Cup of Coffee: March 20, 2024

Good morning! It’s Opening Day!

Well, technically it is in that, as most of you are reading this, the first game that counts in the 2024 regular season is going on over in Seoul, South Korea between the Padres and Dodgers. I appreciate that it doesn’t really feel like Opening Day given that most Opening Day games do not start at 6AM EDT and most Opening Day Games aren’t followed a few hours later by more spring training action in Florida and Arizona. But it does count, so hooray for the regular season!

Today we talk about the Opening Day starters, the leadership mishegoss at the MLBPA, some serious and righteous shade thrown at a Trump advisor by a couple of reporters, a story about a photograph that doesn’t matter much but which I wanted to tell anyway, and how I’m gonna sing along with the common people in September. Well, the common people who can afford to buy expensive concert tickets and travel out of state anyway. Yes, I’m aware of the irony.

 The Daily Briefing

Understanding the unrest in the MLBPA

Late Monday night reports circulated about unrest in the players union from the two most plugged-in MLB reporters going, Evan Drellich and Jeff Passan. You’ve probably read about it some in the roughly 32 hours since those reports hit, but if not, here is the bullet points version:

• Bruce Meyer is the Deputy Executive Director of the MLBPA. That’s number two to Executive Director Tony Clark. He’s been in the position since 2018, having come over from the NHLPA. He is a litigator by trade and he was hired specifically to shore up the union in negotiations, as it had had a couple of bad ones in the leadup to his hiring;
• Meyer’s most notable work to date includes handling talks to restart the season following the COVID shutdown in 2020, during which the players refused to cave to what were some pretty ridiculous MLB demands. More significantly, he led the MLBPA negotiating team in the runup to the 2022-26 Collective Bargaining Agreement which was widely seen as a win for the players on a number of fronts;
• Harry Marino is the lawyer and former minor league player who spearheaded the unionization efforts of minor league players as the head of the group Advocates for Minor Leaguers. After the MLBPA agreed to represent minor leaguers, Marino joined the union as an assistant general counsel, but then left in the summer of 2023;
• While the 2022-23 offseason set records for free agent spending, this past offseason has seen a return to the tepid hot stove years of the teens. If you back out the unique Shohei Ohtani deal and the Dodgers signing of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who as a posted player kinda fell out of the sky, it was a particularly dire winter, with even last year’s Cy Young winner not signing until the other night and several solid major leaguers still without jobs;
• Whether it’s because of the bad winter or other reasons, players are unhappy and they have apparently decided that Meyer, and possibly even Tony Clark, is the problem. In a conference call on Monday with Clark, Meyer, and the 72 player representatives — 34 of whom are minor league representatives — the players demanded that Clark fire Meyer and replace him with Marino.
• It should be noted that there is a suggestion in the Passan piece that Marino is openly lobbying for Meyer’s job, as he has been going to the players and pledging to make changes to the MLBPA negotiating team if he gets the gig. That sense was more than solidified yesterday morning when, in response to Scott Boras coming out and criticizing Marino’s efforts, Marino said “That [Boras] is running to the defense of Tony Clark and Bruce Meyer this morning is genuinely alarming.” Evan Drellich added in his latest report that if Marino and the objecting players oust Meyer that they’re likely ousting Tony Clark too. So it seems to be a full on civil war. Or, really, since Marino is not in the union, a rebellion.

Now for my thinking on this.

It strikes me generally that players are (a) mad that the owners ratcheted back on spending this offseason; and (b) have the idea that Scott Boras has some sort of control of the union, possibly through Meyer, and they don’t like it.

That latter point — Boras’ alleged sway over the MLBPA — I should note, is something that has popped up in the past but it appears to have no factual basis from what I can tell. A lot of non-Boras clients dislike Boras because they believe that Boras’ work on behalf of his blue chip clients works to the detriment of less highly-paid players. And yeah, that may be true, but how that amounts to “Boras controls the union” is beyond me. Especially when you realize that virtually all of the gains in the 2022 CBA negotiations were things which favored lower-paid players and pre-arbitration players as opposed to big money free agents. And that, again, Boras has basically had to eat shit all winter because his clients aren’t getting what they want.

