Cup of Coffee: November 22, 2024

Good morning!

It’s the last day of school before break, y’all! Let’s make the last Beehiiv newsletter one to remember! Assuming everyone actually gets it in their inbox which, at this point, is not a thing I count on.

But better things are ahead, everyone, and Matt Gaetz eating shit yesterday seems like a pretty good harbinger of it. Let’s have fun today, let’s then take a week off to stuff ourselves with turkey and touch some actual grass, and then let’s get back to it on the new platform starting a week from Monday.

The Daily Briefing

Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge are your MVPs

In what was one of the least surprising awards votes of all time, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge were named the NL and AL Most Valuable Players last night. This was Ohtani’s third MVP, having won in the AL in 2021 and 2023 when he was with the Angels. It’s Judge’s second MVP, having won the honors in 2022. Both were unanimous winners.

Ohtani didn’t pitch in 2024 but he hit like the dickens, posting a batting line of .310/.390/.646 (OPS+ 190) while hitting 54 home runs, driving in 130, and stealing 59 bases. In addition to becoming baseball’s first-ever 50/50 player he led the NL in plate appearances, runs, home runs, RBI, on-base percentage, slugging, OPS, OPS+, and total bases. The Dodgers, of course, won the NL West and went on to win the World Series.

Judge had an even better year than Ohtani. He batted .322/.458/.701 (OPS+ 223) hit 58 homers, and knocked in 144 runs. He led all of MLB in homers, RBI, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+, walks, and WAR. He was the AL leader in total bases and extra-base hits, all while playing a key defensive position in center field.

Hats off to runners-up Bobby Witt Jr. and Francisco Lindor, each of whom had the sorts of seasons which, in many years, would’ve earned them MVP honors themselves. But we’re living in a time when giants roam the Earth and it’s damn hard to argue that anyone deserved even a single first place vote at Judge’s and Ohtani’s expense.

Congrats, big guys.

Roki Sasaki’s agent is “insulted” at insinuations that he has a handshake deal with the Dodgers

Japanese ace Roki Sasaki will soon make the leap from Japan to North America. As we’ve discussed, he doesn't have the requisite service time in NPB to be an unrestricted free agent, so he is subject to MLB's international amateur free agent bonus pool caps. While that sucks for his short-term earning potential it does mean that all 30 teams can afford Sasaki and, at least theoretically, all can bid for his services.  

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, there is strong reason to believe that Sasaki will nonetheless go to the Dodgers so that (a) he can be on a team virtually guaranteed to win a lot of games; (b) he can be on the west coast, which Japanese players have tended to favor so as to cut down on travel time for both themselves and their families; (c) he can be teammates with countrymen Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto; and thus (d) he can pursue marketing and endorsement synergies that may not be available to him on other clubs. It makes sense.

That sort of speculation, however, has started to morph into a theory among some folks in the game that not only would Sasaki prefer to play for the Dodgers but that he already has an informal agreement in place with them to make that happen once the new international signing period begins on January 15. Sasaki's agent Joel Wolfe, however, angrily responded to such speculation earlier this week, saying the following to Evan Drellich of The Athletic: 

"While a bunch of executives who should know me better and do a lot of business with me insult my integrity by insinuating that I would be a part of some type of nefarious agreement, in reality, this is just poor sportsmanship."

Personally, I would be shocked if Sasaki signs with anyone but Los Angeles, but I am struggling to understand why there would be any need for a handshake agreement beforehand, even if he desperately wants to become a Dodger. I mean, maybe not all 30 teams will give Sasaki an offer but I’m sure many will and I am certain that the Dodgers will be one of them. If Sasaki wants to go to L.A. all he has to do is wait for the offer to come in and accept it.

While the Dodgers would no doubt love to have some sort of guarantee, the only possible way they could get him to agree to it would be to give him some sort of assurance about a long-term deal in the near future or some side agreement that might make up for the capped bonus. But such things (a) would be serious violations of the rules; and (b) would be pretty easy to suss out, either before or after the fact, thereby making it positively stupid for the Dodgers to participate in such a scheme. They’d have their bonus pools blasted back to the stone age if anyone found out and there’s a real chance that any Dodgers executives involved in such a thing would be given the John Coppolella Special.

So yeah, I think we’ll see Sasaki wearing Dodger blue come spring, but if we do, I highly doubt it’s because of something nefarious.

Relying on flame-throwing bullpens is backfiring

Lewie Pollis has an article about how teams over-working and over-exposing their relief aces in the postseason is backfiring.

