Cup of Coffee: December 15, 2022

Thor goes back to L.A., some minor trades and signings went down, a gonzo Hall of Fame ballot dropped, I'm back at war with my suburb, and we have items about Grant Wahl and 1970s soft rock

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There weren’t any major moves around baseball yesterday, at least if you don’t count Noah Syndergaard signing as “major,” which I suppose is debatable. One transaction did allow me to use a “Major League” line, though, so the day was worth it. I also saw a wacko Hall of Fame ballot and wanted to share it with you.

In Other Stuff I am, once again, going to war with New Albany, Ohio, and I talk about that and my ambivalence about it all. There’s also an item on Grant Wahl and on 1970s soft rock.

Thanks for reading today, everyone. For whatever reason you all care about what a fool believes, and for that I’m grateful.

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The Daily Briefing

Dodgers sign Noah Syndergaard

The Los Angeles Dodgers have signed Noah Syndergaard to a one-year contract. The deal is for $13 million, plus $1.5 million in incentives.

Syndergaard posed a 3.94 ERA (103 ERA+) and a 95/31 K/BB ratio across 134.2 innings in 25 appearances, 24 of which were starts, between the Angels and Phillies. His strikeout rates were nothing special. He pitched to contact. He did what he did with a lot of smoke and mirrors.

That said, L.A. is as good a place as any for him to get things back on track. There he’ll join Clayton Kershaw, Julio Urías, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May in the rotation and hope to become 2023’s Tyler Anderson, who himself made a huge leap with the Dodgers after years of meh pitching. Anderson just signed a three-year deal with the Angels based on his rebound year in Los Angeles. Syndergaard will try for the same thing.

Nationals sign Matt Adams

Mark Lerner: “Here’s a list of players we’ll be inviting to camp.”

Mike Rizzo: “This guy here is dead.”

Lerner [as if speaking to a toddler]: “Cross him off then.”

The Washington Nationals have brought back and old friend, signing first baseman/DH Matt Adams to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training. Adams played for the independent Kansas City Monarchs of the American Association in 2022 where he batted .248/.327/.554 with 27 home runs and 85 RBI in 80 games. I’m too busy to check but I think they edged out the California Penal League for the championship.

Adams last played in the bigs in 2021, but he only appeared in 22 games for the Rockies, failing to do anything of note. He played 16 games for Atlanta in 2020 and ditto. His last substantial big league experience came in 2019 for Washington where he hit .226/276/.465 (86 OPS+) with 20 homers in 111 games. Which is to say that this invite is a combination flyer/courtesy.

Dodgers acquire J.P. Feyereisen

The Dodgers have been pretty damn quiet so far this offseason but they made a trade yesterday. Alas, it was a pretty tiny trade: they acquired reliever J.P. Feyereisen in exchange for Minor League pitcher Jeff Belge.

Feyereisen pitched 24.1 innings in 2022 and struck out 25 batters without allowing an earned run. In 2021 he posted a 2.73 ERA )150 ERA+) in 55 games for the Rays and Brewers. Unfortunately Feyereisen underwent shoulder surgery last week, after which the Rays designated him for assignment. He’s not expected to be available until at least late in the 2023 season and it may be the case that he doesn’t pitch next year at all. He’ll be under team control through the 2026 season, however, so for the Dodgers this is a long term play.

In Belge the Rays get a 25 year-old reliever who pitched in A-ball who strikes out a ton of guys and walks a ton of guys. Those kinds of guys are always fun but they’re also a dime a dozen in the lower minors.

Tigers sign Michael Lorenzen

The Detroit Tigers have free agent right-hander Michael Lorenzen to a one-year, $8.5 million deal. It includes another $1.5 million in incentives.

Lorenzen, 30, 4.24 ERA (5 ERA+) and an 85/44 K/BB ratio across 97.2 innings over 18 starts last year for the Angels. He was far more effective as a reliever for the Reds from 2016-20, so consider it a gamble by the Tigers, but one with little downside.

Brewers acquire Owen Miller from Cleveland

The Milwaukee Brewers have acquired infielder Owen Miller from the Cleveland Guardians for a player to be named later and cash.

Miller, 26, hit .243/.301/.351 (89 OPS+) with six homers and 51 RBI in 130 games with the Guardians last season. He mostly played first base but also made appearances at second base and third. Cleveland didn’t really need him anymore now that they have Josh Bell on a two-year, $33 million deal.

That’s definitely a ballot

It’s madness to dig too deeply into any given Hall of Fame ballot because people are people and the BBWAA has no accountability or any real standards when it comes to such things. Once in a while, though, you come across one that is truly awe-inspiring. Like this one from a sports editor type I’ve never heard of names Art Davidson. He votes for one player: reliever Francisco Rodríguez.

