Cup of Coffee: March 27, 2024

Good morning!

Once again, I wanted to remind you of our Opening Day sale. All new Premium Subscriptions are 20% off for a limited time:

Take 20% off on a Premium, babies!

The sale price will last you for a year on either a monthly or an annual sub. Thanks for considering it, folks.

Today the last major free agent domino fell, there are memories and desire stirring dull roots with spring rain, ESPN is farting around with baseball rights, three former Rays minor leaguers are in deep, deep legal trouble, there are various bits of news from Japan that have noting to do with Shohei Ohtani, a Chávez Ravine reparations bill has been introduced, and there’s a low-stakes conspiracy theory floating around that amuses me.

In Other Stuff, we talk about the NFL Spheres of Influence, the brutal autocracy that is Russia, and how the ugliness of the political right seemingly knows no bounds. And since all of that is bleaker than fuck, I end things with a palate cleanser.

 The Daily Briefing

Jordan Montgomery signs with the Diamondbacks

It’s about time: Jordan Montgomery has finally signed. He’s in agreement with the Arizona Diamondbacks on a one-year $25 million deal. There is a player vesting option for 2025.

Montgomery went 10-11 in 32 starts last season with a 3.20 ERA (138 OPS+) in 188.2 innings for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers. He was key, of course, in helping the Rangers win the World Series.

There are so many teams who would be better for having signed Montgomery before now. The Dbacks got him, however, and I bet they’re gonna be happy with the signing.

Farewell Panda

Pablo Sandoval signed with the Giants this spring. He 37 and he hasn’t played in the bigs for the past two years, so it was pretty clear that this was something of a farewell tour for the 2012 World Series hero.

Last night was the Giants’ last spring training game and with it was Sandoval’s final plate appearance in a Giants uniform. He made the most of it:

The Giants have a lot of issues as an organization, but between last year’s spring training goodbye for Sergio Romo and this spring’s hat tip to Sandoval, they do farewells pretty damn well.

The season must be about to start

I know it must be getting close to Opening Day because, as of yesterday, ESPN dot com has moved the “MLB” tab from the pulldown menu on the far right above the football player’s helmet into the main banner there.

Yes, that represents pretty much the high point of ESPN’s efforts to promote baseball in this or any other year, but give them their kudos for at least doing something.

ESPN could bail out of its MLB broadcast deal after this season 

Sticking with ESPN and its vacillating interest in baseball . . .

Major League Baseball’s current broadcast rights deal with ESPN runs though 2028. There’s an opt-out following the 2025 season. John Ourand of the Puck newsletter, however, reports that ESPN is making noises about opting out following the 2024 campaign. Whether that’s because past reports of a 2025 opt-out were wrong or if there’s another means for them to opt-out after this season is unclear.

Ourand says that ESPN does not want to actually get out of the baseball business. Rather, he says, this is about them leveraging MLB in an effort to get a better deal. Or a different deal. The “better” could simply mean a discount on the over half a billion dollars it paid to broadcast baseball via this deal. Or it could be about getting different and/or better game inventory.

The “different deal” angle might involve ESPN getting deeper into the local media rights world in which it has dipped its toes recently. With Diamond Sports imploding and Major League Baseball assuming some teams’ local rights and possibly assuming more in the next year or two, ESPN could see an opportunity.

Regardless of what it’s doing, broadcast rights, particularly in baseball, are not worth quite what they were until very recently, and everyone is trying to find their way through this new normal, if that’s what it is anyway. ESPN seems poised to play some hardball to keep, um, hardball.

Rays minor leaguers charged with insider trading

This story, which almost has an element of MadLibs to it, is not one that I would’ve predicted, I tell you what. From the DOJ:

An indictment was unsealed today charging current and former minor league baseball players Jordan Qsar, Grant Witherspoon and Austin Bernard with insider trading in Del Taco, Inc. stocks after they received advanced notice of the acquisition of Del Taco by Jack in the Box, Inc. on December 6, 2021.

According to the indictment, Qsar learned from a close friend who worked at Jack in the Box that the company was acquiring Del Taco. The friend was a senior associate in Jack in the Box’s strategic finance department who personally worked on the acquisition project. The disclosure was a violation of duties to Jack in the Box and its shareholders.

The indictment states that Qsar fraudulently shared the inside information with Witherspoon and Bernard, who were connected to Qsar through collegiate and minor league baseball teams at Pepperdine University and the Tampa Bay Rays.

The three of them all purchased Del Taco stocks and tipped others to buy the stock. After Jack in the Box and Del Taco went public with the acquisition, Del Taco stocks jumped in price from $7.53 to $12.51 per share, Qsar, Witherspoon, and Bernard sold all their stocks, and earned illegal profits of $56,000, $41,800, and $64,600, respectively.