The 2024 MLB postseason was notable both for how aggressively teams unleashed their best bullpen arms, and how often they got shelled. Across the league, relievers threw 52 percent of the innings, the second-highest proportion in history and just the fourth time ever when the bullpens collectively outworked the rotations. Pitchers blew a record-setting 17 saves — more than the previous two Octobers combined. The 1.5 bullpen meltdowns per game were also the most in playoff history, a stark increase from this year’s 1.1 regular-season average. As I watched these parades of relief aces get lit up in the biggest games of the season, I wondered if we had reached an inflection point in the pursuit of strikeouts. Now that I’ve dug into the data, I suspect we have.

There are a stats and math here and I’m a moron so I’m not gonna try to summarize it all lest I totally miss something important. But Pollis’ conclusion — “I’m convinced it is a sign that we have finally found the upper limit for how hard teams can lean on their back-end arms before it ceases to be advantageous” — is one I hope is right. Because folks, I’m really sick of the endless parade of bullpen arms every October.

Other Stuff

Smell ya later, Matt!

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn himself from consideration for the Attorney General gig. This comes after intense pressure and scrutiny arising out of the fact that he’s, you know, a sexual predator who almost certainly raped/trafficked teenagers at drug-fueled parties, which is generally frowned upon for people being considered for the most powerful law enforcement job on Planet Earth. The best part: his withdrawal came IMMEDIATELY after CNN ran a story about a second underage girl with whom Gaetz had sex. Like, Gaetz literally withdrew 45 minutes after CNN asked him for comment.

The tipping point on his withdrawal was pretty obviously the battle over the release of a House ethics report over his predatory behavior which, because Gaetz resigned his congressional seat, was theoretically no longer supposed to be made public. Democrats were, quite understandably, pushing to release the report nonetheless. Republicans who were trying to protect Gaetz were threatening payback, saying that if the House voted to release the Gaetz ethics report they would push for reports involving Democratic members of Congress to be released, but that seems like a pretty good deal, actually. Indeed, I think it'd be a great thing for ethics reports about public officials to be public, always, regardless of what party they belong to. It’s a briar patch I’d eagerly leap into, friends.

Anyway, look for Trump people to start whining about bullying and how Gaetz withdrawing will only embolden attacks on his nominees by the woke mob, etc. etc. Which, yes. Yes it will. Because fuck every one of these predators, bigots, and unqualified cronies who would willingly drive what’s left of this country into the ditch. May they never have a moment of peace.

Dan Bongino? Ok, sure.

From one bad nominee to another:

Donald Trump is considering a right-wing media personality, people who have served on his US Secret Service detail, as well as others to run the agency that has been plagued by its failure to preempt two alleged assassination attempts on Trump this summer, sources familiar with the president-elect’s thinking tell CNN.

Podcaster Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who was highly critical of the agency’s leadership as security failures around the alleged attempts on Trump’s life became clear, as well as Sean Curran, the head of Trump’s current detail, are among those being considered for the job.

There are a lot of people out there who are convinced that everything Trump does is part of some five-dimensional chess strategy. That he nominated Matt Gaetz as a stalking horse, for example. That he KNEW that nomination would be doomed and Gaetz’s failure would thereby give him the latitude to select who he REALLY wants! There were a zillion examples of this kind of thinking during Trump’s first term, too, and it was misguided overthinking every single time.

Trump is a a lot of things, but he’s not a complicated man. He is dumb, he is arrogant, he has poor impulse control, and he values nothing more than (a) surrounding himself with lickspittles and yes-men; and (b) doing things that he thinks will anger his enemies, real or perceived. He’s also pretty clearly into at least the early stages of dementia, which probably explains why he’s been so eager to nominate people he sees on TV and to listen to people who won’t leave his house. The guy is not working from some master playbook here. He’s leaning heavily on recency bias and whatever and whoever makes him feel warm and fuzzy in the moment, and nothing makes Donald Trump feel warmer or fuzzier than the people who kiss his ass over the airwaves like Bongino does. It’s also abundantly clear that there is no one with half a brain in Trump’s orbit who can talk him out of anything. If there were, Gaetz would never have been nominated in the first place.

Anyone who thinks otherwise — who thinks Trump’s moves are all part of some deviously clever master plan — should probably ask themselves why, if that were the case, he would be leaning toward a Secret Service chief who has absolutely no administrative experience of any kind, whose plan for everything is to create disarray and chaos, and who would thus massively increase the odds of Trump being assassinated.

So no, Trump is not playing five-dimensional chess here. Though, now that I’ve written all of that, I’m starting to wonder if J.D. Vance is. Hmm . . .

Don’t do Trump’s work for him

Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council — and a Cup of Coffee subscriber! — wrote a guest essay in the New York Times yesterday about the potential barriers to Trump’s mass deportation program. The column is good both with respect to the subject matter to which it directly pertains and to the broader Trump agenda.

