Cup of Coffee: September 6, 2024

Good morning!

Today we talk about John Sterling returning to the Yankees both, I argue that you should not stretch a pitcher for a no-no, ESPN plans to run A.I. sports reporting for some reason, I link to an article about the “Repo Man” soundtrack, I consider the explanations of the MAGAchurian Candidates, a new nightmare has been unlocked, and we talk about how to be a morning person.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Reds 1, Astros 0: Reds starter Rhett Lowder pitched shutout ball into the seventh and two relievers finished the four-hitter. Ty France’s seventh inning solo shot was the only run scored in the game. Reds sweep the Astros in three and have won four in a row overall.

Twins 4, Rays 3: Edouard Julien hit a three-run homer in the second, Matt Wallner hit a solo shot in the third, and the Twins held on. There was a 13-minute video review in the seventh. It was to determine whether or not a guy who fielded a ball and then fell into the stands had possession of the ball when he fell. Football season is back, everyone.

Mariners 6, Athletics 4: Cal Raleigh hit a two-run homer in the first, Luke Raley hit a two-run homer in the ninth and Julio Rodríguez homered in the third. His was a long one: 448 feet. This was the Mariners’ last ever game at the Coliseum. The clubs split the four-game set.

Giants 3, Diamondbacks 2: Patrick Bailey has lost like 50 points of batting average in the past couple of months but he was the offensive hero here, hitting a two-run single in the fourth and then hitting a walkoff ground rule double in the ninth. All of that overcame the fact that Blake Snell only pitched one inning. He didn’t get hurt or anything but he was ineffective and his defense was atrocious, causing him to throw 42 pitches in the first.

Phillies 5, Marlins 2: Ranger Suárez scattered three hits over five scoreless innings, Bryson Stott singled in a run and homered, and Kody Clemens doubled in two and scored on a wild pitch. Five straight wins for the Phils.

Pirates 9, Nationals 4: The Pirates were no-hit on Wednesday night but plated nine on Thursday, with eight hits and nine dang walks. Nick Gonzales hit a two-run single in the Pirates’ five-run second inning and finished with three RBI. Jared Triolo, Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Bryan Reynolds each knocked in a run.

Rockies 3, Atlanta 1: Austin Gomber gave up a first inning run but otherwise shut out the Atlanta lineup through the eighth, scattering five hits, three of which came in that first inning. Michael Toglia and Ezequiel Tovar homered. The Rockies avoid the sweep. Atlanta falls into a tie with the Mets for the third NL Wild Card.

Rangers 3, Angels 1: Adolis García hit a three-run homer in the first and starter Cody Bradford allowed one run on two hits over six. Three wins in a row for Texas.

Tigers 4, Padres 3: Jurickson Profar hit a solo shot in the first and Xander Bogaerts hit a two-run homer in the second. Martín Pérez pitched shutout ball into the seventh and the Padres took a 3-0 lead into the ninth. Robert Suárez came in to close it out but he loaded the bases on a single and two walks and then gave up a dang two-out, full-count grand slam to Parker Meadows to give the Tigers their first lead of the game. Wow.

The Daily Briefing

John Sterling is coming back for the playoffs

Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported yesterday that longtime Yankees radio voice John Sterling is coming out of retirement to call the postseason for WFAN. Sterling, 86, retired in April, but he will call a few warmup games as the regular season winds down and then be in the booth for both home and road games in October, paired with his longtime radio partner, Suzyn Waldman.

After Sterling’s retirement three play-by-play announcers — Justin Shackil, Rickie Ricardo and Emmanuel Berbari — have covered Yankees games. They will step aside for the postseason games, after which Sterling will go back into retirement.

This all began being discussed a week or two ago and many people have said that the idea of Shackil, Ricardo, and Berbari being pushed aside for a Sterling victory lap was distasteful in some way. Which, yeah, I can see that. But (a) I’m sure a lot of fans will like to hear his voice again; and (b) given that how the Yankees have played in the second half, it’s not like those broadcasters are going to be pushed aside for long, right? Odds are that Sterling will be back home by the second week of October.

Yeah, about that . . .

From Bob Nightengale yesterday:

Thoughts:

• In the five starts immediately after that 149-pitch no-hitter Edwin Jackson gave up 24 runs in 23.1 innings and his team lost four of those five games;
• In 2012 Johan Santana pitched the first no-hitter in Mets history, going 134 pitches. He was shelled in his final ten starts that season and they would turn out to be the final ten starts of his career. He was completely done at 33 years old;
• In 2016 Matt Moore of the Giants tossed 133 pitches while taking a no-hitter into the ninth inning. He lost the no-no — still won the game — but his career went into a tailspin after that. It wasn’t until 2022, six years later, when he came back as an effective relief pitcher.

There a ton of examples of guys struggling for the short-term, like Edwin Jackson, after high-pressure, high-pitch-count performances. And while it’s not as common, there are at least a handful of guys who, like Santana and Moore, had their careers wrecked or at least significantly upended by overuse in one or a few games.