Which is to say, it strikes me that players are generally mad, are looking for a scapegoat, and Meyer — who is still relatively new and who, unlike Marino, is neither a former player or someone in the trenches of organization as opposed to negotiation — seems like a good target. I’ll add, though, that Boras coming out yesterday and lambasting Marino and arguing that if he has problems with the union he should take it up with the union rather than foment “a coup d’etat,” to use Boras’ words, isn’t going to do much to persuade players that Boras doesn’t have a vested interest in the current regime.

To be sure, I am not privy to what goes on with the MLBPA on a day-to-day basis and I am not going to suggest that I know what the players want or need more than they do. It’s their union, after all. But calling for the head of guy who actually walked into negotiating rooms, faced off against MLB’s negotiating team and, for the first time in a couple of CBAs, came out with what could be called a solid win for the players doesn't strike me as particularly smart.

Smart, however, has nothing to do with it. Reason or prudence notwithstanding, Meyer is clearly not popular with the rank and file, Clark may be falling in the players’ estimation alongside him, and the rank and file are who truly run a union, so they may be toast regardless. That's just how it works.

If this goes down the way it looks like it’s going down, we’d be witnessing the most radical change to the union since Marvin Miller took over in the 1960s. We’d be in completely uncharted waters. Waters, I suspect, that Rob Manfred and the owners would be happy to swim in for a while, figuring that Marino, with no first-hand knowledge of how stuff actually works in MLB-MLBPA negotiations, might be easy prey the next time the sides talk.

Your Opening Day starters

You’ve probably been aware of who your favorite team plans to send out to the mound on Opening Day for some time, but in case you didn’t, or in case you just wanna know what everyone else is doing, below is a list MLB sent out yesterday confirming every team’s Opening Day starter.

As you probably know, apart from the games going on over in Korea today and tomorrow, Opening Day is a week from tomorrow and so all the other game times are for March 28:

GAME

PITCHING MATCHUP

TIME

SD vs. LAD

Yu Darvish vs. Tyler Glasnow

6:05 a.m. (ET) on 3/20 (Seoul Series)

NYM vs. MIL

Jose Quintana vs. Freddy Peralta

1:10 p.m. (ET)

BAL vs. LAA

Corbin Burnes vs. Patrick Sandoval

3:05 p.m. (ET)

PHI vs. ATL

Zack Wheeler vs. Spencer Strider

3:05 p.m. (ET)

CIN vs. WSH

Frankie Montas vs. Josiah Gray

4:10 p.m. (ET)

SD vs. SF

TBD vs. Logan Webb

4:10 p.m. (ET)/1:10 p.m. (PT)

LAD vs. STL

TBD vs. Miles Mikolas

4:10 p.m. (ET)/1:10 p.m. (PT)

TB vs. TOR

Zach Eflin vs. José Berríos

4:10 p.m. (ET)

MIA vs. PIT

Jesús Luzardo vs. Mitch Keller

4:10 p.m. (ET)

KC vs. MIN

Cole Ragans vs. Pablo López

4:10 p.m. (ET)/3:10 p.m. (CT)

HOU vs. NYY

Framber Valdez vs. Nestor Cortes

4:10 p.m. (ET)/3:10 p.m. (CT)

CWS vs. DET

Garrett Crochet vs. Tarik Skubal

4:10 p.m. (ET)/3:10 p.m. (CT)

TEX vs. CHI

Nathan Eovaldi vs. Justin Steele

7:35 p.m. (ET)/6:35 p.m. (CT)

OAK vs. CLE

Alex Wood vs. Shane Bieber

10:07 p.m. (ET)/7:07 p.m. (PT)

AZ vs. COL

Zac Gallen vs. Kyle Freeland

10:10 p.m. (ET)/7:10 p.m. (PT)

SEA vs. BOS

Luis Castillo vs. Brayan Bello

10:10 p.m. (ET)/7:10 p.m. (PT)

It’s a long season and one game means very little. But man, there are a LOT of dudes on the schedule for Opening Day whom I never would’ve believed, even six months ago, would get an Opening Day start in their whole careers. Viva injuries, I guess. And to some extent, Viva Tanking.

Jazz Chisholm Jr. calls out a former Marlins captain

Jazz Chisholm Jr. of the Marlins gave an interview in which he talked up the great chemistry he says the Marlins have in the clubhouse now. To illustrate it talks about what it was like when he was a younger player, telling an anecdote about how he once fell asleep and missed a team meeting. The issue, though, was not that he fell asleep — which I think he’d agree he shouldn’t have done — but that an unnamed team captain didn’t care and let him sleep:

Chisholm has only been on the Marlins since 2020, so I cannot imagine who else he’d be talking about other than Miguel Rojas, who was the team captain and the undisputed team leader during his tenure in Miami, which lasted until 2023.

