Cup of Coffee: May 7, 2024

Good morning!

Today Rob Manfred, as is his wont, makes a couple of spurious claims, the Tigers City Connect uniforms underwhelm, and we (very) briefly contemplate a French Field of Dreams.

In Other Stuff some Marvel directors fail to diagnose why Marvel movies aren’t working anymore, Americans who buy English football clubs fail to understand why English people like football, we visit a sponge city — yeah, that’s a thing! — and we learn why Ohio State University just had the worst graduation ceremony ever.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Royals 3, Brewers 2: Brewers starter Bryse Wilson only allowed one hit in six shutout innings as Milwaukee clung to a 2-0 lead from Gary Sánchez’s two-run homer. Once Wilson departed in the seventh, however, the Royals bats woke up with Mike Massey hitting a solo shot, three more men reaching and then Maikel Garcia singling home two. The Kansas City pen then shut ‘em out for the final three innings and that was that.

Rays 8, White Sox 2: Jonny DeLuca homered and drove in four as the Rays put it to Mike Clevinger, who was recalled from Triple-A before the game to make his first start of the year. He allowed four runs on six hits and walked four without making it out of the third. I’d say I hate to see it but with him, actually I have absolutely no problem seeing it. The Rays have won four in a row.

Pirates 4, Angels 1: Mitch Keller went the distance, allowing just the one run on five hits and needing only 109 pitches for the CG. Edward Olivares’ third inning grand slam was all the support he’d need.

Guardians 2, Tigers 1: Riley Greene took the first pitch of the ballgame over the fence, but that would be the only run Detroit would score on the day. Will Brennan knocked in a run in the bottom half of the first and remained tied until José Ramírez smacked a dinger to give Cleveland the winning margin. Detroit has now lost four in a row.

Phillies 6, Giants 1: Zack Wheeler dominated, punching out 11 and allowing only an unearned run over seven. Bryce Harper hit a three-run homer that broke things wide open and Kyle Schwarber hit one out late. That’s six straight for Philly.

Twins 3, Mariners 1: Minnesota starter Simeon Woods Richardson pitched six shutout innings of one-hit ball, striking out eight, including five of the first six batters he faced. Not bad if you’re into the whole “establish dominance early” thing. Still, he didn’t get the win as the Twins didn’t put any runs across until the seventh via a sac fly which scored Carlos Correa, who had doubled, and an RBI single from Manuel Margot.

Padres 6, Cubs 3: Scoreless until the top of the sixth when the Padres plated six, capped by Luis Campusano’s three-run double. Yu Darvish was the pitcher of record at the time and picked up the win on the strength of five scoreless frames. Which is exactly what he did his last time out, too. Both of those starts came after an injured list stint, so I can only assume they upgraded him with the “five shutout innings” chip during his convalescence.

Mets 4, Cardinals 3: Brandon Nimmo hit a tiebreaking homer in the seventh which no doubt led to celebration. A Met Gala if you will.

Beats most City Connect uniforms if you ask me.

Rangers 4, Athletics 2: Alex Wood was yet another pitcher with six shutout innings last night, but his team lost as Texas plated four late, three of which came on a Corey Seager three-run blast in the eighth. Oakland drew a season-low 2,895 fans to the Coliseum for this one.

Dodgers 6, Marlins 3: Walker Buehler made his first major league start in nearly two years. It wasn’t great, as he went four innings, allowing three runs and six hits, but his velocity was good and he generally said all the right things after the game. His bacon was saved by the longball, as Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, James Outman, and Teoscar Hernández all went deep. It was Ohtani’s MLB-leading 11th and his fourth in his past three games.

The Daily Briefing

Rob Manfred claims baseball was “kind of dragged into legalized sports betting”

Via CBS Sports, we learn that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred was a guest at the 2024 Associated Press Sports Editors Commissioners Meetings yesterday. During his appearance he was asked if, in light of the Ippei Mizuhara and Jontay Porter scandals, whether the league has reconsidered its stance and approach toward gambling.

