Cup of Coffee: March 12, 2024

Good morning!

There’s trouble in YankeeLand, a Red Sox pitcher is going under the knife, the Seoul Series starters have been announced, the Giants released someone, perhaps to save some cash, and our friend Trevor Bauer is getting a lot of help from the media in his efforts to rehabilitate his character but, I’ll be damned, it’s not working.

In Other Stuff: another sports media site goes tits up, a new secret society has dropped, there’s a new movie out that you haven’t heard of but which definitely takes me back, and we look back at the New Wave Era.

 The Daily Briefing

Yankees owies

Yesterday morning Aaron Boone told the press that Yankees ace Gerrit Cole was undergoing an MRI on his right elbow. As far as details go, all Boone would say was that Cole was not recovering as well after throwing sessions this spring, whatever that means. Later on that was upgraded to “elbow discomfort.”

We may not know anything about this for a couple of days, as Boone told the press that the club may not have a prognosis for Cole until later in the week. Luckily Yankees fans are the patient types who will calmly wait for official updates rather than assume the worst and fill the information vacuum with all manner of imagined horrors.

In related news, Boone held star slugger Aaron Judge out of yesterday’s game. This came a day after Judge left a game after only two plate appearances when all of the other regular starters remained in the game longer. His being pulled came after an at bat in which some people believe Judge winced on a big swing and that he might have hurt himself. Boone, however, claims that both the early hook and yesterday’s day off was normal, and that Judge is just “mid-spring beat up." Again, whatever that means.

Normally I’d chalk all of this up to relatively unimportant spring training stuff, but Boone and Brian Cashman have something of a history of initially soft-peddling injuries only to later announce that things are way worse. A lot of “so-and-so is day-to-day” or “is just banged up” before they spend a long time on the injured list. Anthony Rizzo’s concussion last year is the most recent and most notorious example but there are a lot of them. I hope that this is not the case here, but I’m guessing Yankees fans are on tenterhooks.

Lucas Giolito is going under the knife today

Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito will undergo surgery on his right elbow this afternoon. It’s still unknown whether he will require full-blown Tommy John surgery or what is known as a brace procedure instead. Usually the doctors don’t know until they get in there and start probing around. He’s going to be out for a long time either way. And, given how these things go, I’d bet that it’s TJ surgery.

All of this is because, as was reported last week, Giolito has a partial tear in his ulnar collateral ligament and a strain of his flexor tendon. Tough break.

Seoul Series starters announced

It seems crazy, but the regular season begins next week. At least technically speaking. That’s when the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres will open the season with two games in Seoul, South Korea.

The pitching matchups for the Seoul Series were set yesterday. Tyler Glasnow and Yu Darvish will face off in the first game, on March 20, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Joe Musgrove will get the ball in Game 2 on March 21.

Those games start at like 6AM EDT, so I’ll be enjoying them. How about you?

Giants release J.D. Davis

Yesterday the San Francisco Giants released third baseman J.D. Davis. He had been placed on waivers on Saturday but made it through unclaimed, so now he’ll be a free agent.

Davis’ place in the Giants universe was up in the air since the club signed Matt Chapman last week. Davis has played a lot of outfield in the past, but with Jorge Soler at DH and available to be a backup outfielder it was gonna be hard to find much playing time for him.

The thing that really sucks here is that Davis had just gone through arbitration and was awarded a $6.9 million deal for 2024. Arbitration-awarded contracts are not guaranteed until Opening Day, however, so by releasing Davis the Giants only have to pay $1.15 million of Davis’ arbitration award.

It’s not the height of baseball malpractice to release a 30 year-old player with no obvious position, but it’s still a curious move given that the Giants had been linked to Chapman for months. How much better would things have been for Davis had he been a free agent a few months back rather than a couple of weeks before the season starts and everyone’s roster is already coming into focus? Why did the Giants keep him around? Was it to create some leverage in negotiations with Chapman? Did they simply not have a coherent plan before the season started? Were they pissed at the arbitration award and just wanna be done with him? Has to be one of those, right?

