korea, I’ll be ready to go.”
For all the money the Dodgers spent and all the waves they made this past winter, it’s kinda nuts that they’re gonna open the season with Betts at shortstop and a guy with the yips at second, but (a) the Dodgers once had Pedro Guerrero at third and Steve Sax and second and still went to the NLCS; and (b) it’ll sure as hell be interesting to watch.
Joey Votto signs with Toronto
Joey Votto’s amusingly performative unemployment is over. The Toronto Blue Jays signed him on Saturday as a non-roster invite.
Votto, 40, grew up around Toronto and idolized 1990s Blue Jays like Tony Fernández and Joe Carter. While he said over the weekend that he had hoped to sign a similar sort of deal with the Reds to finish out his career in Cincinnati, he’s obviously happy to be in uniform for his hometown team.
Whether he’ll be in the major league uniform at any point after spring training is an open question. Votto said on Saturday that he expects to start the season in the minor leagues and that he hopes to earn his way onto the big-league roster, saying he’s in “tryout mode.” Which he sort of has to be. He’s only played 156 games over the past two seasons due to various ailments, including a shoulder injury that ended his 2022 campaign. Over those two seasons he hit just .204/.317/.395 (93 OPS+) with 25 home runs and 79 RBI over 618 plate appearances. Maybe health makes a difference. It’s possible, of course, that he’s simply done.
But at least he’ll get a chance to see. And a lot of Joey Votto fans — and there are many of them — will get a chance to see him take at least a few more hacks.
Reds top prospect suspended 80 games for PEDs
Reds rookie infielder and top prospect, Noelvi Marte, was handed an 80-game suspension from Major League Baseball on Friday for violating the league’s PED policy. According to the league he tested positive for Boldenone.
Marte, 22, debuted for the Reds late last season and was expected to be their everyday third baseman out of camp. That plan presented an infield logjam, with Elly De La Cruz and Matt McLain playing short and second, respectively, and newly-signed Jeimer Candelario, Jonathan India and Christian Encarnacion-Strand to find playing time between first base and various backup positions. With Marte in a half-season timeout Candelario, who signed a three-year $45 deal in December, will assume full-time hot corner duty. It makes me wonder how early the Reds knew Marte got popped for PEDs. There is a lengthy appeals process before discipline is announced, after all. I wonder if the Candelario signing was at least in part aimed at covering that.
Marte is considered a top-20 or top-25 prospect in the sport depending on who you listen to. The Reds acquired him from Seattle as part of the return in the Luis Castillo trade in July 22. Marte hit .316/.366/.456 (120 OPS+) in his 35-game Cup of Coffee last season. He has pretty consistently raked in the minors, posting a regular .800+ OPS at various stops along the way.
Don’t do drugs, mmkay?
The first step in the Orioles sale has been taken
The first step in the Angelos family’s sale of the Baltimore Orioles to David Rubenstein has been taken as Major League Baseball's ownership committee voted to approve the deal.
Next up: the league's eight-man executive council gets a stab at approval — do no task me how that is different from the ownership committee because I do not know — and should the council approve, it will go to the full group of 30 owners. If the deal gets 23 votes out of that 30, which I see no reason why it won’t at this point, the sale is done. Assuming the checks clear at least. Which is not a worry for the insanely wealthy Rubenstein I figure.
The sale, which could be finalized next month, is for $1.725 billion. Peter Angelos bought the team for $173 million in 1993. After the sale is done I put even odds on John Angelos, son of Peter, to either write a book or give an interview in which he laments the lack of a work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit among today’s young people.
Ángel Hernández is in midseason form
On Friday night St. Louis Cardinals starter Lance Lynn was ejected from his first spring training start. The reason: he, like so many players before him, had words about balls and strikes and, apparently, how much time he had left on the pitching clock, with the outrageously thin-skinned and mostly incompetent umpire Ángel Hernández.
In many spring games, starting pitchers will go to the bullpen after they’re done to throw some extra pitches so that they can stay on their spring ramp-up program. Like, if the team determines that the pitcher needs 50 pitches on March 8, but he gets knocked out of the game for some reason at 38 pitches, the player will often toss another dozen in the pen to stay on track. Lynn attempted to do that following his ejection, but then Hernández stopped the game and ejected Lynn again, telling him he could not throw in the pen adjacent to the field since he had been ejected.
You can watch the whole thing below. My favorite part is just how slow Lynn walks from the bullpen, across the field, to the Cards clubhouse following the second ejection. And the wave he offers, which I presume was intended for our friend Ángel Hernández:
After the game Lynn said Hernández was “in midseason form.” I figure MLB will fine Lynn for that, even if they and everyone else agrees with him.
Yes, I saw it
I was even given a reminder:
Upon reflection, I am pretty sure Mulaney was making fun of it, so it’s all good.
