Cup of Coffee: September 4, 2024

Good morning!

In today’s newsletter I offer a Jasson Domínguez correction, share a fun item about baseball slang, contemplate the Gulls of Oracle Park, reveal the identity of Pinnacle Man, bid adieu to a Lady-in-Waiting who, if she had not died, would eventually have been placed in my regime’s gulag, talk a bit about the effects of Trump’s and Harris’ respective tax and tariffs policies, and discover that while it’s a drag getting old, it really happens in two big gos.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Rangers 7, Yankees 4: The Yankees had a 4-1 lead after their half of the eighth but a Rangers RBI single and sac fly in the bottom half reduced their lead to one run. Aaron Boone called in his closer, Clay Holmes, to hold that one run lead in the ninth and this he did not do. Holmes loaded the bases with a single and two walks. Then up came Wyatt Langford who worked the count full, fouled one off, and then launched one over the left field fence for the walkoff grand slam:

I follow a lot of Yankees fans on social media and despite this being a generally good season for New York they are really, really pessimistic about Clay Holmes as the team’s closer. This may be the most spectacular example of why that is, but the blown save is nothing new. Indeed, Holmes leads all of baseball with 11 of them in 40 chances. With this loss and the Orioles win, the Yankees fall out of first place in the East.

As for that Orioles win . . .

Orioles 9, White Sox 0: . . . Welp:

Baltimore led 7-0 before anyone was on to their second beer so all anyone had to do at that point is watch O’s starter Cade Povich strike out 10 while pitching shutout ball into the eighth inning. Make that 12 straight losses for Chicago.

Nationals 6, Marlins 2: Joey Gallo hit a three-run homer, Keibert Ruiz singled, doubled, and homered, while Patrick Corbin allowed two runs on seven hits with eight strikeouts while pitching into the sixth. Washington is 8-0 against Miami this year.

Rays 2, Twins 1: Jeffrey Springs allowed a run on four hits over six and the Rays eked out two RBI singles. One of them came off the bat of Logan Driscoll, the Rays catcher who was making his big league debut, so that’s sweet. Carlos Santana homered for Minnesota’s only run.

Phillies 10, Blue Jays 9: Toronto jumped out to a 6-1 lead, knocking Phillies starter Tyler Phillips out of the game after two-thirds of an inning but Kyle Schwarber hit three homers, with his last being a go-ahead, three-run shot in the ninth. He finished 5-for-6 with six RBI. Philadelphia matched a season high with 18 hits and won its third straight. I didn’t look but I feel like Toronto has lost a number of games like this in 2024. Sizable early lead after which they just got boat-raced.

Mets 7, Red Sox 2: David Peterson, whose birthday was yesterday, struck out 11 over six, allowing one run while Francisco Lindor hit a two-run homer in the third — his 30th — and had an RBI double in the eighth. Pete Alonso knocked Lindor in with a two-run eighth inning homer. Mark Vientos also went deep. Lindor, by the way, also stole his 28th base so he seems a lock for the 30/30 club. He now has a 14-game hitting streak and has reached base in 32 straight games. The Citi Field crowd gave him the M-V-P! chant a few times. As a lot of you discussed in the comments yesterday, Lindor is not likely to win it with Shohei Ohtani around, but he is having an MVP-caliber season. And that’s six straight wins for the Metropolitans.

Atlanta 3, Rockies 0: Chris Sale continues to make what appears to be a winning Cy Young case — not to mention a Comeback Player of the Year Award — shutting out Colorado for seven, striking out nine, picking up his 16th win on the year, and dropping his ERA to 2.46 (171 ERA+). He also leads the league in strikeouts with 206 in 160.2 innings, so he’s on track for the pitching Triple Crown as well. Gio Urshela doubled in a run and Michael Harris II had a sac fly and a single which forced in a run on an error. Atlanta maintains a half-game lead over the Mets for the final NL Wild Card

Guardians 7, Royals 1: The Royals skid continues — they’ve now lost seven straight — thanks in large part to Cleveland shortstop Brayan Rocchio drove in four runs on a two-run homer, a sac fly, and a bases-loaded walk. Steven Kwan and Andrés Giménez hit two-run singles. Tanner Bibee allowed one run on two hits in six innings. On August 27 the Royals and Guardians were tied for first. Now Kansas City is five and a half back.

