Cup of Coffee: February 20, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

You know what America doesn't have, by definition? Kings. When here someone claims to be one, I believe that calls for a response of some kind. But don't mind me, just thinkin' out loud.

Let's get at 'er.

The Daily Briefing

Alex Bregman doesn't care where he plays

On Monday Rafael Devers made a big point to say that he's going to be the Red Sox third baseman no matter what the team thinks and no matter who the team has brought in. While neither Alex Cora nor the front office has either confirmed or contradicted that state of affairs yet, the guy who most of us would probably put at third base if we ran the Red Sox, Alex Bregman, is taking the high road. Here's what he said to reporters on Tuesday:

"I'm super excited to just be [Devers'] teammate. He's a great player. I think everybody in this clubhouse is worried about winning, and whatever it takes to help the team win – that's all I'm focused on. I'll play wherever [Cora] tells me to play."

Part of that is no doubt inspired by Bregman wanting to help ratchet-back drama. Part of it is also likely a function of Bregman having an opt-out after 2025 which, if he has a big season, he'll exercise, making Boston's third base situation someone else's problem. And if he does opt out, being seen as a super flexible team player would help a new free agent case next year. So too would showing teams he can play other positions.

So yeah, I think Bregman is playing it right.

Tony Clark criticizes Rob Manfred for injecting "negativity into the conversation"

Last month Rob Manfred said that he thinks an offseason lockout following the expiration of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement could be a good thing. A "positive" he said, in that it creates leverage and urgency. Only a hardened labor lawyer who has never seemed to care about actual baseball games being played could believe such a thing, but that's Rob Manfred for ya.

Yesterday MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark, conducting his annual tour of spring training camps, took a swipe at such thinking. Via Bob Nightengale of USA Today:

“When the commissioner suggests openly that the expectation is a work stoppage and that a lockout is the new norm or should be considered as much, that's going to lend itself to some conversation even though we're a year and a half, two years away from the expiration of the agreement. We'll continue to talk about it openly too. It'll be in an environment where the game seems to be moving forward positively, while the other side keeps interjecting negativity into the conversation. But we'll navigate it accordingly."

We're still nearly two years away from the expiration of the CBA, but nothing anyone has said so far suggests that this round will be any less acrimonious than the last one, which led to an extended spring training lockout.

The RoboUmp may cause broadcasters to eliminate the digital strike zone

Starting today Major League Baseball will be experimenting with the Automatic Balls and Strikes Challenge System, which is referred to as "ABS" but which most folks have taken to calling the RoboUmp. It'll just be a spring training experiment at the major league level this year.

If you’re not familiar, under the RoboUmp version with which MLB has been experimenting, balls and strikes are called as usual by the home plate umpire but every pitch is monitored by cameras and stuff. During the game players can challenge pitch calls. And, yes, it has to be players. Either the pitcher, the batter, or the catcher. They can't get help from the dugout or anyone sitting in front of a video monitor. Teams get three challenges a game but they retain challenges in cases when they are proved correct. If they are wrong the challenge is burned.

The RoboUmp system has been in use at Triple-A for the past couple of years and I've been to multiple games in which it was employed over that time. For what it’s worth the challenge happens pretty fast. Just as the ball gets back to the pitcher the P.A. guy announces that the call is being challenged, the review is made and then the P.A. guy announces whether or not the call is upheld or overturned and play resumes. The whole thing takes mere seconds. It's not at all distracting. Rather, it's just a momentary interruption of flow that takes less time than it used to take for a batter to step out and adjust his gloves in the pre-pitch clock era.

My guess is that the system will be in place for big league games as soon as next year. If it may lead to one noticeable difference in the way you view games, at least on TV: it will likely cause the on-screen strike zone to disappear. From Evan Drellich of The Athletic:

The league fears the digital box hovering over home plate showing viewers an approximation of the strike zone could interfere with ABS’ effectiveness . . . “The strike-zone box that we display on broadcasts and our app probably is inconsistent with the way we currently do it with the challenge system,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president for baseball operations, at a press conference Tuesday. “You take a lot of the drama and excitement out of it if the fan can see up front that that pitch was a strike. It sort of obviates the need for the challenge.

“Then there’s a secondary issue, which is cheating. There are monitors, big-screen televisions all over our ballparks that display the feed of the game. And it wouldn’t be that hard if this box was up there for fans or anybody to yell to the players, right? That’s not what we want, either.”

I find the first justification odd in that correcting bad ball/strike calls are, above all else, a a benefit for the players in the game who are being boned by the human ump, not a matter of fan entertainment. Indeed, I can't see how the fans knowing, thanks to the strike zone box, that a pitch call is bad before it's corrected is any different from them seeing replays on the screen before a tag down at second base can be reviewed. Of course, this is an MLB executive arguing for that and MLB executives are notorious for not understanding what fans actually care about.