While I will grant that K-Rod was a nice player for a while — 437 career saves and a 148 career ERA+! — I at first suspected that this was actually a mistake on Davidson’s part. As shown on the ballot, last year he voted for Alex Rodríguez and no one else who remains on this year’s ballot. This year he has left A-Rod off. My guess was that he just saw “Rodríguez” and checked the wrong box without giving it a once-over.

Alas, no. He intended to vote for K-Rod and K-Rod only. Which is a hell of a damn thing.

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Other Stuff

Meanwhile, in New Albany, Ohio

I’ve lived in New Albany, Ohio since February 2005 and I’ve been in at least low-level conflict with New Albany, Ohio since . . . February 2005. Most of it is my fault. I have some friends here. I have raised my kids here. I pay my taxes and keep my yard nice and do all of the things you’re supposed to do in places like this but I never quite figured out how to be a proper suburbanite. Not really. I never quite learned how to interact with the parents of my kids’ friends or be super neighborly. I tried to play golf for a while. I volunteered at the kids’ school and learned to do ballet buns. In the end, though, I’ve never figured out how to not be at war, at least on a low level, with my surroundings.

A couple of years ago I went after the powerful people in my town and caught a lot of hell for it. It led to some threats and some unpleasant personal interactions, but I don’t regret it for a minute. Last year I went after a guy on the school board — more than once — and though that also led to threats and hate mail, I sure as hell don’t regret that. He’s a piece of shit and I’ll spend the rest of my days giving him hell if I have to.

It still doesn’t make life easy here, though. I’m still that guy. I suppose I’ll always be that guy. I’m about to be that guy again.

Last fall the New Albany school board passed a resolution requiring that kids get parental permission before they can use their preferred name and/or pronouns at school. No one in the community was asking for that. No law was calling for it. It is, objectively, a horrible policy because it refuses to appreciate that a lot of trans or non-binary kids are not out at home and thus requires them to either not be their true selves at school or else forces a conflict at home that could be traumatic and destructive. It’s also completely out of step with what psychologists, doctors, and other experts think is best and that which most school boards do. Just as a kid named Anthony can ask his teacher to call him “Tony” in class, a trans student can and should be allowed to ask their teacher to call them by their preferred name or with their preferred pronouns at school too. But that can’t happen in New Albany unless the parents get involved. If the new policy is not followed, and a teacher calls a student what they want to be called without parental permission, they will be fired.

I will be writing a lot more about this in the near future — boy howdy, things are in the works — but suffice it to say, this policy was not the product of the public asking for it. Rather, it appears to be the brainchild of the same school board member with whom I went to war last year. The same guy who, due to his being brainwashed by conservative media and being rich enough to where no one ever tells him no, thought that it was reasonable to equate wearing masks during a pandemic to the Holocaust. He now believes that it’s super important for trans kids to get parental permission before being allowed to be who they are. Why? Per a lot of public requests and detective work there appears to be no reason but his own bigotry. He invented the need to do it, claiming it was legally necessary, the board’s lawyer said “actually, no, it’s not, Phil” but he went forward with it anyway and got the board to agree.

There’s a movement afoot in New Albany pushing back against this. Gay kids. Trans kids. Parents of gay kids and trans kids. Pride New Albany. Allies to the kids and the cause. These people have attended and spoken out at school board meetings. They have submitted letters, petitions, and memos. They have attempted to work within the system to get a bad policy changed because it’s a bad policy. There has been little progress in this regard so far, however, mostly because the school board members refuse to listen to people with whom they don’t agree. Mostly because the school board members refuse to appreciate basic reason and demonstrate basic humanity.

I was not involved in this until recently. I had missed it when when the policy was enacted and only got up to speed on it in the last couple of weeks. I became aware of it largely because people working through proper channels hit a brick wall and reached out to me, asking me to enter the fray, knowing that I have a moderately sizable platform, that I raised some hell in the past with that lot, and that I might be able to do it again. So I’m doing it again.

Yesterday I got a tip that a member of the New Albany City Council — a guy named Chip Fellows, who also happens to be the Council’s liaison to the school board, so he knows this is an issue — posted a transphobic “parody” article on his Facebook page. There are a number of things one can do when that kind of thing happens — ignore it; reach out privately; block and/or report the person’s account — but I think the best thing to do when a public official is involved is to show and tell everyone. So I did, both on Twitter and on my own Facebook page:

Within a couple of hours a great many people in the community found out about it and reacted to it in sharply negative ways. The council member deleted the post within an hour or so and, a couple of hours later, deleted his entire Facebook account. Dude is obviously freaked out. Good.

