Cup of Coffee: December 14, 2023

A possible trade, some weird Ohtani contract provisions, Zack Greinke's will to press on, old Certs, Musk's mess, gift maps, movies, "The Meatball" and "The Worm."

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s jump in, shall we?

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The Daily Briefing

The Dodgers and Rays are talking about a four-player trade featuring Tyler Glasnow

The Dodgers and Rays are discussing a trade in which L.A. would get starter Tyler Glasnow and outfielder Manuel Margot from Tampa Bay in exchange for righty Ryan Pepiot and outfielder Jonny Deluca. The move would represent a salary dump for the Rays and would address a couple of needs, one major, one relatively minor, for the Dodgers.

Glasnow, 30, is an absolute ace and strikeout machine when he’s healthy but that’s a pretty damn rare state of being for him. Indeed, his 120 innings and 21 starts in 2023 were both career highs. The Dodgers could use a strong arm or two in the rotation, but a durable arm would be preferable. That said, if 2024 is the year Glasnow makes 30 starts it’d be a fantastic pickup for L.A.. It’s just that the odds on that have to be pretty frickin’ long.

Margot, 29, has hit .255/.309/.385 (91 OPS+) over the course of his eight-year career, but he plays pretty strong defense in the outfield corners. The Dodgers have said they want to platoon Jason Heyward and Margot might make sense as a platoon partner for him.

The key here: Glasnow will make $25 million in 2024 and Margot will make $10 million, with a $2 million buyout on a $12 million option for 2025. The Rays’ current payroll projects to be its highest ever in 2024 so they, being the Rays, no doubt wanna cut it if they can.

Not that they’d be getting nothing in return. In Pepiot they’d be getting a 26 year-old pitcher with only 17 big league appearances under his belt but (a) those appearances have been pretty good; and (b) they’d have plenty of team control. One can picture him fitting in quite well in the Rays rotation for several years. Deluca, 25, made his big-league debut last season but only had 45 plate appearances in which he posted a 97 OPS+. He’s a high-contact, low-strikeout hitter that could prove useful.

The deal is not said to be imminent, but the contours of it seemed to hold pretty steady all day yesterday, so I’m guessing it goes down soon.

Some weird Shohei Ohtani contract details

Ken Rosenthal has some details about Shohei Ohtani’s contract with the Dodgers. Such as:

Per source, Shohei Ohtani’s contract with the Dodgers states, “Player will donate to club charity amount not to exceed 1 percent.” Also gives him suite at Dodger Stadium for all regular and post-season games and provides for interpreter.

That’s all pretty standard stuff these days, at least for top-earners. As is the full no-trade protection he has. What else ya got, Ken?

Contract also states, “If specific change in Dodger personnel, player may opt out of contract at end of season the change occurs.” Not known at present who this refers to.

Before we learned who it referred to I assumed that it was Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter, who is technically employed by the Dodgers now and with whom Ohtani is reportedly really tight. Later in the day we learned that it’s owner Mark Walter or president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. Which, yeah, is kind of weird, but I get it. The thinking being “if the brain trust leaves and the Dodgers are run by a bunch of folks who do not care, I want the hell out of here.” The opt-out rights would go into effect at the end of any season in which Walter or Friedman departed, so it’s not like Ohtani could opt-out midseason.

Normally a head of baseball operations, like Friedman is, subject to firing if things go bad, so him now having this level of job security is kinda weird. But I suppose if things go so badly that the Dodgers want to fire him, they won’t want Ohtani’s obligations anyway. So, sure, fair.

MLB to hold a prospects showcase in Spring Training

Major League Baseball announced yesterday that it will hold its first-ever “Spring Breakout” minor league showcase in games which take place between March 14-17. It will consist of a series of games that will showcase prospects facing off against one another, as part of a doubleheader accompanying the regular spring training games. The idea is to bring the top-caliber prospects onto the big league fields in Florida and Arizona as opposed to relegating them to backfield games.

Makes sense to me. And it certainly makes sense to the clubs, which will give fans a reason to spend more times at the Spring Training complexes on those days.

Rowdy Tellez signs with the Pirates

I missed this yesterday but the Pittsburgh Pirates have signed free agent first baseman Rowdy Tellez to a one-year contract. It’ll be for $3.2 million guaranteed with incentives that could take it just over $4 million.

Tellez, 28, had a terrible 2023 season, hitting a mere .215/.291/.376 (82 OPS+) with 13 homers and 47 RBI in 351 plate appearances with the Brewers. He’ll look to turn it around in PNC Park.