Pirates 5, Cubs 0: Paul Skenes tossed five shutout innings despite having some control problems and having to pitch out of jams. And despite a home plate umpire who thought everyone came to Wrigley Field to see him:

The ump is Doug Eddings, who took issue with Skenes walking off the mound after what he thought was strike three. It wasn’t — the pitch call wasn’t bad — but Eddings’ little big man act was pretty damn unnecessary. Kudos to Derek Shelton for barking right back at Eddings. Anyway, after Skenes departed, three Pirates relievers combined for four innings of one-hit ball. Jared Triolo homered. The Pirates have struggled mightily in the second half but they’ve now won three of four.

Cardinals 7, Brewers 4: Michael Siani hit a tiebreaking two-run single in the 12th, he then stole second, advanced to third on an error, and then scored the Cards’ seventh run on a sac fly. Paul Goldschmidt homered as St. Louis won for the third time in four games and moved back over .500. Willy Adames’ streak of games with a home run ended at five and Jackson Chourio homered and doubled in a run in a losing cause.

Dodgers 6, Angels 2: Shohei Ohtani came back to Anaheim, tripled in a run, and scored twice. It was nonetheless tied at two after regulation. Miguel Rojas hit the go-ahead RBI single in the top of the tenth after which Mookie Betts hit a three-run homer to more than ice it. Oh, and this was fun: Angels reliever Ben Joyce struck out a Dodgers batter in the ninth inning on a 105.5 MPH fastball, which is the fastest pitch anyone has thrown in the bigs this year.

Athletics 3, Mariners 2: Seth Brown homered in the fourth and hit a walkoff single in the ninth. It was Oakland’s second straight walkoff win. Seattle, menawhile, has lost four straight one-run games and are now five and a half games back for the last AL Wild Card. I suppose you could call it bad luck as records in one-run games tend to be fueled more by fortune than anything else. But really, they have simply looked bad against a lot of competition contenders should be easily handling. Put differently: losing all of those one-run games may be bad luck, but being unable to substantially out play the opposition and thus avoid close games is not.

Diamondbacks 8, Giants 7: Randal Grichuk hit a two-run homer in the first and a solo drive in the fifth. The second one was his 299th career dinger. I am pretty certain that I would not have guessed that he’d be about hit the 300 mark if you had asked me. The Giants have lost three in a row and five of six.

The Daily Briefing

A correction

Yesterday I wrote about Jasson Domínguez’s rookie status possibly impacting the Yankees’ decision to keep him down on the farm when the rosters expanded. Specifically, I repeated Brian Hoch of MLB dot com’s assertion that if Domínguez kept under a certain at bats threshold in 2024 he would retain his rookie status for next year and could net the Yankees a draft pick pursuant to the Prospect Promotion Incentive (PPI) in the CBA if he ranks high in the Rookie of the Year voting in 2025.

Turns out both Hoch and I were wrong about that. As J.J. Cooper and Matt Eddy of Baseball America and Chris Kirschner of The Athletic wrote yesterday, since Domínguez began the year on the MLB injured list, he now has more than 60 days of MLB service time. While he could still be a rookie in 2025 if he stays under the requisite number of at bats, the PPI thing has multiple levels of qualification to it and his service time makes him ineligible for a pick in 2025 regardless of his Rookie of the Year finish.

Which makes the Yankees’ reason for not calling Domínguez up even worse: they simply like Alex Verdugo. Yikes!

Baseball Slang 101

With the trade deadline long since behind us and the playoff chase being less-than-engaging, Tyler Kepner of The New York Times — yes, I know he’s officially at The Athletic now but in my mind Kepner is and always will be from the New York Times — wrote a fun piece yesterday about baseball slang. Specifically clubhouse slang. The sort of things ballplayers and coaches and scouts say when talking amongst themselves.

Kepner sets it up in a fun way, showing what the word or phrase means literally, showing how it is used by baseball people, and then showing how it might be used by people outside of baseball who nonetheless know its baseball connotation:

Bang

Everyday meaning: v. – to strike sharply
“Don’t bang your head on that low railing.”

Baseball meaning: v. – to postpone a game
“It was raining all afternoon, so they banged the game.”

When worlds collide: “It’s supposed to snow overnight. Do you think they’ll bang school?”