The Giants are already having problems attracting free agents. There’s just this sense out there that the club is an undesirable landing spot, particularly for hitters, if they have any choice. While it’s perfectly within the rules to release a guy on an arbitration deal in March, it’s a bit rough from the players’ perspective. Makes me wonder if it’ll make San Francisco even less attractive for free agents going forward.

Or — and hear me out! — maybe we can not do this?

At what point does is begin to occur to the reporters who keep giving Trevor Bauer a platform to beg for a job that 30 MLB teams, fully aware that he is willing to take a minimum money deal, STILL don't want him, and that that's for a very good reason?

But even if it isn’t going to occur to them, maybe they can at least refrain from the abject boosterism Nightengale displays in this article. It’s an advocacy piece in all but name. It’s really something, man.

In related news:

Yeah, if there was only a reason people don’t wanna associate with you, Trev. Maybe if we think harder we’ll figure it out.

Seriously: the extent to which this chucklehead refuses to even remotely reflect is impressive. It’s 80-grade calculated obliviousness

Deadspin sold

The sports website Deadspin has been sold to some European company and all of its current staff has been fired. The message at that link about the sale says that staff was informed about it via email before it was publicly announced but actual Deadspin staff have refuted that, saying that they were locked out of their emails and Slack and stuff before any announcement was made. So, yeah, just another day in corporate sports media.

Deadspin had been through multiple iterations over the years, some good, some not so good. But seeing yet another once-prominent sports website destroyed, as Deadspin has been systematically destroyed by its blind-to-everything-but-profits overlords, only to be sold off for parts, is as depressing as it is commonplace.

I cannot imagine where I’d be right now if I didn’t strike out on my own when I did. I cannot imagine trying to do this job for anyone but myself. Not just as a matter of comfort, but as a matter of survival.

Other Stuff

The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club

Are you a white, heterosexual man of independent means who is eager to recruit and serve in a Christian government that will form after a “regime change” which ushers in an age which existed before “decadence” destroyed America’s Christian virtue? If so, there’s a secret society just for you!

It’s called the Society for American Civic Renewal — referred to as “sacker” — and there was a big investigative exposé of it at Talking Points Memo yesterday. And folks, it’s an absolute trip:

The man who incorporated the national umbrella group is an Indiana shampoo tycoon who refers to himself as “maximum leader” and blogs about Rhodesian anti-guerilla tactics and how the must-read dystopian fiction novel for white supremacists, The Camp of the Saints, is actually a vision of America’s present.

Group members hold a distinct vision of America as a latter-day ancient Rome: a crumbling, decadent empire that could soon be replaced by a Christian theocracy. To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and “alignment,” which it describes as “deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.” More practically, members must be able to contribute either influence, capability, or wealth in helping SACR further its goals. 

“Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm,” a mission statement reads.

If I may: if you ever find yourself around someone who refers to “the temporal realm,” do NOT let them drive because they really don’t care whether they or you live or you die. Just a tip from your Uncle Craigy.

The group further describes themselves as “un-hyphenated Americans [who] believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.” They say that they are “willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance of that ideal.” Again with the “nothing lasts forever, so YOLO!” stuff. I cannot tell you how dangerous such people are.

It’s also worth mentioning that they happen to LOVE the example of the white people who ran South Africa under Apartheid and white African settlers in places like Rhodesia who mounted armed insurrections after those countries gained independence. You know, just normal bros being normal dudes.

The founders of the Society for American Civic Renewal had attempted to maintain it all as a secret society but they were recently outed by the TPM investigation and an earlier Guardian report. Now that they’re public they’re trying to downplay it as a mere fraternal organization like the Masons or the Moose Lodge. Last i checked, though, the Moose Lodge guys aren’t fans of theocratic dictatorship, a strict patriarchy and, it would seem, the reversal of every social advancement since the William McKinley administration and, by extension, the eradication of all progressive dissent, which it refers to as “decadence.” Whether those of us who adhere to such “decadence” will be allowed to exist in their envisioned national order if we accept their RightThink or, alternatively, we must be eliminated, is not yet known, but I have an inkling.

