Cup of Coffee: May 8, 2024
Dodging the draft, the family group chat, That Team Up North, calling a dictatorship what it is, new Superman, and James
Good morning!
If that isn’t this newsletter’s mission statement, I don’t know what is.
Anyway: due to my traveling to Vermont we’re starting the part-time portion of the week. Almost every game was a night game last night and I had to be on the road hella duper early this morning, so while I do have one in-game item today, I’m punting recaps today. It’s not a big loss, as I was never gonna do ‘em justice without either my evening cocktail-inspired observations or my leisurely morning coffee analysis, neither of which was an option before publication.
We do, however, have a couple of genuine baseball news items, a handful of Other Stuffs, and a request from a friend, so let’s just go with that and regroup in the future. Thanks for understanding. If you need me today, I’ll be driving. If we lived in a more civilized time I’d be reachable via CB radio — my handle would be, I dunno, Dog Fister — but otherwise I’ll just check comments and emails from my hotel tonight.
Last Night’s Scores
Rangers 15, Atheltics 8
Tigers 11, Guardians 7
Diamondbacks 6, Reds 2
Phillies 10, Blue Jays 1
Nationals 3, Orioles 0
Rays 5, White Sox 1
Angels 9, Pirates 0
Yankees 10, Astros 3
Atlanta 4, Red Sox 2
Brewers 6, Royals 5
Cubs 3, Padres 2
Mariners 10, Teins 6
Mets 7, Cardinals 5
Giants 5, Rockies 0
Dodhers 8, Marlins 2
The Daily Briefing
Willy Adames called his shot
The Brewers were down 5-3 in the top of the ninth in Kansas City last night. There were two men on but they were also down to their last out. Just before coming to bat, Brewers shortstop Willy Adames was jawing a bit with some Royals fans who were trying to jinx him. Per Adames, "They told me they wanted me to hit a three-run homer, and I was like, 'you sure?” and then “I got you.'" His manager Pat Murphy also told the press after the game that Adames told the fans that he was going to hit a home run.
Adames then took an 0-1 curveball from Royals closer James McArthur into the left-field bullpen, sending Milwaukee to a 6-5 win:
If you watch this version of the video you can see Adames pointing at the fans behind the on deck circle to whom he had been speaking, which I take as further confirmation that he did, indeed, call his shot.
Willson Contreras has a fractured forearm
Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras was removed from last night’s game against the Mets after taking a J.D. Martinez swing directly to his left forearm. He was diagnosed with a fracture, so he’s going to miss a lot of time.
If you watched that linked video, you see that the injury did not happen on a backswing. It was Martinez’s full, forward swing that caught Contreras on the arm. John Denton, the MLB dot com Cardinals beat writer said that, “in an attempt to help catcher Willson Contreras get more low strikes, the Cardinals have him moved up closer to the plate.” So, yeah, there’s your reason. Not a great idea in hindsight.
Contreras had been the best hitter in the Cardinals lineup to this point, with a batting line of .274/.394/.538 (167 OPS+) with six homers heading into last night’s game. His loss represents a big blow to a team that’s already facing a lot of challenges in 2024.
Dodging the draft
No matter what Major League Baseball says, the purpose of the amateur draft is to end bidding wars between teams for top talent, thereby reducing how much money teams have to pay for amateur talent. And that works great, especially when combined with the slotting system and bonus caps and stuff.
Per this report from Kiley McDaniel of ESPN, however, some teams are looking for ways around the salary-depressing mechanism their owners wanted in the first place:
Major League Baseball has sent a warning to clubs about encouraging players subject to the MLB draft to withdraw from high school baseball to become eligible to sign as an international players. An MLB spokesman declined comment.
The key section of the memo sent to teams Monday and obtained by ESPN reads: "It has come to our attention that Clubs have been encouraging amateur players in the United States to withdraw from, or otherwise refrain from playing, high school baseball in the United States and/or Canada, in order to try to establish residency in a foreign country, in an effort to make themselves eligible to sign under the International Amateur Talent System instead of the Rule 4 Draft."
The only example of this scheme being employed that is mentioned in the article involved Lucius Fox, who briefly played for the Washington Nationals in 2022. He was from the Bahamas, had moved to Florida for high school, but then when he emerged as a prospect he dropped out of school, went back to the Bahamas, and the San Francisco Giants signed him as an international free agent with a $6 million bonus.
Fox, who was released by the White Sox in the spring, obviously didn’t pan out, but the gambit paid off for him. And, had he been a better prospect, it would’ve paid off for the Giants too. Major League Baseball, however, pretty clearly doesn’t want this continuing to happen lest it disrupt their salary cap— er, I mean, their equitable talent distribution system.
I know this much, though: this is a copycat league and if MLB is sending memos to teams about it, it’s probably a more widespread practice than we know.