Zack Greinke plans to pitch in 2024

Zack Greinke had a rough 2023 season, going 2-15 with a 5.06 ERA (87 ERA+) in 142.1 innings. It was his 20th season in the bigs. He’s 40. As the season was ending he said he did not know if he would continue pitching. The foregoing data points are all strongly indicative of a pitcher who has pitched his last. Yet:

Based on who is reporting that it probably means that Greinke has placed a large downpayment on a retirement home and donated all of his baseball equipment to a local youth charity, but let’s leave that aside for a minute and assume it’s accurate.

I’m not exactly sure what Greinke has to prove to anyone at this point. He’s 21 strikeouts short of 3,000, but that’s nowhere near as significant a milestone as it once was. Maybe he wants to end on a higher note than he did in 2023, but it’s not common for someone his age to improve with the passing of another year.

I dunno. Maybe the dude just likes pitching.

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Other Stuff

BlueSky Codes

• bsky-social-kh5lu-brjor

• bsky-social-xxxpo-w3wla

• bsky-social-xsw3o-gf2xi

I’m in danger

Yesterday I said that if anyone could find any old Certs rolls in their junk drawer that I’d buy and consume them. Less than two hours after the newsletter dropped, one of you texted me this eBay listing, saying “EVERYTHING is for sale somewhere!”

And no, that was not the only listing. My correspondent instantly found like four or five more, and I suspect he was barely trying. In related news, the older I get the less I understand of this world.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be busy trying to determine what “best offer” turtleboy50 will take for these nearly 30 year old breath mints. Which is not a sentence anyone has ever written in the history of the English language, of that I am confident.

Success after success

Yesterday it was announced that Tesla is set to recall more than two million vehicles — which is nearly every single car it has sold in the past eight years — after a multi-year investigation by auto regulators into the safety of its autopilot system. Add this to the near-universal mockery and inevitable failure of the CyberTruck, multiple exploding rockets from his space endeavors, and his epic failure a social media tycoon, and it’s been a hell of a year for Elon Musk.

In the past, nearly free money by virtue of low interest rates, bailouts from China, and a still general sense among people who don’t pay super close attention to Elon Musk and his pathologies that he is smart and successful and visionary and all of that covered up a lot of ills. Most of that has evaporated by now, however, so he’s probably in no small amount of trouble.

I have been around long enough to have learned that once someone becomes mega rich that it’s almost impossible for them to land in total ruin because this world is absolutely MADE for insulating the wealthy from the consequences of their actions. But I’m holding out cautious hope that this truly bad guy becomes the exception.

When you’re not particularly discriminatory about your maps

I was served this Facebook ad yesterday:

Dad: “Wow, son, it’s a map of my favorite place! How did you know that I loved literally the entire Earth?”

808 lines about 404 movies (Part 2)

The other day I shared Part 1 of Stephen Silver’s year-end movie rankings, “808 lines about 404 movies.” Here is part 2.

It’s a good reminder of just how many damn movies come out these days once you include documentaries and straight-to-streaming fare. Which you should. It’s also a reminder of just how few movies I’ve seen this year. But, thanks to Stephen, I can at least make a list of the ones I should see, even if I can’t come close to seeing them all.

The Meatball and The Worm

When I was a kid this, created and adopted in 1975, was the NASA logo:

Then, in 1992, NASA’s Space Age logo, which was first adopted in 1959, reappeared and resumed its status as the space agency’s official logo, and has remained so ever since:

The 1975-1992 logo is nicknamed “The Worm.” The 1959-1975, 1992-present logo is nicknamed “The Meatball.”

I remember when The Meatball returned. Everyone was very pleased about it. It was viewed as a tribute to NASA’s glory years and the casting aside of a relic of the Malaise-Era during which our space travel aspirations shrunk to mere orbit and tragedy, in the form of the Challenger Disaster, took the shine off of even that. The return of the Meatball, then, was both an act of nostalgia and vision. From a branding perspective it seemed like the right move.

NASA was not alone in this sort of return to classic branding in the early 1990s. A whole host of companies and brands decided to revert to classic styles or adopt neoclassic ones. Hell, we even saw it in baseball uniforms as the era of double knits and bold-but-often-weird 1970s designs were cast aside in favor of designs that either were or could’ve been products of the Eisenhower Era.

A funny thing has happened over the last couple of years, however: The Worm has returned. No, it hasn’t resumed its status as NASA’s official logo. It’s sort of like an alternate uniform, trotted out on special occasions or under special circumstances. But, like alternate uniforms, it has a surprisingly large number of fans, including some who were happy to see it cast aside 30 years ago. Myself included. I guess there’s nothing from the 1970s that I’m not at least a little partial to.

As Noah Cross said in “Chinatown,” politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. I suppose you can add logos to that as well.

Have a great day everyone.