Cup of Coffee: November 21, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

By way of a reminder, tomorrow is the LAST DAY this newsletter will be published on Beehiiv. Beginning this weekend the process of transitioning its content and all subscriber information to Ghost will begin. To effect that, the newsletter WILL NOT PUBLISH NEXT WEEK. Barring any unexpected hiccups, publication and delivery of Cup of Coffee will resume on Monday, December 2.

Some ins and outs:

• Subscribers do not have to do anything. Your email address and, if applicable, payment information will port over to Ghost automatically. You should simply begin getting newsletters from Ghost on December 2 like any other Monday. The sending address will be “cup-of-coffee@ghost.io”;
• While I anticipate that most subscribers will not have issues receiving the email, it might be a good idea to whitelist that sending address. Here are instructions about how to whitelist emails at most of the major email platforms. It’s not foolproof, but if you whitelist it, it will reduce the possibility of the newsletter falling into the black hole of dropped/blocked/spam emails;
• The web version of the newsletter will be on a new custom domain: www.cupofcoffeenews.com. The site is actually live now, and I have put some of the last few days’ newsletters on it for testing purposes. Feel free to go poke around there if you want, but DO NOT sign-up/subscribe to the newsletter there, as it is not connected to any payment accounts yet and, if you do, it might mess up the transfer of your current account. If you are a free subscriber now and wish to become a paid subscriber you can still subscribe at this site using the button above through this weekend. If you do, your account will port over.

At the moment the website is a bit on the basic side, but it’s already prettier and more user friendly than it has been on Beehiiv. My hope is that people will feel as comfortable accessing the newsletter from the website as they do via email.

That’s about it for now. If I think of anything else y’all need to know before I give the order to spool up the FTL drive and make the jump, I’ll send out a supplemental email between now and Sunday. So say we all.

The Daily Briefing

Tarik Skubal, Chris Sale win the Cy Young Awards

There was a certain uncertainty about who would win the Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year Awards, but the same cannot be said about this year’s Cy Young honors. It was long obvious that Tarik Skubal of the Tigers and Chris Sale of Atlanta were going to get the nod and yesterday both of them did.

Skubal, who turned 28 yesterday, making it a very happy birthday for him, won the AL pitcher’s Triple Crown by leading the circuit with 18 wins, a 2.39 ERA (170 ERA+) and 228 strikeouts while leading a Tigers team that was extremely low on starting pitching depth to its first playoff appearance in a decade. Skubal was the first American League pitching Triple Crown winner since Shane Bieber did it in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign and was the first to do it in a full season since Justin Verlander in 2011. Skenes was a unanimous selection by the voters, receiving all 30 first place votes.

Sale, 35, took the NL Triple Crown with 18 wins, a 2.38 ERA (174 ERA+) and 225 strikeouts. In so doing he became the first pitching Triple Crown winner in the National League since Clayton Kershaw did it in 2011. Sale also earned his first career Gold Glove and helped Atlanta eke out a Wild Card berth in a year when the roster was positively wracked with injuries. Sale received 26 of the 30 first place votes with the Phillies Zack Wheeler receiving the other four. Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes was a distant third.

Congratulations fellas. And congratulations in advance to the MVP winners who will be announced to tonight and who are likewise no surprise.

Cubs acquire reliever Morgan from the Guardians

The Chicago Cubs acquired reliever Eli Morgan from the Cleveland Guardians in exchange for outfield prospect Alfonsin Rosario yesterday. Chicago designated Patrick Wisdom for assignment in a corresponding move.

Morgan experienced some elbow and shoulder problems in 2024 but when he pitched he was an important part of Cleveland’s strong bullpen, posting a 1.93 ERA (212 ERA+) and a 34/11 K/BB ratio over 32 appearances. He’ll likely regress from that given what were pretty flukey BABIP numbers, but he’ll definitely help improve what was a somewhat middling Cubs pen in 2024 and what looks to be an inexperienced Cubs pen in 2025.

Rosario, 20, was a sixth-round pick by the Cubs in 2023. He played 109 Single-A games in 2024, struck out a ton, walked at a pretty decent clip, stole some bases, and showed some pop. It’s way too early to tell if he’ll be anything.

