Cup of Coffee: March 20, 2025

Good morning!

In the wake of the Extra post about Jackie Robinson on Tuesday night there are a lot of new members of the newsletter community today. I wish it wasn't understandable and righteous outrage that brought you here, but that is sort of the Cup of Coffee brand, so you're among kindred spirits. Welcome!

Before we get going today I did want to let our new friends know that Cup of Coffee is a paid deal four days a week but that it's free on Thursdays. I am totally thrilled that you've decided to subscribe even on the unpaid tier, but if you like what you're seeing, consider giving a paid sub a try!

Yesterday saw the second and final game of the Tokyo series, in which Shohei Ohtani sorta hit a homer and Roki Sasaki gave us a pretty good Nuke LaLoosh impression. Also, it was brought to my attention that, not only does MLB have nothing to say about the Department of Defense trying to scrub Jackie Robinson from history, but they themselves have scrubbed the word "diversity" from the league website. We're through the damn looking glass, people.

If it wasn't for bad news there'd be no news at all, it seems, but on we trudge because trudging onward beats the alternative.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Dodgers 6, Cubs 3: The first two home runs of the 2025 baseball season were hit by Tommy Edman and Kiké Hernández. The third, a solo shot in the fifth inning from Shohei Ohtani, was a bit more expected. It was also the weakest of the three because a fan pretty clearly reached out in an effort to grab it, making contact with the ball as it was poised to hit off the fence. Shoulda been fan interference but I suppose the replay officials didn't wanna be dragged out into the streets and torn to pieces by Ohtani fans.

Not that it mattered to the outcome given how dead the Cubs looked, both on Monday and yesterday. Starter Justin Steele was lit up for five runs over four innings. The Cubs had eight hits in all, three of which came from Jon Berti. One of their runs came on a bases loaded walk from Roki Sasaki who gave up just one run and one hit while striking out three but he also gave up five free passes. More like Walki Sasaki, amitire?

[Editor: Easy, Craig. The season doesn't really start for a week and we have like seven months of this. Pace yourself].

Still, Sasaki's stuff was pretty electric, with the first six pitches of his MLB career registering at 99.5, 99.5, 100, 100.5, 99.4 and 98.9 mph. I'm not gonna get too worked up over a kid having command problems on March 19, though, even if the game is, officially speaking, part of the regular season. He left the game with a 5-1 lead but since he only made it through three innings he didn't get the decision.

Now it's back to Arizona and Florida action for a week. Yawn. Then the real regular season begins. Yay!

The Daily Briefing

MLB has scrubbed the word "diversity" from its website

Back on February 12 I wrote a bit about what I thought the new Trump Era might mean for Major League Baseball. Among the things I wrote:

What might that look like?

Jackie Robinson Day falls early in the season. In the past I've criticized the league for coopting Robinson's memory and the Negro Leagues as a whole for its own P.R. and image interests. And, no, that's not a good look. But I would not be at all surprised if, this year, MLB moves massively in the opposite direction and radically downplays its April 15th celebrations and events in the same way that all manner of government offices and even private businesses are capitulating to Donald Trump's desire to erase Black people from public life;

Billy Bean, baseball's Senior Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, died last summer. He was replaced in the role by a woman named April Brown, but Rob Manfred took some of Bean's responsibilities from her and gave them instead to Michael Hill, who is the Senrior Vice President of On-Field Operations and Workforce Development, all while making noises about enlisting former players to talk to current players who find themselves in "crisis," to use the term from an Athletic article from last fall. Given the watering down of the role it would not shock me in the least if MLB eliminates Bean's old role altogether, reassigns or fires Brown, and shutters its formal diversity efforts so as to not catch heat from Republicans. Or, more likely, in response to heat from Republicans;

To that end: Major League Baseball currently has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website. Keep it bookmarked. I would not place much money on it still existing by Opening Day, especially if some diversity-adjacent story arises in baseball during spring training. And folks, that happens most years;

I wish that wasn't as prescient as it has turned out to be.

In addition to the Jackie Robinson stuff, yesterday a reader brought it to my attention that Major League Baseball has scrubbed the word "diversity" from what was once its "Diversity and Inclusion" web page. The move was made at some point after December 14, 2024.

On the left, via the Wayback Machine, is how the page appeared in December. On the right is how it appeared as of 11AM yesterday morning:

As was the case with the Jackie Robinson erasure at the Department of Defense, I emailed Michael Teevan, Major League Baseball's Vice President of Communications for comment. It's been nearly 24 hours now and I have received no response (nor did he or anyone at MLB make a comment about the Jackie Robinson thing). I think it's safe to say that an organization whose leader plays golf with Donald Trump is not at all interested in talking about this stuff, even if he is perfectly fine with the MLB website being scrubbed in an effort to head off heat from the Trump regime. I'd be dying to know who actually ordered the scrub job. I've been out of the serious news game for a while now, but I still have a few mice at the league office. If any of them want to squeak about it in this direction your anonymity is assured.

