Cup of Coffee: May 24, 2024

Good morning!

We roll into Friday with talk about robot umps, the World Baseball Classic, that scouts age discrimination case, the best pizza in the country, the Supreme Court’s love of racial gerrymandering, and how history never ends.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Yankees 5, Mariners 0: Luis Gil keeps rolling, tossing six and a third innings of one-hit shutout ball while striking out eight. Gil has won five straight starts and six consecutive decisions. He has allowed only two runs over his last 30.2 innings and struck out 14 in his last outing. Just amazing stuff from this kid. Otherwise, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge homered and Juan Soto singled in a run. The other two came on sac flies. The Yanks and M’s split the four-game set.

Giants 7, Pirates 6: It was Paul Skenes day and, while he did not dominate like he did last week, he was pretty darn good again, allowing just one run on six hits over six. The same could not be said for the Pirates bullpen, which coughed up six runs over the final three innings to blow a 5-1 lead. Matt Chapman had the biggest blow, smacking a three-run homer off of reliever Hunter Stratton in the eighth. Brett Wisely hit the go-ahead single off Aroldis Chapman later that inning. A home run from Heliot Ramos in the seventh and a Wilmer Flores RBI single helped the comeback cause.

Phillies 5, Rangers 2: The sweep. Zack Wheeler allowed two over seven, J.T. Realmuto and Nick Castellanos homered, and Cristian Pache hit a two-run triple. Philly has won six straight, 29 of its last 35, and is 37-14 on the season. The defending World Series champion Rangers, meanwhile, have lost ten of their last 12 games.

Padres 6, Reds 4: Fernando Tatis Jr. doubled home Luis Campusano in the tenth after which Jake Cronenworth hit a sac fly. The Padres take two of three.

Atlanta 3, Cubs 0: A.J. Smith-Shawver was sharp in his season debut, carrying a shutout into the fifth inning. He didn’t qualify for the win because Brian Snitker yanked him at 87 pitches as the Cubs lineup was about to turn over, but the pen came in and completed the final four and two-thirds. Jarred Kelenic homered in the fifth, Ozzie Albies singled in a run in the eighth, and a sac fly closed out the scoring.

Athletics 10, Rockies 9: Some great late-inning pitching in this one:

Oakland’s Tyler Soderstrom drew a bases-loaded walk to give the A’s the walkoff walk win in a game in which they overcame multiple four-run deficits.

Blue Jays 9, Tigers 1: Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and Daulton Varsho all went deep with Varsho’s being a tie-breaking homer in the seventh. Kevin Gausman allowed one run on three hits and struck out ten in six innings of work. Seven innings of this game were played with neither team having access to replay review due to a technical glitch. No one died. Detroit has lost five straight.

Orioles 8, White Sox 6: Jore Mateo hit a three run homer, Anthony Santander homered as well, and Adley Rutschman drove in three via a one-run and a two-run single. Chicago rallied late but it was too little for such an hour.

Though, it should be noted, a sketchy as hell game-ending interference call on Andrew Vaughn, with the potential winning run at the plate, helped hasted the close of proceedings. Vaughn is the runner on second here, and they say he, somehow, interfered with Gunnar Henderson at short in tracking down this pop fly, turning it into a double play:

I have no idea what the umps were smoking there, but I hope they enjoyed getting back to their hotel rooms a few minutes early.

The O’s end a brief three-game losing streak. Chicago has lost six of seven.

The Daily Briefing

Robot umps unlikely for 2025

Yesterday Rob Manfred spoke to the press about robot home plate umpires, saying that the system is unlikely to be in place at the big league level for 2025:

"We still have some technical issues. We haven't made as much progress in the minor leagues this year as we sort of hoped at this point. I think it's becoming more and more likely that this will not be a go for '25."

MLB has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in the minors since 2019. In some cases the robot is being used alone and in others there has been a human ump making the calls with a challenge system in place if the batter or the pitcher thinks the call was wrong. Manfred said yesterday that “there's a growing consensus in large part based on what we're hearing from players that the challenge form should be the form of ABS, if and when we bring it to the big leagues, at least as a starting point."

While I generally dislike the challenge system for instant replay — I’ve long thought we should just have a fifth ump in the booth quickly overruling clearly missed calls on his or her own initiative — I’m actually OK with the challenge system with a robot ball-and-strike ump. Theoretically it seems like it might be cumbersome or prone to gamesmanship or whatever, but I got the chance to watch it in person at some Columbus Clippers games last year and it was pretty seamless and unobtrusive. It certainly cut out a lot of the drama. Gone were the head shakes, the heavy sighs and, in all likelihood, arguments over balls and strikes. It moves quickly and you forget it’s there after a while.

Granted, that was a data set of only two or three games, so maybe the tech isn’t quite right yet, thus necessitating a delay in big league-level implementation. Once they are confident in it, however, I think more people will like it than not.