Other Stuff
I’m not gonna keep going on about this, but . . .
. . . If I were managing the royal family’s P.R. operation I’d stop doing things which feed the conspiracy theories.
Rudy Gobert implies that gambling impacts referee decisions
On Friday night Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert fouled out late in the team’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. When that happened Gobert was caught on camera rubbing his thumbs and forefingers together in the universal “money” gesture. Gobert got a technical foul on top of it and the Timberwolves went on to lose the game in overtime.
After the game Gobert, while acknowledging that his reaction was immature and that it helped cost his team the game, suggested that gambling is influencing the way NBA games are being officiated. He said, “I’ll bite the bullet again. I’ll be the bad guy. I’ll take the fine, but I think it’s hurting our game. I know the betting and all that is becoming bigger and bigger, but it shouldn’t feel that way.”
On the one hand, Gobert is something of a jackwagon who has often made dubious headlines and has often said provocative things. On the other hand, the NBA already had a gambling-fueled officiating scandal which, amazingly, seems to have been memory-holed since the legalization of sports gambling went down. And there are suggestions that point-shaving has returned to college basketball as well. Gobert may not have any concrete reason to believe that Friday’s game was affected by gambling and, whatever the case, he’s not the greatest messenger of all time. But it’d be crazy to think that professional sports, particularly basketball, are somehow immune from that sort of corruption.
Indeed, I still maintain that we’ll see a pretty massive sports gambling-related scandal at some point over the next few years. I’d, for lack of a better cliche, bet anything on it.
Maybe they should rethink their fandom
News circulated over the weekend that several Kansas City football fans who attended the Miami-KC playoff game back in January, when the wind chill was 27 below zero, suffered frostbite that required amputations.
I get that a Wild Card game is super important to a lot of people, but that shit was on TV, man.
Huh, I hadn’t realized that Gen-X “fixed” racism in the 1990s
I realize you can say absolutely any objectively insane thing you want on Twitter, but sometimes people say things that really and truly make my mind reel. Such as:
In support of that he retweeted a poll about how “Americans did not believe race to be a big problem” until the 2010s. Which, in addition to being dubious on its own merits, is meaningless even if it came from the most rigorous pollster imaginable.
White Americans felt race relations were great during slavery and the Jim Crow era because everyone “knew their place.” They thought things were bad during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement because there was discord. Americans, particularly white Americans, are really big on out-of-sight-out-of-mind thinking. They like it when they are not reminded of real problems. They hate the messy process of problems being addressed. It’s why a wide swath of Americans believe the 1950s to be “the good old days.”
I can see these sorts of attitudes being applied to the 1990s, particularly the late 1990s, because of how pop culture and, to a large extent, our national politics and national media largely avoided the topic of racism and racial inequality back then. I believe that this was because there was a prevailing yet obviously erroneous sense, across all manner of topics, that we had escaped history. The Cold War was over and a Pax Americana was dawning. The civil rights and women’s rights movements were often spoken about as past struggles. It was an era in which, the occasional Spike Lee movie aside, which white America tended to dismiss anyway, America pretty much put its fingers in its ears and said “LALALALA EVERYTHING IS FINE.”
Of course that’s laughable. I’m old enough to have been an adult for most of the 1990s so I remember things. Things like:
- A literal Klansman getting 40% of the vote in a U.S. Senate election and even more of the vote when he ran for governor of Louisiana;
- Police in Los Angeles beating a Black motorist to within an inch of his life and then getting acquitted for it even though it was caught on video;
- The rise of so-called militia groups, largely populated by skinheads and white supremacists, gaining cultural prominence and, in many cases, committing hate crimes throughout the decade. They got a lot of coverage for their anti-government right wing politics and violence but it was rarely noted that racism was a tremendously important animating factor in their rise;
- Republicans and a compliant media routinely demanding that Democratic politicians denounce Black hip hop artists who said things that made white people uncomfortable (i.e. almost anything they said) and those same Democratic politicians gleefully doing so because they believed it’d help them with white swing voters;
- A West African immigrant being killed by skinheads in Denver in the late 1990s. The skinheads later told authorities they did it because the man was “wearing the enemy’s uniform,” referring to his Black skin;
- A black man in Jasper, Texas named James Byrd being chained by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death by white supremacists.
That’s just stuff I remember off the top of my head. There are countless other examples of hate crimes and far, far more examples of everyday systemic racism continuing to do what systemic racism has always done: oppress minorities and deny them of equal opportunity. That it was largely downplayed or even ignored by wide swaths of the public and the media at the time doesn’t change the reality on the ground.