Most of Manfred’s comments in response to that were fairly sensible. He talked about the important role of gambling regulation and how bringing more gambling into the light of legality as opposed to keeping it in the darkness of illegal bookmaking is beneficial as far as integrity goes. But Manfred dropped a hell of a line even by his usual head shake-inducing standards:

"We were kind of dragged into legalized sports betting as a litigant in a case that ended up in the Supreme Court"

There is a tiny kernal of truth to that in that, for years, MLB and the other sports leagues were vehemently opposed to the legalization of sports gambling. Indeed, for several years they were on the government’s side in litigation in an attempt to preserve the then-existing federal sports gambling ban. They backed off that position only when it became painfully obvious, circa 2017-18, that the Supreme Court was going to overturn the ban at which point they switched sides and began to figure out how to navigate a world with legalized sports gambling.

But if circumstances caused the sports leagues to reluctantly cease opposing legalized betting, their behavior in the six years since the Supreme Court ruled can only be characterized as hyper-enthusiastic opportunism. Rather than just learn to live in a world with legalized gambling, Rob Manfred and his counterparts in the other leagues have pursued virtually every gambling moneymaking opportunity imaginable. They have partnered with sportsbooks and casinos. They have saturated broadcasts with gambling ads and gambling content. There are sports books inside multiple MLB ballparks and more to come, I am certain.

Saying that Major League Baseball was “dragged” into gambling is like saying our Homo Habilis ancestors were pressured into using stone tools. Maybe there’s truth to it, but what’s happened since then is considerably more important and illuminating. Suggesting otherwise makes you sound like a friggin’ idiot. Or, more accurately in Manfred’s case, like someone who thinks everyone else is.

And one more Manfred quote . . .

At the same event, Manfred was asked about publicly-financed stadiums. Our commissioner:

"There has been a long history of public financing of not just baseball but sports venues in general. Expenditure, public funds that people have seen as justified as part of the quality of life and entertainment opportunities available to residents in particular cities, as well as an economic driver. Certainly on the latter point, I recognize this is something that some will debate, but whatever the merits of it across the board, investment in baseball facilities is the best of the (sports) investments because of the number games.

As we’ve recounted here countless times, some may, as Manfred says, “debate” whether public investment in sports facilities are economic drivers. But in this they are akin to those people who “debate” whether the Earth is flat or whether COVID is caused by 5G mobile phone technology. One hundred percent of the evidence and one hundred percent of the experts who have legitimately studied the matter believe one thing and the debaters, such as they are, simply spew bullshit.

Manfred knows which side of that divide he’s on. He just doesn’t care because he realizes, like any good politician, that if he simply asserts something over and over again that most of the media and most of the people out there will either believe it to be true or will cast it as one side of a balanced, two-sided issue. In either case, the billionaires win.

Tigers City Connect uniforms have dropped 

Eh:

It looks like a Lions alternate jersey from the aughts or early teens. And the block “Detroit” on the cap looks like knockoff gear you buy on the street from an only possibly-licensed vendor a block and a half from the ballpark.

Other than that, great. And by “great” I mean “with maybe one or two exceptions, none of the City Connect uniforms look anywhere close to as good as teams’ regular uniforms, so why are we still bothering with this?”

Si tu le construis, il viendra

A farmer built a baseball field on his property as a labor of love. Except it’s in France.

They should make a movie out of it. Other than it having far more cigarette smoking and ennui I’m sure it’ll translate perfectly.

Other Stuff

Nope, that ain’t it my dudes

Anthony and Joseph Russo, the brothers who directed four of the best and most successful Marvel movies — “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame” — spoke to Variety and gave their theory as to why the more recent Marvel movies have not done so well:

“There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s aging out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”

Or — and hear me out — maybe the post-”Endgame” Marvel movies have largely sucked in terms of both conception and writing, maybe the rollout of Disney+ led to the creation of too much product, much of it mediocre but most of it confusing for casual fans, and maybe Marvel’s special effects efforts have famously began sucking eggs, turning movies that were once considered to be high-quality events into cheap-feeling and weightless affairs. If Marvel doesn’t care as much as they once did, why should we?