Wisdom had his moments in Chicago, hitting 84 homers over the last four seasons. But he’s 33 and he had a horrendous 2024, hitting a ghastly .171/.237/.392 (75 OPS+) thereby making him expendable the moment an open spot on the 40-man became necessary.

The “We Tried” Tracker

For several years I and a lot of other baseball writers who live on the snarkier side of the street have made fun of teams which desperately want you to know that they almost signed a free agent.

The Red Sox and Mets are the undisputed champs at this, though a lot of teams do it. You’ve seen how it works: when a big fish agrees to a new contract with teams other than them you can bet the pink slip on your Gran Torino that one of the more friendly/captured reporters on their beat will drop an item like “Sources close to the team say the Red Sox were in the running late” or “The Dodgers signed Shlabotnick, but the Mets showed considerable interest.” It’s harmless horseshit but it’s also telling of a desire to make fans think the team is trying hard even if it’s not able or, in some cases, willing, to hang with the competition.

Over at FanGraphs Davy Andrews has decided to take this dynamic beyond snark and into the realm of quantification:

I love it. And if any front offices get mad at this, welp, sign guys faster, as this is 100% a product of slow free agent market-induced boredom.

Other Stuff

Private Equity acquires Jersey Mike’s

From the business pages:

Jersey Mike’s, the quickly expanding sandwich chain, is being acquired by asset management giant Blackstone.

In the transaction announced Tuesday, private equity funds managed by Blackstone will be used to acquire majority ownership of Jersey Mike’s. The deal is “intended to help enable Jersey Mike’s to accelerate its expansion across and beyond the U.S. market,” the companies said, as well as aid ongoing technological investments.

My initial take on this is that it’s less of a “let’s buy this company, burden it with debt, and loot everything of value” kind of deal than a “this company has legs and we want in on it” deal. As such, I’m gonna hold off on my usual anti-private equity harangue for the time being.

That said: Jersey Mike’s is kind of important to me because, in addition to making pretty good subs, it’s one of the few national chains and the ONLY national sandwich chain which does an excellent job of catering to the needs of people with celiac disease like my wife. They have good gluten-free bread, they actually clean the slicer before making a gluten-free sub and prepare it all on a freshly-cleaned, dedicated surface with an eye toward minimizing the possibility of cross-contamination. Best of all, the employees are all well-trained and, unlike some chains I could name, none of them roll their eyes at you and act all put out when you ask for a gluten-free sandwich and prep. It’s a professional operation that, quite often, particularly when we’re traveling, is the only option available for people with celiac disease.

Which is to say: if you think I go off on private equity as it is, just wait to see what happens if this acquisition leads to the enshittification of Jersey Mike’s.

A Heartbreaking development

Like a lot of hipsterish Gen-Xers, I read and was immediately enthralled with Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when it came out 24 years ago. I have no idea how it would hit now, at my age and after all of these years — probably poorly — but at the time it struck me and a hell of a lot of other people as a smart, postmodern, self-referential, and often self-deprecating masterwork that did about as well a capturing a time and a generation as anything might be expected to do.

For those who have not read A Heartbreaking Work, its narrative kicks off with the deaths of Eggers' parents from cancer within five weeks of each other. That trauma left Eggers, then in his early twenties, as the primary caregiver for his eight year old brother, Christopher, who goes by the name of Toph. The book chronicles the two brothers moving from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Eggers tries to balance his responsibilities as a young parent to Toph with his life and career ambitions, with all of that filtered through some extraordinarily 1990s kinds of happenings and attitudes. Vibe-wise, it features wild vacillations between Gen-X’s trademark ironic detachment and pop culture obsessions with surprising moments of emotional vulnerability that presaged the more sincere sensibility of the Millennial generation to which little brother Toph belongs.

