Cup of Coffee: March 22, 2024

Good morning!

So, as you probably saw, I wrote a 2,700-word breakdown of the burgeoning Shohei Ohtani scandal in a Cup of Coffee Extra yesterday afternoon. That took a lot of time and effort, so today we’re just gonna do a digest of sorts if that’s all the same to you. If it’s not all the same to you, well, I owe ya one? I dunno.

But let’s at least talk about a few things today, shall we?

And That Happened 

Padres 15, Dodgers 11: I sure hope Shohei Ohtani took the over on this one.

I kid! I kid!

This was all very entertaining in certain respects — I like watching videos of messy car wrecks as much as the next guy — but both Wednesday’s and yesterday's games underscored just how much March 21 is still spring training whether the games count or not.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto's Major League debut was more than a letdown, that’s for sure. He lasted just one inning, giving up five runs on four hits and had no command whatsoever — spring training, folks! — throwing only 23 strikes on his 43 pitches. Jake Cronenworth, one day after demonstrating the newest glove technology from Fanatics — tied a career high with four hits and had four RBI. Mookie Betts had four hits and drove in six in a losing cause. The Dodgers got as close as 12-11 late, but Manny Machado hit a three-run homer in the ninth to put it in the bag.

Ohtani did not speak with reporters after the game. I guess his interpreter was busy with other things.

And now we take a week off until we get back to baseball which counts.

 The Daily Briefing

Supplemental Ohtani info

The only new information since my post yesterday afternoon came in this ESPN story in which an anonymous source in Ohtani’s camp told ESPN that they have asked authorities to investigate a "massive theft" of money from Ohtani. But “The source declined to say which agency had been contacted.”

I said in yesterday’s extra that if Ohtani’s people initiated and cooperated with a probe into the alleged theft by Ippei Mizuhara and the investigation had any legs, it would make the story that he effected fraudulent bank transfers in Ohtani’s name — and thus that Ohtani did nothing wrong — more likely. But yet another unattributed and unsupported assertion that they have done so doesn’t exactly clear anything up.

I’m not saying that to be a dick — I’m totally open to the “Ohtani was defrauded” story being the true one — but given how self-serving it is for Ohtani’s people to put this out there, there needs to be some corroboration of it before I’m willing to believe that it’s anything other than spin in the early going of a profoundly fluid situation.

Mets sign J.D. Martinez

The New York Mets have signed free agent slugger J.D. Martinez to a one-year, $12 million contract.

Martinez has a nice age-35 season with the Dodgers last year, hitting .271/.321/.572 (134 OPS+) with 33 homers in 113 games en route to his sixth All-Star Game. It was a year in which there wasn’t much on which to base a belief that he is in decline — his StatCast-y numbers suggest he was still making solid contact and wasn’t just falling into some aging player luck — yet for some reason he lasted until the last week of spring training.

Martinez will look pretty good slotting into the Mets’ previously uncertain DH slot, helping bolster the middle of what is shaping up to be a pretty good Mets lineup.

Rangers sign Michael Lorenzen

Free agent pitcher Michael Lorenzen has agreed to a one year deal with the Texas Rangers. The contract pays him $4.5 million guaranteed but it can max out at $7 million if incentives are reached.

Lorenzen had a whiplash kind of year in 2023. He pitched pretty well for a not very good Tigers team, making the All-Star team because someone from Detroit had to. He was then dealt to the Phillies at the trade deadline and pitched a no-hitter in his home debut. But then after that he totally face-planted, putting up a 5.51 ERA in 11 appearances, eventually being yanked from the rotation due to general ineffectiveness, and left off the postseason roster. He probably just got his gravity back a couple of weeks ago, frankly.

But Lorenzen will have a chance with the Rangers. Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle are all gonna miss a lot of time this season and may not factor into the rotation conversation at all. At the moment their starting five is Nate Eovaldi, Jon Gray, Andrew Heaney, Dane Dunning, and Cody Bradford. There’s no reason to believe that Lorenzen can’t figure into the back of that group.

A day shy of a pension

Here’s an interesting story about a speedster outfielder named Gary Cooper who got 42 days of MLB service time in 1980 with Atlanta. That was it. He had his cup of coffee and then it was back to the minors and then out of the game. It happens to guys every year.

The thing about Cooper: he needed 43 days of service time to qualify for the lowest-tier MLB pension under the Collective Bargaining Agreement in place at the time. While Cooper has mostly just gotten on with his life as best he could, there are many trying to get the MLBPA to give him that extra day and get him that pension, as modest as it would be.

I’m not advocating one way or another or anything — sometimes rules have to be rules or else you do risk sort of setting the system aside — but it was a pretty interesting read about someone who has fallen through the cracks all the same.

Other Stuff

What?

I realize that this is engagement-bait, but this made the rounds yesterday and I about dropped my teeth:

“Reservoir Dogs” features multiple murders, a police siege and a song-and-dance number in which a cop’s ear gets cut off just before he is (almost) set on fire. “Taxi Driver” ends in a bloody rescue mission. “Forest Gump” features a pitched jungle battle, a boat tossed about in a storm at sea, a football game, a cross-country jogging vision quest, and a whacked-out 1970s drug montage set to “Freebird.” I have never seen “Kids”

But sure, nothing happens.

Nothing is real

A New York Times story talking about the Princess Catherine-is-dead rumor and other such out-there speculation about celebrities and political figures:

For many of the people pushing the falsehoods, it is harmless fun: casual gumshoeing that lasts only a few clicks, a bonanza for meme generators. Others, however, spend “countless hours” on the pursuit, following other skeptics down rabbit holes and demanding that celebrities provide proof of life.

Whatever the motivation, what lingers is an urge to question reality, misinformation experts say. Lately, despite extensive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the same sense of suspicion has contaminated conversations about elections, race, health care and climate.

There’s nothing factually wrong in this story, but I take some issue with the way in which it, like almost all stories about Internet trends, talks about it as if what’s going on is something new. As if we haven’t always had weirdos with weird theories and outlandish claims. We see them more because of the way the Internet works, but believe me, there were nutjobs back in 1894 ranting about President Cleveland being replaced my moon men and lunatics who believed that Frankie Valli and two of the Four Seasons were animatronic in 1964.

To that end, the article makes mention of the “Paul is Dead” stuff from the Beatles years, but then just sort of waves it away, implying it was different somehow. Not really. Obsessives and nuts pushed the same kind of stuff back then as now. And a bunch of us with too much time on our hands talk a lot about it and make jokes about it because it’s all rather harmless. It’s nothing new.

Sorry about the quickie newsletter today. Back at it on Monday.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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