Or, as Matt Zoller Seitz tweeted, “this year‘s best picture winner is a three hour nonlinear biography of Robert Oppenheimer that made $1 billion,” so no, it’s not all about a new generation’s short attention spans and “I want it now” impatience.

In related news the Russo Brothers are basically my age and I greatly resent that my contemporaries are, like all previous generations of moviemakers, leaning into the whole “young people today don’t have any patience and don’t appreciate moviemaking like we do” thing. I realize that it’s easy as hell to slide into back-in-my-day-ism, but let’s at least try to fight that urge, folks.

Ugly Americans

A story in New York Times Magazine talks about a culture clash which has occasioned Americans purchasing English football clubs:

This season, nine of the 20 Premier League clubs are owned by Americans. The sale of a 10th awaits approval. All of them, you could argue, are being run far more professionally than ever, as the billion-dollar businesses that many have become. Yet most of the Americans spotted in the owners’ box from time to time — or, worse, seldom spotted there at all — are disdained by their club’s fans. The sentiment is easy to appreciate. Imagine Chinese businessmen, say, quickly coming to control half the teams in the N.F.L., a situation that would probably spark congressional hearings. The concern would be cultural as well as economic: How could foreign investors truly understand this integral piece of Americana when they didn’t grow up hearing the stentorian voice of John Facenda narrating slow-motion highlights, or watching Detroit Lions games in the tryptophan haze of a Thanksgiving afternoon?

Now imagine that pro football has been the country’s defining leisure activity for 150 years. “We’ve reached a point,” Onuoha says, “where there is something of a stigma against American ownership.”

It’s not just the fact that Americans own an increasing number of teams, in and of itself, that is the problem. It’s not primarily a xenophobic thing, really, even if I’m sure there’s some element of that underlying it. Rather, it’s that American owners seem not to understand or care about the importance of the matchday experience or the tradition to English football fans. They don’t understand their need for change, when it does come, to be gradual and measured. To the contrary, American owners have quickly introduced all of the “innovation” which has made attending sporting events in the U.S. a luxury pursuit that is increasingly limited to the wealthy. Heavy on luxury boxes, high-end concessions, party decks, mingling space, cheap and confusing corporate tie-ins and other tools of increased revenue generation and light to the point of dismissive on respect and appreciation for club culture which has existed for generations.

Chelsea’s owner, Todd Boehly who is also a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is a case study here. He has been accused of “rebranding the club into a business where the sport feels almost secondary.” One could say that if Chelsea was still as good as it used to be — they’re in a marked competitive lull — that this would be forgiven, but to say such a thing is to miss the point. At bottom, what truly matters to English football fans are the matches, the players, the club’s position on the table, and the talent in the pipeline. To American sports owners, however, winning doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as it used to. It’s all about increasing revenue and profits and shielding themselves from competitive pressure, both in the business arena and, increasingly, on the field of play itself. In this the American owners have excelled and they seem to think they’re doing a great job in England because of it.

And, of course, they plan on continuing to bring U.S. sports owner “innovations” to England. Just check out the plan of Wes Edens, the American owner of Aston Villa and see if it sounds familiar:

To increase its revenue, and to keep as much of his winning team intact as possible, Edens is planning to develop the neighborhood around Villa Park. In Milwaukee, he and his partners transformed 30 acres of vacant urban land into a thriving arena district, anchored by a sports bar and a boutique hotel. The neighborhood in Birmingham where the club plays, called Aston, isn’t quite as desolate, but when I drove through its streets with Edens one afternoon, its poverty was evident. Eventually, Edens told me, he hopes to build hundreds of apartment units there, as [David] Blitzer and his partners are proposing to do in Philadelphia, where they own the N.B.A.’s 76ers. “Real estate is a big part of this because of the incremental revenue you can generate,” Blitzer says.

And really, isn’t that what sports are all about?

