Cup of Coffee: February 17, 2022

Matt Harvey, a labor update, Juan Soto, tanking, a player who will make you feel REALLY old, Sarah Palin, Peter Thiel, my dumb law school, and . . . just one more thing

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today we talk a little about consequences in Major League Baseball, look at the latest developments in the labor negotiations, talk tanking, assess a big, rejected contract extension offered to Juan Soto, I remind you not to loan Rob Manfred your money while he’s trying to kill the sport you love, and I share a news item that is probably gonna make you feel old.

In Other Stuff my plan to become the most hated person in Columbus, Ohio continues apace, a couple of terrible defendants settle lawsuits, I ask, given that Sarah Palin doesn’t have the kind of money it takes to sue the New York Times, who has been backing her, I explain why I have never given my law school alma mater any money and, as is so often the case, there is . . . just one more thing.

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The Daily Briefing

Matt Harvey likely to be suspended

A Major League Baseball official told ESPN yesterday that, should he sign with a team once the lockout is over, Matt Harvey could be suspended for at least 60 games for testifying on Tuesday that he provided opioids to Tyler Skaggs. The reason: Harvey’s acts qualify as distribution under MLB's drug policy. It’s a policy that is currently lapsed, but once there’s a new CBA it’ll be back in force and Harvey’s acts will be in its purview.

The other players who have testified — C.J. Cron, Mike Morin, Cam Bedrosian and Blake Parker — testified to their own drug use but did not say they ever distributed drugs to anyone else, so they’d be more likely to be referred to treatment or counseling and would not be suspended. The only way they’d be suspended is if they had previously violated the league’s policy regarding drugs of abuse, which is not a thing that is made public.

So, there will be consequences for Harvey. I suspect, however, there will be no consequences for the Angels and the Mets and likely a bunch of other teams for allowing for ignoring their players’ well-being in such a way that it allowed and encouraged the sort of drug culture we’ve learned about over these past couple of weeks to exist. Indeed, as far as Major League Baseball is concerned this case, like every other notable drug case or scandal in the league’s history, will be chalked up to a couple of high-profile players who get dragged for their involvement while no one else pays any sort of price.

As for the Eric Kay trial, the defense rested yesterday. Its case was brief, with only a few witnesses, none of whom seemed to have anything of particular note to say, taking the stand. Kay’s defense, in essence, is that the prosecution did not prove that he provided the drugs in question to Skaggs and/or that the drugs Skaggs took were not what killed him, and his legal team attempted to make almost the entirely of that case via cross-examination.

Closing statements today. A verdict, I’d guess, before end-of-day tomorrow.

MLB, MLBPA to meet again today

Various folks reported yesterday that the league and the union are expected to meet again for a negotiation session today at 1PM Eastern. The Players Union is reportedly planning to make a proposal at that time.

The last face-to-face negotiating session on core economic issues took place this past Saturday and wrapped up in less than an hour with very little notable progress being made. Primarily because the owners really, really don’t seem like making serious offers or, for that matter, talking at all. So expect some sort of word from today’s meeting by about, oh, 2 or 2:15PM.

If you listened to some people, though, you’d think that all that needs to happen are longer bargaining sessions:

Buster Olney @Buster_ESPN

The most surprising/appalling element of baseball's labor situation over the last 6-7 years is the stark diminishment of engagement and conversation. It costs nothing to talk.

This is damn nigh criminally disingenuous framing, of course. As Olney well knows, Major League Baseball locked the players out unilaterally. It then sat on an MLBPA offer for 43 days before making a counterproposal. It most recently delayed making another counterproposal while it disingenuously claimed that federal mediation was required and, during that delay, went on a P.R. offensive planting anti-player stories in the press. When it finally came back with its counterproposal it went backwards, in a way that would make things worse for the players than the just-expired CBA would’ve been if it had simply been extended. As all this has happened, Major League Baseball has told the union that it simply will not negotiate certain items. I guess “it costs nothing to talk,” but one side isn’t talking, let alone talking seriously, and it sure as shit isn’t the players.

Like I said when he pulled this crap last week, I think Olney is trying to brand himself with this stuff. To position himself as Bob Costas v.2 as some sort of above-it-all conscience of the game or voice of the fan. Except v.1 of that was tired and played out a good 20 years ago. Even if it wasn’t, at least Costas has a baseline of charm that Olney sorely lacks and which causes him to come off more like an ignoramus than some well-meaning would-be conscience of the game.

Whatever the case, when word of today’s meeting comes down, and the Buster Olneys of the world attempt to both-sides it all, just remember that MLB's last proposal, and every other proposal it has made to date, essentially establishes a salary cap that, adjusted for inflation, is lower than the defacto cap which previously existed and ensures that, overall, players will get a continually decreasing percentage of MLB revenue. That is what they want and, at present, they are unwilling to allow a baseball season to happen in order to get it.

