Cup of Coffee: December 16, 2021

CBA talks resume, but don't get your hopes up. Urban's out in Jacksonville but there's a job opening in Gainesville. Also: Sedition, activism, snacks, and business suits.

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There will be talks between MLB and the Player’s Association today, but don’t get your hopes up. At least one player says he could tell the difference between the different balls that were switched in and out last season, another player is heading to Japan, and another team is proceeding as if actual players don’t matter.

In Other Stuff, Urban Meyer is now gonna have plenty of time to own his R, his old employer, the Florida Gators, want you to pay to work for them, I talk about business suits and the difference between leveling and conformity, marvel at what passes for activism among anti-vaxxers, get very grumpy about the Democrats’ congressional agenda, prepare myself to be represented by a congressman who openly advocated for sedition, ask y’all if you could raw-dog a bunch of snack food in 30 minutes, provide an update on the spicy horses, and then let all of that madness wash away via the cleansing power of hare, hare, krishna, krishna.

My sweet Lord, that’s a lot of stuff, but if we start now, we’ll get through it

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The Daily Briefing

MLB, MLBPA to talk today, but not about important stuff

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported last night that there will actually be some MLB/MLBPA talks today. They are not, however, gonna talk about the hard stuff:

The parties have had some communication since the owners started the lockout Dec. 2, and a small in-person meeting is planned for Thursday to discuss areas outside of core economics. There are more than 30 subjects in collective bargaining, and not all of them are as contentious as matters like the competitive balance tax or how many years it takes players to get to arbitration.

Drellich reports that serious talks about the big issues are more likely going to be a January thing. Which is what I’ve been saying when asked on radio shows or podcasts or on social media or whenever I’m having inner monologues about it all. They just need some reset time, ya know?

As for whether this is a good thing or a bad thing: eh, it’s a thing.

There are some people that hear stuff like this and talk about how agreement on small issues can grease the skids to agreement on bigger issues, but I don’t think that idea really applies here. The parties know each other well. The issues in play are well-defined. This is not the Federation and the Tamarians and we’re not trying to parse “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” or what have you. Establishing a baseline of trust and dialog on some obscure matter relating to pension accounting is not gonna miraculously crack the nuts that are service time or revenue sharing. Only talking about those things will do that and they’re not doing that yet. Which is to say: don’t get your hopes up.

When they do get started talking about the big things, however, it may be awkward at first, as Drellich says the union expects MLB to make the next offer while MLB believes it made the last one and that it’s the MLBPA’s turn. If I was an old man who loved old references I’d make some comment about how they’re arguing over the shape of the table, Paris Peace Accords-style, but since I’m not I won’t engage in any of that nonsense.

Anthony Rizzo says players could tell MLB used multiple different balls in 2021

Free-agent first baseman Anthony Rizzo was on a podcast hosted by his former Chicago Cubs teammate Ian Happ earlier this week and claimed that he and some other players could tell the difference between the multiple baseballs used by MLB last season. Rizzo:

“I would take the balls this year and feel on them and be like, 'Man, this seems harder. And then you take some of them and you're like, 'Feel how soft this is compared to what they were.' It's crazy.”

Rizzo’s comments, of course, come in the wake of Bradford William Davis' Business Insider report about Major League Baseball using two sets of baseballs during the season. The league blamed the switch on a manufacturing delay at Rawlings due to the pandemic, but that explanation was debunked in the original report.

It’s exactly this sort of bait-and-switch that caused Japan’s baseball commissioner to resign a few years back, but so far Rob Manfred has been able to stand by the league’s erroneous excuse without anyone pressing him on it. Must be good to be Rob Manfred.

Gregory Polanco to play in Japan

A report came out yesterday that Gregory Polanco is “very close” to signing with a team in Japan.

Polanco, 30, was released by the Pirates in late August. At the time he was the last player from the last Pirates team to appear in the postseason still on the roster. He was hitting just .208/.283/.354 with 11 home runs and 36 RBI in 107 games, though, and history can only get a man so far. He latched on with the Blue Jays after that but didn’t make an appearance with the big club.

Polanco had some nice moments in Pittsburgh but never lived up to the hype he received as a top prospect, hitting .241/.309/.409 with 96 home runs and 362 RBI in eight seasons. Now he’ll be taking his talents to Japan.

A player-free FanFest

Yesterday I shared the Cleveland Guardians’ press release announcing spring training tickets going on sale despite the fact that there’s a lockout going on and thus we’re not assured of there, you know, being a spring training.

Today I share news that the Houston Astros are still going on with their annual FanFest despite the fact that those sorts of events usually feature the players. How are they getting around it?

Chandler Rome @Chandler_Rome

In an email to season-ticket holders, the Astros announced that FanFest will return to Minute Maid Park on Jan. 22. It promises appearances from "your favorite coaches, alumni, and broadcasters." If the lockout is ongoing, no current players are permitted on site.

Act now or else you won’t be able to meet, I dunno, Morgan Ensberg or Jason Lane or someone like that. At least until the next time they’re making an appearance at a Home Depot or something.

