Cup of Coffee: December 7, 2023

The Juan Soto deal, the Craig Kimbrel signing, a looming threat in St. Louis, no thanks Bryce, reporters who have lost the plot, the Frick Award, Great Moments in Chipotle, trains, and Norman Lear

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

The Winter Meetings are closing with a bigtime trade and we had a couple of notable signings yesterday as well. It was a pretty quiet week but it’s ending a bit more noisily.

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The Daily Briefing

Blockbuster: Juan Soto traded to the Yankees in seven-player deal

The New York Yankees have made the sort of big splash their fans have been hungering for for some time: they’ve acquired superstar slugger Juan Soto from the Padres in a seven-player deal. And the Padres got a pretty good return considering that Soto is, at present, a one-year rental.

The specifics:

• The Yankees get: outfielders Juan Soto and Trent Grisham

• The Padres get: starters Michael King and Drew Thorpe, swingmen Jhony Brito and Randy Vásquez, and catcher Kyle Higashioka.

Soto’s bonafides need no extensive explanation here. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball. He hit .275/.410/.519 (158 OPS+) with 35 homers in 2023. For his career he’s a .284/.421/.524 (157 OPS+) hitter. He’s just 25. He’ll make something like $30 million-$35 million via arbitration in 2024 and will become a free agent a little less than a year from now. The Yankees, however, are apparently not concerned with payroll these days. Which, good for them.

Soto will play left field unless and until Giancarlo Stanton gets hurt at which point he’ll likely DH. Grisham, 27, a career .216/.316/.383 (95 OPS+) hitter, will be used by the Yankees as a fourth outfielder and late-inning defensive upgrade.

The Padres, apart from avoiding having to pay Soto that $30-35 million, will get a number of quite useful though by no means transformative players should the deal be finalized:

• King, 28, has appeared in 115 games for New York over the past five years, 19 of which were starts. He’s posted a 3.38 ERA (126 ERA+) with solid peripherals. The Yankees moved him to the rotation in the second half of the 2023 season and had planned to have him compete for a starting role in 2023. One assumes that the Padres eye him as a starter themselves. Either way, he’ll likely benefit from the larger parks of the NL West.

• Thorpe, 23, was a second-round draft pick of the Yankees in 2022. This past year he was named baseball’s Minor League Pitching Prospect of the Year after pitching 18 games with High-A Hudson Valley and five games with Double-A Somerset. At Hudson Valley he posted a 2.81 ERA and held opponents to a .215 average. He was even better at Somerset, posting a 1.48 ERA while being even stingier to opposing batters. When talks between the Yankees and Padres stalled earlier this week it was said to be because the Yankees did not want to include Thorpe. Good for the Padres for sticking to their demands. Thorpe should be a good one eventually.

• Vásquez, 25 was a rookie in 2023, appearing in 11 games, five as a starter, and posting a 2.87 ERA (152 ERA+). He didn’t miss a ton of bats and walked more guys than you’d like with the big club, but he has been better on that score in the minors and has been one of the Yankees’ better pitching prospects in recent years.

• Higashioka, 33, has been with the Yankees over the past seven seasons and, though ideally a backup, he has seen increased playing time year-over-year. He’s not a great hitter but he has some pop. At this point you pretty much know what you’re getting with him.

All in all I think that’s a pretty good haul for a guy in Soto who is subject to only one more year of team control. San Diego will get four major league or near-major league pitchers and a solid receiver in Higashioka.

As for the Yankees: congratulations on finally starting to act like the Yankees.

Eduardo Rodríguez signs with Arizona

The Arizona Diamondbacks have agreed to a four-year, $80 million deal with free agent starter Eduardo Rodríguez. There’s also a vesting option and bonuses which could make the deal reach five years and $99 million.

I guess it’s fair to say that Rodríguez’s decision to opt out of the final three years and $49 million of his deal with the Tigers paid off.

Rodríguez reestablished his value by posting a 3.30 ERA (134 ERA+) in 152.2 innings for Detroit in 2023. The Diamondbacks, who had a good 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation but no great shakes at 3-5, make for a great landing spot for him.

Craig Kimbrel signs with the Orioles

Reliever Craig Kimbrel has signed with the Orioles. It’s a one-year deal with a 2025 team option. He’ll get $12 million in 2024. The option buyout is $1 million. If the option is picked up for 2025 he’ll make $13 million that season. There are reportedly some incentives in the deal as well which could make it more lucrative.