What stage of denial is this?

Steve Hill, the chairman of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, has been the most out-front person in the whole A’s stadium in Las Vegas thing. Yesterday he talked to the press and responded to critics who are skeptical that a stadium is going to be build for the A’s to play there in 2028, saying that the timelines will be met. His quote may as well be a cry for help:

"They're coming and they've said they can finance this stadium. They are going to play baseball here in 2028. I frankly think it's just fun [for critics] to create some drama around it and that's happening. That keeps all of our lives a little more interesting, but it doesn't change the facts on the ground, which is they've said what they're going to do and they're just doing it."

Attempts to reach A's officials for comment were unsuccessful.

It’s abundantly clear that John Fisher has given no one any concrete plans or assurances of any substance that he’s going to supply the $1.2 billion for the stadium project that everyone is assuming he’s going to supply. Hill is practically talking himself into it here.

I am increasingly of the belief that the A’s Vegas stadium is vaporware and I’ll believe that until the moment I see steel beams rising out of the lot on Las Vegas Boulevard.

2026 World Baseball Classic sites set

It’s still a long ways off, but yesterday Major League Baseball announced the venues for the 2026 World Baseball Classic. The sites:

• Marlins Park in Miami
• Minute Maid Park in Houston;
• The Tokyo Dome; and
• Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

As it did in 2023, Marlins Park will host all three rounds of the tournament, including the championship game. The Tokyo Dome and Hiran Bithorn Stadium have been used in previous WBCs, but Minute Maid Park in Houston is a first-timer.

Scouts’ age discrimination case moved out of Colorado 

Earlier this month I wrote about an ongoing lawsuit in which a bunch of former MLB scouts have sued the league for age discrimination. The reason I brought it up was that the case was pending in Colorado for some reason, and MLB was objecting to that in a chance of venue motion. Well, it’s not pending in Colorado anymore. A federal judge in Colorado ruled in favor of the league and moved the case to a New York federal District Court, citing convenience and the “interests of justice.”

By way of background, the lawsuit, which was filed last summer, contends that Older Scouts — that’s the actual descriptive name of the class as stated in the complaint — have been blacklisted for re-employment by MLB, with the league using analytics as an “ongoing pretext for coordinated and systematic discrimination based on age.” The suit also states that MLB used the pandemic as an “opportunity to terminate an entire class of older employees more susceptible, on the basis of age, to the COVID-19 virus.”

The suit alleges that MLB and the clubs violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and age discrimination laws in 12 separate states. The plaintiffs range in age from 55 to 71, and most worked as a scout for at least 30 years.

I presume that clips from the movie “Moneyball” will be exhibits at trial.

Other Stuff

The best pizza in the country

Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro read a statement into the Congressional Record earlier this week declaring that New Haven, Connecticut has “the best pizza in the country.”

The New York Times tried to stir up some crap over this by getting comments from New York pizzerias. But while they almost all understandably vouched for New York pizza, they were mostly diplomatic. One — Frank Tuttolomondo, who owns the well-regarded Mama’s Too in Manhattan — even said this, which is every bit as true as it is shocking to hear said out loud by a New York pizza guy:

“Pizza in general, there’s nostalgia involved, there’s memories. You could go to one place and it could be the best place in the world. If you had your first slice of pizza at Pizza Hut it could resonate with you in a certain way.”

I totally buy that. I mean, I love good, quality pizza and I almost always seek it out when I’m craving a slice, but I grew up in Flint, Michigan and everyone ate Little Caesars when I was a kid. I know, objectively, that it’s garbage pizza, because I actually worked at a Little Caesars for a couple of weeks when I was 16 and I saw what went into it all, but I still like it precisely because I ate a lot of it after Little League games and stuff. If you made me get a national chain pizza tonight I’d pick it over the others precisely because of the nostalgia tied up in it. Well, that and because Papa John’s makes me physically sick for reasons I never understood.

While I’ve had a lot of wonderful New York pizza — there’s even a Paulie Gee’s here in Columbus for reasons I’ve never quite understood — I’ve never had New Haven pizza. Which is a shame because as I may have mentioned here before, my ninth great-grandfather, William Ives, was one of the founders of New Haven. They didn’t have pizza in 1638, but I feel like if my lot had stayed in town rather than bugged out across the country before then, they would’ve gotten first crack at it when it finally showed up a hundred years ago. At least assuming they didn’t try to redline Italian immigrants out of the city which, now that I think about it, those lily-white Puritan bastards probably would’ve. Forget I mentioned it.

I can’t imagine what might take me to New Haven, Connecticut any time soon, but if I do get there I’ll be sure to get some pizza.

