Cup of Coffee: February 11, 2021

Gambling, fans in the stands, an interesting trade, a trip back to the Dyatlov Pass, the national anthem, and Velma Dinkley's past

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Before we get going today, I have request. I’ve put together a quick reader survey to try to get a gauge of a few things like reader habits, likes, dislikes, and stuff like that. It’s both for subscribers and those of you who just read on the free day. It shouldn’t take much time at all. If you could fill it out, it’d be super helpful:

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Today we have a lot of stuff some others may like. Like me getting all preachy and angry about crap, which I’m told a lot of you like to see. I’ve never been sure what to think about that — half the time I’m angry people think I’m joking and half the time I’m joking people think I’m angry — but I go off on gambling and performative patriotism today, and those are some of my greatest hits.

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The Daily Briefing

Et Tu, Rotoworld?

The fantasy sports website Rotoworld is owned by NBC, but with respect to my experiences at NBC, Rotoworld was not the subordinate entity by any stretch of the imagination.

The man who hired me at NBC — and who is now a way-up-there-executive — was once a blurb-writer for Rotoworld, back when it was Mathew Pouliot’s independent little startup over 20 years ago. HardballTalk, which launched in 2009 and was originally titled “Circling the Bases,” was deeply influenced by Rotoworld. That’s putting it lightly, actually, as I was the only original HardballTalk/Circling the Bases writer who didn’t also write for Rotoworld. Matthew, Aaron Gleeman, D.J. Short, and Drew Silva all did double duty. Rotoworld was their full-time gig, with HardballTalk being something to which they contributed, at least when it started off. Rotoworld, in content, sensibility, and tone, definitely fueled HBT for the first several years of its existence.

It’s also the case that while HardballTalk may have been a higher-profile operation in certain respects, Rotoworld did way more to pay NBC’s bills. Its traffic was much bigger than HBT’s was and, while I never saw revenue numbers, I’m sure it did way better in that department too. I hated that HBT got axed, but if I was in the executive suite at NBC Sports and someone upstairs told me I needed to streamline baseball coverage, I’d have fired me and stuck with Rotoworld too. It was simply the smarter play.

But now Rotoworld is no longer Rotoworld. As of yesterday, it’s “NBC Sports Edge.” Which is selling something called “NBC Sports Edge+” which promises to help you “take advantage of premium tools to dominate your draft, manage your teams all season long, optimize DFS lineups, and make informed wagers across multiple sports.”

Which is to say that, while the fantasy content is still there, NBC has pivoted the website formerly known as Rotoworld sharply into the gambling world:

On one level this is understandable. There’s a lot of money in sports gambling these days. Fantasy content, which is already geared toward giving tools to readers to help them act on sports information as opposed to just consume it, lends itself to gambling stuff fairly naturally compared to regular sports content. For a company looking to make as much money as it can — and all sports media companies fit that description — it’s a pretty obvious and in some ways natural play.

I don’t like it though. And a lot of it is tied up with that catch phrase on the main page up there: “stay ahead of your competition!”

This kind of slogan works well for fantasy sports because in most fantasy sports formats you’re competing against other fantasy players and your superior knowledge of, say, who is likely to get the most steals or saves next season, will help you beat the other people in your league. So, “read Rotoworld, we’ll give you that edge and help you dominate your fantasy league!” makes a lot of sense.

When you’re betting on sports, however, your competition is not other fans and your “edge” is not knowing more about sports. Your competition is the house — a super sophisticated sports gambling operation with resources you can barely fathom — and there is no edge most people can get that will help them beat the house. To the extent there is an edge, it’s not based on sports knowledge. Indeed, if you talk to people who are super serious about sports gambling, they’ll tell you that knowing this or that substantive fact about baseball or football or whatever is relatively unimportant. What’s important is game theory-type knowledge and expertise in reading and playing odds. And even those guys lose most of the time no matter what they claim when they’re trying to act like big shots.

Sports media companies getting into the gambling space are not teaching you how to beat the house. Indeed, in many cases they are in a direct business relationship with the house, giving them a vested financial interest in bettors losing, not winning. They, in turn, benefit the sports books by steering readers and viewers toward their partners’ virtual betting windows. There is nothing a bookie loves more than someone who foolishly thinks they have some sort of “edge” placing a wager, so it’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship when you think about it. A relationship aimed at taking money from readers’ and bettors’ pockets. All the better if you can get them to pay a subscription fee for ultra-inside information before they lay down those wagers.