The book, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a bestseller, launched Eggers’ wildly successful career as a literary celebrity and led to numerous book, movie, and philanthropic projects, which include the humor site McSweeney's Internet Tendency and a host of other concerns. It also led to no small amount of backlash, some of which came from Eggers’ two older siblings who were barely mentioned in the book and whose roles as co-carers for Toph were almost completely written out of the story. Others took issue with the various liberties Eggers allegedly took with other facts, people, and places in the memoir. It wasn’t on the level of fabrications which would later be discovered in memoirs like A Million Little Pieces or anything, but it became the stuff of literary gossip and chatter, the likes of which bore me, so I pretty much tuned out of that stuff. It didn’t do anything to harm Eggers’ reputation or career.

I still read McSweeney’s on occasion, but I’ve never read any of Eggers’ followups. Indeed, I hadn’t even thought of the guy for years and years. But yesterday I read a story in The Hollywood Reporter which cast A Heartbreaking Work and both Dave and Toph Eggers in a whole new light.

It’s about how Toph, now in his 40s, and Dave Eggers have been estranged for years, primarily because of what Toph has come to believe was his exploitation at the hands of his brother and the exploitation of their late sister Beth, who died of suicide in 2001. Toph also talks about how he felt controlled by his brother for many years and how the two of them have radically different views of the trauma they experienced and how they processed it. Toph, basically, believes that Dave used his life for fodder and, by negative example, prevented him from properly grieving the death of their parents and sister.

I was somewhat hesitant to share this article because there is an element of “wow, that’s not really any of my business” to it all. But it’s also the case that Eggers put his life and his family out there — eagerly, with gusto, and to great fame and fortune — and now Toph is willingly doing the same. Given how many people read one side of it in a very famous memoir I think it’s fair to hear a different side of it from a man who, at the time everyone was paying attention, was too young to have a say.

The junk food empire strikes back

For most of the last century, the processed food industry has been five steps ahead of anyone trying to get Americans to eat better. They have perfected the art of creating food products laden with sugar, fat, salt, and all of the other bad-for-us things that our lizard brains nonetheless want because, evolutionarily speaking, our lizard brains still think we’re out foraging for food on the savannah and that we must maximize our caloric intake lest we starve to death. It’s good business for them because that kind of food is pretty cheap to make, has high profit margins, and appeals to consumers on taste, price, and convenience. You don’t win friends with salad, Lisa.

New drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, which were originally developed to combat diabetes but which have been shown to be shockingly effective weight loss drugs, are changing the game, however. Those drugs mimic a natural hormone, GLP-1, that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain. They make people not want to eat all that much in general and are particularly effective at helping people avoid sweet, salty, and greasy snacks. They also seem to be effective at making people less likely to drink, smoke, and take certain recreational drugs and, while the research is still in its early stages, they may very well be effective at cutting the risk of all manner of health problems including strokes, heart and kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. At present, fewer than 10 million Americans take GLP-1 drugs, but given the benefits they’re bestowing it’s likely that many millions more people will be taking them soon.

This, of course, presents a problem for the junk food industry. But as the New York Times reported yesterday, the junk food industry is fighting back:

Right now, the industry’s adaptation to Ozempic is in its infancy. A few companies have tested the waters: Nestlé, for example, has started a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1s called Vital Pursuit — frozen pizzas, sandwich melts and chicken bowls with “a sharper focus on smaller portions.” But reliable data about how GLP-1s reshape people’s likes and dislikes is yet to come. While Ozempic is threatening to turn off the industrial palate, Mattson believes that industrial foods may just need to be tweaked. Though many ultraprocessed foods and drinks turn off a lot of GLP-1 users, some are breaking through: On GLP-1 forums, people celebrate Fairlife, a line of sweet protein shakes owned by Coca-Cola. And Mattson has already dreamed up an arsenal of other potential winners.

The most fascinating part of the article is the part where it explains just how easily the processed food world has adapted to previous health fads and developments. That has primarily come via coopting trends and launching seemingly health-conscious brands which most people have no idea are owned by the same companies which make Twinkies and Hot Pockets and all of the other tasty-but-bad-for-you foods people might be trying to avoid. The GLP-1 challenge is harder because whereas various diet fads of the past were behavior-driven, the new drugs work on a biological level. You might trick someone who is counting calories that something is good for them because it has the word “lean” in the name, but you can’t as easily trick a hormone that is telling someone “no, it is not time to eat and that doesn’t sound that good anyway.”