Supreme Court makes it impossible to stop racial gerrymandering

The Supreme Court issued a decision yesterday which gives state legislatures the green light to do essentially whatever they want to dilute the voting power of Black voters by shifting them into districts where their votes will matter less. It did so by reversing a lower court ruling that found South Carolina Republicans had violated the Constitution by racially gerrymandering a district to remove Black voters and to place them in a different district in an effort to protect Rep. Nancy Mace, a white Republican.

Despite the fact that the trial court found, as a matter of fact, that the gerrymander was racially motivated — and despite the longstanding tradition of deferring to lower courts in matters of factual determination — the Supreme Court reached a different factual conclusion out of thin air, holding that this gerrymander was politically-motivated, not racially-motivated, ignoring how closely intertwined political identification and racial identity is, particularly in the south. Which was convenient, because the Court decided in 2019 that politically-motivated gerrymandering was totally fine, even if it really should not be.

It’s also worth noting that one Justice, Clarence Thomas, issued a concurrence in which he argued that courts should not be involved in redistricting cases of any kind, racial or political, whatsoever. His argument — I shit you not — was that English courts did not do that when America gained independence so American courts should not do that now. And of course we know just how robust and inclusive representative democracy was in the 18th century.

In so arguing, Thomas attacked Brown v. Board of Education and Baker v. Carr, two seminal rulings which went a long way toward undoing racial segregation and discrimination after nearly two centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas is not a young man anymore and I don’t think his insanely radical ideas will every fully hold sway over even this Court, but it’s positively gobsmacking to hear anyone in a position of power in 21st Century America making such arguments, let alone a Black man who was born when segregation and Jim Crow were still the order of the day.

Thomas’ shockingly retrograde bullshit notwithstanding, yesterday’s decision guts a series of precedents that guarded against racist redistricting and grants state legislatures sweeping new authority to sort their residents between districts on the basis of skin color. There are now limits to such a thing whatsoever. Unless of course Democrats do a gerrymander, racial or otherwise, which harms Republicans, in which case I am 100% certain the Court would rule in completely opposite fashion, while limiting such a ruling only to the case before it. I say that with confidence because if there is any sort of philosophical through-line on the Roberts Court, it’s that it will do whatever it can to advance the Republican political agenda, jurisprudential coherence be damned.

At this point it’s worth recalling that five of the current six Republican Supreme Court Justices were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate in which the Republican senators in question represented a minority of Americans while Democrats represented a majority. And of course, the Senate blatantly thwarted the power of a Democratic president who was elected with a majority of the popular vote from appointing a Democratic Justice in a pure power grab without any justification whatsoever.

The Electoral College and the United States Senate are, by definition and design, anti-democratic. But as time has gone on, as civil rights have expanded, and as the country has urbanized, their anti-democratic nature has massively intensified to the point where, for all practical purposes, we live in a country ruled by an unrepresentative minority. That minority has spent the last several years doing everything it can to fortify and solidify its rule in a way that threatens to make it a permanent feature of American governance. This ruling is just the latest brick in that wall.

Quote of the Day: History Never Ends

“Yes, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat … I planned everything, I am commander in chief. I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo but I had a justification. He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back. I hit them back.”

— Irish Republican Army member Michael Hays, now 76 years old, claiming last weekend that he was the mastermind behind the assassination of Earl Louis Mountbatten in 1979, which was one of the most high-profile IRA attacks during The Troubles. Hays had never been connected to the bombing, though he had been linked to a 1974 bombing in Birmingham. There is talk in the UK of prosecuting Hays, 45 years after the fact.  

I might not have shared this if not for the fact that I just got done reading a bunch of things about the political push for Irish independence in the 19th century, the Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War. While I am generally familiar and at least basically conversant with the more recent history of The Troubles, I have not read anything definitive about it, though I hope to do so soon.

The result of that recent reading is that, in my mind, I sort of auto-pilot to thinking of Irish history in terms of the 19th Century “Irish Question” discourse, the violence and warfare of the teens and twenties, Michael Collins, the Black and Tans and all of that. Which because of black and white photos and the fact that everyone from back then is dead, feels like a million years ago. Reminders that the tail of that history extended not just into my lifetime but into my adulthood — the Good Friday Agreement was not reached until I was nearly 25 years old — is always a bit weird, but the fact that a guy who bombed Mountbatten is still alive and well and giving interviews is strange in a completely different way.

Almost all of us were taught that all of the history that matters was about long-settled things that happened a long time ago in a different land, with everything else falling under “news” or “politics.” It’s not until later in life that one begins to appreciate history, with some modicum of context, as it’s happening or as people are still trying to understand and process the fallout. Appreciating that history is a living thing that continues to impact what happens now — appreciating that nothing ever truly ends and that the endings we do assign to historical events are inherently artificial — has been one of the most important things I’ve ever come to understand. It’s the difference between reading the news and saying “that’s a hell of a thing” and reading the news and saying “that’s understandable based on x, y, z.”

Have a great weekend everyone.

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