Cup of Coffee: May 31, 2024

Good morning!

You hate to see it. Except you love to see it.

I don’t have much to say about this because, really, what else is there to say? Anyone with a brain knew he was a criminal all along, so seeing it legally ratified, however satisfying, doesn’t really change anything. His cult is his cult and they’re not going anywhere. Everyone who loathed the guy yesterday still loathes him today.

But I have a theory about Trump support: he’ll never be broadly and conspicuously rejected, but every time he looks bad a small but non-trivial number of people decide this ridiculousness has finally gone too far for their tastes and they decide to just stay home or issue a protest vote next time. People who think that voting for an asshole who will lower their taxes and not guilt trip them for think the worst about non-white people is OK. Voting for a criminal asshole, maybe not if, for no other reason, than it’s embarrassing. Maybe that’s just wishcasting. And even if it’s not, it’s an open question as to whether the defection of such fringier supporters is outnumbered by the recruitment of new cult members. But I do think those kinds of shifts happen. And, at any rate, anyone out there saying, somehow, that this is good for Trump is deluded or has experienced too much post-2016 trauma to be reliable about it all.

Anyway: I had a Trump item about something else entirely already written up in Other Stuff, so we’ll just go with that today. If it helps, just mentally add “convicted felon” every few times I mention his name and you’ll be fine.

Now, let’s get on with the day’s news.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Yankees 8, Angels 3: Aaron Judge hit a two-run homer. It was his league-leading 18th on the season and the the 275th of his career, and his evening put him at .355/.479/.871 with 12 homers in the month of May which, Jesus. Juan Soto hit a three-run triple to cap a five-run seventh inning which also featured two bases loaded walks. The only bad news for the Yankees here was Anthony Volpe going 0-for-4, ending his hitting streak at 21 games. As is always the case when a hitting streak of any decent length ends, somewhere the ghost of Joe DiMaggio takes a sip of coffee from his Mr. Coffee machine in celebration. He’s always been that kind of petty asshole.

Twins 7, Royals 6: Kansas City blew an early 4-0 lead, fell down 7-4 thanks to two home runs from Ryan Jeffers and a three-run triple from Carlos Correa, and then mounted a late comeback which fell just short. It was the third game in a row, in fact, in which the Royals surged late, only to see their comeback fall short. That’s plucky, but plucky is overrated. The better strategy is to not fall behind and/or blow leads in the first place.

Brewers 6, Cubs 4: Gary Sánchez hit a tie-breaking, two-run homer in the eighth and drove in three in all as the Brewers take three of four from the visiting Cubs and their visiting former manager, Craig Counsell. Cody Bellinger, Seiya Suzuki and Christopher Morel homered for the Cubs in a losing cause.

Rays 6, Athletics 5: José Siri had already hit homer earlier in the game, but then he hit a game-tying solo homer off of Mason Miller in the bottom of the ninth to force extras. It was Miller’s first blown save of the year. The teams exchanged runs in the tenth and went scoreless in the 11th. In the bottom of the 12th the Manfred Man advanced to third on a groundout and was brought home as the walkoff run by a Richie Palacios single. The Rays took two of three.

Astros 4, Mariners 0: Astros starter Spencer Arrighetti tossed six shutout innings, allowing just two hits and three relievers finished it as a four-hitter. Alex Bregman and Victor Caratini went deep. Houston avoids the sweep.

Mets 3, Diamondbacks 2: Francisco Lindor went 4-for-4 with a homer, two RBI and a stolen base and J.D. Martinez hit a go-ahead homer in the eighth as the Mets bounced back following an ugly Wednesday night. Worse news than just the loss for the Dbacks: Ace Zac Gallen is likely headed to the injured list after straining his right hamstring five pitches into the game.

Tigers 5, Red Sox 0: Jack Flaherty no-hit the Sox until the seventh inning, striking out nine while turning in six and two-thirds innings of shutout ball. He leads the AL in strikeouts now with 90 and his K/BB for is now 90/10 in 11 starts over 67.2 innings. Not too shabby. Riley Greene homered. The Tigers have won five of six.

Nationals 3, Atlanta 1: Joey Meneses drove in two of Washington’s three runs on a double and went 2-for-4 on the evening. Lane Thomas stole two bases and scored a run. Starter Trevor Williams allowed just one run on four hits while pitching into the sixth. Atlanta has dropped five of their last seven games.