The idea: yes, there is a lot of unpleasantness coming. Trump has made it 100% clear that he plans to brutalize immigrants using any means necessary. As Lind argues, however, there are a lot of practical limits to what Trump can do or, at the very least, do easily. The deportation plan will require a massive mobilization of resources and the expenditure of billions upon billions of dollars. It will require figuring out the way around legal and practical bottlenecks in the form of clogged immigration court dockets, a lack of detention center beds, and the willingness or unwillingness of various countries to actually accept deportation flights and deportees.

Lind does not conclude that, in light of that, Trump’s plans are doomed. She is simply pointing out the massive amount of friction his plans will have to contend with and that, where there is friction, there is opportunity for opposition. Most importantly, she is noting that what we should not do is to simply give up, roll over, and assume Trump will figure out a way to enact his depraved plans no matter what we do:

Many Trump critics are liable to wave off such considerations, because they assume that a second Trump administration will have no problem breaking the law en masse to deport large numbers of people. Even if true, that doesn’t exempt them from the logistical realities: beds in detention, seats on planes.

That this mass deportation will happen with no legal restraints, accountability or oversight is by no means a premise to be granted without contest. Because resigning oneself in advance to a maximalist vision of mass deportation helps accomplish the same goal: making immigrants feel they have no choice but to leave the United States . . .

. . . [T]hose who do not wish to see millions of people leave the United States under coercion during a second Trump administration should do what they can to prevent that reality. That starts with a committed and cleareyed understanding of what is actually happening, and a willingness to treat abuses of power as a rupture and an aberration — something that can, and should, be fought. . . This work will require, particularly for those who are not themselves immigrants, a promise not to let pessimism do the Trump administration’s job for it.

As many have noted, fascist regimes rely heavily on defeatism and a sense of helplessness on the part of the populace in order to do what they do. They want to create the impression that their plans and their power are somehow inevitable, thereby making opponents believe that resistance is futile. In the case of mass deportation defeatism could cause people who may have a right to be in the United States — or who at the very least have a right to a hearing before being deported — to leave voluntarily. It may cause those of us who are not targets of mass deportation but who nonetheless oppose it to simply roll over and give up. It’s an impulse I totally understand — God knows I’ve felt rather defeated in the two and a half weeks since the election — but it’s one to which we cannot surrender.

Yes, the bastards may win a lot of battles. They may, ultimately, win the damn war. But defeatism is not the answer. Treating every new development like a prelude to another loss will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not Hollywood and the good guys are by no means assured of victory, but you have to make the bad guys work for whatever they get. You have to stand up and fight, however you can, rather than simply assuming the worst and giving up.

Captain Ahab’s sentiment, “to the end, I grapple with thee, from the bottom of hell's heart, I stab at thee” is senseless and hopeless when directed at the inevitability and indifference of nature. But it is absolutely the right attitude to have when fighting evil men. If you don’t fight, you can’t win. And even if you don’t win, you should do everything you can to take the bastards down with you.

I’ll be damned

Before the election nearly two-thirds of Republicans said that their economic situation was worse than it was a year ago. Now, two and a half weeks later, fewer than half of Republicans say so.

Separate and apart from the real and somewhat understandable disconnect that can exist between macro economic data and people’s personal economic realities and attitudes, can we agree that Republicans will ALWAYS say shit sucks when Democrats are in power and everything is great when Republicans take over and that maybe we shouldn't take them at their word? The Republican Party is, at present, a cult. We should probably treat them that way.

Bye-bye Beehiiv

As I mentioned yesterday and above, this is the last Beehiiv-hosted Cup of Coffee newsletter. The migration of posts and subscriber data will begin on Monday, so we’ll be going dark next week and we’ll be back in action on Monday December 2. The new website is here. As I said yesterday, don’t sign up for it or anything, as all of your info will port over there on its own, but feel free to play around with it if you’d like. You won’t hurt anything.

If you need to get in touch with me between now and when we resume operations over at Ghost, you can reply to this or any other old newsletter in your trash or archive and it’ll go to me. Or you can seek me out over at BlueSky, where I am now spending all of my social media time these days. If some baseball news happens in the next week, if I have an opinion about it, and if you care, I’m most likely to say something about it there. I’ll periodically check Twitter, but don’t count on me seeing messages or replies over there because I am no longer active there apart from sharing newsletter links.

I’d like to say it’s been great, Beehiiv, but we all know that’s not true. It certainly was a learning experience, though. Thank you all for enduring the hassles of the past ten months. Not everyone did! Here’s hoping things go more smoothly at the new place.

Have a great day — and a Happy Thanksgiving! — everyone.

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