Cup of Coffee: December 5, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

For those of you with free subscriptions visiting today, know that I have a sale going with 20% off annual subscriptions. Act now!

Existing subscribers will tell ya: the non-Thursday newsletters are just as good as the free ones. As Earl Weaver once said: "This ain't a football game. We do this every day."

A lot of people know that quote, but they don't know that Weaver didn't say it as a brag about how hard ballplayers work. He was talking to Washington Post reporter Thomas Boswell, who had lost track of time and realized that he was still asking questions of Weaver when the National Anthem started before a game. Boswell tried to apologize but Weaver told Boswell not to worry, with that quote being more of a "today's Anthem doesn't matter; it's not special when it happens 180 times a year" kind of thing. Immediately after that Weaver said "The horseshit cameras are always trying to catch me smoking during the anthem." Earl Weaver was the best.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the newsletter! Let's go!

The Daily Briefing

South Korean second baseman posted

It was an exceedingly slow baseball news day yesterday, so we lead with something I'd never otherwise lead with: South Korean second baseman Hyeseong Kim has been posted. The window for him to sign runs from 8AM today through 5PM on January 3.

Kim, who turns 26 on Jan. 27, has played eight seasons in South Korea, the last six with the Kiwoom Heroes. He's been an All-Star with a career .304 average with 37 homers and 386 RBI and 211 stolen bases in 953 games.

He has decent on-base ability but very little pop. Add in the fact that the KBO is a pretty inflated offensive environment and it's hard to see Kim doing a ton of damage in the bigs, but he could be a useful player if he's a strong defender. Which I've read people saying that he is. He used to be double play partners with the Padres' Ha-Seong Kim and, while we should always be wary of comps, especially the often lazy ones applied to players of the same ethnicity, I've read others describing him as a similarly strong defender but not as good a hitter. So, again, useful, even if he's not likely to be a star here.

Anyway, Kim has enough service time to where he can sign for anything without being limited by the international signing cap, but I don't think he'll break anyone's bank regardless.

Lance Lynn is in the Best Shape of His Life

I don't keep close tabs on Best Shape of His Life guys anymore – like my Handsome Managers lists, the bit got played out some time ago – but on a slow news day I think it's worth noting one, especially this early in the offseason. From Rosenthal, whose awareness of the BSOHL trope further underscores why I don't talk about it too much anymore:

It’s a little early for “best shape of my life” stories. But it’s getting late in Lance Lynn’s career. Frustrated by knee trouble that last season limited him to 117 1/3 innings, his lowest total for a full campaign excluding the 2016 season he missed while recovering from Tommy John surgery, Lynn adjusted his training regimen. In a phone interview Wednesday, the 6-foot-5 right-hander said he has lost 20 pounds, dropping from 280 to 260.

Lynn is 37 now, and is a free agent after his $11 million team option for 2025 was declined by the Cardinals. That came after he was limited to just 23 starts last year, finishing with a 3.84 ERA (109 ERA+) and a 109/44 K/BB ratio across 117.1 innings. The rate stats were actually a bit of an improvement over his previous two seasons but the lack of durability was concerning.

Still, Lynn should be able to latch on as a back-of-the-rotation innings-eater. And if people truly are impressed by his slimmer waistline, he might make a decent salary to boot.

Other Stuff

The Supreme Court is poised to institutionalize anti-trans discrimination

Yesterday arguments took place before the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Skrmetti. It's a constitutional challenge, brought by the Biden Administration, against Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors.

Skrmetti is an Equal Protection case in that the law, as it exists on Tennessee's books, allows the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors who, say, experience early-onset puberty or who have delayed puberty, but bans the very same drugs and treatments when used for gender-affirming care. To put it flippantly but 100% accurately: under the law parents can seek hormone treatment for their 13 year-old son who has developed late because they want him to be better at football, or puberty blockers for their tween daughter because they'd like her to be a top-flight gymnast, but a parent cannot seek the same therapies for their trans sons or daughters who seek to transition from their birth-assigned gender to the gender by which they want to be and feel it necessary and appropriate to be known. Two different people, two different treatments under the law: a classic Equal Protection setup.

