Cup of Coffee: March 13, 2024

Good morning!

Today we talk more about Yankees injuries, the Yankees’ disingenuousness about injuries, and the implications of said injuries. We also discuss the delusions of the president of the Oakland Athletics, Darryl Strawberry’s health, and the importance of making sure the least number of people possible see the games they’d like to see the most.

In Other Stuff we talk about typos, Trump’s miscalculations, Trump’s base cruelty, Boeing’s problems, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

 The Daily Briefing

Aaron Judge is "Mid-spring beat up”, eh?

On Monday Aaron Boone said that Aaron Judge was being held out of a couple of games because he was “mid-spring beat up,” with the strong implication being that Judge was simply tired and sore and that they were wanting to manage his workload. Then, yesterday morning, we learned that Judge actually underwent an MRI on his abs on Monday. Judge said the MRI came back clean, but that he hasn’t swung a bat for a few days and won’t until later in the week. He added that he’s “pretty sure” he’ll be ready for Opening Day.

So, yeah.

An MRI is not something that a doctor just decides to give you mid-exam with no notice. As such, I cannot imagine that there was any way in hell that Boone did not know on Monday morning, when he spoke to the media, that Judge was going to get an MRI. At the absolute least he knew that Judge had issues with his ab muscles that were serious enough to suggest an MRI, yet he trotted out the oh, he’s just run-of-the-mill tired rebop.

Yesterday I talked about how the Yankees cannot be trusted to give the straight dope when it comes to injuries. This is just further evidence of that. Indeed, they seem to just straight-up lie about them. And no one in the organization seems to care. It’s almost as if it’s an ethos. It’s Wilpon-era Mets stuff from what once was considered to be the best-run organization in professional sports.

If that was ever true, as opposed to just Steinbrenner propaganda, it sure as hell ain’t true now.

In related news . . .

Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported yesterday that the Yankees have made a new offer to the White Sox for starter Dylan Cease. The Yankees' re-engaging with Chicago on Cease, who they at least sorta tried to acquire over the winter, comes the day after they revealed that Gerrit Cole would undergo an MRI on his right elbow.

That MRI happened on Monday. The talks with the White Sox started yesterday. How much ya wanna bet that that MRI doesn’t look so good?

Dave Kaval is delusional 

Oakland A’s president Dave Kaval spoke with Forbes’ Maury Brown about the club’s relocation to Las Vegas the other day. He was clearly on relocation sales pitch autopilot during the interview, as he (a) seemed to believe he had spoken with Brown several times before when he never had, suggesting that he didn’t even care who he was pitching to; and (b) he made a couple of eye-rolling claims.

The claims:

• Speaking of the new Vegas ballpark, he said “This is the most important MLB venue since Oriole Park At Camden Yards”; and
• “I like the example of the Dodgers. Our relocation is most similar to the Dodgers move out of Brooklyn.”

Oriole Park at Camden Yards was a groundbreaking venue which has shaped stadium design for over 30 years. What’s more, it was identified as doing so in real time, even before it was completed. Everyone knew it was a big deal. There were articles about it, interviews with the architects, and a clear acknowledgment that something new and important was going down. The Las Vegas ballpark, in contrast, so far only exists in the most tenuous of ways, having only been shown in nearly detail-free, slapdash AI renderings which were mercilessly picked a part the moment they were released. No one has any confidence that whatever arises on the very tight corner of Las Vegas on which it’s set to be built will resemble what has been shown. Sure, it’s possible that something transformative will be built for the A’s, but nothing about this process has suggested it so far.

As for the Dodgers-to-Los Angeles comp: really? The Dodgers and Giants moving to California was an epochal event in the history of Major League Baseball. It literally changed the game. All of professional sports really. What is game-changing about the A’s moving to Las Vegas, exactly? There are already two top-level professional sports teams there, each of whom had and continue to have more juice behind them than the A’s have had since they announced they were scurrying into town. The move serves no apparent fan demand. Indeed, most people believe that, whatever their stadium eventually looks like, the A’s are going to struggle mightily to draw fans.

If I was going to compare this to a move I’d say it’s like the Expos going to Washington — though, unlike here, there was genuine fan hunger for a team in D.C. — or perhaps the Philadelphia A’s moving to Kansas City. Notable? Sure. Groundbreaking? Not at all.