The players:

• Qsar, 28, was a 25th round pick out of Pepperdine in 2018. He was in the Phillies organization last season, playing at Triple-A and based on his Baseball-Reference page, most recently played in the Mexican winter league. He’s an outfielder;
• Witherspoon, 27, was a fourth round pick out of Tulane in 2018 who played in Double-A an Triple-A for the Tigers last year and was also most recently in the Mexican League. He’s also an outfielder;
• Bernard, 28, was a 10th round selection of the Rockies out of Pepperdine in 2017. A catcher, he never advanced above the low minors and spent the past two seasons playing indy ball.

They all face serious time in prison over this on charges of Conspiracy (Max Penalty: Five years in prison; $250,000 fine); Securities Fraud (Maximum Penalty: Twenty years in prison; $5 million fine), and Wire Fraud and Aiding and Abetting Wire Fraud (Maximum Penalty: Twenty years in prison; $250,000 fine).

They obviously won’t do that time if they, um, play ball, but these young men are in serious trouble.

Rougned Odor released by his Japanese team

According to Hochi Sports, Rougned Odor has walked out on the Yomiuri Giants after being told he'd start the season in the minors. They wanted him to start the season in the minors because he hit only .176 with a .376 OPS in spring training. So, yeah, sending him down made sense, even if Odor didn’t want any part of it.

It’s amazing how much mileage Odor has gotten out of his career based on two decent seasons and one well-photographed right cross nearly a decade ago. But yeah, he’s done man.

MLB eliminates club-to-club relationships between U.S. and Japanese, Korean teams

For some time, Major League Baseball clubs have had something akin to exchange relationships with NPB clubs in Japan and KBO clubs in Korea. The Diamondbacks, for example, at one point worked with the Yokohama Baystars, engaging in personnel exchanges, data sharing and the like. The Nippon Ham Fighters and Texas Rangers had a similar setup. There were many such relationships.

A report from Japan’s Nikkan Sports, however, says that MLB has ordered its clubs to terminate such relationships in order to avoid pre-negotiation tampering between Asian players and MLB teams when the former seek to come to the states. There were, for example, many complaints about how Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s negotiation played out with the Dodgers. Another report had A.J. Preller of the Padres mentioning the name of Roki Sasaki, who plays for the Chiba Lotte Marines and is expected to come to the United States at some point in the future. Someone, apparently, believes that funny business is going on and the league is now seeking to put a stop to it.

So, as of now, MLB employees will be prohibited from “direct or indirect contact” with players and teams from foreign leagues. Which, while aimed at negotiations and/or tampering, could extend further. Like, if there’s a Japanese player who wants to spend his offseason training in Los Angeles with Shohei Ohtani, he won’t be able to chat with Dodgers trainers. Things like that.

I get it. But I don’t know if it’s dealing with an actual problem as opposed to a perceived one.

Bill seeking Chávez Ravine reparations introduced in California

In the first half of the 20th century, the place where Dodger Stadium sits, Chávez Ravine, was a semi-rural Mexican-American neighborhood. Actually, it was three distinct neighborhoods: Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. These were poor communities, made up of people who had faced housing discrimination in other parts of the city. Despite this, and despite various environmental concerns born of the oil industry and a polluting brick factory, the Chávez Ravine neighborhoods were vibrant and cohesive.

As the city grew, however, land that was once an afterthought became highly sought-after by developers and city leaders. In the early 1950s the city of Los Angeles forcefully evicted some 300 families of Chávez Ravine, with around 1,800 families vacating the area in all. The stated reason: to make way for a low-income public housing project. In theory the evicted residents were to be given first pick of the new apartments, but the apartments were never built thanks to pushback from those in the city who did not want to see low-income housing built in that part of Los Angeles. Well, any part of Los Angeles, but certainly not the parts where rich white folks could see it.

Chávez Ravine sat vacant for a few years before the Dodgers decided to move west. The city gave Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley the Chávez Ravine land in exchange for land around Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field, allowing O’Malley to build his ballpark. A ballpark which serves millions a year, yes, but which is now a playground for a lot of rich white people and a vehicle for making billionaires even richer than they were. Some excellent books and even a Ry Cooder concept album have been written about the displacement of the Mexican families from Chávez Ravine. You should check both of those, as well as the larger history, out.

Last week a bill was introduced in the California Legislature seeking reparations for the families of people who were displaced from their homes in that shady-ass land grab. If passed the bill, known as the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act, would call on the city of Los Angeles to form a nine-member task force to provide compensation to the displaced or their descendants. The measure proposes different forms of compensation, including an offer of city-owned land or fair-market-value compensation.

