Cup of Coffee: December 28, 2023

A welcome to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a far less friendly welcome to Wander Franco, a welcome to Isiah Kiner-Falefa, eh, the mob has spoken about the Substack bugout, stealth musicals, and Tommy Smothers

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today, unfortunately, you’re gonna get what you pay for, as I have a hellacious cold. The every-bone-and-muscle-of-my-body-aches kind of cold. The cough-to-rattle-the-rafters kind of cold. It happens — and Mom and Dad, I’m fine, so don’t call me all worried this morning — but it also means that (a) my energy and attention span was bupkis yesterday; and (b) I NyQuil’d out at like 9PM last night and set this sucker to go live on its own this morning, so if I missed some big late night news, welp, it happens.

Before get on to the abbreviated news of the day, let us all praise the Great and Mighty God Doxylamine and His disciples: Ibuprofen Chased with Hot Tea, Lemon, Honey, and a Shot of Evan Williams.

Praise be Thy name. Selah.

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The Daily Briefing

The Dodgers introduce Yoshinobu Yamamoto

“Yoshinobu Yamamoto, these are the Dodgers. Dodgers, this is Yoshinobu Yamamoto.”

*25 sets of handshakes, plus a few more for coaches and staff and owners and stuff*

“Thanks for coming everyone!”

OK, there was a bit more. Yamamoto had this to say:

“I’d like to thank everyone in the Orix organization, the Dodger organization and all the people close to me who have given me so much support throughout this free-agent process. I am truly excited to wear Dodger Blue and can’t wait to play in front of a packed Dodger Stadium.”

Later in the press conference he said that Shohei Ohtani “wasn't the sole reason I decided to come here. Even if he decided to go somewhere else, I probably would've ended up on the Dodgers.” Which I guess lets Steve Cohen and Hal Steinbrenner off the hook, not that any of us should care about that too much.

In related news, the Dodgers designated lefty Bryan Hudson for assignment to make room for Yamamoto on the 40-man roster. Every time that sort of transaction is made in order to make room for a huge star I wonder if the dude who got DFA’d brags about it to his baseball playing buddies when they get together. Like if there’s some sort of cachet in getting taken off the roster for a superstar as opposed to an average player or simply being let go because you’re not cutting it. The “what are you in for?” thing but for baseball players instead of inmates.

What else, what else . . .

Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s agent, Joel Wolfe, in noting the lengths clubs went in making an impression on him, said one club presented Yamamoto with a team-issued javelin as a gift.

I’m not sure that a piece of track and field equipment would move the dial for me if I was a top free agent, but the right kind of javelin might make me think twice:

Did I mention that I’m absolutely loopy on cold meds right now?

Wander Franco summoned by Dominican authorities

Some clarity to yesterday’s report about the Dominican authorities looking for Wander Franco from ESPN's Enrique Rojas and Juan Recio:

Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco has been summoned by authorities in the Dominican Republic to answer a complaint of allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with minors.

Franco and his lawyers are required to attend a meeting on Thursday with the Specialized Prosecutor's Office for Children and Adolescents in the city of Santo Domingo.

Rojas and Recio report that “at least two people have filed legal action against Franco, and he is also under investigation for allegedly having a relationship with a third minor.”

I have no damn idea how this stage of the proceedings corresponds to the U.S. criminal justice process. Maybe they’re asking him in for questioning. Maybe this “summons” is akin to a surrender/arraignment. I’ll leave that up to the abogados among you, if there are any among you, to sort that out. I’m sure we’ll hear eventually.

No one affiliated with the Rays or MLB is commenting, but it’d be silly to expect them to comment at this juncture. Partially because it’d be way out of the usual habit for them to do so and partially because they’re all probably busy inventing new forms of mathematics which will allow them to calculate the massive suspension Franco is gonna get when this is all wound up.

Blue Jays sign Isiah Kiner-Falefa

The Blue Jays were in the bidding for Shohei Ohtani. They didn’t get him. This week they’ve began to spend some of the money they were, at least theoretically, gonna shoot his way. On Tuesday it was re-upping Kevin Keirmaier. Yesterday it was signing infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa to a two-year, $15 million deal. The contract includes $1 million in performance bonuses.

Kiner-Falefa, who will turn 29 just before Opening Day, had spent most of his time as a shortstop before last season but was converted into a full-blown utility guy by the Yankees in 2023, playing 78 games in the outfield to go with 31 games at third base and a smattering of appearances elsewhere. He also turned in his worst offensive season in his six-year career, hitting .242/.306/.340 (78 OPS+) with six homers in 113 games, though thats not orders of magnitude worse than he’s hit in the past. You pretty much know what you’re gonna get from the guy on that score by now.