As is the case with all Equal Protection cases, when courts examine whether a given law violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, they have to decide what level of scrutiny/deference to give the law. There are three broad categories:

• Strict Scrutiny: laws that discriminate between people on the basis of race, national origin, and religion – or laws which impinge on a "fundamental right" such as the right to get married – are almost never legal. Under strict scrutiny the government defending the law must prove that there is a "compelling state interest" for the discrimination and that the law is "narrowly tailored" to serve that interest. In practice almost no discriminatory law passes strict scrutiny;
• Intermediate Scrutiny: This test, first recognized in the 1970s, is generally used for cases in which laws discriminate on the basis of gender or sexual orientation. In these cases the government defending the law must prove that the law serves "an important government objective" and that the law is "substantially related" to achieving the objective.
• Rational Basis Review: This is the lowest form of scrutiny, and usually applies to cases dealing with financial laws, various regulations, age discrimination and stuff like that. Under the Rational Basis test the burden is not on the government which propagated the law to show that it was rational. Rather, the person challenging the law must prove that the government has "no legitimate interest" in the law or the policy it is advancing or that there is "no reasonable, rational link" between that interest and the challenged law. Under the Rational Basis test the government is given great deference. Indeed, they need not even state what the rational basis is. A judge looking at the case can simply decide, yeah, they can see a reason for it, and the law will usually be upheld.

Every single trial court that has ever taken up cases involving laws or regulations which impact transgender rights in general or transgender medical care specifically has held that intermediate scrutiny is appropriate. This makes perfect sense given that (a) it deals with sex/gender; and (b) it impacts vulnerable and politically disenfranchised people. In such cases courts have ALWAYS required the government to prove that the discriminatory law serves an important governmental objective. And the government usually cannot meet that burden.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, decided that Tennessee's law should be subject to the Rational Basis standard. What's more, the Sixth Circuit bought Tennessee's argument that the state has rational reasons to "protect" kids from what they claim to be irreversible medical decisions about their bodies they may later come to regret. It's a frankly insane contention and holding, of course. Mostly because it utterly fails to explain why discrimination against trans people should not be held to a higher standard (though I'll talk more about that below). It's also insane on the merits given that (a) the care at issue – which, it should be noted, does NOT include surgery – is basically all reversible; and (b) parents of non-trans minors are freely able to obtain identical care for their kids as well as care that truly IS non-reversible such as breast implants or cosmetic surgery. The Sixth Circuit likewise completely ignored the medically-documented risk to trans kids who do not receive gender-affirming care, including a significantly increased risk of suicide and serious mental illness.

So that's where things stood when the United States and the State of Tennessee walked into the Supreme Court yesterday. And, not surprisingly, everything that was said from the bench strongly suggests that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court will say that the Tennessee law is not subject to heightened scrutiny, that the state can do what it wants, and that trans kids and their families are screwed.

There are a lot of places you can go for the play-by-play of yesterday's oral argument, but there were a great deal of comments from the bench which made it pretty clear that the Republican Justices will grab on to whatever they can to rule in favor of Tennessee. I listened to the arguments and wrote up something of a live blog of the most significant moments:

• Justice Thomas claimed that it was an age-based ban, not a gender-based ban, because adults can still get these treatments. Never mind that most of these treatments are specifically aimed at minors. Adults don't go through puberty, for example, so a ban on puberty-blockers doesn't apply to adults. He knows better, but he doesn't care. Thomas 100% decided to rule in favor of any anti-trans law that came before the Court the moment he first contemplated the existence of anti-trans laws.
• Justice Alito talked about how European governments have cracked down on gender-affirming care so why not us? I'll note that this is a position he would never, ever take with respect to any other law. If you doubt that, imagine him saying such a thing about gun laws. Either way, it's pretty telling that he's looking for a way to analyze this case without reference to the actual U.S. Constitution because if he did that he'd be compelled to rule against Tennessee. Not that I don't think he'd find a way around doing so regardless.
• Justice Kavanaugh mused that maybe it would be best to leave medical questions to the "democratic process." That's cute, but this case is about discrimination first and foremost and the entire POINT of the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection clause is to protect people against whom the democratic process has discriminated. The Jim Crow laws were passed via the democratic process, after all.
• Kavanaugh also tried – as all of the Republicans who ran anti-trans campaigns this past year tried – to make this about youth sports. This law and this case, of course, have nothing to do with youth sports. The politicians did that because the fantastical idea of big strong trans women dominating young boys in sports sparked a visceral reaction in people and that that reaction could be exploited politically. Kavanaugh was clearly doing the same thing in an effort to persuade Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, who some believe might waver here and side with the United States, to join in with the bigots like Alito, Roberts, and Thomas. It also pretty squarely puts Kavanaugh in the bigot camp himself.
• Barrett, for her part, seemed to pretend in her questioning that tans people either don't exist as a class of people or that they do and they've never been discriminated against in any way and thus aren't owed any sort of legal protection. I wish I was making that up, but that's essentially what she said. She also, like Kavanaugh did before, tried to make this a case about determining what is and what is not good medicine as opposed to a case about whether a state has the right to enact discriminatory laws.
• Justice Alito – a proud bigot – suggested that being trans is not an "immutable" thing. That word and that argument is key, because a core basis for heightened scrutiny of discriminatory laws is that the targets of discrimination cannot change who and what they are whereas people subject to a discriminatory financial regulation, for example can just change their habits. It's painfully obvious that Alito, like most homophobes and anti-trans bigots, believe – or want you to believe that they believe – that what's in question is a "lifestyle" or a "trend" or something as opposed to someone's very being. Once you get people to believe that, any and all discrimination and even persecution is allowable. It's what inspires literal Nazis to stand on the steps of the Supreme Court and say that Republicans will not stop until "trans ideology is entirely erased from the Earth." They'll claim that they're merely going after choices when, in reality, they're going after people. It's genocide masquerading as policy differences.
• It's worth noting at this point that Matt Rice, the Tennessee state Solicitor General who made the argument for the anti-trans side, was the 9th round draft pick of the Tampa Bay Rays in 2011. He played two seasons in A-ball. He had pretty good numbers even if he was old for the league. Nevertheless, he decided to quit and go to law school at Berkeley. Now here he is arguing in favor of a law that, if allowed to go into effect, will harm and possibly kill trans kids. You can't predict baseball, Suzyn.
• Rice spent a lot of time getting his ass handed to him by the liberal justices. Mostly because he made arguments like "there is no fundamental right not to conform," again, casting trans people as mere quirky non-conformists, caught up in trends, as opposed to human beings. Also: it's a hell of a thing to hear a conservative lawyer argue that the government can, if it wants to, pass laws requiring that individuals conform to the state's expectations. Thank God Joe Strummer is already dead because a shot to the nose that direct would likely have killed him. In any event, even if I didn't know it already, disdain of nonconformity would have totally outed Rice as a ballplayer. Christ, those guys can be the worst sometimes.
• Rice tried to get on firmer ground by arguing that, actually, this law is non-discriminatory because it applies to both boys and girls. As Justice Jackson noted, that was the same argument that bigots made when trying to defend laws outlawing segregation or interracial marriage. "Blacks can't use this water fountain, but whites can't use that water fountain, so it's fair!" "Neither Blacks NOR whites can marry outside of their gender so it's fair!" By the time this term is up that absolutely disgusting and disingenuous argument will have a roughly .667 batting average. America, man.
• By the same token, Kavanaugh jumped in to say that this, actually, should just be a states rights issue, ignoring the fact that the Equal Protection Clause and the 14th Amendment as a whole were enacted because "states rights" gave us slavery and the Civil War, followed by a century of Jim Crow laws before the federal government began taking Equal Protection seriously. In case you want to know which decade and/or century to which Republicans wish to usher us back.

And that was basically that. If I had to guess, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett will absolutely rule in favor of Tennessee, which is enough to uphold the anti-trans law. Gorsuch, who has been a bit unpredictable at times in these sorts of cases, said almost nothing in the entire argument. I'm guessing that just means that he wants to agree with the majority in the outcome but didn't want to embarrass himself with questions or arguments which he knew to be specious. So call it 6-3, with 5-4 being the absolute best case scenario.

Not that I'll feel clever for properly handicapping any of this. Because make no mistake: that will be a dreadful outcome. It will essentially legalize any and all forms of anti-trans discrimination. Armed with a ruling that says anti-trans laws are not subject to any more scrutiny than a farm regulation, Republican-controlled states and municipalities will race to enact the most draconian measures imaginable. Partially because they think it's good politics to do so, partially because they well and truly hate trans people and want to see them suffer.

Not that this should be any surprise. We just got done with an election cycle – really a couple of election cycles if you go back to the 2022 midterms – in which Republicans demonized trans people in the worst possible ways. They cast them as monsters and predators. As sub-human, even, using the most depraved rhetoric imaginable. They unashamedly promised to persecute trans people and laws like Tennessee's were specifically enacted to achieve that very end. I mean, they could ONLY serve a hateful political end because, otherwise, what parents, their children, and their doctors decide to do with their lives affects no one else and is none of anyone else's business.

Based on what I heard yesterday, the Supreme Court has pretty clearly chosen to pretend that none of that has happened. They have chosen to pretend that Tennessee and the two dozen other states which have passed anti-trans laws have done so out of some benign impulse to protect children or to reasonably regulate medical services. It's total horseshit, obviously. The current Supreme Court majority has, time and again, shown that it considers itself to be the enforcement arm of the Republican Party and its political agenda, and with the ruling it will almost certainly issue in United States v. Skrmetti, it will enshrine discrimination against trans people in the Constitution for decades if not forever. Trans people will, inevitably, become even bigger targets for hateful bigots than they already are.