The second justification – tipping off players to challenge – is perhaps a bit more legitimate, but it's not like fans aren't yelling about calls all the time anyway, even if they can't see a TV monitor from their seats. Hell, dudes 400 feet away in outfield bleachers complain and moan about calls they obviously can't fairly judge with their own eyes, so I'm not sure how more informed moaning is gonna alter anything.

Not that I really care about this. To be honest, I don't much care for the K-zone graphics so I'll be happy if they're gone even if it's for a rather dumb reason.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

As reputable economists have repeatedly explained, big sporting events like the Super Bowl, NCAA championships, Formula One races, and stuff like that are not, actually, economic boons for a city or a region. Yes, you can point to many specific entities which do benefit – typically businesses which are well-connected with the organizers of the event – but overall the story is one of economic displacement. For every image you see of a jam-packed ESPN-themed sports bar or a congested main drag in the tourist-friendly parts of town, there are many more local businesspeople who suffer because customers avoid the area due to the crowds and traffic and jacked up prices and stuff.

That goes for the Super Bowl which just went down in New Orleans. From the New Orleans publication Gambit:

. . . for many businesses and workers across the city, hosting the game was anything but the financial windfall promised by the city and economic development group GNO, Inc. In more than a dozen interviews, Gambit found that a far grimmer picture appears for many small business owners, musicians, artists, tour guides and others.

For those who didn't have access to levers of power, didn't sign a legally binding buy-out contract with a corporate sponsor or just didn't luck out otherwise, the Super Bowl was a dud.

“They sold that [promise] to all of us, with all of the construction going on. It's been a nightmare in the [French] Quarter owning a business here ... for months,” said Remy Diamond, owner of C’Mere on Chartres Street.

Instead of a financial windfall, her shop — which sells locally made art, jewelry and other products — ended up losing thousands of dollars, she said.

The NFL and its partners make big money on the Super Bowl. For most people, however, it's a giant pain in the ass which actually costs them money. The same goes for basically every other sports-related event and development. It's been proven over and over again. It's the case even if sports and entertainment executives, bought-and-paid-for public officials, and incurious and compliant media outlets tell you otherwise.

Barry Bonds: Strava legend

SFgate.com writes about Barry Bonds, who is still breaking athletic records. Primarily for cycling, as logged on his Strava account, of which he was an extremely early adopter and for which he is at the absolute bleeding edge of users:

. . . the statistics on his account over that time are nearly as mind-bending as some of his on-field accomplishments in baseball. Since he began tracking his bike rides on Strava in 2010, Bonds has spent more than 150 days cycling and has covered enough mileage to circle the world twice — and still have more than 3,700 miles extra . . . When Bonds was 53, he covered a popular 0.27-mile stretch of road in Mill Valley in just 31 seconds, tying the fastest time recorded out of more than 120,000 attempts by 22,000-plus people. A 58-year-old Bonds posted the sixth-fastest time for a 0.68-mile stretch along Shoreline Highway in Tamalpais Valley, a ride that’s been attempted nearly 400,000 times.

And six weeks after he turned 59, Bonds posted the fastest time ever on a 0.65-mile portion of Mill Valley’s Blithedale Avenue that starts from Highway 101 and ends just short of Camino Alto, covering it in 69 seconds. He’s since been passed for the top spot by two seconds but remains in second place out of more than 80,000 attempts.

As the Bay Area friend of mine who hipped me to this article said via text, "What I find extra impressive here is that those [Marin County, California] roads are a honeypot for pro cyclists. So getting up into the best time ever means he’s beating pros."

The PED stuff which dominated the latter part of Bonds' baseball career meant a lot of things for his legacy, but one low key thing it did was to obscure the fact that there was never a more psychotic worker in the game than Barry Bonds, be it with respect to workouts, studying film or whatever. For both bad and good he never did ANYTHING less than 150%, and that seems to apply to his retirement as well.

Other Stuff

American Democracy: 1776-2025

The official White House account posted this yesterday:

They'll say they're joking, perhaps, or say that this is just some shitposting to trigger the libs or whatever. But given how Trump and his people have aggressively dismantled the rule of law and constitutional order and have ignored every written and implied limit on executive power since taking office – all of which has come after the Supreme Court gave him basically limitless immunity from legal scrutiny – what functional difference does it make?

The answer is that there is no difference. That becomes abundantly clear when you realize that every single thing he has ever done – every outrage, every transgression – comes back to this. If you have ever wondered why Donald Trump has ignored laws, bucked oversight, denied the legitimacy of election results, or anything else, it's because he believes he is above the law. Because he believes he is a dictator. Or a king. It also explains why the only foreign leaders he admires are themselves dictators who, for all practical purposes, rule as kings.

Donald Trump has declared himself king in both word and deed and both he and every elected Republican is proceeding as if it were fact. Which, in practical reality, means that it is fact and that we do indeed have a king. This despite the fact that the very foundation of our country is based on the rejection of kings and the supremacy of the law.