For all of the looniness, I think the key takeaway here is that this group is not some ragtag assemblage of wackos and yahoos. This is not the Proud Boys or a militia or some other easily stereotyped group of lightly-educated right wing wannabe rebels. These are all business leaders, college professors, think tank executives, many of whom are well connected to people in Trump’s orbit. It’s a good reminder that, no matter how many New York Times reporters interview common folk in Midwestern diners, the real movers behind American fascism are more likely to have MBAs than to drive GMCs.

Jurassic Ark

Growing up in southern West Virginia meant that I was around a lot of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Church of God adherents and various other evangelical types. Here I’m not talking about your garden variety religious people. I’m talking about the “the Earth is only 6,000 years-old and we fully expect to be raptured at any moment” people.

In my day — the mid-to-late 1980s and into the early 90s — that crew was not as involved in politics and stuff as they would soon become. To be sure, many were prominent in the community and, looking at the broader Reagan coalition and the ascendant vibes of the religious right, it was easy to see how they would eventually come to dominate the political and social lives of the area. But at the time they just sort of existed in parallel to the old line Protestants and the more mainstream components of the community.

Among the more noticeable aspects of those communities at the time, at least to a teenager like me, was the then-nascent evangelical media and culture scene. Christian rock and eventually Christian rap. Teen and young adult novels that served as alternate reality Christian versions of “Sweet Valley High” or the “Babysitters Club” or whatever. I didn’t know a ton about these things, but I had a lot of friends who grew up with that stuff. Many of them became disaffected with their family’s religious practices and would talk about all of this stuff to the rest of us. It never ceased to be eye-opening.

I haven’t spent all that much time thinking about that sort of thing over the past 30 years. These days I’m far more concerned about religious fundamentalists trying to impose a theocratic government than I am wabout bad Christian-themed hair metal. But I have learned that, just as the religious right’s political ambitions and power have advanced and matured over the years, so too has the evangelical culture scene. Rather than poorly-drawn cartoons, hastily published books, and some of the most sterile music ever recorded, the fundamentalists have gone big budget! Or at least bigger budget.

That bigger budget can be seen in the evangelical Christian-produced movie coming out on March 20 called “The Ark and the Darkness” which depicts the story of Noah’s Ark featuring — per the movie’s own ad copy — “a photo-realistic depiction of how The Flood happened, how dinosaurs were involved, and what happened afterwards.”

This photo of some Friends of Noah trying, and no doubt failing, to wrangle some dinosaurs onto the Ark is a still from one of the trailers:

The notion that people and dinosaurs lived at the same time before the latter were wiped out in The Flood is not new, of course. My friends would share the bad cartoons and stories and stuff about that with me back in 1988. In terms of production values, however, we have certainly come a long way. Indeed, it feels like eons since I was first shown those Xeroxed pamphlets featuring D-minus drawings of Bart Simpson saying “Jesus is COOL, MAN!”

Just another thing to make me feel old, I guess.

There’s a new wave coming

I was just a little kid when new wave and post punk music truly hit, but to the extent 8-10 year-old me could hear it, I liked it, probably more than most other kids my age did. When all of my friends were listening to Survivor, Hall and Oates, and Foreigner, I was wearing out Human League records. I came to love that stuff even more later. To this day it’s probably my favorite era and genre of music. Probably not a shock to any of you who have been reading this newsletter for very long.

Friend of the newsletter Michele Catalano was in her late teens and early 20s during the heyday of new wave and post punk. She sloughed off the music of her teenage years, however, and went full-in on into that stuff. And now she has written an ode to that music and what it meant to her:

When I was out on the floor, nothing mattered. My stagnant life did not matter. My uncertain future did not matter. My past did not matter. I was in a groove, in the moment. I was not at the club to pick up guys, I was not there to get drunk. I was there for the music and the music only, for the way it lifted me up and made me throw caution to the wind. I was there for the empowerment new wave music afforded me, for the ability to let everything go, to become the person I always wanted to be but couldn’t pull off full time.

It’s a good read for people who like New Order, Duran Duran, Madness, Flock of Seagulls, Alphaville, Big Country, and all of those wonderful bands. Which all of you should, frankly.

Have a great day everyone.

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