Cup of Coffee: May 22, 2024

Good morning!

We had a full slate of games yesterday which featured a lot of dudes hitting two homers, multiple shutouts, and multiple extra inning affairs. The Guardians lost a pitcher to the IL, the Cubs sent a pitcher to the pen, Barry Bonds is probably never making the Hall of Fame but he is being inducted into a hall of fame, Babe Ruth’s “called-shot” jersey is up for auction, and an obscure old baseball song has been unearthed.

In Other Stuff, Columbus has made the news again for a not-great reason, we look inside the terror plot of a radicalized teenager, OpenAI steals from a lot of people but this time they stole from the wrong person, and I have some Star Trek opinions.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Phillies 5, Rangers 2: It was a Ranger vs. Rangers matchup as Suárez took on Texas. Ranger was better than the Rangers, allowing one run over seven while striking out ten, notching his ninth win of the year against zero losses, and lowering his ERA to 1.36. Per the AP, Suárez is the first pitcher to start 9-0 with a sub-1.50 ERA through 10 starts since Juan Marichal did it in 1966.

In other news, this fan was seen at Citizens Bank Park before the game started:

The fact that he’s not in a Phillies uniform is a pretty big upset, actually.

Pirates 7, Giants 6: Pittsburgh trailed 6-2 heading into the bottom of the ninth, rallied for four runs to force extras and then Nick Gonzales knocked in the Manfred man as the first batter in the bottom of the tenth to give the Buccos the walkoff win. That rally consisted of Ji Hwan Bae singling in one, an error plating the second, Bryan Reynolds hitting into a fielder’s choice for the third, and then Oneil Cruz hitting a two-out double to tie it up. That double, by the way, had an exit velocity of 122 mph. Earlier in the game Cruz hit a single at 120.4 mph. It’s the first time in the Statcast Era that anyone has hit two balls over 120 mph in the same game.

Guardians 7, Mets 6: As I note below down in The Daily Briefing, Carlos Carrasco was supposed to start this one but was placed on the IL due to neck spasms. Cleveland called up Xzavion Curry from Columbus to fill in and he allowed two runs over four and a third, which is pretty solid for someone who had to make the boring drive up I-71 yesterday afternoon. José Ramírez hit a two-run homer and had an RBI double and David Fry hit pinch-hit two-run home run in the sixth. Jeff McNeil and Starling Marte each hit two-run homers and Mark Vientos had a solo shot for the Mets but it didn’t stop them from dropping their eighth game in their last ten.

Brewers 7, Marlins 5: Milwaukee was down one but rallied for three in the eighth via a two-run triple from Christian Yelich and a Willy Adames RBI double. It was actually Adames’ second double of the contest. Earlier William Contreras had two hits and he notched three RBI on the day.

Reds 2, Padres 0: Reds starter Andrew Abbott went seven scoreless, allowing just four hits, and only allowing one runner to get past first base. The pen put up two scoreless innings and all three Reds pitchers only needed 117 pitches combined. Both Cincinnati runs came in the second via a fly out/error combo and an Elly De La Cruz double.

Twins 10, Nationals 0: Joe Ryan (7 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 6K) and two Twins relievers combined on a three hit shutout while Patrick Corbin . . . did not do that. Byron Buxton hit two homers and drove in three, Jose Miranda added a two-run homer, and Willi Castro added a two-run shot. The win breaks Minnesota’s seven-game losing skid. The game stories I read credited the Twins having a players-only meeting before the game. If so, it’s the first successful and useful meeting I’ve heard of in a dog’s age. Probably coulda been an email.

Red Sox 5, Rays 2: It was tied at two in the top of the eighth when Boston put up two runs to take the lead and then they added some insurance in the ninth. One of the eighth inning runs came on a Wilyer Abreu single. The other came when Jarren Duran, who had homered earlier in the contest, stole home on a double steal. Rafael Devers, who was on the back end of that double steal, had his team record of homering in six consecutive games come to an end, but I’m guessing he’s fine with that in light of the win. The Rays have dropped three straight and are back down to .500.

Mariners 6, Yankees 3: Dylan Moore hit two of the Mariners' four home runs and drove in four. The other two dingers came from Ty France and Luke Raley. M’s starter Bryan Woo tossed six scoreless innings. Woo must like it in Yankee Stadium, as he got his first big league win there last June after pitching no-hit ball into the sixth. Gleyber Torres hit a three-run homer in a losing cause. This is the first time the Bombers have lost back-to-back games in nearly a month.