Kimbrel spent 2023 with the Phillies, posting a 3.26 ERA (132 ERA+) and a K/BB ratio of 94/28 in 69 innings. He notched 23 saves in 28 opportunities. He made the All-Star team but he struggled in the postseason and, even when he stayed out of trouble, he rarely did so without giving Phillies fans little heart attacks. That’s The Craig Kimbrel Guarantee.™

Kimbrel will be the O’s first choice to take over the closer’s role from Félix Bautista, who will likely miss the entire 2024 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery in October.

Hot Seat Watch

The St. Louis Cardinals hired Yadier Molina as a Special Assistant to the President of Baseball Operations yesterday.

In extremely related news, Oli Marmol had best start 20-5 next season because the writing is on the damn wall. Hell, they may install Yadi even if Marmol does start 20-5.

We’ll get right back to you, Bryce

My Brother in Christ: you are signed through 2031 with no opt-outs. You’ll be 39 years old when you hit free agency again. Go ahead and get a meeting scheduled or whatever, but let’s shoot for, oh, seven years from now as the calendar is full of more pressing matters at present. Indeed, absolutely every possible matter is more pressing than addressing the non-existent problem of your longterm professional future with the Philadelphia Phillies. And that’s the case even if your once huge deal now looks to be slightly under-market for a superstar player.

There was followup later, with Scott Boras saying Scott Boras things, but really, I’m more amused than anything.

Reporters are not MLB’s marketing department

Yesterday I wrote about a couple of reporters who were mad at Shohei Ohtani for wanting operational secrecy regarding his free agent negotiations. I missed Ken Rosenthal jumping on that train.

Like Buster, Rosenthal is upset that Ohtani has not told the press his dog’s name, which ranks pretty high up there for the weirdest hill I’ve seen baseball reporters willing to die on and, folks, they’ve chosen to die on some pretty stupid fuckin’ hills in the 15 years I’ve been covering this sport. But he goes further:

The bigger problem is the nature of baseball’s offseason, which lacks deadlines, and by extension, urgency.  Players, agents and teams procrastinate to their heart’s delight, even if it means sucking the air out of the massive Gaylord Opryland Hotel at a time when hundreds of media members are gathered to generate publicity for the sport.

Ohtani and Balelo are under no obligation to complete a deal this week and trigger a cascade of signings and trades. But you know what? They should be.

Hey baseball media: how many of you consider yourself to be covering baseball in order to "generate publicity for the sport?" Sorta seems like that’s Rob Manfred and Karin Timpone’s job. Baseball reporters are, at least ideally, members of the press and report news they believe to be relevant to their readers on the beats they cover. You know, like the media is supposed to. If the for-profit business that is Major League Baseball is not getting sufficient publicity, it is certainly not the press’ job to drum it up, even if the act of reporting news happens to assist those efforts.

Rosenthal is not just content in this column to complain about how Ohtani is going about his business or to argue that the press should serve as MLB’s marketing arm. No, he’s advocating for something:

The real issue is that Major League Baseball, a league without a salary cap, consistently fails to deliver the frenzied offseasons common to cap-based leagues such as the NFL, NBA and NHL, where teams have only so much to spend and need to act quickly to fill holes.

A cap is not necessary in baseball. Even with chronic disparities in revenue between large-market and small-market clubs, the sport mostly operates just fine without one. But some type of transaction deadline would create the rat-a-tat action fans crave, adding not only entertainment value but also spurring ticket and merchandise sales. And, uh, isn’t one of the goals of the Hot Stove season to drum up business?

Rosenthal is a smart guy, so surely he knows that the only reason the NFL, NBA, and NHL have those frenzied signing periods is because of the caps, right? There are only so many chairs and there are a number of kids walking around them and all of them want to be sitting down when the music stops. In this silly analogy the chairs are money, which is finite under a cap and is not finite without it. If those sports did not have a cap the players in those sports, too, would hold out longer because holding out longer is good for leverage, at least if you’re a player who is in demand.

But even if we granted Rosenthal his magical thinking, and envisioned a situation in which baseball had no salary cap but also had a signing deadline, how does he not appreciate that such a thing would, necessarily, benefit teams and put pressure on players? He argues that since Max Scherzer, Corey Seager, and Marcus Semien got big deals during the quick post-lockout free agency period before the 2022 season that a signing deadline would benefit players, but that’s silly. Superstars like those guys will always get their money. The vast majority of players would be squeezed, however. Particularly if, like Rosenthal suggests, players could only sign one-year deals after his imagined deadline. It’s a proposal straight out of the id of Rob Manfred and the owners who live for nothing like they live for suppressing player salaries.