That doesn’t mean that stretching guys for no-nos will necessarily harm them — and it’s not 100% certain that the career hiccups noted above were caused by their no-hit bids — but I don’t see the percentage in pushing a guy past his usual limits just to get a no-hitter.

In light of that, the fact that the Arizona Diamondbacks didn’t send Zac Gallen out after he already threw 100 pitches in six innings or the Cubs didn’t stretch Shōta Imanaga for what likely would’ve been 120 pitches on Wednesday night is not something to be lamented.

First pitch disaster

Yesterday I linked out to Michael Baumann’s story about English football clubs coming to the U.S. over the summer and making appearances at baseball games. Unfortunately, those were not the only soccer-baseball crossovers of late, and one of them ended really badly:

Washington Spirit rookie midfielder Croix Bethune will miss the rest of the NWSL season after apparently suffering a knee injury while throwing the ceremonial first pitch at a Washington Nationals game last week.

The Spirit said Wednesday that Bethune, who was part of the United States Olympic team that won the gold medal in Paris last month, suffered a torn meniscus "away from training" and won't play again in 2024 while she rehabs the injury.

I watch soccer every weekend and there are at least four or five times in each match when I marvel at the things the players can do while, somehow, not injuring themselves beyond repair (though some do, of course). And then an Olympic gold medal-winning soccer players goes and tears her meniscus on a damn ceremonial pitch.

The universe is out to get us, folks. It’ll get all of us, in its own way, eventually.

No one wants this, ESPN

ESPN is going to start running A.I.-generated game stories:

ESPN has a long history of embracing and experimenting with emerging technologies, and a new initiative will mark its first experimentation with AI-generated content.

Beginning this week, ESPN plans to utilize AI technology to produce text game recap stories of select sports events, which will appear on ESPN digital platforms (ESPN.com, ESPN App). 

ESPN says that it will start with “incremental game recap stories” — whatever that means — for the Premier Lacrosse League and the National Women’s Soccer League. It says it will “extend to some other sports in the future.”

Setting aside the fact that no one was asking for this, it’s almost certainly going to be a crap product. I mean, that’s evident simply from their press release, which shows an example of this A.I. storytelling:

If you zoom in to the story, it says that the victory improved the Spirits’ record to 11-1-4. But if you look up at the top, next to the score and the team logos, it shows their record as 12-1-4. Those header records are generated from the statistical database. The body, which is the A.I.-generated content, has gotten it wrong. Good going!

As for why ESPN says it’s doing this . . .

WHY?

This innovation project was incubated through the ESPN Edge Innovation Center as an initiative that reflects ESPN’s commitment to embracing emerging technologies to drive innovation as a purposeful, responsible experimentation with AI technology.

The aim is to learn, determine how to responsibly leverage new technology, and begin to establish best practices – all while augmenting our existing coverage of select sports and allowing ESPN staff to focus on their more differentiating feature, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage.

They sure have deployed a lot of word salad in an effort to hide the fact that they want to either fire people or forego hiring people.

Maybe instead of using A.I. to write stories they should use it to edit their own press releases. Because even an A.I. editor would encourage direct, honest prose over this sort of misleading nonsense.

Other Stuff

The “Repo Man” soundtrack

The A.V. Club talks about it. And it’s always worth talking about:

As critic Sam McPheeters wrote in the essay that accompanies the 2013 Criterion Collection DVD release (Criterion released a 4K + Blu-ray edition this week), the movie is “an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science-fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens.” As for the soundtrack, it gave a lot of young outcasts some sweet music to slam-dance to back in the day.

It’s mostly about the music, which is FAN-tastic.

Now: let's go do some crimes! Like, let's go get sushi and not pay!

The MAGAchurian Candidates

As you probably saw, a federal indictment against agents working for the Russian state news agency, RT, has revealed that a number of high-profile conservative influencers in the United States took large sums of money to spread Russian propaganda in an effort to swing U.S. elections and to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. From The Guardian:

Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson published statements on Wednesday evening addressing allegations that a US content creation company they were associated with had been provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favour of Moscow’s interests and agenda, including over the war in Ukraine.

The justice department indictment does not name the company, but describes it as a Tennessee-based content creation firm with six commentators and with a website identifying itself as “a network of heterodox commentators that focus on western political and cultural issues”.

That description exactly matches Tenet Media, an online company that hosts videos made by well-known conservative influencers Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and others.

Pool, Rubin, and Johnson all claim that they had no idea that they were being paid to spread Russian propaganda. They claim that they were unwitting victims who honestly believed that a legitimate sponsor wished to pay them upwards of $400,000 a month — yes, $400,000 a month — to make a few videos for them and that there was nothing fishy going on. That, they contend, did not raise any red flags!

Which is hilarious to me on the merits because, c’mon, please. But it’s even hilarious if it is true. It means that "we are merely useful idiots who were duped— pawns, we are, pawns!" is the BEST defense they have! It’s an embarrassing defense, yes, but it’s also one that fatally undercuts their pretensions of being savvy commentators who see the world in ways THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA JUST DOESN’T UNDERSTAND, MAN.

