Cup of Coffee: November 20, 2024

Good morning!

Today we have Managers of the Year, a delay and a temper tantrum in the Rays stadium mishegoss, Rob Manfred’s Project 2028 is now out there, qualifying offer decisions, and a trade.

In Other Stuff we have some people who are going to Hell, a master-class in cowering before tyrants, the most insane element among us, and how we may have killed life on Mars. Great going, humanity!

The Daily Briefing

Stephen Vogt, Pat Murphy named Managers of the Year

The second day of BBWAA Awards announcements came yesterday and it was Manager of the Year time. The winners were both rookie skippers: Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians and Pat Murphy of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Vogt, who got 27 of 30 first-place votes, beat out fellow Central Division managers Matt Quatraro of the Royals and A.J. Hinch of the Tigers. He led Cleveland to a 92-69 record and its second division title in the last three years. He did this despite a spate of injuries to the starting rotation and pretty damn perfect management of Cleveland’s excellent bullpen. His win may be most notable for upsetting the usual pattern of the manager who best exceeded preseason expectations winning, which was probably Quatraro. The Guardians were supposed to be pretty good. The Royals were not. Still, Vogt did a fine job filling Terry Francona’s big shoes and the voters were close to unanimous in giving him the nod.

Pat Murphy also earned 27 first place votes, beating out Mets manager Carlos Mendoza and Padres manager Mike Shildt for the honors. Murphy took over for Craig Counsell when Counsell left to join the Chicago Cubs. And he did a fine job of it, guiding the Brewers to a 93-69 record and their second consecutive NL Central title. Like Vogt, Murphy’s victory was not really born of some sort of massive beating of expectations. The Mets’ Mendoza would’ve been that pick, I suppose. Murphy took a solid club, did what was necessary to deal with injuries and setbacks on the fly, and provided a steadying hand on the tiller.

Pinellas County Commission delays stadium bond vote, Rays issue a temper tantrum of a letter

Yesterday the Pinellas County Commission met for the first time since the election seated a couple of Commissioners who are hostile to the stadium deal the previous iteration of the Commission struck with the Tampa Bay Rays. There was a vote scheduled for today about whether to approve selling the $312.5 million in bonds to fund and effectuate the deal but the Commission decided to postpone the vote for a future meeting. While it’s possible the deal could simply be killed outright, there has been talk about the Commission wanting, at the very least, to renegotiate the deal in certain respects and the delay could make some room for that.

The Rays, anticipating that the vote wasn’t going to happen, went on the offensive ahead of the meeting, delivering a letter to the Commission — and the press, natch — in which they said they were “saddened and stunned” by the delays on financing and that said delays “upend” the deal and make it unlikely that a new stadium could be ready for the 2028 season. They also claimed that they have gone out-of-pocket over $50 million on preparations for the new stadium — no specifics on that were offered — and that “a 2029 ballpark delivery would result in significantly higher costs that we are not able to absorb alone." Team president Brian Auld told reporters — “we know we're going to be in Steinbrenner [Field] in 2025 and we don't know much beyond that."

The thing I don’t understand is why the vote not happening yesterday was so disastrous given that the initial agreement to build the stadium does not require the issuance of bonds to take place until March 2025. The County Commissioners expressed a lot of confusion on that point and no small amount of anger at the Rays during the meeting about why they were taking such a confrontational tack with their letter. They would probably have loved to ask the Rays — who had representatives at the meeting — why this is suddenly such a crisis in their view, but when releasing the letter the Rays said that no one from the club would be answering any questions, from the press or the county. In case you want to know how shittily entitled a Major League Baseball club can be when it comes to this sort of business.

But I suppose the Rays have a pretty tough needle to thread here. On the one hand, they know that massive hurricane damage in Pinellas County and the hardship it has caused is a much more pressing matter for local government than is a multi-billion handout to a baseball team owned by a billionaire. On the other hand, they really, really want and feel they deserve that handout so their temper tantrum was probably inevitable.

I know it doesn’t count for much coming from me given how I roll with these sorts of things, but if I was on that Commission I’d grandstand like crazy about how selfish and petulant Stuart Sternberg and his lackeys behaved yesterday, tell them to pound sand, and spend the rest of my political career kissing babies and telling their parents how I care about them, not the New York finance bro who wanted to be subsidized. I don’t think the Pinellas County Commissioners will actually do that but, based on their response to the Rays’ horseshit today, it seems like at least a couple of them are strongly considering it.