But man, based on the examples of the past successes of the processed food folks mentioned in the article, I would not count ‘em out.

New Shoes

This is a guest post from subscriber Frank Schloegel

My sister, Heidi, died five years ago this month. She was buried under a tree in a cemetery a couple of hours north of her home in the Bronx. Heidi worked at the Mary Mitchell Community Center, which provides after school programs for kids in the Bronx – among many other services. They serve a largely immigrant community. There are a lot of Dominicans. It is a community without a lot of resources. A community that turns out for a funeral.

The funeral was at the center. It was an incredible scene. There were politicians and journalists. There was a lot of white family from Kansas City. There were a lot of powerful Black and brown women. I remember one woman said, “Heidi opened the door and got out of the way!” It is crazy all that I don’t remember.

At some point a woman came in leading 30 teenagers (maybe more). She was a tall woman. A woman who could command the attention and respect of 30 Bronx teenagers. They marched into the room chanting Heidi (clap, clap, clap) Heidi (clap, clap, clap). I cried a lot that day. I’m crying right now thinking of it.

Heidi was buried in an unmarked section of a cemetery. We drove up accompanied by friends, family and vans carrying the Bronx teenagers. It was a lovely natural setting - lots of trees, still changing colors, in the late fall.

As part of the ceremony, people took turns putting on a shovel of dirt. It became apparent that we were going to put all the dirt back into the hole. I had recently bought new shoes for court. They were officially old man lawyer shoes. Black. Comfortable. With rubber soles. I had always worn leather soles, because I’m a snob. My new shoes were clean. But now I had to get them dirty, shoveling the damp dirt back into the hole where my sister’s body was now resting. From ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

I never washed the shoes. I never scraped the dirt off.  I couldn’t do it. I looked at the dirt and would think of my sister. Of the doors that she opened and the kids she inspired. I would think of her work trying to get healthy food into the Bronx. The work she did to make the world a more peaceful place. I would think of her husband and daughter and all those strong women at The Mary Mitchell Center who carry on her work.

I always hoped someone at court would ask about my dirty shoes. Or that I would catch someone glancing at them and could tell them all about Heidi. But it never happened. I think a lot more about myself than others do.

But now it has been five years, and the shoes are worn out. I don’t even wear them to court anymore. I wear them without socks to take out the trash or grab something from the car. I suppose on some level I am worried that I will forget about my sister. That I won’t think of her when I take out the trash - or when I trip over the shoes trying to get something else out of the closet. But I know that’s not right. I still think of Heidi all the time. The mind is a funny place. There is plenty of time in a day to have a million thoughts or more. And I’m sure that Heidi will always be one of them.

I think of how I used to call her on a landline during the middle of the day and get yelled at because it was so expensive. I think of her whenever I eat bread, because she was always trying to not eat bread. I think of her on birthdays because she loved a pie in the face. I think of her when the Royals play the Yankees. I thought of her a lot during the election – one particular quote often came to mind, “Not Joe Fucking Biden.” (For those that don’t know, Joe is too conservative.) I think of her when I see the brick patio she laid at Woodyard BBQ. (I made the first two rows and she finished the next 200 that are much flatter than mine.) I think of her when I use my turn signal. I think of her when I see a bodega. I have a million thoughts about Heidi and it is absolutely horrible that she died. It is so unfair. And so stupid. Good people should get to lead this world and instead we slaughter each other.

Heidi was full of goodness. From that goodness came hope. From hope action. Take care of the people around you. If you can spare a dime, please donate to the Mary Mitchell Center here. If you live in Kansas City, we do a food drive every year on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Feel free to drop off nonperishable items at 415 W Dartmouth, KCMO 64113 between 9am and 6pm.

And thank you so much for this Newsletter and the community of people who read it, for letting me write about my sister every year. And for generally being good people who don’t suck the joy out of life. Thanks Craig.

I need a new Cup of Coffee mug too. I just ordered one here and it was on sale! 

Thanks so much, Frank.

Have a great day everyone.