In a couple of weeks, Major League Baseball will begin its annual fetishization/cooption of Jackie Robinson's legacy as a means of centering itself in Civil Rights history and whitewashing its segregationist past. When it does so, please remember that it has erased the word "diversity" from its website and that it remained silent as the Trump regime attempted to erase Jackie Robinson from history. And yes, I fully expect to see a lot more things along these lines in Major League Baseball in the coming weeks and months.

The Pentagon's statement on the deletion of Jackie Robinson's page

Yesterday multiple reporters sought a statement from the Department of Defense regarding the taking down of Jackie Robinson's page and the appending of "DEI" to the URL.

There were actually two statements given during the course of the day. This is what Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot sent out earlier yesterday afternoon. It was widely reported by Jeff Passan of ESPN but I had seen this statement, as it was given to another reporter at another outlet, several hours earlier, verbatim:

“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed – either deliberately or by mistake – that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”

What a snide and unapologetic reinforcement of the segregationist ideology. An ideology, of course, that led to the decision to take Robinson's page down in the first place. It contains no acknowledgment that deleting it was, specifically, a mistake.

Only a couple of hours later did the second statement come out:

"Everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson, as well as the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee airmen, the Marines at Iwo Jima and so many others - we salute them for their strong and in many cases heroic service to our country, full stop. We do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. We do so only by recognizing their patriotism and dedication to the warfighting mission like ever other American who has worn the uniform. DEI - Discriminatory Equity Ideology does the opposite. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services' core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEl content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed - either deliberately or by mistake - that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period. "

Softer, but still the same general point. And do note the whole Divides/Erodes/Interferes construction which, like the "woke cultural Marxism" stuff from the first statement, may as well have been written by snot-nosed dipshit on 8Chan. Instead, it came from a 50-something Harvard grad who has spent the last decade of his life steeped in TrumpLand.

The Jackie Robinson page was restored a little after 3PM yesterday afternoon. Major League Baseball never did make a comment on it, to me or to any other reporter. It no doubt hoped that the page would be put back up and it could thus pretend that the matter was resolved, even though absolutely nothing is really resolved in any way that matters.

In the meantime, the Trump regime remains a shitty, segregationist enterprise that is unworthy of anyone's respect or obeisance and Major League Baseball utterly lacks a spine.

MLB, NBC Sports Regionals reach a direct-streaming deal for A's, Giants, and Phillies games

Yesterday Major League Baseball and the NBC Sports Regional Networks announced an agreement via which fans of the Athletics, Giants, and Phillies can purchase a direct-streaming package for their teams' games.

It will be run through MLB.tv, there will be no local blackouts, and it will not require a cable package. The A's and Giants package will be available for a monthly cost of $19.99 and can be bundled with MLB.tv's out-of-market games for $39.99 a month. The Phillies package is $24.99 per month and can be bundled with the out-of-market package for $44.99 per month. Is it east coast bias for it to be more expensive to get Phillies games or west coast bias that the other teams are cheaper? Discuss.

I had missed this somehow, but earlier this week, MLB announced a similar agreement with Spectrum SportsNet LA for viewers in Southern California who want to watch Dodgers games. Access to Dodgers games in Los Angeles has been limited due to carriage disputes since the Dodgers got a couple billion bucks from Spectrum SportsNet in 2014.

It's taken years, and there are still a handful of clubs who are not yet on board, but we're moving slowly to a place where local blackouts are a thing of the past. At least if you pay for the privilege.

The Astros have new City Connect uniforms

With a number of the original City Connect uniform adopters ditching the Nike duds and going with their own new alternates, I was of the impression that the City Connect program was deader than vaudeville. Guess not because the Houston Astros unveiled some for 2025 yesterday:

I suppose it could be worse. The hat looks impossibly spring-training-y, but otherwise it's no worse than any other sort of alternate. Personally I think what the Astros have been wearing for the past several years is a great look, so they didn't need a refresh of any kind, but people who sell merch are gonna make new merch.

Other Stuff

There's no going back, Chuck

I promise I'll stop writing about Chuck Schumer after this post but, Jesus, this from The Guardian says it all:

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader insisted Republicans would move on from Donald Trump and go back to a past version of the party even as Trump’s return to power loomed last year, according to the authors of a new book on politics during the Biden administration . . . Schumer told Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater: “Here’s my hope … after this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.”

I suppose he thinks he raised some hell calling Trump a "turd" – and hey, not bad for a 75 year-old guy I guess – but the larger sentiment is so addled and sad that I can barely get my head around it.

There is no one who has had a more closeup view of what has happened to the political class in this country over the past decade than Chuck Schumer. He's seen how Republicans, in his very own chamber, have hijacked democracy and have pledged their fealty to Donald Trump over all things, the Constitution included. They stole a Supreme Court seat in 2016, they did everything they could to sabotage our nation's pandemic response in 2020, they joined in an attempted coup in 2021, and they have done absolutely nothing to stop Elon Musk's illegal dismantling of the federal government and Donald Trump's sharp authoritarian turn over these past two months. Hell, they haven't just done nothing. They've actively cheered it on. They're getting absolutely everything they've ever wanted precisely because of it. In light of that, what makes Chuck Schumer think that the fever is gonna break at this point? Does he believe that this is some second-rate sci-fi movie in which all of the marauding robots or monsters immediately drop dead once the mainframe or the mothership is destroyed?