The Daily Briefing

Jorge López denies he said the Mets were the “worst team”

Mets reliever Jorge López took to Instagram yesterday morning to say that he had actually meant to insult himself, not his own team, in that now-infamous post-game press conference on Wednesday night. López said that reports that he called the Mets "the worst team in probably the whole fucking MLB," were wrong.

As I said yesterday, the video made it sound like he said “worst teammate.” In real time reporters, who could only hear him once, and possibly not clearly, said that López said the Mets were the worst “team.” In their defense, López was asked to clarify what he said on Wednesday night and the answer came back, through an intermediary, that “López said he meant them as a combination of both: the worst teammate on the worst team in the league." At the same time, SNY sideline reporter Steve Gelbs asked López to clarify whether or not he intended to call the Mets the worst team in the majors, and López replied by saying, "yeah, probably."

At this point it seems to me like there has been an increasingly dumb game of telephone going on in which López probably said “teammate” in the clubhouse and was either unclear what was being asked in those clarifications or just went fully YOLO with it on Wednesday, only to backtrack on Thursday. It probably doesn’t matter much at this point given that the Mets DFA’d him yesterday, claiming that they were more upset about the glove toss and things he said and did not say to Mets officials in the clubhouse as opposed to a misheard interview quote.

Either way: it sounds like López could use the change of scenery. Being on the Mets is not anyplace anyone needing to chill out a bit should be.

Quote of the Day: Carlos Mendoza 

The Mets manager had this to say about Jorge López’s behavior on Wednesday night:

"We have standards here. When you're not playing well, guys will show emotions. There's frustrations, but there's a fine line and yesterday went over that line."

Imagine believing that the Mets have standards. Wow.

A good reminder about the incorporation of Negro Leagues stats

This week’s announcement that Major League Baseball was officially incorporating the statistics of the Negro Leagues into its own statistical record was met with a mostly positive response. And I think it was an earned positive response, broadly speaking. But as Jay Jaffe wrote over at FanGraphs yesterday, it’s worth making a distinction between major league statistics and the statistics of Major League Baseball.™

However, it is a mistake to confuse the provenance of those accomplishments as belonging to MLB, and a misrepresentation to brand them as such. As Shakeia Taylor, deputy senior content editor at the Chicago Tribune and host of the historically-focused Society for American Baseball Research podcast Ballpark Figures, succinctly put it on Twitter, “[I]t’s really as simple as referring to [Gibson] as the ‘major-league record holder’ instead of ‘MLB record holder.’ These two things are not the same.”

Again, the semantics and nuances matter. Major League Baseball (MLB) in its capitalized form refers to the corporate and legal entity created by the 2000 merger of the AL and NL, whose histories and records it subsumed, warts and all. Part of their histories is the systemic racism that excluded Black players within the aforementioned period, and so it should not simply call those records part of MLB, for however well-intentioned the gesture may be.

Shakeia Taylor has written extensively about this distinction — which is an important one — at Baseball Prospectus and other places in recent years. She backs that up with a very deep expertise on the Negro Leagues and the way in which, as early as 1946, when Jackie Robinson was first signed without compensation to his Negro Leagues team with whom he was under contract, Major League Baseball and its clubs coopted and have continued to coopt the Negro Leagues, first as a business and then its history and has tried to make it its own. She has argued convincingly that recognition of Negro League players does not require their total assimilation into an entity which never allowed them in to begin with.

This is an important distinction because, without it, someone who does not know any better might be inclined to believe that, prior to 1947, Black players were a part of the American and National Leagues, when they were actively barred from playing in those leagues. Maybe that sounds silly to you and to me, as we know all about baseball’s racist history, but not everyone does and as time goes on fewer people will know such a thing as readily as we do now. That’s how all history works, of course, and it makes the manner of documentation of history important.

The thing that must be avoided here is for Major League Baseball — the successor entity to the very organizations which enacted and enforced racial segregation — to be able to whitewash its racist history and to either actively or passively erase its own complicity in that history. It does this to some degree already in its annual celebration of Jackie Robinson Day. A day on which Robinson is lauded for what he overcame while the league treats that which he overcame as some abstract and ancient evil to which MLB has no connection.

At this point some of you are probably asking “well, what should they do?” My answer is “not that much actually.” I think having Josh Gibson’s statistics listed alongside Babe Ruth’s, which is what has now been accomplished, is appropriate. I think calling Josh Gibson the “all-time leader” or the “major league leader” in a given category is fine. But I think it’s important not to call Gibson or the other Negro League players “MLB leaders” or “Major League Baseball’s Leaders” or to say that their statistical record is now a part of MLB’s records because they were specifically prohibited from ever being a part of what became that entity.