It’s rather insane to even have to say that kind of thing. To have to say “no, racism wasn’t ‘fixed’ in the 1990s only to come back later,” but there are all manner of disingenuously malevolent shitheels for whom such bogus assertions are super important. Be it to absolve themselves for their actions or inaction back in the day or to advance current political priorities that require the marginalization or mockery of anyone who notes the obvious about racism and race relations at present. “Oh that? That’s old news. We fixed that. You’re just being hysterical now. Stop digging up the long dead past.”
I strongly suspect that as the leadership of the greater right wing movement becomes populated by people who were born in the late 1980s or 1990s — the Charlie Kirks, Ben Shapiros, and the Stephen Millers of the world and their acolytes — it will increasingly attempt to cast the 1990s as some 1950s-style ideal. It sort of has to, right? True haters will always hate, but the way they gain power is to convince average Americans who don’t think too hard about such things that something has been taken from them and that once things were better. The 1950s served that purpose for a very long time, but we’re moving out of the era in which the 1950s present a visceral as opposed to a merely intellectual appeal. The 1980s may be a better analog to the 50s, but Reagan remains a more polarizing figure and, because it was largely pre-Internet, the 80s feels longer ago than it was.
As such, I think it serves a lot of right wing purposes to use the 1990s. To try to get people to think that, a Democratic president aside, the 90s were some Golden Age. A time when the economy was great and we weren’t at war with anyone, and all the races got along in harmony. It’s nearly 100% bullshit, but that’ll be the play, I bet.
No. Not gonna do it.
My mother’s family did not care much for my father when he and my mom started dating. She was only 18. He was five years older. He lived in Dearborn while they lived a few blocks north in Detroit. He was a Jewish kid with an Italian last name and from what I can tell of my mom’s family they didn’t much care for Jewish people or Italians even if they weren’t trying to woo their daughter and even if my dad was only Italian in name as opposed to blood. Whatever the case, it was never gonna go smoothly.
One night, after they’d been together for a little while, my mom put all of her clothes in a basket and said she was going to the laundromat. Instead she got in a car with my dad and they drove 350 miles up to Sault Ste. Marie to elope. When my mom called home to tell her parents the news my grandfather told her that he gave it six weeks before she came back home. Next month they’ll have been married for 57 years and my grandparents are long dead so I guess they showed him.
Eventually there was at least a moderate rapprochement between my grandparents and my father. Part of the peace process involved my grandmother making my father a Polish stuffed cabbage dish called gołąbki, which consists of boiled cabbage leaves wrapped around a ground beef, chopped onion, and rice filling. The name of it is often Americanized into something like “golombki” or “golumpki.” In my mother’s family it somehow got translated into “glumpkees.” Plural, because we’re midwesterners, and midwesterners pluralize everything. And no, I do not know how it became a part of my mom's family’s cooking because there is zero Polish ancestry in her background. All I can guess is that they cooked glumpkees because they were poor and cabbage and ground beef were pretty cheap so there you are.
The point here is that my father absolutely loved, and still loves, glumpkees. It may have been the only thing about my grandparents my dad cared for, but God did he love the stuffed cabbage and from what I understand, my grandmother would make them for my dad from time to time. My mom, who was forced to eat glumpkees growing up, despises them, but she learned to cook them from her mother and, to this day, she makes them for my dad on special occasions like his birthday or Father’s Day. She does so despite the fact that she has to open windows or walk outside during the process because even the small makes her want to gag. The things we do for love.
My mom, who vowed never to inflict the sort of food she was forced to eat as a child on the rest of us -- things like stuffed cabbage, liver and onions, fried chicken livers, and the sorts of lunch meats which no one younger than 70 has ever eaten and which I'm pretty sure have since been banned by the Geneva Convention -- only made my brother and I try glumpkees once. I remember almost barfing I hated them so much. As a result of that, and as a result of being present in the house in the hours before my dad's birthday dinners, I will, for the rest of my life, be able to conjure up the smell of glumpkees in my mind at the slightest provocation. I just did it right this moment and it almost made me gag. Vile things. Horrible things.
Most of you at this point are likely wondering why I’m telling you all of this. This is why:
You can read the whole story about the ascendence of cabbage here if you wish. But why anyone would want to is beyond me.
To be fair, I don’t categorically hate cabbage. I’ll do sauerkraut on a reuben. I’ll also eat your creamier cole slaws, but that’s probably because the creamier it is, the less you taste the cabbage. A little bit shredded on a taco or on a sandwich is OK with me because that’s more about texture than taste. I’ll eat cabbage’s cousin, Brussels sprouts as well. I love Brussels sprouts.
But cabbage as anything approaching the main part of a dish is just not my thing. I cannot even hear the word without thinking of glumpkees and their stench, so if some cheffy-chef types are gonna put more cabbage out there in the universe, especially in a prominent as opposed to subsidiary role, I’m out, man. Cabbage may or may not be “having a moment” but my revulsion at it is eternal.
Glad I got that off my chest. As I am sure you are as well.
Have a great day everyone.
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