A Guest Post Request
This is my friend Ethan:
I have known Ethan since the fall of 1991, when we shared a freshman English class at Ohio State. I had no idea how to be a college student back then and while it might be hyperbole to say that he taught me how to write, he absolutely informed me that I did not know how to write at the time, which made me think “oh, man, I need to figure out how to write.” So, basically, you can blame him for all of this. Except for the typos. He sees all of them, tells me about them, and (usually) suppresses his annoyance at me for allowing them into the final product. Which is to say, he’s a lot like most of you.
Ethan sent me that merch photo in order to get a guest post — for those who don’t know, if you buy a cup and send me a photo of you with it, you are entitled to a guest post on any topic of your choosing — but he didn’t really have to do that given that he’s my oldest non-high school friend. But hey, if it causes any of y’all to buy one it’s all good.
Ethan’s guest post comes in the form of a request to the Cup of Coffee readership to help him track something down. At this point I’ll allow Ethan to do the explaining.
So, our friend Dave is having a birthday party on Saturday the 18th, 10 days from now.
This is Dave, 2006:
“Uncle Dave’s” birthday party dress code is "baseball or golf attire only". Because, well, that's Uncle Dave.
Because she is awesome, my wife Rika has decided that she wants to show up as a Japanese baseball beer girl [note to readers: Rika is Japanese, so lay off any accusations of cultural appropriation or whatever the hell]:
Rika has actually managed to locate and purchase the hardest part, which is the backpack. It's a Heineken backpack, but we're creative and we can sort out the branding. BUT we are utterly stumped on finding anything resembling a Japanese beer baseball jersey that isn't a month of shipping time to arrive from Vietnam or Sri Lanka. There are some (thin) hat options online, but we want to find the jersey first so we know what branding we're going with. The dream, of course, is a suitably neon jersey-hat-combo, but we're pretty damn open minded for whatever we can get at this point.
This feels like the kind of quixotic quest that Cup of Coffee’s enthusiastic readership could help with? I will happily pay retail prices and moderately stupid shipping fees to make my wife and Uncle Dave happy, and I promise to share silly party pictures after.
Thanks, Ethan! And readers: if it’s helpful, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Given how bad the Beehiiv comments are, and that I won’t be online all day, if anyone has solid leads on this stuff, email me at ccalcaterra@gmail.com in addition to commenting and I can pass the information on to Ethan. Thanks!
Other Stuff
Great Moments in the Family Group Chat
Let’s do a “Brady Bunch” reboot. Who’s with me?
Regarding rivalries and school spirit
Yesterday one of you made this comment in reference to my bit about graduation ceremonies, during which I mentioned that newly-elevated President Gerald Ford spoke at Ohio State’s summer term commencement in late August 1974:
I am stunned that OSU would have a Michigan Man like Jerry Ford to give the Commencement speech, even if he WAS the VP when asked and the President when he gave it. I wonder if anyone sang the "I don't give a damn about the whole state of Michigan, I'm from O-HI-O" song??
While I appreciate that comment was meant in fun, it’s actually worth talking about the fact of a Michigan Man giving the speech, what with how crazy and intense the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry is. But, as we do so, it’s worth noting that the truly insane aspects of that rivalry are relatively recent creations. And yes, this is a topic that, whenever I bring it up at a party or something, people under, say, 35, simply cannot believe.
While Ohio-State and Michigan has been a noted rivalry for a very long time, it used to be a more muted and relatively constrained thing. People I grew up around in Michigan and the people I came to know at Ohio State and in Columbus would certainly make jokes about “the team up north” or “that team from Ohio” but it was pretty superficial and lighthearted stuff (“directions to Ann Arbor: go north until you smell it, go west until you step in it”). People would get more fired up the week of The Game — everyone would bust out the famous Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler quotes — but it was mostly dormant much of the rest of the year.
I can’t speak for how things go up in Michigan now, but these days it’s a completely different thing in Columbus and Ohio in general. People wear anti-Michigan t-shirts and talk smack year round. People’s business email signature blocks will reference it. Radio DJs will make snarky comments if anything Michigan-related comes up, whether or not its football related. If you’re on a flight to Columbus and the pilot is from Michigan, he will 100% make some taunting remark over the P.A. when announcing his initial descent. During the runup to The Game, people on campus and to some extent, around the city as a whole, will mark out all of the “Ms” on street signs and building signs and things. It’s really fucking weird!
It’s all encompassing and it’s, frankly, exhausting. And as I said: it’s fairly new. Like, the whole mark-out-the-X thing never existed until a few years ago. It just was not something anyone did. Nor was the year-round, “can’t mention Michigan, even outside of a sports context, without making some rivalry comment” thing. People weren’t doing this outside of the direct context of an impending football game when I went to Ohio State. It was something that really began to take off in the mid-to-late 1990s and which has gone into overdrive in the 21st century.