There were and are several major leagues. Not all of them were Major League Baseball. It’s important to remember the difference between the adjective and the noun.

Other Stuff

Trump called an “Apprentice” contestant the n-word.

There was, if you can believe it, some Trump stuff yesterday that had nothing to do with his felony conviction.

Slate ran an article written by a man named Bill Pruitt, who used to be a producer on Donald Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice.” In it Pruitt, who was just released from a 20-year-long non-disclosure agreement, describes the making and evolution of the TV show, complete with all of the tricks and deceptions he and his fellow reality show producers used to manipulate audiences and create what, to them at least, was compelling television. He likens it all to a con-game.

The article spends a lot of time revealing Trump’s unpreparedness and discomfort with the filming process and things he said on-set which bolster what we know about his philandering and his habit of not paying people the money he owes them. The article is making the rounds mostly, however, because Pruitt reveals that, during the production of a first season episode, Trump called a Black contestant, Kwame Jackson, the n-word.

The use of the word came in the context of Trump and his on-screen advisers trying to figure out whether to get rid of Jackson or, rather, his white competitor:

“I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organization,” Kepcher says to Trump, who winces while his head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting . . . “Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”

Pruitt says it was filmed but that he’s certain the tape has been destroyed by now. Probably a safe bet.

This revelation may have mattered in 2016. Sure, the gross, rapey, and misogynistic stuff that was released on the “Access Hollywood” tape didn’t keep him from getting elected, but it was pretty damaging. I feel like his use of the ultimate racial slur might have sunk him eight years ago.

Now, though? I doubt it matters. It’s no less odious now, obviously, but we’re in a political era in which every possible awful thing is already baked into Trump’s political salience. He gets defended by the conservative media and Republican figures for anything he says or does. Mainstream media barely covers this sort of thing — and when it does it’s way, way below the fold — because Trump being a horrible person is just assumed and is considered old news. And, of course, such a thing will not weaken his political base because, as we’ve learned very well over the past eight years, that base loves Trump largely because he has created a permission structure for them to be openly racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and all manner of other things. They’d not punish him for saying what they were thinking. They wish they could say the n-word out loud. He’s a hero to them for doing so.

It’s also worth noting at this point that anyone who is surprised that a guy like Trump casually uses the n-word is a special sort of ignorant. I mean, really, did anyone believe, before reading this, that Trump doesn’t drop n-bombs on the regular? Complete with the hard “r?” Of course he does.

So nah, I doubt this changes anything, at least separate and apart from my “peeling a few people off the top, almost unnoticed” dynamic I described in the intro to today’s newsletter. The most notable thing it will do is to remind folks who like to watch reality shows just how manipulated and phony they are. And how, if not for the producers of “The Apprentice” and the executives at NBC using the show to create a fantasy version of a savvy, in control business expert Donald Trump, he likely never would have become president.

This guy again

Some of you may remember my old nemesis, Philip Derrow. He’s the rich jackass who once served on the New Albany, Ohio school board and did his damndest to get rid of all mask mandates during the pandemic, purely on ideological grounds. I managed to get him formally censured after I found and publicized his Twitter account, where he compared masks and vaccinations to the Holocaust, among other awful things.

Derrow is retired now and spends his time writing guest op-eds for our local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. Like everything else does, his op-eds are an exercise in espousing the shallowest form of conservative ideology. The masks/vaccines stuff aside, his writing tends to be about economic ideology. The glories of hard work, competition, and laissez-faire capitalism. Which is hilarious given that he inherited the family business from his father and has never had to work a job he actually had to apply for or could be fired from in his life. He’s a guy who was handed everything he’s ever had yet gets off on lecturing others about bootstraps and industriousness.

Derrow’s latest op-ed lambastes the city of Columbus — where he does not live, by the way — for giving people e-bike subsidies. In it he rails against the moral hazards of "free money" and the evils of "government picking winners and losers." What he never mentions is that his own company received a series of generous tax abatements from the City of Columbus over the years. Like this one, the record of which I found in about four seconds:

I am sure that, in Derrow’s mind, his free money is different than the free money given to promote greater bike usage. And I’m sure that, in his mind, it’s an important difference, not just one in which policy outcomes he likes (i.e. his company getting tax abatements) are preferable to ones he does not like (i.e. residents of a liberal city getting some help to be less car-dependent).