So, were they oblivious, easily-manipulated idiots or knowing Russian assets working against American interests? It has to be one or the other, right? I’m not sure which one is better, but at least the latter embodies an ethos. The former, which they’re sticking to, is simply humiliating.

New nightmare unlocked 

That’d be the “you’re in a tunnel under a river and all of a sudden a bunch of water comes raining down on you” nightmare:

Thanks, Roberts Court!

My old client, the former Ohio Speaker of the House Larry Householder, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping orchestrate the largest corruption case in the history of the state. He is, of course, appealing his conviction. His primary argument: that politicians have a first amendment right to accept bribes.

Really, that’s his argument.

He’ll likely lose that argument, but as the Brennan Center notes in its writeup of the case, the fact that it’s even possible for his lawyers to make it without being sanctioned is a testament to how thoroughly the Roberts’ Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws via decisions in cases such as Citizens United v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC. From the Brennan Center:

This should be an easy case for the Sixth Circuit to decide. The judges should unanimously affirm Householder’s conviction and reject his warped interpretation of the First Amendment.

But courts have recently botched other cases that should have been just as easy, including the Supreme Court just a few months ago in Snyder v. United States. In that case, James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, was convicted for accepting thousands of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for steering a city contract worth $1 million to a local truck dealership. The federal law he was convicted under had long been understood to criminalize both the knowing acceptance of bribes (payments in exchange for a future decision) and gratuities (payments to reward past actions). Indeed, Snyder’s own lawyers conceded that the statute could encompass the gratuity payments he received. But the Court’s conservative majority — justices who all claim to adhere to textualism and originalism — jettisoned the plain text of the statute in favor of what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent called an “absurd and atextual reading” that the prohibition applies only to bribes, not gratuities . . .

. . . This apparent hostility toward even reasonable efforts to police corruption creates an environment that emboldens bad behavior from public officials. Decisions like Citizens United and Snyder — not to mention the Court’s shocking presidential immunity ruling — send a signal to would-be corrupt officials that they can conduct their schemes with impunity.

So no, it’s not surprising that Householder is making such an argument. His case is likely distinguishable from the decisions mentioned above, but thanks to this Supreme Court, it’s not a frivolous argument. Which is quite an indictment of this Supreme Court and the current state of campaign finance law.

Wanna be a morning person? 

I’m up most mornings between five and five-thirty without the aid of an alarm. I will use an alarm if I have an early flight or something because I’m not reckless, but most of the time I can just tell myself before I go to bed “I need to be up at five” and my body just wakes up at five. On days I consciously attempt to sleep in — like, if I tell myself tonight “you have no newsletter to publish tomorrow and nothing to do” — I may make it to 6:45, but that’s pretty rare. Apart from weird nights when circumstance or travel or something keeps me up until two or three in the morning, I have not slept past 8am in well over a year. On average I probably sleep until eight two or three times a year at the outside.

I’m just a morning person. And, what’s more, I’m one of those morning people whose natural sleep requirement seems to be six and a half hours or so, on average. I can go several nights in a row on six and not experience too many issues. It may push to seven on occasion, but only when I need to make up a multi-day sleep deficit. It’s just how I am and how I’ve been wired for around 20 years or so. Hell, given how my dad rolls — he’s up even earlier than I am almost every day and I don’t think he’s ever owned an alarm clock — and given that my daughter has increasingly skewed this way as she’s gotten older, I suspect it’s simply a genetic thing.

But it’s not all genetics! Per this BBC Science article from last month, one can make themselves into a morning person if one wishes and even if one’s genetics don’t favor it. Indeed, you can change yourself into more of a morning person than you are in as little as a few days because a lot of it is just about habits and routines and light exposure that can be shifted fairly simply and to great effect if one chooses to do so.

Also important is managing your caffeine intake, though that may vary from person to person. Indeed, in addition to being predisposed to being morning people, Calcaterras all seem to have amazingly high caffeine tolerances. Both of my parents, both of my kids, their mother, and I can drink two cups of coffee at 8pm and have no trouble going to bed at 10:30. If you’re not like that, and if you still want to be a morning person, you need to cut it off way earlier in the day than you think.

None of this is to say that you SHOULD turn into a morning person. Though I am one and I could not imagine not being one, being a morning person is not for everyone. Like, if you don’t need to and you like staying up late and if it doesn’t create problems or sleep deficits or something, keep on burning that midnight oil. The article does point out some health benefits to being a morning person, but it mostly talks about the science behind day/night schedules an how it’s relatively easy to change things if one chooses to.

And, honestly, not everyone should choose to. I say this because per the article, studies exist which suggest that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle selected for both morning people, who could get up early and get everyone on the move, AND night people, so that there could always be somebody to keep watch while others slept. The genetic thing cuts both ways, you see. Which means that if a tribe of hunter-gatherers were all wired like the Calcaterras they’d have been picked off by sabertooth tigers before the years had numbers.

Given the way the world is going I’m not 100% sure we won’t have to survive in roaming bands of subsistence-seekers, some of you had better be able to stay up late.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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