Sponge City 

You may have heard the term “green roofs” which refers to installing plants and grasses and various other forms of vegetation on the roofs of buildings. Green roofs provide shade and reduce temperatures of the roof surface and surrounding air in a way that can combat the urban heat island effect. It’s a pretty swell idea.

Over the weekend I read an article in the Guardian about “blue-green” roofs. In addition to serving the same purpose as green roofs, blue-green roofs absorb rainwater and allow it to be used by building residents to water plants and flush toilets while simultaneously (a) helping mitigate the effects of torrential rains and reduce or prevent flooding; and (b) helping areas facing water shortages capture rainfall, thereby easing the stress on reservoirs and aquifers.

As the article notes, Amsterdam has 45,000 square metres of blue-green roofs. As I have horrendous problems with scale I don’t know if that’s a lot but the article makes it sound like it’s a lot so let’s assume it’s a lot. I also have a hard time getting my brain around even moderately-complicated engineering, so this both impressed and confused me greatly:

The system works in layers. At the surface, you have plants: some combination of mosses, shrubs, grasses, ferns, herbs and sedum, a hardy genus that’s a staple of green roofs. (While plants need sunlight to survive, on a roof, they can be bombarded with too much light. It can also get hot and windy up there.) The plants are rooted in soil, providing nutrients and support.

Below that is a filter layer, which keeps the soil from getting into the next layer: a lightweight crate system that stores the water. Finally, below that are additional layers to keep water and plant roots from infiltrating the actual roof. . . . The water levels in the blue-green roof are managed by a smart valve. If the forecast says a storm is coming, the system will release stored water from the roof ahead of time. That way, when a downpour comes, the roof refills, meaning less rainwater enters the gutters and sewers in the surrounding area. In other words, the roof becomes a sponge that can be wrung out as needed.

It can be dangerous to just assume that technological advancement is never-ending and that we can engineer our way out of the world’s problems. That’s the sort of thinking that leads people to discount human agency in those problems and to drag us into the land of moral hazard. But I’m not gonna lie: I am almost always impressed with scientists’ and engineers’ efforts to do so. It’s gee-whiz neat-o stuff as far as I’m concerned.

Ohio State just had the worst commencement speech ever

Before we get to why that was, here are some random things about my history with graduation ceremonies:

