Cup of Coffee: December 21, 2023

The Padres sign a closer, the Mets and Brewers make a trade, what Ohtani's contract means for L.A., janky uniforms, a frightened car, A woman after my heart, Jackwagons, and The Rolling Stones

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s jump on into our day, shall we?

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The Daily Briefing

Padres sign Yuki Matsui

The San Diego Padres have reportedly signed Japanese closer Yuki Matsui to a four-year, $21 million contract.

Matsui, 28, has recorded 326 career saves in ten seasons for the Rakuten Golden Eagles, including 39 this past season. He’ll likely take over as San Diego’s primary closer heading into 2024.

Mets, Brewers make a trade

I always raise an eyebrow when a new GM makes a trade with the team he just left. My assumption is that he knows more about the player(s) he’s acquiring than anyone and if he wants them on his new team maybe the old team should think twice about letting him go. That’s probably flawed reasoning, though, because if the old team was happy to let the old GM go, does it not mean that they don’t think his judgment is as good as who they have in the job now? I’m guessing it’s more complicated than that. Or less complicated. I dunno. It’s just a thing I think about.

I mention that because the New York Mets, the new home of former Brewers’ GM David Stearns, has acquired starter Adrian Houser and outfielder Tyrone Taylor from Milwaukee in exchange for minor league pitcher Coleman Crow.

Houser, a slightly above average innings eater type, fills a hole at the embattled back-end of the Mets rotation. Taylor will be a reserve outfielder in New York in all likelihood, and his departure from Milwaukee helps clear up space for top prospect Jackson Chourio, who just got that pre-debut $82 million extension. Crow, 22, just underwent Tommy John surgery and will miss the season but the Brewers no doubt see him as useful in the future.

I’ll probably forget about this trade in approximately three days, but if it turns out that the Mets got a steal in acquiring Hauser, someone remind me about my raised eyebrow back in December, because I’ll definitely gloat about it and claim an uncommon prescience about such things. If the trade is a bust for New York or even a wash I’ll probably just delete this item and pretend it never happened.

What the Shohei Ohtani contract means for the Dodgers

We talked a great deal about how great a deal Shohei Ohtani’s massively-deferred money contract is for the Dodgers. In the L.A. Times yesterday Jack Harris spoke to some finance and sports business folks and had them expand on that a bit more. Their assessments were pretty startling:

“They’re getting a huge financial windfall for this contract [when compared to the $460-million present value disclosed],” said finance expert Morrie Aaron, founder and president of MCA Financial Group. “They’ll make a lot of money — a lot of money — on this thing.”

One rival agent offered up a jaw-dropping estimate.

“This may be close to an $800 million to $1 billion gain for the Dodgers over a decade,” the agent said, noting that if the team were to simply take the $680 million in deferrals and invest it — say, with an asset management firm like Guggenheim Partners, which is run by Dodgers owner Mark Walter — then the money could more than double in a decade’s time.

“They may be able to make $1 billion extra,” the agent reiterated.

Yesterday we talked some about what baseball opinions would make normie/civilian baseball fans angry at you. Many of you, quite correctly, mentioned player salary opinions being one of them, as there remains, to this day, a strong sentiment among civilians that ballplayers are massively overpaid. As such: next time you’re at your local saloon, elbow the guy at the barstool next to you and tell him “man, the Dodgers are making out like bandits by paying that Japanese fella $700 million. What a deal for them!”

Please report back your findings.

Some uniforms are gonna look mildly janky next year

Paul Lukas has an item over at UniWatch that is of some interest. It has to do with a mild uniform tweak that Nike and MLB have embarked upon that will result in a weird look for a couple of teams.

It’s a small technical thing relating to uniform graphic templates which, apparently, are the same size for every uniform, even if the designs themselves obviously vary. Nike and MLB have decided to narrow that template a little bit in order to make an adjustment to uniforms which have those solid outlines around players’ necks and down along either side of the buttons, which Lukas calls “headspoon pipining.” That narrowing makes those uniforms look a bit sleeker but it disrupts the spacing on uniforms which feature writing across the chest, requiring teams to either move the script an inch or so to the left, rendering it lopsided, in order to keep the same button break in the lettering. Or they have to change where the script breaks for the buttons.