Like most reparations efforts it won’t make true amends for the damage that was done. But it will do something, which is more than anyone has bothered to do in the 70 years before now.

Put on your tinfoil hats, folks

I don’t have any dogs in this hunt other than a mild interest in wanting to see A’s owner John Fisher and/or team president Dave Kaval look ridiculous, but I pass this from Oakland A’s fan account Sell The Team along in the name of science or journalism or something. The executive summary:

• There’s a social media account under the name of “John Fredericks” which has posted some pro-Oakland/Las Vegas A’s content recently. Its most recent post is about a possibility of the A’s playing in Salt Lake City, Utah for the next three seasons while the stadium in Las Vegas is being built;
• That’s useful timing for the A’s who are in the midst of a three or possibly four-way negotiation regarding where those interim games will be played. Sacramento is making a push, for example, and the A’s have expressed some interest in both staying in Oakland during that period or playing in the Las Vegas Triple-A park;
• In light of the significance and, one presumes, insider-ish nature of “John Fredericks’” Salt Lake City post, an A’s fan account called Oaklandfans did some digging into this “John Fredericks” to see if they were somehow connected to the situation. They found something interesting;
• Based on two remarkably similar posts, Oaklandfans believes that “John Fredericks” is the same person posting on Facebook under the name “John Fields.” Both shared similar articles and the same sorts of pro-A’s/anti-Oakland arguments were made on both accounts. What’s more, both were making sort of in-the-weeds, esoteric and insidery kinds of arguments, not the sorts of things your typical fanboys or haters might toss around. Things about some litigation the A’s had with a company at Howard Terminal called Schnitzer Steel, which John Fisher and Dave Kaval have both argued represented the final straw in their decision to abandon Oakland and go to Vegas;
• Oaklandfans dug deeper and determined that the “John Fields” account was a fake. It was set up to look like a real person from the Las Vegas area but isn’t real. What’s more, its profile photo has only one like and that one like is from a clearly fake account that is only friends with Fields. A standard, lazy “make a fake account look real” tactic. The Fields account spends virtually all of its time in Las Vegas area Facebook groups trashing Oakland and its fans, praising John Fisher and Dave Kaval, and otherwise being the biggest booster of the A’s-to-Vegas scheme you can imagine;
• The John Fields account has existed since 2019. Which would be weird for a fake pro-move account given that the A’s did not announce the move until 2023. Except there are many who, not without good reason, believe that Fisher and Kaval had been plotting the move to Vegas for years and were negotiating with Oakland in bad faith. One reason: Dave Kaval famously posting a video of himself at a Las Vegas Golden Knights game during his “informational” visit to the city in 2021, over two years before they allegedly made the decision to go to Vegas.

The clear implication from the Sell The Team thread is that the John Fields and John Fredericks accounts are burners, operated by A’s brass or someone close to them to try to fake support and enthusiasm for the team’s move and, in the case of Fredericks at least, put information out there regarding the interim city situation that might favor the A’s.

I have no idea if that’s true. But I do know (a) “John Fredericks” has limited replies to his posts, much in the same way Dave Kaval does whenever he posts anymore; and (b) Fisher and Kaval have been profoundly weird, petty, and at times ridiculous throughout this whole process so it would not shock me a bit to learn that they’re setting up sock puppet accounts which they believe, rather foolishly, to further their ends.

At this point I’ll step away from that muck, watching from afar to see if it goes anywhere.

Other Stuff

Great Moments in Spheres of Influence

One of the more disastrous things to happen in the history of humanity was the process by which large colonial powers carved up the world into spheres of influence and control. In addition to the basic and obvious imperialist and at times genocidal horrors it visited upon everyone who was not a colonial power — and in addition to the brazen theft and exploitation of resources from native peoples and their lands — it led to a situation in which those colonial powers’ interests came into a conflict which eventually led to multiple regional wars and two world wars which led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people.

All of which makes me wonder if the NFL could’ve cast its global marketing program a bit differently than this, aesthetically speaking, because it definitely gives off a . . . vibe:

My son pointed this all out to me in a text early yesterday morning, noting that The Los Angeles Rams having power on three separate continents and the Steelers possessing interests in both Ireland and Northern Ireland seems unfair and possibly risky. Which is simultaneously hilarious to me while standing as evidence that, so far at least, he’s getting a good humanities education down at Ohio University.

For my part, I am happy to see the Vikings back in control in England for the first time in 978 years. Based on how the Norman-French have run it since then — and folks, the people in charge there are still Norman-French for all practical purposes — I really feel like the Vikings have deserved a second chance.