I suppose Kiner-Falefa is simply filling the Whit Merrifield spot for the Jays, but Toronto has like eleventeen infielders either on the 40-man roster or close to it, so I’m not sure why they needed to shell out fifteen large for Kiner-Falefa, but it ain’t my money.

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Other Stuff

The mob has spoken

I said yesterday that I was leaning toward waiting to migrate to Buttondown — if I do indeed settle on Buttondown — until comments were available. I also asked your opinion. I did not count the replies exactly but the result was approximately 99.999% in favor of waiting, so that’s what I’m gonna do. When the newsletter migrates, it will migrate with full commenting functionality on Day 1. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

In related news, Radley Balko wrote a thoughtful and detailed post about this whole Substack mess yesterday. In it he talks about the challenges writers face in switching platforms and why it’s not so easy to simply say “screw you, Substack, I’m leaving.” Not every single one of the considerations he cites applies to me in quite the same way as it applies to him, but, as is the case with me, Substack is Balko’s livelihood and enough of the things he talks about apply enough to me to where it had me nodding my head a lot.

Which is not to say that I’m not leaving Substack. I am. But if you do follow and subscribe to newsletter writers who are not bolting or who are not bolting quickly enough for your tastes I hope Balko’s piece causes you to cut ‘em a little slack.

Stealth musicals

Allison and I went to see “Wonka” on Tuesday afternoon. My take: pleasant and enjoyable, even if it’s pretty much the definition of an inessential movie. When taken on its own terms, as opposed to comparing it to the original or the Tim Burton remake, it’s a perfectly fine, ahem, confection, with a good cast and some good performances. The decision to not, once again, tell the Golden Ticket story from the book and both movie versions was a good one. If you’re super into Wonka stuff or if you are a big Timothée Chalamet fan, you’ll like it. If not, you really don’t need to see it, even if it is perfectly fine entertainment.

The best part of the whole moviegoing experience, however, came right when Chalamet hit the first note of his first song, which was about 11 seconds into the movie. That’s when an adult man down the row from me, who was taking in the movie with his whole family, audibly groaned “oh, NOOO.” It was obvious that he had no idea “Wonka” was a musical and he was not at all eager to watch a musical. To his credit that was the first and last time he made any noise during the movie, presumably because his wife or one of his kids elbowed him to shut up.

I was amused at the man’s reaction because I was not sure how anyone could not know that “Wonka” was a musical. The original one was, after all. And I’d read a couple of articles about the movie as it was being developed and as it shot over the past couple of years which talked about the song choices and the choreography and things like that which made it clear what the film really was. But then, after talking to some folks on Tuesday night, I learned that many people were surprised by it and that my awareness of it was an exception born of my media habits, not the rule.

What most of these people hipped me to was Ben Lindbergh writing at The Ringer back in mid-December about how Hollywood has taken to hiding the fact that a given movie is a musical. This can be seen primarily via the trailers, which almost completely edit out all the song-and-dance business in an effort to disguise the genre. The thinking, as Ben’s well-reported article explains, is that a pretty wide swath of moviegoers are turned off by singing and dancing and stuff so it’s better to downplay that and get butts in the seats, even if deception is required. Given that a number of otherwise well-regarded musicals have flopped over the past few years, it’s probably not a dumb move, though it sort of makes me wonder why, if that is the case, anyone makes musicals at all anymore.

After reading that and thinking for a minute, I realized that I was the weirdo here, not the guy down the aisle from me. I watch almost no TV with commercials these days, so I didn’t see televised trailers for “Wonka” in the runup to its release. I probably did see a music-free trailer for it at the theater several months ago but, as noted, I had already looked it up and read stuff talking about it as a musical well beforehand so I wasn’t really paying attention. It makes perfect sense, however, for most people to go into a movie only having seen the trailers. Especially a family-friendly movie around the holidays which is not always the most carefully considered ticket-buying decision.

The funniest thing about all of this, though, was that before “Wonka” started, there was a trailer for the new “Mean Girls” movie. When it rolled, I turned to Allison, confused, and asked why they were remaking “Mean Girls” already. She didn’t know. Then, when I read Lindbergh’s article, I learned that it too is a musical and that its trailer, like “Wonka’s,” completely hides that fact. Same with “The Color Purple” by the way, though I also randomly knew that was a musical already.