But beyond that, does Schumer have an even basic concept of how history works? How societies that have moved on and recovered from authoritarians and despots have done so? Sure, that's some complicated business, but I assure him that "pretending this was just a minor blip and then everything goes back to the way it was" is not part of that process. Indeed, doing that all but ensures that authoritarianism persists. Listening to Chuck Schumer talk about how his good friends on the right will all go back to being Howard Baker and Bob Dole the minute Trump dies is like listening to Neville Chamberlain talk about how Hitler's ambitions will moderate now that he's been given the Sudetenland.

You cannot wait out tyranny. You cannot bargain with fascists and totalitarians. You must fight them and you must defeat them soundly. If you can't beat them at the ballot box you beat them with a tire iron. And then you must create conditions under which they cannot recover and return to power. There is absolutely nothing about Chuck Schumer's mindset that suggests he understands that. Which means that neither he nor anyone who agrees with him in this regard can be counted on to lead the opposition against Donald Trump.

"Emptying a bucket of sand with tweezers"

A professor CUNY history professor named Angus Johnston posted a pretty good thread over at Bluesky yesterday about the current Constitutional crisis. I think he nails it perfectly. I've pasted his handful of posts together here for readability purposes:

As always, not a lawyer, but one thing that leaps out at me about how things are going down in the courts right now is that the US court system is not designed to be responsive to a crisis like this one. A crisis like this one is not what it's FOR. Courts are designed to answer small, narrow, discrete questions. But our current crisis isn't an accumulation of small, narrow, discrete questions, and trying to get the courts to solve it is like trying to empty a bucket of sand with a pair of tweezers.

The constitution has a system in place for a crisis like this, and that system is impeachment and removal from office. That's the mechanism by which this kind of a crisis is supposed to be resolved. Removing that mechanism—as Republican congressional majorities have made it clear that there is literally nothing this administration could do that would make them even contemplate impeachment—is the equivalent of cutting a car's brake lines.

You might be able to stop such a car, there are things you can do to try to stop such a car, but the way you're supposed to stop the car—the mechanism in the car that stops it when it needs to stop—no longer exists. And so every time a federal judge acts in a way that seems weird or unsuited to the moment, the first thing I try to remember is that they're being asked to empty a bucket of sand with a pair of tweezers.

I think this is absolutely right.

A critical part of American jurisprudence is that the matters to be adjudicated need to be narrow and the need to be precise. You don't throw everything but the kitchen sink in complaints. You present discrete disputes to the tribunal, not a laundry list of broad-based beefs. The system does not handle the latter very well for a host of reasons that, while a bit cumbersome to detail here, is something lawyers and judges know very well.

There has been very little focus on Republicans in Congress right now. Some of them are getting heat at town halls back home, but none of the commentary or general outrage, certainly at the national level, is really aimed at them. They no doubt love that fact, of course, because they all know that (a) everything that's happening right now is illegal as all get-out; (b) it is their job, pursuant to the Constitution, to put a stop to it; but (c) they have absolutely no desire to do that because they consider the people and institutions that are being harmed their enemy and those who are benefitting from this chaos their friends. And that's before you get to the part about how they're all cowards and are afraid to upset Trump.

I hope we'll eventually find our way out of this crisis, but no matter how that plays out, one thing is absolutely certain: Trump has been able to assume and exercise dictatorial powers because the Republican-controlled Congress has allowed him to do so.

Columboxd

Someone pointed this out to me the other day and I totally forgot about it. But better late than never!

A guy named Jeff Greco has launched a fun little website. It's called "Columboxd." Based on the name you've probably guessed that it's like Letterboxd, which is the social cataloging service for movies, where members can rate, review, and recommend films, keep track of which ones they have seen and all of that. Except instead of movies it's for "Columbo" episodes:

It's been a couple of years since my peak "Columbo" posting era, but I still go back and rewatch an episode now and again. Might be a fun site to check out.

All I wanted was a Pepsi . . .

From CNBC:

Setting aside the fact that almost nothing that gets referred to as "AI" in stories like these are actually artificial intelligence as opposed to automation, I'm struggling to think of any enterprise less in need of it than Taco Bell.

Taco Bell is a place where drunk people go to order food from stoned kitchen workers. All of that food is comprised of the same seven ingredients. It's glorious. Indeed, it's one of the few things in this society that works perfectly and as intended and for which no further innovation is necessary, required, or welcome.

For reasons I'm not even clear about I'm re-watching "Succession" right now, and I "adding AI to Taco Bell" is the sort of shit that Kendall Roy would come up with while totally coked out and desperate to "move the needle." The only proper response to that is to pretend to be Logan Roy for one lucid moment and to shout "fuck off.'

Have a great day everyone.