Other fun ones he covers: “boat race,” “guy,” “eye wash,” “kitchen,” and “let it eat” among others.

Back when I was working in the legitimate sporting press I was only rarely in clubhouses — spring training for the most part and a handful of World Series — but I still picked up a bunch of these and still use a few of the terms in the “when worlds collide” sense Kepner describes. “Bang” is one I use all of the time because I’m mentally 13 years old. “Eye wash” is another I’m prone to deploy.

Writers who actually work in clubhouses on the regular use them way more often. But, to their credit, they do it in a sort of winking, self-aware way. It’s not some stolen valor situation in which they’re trying to act like they’re in the game more than they are or anything. It’s almost always pretty funny and it stands as one of the few genuine charms of ballwriters who, in the aggregate, are pretty miserable people otherwise, present company included.

The Gulls of Oracle Park

The San Francisco Chronicle had a story last weekend about the prevalence of seagulls in and around Oracle Park and the measures the Giants have taken over the years to try to shoo them away from the field and the fans. Among them:

Over the past decade, the Giants have considered a few different tactics to keep the gulls from breaching the outfield. Falconry was a promising solution, but was deemed too expensive — $8,000 a game, the Mercury News reported in 2016. 

An enterprising red-tailed hawk named Bruce Lee kept other birds away while nesting at the stadium, but eventually abandoned his position. One of the more successful strategies was to blast “The Cha-Cha Slide,” with a chorus of mid-song claps usually enough to scare the gulls away. The Giants also played a falcon screech to scare off the gulls, which worked until the gulls became accustomed to the noise, Sprinkles said. 

I’m just glad that DJ Caspar is no longer alive to learn that his signature song’s highest and best use is as pest abatement.

Those measures notwithstanding, the seagulls are more prevalent at Oracle Park than they ever have been, and the article diplomatically states that “the Giants have embraced their presence.” In this I assume that it’s not unlike the way in which Napoleon III “embraced” the Prussian army’s presence at the Battle of Sedan. They’ve surrendered. Let’s call things what they are, Chachi.

Other Stuff

Man of the People 

Pinnacle Man 

If I have one hard-and-fast rule when it comes to this newsletter it’s that I will, 100% of the time, link to stories about human remains which have been unidentified for nearly 50 years but which now, thanks to either DNA analysis or detective work or what have you, have finally been identified.

That’s the Cup of Coffee Guarantee.™

An American Lady-In-Waiting

I oppose aristocracy and all of its attendant trappings, but I always find it oddly fascinating when I discover an American in that milieu. Like this lady:

Virginia Ogilvy, the Countess of Airlie, who served Queen Elizabeth II for nearly 50 years as the only American-born member of the monarch’s inner circle of advisers, assistants and close friends known as the ladies-in-waiting, died on Aug. 16 at her estate in Cortachy, a village in Scotland. She was 91.

Do take the term “oddly fascinating” lightly, however, because if The Revolution had in fact come during Lady Ogilvy’s lifetime and I was finally allowed to enact a benevolent Craigocracy, I’d still have her thrown into prison for Providing Aid and Comfort to a Class Enemy. My odd fascination notwithstanding.

And though I oppose royalty in all of its forms, I would very much love to have someone like this in my life:

Lady Ogilvy was regularly at the queen’s side and often stood quietly to her left when Elizabeth sat for ceremonies. She was attuned to a subtle sign language as the monarch mingled; if Elizabeth twisted her wedding ring, for example, it meant that she was tired of a conversation and needed to be extricated.

Per the other day’s item, I am not an introvert, but I do have a fairly low threshold for mingling and would love to have such an extrication force at my disposal. I mean, yeah, if the Craigocracy did come to pass I could simply have people who bore me dragged away from my presence, but until such time it’d be useful to have a stop-gap solution.

What else is interesting about this lady? Oh, this:

Both her parents came from immense wealth: Her maternal grandfather was Otto Kahn, the financier said to be an inspiration for Rich Uncle Pennybags, a.k.a. Mr. Monopoly, while her father, John Barry Ryan Jr., was a grandson of the financier Thomas Fortune Ryan.