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Other Stuff

Urban’s out

Adam Schefter reported early this morning that Urban Meyer has been fired as the coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. You hate to see it.

Dude signed a five-year deal, but he lasted only 13 games, going 2-11, bailed on his team after a loss, was immediately caught on video grinding on a woman who was not his wife in his own restaurant, blamed the media, called his coaches losers, kicked one of his players and called him a dipshit, and then got fired. And people say he didn’t accomplish anything.

Remember this holiday season that, if you find yourself facing adversity, own your R. If you’re having trouble doing that, rest assured that the book which contains the instructions for doing so should be pretty deeply discounted pretty soon:

The Florida Gators want you to PAY to be a locker room assistant

A subscriber sent me this yesterday. It’s from the University of Florida basketball team which is selling you the “incredible experience” of working as a locker room assistant. Yes, that’s right, YOU will pay THEM for the right to hang up the jockstraps and stuff:

This is what, in less-dystopian times, we would call a “job” not an “incredible experience” and something for which one would be paid not something for which one would shell out $350 to do. The fact that purchasers of this “experience” don’t even get to see the game after doing this is just an extra kick in the balls to the pathetic marks who would fall for this.

Not that there will be a shortage of pathetic marks, I don’t suppose. I’ve lived in Columbus long enough to know that if Ohio State offered people the “incredible experience” of being literal tackling dummies for the Buckeyes, people would probably shell out $1,000 to do it. Then they’d frame the laser-printed Certificate of Completion of the event right next to the X-rays which showed their broken ribs and the game-worn Craig Krenzel jersey. It’d all be hung on the all of their scarlet-and-gray-pained basement rec room.

Cutting Ties

A person named Jonathan Miller of The Spectator wrote a pathetic lament about how men’s neckties have gone out of style. It’s pathetic not because the writer is sad about ties for their own sake — hey, if you like ties, good for you — but rather because he views the decline of the necktie through the lens of conservative jackass male grievance. To him it’s about wokeism at work, political correctness run amok, and the emasculation of western civilization and all manner of that sort of bullshit:

Political correctness in turn warped into wokeness and intersectionalism. Men, especially privileged men, began to be blamed for everything. And so they ran, hid and finally surrendered. As a visible sign of submission, they also stopped wearing ties. What got lost was an important point about male formality more broadly: dressing sharply is an egalitarian act. Granted, you can have cheap suits and expensive suits, tasteful ties and ugly ties, but the universality of jackets and ties made them a great leveller. The sense of obligation to wear a tie applied to an estate agent as much as to a lord.

Business suits were and remain about superficial conformity, not leveling. About keeping anyone from standing out in the crowd in anything approaching a unique way. Suits, and especially ties, however, bring with them all manner of new levels within that conforming group which allow people to judge and sort people into classes all the same. How nice is your tie. How well-cut is your suit. Who made your oxfords?

Uniforms, in contrast, are a leveler. There is leveling, at least to a degree, going on for workers at Best Buy or in a restaurant kitchen. There is no leveling happening in law firm or bank offices. At least not as long as the guy in the corner office can afford — and make a big show — about his $2,000 suit compared to the new kid’s Men’s Wearhouse number.

I hated wearing suits and ties back when I was a lawyer. Mostly because I had to do it per office and, then anyway, industry policy. I felt like a drone being made to look like other drones. Now I wear a suit, maybe, once or twice a year for someone’s wedding or a formal event of some type. I rather like dressing up for those, because it’s special and it’s nice to feel sharp sometimes. It’s a rare and unique look and experience for me. It’s everything that wearing a suit and tie to work every day was not.

Great Moments in Activism

Six anti-vaccination protestors were arrested at a Cheesecake Factory in New York for refusing to comply with city laws which require restaurant patrons to show valid proof of vaccination.

It was basically a sit-in for assholes, as thirty or so protesters refused to check in at the host stand, walked past customers who were waiting for tables and sat down in the restaurant while waiting to get pinched. When the cops showed up one of the anti-vaxxers compared them to Nazis. You’d think that they’d at the very least wait their turn before endangering other people’s health and calling the cops Nazis. Lines at Cheesecake Factory are no joke.

Anyway, of all the hills to die on, imagine choosing it to be a Cheesecake Factory in Queens. Imagine telling that story when your granddaughter is sitting on your knee, asking what YOU did during the war.

Great Moments in Failure

It was reported yesterday that the Senate Democrats are expected to shelve the Build Back Better bill and will, instead, move forward to deal with a voting rights bill. A voting rights bill for which, like the Build Back Better bill, they almost certainly do not have the votes to pass, so they’ll just go from one failure to the next, looking impotent and rudderless in the process.

As they do so, child tax credits and all manner of other popular and useful things President Biden promised will go by the wayside, allowing Republicans and the media to, quite convincingly, cast Democrats as ineffectual, after which they will lose Congress next fall and nothing will happen for two years until we get either another Trump campaign or one that may as well be one.