White Sox 5, Blue Jays 0: Garrett Crochet and three relievers combined for a two-hit shutout, with Michael Kopech striking out the side in the ninth to close it down. Crochet, a converted reliever, retired the first 13 batters he faced en route to winning his fourth straight start. Corey Julks and Danny Mendick each had two RBI as the Sox snap a four-game skid. The Jays have lost four of six, are five games under .500, and are 10.5 games back. I haven’t been paying too close attention to the heat of Jays manager John Schneider’s seat, but clubs which go for it in the offseason like Toronto has, and then turn in listless performances like this against bad teams, especially at home, often wake up to find their manager fired in the fairly near term.

Cubs 4, Atlanta 3: The Cubs had runners on the corners with one out in the 10th when Nico Hoerner hit a chopper to the right which plated Cody Bellinger for the walkoff win. It was Hoerner's first hit after missing six straight games with left hamstring tightness. Dansby Swanson returned to the lineup after an IL stint himself and had two hits. Mike Tauchman had two hits and two RBI. Atlanta has lost five of six and has fallen six games back of Philly.

Royals 10, Tigers 3: Kansas City continues their surge, winning their fifth straight. This one was never in doubt as they had an 8-0 lead by the end of the third on a night in which they rattled off 15 base hits. Bobby Witt Jr. homered twice and drove in six damn runs. One of his homers went 468 feet which, um, OK — and not to take anything away from Witt, who is one of the game’s best players — but we’ve seen a lot of long shots like that this year and it has me feeling like the ball is juiced again.

Astros 6, Angels 5: Another game decided in extras. Another game in which someone homered twice. That someone here was Kyle Tucker, who now has a league-leading 17 dingers on the season. Jeremy Peña singled in the Manfred Man — who happened to be Tucker — to hand this one to the home team. Jon Singleton hit a two-run homer and Yordan Alvarez added a solo home run for the Astros.

Athletics 5, Rockies 4: The A’s end their eight-game losing streak thanks to Seth Brown hitting a tying two-run homer in the seventh and Abraham Toro hitting a go-ahead solo shot in the eighth. Colorado's Ezequiel Tovar was yet another player who hit a pair of home runs last night. They were both solo shots. Per the gamer Oakland also had a team meeting before this game. This one might not have been able to be an email because I figure John Fisher is too cheap to spring for laptops, but maybe it coulda been a voice message.

Diamondbacks 7, Dodgers 3: Joc Pederson hit a three-run homer and Christian Walker went deep as well. Every player in the D-backs' starting lineup notched at least one hit, which is always fun. At one point in the game Shohei Ohtani stole third, tearing his pants sliding:

This is probably one of the many reasons why he endorses New Balance and not Nike.

Orioles vs. Cardinals — SUSPENDED: It was tied 1-1 after six when they could not go on any longer. They’ll resume the game early this afternoon.

The Daily Briefing

Carlos Carrasco scratched, sent to the IL 

Guardians starter Carlos Carrasco was supposed to take the ball in last night’s game but the club placed him on the injured list due to an acute neck spasm. In a corresponding move, the Guardians recalled righty Xzavion Curry from Triple-A Columbus. I hope to God that they called Curry up in time for him to stop at the Ashland exit off of I-71 and hit Grandpa’s Cheese Barn. If not, it’s a real a tragedy.

Carrasco joins Shane Bieber and Gavin Williams as Guardians starters on the injured list. Bieber is out for the season due to Tommy John surgery and Williams has not yet pitched this year. Carrasco has been no great shakes so far — just as he was no great shakes with the Mets last year — so his neck spasms may be a blessing in disguise. At the very least it’ll give the Guardians a chance to see if Curry can take over on a more regular basis. As it was, he allowed two in four and a third in last night’s win over the Mets.

Kyle Hendricks sent to the pen

Cubs manager Craig Counsell announced before last night’s game that starter Kyle Hendricks is no longer starter Kyle Hendricks. He’s reliever Kyle Hendricks after being moved to the bullpen.

It has been a rough year so far for Hendricks. He’s allowed 36 earned runs in 30.2 innings over seven starts, which breaks out to an ugly 10.57 ERA (40 ERA+). He's coughed up 10 home runs and opponents are hitting a Ted Williams-like .362/.411/.638 against him.

Counsell said that Hendricks, the last player left from the 2016 World Series champs, will have a chance to get back in the rotation assuming he gets back on track, but I’m not sure I’d bet a lot on that happening.

Barry Bonds to be inducted into the hall of fame!

It’s just the Pirates’ hall of fame, but it still counts, right?

I have no idea if Bonds and Leyland have buried the hatchet after their testy relationship back in the early 90s, but on some level the induction ceremony will be even better if they haven’t.

Wanna buy Babe Ruth’s “called shot” jersey?