All of that sounds like word salad, but if you click through to UniWatch you’ll see the effect it has, particularly on Dodgers and Cardinals jerseys. Each of them previously had button breaks in the small, low line between letters, making it barely noticeable. Now that break comes in the middle of letters and sticks out like a sore thumb.

In related news, I’ve been reading UniWatch for many, many years now and I never cease to be amazed at how much is going on with uniform design and how much seemingly little things matter. Which I suppose is the entire point of UniWatch.

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Other Stuff

I approve of your mission but question the likelihood of its success

The post:

The photos:

It looks better than a Cybertruck but that’s not sayin’ much. Mostly it just looks frightened. Or maybe its just shaken. This car as SEEN THINGS, man.

A woman after my heart

Last week Washington Capitols and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin announced plans to move the Washington Wizards and Capitals from Capital One Arena in downtown Washington D.C. to a new complex in the Potomac Yards neighborhood north of Alexandria, Virginia. That has led to a lot of the usual discourse surrounding stadiums and arenas and development and all of that.

I will not pretend to understand the politics required to get that proposal through the Virginia legislature and to a place where shovels start to dig dirt, but I feel like this statement from Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas is possibly relevant. And undeniably delicious:

According to her Wikipedia page, Lucas is 79 years old and has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Despite that, and despite the fact that I already have a wife, I think I want to marry her.

Sticking with Virginia . . .

The other day I wrote about the injunction that was issued to stop the removal of a statute in Arlington National Cemetery which glorifies the confederacy and slavery. That injunction was removed and the statue has been as well.

I was unaware of the precise dynamics of the legal challenge, but this story explains a couple of fun things.

First, it seems that the group wanting to protect the statue — Save Southern Heritage — had filed a previous action to preserve it in the District of Columbia. They lost that. Then they re-filed basically the same action in Virginia without telling the court that they had just lost in D.C. That’s generally a no-no and the judge made an annoyed note about it.

Second, that group, rather than just rely on procedural grounds or citations to environmental impacts of the statue’s removal, actually straight-up defended it as “promoting reconciliation” between the north and the south and thus not being offensive. About that . . .

Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war . . . Tuesday’s hearing focused largely on legal issues, but [Judge Rossie] Alston questioned the heritage group’s lawyers about the notion that the memorial promotes reconciliation.

He noted that the statue depicts, among other things, a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?” asked Alston, an African American who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.

Trump appointee or not, what on earth makes anyone think it’s a good idea to walk into a courtroom presided over by a Black judge and argue, with a straight face, that a statue erected by a southern state during the Jim Crow era which features mammies and slaves following a confederate soldier as he departs for battle is a benign, non-racist thing? Like, how blinkered do you have to be? Usually groups like these sorts of people come up with total horseshit in order to hide their abject racism, but I feel like they’ve gotten so high on their own supply that they don’t know when they’re telling the truth and when they’re shoveling said horseshit.

Not that the statue is going away entirely:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who disagrees with the decision to remove the memorial, made arrangements for it to be moved to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley.

Remember when Youngkin was running for office and people claimed he was a moderate Republican who could take the party into a new, less-bigoted and less-confrontational direction? Yeah, that was hilarious.

Jackwagons

I’ve been using the word “jackwagon” for a long time. It started at NBC, where I couldn’t really swear, and the word was deployed as a synonym for “asshole.” I had picked it up from some commercial that aired during the World Series several years ago. It starred R. Lee Ermey — the drill sergeant from “Full Metal Jacket” — and he used it in the same way. I wanna say the commercial was for salsa or tortilla chips or something. I can’t remember.

The weird thing about my use of “jackwagon” was that hardly anyone else seemed to remember the commercial and so a lot of people thought I made the word up. A few people mentioned older uncles or grandparents who had used it but, for the most part, my deploying “jackwagon” was met with amusement and the mistaken impression that I had coined it. It was some real Mandela Effect stuff. At times I almost wondered if I had simply dreamed that commercial.

Yesterday I took Anna and Carlo out to a nearby diner for lunch. While waiting to be seated I looked into the kitchen and saw this:

I already liked this place, but now I like it even more. And I may have to inquire about getting me one of those shirts.

The Rolling Stones

As Christmas approaches and the news cycle slows down, I’m more inclined to talk about non-pressing stuff than usual, so let’s argue about music some, shall we?