Again, we can argue about whether Chisholm falling asleep and missing a team meeting is something one should require a team captain to prevent, but I imagine most players would agree that correcting young players’ bad habits is part of the job description for a captain, so that’s definitely a knock on Rojas.

As for the “our team chemistry is great now!” stuff. Well, find me a team that has yet to play a game that doesn’t think everything is wonderful. Everyone’s an optimist until they start out 4-11.

Other Stuff

The shade, it burns

Yesterday former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who was convicted of contempt of Congress last year, surrendered to federal authorities in Miami to begin serving a four-month sentence. Basically, he was up to his neck in the plot to overthrow the election, Congress subpoenaed him during their investigation into the matter, and he flat out refused to appear.

Navarro’s ostensible reason for not appearing was an extraordinarily spurious assertion of “executive privilege.” But even the in-the-bag-for-Trump Supreme Court brushed aside that argument noting that even if one does have a legitimate claim of privilege, one has to actually show up to a proceeding and assert it so that it might be considered by a judge. You can’t just say “fuck off, I’m not coming, for reasons.”

Navarro going to prison pleases me. Not because he matters and not even due to the substance of the case at hand. Rather, I’m pleased because someone, finally, is suffering a consequence for ignoring a Congressional subpoena. No, it wasn't the most pressing problem of the Trump years, but administration officials and associates shitting on Congressional subpoenas, one after another, was a key marker of a descent into lawlessness during that time. I’m glad to see someone doing actual time over this, even if it’s short time and even if Navarro does not appear to have learned any lessons here.

I’m also pleased because the NBC News story about all of this, which throws all kinds of shade at Navarro, is objectively hilarious. To wit:

Before turning himself in, Navarro held a press conference in a strip-mall parking lot down the street from the facility. Near a Papa John’s, Navarro gave an extended speech airing his grievances against the government and his prosecution, painting himself as a victim of political persecution.

I don’t think the press has done nearly enough to illustrate just how tacky and pathetic so many Trump-associated figures truly are. Yeah, we all got laughs about that Four Seasons Landscaping debacle back in January 2021, but there’s loads of this kind of thing that is rarely mentioned in the news stories. Bad taste, bad optics, and the like. I think the press normally pulls its punches with this stuff because it doesn’t want to seem elitist, but I think noting just how lame and often sad these wannabe despots and oligarchs truly are would take the Hugo Boss shine off of their particular brand of fascism and would limit its appeal in some respects. When putative strongmen make themselves look ridiculous they don’t stay strong for long.

Moving on, the story continued to have fangs:

Asked whether he had spoken to Trump ahead of his incarceration, Navarro claimed “executive privilege” on his conversations with Trump, who is not currently the president of the United States.

“I’m gonna claim executive privilege on the Donald Trump conversations,” Navarro told reporters, referring to conversations he had with Trump, who stopped being the head of the executive branch more than three years ago, on Jan. 20, 2021.

We may disagree on wanting to make Trump and his gang seem tacky — I’m at least somewhat sympathetic to the fear that such a stance may encourage elitism and snobbery — but I am all for calling out the ridiculous claims of these jackasses the moment they are given voice. So much of the political press feels it is their duty to transcribe the statements of these guys no matter how mendacious or ridiculous they are. It leads to toxic both-sides stuff and lends unwarranted credence to lies by making them seem like something other than lies. Republicans are keenly aware of this dynamic and say the most outrageous and unsupportable things because they know it will be reported with minimal if any critical context. At most someone will write a fact-check piece or a column a few days later debunking it all but by then we’re three news cycles in the future and no one cares.

But this, this is beautiful. A nonsense assertion is made and immediate factual refutation — not opinion, not opposing viewpoints, but objective and factual refutation — is set forth. Navarro is small potatoes, so I suppose the reporters here were allowed to break the usual “he said” form, but there is no reason this sort of thing could not be done with every single speech or statement Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Johnson, or any other political figure makes. More please.

This has nothin’ to do with anything, but . . .