The jersey worn by Babe Ruth when he allegedly called his shot before hitting a home run in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series is going up for auction in August. It last sold in 2005 for under a million dollars. This time, however, it’s expected to go for as much as $30 million. The difference: in 2005 it was only confirmed to have been from the 1932 season and was only suspected of being the one Ruth wore when he hit that homer in the Series. Since then it has been definitively authenticated to be the very same jersey:

"There were a couple of things that helped [this jersey] stand out from previous seasons," said Jim Montague, MeiGray's vice president of authentication. "How the Y was positioned on the front of the jersey in relationship to the buttons and the placket on the jersey.” . . . Montague said photography from Game 3 of the 1932 World Series aligned with nuances of Ruth's New York Yankees jersey. He pointed out a small notch in the "N" in "NEW YORK" -- "almost as if [it] wasn't completely straight." The top of the "W," he said, "had this curve as opposed to a flat edge; other images we saw [from other years] had a flat edge." The "E," he said, "had a sort of bend at the bottom."

If something as historically important as Babe Ruth’s called shot happens in baseball this year, historians and auctioneers will be able to authenticate the player’s jersey in much the same way. Except instead of comparing nuances of stitching, they’ll only have to determine whether the uniform is, to use a technical term, “right shit.” If it is a right shit jersey, collectibles experts will know that it came from 2024.

“One Strike Away”

Speaking of the Bambino, you may recall that at one point in time people considered him to have bestowed a curse on the Boston Red Sox. Or maybe the Red Sox cursed themselves. I’m not exactly sure how that was supposed to have gone because I’ll never willingly read something Dan Shaughnessy writes, but you know what I’m getting at. The Red Sox failed to win a championship for decades and decades and Red Sox fans considered themselves baseball history’s greatest victims as a result.

Four World Series wins later and that’s all ancient history, of course. But yesterday someone on Reddit posted about a song he had heard in a bar in the early 90s about the futility of the Boston Red Sox to that point. The song was called “One Strike Away,” and the poster liked it so much he paid $5 to buy a cassette of it from the band before leaving the bar. He and his friends would listen to it all the time, putting it on their mix tapes, singing it on road trips and what have you.

Recently the poster thought of the song for the first time in a long time and he tried to track it back down again. He couldn’t find any trace of it, however. To scratch the itch he performed and recorded the song again from memory and uploaded it to YouTube last month. It was a pretty modest, instrumental effort with the words run in subtitles on the video, but his rekindled interest in the song bore some unexpected fruit:

Based on some sleuthing, including uncovering a cached page of a 1991 magazine mentioning the song, we managed to track down the original band, who recently reached out personally to me (1) mentioning they themselves pretty much forgot about the song, and (2) sending me an .mp3 along with permission to share it / upload to YouTube!

And, yesterday, the poster did just that. So here is Wet Paint’s most famous song, complete, with some halfway decent, though occasionally anachronistic images overlaid:

While anything portraying Boston sports teams as hard luck losers plays pretty poorly these days — and while, as was the style at the time, the lyrics are a bit unfair to Bill Buckner — it’s not bad for a 30+ year old ditty from a Rhode Island bar band.

And now that we’ve heard it and enjoyed it, we can go back to being contemptuous of anyone who claims that the Red Sox are underdogs of any kind.

(h/t to Neate Sager for the heads up).

Other Stuff

Columbus is in the news again!

And, again, for a not great thing! 

Columbus leads the nation in one unusual metric: the amount of summer sign-ups to adultery website Ashley Madison.

The city had the highest per capita sign-ups to the online dating service for married people seeking affairs from June 20, 2023 to September 22, 2023, according to a Monday press release from the company.

*principal Skinner voice*

I was only in there to get directions on how to get away from there.

Inside a radicalized teenager’s terror plot

Sticking with central Ohio, my sometimes colleagues Andy Downing and Joel Oliphant have a new report at Matter News and Columbus Monthly magazine about how a 17 year old kid from a Columbus suburb got involved in a neo-Nazi conspiracy aimed at attacking the nation’s power grid and, he hoped, sparking a race war, the end result of which would be the United States’ transformation into an Aryan homeland.

Christopher Cook, who is now in his early 20s, was born to basically normal parents in Hilliard, Ohio which is a basically normal suburb on the west side of Columbus. As he grew up he struggled in school and was a social loner until he found his way into the underbelly of the Internet which radicalized him like it has radicalized so many other young men. What started as a means of connection spiraled into a hate-fueled plot involving co-conspirators who wore “suicide necklaces” which would supply them with fentanyl overdoses in the event they were apprehended.

As Downing and Oliphant write, it’s striking how many people like this have sprouted up in Ohio specifically and the Midwest in general. And how little people like this are noticed — by family, friends, and schools — until it’s far too late to redeem them.