I have a tremendous respect for Rotoworld and the people there who have made that site work for the past 20+ years. The writers there I know and with whom I have worked are top notch people across the board. And, to their credit — and, I will grant, the credit of NBC — it appears that they are still going to be able to do much of their work as they did before. Writing up player profiles and analysis and reacting to transactions, other breaking news, and the like. They’re still doing the excellent Rotoworld baseball podcast, too which, due to the new name of the website, has been changed to “Circling the Bases.” Almost brought a tear to my eye. You can still use the new site as quick stop for baseball transaction and injury news and it’s still going to have fantasy content.

Still, this sort of shift leaves me cold, be it at my old place of work or at all the other sports media sites that are pivoting to gambling. I don’t like that we have lowered almost all barriers to sports gambling as it is. I especially don’t like that my colleagues in sports media are increasingly being forced into the business of selling it to people who know nothing about it, all the while making them think that they do via repurposed sports content branded as something that will help them “make informed wagers.” It’s unseemly business.

Like every other sports media pivot, I suspect that it will ultimately prove to be a dead end for sports media companies. If I’m wrong about that, however, and if this does pay off big for them, it will be because in many significant respects, those companies will cease to be in the actual business of sports media.

There will be fans in New York

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that large sports venues around the state -- those which hold 10,000 people or more -- can reopen at 10% capacity. Which means that the Yankees and Mets can seat crowds of roughly 5,400 and 4,200, respectively, once Opening Day hits.

We’ve long since stopped taking actual cues from public health experts and data when it comes to opening things, closing things, and opening things back up again. We’ve basically been cruising along on vibes. If people are feeling particularly scared about COVID numbers, governors issue closing orders that make little sense but make it feel like they’re doing something. When people get fed up at inconveniences or when the infection or death numbers tick down even a tad, stuff gets reopened, regardless of what actual effect that might have on public health. It’s all about optics and polling. It hasn’t been about the actual virus since last May at the latest.

All of which is to say that I have no idea if it makes any sort of sense to let 5,400 people into Yankee Stadium in April or not. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s crazy. Hell, maybe it’d make sense to let 10,000 people in with very little change in risk. I don’t suspect Andrew Cuomo knows either. Ten percent sounds cautious and scientific, so ten percent it is.

That being said, I am curious as to how the economics work for Yankees or Mets games to operate at 10% capacity. They might actually lose money at that level, right? There are overhead costs to opening a ballpark which require a certain volume. I suppose the way you deal with that is to simply make these games into ultra-luxury products and charge people hundreds of dollars per ticket. Which, given broader trends in prices and exclusivity at ballparks over the past few years, is one of the first signs of things “getting back to normal” we’ve seen in a long time.

Red Sox trade Andrew Benintendi

The Boston Red Sox have traded Andrew Benintendi to the Royals as part of a three-way deal. The Sox will get outfielder Franchy Cordero and two players to be named later from Kansas City and righty pitcher Josh Winckowski and one player to be named later from the Mets. The Mets get Royals outfield prospect Khalil Lee. Kansas City also gets some cash considerations.

A couple of years ago trading Benintendi seemed unthinkable. He was a 20/20 player and finished second in the Rookie of the Year balloting in 2017 and then hit .290/.366/.465 over 148 games in 2018. He fell off a good deal in 2019, however, and then had a miserable, injury-plagued 2020 season. Still he’s just 26 and is under team control through 2022, so Boston is definitely selling low on a guy who could very well bounce back to his old form. The Royals, meanwhile, have had a decent track record of picking up once-promising guys who have faltered and getting good production out of them.

The best way to think of this is Boston doubting Benintendi’s ability to bounce back but Kansas City thinking they can fix him. A good old fashioned challenge trade. At least if you don’t think Boston just wanted to save most of the $6.6 million they’d have to pay him and would prefer to employ the $800K-making Cordero instead.

Cordero has four years under his belt, but he’s played in just 95 games due to various injuries. He’s hit hit .236/.304/.433 in that time. He has lots of potential but has yet to put it together. Winckowski, 22, was a 15th round pick by the Blue Jays in 2016 and was traded to the Mets just a couple of weeks ago in the Steven Matz deal. He didn’t play last year and split the 2019 season between A-ball and High-A. He’s not thought of as much of a prospect but has some back-end-of-the-rotation upside.

I still think it’s a bit odd that the Sox have cut bait on Benintendi like this, when he’s at a low ebb, but at the same time, there’s every bit as much reason to think that we’ve seen his best and won’t see it again as there is to think that he’s the star he seemed on track to be in 2018.