People will die as a result of this decision. Kids will die. Their blood will be on the hands of the Justices who rule in Tennessee's favor and every single person who has participated in and enabled the rise in anti-trans sentiment over the past several years.

The Premier League is showing some pretty damn ugly colors

During last weekend's and this week's matches – covering match weeks 13 and 14 of the schedule – the English Premier League partnered with LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall to promote acceptance of LGBTQ+ soccer players and LGBTQ+ fans. They've been doing this for over a decade. But two incidents which went down over the past week have put the league and some of its players in a pretty ugly light.

First off: during this campaign club captains are given the option to wear a rainbow-colored armband. They are free to decline to wear it, actually, so it's a bare minimum sort of gesture. Crystal Palace's captain Marc Guéhi chose to wear it but decided to deface it during two matches by writing "I [heart symbol] Jesus" on it last weekend and "Jesus [heart symbol] You" on Tuesday.

While Guéhi deflected questions about his intent, claiming he was just being "inclusive," the media caught up with his father, who is a pastor and who describes both himself and his son as "devout Christians" for further comment. His father said that his son was trying to "balance" the league's pro-LGBTQ+ messaging and that he felt that the LGBTQ+ community is "trying to impose on what others believe in." He added that his son was essentially saying "You gave me the armband, as a Christian I don't believe in your cause, but I will put it on."

Even if his father hadn't given the whole game away [query: what is one saying, by definition, if one is trying to "balance" pro-LGBTQ+ messaging?] anyone but the most blithering idiot or committed bigot knows damn well that Guéhi was trying to undermine a pro-LGBT message. Sadly the league, which has a rule against players writing political or religious messages on their uniform or on their person for games, decided to merely warn Guéhi after the first game and then do nothing when he did it again despite the warning. They obviously have no problem with overt bigtory.

Meanwhile, up north, Manchester United planned to walk out onto the pitch for their match against Everton on Sunday wearing Adidas jackets with pro-LGBTQ+ messaging on it. However one of their players –  Noussair Mazraoui – refused to wear the jacket, citing religious concerns. In what can only be called perverse solidarity, the rest of the Manchester United squad abandoned the plan to wear the jackets because they did not want Mazraoui to be seen as the only one to refuse. Which is to say: supporting their bigoted teammate was more important to them than showing the most basic form of support for gay athletes and gay soccer fans.

All of this puts me in mind of the NHL choosing to cease all LGBTQ+ outreach gestures – even banning them – because a handful of bigoted players refused to wear rainbow warmup gear. Or the Tampa Bay Rays allowing players to deface their actual game uniforms during the team's PRIDE night in ways they'd never let them deface their uniforms in any other way, all in the name of the players' "faith."

There will always be bigots in professional sports. They are who they are and there's not a hell of a lot we can do about it. But to see professional sports leagues, teams, and players protect and even support such bigotry is shameful and it makes it patently obvious that their official gestures of inclusion and outreach are completely hollow acts of P.R. and nothing more.

In lighter news . . .

That was a lot of heavy Other Stuff today. It happens. So let's cleanse the palate shall we?

The Minnesota-born Mexican restaurant chain CHI-CHI's is making a comeback 20 years after ending its "celebration of food." CHI-CHI's announced on Wednesday that a new agreement has been reached with Minnesota's Hormel Foods, which has owned the restaurant's trademarks since 1987. The deal gives Michael McDermott, the son of CHI-CHI's co-founder Marno McDermott, use of the restaurant name on physical locations set to open in 2025.

OK, maybe "CHI-CHI's," "lighter," and "cleansed palate" are not notions which go together.

But for people of a certain age who didn't live in real cities, CHI-CHI's was the first non-Taco Bell Mexican food we ever had. Sure, Taco Bell is actually much better than CHI-CHI's was and stands a WAY lower chance of killing multiple peole with hepatitis A, but these are trying times and in trying times nostalgia, if not overdone, can provide a warming glow. So don't harsh my buzz, OK?

Holy crap. That was a commercial in which they paid professionals to make the food look good and it still looks horrible. I spend a lot of time thinking about how everything has gone to hell over the past 40 years, but we have definitely improved the food situation, so this has been a good reality check. Progress is possible, even in an otherwise dark age.

OK, I'm gonna go take some Pepto. The rest of you talk amongst yourselves.

And have a great day, everyone.