• I graduated three times: from high school, from college, and from law school. I only attended one of the actual graduation ceremonies, however, which was high school. As I was in high school choir, I was required to leave the march-in line and join the assembled choir and sing “One Moment in Time” from the stage in my cap and gown, which was weird. Our commencement speaker was the space shuttle astronaut Jon McBride, who happened to have attended my high school;
• The year before that, when I was a junior, the choir did not sing but I was asked to attend anyway in order to work the sound board for the ceremony. I did so despite putting in an 11-6am shift at the radio station where I worked the night before and skated into the ceremony at 11am that morning with no sleep. I was also stoned out of my mind because I spent the hours in between work and the graduation ceremony smoking pot with a friend who was an emancipated minor and who thus had his own apartment and a lot of time on his hands. He was graduating that day, by the way. We both made it on time, I ran the sound board flawlessly, he got his diploma, and no one seemed to be aware of the state we were in. Look beyond the stoner stereotypes, people;
• I didn’t attend my college graduation ceremony from Ohio State in 1995 because on the day it took place a group of nuns — one of whom was my fiancee’s aunt and the others of whom were her longtime nun colleagues who had known my fiancee since she was a baby — threw a wedding shower for us in the basement of the Catholic church in Beckley, West Virginia. I have zero memory of the thought process involved, either on the part of the nuns throwing the shower or our agreeing to go to that instead of graduation, but we went to the shower anyway. The theme for the shower was “strawberries” for some reason. The commencement speaker who I missed hearing, by the way, was Shimon Peres, who was then Israel’s Foreign Minister. Six months later he’d become acting Prime Minister when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. We didn’t know that then, of course, or else we would’ve told somebody;
• While I was told by my friends that Peres was a pretty impressive speaker I remember not being not at all upset about missing the graduation ceremony. This was primarily because by that point I had already attended like a half dozen of Ohio State’s then-quarterly graduation ceremonies. This was because I worked at the Ohio State bookstore and the bookstore was tasked with storing and managing the caps and gowns for the OSU President, the Board of Trustees, and the commencement speaker for each ceremony. I was one of the staffers who worked backstage at the graduations, helping the dignitaries get into their caps and gowns before the ceremony and then helping them out of them at the end, collecting the caps and gowns for cleaning and storage. If you’ve seen one college graduation ceremony you’ve seen ‘em all;
• While I wasn’t upset that I didn’t go to my college graduation, I was upset that we missed seeing the R.E.M. concert which took place up in Columbus that evening. We had tickets for it — it was the “Monster” tour — but then somehow the strawberry shower became non-negotiable so we sold them. Don’t get married young, people. Sure, I got 16 decent years before that marriage shit the bed and I did get my kids out of the deal, but I never got to see R.E.M. live and I truly regret that;
• I did not go to my law school graduation ceremony in 1998 either. That was a far easier call. We were moving from Washington, where I attended George Washington University Law School, back to Columbus. Our lease was ending just before the ceremony, and we didn’t feel like trying to make arrangements to stay in town for it so by the time it went down I was back in Ohio. For the record, the commencement speaker was Hillary Clinton. While I voted for her once, I honestly can’t say I regret skipping town before hearing her speak. By 1998 everyone was sort of over hearing much more from the Clintons;
• Back to Ohio State: a weird thing about Ohio State is that unlike most universities, OSU does not pay its commencement speakers. They invite people and they either decide to do it or not do it. This results in a pretty disparate group of speakers. Sometimes sitting presidents agree to do it, like Gerald Ford or Obama (Ford agreed to do it when he was vice president but Nixon had resigned in the interim and Ford, to his credit, kept his commitment). Sometimes you get once and future Israeli Prime Ministers like Peres. Other times, however, you get random alumni like the then-CEO of L.A. Gear shoes, Mark Goldston, who spoke at the spring 1994 OSU commencement. Remember L.A. Gear shoes? Based on his LinkedIn page I don’t think even Goldston does, as he’s had like 16 random executive/V.C. jobs since then. He was also kind of a douchebag backstage before the ceremony began and clearly wasn’t up to the moment.

I mention all of that because Ohio State’s spring 2024 graduation ceremony happened on Sunday and based on reports it was . . . not like most graduation ceremonies.

For one thing, a person died. As in, they fell from the top of Ohio Stadium to their death. As of this moment the details and circumstances of the person’s death are not known, but per the Columbus Dispatch, “The commencement continued uninterrupted as news of the death spread through the crowd. Students leaving the ceremony walked past the area where the body fell still cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape.” One moment in time, indeed.

For another thing, Ohio State’s refusal to pay commencement speakers policy didn’t pay off with a president or a noted foreign dignitary this time around. Rather, they got stuck with a man named Chris Pan, an OSU alumnus whose LinkedIn page describes him as a “Social Entrepreneur, Investor, Musician and Keynote Facilitator helping a billion people find their freedom.”

Per the indispensable Ohio politics newsletter, The Rooster, we learn that Pan delivered “the worst commencement speech ever.” What made it bad? For one thing he used the opportunity to shill for Bitcoin. For another, Pan’s speech, per his own speech notes, was geared toward “the alpha males in the audience.” For another thing, per Pan’s social media accounts, his speech was at least partially written while he was high on the South American psychedelic known as “ayahuasca,” which was recently popularized by noted loon Aaron Rodgers. Oh, and he attempted to end the speech with a singalong to the song “This Little Light of Mine,” which was met by silence and befuddlement by the tens of thousands of people in Ohio Stadium, many of whom were trying to process the fact that someone just fell off the goddamn building to their death and the show, for some reason, was still going on.

In light of all of the foregoing, I can’t decide if my policy of missing graduation ceremonies is a good one or a bad one. At the very least we can say that they aren’t all boring.

Have a great day everyone.

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