Because my memory has been ravaged by age and the trials of the world at large, it takes me months of repetition to remember how to spell ballplayer names that are even slightly unusual. So, when I needed to write Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s name up in the MLBPA item, I just Googled it, copied it, and pasted it. When I Googled it, one of his official player photos of Yamamoto from the Getty archive popped up:

I love stylized “glowing briefcase from ‘Pulp Fiction’” photos like this. Not just because of the effect, but because I once had a photo sort of like this taken of me. The process of getting it was amusingly ridiculous and I think about it every time I see one.

It was the summer of 2008. While sabermetrics and the wider analytic movement in baseball had been going on for a long time, the movie version of “Moneyball” was still over three years away and it was really just starting to dawn on casual baseball fans how much the game was changing. My local newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, decided to do a big feature on analytics in sports in an effort to explain it all to the masses. This, by the way, was back when The Columbus Dispatch was locally/privately owned, employed reporters, and actually tried to be a journalistic outlet as opposed to a means of enriching private equity, so the feature actually came out pretty well if I remember correctly.

Because this was in the local newspaper, they wanted a local angle and I was the closest thing to a local angle they had. I had been writing my old Blogspot blog Shysterball for a little over a year at this point and it had gotten at least some notice. The Dispatch sports reporter who was behind the whole stats feature, Scott Priestle, was (and remains!) a reader of mine. He reached out to me and asked if they could do a little sidebar about my blog and sabermetrics in general. Sort of “hey, here’s a guy in town who appreciates this stuff” kind of thing. It ended up being me writing a brief guest piece explaining my relationship to sabermetrics. You can read it here. It’s pretty basic but it holds up I suppose.

They also ran a photo with it. This was it, and yes, that was my office, looking out over the Ohio Statehouse from the 7th floor of the One Columbus building at 10 West Broad Street. Oh how far I have fallen:

Be nice to me about the photo, you guys. I was nearly 16 years younger there than I am now, but I was in way worse shape by just about every measure for a host of reasons, including but not limited to burnout, too many mandatory-in-all-but-name law firm happy hours, and having a four year-old and a two year-old at home. I was busted, my friends.

But the key to this picture is not my bloat. It’s not even the baseball captured in mid-air, which took the photographer and me like 10 snaps to get just right. It’s the glow coming off my laptop. The glow that either matched or inspired the headline of the story about a fan “seeing the light.” The glow was achieved by the photographer placing a small but powerful light right in front of my laptop screen, just out of the shot. The photographer explained to me that even though it had been some time since TV and computer screens actually projected any significant glow, people still sort of expect to see it. So they put one of those lights just out of the shot when they wanted to suggest someone looking at a monitor or what have you.

The fun part of all of this: the story led to two or three other small items about my baseball blogging in various publications, one of which was a legal trade paper. I was told later that the people who ran the firm up in Cleveland were not at all happy about that one. Most of them knew I blogged on the side, but they thought my talking about it made the firm seem full of lawyers who weren’t committed to the job and they thought that would look bad to clients. Never mind that the guy who was the head of the litigation department at the time was working on a book about Warren Harding’s extramarital affairs that I am sure took about 10x the amount of work my little blog took in its entire existence.

All I know for sure was that when the financial crisis truly hit that fall and they needed to come up with people to lay off, the media attention I was getting had made me something of a target. You’d think someone who has read as much World War I history as I have would’ve appreciated the benefits of keeping one’s head down, but I don’t always do what I’m supposed to do. Indeed, I rarely do what I am supposed to do, which means I would’ve been run out of the law eventually anyway. And of course, there’s no such thing as bad press.

It all worked out for me, obviously, even if the view from my office these days is way worse than it was in 2008. I likewise imagine things will work out well for Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Who, thanks to this item, I do not think I’ll have to Google again while trying to spell his name. See, there was a point to this after all.

 Sing along with the common people

I would like to take this opportunity to let the newsletter community know that yesterday I acquired tickets to see the band Pulp in Chicago on September 8 and in New York on September 13. Do I need to see them twice? No. But I certainly want to, as I have never seen them live before.

As I was in the online queue for yesterday’s presale it occurred to me that, given how much concert tickets cost these days, purchasing said tickets and singing along to Mr. Cocker as he excoriates those who playact as the working class in not just one but two cities that are not my own may represent considerable irony and/or hypocrisy on my part. I chewed on that for a moment. Then decided I did not give a shit, so off to the concerts I shall pop come September.

Life is messy and we are imperfect people. Sometimes you just gotta accept that. And, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, always — always — go to the show.

Have a great day everyone.

Make a Comment