OpenAI stole from the wrong person this time

Over the past year or so, multiple newspapers and authors have sued OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence concern of illegally using their copyrighted content. Specifically, the publications accuse OpenAI of feeding millions of their articles into their generative A.I. product, ChatGPT, which in turn alters and processes the material which it later spits it out in response to queries. OpenAI’s cult-of-personality-backed chairman Sam Altman and his counterparts at other AI companies claim this is some revolutionary new product but it’s obviously a product that would not and could not exist if they hadn’t used the underlying material without permission or compensation.

In extremely related news, OpenAI recently demoed what it’s calling its GPT-4o chatbot, which features a digital assistant-style audio interface named “Sky.” After the demo many people noticed that the voice sounded a lot like that of actor Scarlett Johansson, who played an AI voice in the 2013 movie “Her.” In response OpenAI issued a statement saying “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.” They nonetheless pulled the demo, implying that they didn’t even want to appear to be deliberately imitating Johansson’s voice, which they said in their statement they strongly oppose doing.

The only problems with that are (a) after the demo event Sam Altman tweeted a one-word post, saying “her,” which pretty obviously establishes that they had Sky intentionally impersonate Johansson; and (b) Johansson herself issued a statement on Monday showing that not only was it an imitation, it was a brazen imitation done only after she herself declined to have her voice used in such a way. Johansson’s statement:

“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and A.I. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ‘Sky’ sounded like me.

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word, ‘her’ — a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.

“Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there. As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, setting out what they had done and asking them to detail the exact process by which they created the ‘Sky’ voice. Consequently, OpenAI reluctantly agreed to take down the ‘Sky’ voice.

“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity. I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”

After that statement, OpenAI seemed to cast about a bit to find the right lie to cover itself. Such as:

Yes, because Scarlett Johansson’s voice — which may be the most distinctive actor’s voice this side of Patrick Stewart or Lauren Bacall — is so hard to peg and requires outside research to figure this kind of thing out.

Later Sam Altman himself released a statement saying, “[w]e cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson.” Which seems laughable on its face. If they had their woman to begin with, why reach out to Johansson at all? The way all casting works, be it for movies or voice work, is that you go for the person you want and, if you can’t get them, you go for the next-best thing. I mean no disrespect to whoever it was they got to do the Sky voice, but I’m pretty sure Scarlett Johansson is not her or anyone else’s second choice followup. Altman’s statement notwithstanding, the situation was almost certainly reversed.

The best part of all of this is that Altman’s “her” tweet is still sitting out there. I suspect that’s because OpenAI’s lawyer told him that to delete it would constitute spoliation of evidence.

RIP: “First Contact” 

From the Hollywood Reporter we learn of a new Star Trek movie, to be produced by “X-Men" producer Simon Kinberg

The project Kinberg would step into is already in very active development. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes of of the Star Wars series “Andor,” is on board to direct the new feature, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing the script. The project is said to be set decades before the events of the 2009 movie that was directed J.J. Abrams, likely around modern times. It is said to involve the creation of the Starfleet and humankind’s first contact with alien life.

“The Starfleet.” That may be worse than “The MLB,” but I suppose we’ll let it slide.

Anyway, I get that the Star Trek franchise has constructed alternate universes and timelines — the Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto movies are in the so-called “Kelvin” universe, parallel to the stuff from “The Original Series,” “Next Generation,” and so on — but we already have a pretty damn good story about humankind’s first contact with alien life. It’s called “Star Trek: First Contact,” and it was the best of the “Next Generation” movies.

I appreciate that 1996 may as well have been a million years ago. I further appreciate that nothing is sacred and that, at this point in history, it’s my fault, not Hollywood’s, if I presume that anything is. But when you have an entire galaxy filled with thousands of planets and alien races to play with, why revisit territory that was handled pretty damned deftly already? I would hope that the director of “Andor” — one of the few Star Wars properties that is not obsessed with Skywalkers and Jedi and, as a result, one of the best things to exist in the Star Wars universe — would appreciate that.

All that being said, I’ll grant that “First Contact” didn’t deal with the actual interaction between humans and aliens beyond the initial hello — it was assumed that Star Trek fans would know what came next — so there could be something to play with here if the people behind this movie wish to do so. You could cut from Zefram Cochrane’s introduction to the Vulcans — maybe even using the original footage with James Cromwell, maybe recasting, as Cromwell wasn’t even the original Cochrane — and then make the movie about what happened next. It could work! I have a feeling, though, that it’ll be irresistible to retell, or alter, what led up to it too, effectively erasing the “First Contact” storyline.

Oh well. It’ll be a couple of years before any movie spins out of this news, if indeed one does, as the Star Trek franchise is notorious for scuttled and unrealized projects. Which means I’ll have a lot of time to tell people to get off my lawn between now and then.

Have a great day everyone.

Make a Comment