As I was winding down last night, there were a lot of conversations being had about this sonofabitch and what he’s spewing. And people are now having conversations about what can be done about him, legally speaking, and how to more directly attack the school board policy, which he clearly supports. This guy taking five minutes to show his ass on social media, and me taking five minutes to point it out to others, has done more than a few months of meetings has done. And there is going to be more. Believe me, there is going to be more.

Part of me is proud of this. Proud that I shut this guy down and that, in the future, the fight will be taken to him and his fellow bigots. Part of me, however, is sad that it takes this kind of thing to make any progress at all. Sad that the only way someone like Les Wexner was hurt is by finding dirt on him and publicizing it. That the only way a COVID-truther jackass on a school board was hamstrung is because I found his secret, toxic social media account. That the only way this city councilman is hurt is because he fucked up online and I had the platform to shine a spotlight on it. It shouldn’t be that way. Bad, toxic crap should be halted by virtue of it being bad and toxic, not because someone with nothing to lose played gotcha with the people behind it. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.

So here I am. Wanting to be that good citizen. Wanting to be a part of my community. But it’s not in the cards, I don’t guess. My job is to be the guy who goes after people, so by God I’ll do it. I’ll do it until Hell won’t have it. I’ll outlast every single one of these sons of bitches and punch them until either they or I can’t stand up any longer. I can do it longer than they can.

But I wish I didn’t have to. I wish we didn’t live in a world in which that was necessary. I wish I didn’t have to be this guy. But at some point we all have to accept who we actually are and what role we actually play. And I have accepted that the role I play in my community is not a friendly one.

Grant Wahl died of an aortic aneurysm

Dr. Céline Gounder, the wife of the late soccer writer Grant Wahl, announced yesterday that his death last week while covering the World Cup was the result of a sudden rupture of an aortic aneurysm. That determination was made after an autopsy was conducted in the United States.

Here’s Gounder, appearing on CBS This Morning yesterday:

“[The autopsy] showed that he had an aortic aneurysm that ruptured. The aorta — that’s the big blood vessel that comes out of your heart — is sort of the trunk of all your blood vessels. An aneurysm is a ballooning of the blood vessel wall, and so it’s weak . . . [it] is just one of those things that had been likely brewing for years. For whatever reason, it happened at this point in time.”

Gounder followed up with a post at Wahl’s Substack, saying that her husband’s death was not suspicious in any way. He died, she wrote, “from the rupture of a slowly growing, undetected ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium. The chest pressure he experienced shortly before his death may have represented the initial symptoms. No amount of CPR or [defibrillation] shocks would have saved him. His death was unrelated to COVID. His death was unrelated to vaccination status. There was nothing nefarious about his death.”

Sadly, she had to add the part about COVID and vaccination because the utter ghouls of the anti-vax world, such as the execrable Alex Berenson, have begun using Wahl’s death as fodder for their malicious agenda. I don’t believe in Hell, but if I’m wrong about that, I hope those bastards will be eternally burning in it one day.

That aside, the matter is now settled, though it is no less tragic and sad for being so.

“Sometimes When we Touch”

Variety reports that there will be a new three-part documentary about soft rock streaming on the Paramount+ platform beginning January 3. The title is [chef’s kiss] “Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin and Resurrection of Soft Rock.” It’ll focus on acts like Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Air Supply, Ambrosia, the Carpenters, and the Captain & Tennille.

As the marketing stuff — and the subtitle of the documentary itself — suggests, this will be a comeback story. As it should be. Soft rock, a subgenre of which is yacht rock, was massively popular from 70s and into the early 80s. A great deal of it, however, was critically derided and it was absolutely loathed by a certain sort of rock fan as schmaltzy, middle of the road stuff. They probably hated disco more — never underrate racism and homophobia as motivators — but the rockers hated the slick-as-shit L.A. soft rock sound a whole hell of a lot.

A new appreciation for the genre — to the extent it is a genre as opposed to a catch-all category — began several years ago, however. That new appreciation began partially ironically with the YouTube series “Yacht Rock,” which simultaneously poked fun at and actually seemed to love soft rock music. Eventually it achieved a full-fledged comeback. SiriusXM has had a dedicated channel for it for many years now. You hear it in commercials and in movies fairly often. Given that, in a lot of ways, we’re in a post-irony age and artistic gatekeeping is way less of a thing than it used to be, I think it’s safe to say that these days soft rock has the largest audience it’s ever had since it (mostly) disappeared from the radio in the mid-80s.

There is a lot of stuff I like a lot more than 70s soft rock, but I do have a soft spot for it and, in the right place, at the right time, it definitely hits right. Particularly this jam, which used to be my go-to 2AM song when I was a DJ 30 years ago. I don’t care what you think about it but to me it’ll never, ever get old.

Have a great day everyone.