The same, I’ll add, goes for shows of Ohio State school spirit separate and apart from the rivalry. Most people had an Ohio State shirt hanging around back in the day but now people have a dozen of them, ranging from the kid in a cheap t-shirt to the exurban, country club types who have “nice” Ohio State gear, including sweaters and jackets which cost a small fortune. In the early 1990s you rarely if ever saw a personalized license plate which made reference to Ohio State but now you can’t go a block without seeing a few of them. And, of course, since there are so many of them, the messages you see on those plates are increasingly tortured and tenuous (“IB4Bucks” etc) It’s as though something snapped in people’s minds at some point during the Clinton years to send both rivalry sentiment and overall school spirit into overdrive. Or, I should say, school sports spirit because not too many people who are all “Go Bucks!” all the time care all that much about the university as an educational institution. It’s almost exclusively about the football team.
I suspect all of this is tied up in sports radio and ESPN-fueled sports 24/7 culture, with a healthy assist from athletic apparel companies, marketing and merchandising firms, and stuff like that. Whatever the case, sports have gone from pastime/diversion to lifestyle in countless ways over the past 25-30 years, but nowhere has it done so as intensely as it has in big time college sports.
All of which is to say, no, not too many people batted an eye at a former University of Michigan football star giving the commencement address in 1974. Maybe there were some quips about it — hell, Ford’s speech may have even included one or two as far as I know — but no one would even half-seriously suggest that it was weird or controversial for it to have gone down that way. If it were to happen now, though? Yeah, I do feel people would say quite a bit, even if it involved a U of M alumnus president. Some might even be mad about it and think it’s wrong. Because sports have broken so many people’s brains.
Is that what’s happening?
The graphic, from Yahoo News, is a hell of a thing:
I don’t think it’s being pedantic to say that Vladimir Putin is not serving “terms” in any real sense of the word. Yes, there was nominally an election, and yes he is nominally now beginning a fifth six-year term, but all of that is fantasy. Putin has murdered or imprisoned his political adversaries, Russian elections are in no way free or fair as their outcomes are predetermined, and Putin will not have just six years in office but, rather, as many years as he would like to have, with only his own death being the limiter. Russia is a dictatorship in every way that matters.
Maybe the manner in which a news outlet refers to Putin should not animate me all that much, but it makes me wonder how the media would refer to Trump had the January 6 insurrection have been successful. If Mike Pence had refused to certify the election results, if the whole matter was thrown into the courts, and if Supreme Court which already clearly exists to do Trump’s bidding had ratified the whole shebang. It also makes me wonder how the media will refer to it if Trump loses again in November but, with a second bite at the apple, manages to find a way into office via undemocratic means.
If that were to happen I suspect that the press will continue to use the vocabulary of democracy. They will refer to Trump’s “election” and will characterize him as serving a four-year term and all of that. Even if doing so lends legitimacy to something that is manifestly illegitimate, as it is doing with Russia.
New Superman drops
There’s a new Superman movie coming out next year, written and directed by James Gunn. The actor playing Superman will be David Corenswet. I don’t know anything about him but his Wikipedia page says that his grandfather was Edward Packard, the man who created those Choose Your Own Adventure books, so apparently heroism runs in the family and not all of ‘em wear capes.
The other day DC dropped the first photo of him in costume:
I sorta like the whole tactical sweater vibe — it has to get cold flying so high all the time — but I’m not sure how I feel about Superman sort of slowly putting a boot on while some giant light orb thingy is apparently trying to destroy Metropolis. The guy looks like I do, sitting on the edge of the bed to keep from falling over, as I put my slippers on after I hear the cat puke at 4:57AM. I just feel like Superman should have a greater sense of urgency about him, ya know?
Oh . . . Oh, my.
Yesterday my therapist told me that happiness doesn’t just fall on us out of the sky. That we often have to work to create and to truly appreciate happy moments in our lives. He said that sitting around waiting for out-of-the-blue joy to serendipitously descend upon us is a good way to never really find contentment.
That all made sense to me but then I logged out of the session, checked my email, and found that this had dropped:
If you need me today I’ll be (a) firing my therapist because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; and (b) getting in the ticket queue for the artist’s presale from a service area somewhere on the New York Thruway.
If you need me in October, there’s a decent chance I’ll be following this tour halfway around the country while half-assing the newsletter from hotel rooms for two weeks. Sort of like I’m doing today, tomorrow, and Friday. Hope you don’t mind.
Have a great day everyone. And remember: tomorrow and Friday’s newsletters are gonna be short-to-non-existent given that I’m in Vermont. Back to normal on Monday.
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