The question now is what will anyone do about it? How will we resolve the intractable conflict between the laws of the United States and the behavior of its chief executive? Because only one of 'em can win. We will either have a democracy going forward or we will have Donald Trump in charge. We cannot have both.

Anduril update

Yesterday I wrote about the weapons manufacturer Anduril, which plans to build a new plant in Columbus thanks to the state of Ohio giving it over half a billion dollars in taxpayer money as a gift. Then, later yesterday morning, one of you alerted me to this tweet from the company's official account which had been up for hours and hours at that point:

My big issue with them in yesterday's post was the fact that the company's founder, Palmer Luckey, was sharing racist Great Replacement Theory content on his social media accounts. But folks, I'm probably even more concerned that a company that makes autonomous weapons systems like drones can get its Twitter account hacked so easily and that they can't figure out what to do about it for like a day.

Anyway, right now I'm putting the odds of Anduril actually building a plant in Columbus at like 15%.

Air Force One update

A few weeks ago I wrote about how it has taken Boeing a long time to deliver the new Air Force One 747s that Trump had commissioned during his first term. Yesterday the New York Times published a story about that, characterizing Trump, as "furious" about delays and reporting that he has empowered Elon Musk to explore "drastic options" to prod Boeing to move faster ("The president has told associates that if Mr. Musk can fly a rocket, he can probably figure out an airplane"). That includes relaxing security clearance standards for the people who work on the presidential planes.

You all know my political leanings here, but even I have to acknowledge when President Trump is right about something. And folks, he's right about this. Boeing must deliver these jets with great haste! I thus offer my full-throated endorsement of the relaxation of whatever safety and security concerns typically apply to the delivery of aircraft and heartily agree with the idea of putting the man behind the safety and performance record of Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets in charge of President Trump's planes. God bless America.

The racist ICE prosecutor

The Texas Observer released a bombshell report yesterday. It identified the operator of an overtly racist Twitter account, "GlomarResponder," as belonging to ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden. Rodden's job is to represent ICE in immigration court hearings.

The account, which was first created in 2012, has spent the last 13 years posting hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. Stuff like “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us," which was posted just last month. Last August the account posted "Migrants are all criminals" and “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Last March it posted, “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders. Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” He has also said “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also, in response to someone calling him a "commie" said “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist. Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

The Texas Observer figured out that the account belonged to Rodden based on an overwhelming number of biographical details from the account which matched publicly available documents and Rodden's other social media activity. Most damningly, they figured it out simply by watching Rodden during a January courtroom appearance:

During the January court hearing the Observer attended, Rodden repeatedly used his phone at moments that corresponded to times GlomarResponder made posts. At the February hearing, the Observer saw Rodden scrolling through the X app on his phone and drafting a post at 1:14 p.m. The profile photo that appeared while Rodden drafted the post resembled that of GlomarResponder, which posted at 1:15pm.

There are way more specific details mentioned in the article matching the racist account and Rodden. It's unequivocally the same guy. Like, there is zero room for doubt.

Rodden is admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia. That bar, like every other bar in the country, has strict and clear ethical rules which prohibit any and all conduct which is prejudicial to the administration of justice. I think it goes without saying that a government immigration lawyer's repeated demonstration of virulent racism, with constant specific mention of how those subject to the cases he brings are subhuman and should be subjected to violence, stands in violation of those rules.

James Rodden should be disbarred. The proceedings to do so should begin immediately. There is absolutely no excuse for doing otherwise. To help things along I submitted a disciplinary complaint against him with the bar for the District of Columbia yesterday afternoon. I'm sure others have as well. At the very least it made me feel good to do so.

Is that what this is?

There was a story in the Washington Post yesterday about how Republicans, while fully backing Donald Trump and Elon Musk's illegal usurpation of Congress' spending power, are privately lobbying for their own preferred programs to be spared from defunding. In the course of the story the reporter, Liz Goodwin, writes this:

Trump campaigned on overturning traditional limits on his ability to cancel funding appropriated by Congress, saying he should be able to use a technique called “impoundment” to reduce or eliminate spending.

Using the phrase "overturning traditional limits" to describe what is, by definition, a violation of both Article 1 of the Constitution and the Impoundment Act of 1974 – and which represents an abuse of power that, at any time before 2017, would've immediately led to a president's impeachment and removal – is definitely a choice. A choice made to empower a man who believes he is America's king. It is a choice made for the express purpose of deceiving the American people as to what is actually being done to their country right now.

Ask yourself: would a reporter refer to a statute outlawing capital murder as "a traditional limit on one's ability to coerce another?" Would they refer to laws and regulations keeping poison out of drinking water as "a traditional limits on chemical companies' ability to dispose of toxic waste?" Of course they wouldn't. So the fact that they're doing it here is extraordinarily telling.

I'm sick of this shit, y'all.

Have a great day everyone.