On some level I feel for Kaval. He’s being ordered to make the media rounds by his equally delusional boss, John Fisher, and he has to say what he has to say. But it’s abundantly clear that the only person the A’s moving the Las Vegas might serve is Fisher, who believes he’ll become even more wealthy than he already is by virtue of this move. And given how ham-handedly the move has been so far, even that’s not guaranteed.

Which should probably make Kaval stop, take stock, and ask himself whether he actually believes the bull he’s peddling. Not that I’m counting on it happening.

This guy is delusional too

My man was protesting outside of MLB headquarters in New York:

I wonder if anyone came out and told him that no one at MLB is stopping a team from signing Bauer and putting him in their rotation. Except they’re not doing that because he’s a total shit show of a human being with whom no one wants to associate.

Maybe if someone told him that he’d stop wasting his time. But then again, maybe not.

Darryl Strawberry had a heart attack

Mets legend Darryl Strawberry is in a Missouri hospital recovering from a heart attack. He seems to be doing OK, though, having posted on Instagram that he's "happy" and "honored to report that all is well":

Yesterday was his 62nd birthday too. The heart attack obviously sucks, but surviving it and being around loved ones is certainly a wonderful gift. Get well soon, Straw.

Finger on the pulse

Cole Hamels announced his retirement late last season. In response the Phillies named this June 21, when the Phillies take on the Diamondbacks, “Cole Hamels Retirement Night.” There will be a pre-game ceremony and, as is always the case with these sorts of things, Hamels will no doubt be visible in the ballpark all game long, will likely take an inning or so to chat in the broadcast booth, and will no doubt be the subject of various sorts of tributes all evening. Like, the odds that Bryce Harper doesn’t have some Hamels references on his socks or his shoes or his glove or something are so low that they’re not worth measuring.

We just learned something else about that June 21 game: it will be exclusively broadcast on AppleTV+ and will not be available on the Phillies’ local broadcast partner NBC Sports Philadelphia.

What a brilliant move by Major League Baseball. An institution that when given a choice to maximize revenue vs. optimizing the game experience for fans, will always, always choose the former.

Other Stuff

Pobody’s Nerfect

As you all know, I make more than my fair share of typos. I don’t get too worked up over them, though, because I write in a digital medium and I can always go back and fix things, at least on the web version of the newsletter. My thought process is always, “well, it’s not like these words are etched in stone.”

It feels considerably less forgivable when you make typos on words that are, actually, etched in stone. Like when you make multiple mistakes on the base of a statue of one of the most famous athletes in history. That, my friends, is a much bigger problem.

This is not gonna end well for him

A political coup has gone down this week:

Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC . . . Under the new structure, the Trump campaign is looking to merge its operations with the RNC. Key departments, such as communications, data and fundraising, will effectively be one and the same.

On the one hand, it’s always the case that a party’s presidential nominee comes to exert control of the party apparatus in an election year as the entire point of that apparatus is to get the nominee elected. But that has always been defacto control, not formal control via an actual personal takeover accomplished by purging party officials and installing literal family members in leadership positions. Coordination between party and nominee is the norm, but the notion that the RNC is Trump and Trump is the RNC is unprecedented in modern politics.

As Josh Marshall mused early yesterday morning, there really can be only one reason for Trump to do this: so he can have complete and total control of the money in RNC accounts. There’s no other reason. The party would have done Trump’s bidding anyway. What’s more, the merging of the two entities actually causes the Trump campaign practical problems as it’s useful to have a separate entity that can handle get out the vote and voter education initiatives. Now that’s gone. It’s also worth mentioning that the national party has a responsibility to hundreds of other races across the country besides the presidential race. Now Trump campaign people will have the practical responsibility to handle those as well.

Except you know they won’t. All efforts and resources will now be diverted to Trump and Trump alone. Any Republican candidate who has not bent the knee and kissed the ring — and many still exist! — will be completely shut out. Even those who have will see diminished funding and support because, again, Trump comes first, always. His political aims — not to mention his legal and personal interests — will be the top priority.

Which, by the way, also greatly increases the chances of the RNC itself getting sucked into the Trump legal morass. He’ll 100% try to use it to fund his legal defense and to pay for the massive judgments against him. He’ll likely employ it in the same way he has long employed his personal business: as a racket aimed at enriching him and only him. Indeed, if Trump’s usual m.o. prevails it would not shock me to see the RNC named as a defendant in a lawsuit or even a criminal complaint.

I am sure every other Republican out there knows this. I understand that their fear and general spinelessness requires them to demonstrate public fealty to him at all times, but I can’t help but think, privately, they’re fuming. Which, good.