Project 2028: Manfred’s long-term media strategy comes into focus

Per Evan Drellich in The Athletic we have learned that Rob Manfred is looking to have the majority of the league’s teams on board with a nationalized media rights strategy by 2028. That strategy would involve teams ceding their broadcast rights to MLB, the league selling them in various packages to national, blackout-free streaming platforms, and clubs equitably sharing broadcast revenue.

The year 2028 is the target because that is when most teams — maybe two-thirds of them — will see their broadcast rights expire. Most of those are with Diamond Sports Group, with whom MLB specifically negotiated deals to end at the same time for these purposes. Others are for teams whose broadcasts are already handled by the league. The hope is that the league can convince other clubs who are on deals which will still be in effect then and who, at present, have no reason to change a thing, to agree to join in the consolidated rights party.

There are, of course, a LOT of barriers in the way of making Manfred’s dream a reality, and Drellich talks about them in considerable detail in his article.

The biggest one is trying to get the Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, and Cubs of the world to join in, because without them whatever package MLB can sell to the streamers will be way less valuable. The league also has to talk about all of this with the players. Per the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the players have a say in revenue sharing, which would be radically altered in such a scenario. The current CBA is up after the 2026 season and anything negotiated there would control Project 2028.

The idea of a one-stop shop where fans would have any or all MLB games available to them on a single platform, blackout-free, sounds like a pretty amazing thing. Manfred and the owners, meanwhile, believe there will be a lot more money in it for them or else they wouldn’t be pursuing it. Whether such a thing can ever happen, however, is a totally different conversation.

But now both of those conversations are out there to be had in the open, and that’s news.

All but one player rejects the qualifying offer

The deadline for players to accept or reject the qualifying offer passed yesterday afternoon and just one accepted: Cincinnati Reds righty Nick Martinez, who actually did so on Monday rather than wait until the deadline. In so doing he has agreed to a one-year, $21.05 million deal with the Reds and will not be subject to the qualifying offer in the future. He is just the 14th player to accept the qualifying offer since it was introduced in 2012.

The players who rejected the qualifying offer — Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes, Alex Bregman, Max Fried, Willy Adames, Pete Alonso, Anthony Santander, Teoscar Hernández, Nick Pivetta, Christian Walker, Sean Manaea, and Luis Severino — will now have draft-pick compensation attached to their free agency journey. Which specific pick the signing team will have to give to he players’ old team varies depending on the revenue-sharing statuses of each team and the amount of the contract signed, but can range from a supplemental round after the first round to one that comes after the fourth round.

The Mets and Rays swing a trade

The New York Mets acquired outfielder Jose Siri from the Tampa Bay Rays in exchange for reliever Eric Orze yesterday.

Siri, 29, is one of the game’s best defensive center fielders but he hit a mere .187/.255/.366 (76 OPS+) with 18 homers, 14 stolen bases and 170 damn strikeouts last year. His defense was good enough to give him a positive WAR but his bat is a massive liability to say the least. Assuming he recovers on time following some offseason surgery, Tyrone Taylor will no doubt still be the guy getting most of the action in center for the Mets in 2025. Siri will be taking over the Harrison Bader role of defensive caddy.

Orze, 27, posted a 2.92 ERA over 43 appearances at Triple-A Syracuse and only pitched in two big league games. He has good stuff that may land him work as a back-of-the-bullpen option, but the Rays real reason for this deal was not to acquire a reliever as much as it was to unload Siri, who is arbitration eligible for the first time. That’s just what the Rays do.

Other Stuff

Hell ain’t hot enough

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) has introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from female bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol,. This comes two weeks after Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first openly trans person elected to Congress.

There have already been a lot of words written about this but all that really needs to be said is that Nancy Mace and anyone who goes along with this resolution are deeply evil and depraved bastards. They care about nothing but hating people and hurting people and profiting politically on the hate they foment and the pain they inflict.

I do not believe in Hell, but if I find out I am wrong on that score I will take comfort in knowing that Nancy Mace and those like her are burning in its deepest circles.

All animals are equal, but . . .