OK, let me revise something I said above. Seeing as though she was the granddaughter of LITERALLY THE MONOPOLY MAN and the great-granddaughter of a man LITERALLY NAMED “FORTUNE,” I believe I’d be within my rights pursuant to the Constitution of Craigistan to have her thrown into prison regardless of any royal associations.

Don’t look at me that way. The law’s the law. But she can rest in peace, I suppose.

Taxes and Tariffs

The New York Times did a compare and contrast on Trump’s and Harris’ respective tax/tariff policies and assessed what they would mean for people if enacted. I’ll skip the rundowns of the plans’ specifics — you can read that here - but here’s the summary:

How would the tax plans affect actual people? A middle-class household with $80,000 in income would gain $1,700 after taxes under Trump’s plan and $2,200 under Harris’s, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. A household in the top 0.1 percent, with $14 million in income, would gain $377,000 under Trump and lose $167,000 under Harris.

Those numbers, however, do not include the impact of tariffs. If they are included, Trump’s plan would actually reduce a middle-class household’s after-tax income by $1,700, the Peterson Institute for International Economics found. Wealthy households’ after-tax income would still increase. Since Harris hasn’t proposed new tariffs, her numbers are unchanged.

People who pay fairly close attention to such things — and who have paid attention to each party’s tax policies over the past couple of decades — already know that Republican tax plans almost always help the wealthy and either harm the middle and lower classes or help them far less than they help the wealthy. But seeing the most recent policies broken down like this is nonetheless eye-opening. It should be particularly eye-opening to those who do not pay close attention to such things but who, rather, simply accept the age-old and mostly erroneous branding which has Republicans cutting your taxes and Democrats raising them.

Thing is, though: the people who aren’t paying much attention aren’t reading the New York Times. It’s up to us to let those folks in our lives know about this sort of thing between now and November.

Why you feel like you got old overnight

Everyone assumes that aging is a gradual, linear process, but per Stanford researchers, that’s not true. Rather, we age in two significant bursts: once in our mid-40s and again in our early 60s. From the abstract, which skews a bit jargony but should be pretty comprehensible for this group:

The analysis revealed consistent nonlinear patterns in molecular markers of aging, with substantial dysregulation occurring at two major periods occurring at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age. Distinct molecules and functional pathways associated with these periods were also identified, such as immune regulation and carbohydrate metabolism that shifted during the 60-year transition and cardiovascular disease, lipid and alcohol metabolism changes at the 40-year transition. Overall, this research demonstrates that functions and risks of aging-related diseases change nonlinearly across the human lifespan and provides insights into the molecular and biological pathways involved in these changes.

So you can’t drink like you used to when you hit 44, you can’t eat like you used to when you hit 60, and your looks and overall health take a hit at both way stations, as both of those times are when wrinkles and sags, graying hair, joint pain, and susceptibility to colds and other viruses first appear (44) and then get worse (60).

I’m 51 and I can attest that a LOT of aging stuff hit me at once, though I was a bit later on the scale. At 44 I still felt and looked pretty much like I did all through my 30s, but many the things mentioned — particularly wrinkles, graying hair (in my case it’s beard and sideburns, obviously), and a reduction of my alcohol tolerance — became noticeable when I was around 48-49, seemingly overnight.

The most humbling evidence of this came just this past weekend when I went to renew my passport. When I got my last one in early 2015 they still let you wear glasses in your passport photo. Now they are strict about you not wearing them. As I have my glasses on 100% of the time I am not sleeping or in the shower, I rarely if ever take a good look at my face without them. Thanks to the lack of wrinkle-hiding glasses I look about 112 years old in the passport photo. Reason number 115 I will never get laser eye surgery. When you get to a certain age glasses de-age you rather than age you.

Not that we should get too hung up on this stuff. I saw my doctor last week. Kind of a checkup thing, as I’ve been mildly concerned of late that I haven’t felt particularly spry or, in some cases, particularly well of late. Not sick or anything, just . . . dragging and aching and feeling time a bit more than I usually do. After the usual talk about diet and exercise and all of that he used a phrase I often use about aging baseball players: “time is undefeated.” And of course he’s right about that. The key, I suppose, is not to fight age, entropy, or decrepitude, but to simply do your best to manage the collapse as gracefully as possible.

And, apparently, to up your SSRI dose at around age 44 and age 60 because, God, this crap can be depressing.

Have a great day everyone.

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