Yesterday in the comments a little conversation about the Rolling Stones popped up. It started with someone saying that “Exile on Main Street” sucked, to which I jokingly threatened a banning (I was only half-joking; I’m watchin’ you, buddy!). After that some people talked some about the Stones’ late-60s, early-70s peak, during the course of which one of you said “The Rolling Stones as an entity are wildly overrated.”

My take: I hate almost all “underrated/overrated” analysis as it’s unnecessarily reductive. What I will say, though, is that the Rolling Stones were, for a time, as the well-worn slogan goes, The World’s Greatest Rock Band. But they also have been irrelevant for far longer than they were great even if a lot of folks won’t really acknowledge that. You can call that what you’d like, but it’s where I fall with them.

Here’s the quick and dirty, as far as I am concerned, and no, I do not claim an ounce of originality in this assessment, as many critics with far more knowledge and expertise than I possess have said much the same:

1964-65: A nice bluesy counterpoint to the Beatles — and better than most of the many other English bluesy bands which popped up in the early 60s — though nowhere near the Beatles level in quality. I have listened to their first few albums before (self-titled until “Out of Our Heads” and whatever compilations that material appeared on) but have never felt really compelled to revisit them;

1965-1967: A big leap forward with “Out of Our Heads” through “Between the Buttons.” Much stronger songwriting and much greater adventurousness. I personally prefer the Kinks in this era to the Stones, but I know I’m unusual in that regard. To most people, this is when they buried all of the other British Invasion bands in the ground, save the Beatles. If the Stones had died in a plane crash in 1967, or if they had all retired from music to become monks, they’d still be remembered and lauded as one of the best bands of the 60s based on this output. I go back and listen to these albums fairly regularly.

Their Satanic Majesties Request: Eh, nice try. I know there has been a lot of revisionism about this album, and I’ll acknowledge that a couple of songs are truly great, but this was obviously a dead end for them. But its failure is also what set them on the path to their greatest accomplishments in . . .

The Peak: “Beggar’s Banquet,” “Let it Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Exile on Main Street.” Throw in the live “Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!” as well. All of these came out in a three and a half year period. The only other artists I can think of who put out this much top product in such a short period of time is Dylan in the mid-60s and, perhaps, the Beatles. Though, I should note, the Beatles’ peak featured a couple of lesser works (“Magical Mystery Tour” and “Yellow Submarine”) and one uneven album (“The White Album”) whereas the Stones’ produced nothing lesser or uneven at all in this period. This run is peak rock classic rock-era rock and roll — it may be all-time peak rock and roll — and I’m usually inclined to say that it’s rather preposterous to argue otherwise. And I don’t care what anyone says, “Exile on Main Street” is the best of ‘em, even if it’s not as immediately accessible as “Let it Bleed.” It may be the best of them precisely because it’s not as immediately accessible.

The Rest: The immediate post-peak run of “Goats Head Soup” through “Black and Blue” has its moments and some killer tracks and would represent the peak of a lot of bands, but it’s obviously more than a step down for the Stones. What wouldn’t be? 1978’s “Some Girls” was a masterwork which I would argue is on-par with The Peak. But it was also the last great album they’d ever put out. Indeed, in my assessment, they’ve only put out one more truly interesting album in the 45 years since “Some Girls.” That would be “Undercover,” which wasn’t a great work or anything — indeed, it was a stylistic reach for them and was both a mess and ultimately a failure in a lot of ways — but they were at least trying something different.

In the 41 years since “Undercover” came out the Rolling Stones have only released six studio albums of original material, one album of blues standards, and a massive amount of live material and greatest hits sets. The blues standards album, 2016’s “Blue and Lonesome,” is excellent and serves as a great career coda even if they just put out that new record. The rest of it is mostly throwaway stuff to justify tours. These albums, collectively, have a very small handful of decent songs but not enough to even make up a decent “late period” playlist or compilation in my view. The Stones have, quite obviously, earned the right to do whatever they want, and I certainly won’t criticize Stones fans who love some of this later material because we all like what we like, but I find it almost uniformly uninteresting and unnecessary.

I’m not sure where that falls on the “overrated/underrated” scale, but that’s what I think about ‘em.

Have a great day everyone.