Like I said, this is shallow, shallow stuff. Which is not surprising as, in my experience with Derrow, he’s not a super bright guy. To be sure, he thinks he is. His whole vibe is “someone who once read a Wall Street Journal column in the 1980s about how socialism is bad and has remembered every word of it.” But he’s just a lazy rich guy searching hard for whatever excuse he can to glibly espouse an ideology he barely understands but which justifies his base predispositions and his status in the world.

I’d like to think that if I had Phil Derrow’s money and his kind of free time that I’d be doing things other than lambasting the policy decisions of a city in which I do not even live, but I suppose he’s built different.

Courtesy

I got this email yesterday:

I like that an increasing number of companies think to ask if you want to opt out of emails for Mothers Day or Fathers Day. It’s a small act of courtesy in an otherwise fallen and debased age.

But that one came from Ancestry.com, the entire purpose of which is to crawl up the rear ends of your dead relatives. Not gonna lie, it gave me a chuckle.

Today in Dystopia

First up is an ad which makes you want the advertised product even less than getting a ball-peen hammer straight shot to the brain-pan:

Does that seem like something the woman in the ad wants? The look on her face practically screams “all three of these meetings could’ve been emails!” If this person wasn’t either a model in the cheapest possible stock photo or AI-generated I’d actually feel sorry for her.

Second: I became aware of the existence of an Uber/Lyft-style ride sharing service called Blackwolf. The difference, per Blackwolf’s webpage: “We made ride-hailing safer by hiring only drivers with experience in law enforcement, the military, or the security sector.” And yes, the key selling point here is that all of Blackwolf’s divers are armed.

Which is a thing I’m guessing your dad or someone who unironically uses the term “first-responders” four times a week might idly think sounds safe, but when I think about ex-cops, ex-soldiers, and ex-security guards whose life circumstances have taken them to a third-tier gig economy job, the only qualifications for which are (a) owning a gun; and (b) having a driver’s license, I don’t exactly think “this person is probably super safe and responsible.” I get more of a Travis Bickle vibe.

Uber and Lyft have features built in to their apps that allow you to notify your friends about where you are and who your diver is in the event something happens to you or if you simply feel unsafe. There’s a reason for that! Now give every driver a gun and make that the key sales pitch for the business. I can’t think of any problems with that, can you?

Look . . .

I know it’s probably deeply theoretical bullshit which will never result in practical realization in my lifetime if, indeed, it ever does. But if you publish an article that suggests someone just made a breakthrough in faster-than-light travel, I’m GOING to link that motherfucker, no questions asked. I’ve watched too much Star Trek in my life not to.

The short version, for those who can’t get past the paywall, is that in 1994 a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre Moya published a paper which laid out the theory for what he called the “Alcubierre warp drive” which would, again, theoretically, contract spacetime in front of a spaceship while expanding the spacetime behind it, so that the ship would move from Point A to Point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed that could exceed the speed of light, possibly by orders of magnitude.

The problem is that, per Moya’s paper, the force behind such a warp drive involves exotic negative energy particles that are themselves theoretical and, as far as anyone knows, don’t exist in our universe. What the above-linked article reports is that some scientists believe they’ve found a way around that fuel problem:

Now, researchers at the New York City-based think tank Applied Physics believe they’ve found a creative new approach to solving the warp drive’s fundamental roadblock. Along with colleagues from other institutions, the team envisioned a “positive energy” system that doesn’t violate the known laws of physics. It’s a game-changer, say two of the study’s authors: Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, and Jared Fuchs, Ph.D., a senior scientist there. Their work, also published in Classical and Quantum Gravity in late April, could be the first chapter in the manual for interstellar spaceflight. 

We were way beyond my ability to comprehend this stuff two sentences into this item, so I’ll leave it there. And yes, the smart money is on this being something we’re a century from figuring out. Or, more likely, it’s total horseshit and will never happen.

The only thing I’m pretty sure of is that magazines like Popular Mechanics publish these articles specifically because there are dorks like me who will eat it up, no matter how detached from reality the stories happen to be. “Scientists think they’ve figured out faster-than-light travel” articles are the middle aged dork equivalent to Cosmopolitan publishing a different version of “26 sex tips to make your man GO WILD” every issue. The most reliable click-inducer imaginable.

I’ll be in Boston between today and Wednesday and, because of some stuff I’m doing there, the newsletters early next week may be a bit more cursory. Hope you don’t mind.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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