Other Hot Stove Notes

• The Dodgers have signed Walker Buehler to a two-year arbitration-avoiding deal that will pay him $8 million over the next two seasons. He’ll make $2.75 million plus a $2 million signing bonus in 2021 and $3.25 million in 2022. Buehler filed at $4.15 million with the Dodgers filing at $3.3 million at this year’s arbitration deadline. He’s a Super Two, so he’ll still have two more years of arbitration eligibility after this deal expires.

• The Athletics brought back infielder Jed Lowrie for the third time. This time, however, it’s on a minor-league contract. Lowrie missed most of the last two seasons with the Mets due to knee injuries;

• Matt Joyce has signed a minor league deal with the Phillies. Joyce played 46 games for the Marlins in 2020 and didn’t hit all that well. He’s a career .244/.343/.428 hitter over 13 seasons. It feels like he’s been around since the dawn of time;

• Big day for 2020 Marlins signing elsewhere, as the Phillies have signed Brandon Kintzler to a minor-league deal. Kintzler saved 12 games for Miami last season. He’ll make $3 million if he makes the Phillies roster.

Slow day. Oh well. At least we learned something about baseball yesterday:

Maury Brown @BizballMaury

This is the funniest and best explanation of baseball, ever. I’m dying.

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Other Stuff

The National Anthem

Through Tuesday night, the Dallas Mavericks had played 13 preseason and regular season home games this year. At none of them did they play the national anthem. And no one really noticed for the first 12 of those games. A reporter for the Athletic noticed it before Monday night’s game. Team owner Mark Cuban confirmed that night that, no, they hadn’t been playing it and, yes, it was his decision.

This, of course, has quickly turned into a shit show, but more on that in a second. First I want to walk through this to see how Cuban got to where he got.

Cuban didn’t initially elaborate on his reason for canning the anthem to The Athletic, but over the summer he was vocal about how “the National Anthem Police in this country are out of control,” and asked, rhetorically, ”why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work?” Which, makes a lot of sense really.

The national anthem has been a fixture for as long as you and I have been attending games, but it hasn’t always been there. Indeed, it was not a regular fixture at sporting events until 1942, when it was added for the obvious reason that we were fighting a world war. It never really went away after the war ended. It’s something done out of obligation now more than anything. Indeed, in a 2016 New York Times story, Major League Soccer’s spokesman said that rules regarding the playing of the anthem were enacted when the league was formed in 1996 because “at this point, it has become part of the tradition of playing a sporting event in America.”

There is still an element of obligation to it. To the anthem and to other patriotic elements which have been inserted into the sports experience.

Over the years — especially since 9/11 — patriotism at sporting events has been transformed from something most Americans demonstrate out of natural national pride and personal motivation to something more . . . performative. Often, something de rigueur. Unquestionably more political. There is an element of opportunism at play as well. We saw that with the pay-for-patriotism scandal from a few of years ago in which it was revealed that the government had paid teams to promote patriotic and pro-military initiatives for propaganda and recruitment purposes. Corporate sponsorship has seeped into patriotic activities as well. I still remember back when I covered the 2014 World Series and saw that the American flags given out at the ballpark entrances were “presented by Bank of America, the Official Bank of Major League Baseball.” Hell, there are rankings of which brands best-leverage patriotism for commercial purposes. There are many examples of this sort of thing.

Since Colin Kaepernick’s protests of police brutality began several years ago the national anthem has become something else entirely. An appropriate time and place of protest for some. A vehicle for smearing those who would protest injustice for others. And, last summer, a way for sports leagues to co-opt and/or spin and control protests in such a way that works for the leagues’ public relations interests. At times it seems so damn complicated. It makes one pine for the days when the most controversial thing about the anthem was how some young pop star mangled it while trying to turn a song that is, essentially, a march, into a slow jam. I don’t know where Mark Cuban falls on the “to protest or not to protest during the national anthem” spectrum, but I can understand someone in his position just saying “this is all so dumb and so removed from any organic purpose anymore that I just don’t wanna bother.” Which is apparently what happened thirteen games ago in Dallas.

And now the shit show.

Once The Athletic report came out, the usual right wing culture warriors came out of the woodwork to excoriate Cuban for hating America. And the Dallas Stars hockey team decided to chime the hell in despite the fact that nobody asked them. Which meant that, before sundown yesterday, a somewhat rational decision to give reflexive patriotism a break for a time snapped right back into a reductive “if you’re not maximally and comically over-the-top patriotic, you hate America” rebop. Which, folks, I’ve had experience with. To the point where I got death threats over it.

Late yesterday afternoon the NBA issued a statement that, while not mentioning the Dallas Mavericks, was clearly aimed at the Dallas Mavericks:

“With NBA teams now in the process of welcoming fans back into their arenas, all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league policy.”