Also

At a rally over the weekend, Trump mocked President Biden’s stutter. This is nothing new, of course. During his first campaign he mocked a New York Times reporter named Serge Kovaleski, who has the condition known as arthrogryposis, which causes involuntary joint contracture and movement. Trump, mockingly repeating a question Kovaleski had once asked him, jerked his arms around in an imitation of the reporter. And, of course, Trump’s record of racist and misogynistic words and deeds is extremely well-documented.

We can talk about politics. We can talk about policies. We can talk about commitment to democratic norms and personal character and everything else about which political candidates are scrutinized. But never has there been someone in so prominent a position who has been so shamelessly and publicly cruel as Donald Trump. He’s, by every conceivable measure, the biggest piece of shit human being to gain political prominence in my lifetime.

Historically, I have not thought less of people based simply on their support for a candidate who I do not support. I may have made inferences about their values or personal philosophies, and I certainly took issue with them politically, but I always at least acknowledged that their motivations were not fully known to me and that there are limits to what I can conclude about a person simply because they voted for a given person.

But that’s not the case with Trump. It wasn’t in 2016 and it isn’t now. His politics aside, he’s a demonstrably awful human being whose success and prominence has and continues to stain America. There is no position to which he adheres, be it taxes, spending, regulation, immigration, foreign policy, defense, or anything else that excuses one’s support for someone as personally mean, cruel, petty, and hateful as he is. Being able to demonstrate basic humanity is the barest threshold and the lowest bar for someone in public life. If you support a politician who cannot clear them, I have absolutely no use for you. It tells me everything I need to know about you.

This is fine

Shot: At least 50 people were injured on board a Boeing 787-9 flight from Sydney to Auckland operated by Chilean airline LATAM, after the aircraft experienced a technical issue that caused it to suddenly lose altitude.

Second shot: An FAA audit has found dozens of problems in the manufacturing and production of the 737 MAX.

Chaser: “A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm's production standards has been found dead in the US . . . In 2019, Mr Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting sub-standard parts to aircraft on the production line . . . After retiring, he embarked on a long-running legal action against the company. He accused it of denigrating his character and hampering his career because of the issues he pointed out - charges rejected by Boeing. At the time of his death, Mr Barnett had been in Charleston for legal interviews linked to that case.”

OK, I’m just being a dick here. These things are not related, obviously. For one thing, I suspect that the issue on the Sydney/Auckland flight will be proven to be turbulence that was somehow missed by the pilots or misread by their instruments, none of which are related to anything that whistleblower was working on. These things have happened before and are not unique to Boeing.

For another thing, initial reports of the death of the whistleblower have it as a suicide. We know almost nothing about him or his life but based on what I’ve read he’s been embroiled in litigation and investigations for a long time, all against the background of his career ending over it, and that stuff can upend one’s life. I’m a natural born shit-stirrer, but I’m not gonna claim that someone’s death is the result of intrigue and foul play unless and until someone presents evidence that it actually is. And that’s the case even if people were doing so all over the damn Internet yesterday and into today.

The real story of Boeing in 2024, I suspect, will end up being one which shows how ever-increasing incentives to maximize profitability and share price has intersected with an unprecedentedly lax U.S. regulatory regime, leading to all manner of otherwise unrelated problems, the likes of which safety experts have long warned authorities about but about which they don’t seem to particularly care. That’s, actually, far more scandalous and far more dangerous than anything that the people who write the potboilers and thrillers usually come up with.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Over at The SS Ben Hecht our friend Stephen Silver looks back at “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” on the 20th anniversary of its release. It’s a movie which he and many other people consider to be the best movie of the first decade of this century.

If you haven’t seen it, Stephen sums it up perfectly when he writes, “‘Eternal Sunshine,’ more than any other film, captures the nearly universal feeling of the aftermath of a breakup- more specifically, the mixed emotions felt by so many broken-hearted people of resenting their former partner and missing them all the same.”

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is one of my favorite movies of all time. Probably a top-5 selection. It was a movie I loved immediately when it came out, but when it came out I had never, in my life, gone through a bad breakup. I had been with my then-wife since high school and would remain with her for several more years after that. It was only in 2011, when we split up, that I truly understood what the movie was about. Indeed, I lived that whole tug-of-war between wanting to forget everything but knowing that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, and ultimately didn’t want to, and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” played a big part in my dealing with it all at the time.

So yeah, I’m gonna link someone writing about that flick every time I see it. It’s a movie that will stick with me until the day I die.

Have a great day everyone.

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