At that point all of the political oxygen will be sucked up into a battle between Democrats who will argue “hey, fascism is suboptimal so perhaps let us hold on to power with which we know not what to do for a few more years?” which will not do much to turn out the votes that they actually need to hold on to power, let alone increase their majorities in such a way that they can do something. Meanwhile, Republican voters will be mainlining misinformation campaigns filled with racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of uncut lab-quality grievance. It’ll hit ‘em like Mia Wallace getting a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart, giving them life and purpose. Though there are not as many of those types of people as there are non-sociopaths in this country, their passion, combined with levels of anti-democratic measures unseen in this country since the end of the Jim Crow era — and, if those don’t work, a straight-up judiciary-assisted coup — will likely push the ball over the line for them, putting us right back where we were in 2017, but way, way worse.

But hey, maybe if we just vote harder it’ll all work out?

Great Moments in Sedition

If the Ohio legislature’s shameless gerrymander is upheld — and it likely will be — Jim Jordan will become my congressman. That’s special. I love that so much for me.

In other news, Jordan was outed last night as the sender of a text message to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, partially revealed this week by the Jan. 6 committee, which argued that Meadows should tell Mike Pence that he should, basically, just invalidate the election and name Trump president. The text:

“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”

Jordan’s defense is that he didn’t write that but, rather, some attorney did, and that he merely forwarded it.

Setting aside how some broad and tautologous verbiage about unconstitutional things being bad does not justify the shit-canning of election results, Jordan's defense -- "I was merely forwarding the suggestion that the Vice President unilaterally invalidate the votes of millions of Americans and hand the presidency to Trump against the will of the people to the president’s Chief of Staff” -- is not the exercise in absolution he thinks it is.

In a sane and smart world Jordan would be, at the very least, drummed out of Congress for aiding and abetting an attempt to undermine American democracy. In a sane, smart, and just world he’d find his ass prosecuted. In this world, however, I predict nothing will happen to him and that, if anything, him being outed as this text’s sender will enhance his standing in the Republican Party and make him richer and more powerful than he would be if he actually respected and adhered to the laws of the land.

Could you do it?

That last couple of items were dark. Let’s lighten the mood a bit.

This tweet made the rounds yesterday:

🌹 Travis 🌹 @801FuNk801

Could you eat 1 of everything in here within 30 minutes for $10k?

This would be much harder than it appears, I reckon.

I think most people would look at the Jack Link’s and think that’s the biggest obstacle, but I disagree. I likewise see no real problem with the Trident gum in there that everyone is worried about. The key: you don’t chew it. You dry-swallow it. Just go in and raw dog that gum and worry about the constipation later. The Trident is not the issue here, dude.

No, where I think the rubber would really hit the road is when it came to the Captain’s Wafers, Toast Chees, and such down on the lower right. That’s a lot of starchy chewing in them crackers. It’ll make those Taki’s up top look like child’s play. The game will be decided there, I suspect.

In other news, there is no way NBC would’ve ever let me say “You dry-swallow it. Just go in and raw dog that gum” when I worked there. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to you. If it’s a good thing:

They caught the spicy horses

Back on October 1 I wrote about how three zebras had escaped a farm and had been traipsing all over suburban Maryland, becoming local celebrities in the process. Sadly, one of the three died not long after escaping, it was later learned. The other two continued their little jaunt for months. But now it’s over: they’ve been captured and returned to captivity.

When I wrote about this back in October I suggested that, since zebras are so hard to capture, officials should let nature handle the matter via the release of several of the only three animals which have a demonstrated track record of handling zebras: lions, hyenas, and crocodiles. Maryland’s pretty boring, so it could use the excitement. We don’t know exactly how the zebras were captured but, given that they are reportedly unharmed, officials do not appear to have taken my advice on that score. Like so many other people in power they’re not yet ready for my kind of vision.

Pity, that. Would’ve saved them a load of time.

“My Sweet Lord”

If The Beatles as a group can make a big splash in 2021 for some 1969 footage, certainly one of them, on their own, can make a big splash in 2021 for a video of one of his songs from 1970. That Beatle is George Harrison whose “My Sweet Lord” got a new music video released for it yesterday.

The video is a star-studded affair, framed my Mark Hamill sending Fred Armisen and Vanessa Bayer, playing agents of sorts, out on an undefined mission to find . . . something. Most of it involves them simply poking around Los Angeles, with most of the poking around taking place in a movie theater with multiple other well-known celebrities on staff or in the audience.

Most notable among them: Ringo Starr who, while hanging out with Joe Walsh, throws popcorn at Armisen. Weird Al Yankovich is working concessions. Patton Oswalt is taking tickets. Also taking part: Jeff Lynne (natch), Dhani and Olivia Harrison, Jon Hamm, Tim & Eric, Garfunkel and Oates, Taika Waititi, Tom Scharpling, Paul Scheer and some others whose faces were familiar but whose names escaped me.

The story of the video has no real point, necessarily, but Harrison’s whole deal was about the journey not the destination, so it seems appropriate. Also: it’s very well done and contains some lovely archive footage of Harrison himself.

And of course, his very, very lovely song.

Have a great day, everyone.