Reducing what was originally intended to be an impassioned invocation of patriotic sentiment during a time of national strife to “league policy” sounds about right for this country at this time.

Either way, Cuban has relented. He had a lot to say as he relented, but he did. And it’s hard to blame him, as no one wants or needs to be the star of the right-wing media outrage cycle for several days. Still all rather chilling and rather depressing. There is absolutely no room for discussion in American sports culture for this. There is no way to ratchet-back performative patriotism at sporting events once it is ratcheted-up.

The Below Zero Effect

I watched the movie “Zero Effect” for about the ten millionth time last weekend. As I’ve said before, it’s one of my favorite movies ever. Easily a top fiver. No, it’s not Oscar bait or anything, but it just speaks to me.

It speaks to me on a superficial level because it’s a Sherlock Holmes update and I love Sherlock Holmes stuff and because it’s a well-written and tightly-plotted bit of fun. It speaks to me more deeply too, though, in that its main character is afflicted with something I often worry about in myself: falling into the habit of observing life more than actually living it. I’m not a sociopathic head case about it like Daryl Zero is, but . . . I get it. This is one of the reasons why I love “The Conversation” too, by the way, as Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul has a similar affliction. I’ve never solved an impossible case or got caught up in a murder plot I didn’t remotely understand, but I see a lot of myself in those two voyeuristic whack-jobs.

I was thinking about Daryl Zero today again when I read this story about a guy who lost his wallet in Antarctica in the late 1960s and just got it returned to him last week:

Paul Grisham has many memories from his time working as a meteorologist in Antarctica in the 1960s, but losing his wallet is not one of them. Yet here was a man on the phone last month telling Mr. Grisham that he had found it, 53 years later.

“It was like a bolt out of the blue,” Mr. Grisham, 91, said. “It was because of what’s in the wallet and what it looked like that I remembered a lot of things.”

It was returned by a couple of people who have specialized in putting people together with things they lost a very long time ago. No word on whether they’ve ever reunited a murderous timber company executive with his keys.

Anyway, I call the “The case of the man who lost his wallet containing his beer ration punch card, his military identification card, money order receipts, a recipe for Kahlúa; and an atomic, biological and chemical warfare pocket reference card in Antarctica in 1968 and had it returned to him 53 years later.”

Return to the Dyatlov Pass

Last week I wrote about the 60 year-old mystery of the Russian hikers who were killed in the Dyatlov Pass and how the mystery was solved, as explained in this National Geographic story.

Welp:

Eight tourists from Moscow who ventured into the Dyatlov Pass in the Ural region had not returned by Wednesday morning as expected, a local resident told E1.RU.

The source said: "They were supposed to leave at eight o'clock this morning. But they have not returned yet and there is no contact with them."

The tourists came to visit the pass to pay tribute to the nine people who died there in February 1959, the source reportedly added.

The word “tribute” has many definitions, of course.

An origin story for . . . Velma?

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said we didn’t need any origin stories? Well, except for “Columbo,” for which I have some GREAT ideas? Welp, no one is listening to me on that:

HBO Max has announced series orders for three new adult animated shows, including a Scooby-Doo spinoff that will tell the origin story of Velma Dinkley . . . The original and comedic series, aptly titled Velma, will unmask the complex and colorful past of the under-appreciated brains of the Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc. gang, Velma Dinkley, voiced by executive producer Mindy Kaling (The Office).

I don’t know that you need ten episodes to get to Velma saying “jinkies!” for the first time, which is how so many of these things tend to go. Or that you need ten episodes to get to her teaming up with a stoner, his dog, and a couple of other friends to investigate ghosts, because that seems like it’d be something a person would jump into immediately if given the chance. But at least Kaling’s involvement means it’ll be a comedy, so that’s a relief. The last thing we need is yet another gritty reboot of, well, anything.

Just one more thing . . .

Whenever people talk about “Columbo” the subject eventually gets to reboots. Whenever people talk about rebooting “Columbo” they tend to talk about people like Mark Ruffalo or Sam Rockwell taking the lead role because it’s easy to picture them wearing the wrinkly raincoat and running their hands through their mussed-up hair.

That gets it wrong, though. As this excellent thread from a British “Columbo” fan makes clear, the habits and appearance of the good Lieutenant are sorta beside the point. The actual point is for the character to be underestimated and overlooked by the criminals who believe themselves to be superior and thus above suspicion. To that end, as the linked thread makes clear, a Columbo in a “Columbo” reboot should probably be anyone other than a white guy.

Have a great day, everyone! Thanks for filling out the survey, and thanks for subscribing!