Whatever the case, I cannot for the life of me remember a time when an initial impulse on my part — to feel mildly superior to the guy down the aisle from me — had been shown to be so thoroughly and hilariously wrong as quickly as this one had. It serves as a good reminder for me to be careful with my assumptions.

Tommy Smothers: 1937-2023

The great Tommy Smothers died on Tuesday. He had cancer. He was 86.

It’s hard to explain The Smothers Brothers’ success to people who are not already familiar with them or their time, but for those who don’t know, they were two straight (in the counterculture/non-counterculture sense) boy-next-door brothers who played folk songs that quickly devolved into comedic asides and arguments. The basis of the arguments: sibling conflict in which the older brother, Tommy, offered all manner of malapropisms and seeming confusion about the subjects of the songs and was subsequently corrected by the seemingly more intelligent and refined younger brother Dick. Eventually Tommy would offer his big catchphrase — “Mom always liked you best!” — and the audience roared.

The Smothers Brothers’ act shouldn’t have lasted for more than a comedy album or three in the early 1960s after which it probably should’ve petered out alongside the folk boom which the Smothers Brothers lampooned. But two things happened that changed that.

First, those albums were WAY funnier than a mere description of them could capture. There was broad humor and narrow humor, low humor and high. The bits almost always came close to falling apart but then wrapped up satisfyingly with either a surprisingly coherent musical conclusion or in abject chaos. My parents had a couple of Smothers Brothers albums lying around when I was a kid. I absolutely loved them both on the level a kid can love anything funny but also because I sensed that there was some stuff going on with them that, even if I didn’t quite understand it, I wanted to.

The second and far more important thing, culturally speaking, was “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” which ran on CBS between 1967 and 1969.

I’m guessing the network exec who gave the show the green light figured that Tommy and Dick would just be moving their comedy club/album schtick to television. What they did, however, was to bring satirical, countercultural and sometimes downright radical sentiments into America’s living rooms. The show, for which Tommy was the unquestionable driving force, was simultaneously entertaining and subversive. There was slapstick comedy — a young writer named Steve Martin got his real start there — political commentary, and the showcasing of the day’s hottest rock acts and counterculture comedians. The Smothers Brothers took on the war in Vietnam,¹ spoke out against racism, talked about sex and politics, and much more than winked at recreational drug use. From the outset Tommy’s vision was such that he was forced to wage war with the network censors like it was his job. Which is a good reason why, in the spring of 1969, he was out of a job with the show being cancelled and replaced by a new, much safer comedy/variety show called “Hee-Haw.”

In later years Tommy would admit that at some point in all of that he sort of lost the plot and became pretty damn humorless about it all, which is kind of a problem for a comedian. He gave interviews in which he claimed thats Richard Nixon personally leaned on the network to cancel the show and took to going on rants as opposed to using his wit and talent to make the message go down more easily. He’d eventually shake that off and he and Dick would return to network TV a couple of more times as the years went on, but the moment was sort of lost.

They would continue to tour their two-man act for decades, though, and from what I saw of it via TV clips and the like, they remained sharp and funny, and Tommy still delivered some political commentary, albeit in a less in-your-face way. That said, I tend to think that Tommy Smothers blunted his critique of Nixon and eventually Reagan’s America far less than a lot of his contemporaries did, and I’d guess that he and his brother left a lot of money on the table as a result.

It’s probably not a surprise to you to hear that Tommy Smothers was something of an inspiration to me. Like I said yesterday when talking about my political leanings, I’m not anyone’s idea of a radical, certainly not superficially speaking. I’m not gonna storm the castle or anything because that’s just not who I am. I do, however, believe in poking at, questioning and, when necessary, challenging authority. And, while I’m content to keep to myself most of the time, I will refuse to compromise my principles when people or circumstances lean on me to do so.

Blacklisted Hollywood types were those kinds of people. Jim Bouton was that kind of person. So too was Tommy Smothers. It’s those sorts of folks who are the closest things I have to heroes, and when one of them shuffles off, it’s worth toasting their memory.

Rest in peace Tommy Smothers.

Have a great day everyone.

1. The linked song, “Draft Dodger Rag,” was a Phil Ochs song. You may or may not know who Phil Ochs was, but suffice it to say that neither Ochs nor his sentiments were getting a hell of a lot of exposure on network TV in the late 1960s.