All of that aside, this is just gauche. At least the British, French, Dutch, Belgians, Germans and their pals carved up the world for their domination in richly appointed palaces and drawing rooms over the finest food and drink and amidst the grandest luxuries ever seen. The NFL guys, in contrast, did it in a hotel conference facility in Orlando the other day. Say what you want about the tenets of historical European imperialism, but at least it had superficial style.

Russia is proud of itself for torturing people

Russian officials have arrested four men in connection with the terrorist attack that killed over a hundred people in Moscow last weekend. The suspects appeared in court on Sunday and it was quite obvious that they had been tortured. As the New York Times put it, all of them were bandaged and battered. One had a partially severed ear. Another came in seated in a wheelchair, “his left eye bulging, his hospital gown open and a catheter on his lap.”

Not that anyone need infer that they were tortured, as video of them actually being tortured by Russian interrogators widely circulated online, including video of the man having part of his ear cut off and shoved in his mouth. Per the Times, experts are certain that Russia eagerly circulated the footage itself to serve as a warning to the public.

While it goes without saying that the attack in Moscow was horrible and that the perpetrators of that attack should be punished, I would hope that it goes without saying that a society which tortures detained criminal suspects — let alone one that does so openly and unashamedly — is seriously corrupt and profoundly evil. The Times makes a broader argument about how countries at war become inured to violence and inevitably direct that violence inward at enemies either real or imagined. That’s true, but I don’t think this requires that level of analysis.

Russia is an authoritarian state, full stop. Authoritarian states — in addition to waging wars of conquest, as Russia has also been doing for the past couple of years in Ukraine — act with brutality. It’s part of the deal. Violence is the inevitable product of authoritarianism because the stoking of violence helps quash dissent and undermines political norms and civic trust, and that in turn erodes democratic stability. As democratic stability erodes, the methods of the autocrat gain greater salience compared to things like pluralism, negotiation and compromise, all of which require trust, thereby further empowering the autocrat. It’s a vicious cycle that is as old as civilization itself.

While Russia is not exactly thought of highly by many, I’m amazed that it, and more specifically its autocrat, Vladimir Putin, is not universally loathed. To the contrary, our former and potential future president openly admires Putin and Russia and has gone out of his way to enable him and cater to him. My senator, J.D. Vance, is just as eager to do Russia’s bidding. There is an entire faction of the Republican party which supports Putin and that faction is ascendent in the party.

I cannot for the life of me accept an America that supports Putin and what he is doing. And if America bends further in that direction, it cannot support it either. And I won’t.

The ugliness on the right knows no bounds 

There was a time in this country when a horrible disaster in which people actually died would cause everyone to react with some combination of horror, sympathy, and compassion. Yeah, there have always been heartless jackasses who think bad news is somehow good news or at the very least fun, but social conventions caused them to mostly keep that to themselves.

That time ended a few years ago when the increasing radicalization of the political right in this country caused them to treat every news item as an excuse to push their ideological agenda. Natural disasters being portrayed as God’s Revenge on the Sinful was an older, almost quaint version of that, pushed by the Pat Robertsons of the world. Tragic crimes in large cities — even rare and freakish ones — became the fault of Democratic leaders and their policies. Any notable person who dies even remotely young these days — and some people who die legitimately old — are held up by total freaks on the right as victims of COVID vaccines. It’s just awful business.

Yesterday the horrible accident which caused the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore — a collapse which led to multiple deaths — led to some of the ugliest and most cynical examples of political opportunism I can recall. Stuff like this:

If you’ve even casually observed what’s going on in right wing discourse these days you know what this person is saying. “DEI” is basically the n-word. Like “woke” was before railing against “wokeness” began polling poorly. They’ll deploy “DEI” in that manner until enough people realize what they’re doing and then they’ll find another euphemism.

While that sort of thing is the most egregious, it’s certainly not the only example of this sort of sick opportunism, much of which sprung up while rescuers were still on the scene in the Harbor. A Fox News anchor, somehow, connected a cargo ship into a bridge with America’s “wide-open border.” Some other right wing media personalities claimed that this tragedy was the fault of Biden’s Infrastructure Act. And all of that is just the low-hanging fruit. I cannot imagine what horrors lurk if you make an even half-hearted attempt to look for them.

Something is broken in the mind of the right wing body politic. It’s been broken for some time and I don’t see how it can ever be fixed.

This has all been bleak today, eh? In that case let’s end things with something that only the darkest of the dark heats will be unable to resist:

Have a great day everyone. We’ll come back a bit brighter tomorrow.

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