Thomas Goldstein is n actual attorney who was once counsel to Al Gore’s campaign and who is currently the publisher of SCOTUSblog, which reports on the Supreme Court. Yesterday he wrote the sort of op-ed that, if I were in charge, would cause him to be disbarred:

With the election now over, the courts have to decide quickly whether to move forward with the criminal cases against Donald Trump. Although this idea will pain my fellow Democrats, all of the cases should be abandoned.

Democracy’s ultimate verdict on these prosecutions was rendered by voters on Election Day. The charges were front and center in the campaign. The president-elect made a central feature of his candidacy that the cases were political and calculated to stop him from being elected again. Despite the prosecutions, more than 75 million people, a majority of the popular vote counted so far, decided to send him back to the White House . . . A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.

"If someone is sufficiently popular they should be immune from facing consequences for their crimes" is not an argument any lawyer should ever be making. And that last passage — “A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man” — is even worse. Indeed, there is literally no sentence a person could utter that would exhibit a greater misunderstanding of the ideas behind the American Experiment than this. How anyone, let alone a Constitutional attorney, can correctly identify that the concept of no man being above the law is “central pillar of American democracy” and then claim that there are extraordinary men to whom it does not apply is utterly beyond me. It’s enraging in the extreme.

The explicit and imminent threats of violence and persecution of vulnerable minorities is the most dangerous aspect of the current age. But, at the risk of sounding like a privileged institutionalist, the assault on the Rule of Law — and the surrender in the face of that assault by people who should fucking know better — bothers me on a personal and visceral level. It flies in the face of everything I've ever been taught, everything I was ever trained for, and the manner in which I have understood and proceeded through life as an American for my 51 years on this planet. The erosion of the Rule of Law and the discarding of our justice system, its promises, and its safeguards imperils everyone other than those in power and everything which a civil society should hold dear.

Shame on Thomas Goldstein. Shame on anyone who freely and willingly capitulates to tyrants who believe they are above the law.

The State of Things

From the Guardian:

A vigilante militia notorious for its patrols on America’s border with Mexico has threatened to take on the US military in recent weeks, with its founder baselessly claiming that Hurricane Helene was deliberately caused by a government energy weapon that needs to be destroyed, according to private and public Telegram chats.

Veterans on Patrol’s (VOP’s) conversations reveal that members believe the outlandish conspiracy theory that the US government caused the hurricane with weather manipulation technology, that the US military is spraying the American people with poisons, and that members should be willing to destroy government facilities in order to stop these activities . . . In early October, the main account on VOP’s public Telegram – likely run by the group’s founder, Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer – has been depicting Helene as an “act of war perpetuated by the United States military”, with the goal of ensuring that “the lithium mines are secured and the planned Ashville Smart City comes to fruition”.

I was prepared to end this item with “congratulations to Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer on his inevitable appointment as director of the National Weather Service under President-Elect Trump,” but then I read on and saw that these loons actually hate Trump too. Why? Because he approved the development of the COVID vaccine.

There are some days when I feel fairly OK about humanity. But increasingly I feel like, nope, we’re not gonna make it. Better for God to start over. With the bees, probably.

Speaking of planetary life . . .

. . . We may have already murdered it on a completely different planet:

When the Viking 1 lander send down twin landers to study Mars in 1976, the results returned a negative result for the possibility of microbial life. However, for years, scientists have argued that the Viking's experimental techniques might’ve killed hygroscopic microbes living on Mars with too much water. While impossible to know for sure, this theory could be proven true or false if NASA sends another dedicated mission to detect biological life on Mars. 

The upshot: In hyper-arid environments, life can get water through salts that draw moisture from the atmosphere. The experiments performed by NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s may have accidentally killed Martian microbial life by applying too much water to the samples, thereby zapping the salts. Oops.

As the above-excerpt notes, some experts have speculated that we messed things up for many years, but microbiologists are increasingly coming around to the notion. A consensus is forming that NASA’s belief that all life will thrive in the presence of water, is an “Earth-centric” view of things that is far too narrow to project on the cosmos.

Which sucks, of course. Still, accidentally killing alien life because we failed to see beyond our own, personal context would be extraordinarily on-brand for mankind, so kudos to humanity for its consistency.

Have a great day everyone.