That part is secondary, though. I really cannot get my mind around the fact that reporters like Rosenthal — and, as mentioned yesterday, Buster Olney and David O’Brein and no doubt more — think it’s their job to serve as baseball’s marketing department and that it’s the job of players to provide early December entertainment for their readers. They entertain on the field. Right now they’re conducting business. The reporters, I thought anyway, were supposed to be reporting on that business, not yelling about how they’re entitled to more and more exciting content. All the way down to the name of the MVP’s dog.

Joe Castiglione wins the Ford C. Frick Award

The Ford C. Frick Award is presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting. Yesterday was that annual presentation and the award went to longtime Boston Red Sox radio voice, Joe Castiglione.

Castiglione, 76, has been calling Red Sox games since 1983, making him the longest tenured broadcaster in Red Sox history. In 2022, the home Fenway Park radio booth was named in his honor.

Before his time in Boston he was the radio voice in Cleveland from 1979-80 and again in 1982 and for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1981.

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Other Stuff

BlueSky Codes

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Meanwhile, in my DMs . . .

One of these days I’m gonna take advantage of one of these free AI trials and see if anyone notices. I’m guessing everyone will notice, but if I say no one did enough times maybe I’ll get a feature written about Cup of Coffee in a business magazine lauding me for cleverly leveraging technology to increase my, well, whatever I’m supposed to be increasing here.

Great Moments in Chipotle

A woman who threw a burrito bowl at the manager of a Parma, Ohio Chipotle because her order was wrong was sentenced by a judge to work at a fast-food job for two months in exchange for a reduced sentence for her battery conviction. You can see the incident here if you’re into that sort of thing.

I can’t decide what’s “best” about this story, but among the possibilities:

• The video itself, the highlight of which was an old lady customer chasing after the burrito bowl-thrower, lookin’ like she was about to give her what-for;

• Chipotle’s corporate “the safety and well-being of our employees is our highest priority” boilerplate paired with the fact that the manager who had the bowl thrown at her does not hesitate to rip Chipotle a new one for overworking her understaffed store and for not supporting her after the incident;

• The fact that the manager who had the bowl thrown at her quit Chipotle and has now taken a job at a Raising Cane’s which, based on my experience, is not gonna feature more patient customers or better-staffed stores than Chipotle has, but God bless her anyway; or

• The fact that, in 21st century America, a job working at a fast food place is now a government-sanctioned equivalent of a carceral sentence.

Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind. And everyone breaks that rule pretty constantly.

Choo-Choo!

From Cornelius Frolik of daytondailynews.com:

The Federal Railroad Administration has identified four routes in Ohio as priorities for Amtrak expansion, including a proposed line connecting Dayton to Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.

Amtrak, the state of Ohio and other planning organizations will start corridor development work, including the creation of a service development plan, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, announced on Tuesday.

The Federal Railroad Administration will provide $500,000 to pay for planning for each of the four routes, including the proposed service between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati (3-C+D corridor).

The four Ohio corridors will receive priority in future funding competitions, Brown’s office said.

Part of the planning work will include identifying capital construction projects needed to initiate or expand passenger rail service to those areas, his office said.

It will be years and years until this is a reality and I can take a train from Columbus, Ohio to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Detroit. But after decades and decades of active hostility to rail service in Ohio — our former governor John Kasich rejected free federal money to build these exact train lines simply because it came from a Democratic administration — there is finally something approaching progress with respect to transit afoot.

Norman Lear: 1922-2023

Legendary television Writer/producer Norman Lear has died. He was 101 damn years old.

Lear’s shows — including “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” and “One Day at a Time” — revolutionized network television in the 1970s, transforming the sitcom from mostly mindless and formulaic pablum into challenging and even daring fare which addressed hot-button political, cultural and social flashpoints of the time.

Lear’s shows dealt with politics, racism, abortion, rape, homosexuality, the Vietnam war, divorce and just about anything else you can imagine existing in 1970s America. And, despite the weighty and heady topics they covered, those shows were nonetheless highly-rated, crowd-pleasing, award-winning and, above all else, hilarious. That’s a neat trick that no one has pulled off with anywhere close to the level of success that Lear did. His work defined network television in the 1970s and continues to have influence to this day.

Lear’s shows contained no small amount of political content, but he walked the walk in his own life as well, engaging in considerable political activism and raising money for all manner of liberal and progressive causes. In 1980, he founded the advocacy organization People for the American Way to counter the influence of the Christian right in politics. Given the state of everything the right wing theocrats have been anything but countered, but I guess not everything Lear created was a massive hit and the man’s heart was certainly in the right place.

Rest in peace, Norman Lear. The closest thing network TV ever had to a saint.

Have a great day everyone.