Juan Soto turned down an offer of a 13-year contract extension

Enrique Rojas of ESPN Deportes reported yesterday that Washington Nationals star Juan Soto turned down a 13-year, $350 million contract extension offer from the club just prior to the lockout. Soto didn’t confirm the amount but he has confirmed that an offer was made. He said, however, that he and his agent, Scott Boras, would prefer to go year-to-year.

You can’t blame him for that. Yeah, a 13-year deal with an average annual salary of nearly $27 million is a lot of damn money — and while it’s always possible a piano could fall on a guy before he hits free agency — Soto is on a trajectory that will make a $26-$27 million annual salary seem pretty quaint.

Soto has hit .301/.432/.550 (160 OPS+) with 98 home runs and 312 RBI through his first 464 career major league games He just turned 23 years-old in late October. Per Baseball-Reference.com’s similarity scores, the batters to whom Soto is most similar through his age 22 season are, in order: Mike Trout, Frank Robinson, Bryce Harper, Miguel Cabrera, Mickey Mantle, Tony Conigliaro, Henry Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, Giancarlo Stanton, and Ken Griffey Jr.. So, yeah.

Soto, who avoided arbitration last year after reaching a one-year, $8.5 million deal, is arbitration-eligible for the second time heading into the 2022 season. He will go through arbitration four times in all as he was a Super Two, which earned him an extra year of arbitration eligibility. He is currently slated to reach the free agent market at the conclusion of the 2024 season.

“Tanking isn’t pretty but it works”

Mark Bradley of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a column yesterday with the headline “Tanking isn’t pretty but it works.” The angle is that, while the MLBPA is currently looking for ways to disincentivize tear-down rebuilds and tanking in order to jockey for draft position, tanking can be an effective team-building strategy. Or, as Bradley puts it, “As awful as tanking is to watch, it can work.”

The examples Bradley gives are the usual ones: the Houston Astros, which famously and openly tanked for years, before becoming one of the best teams in baseball. He also mentions the Cubs and, of course, given the newspaper he’s writing for, the Atlanta Baseball Club which tore things down despite a 96-win season in 2013 and endured four pretty lackluster years while rebuilding and, eventually, won the World Series.

But while you hear the Astros and Cubs mentioned a lot in the “tanking works” context, and now Atlanta as well, why don’t we ever hear of all of the tanking teams who go nowhere and do nothing except provide a horrible product for their fans?

In each of the last two 162-game seasons, four teams have lost 100-plus games, tying a record. In 2019 six more lost at least 90 games and in 2021 three more lost 90 and three more lost between 87 and 89 games. Between 2018-19 the Baltimore Orioles lost 223 games, giving them one of the worst two-year stretches in baseball history and they lost 110 MORE games in 2021. The Tigers’ 114-losses in 2019 was the fourth-most in baseball history and but for the pandemic they would've stood a good chance of losing 100 in 2020. All of this was merely a culmination of a several years-long trend which also included a mess of losses from the Rangers, the White Sox, the Blue Jays, the Marlins, the Royals, the Mariners, and the Pirates. Other teams, while more superficially competitive for a time, have declined to improve themselves in the course of a given season or between seasons, preferring to miss the postseason by many games than merely by a few.

Within the last year, the White Sox and the Blue Jays have emerged from the Hella Losses Club as competitive franchises. There are some signs of life with the Tigers, but they still were a losing team in 2021 as they have been for five straight and six of the last seven years. For the most part, though, the success rate of teams which tank is pretty low. It has certainly no better than other team-building strategies. Unlike other strategies, though, tanking has left some franchises and their fanbases totally hollowed out. Baltimore and Pittsburgh were once great baseball towns and now their teams are afterthoughts and their teams’ owners are held in contempt. Attendance across baseball has steadily declined for the past decade and a half after reaching a peak in 2007, and went down in each of the five years before the pandemic. Fans are turning away from in-person baseball for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is no doubt tied up in them being uninterested in watching games in which as much as a third of the league isn’t interested in winning.

Tanking isn’t pretty. It’s pretty damn ugly and damaging, actually. And to date, contrary to what people like to say, its success rate is pretty poor.

Reminder: Cancel your MLB.tv auto-renew

I ran this item on Tuesday, but I wanted to run it again today since so many more readers catch the Free Thursday edition and may not have thought about it.

But to repeat: if you are an MLB.tv subscriber, know that Major League Baseball will auto-renew your subscription on March 1. This despite the fact that it is extraordinarily unlikely that there will be any baseball played any time soon. My personal view on this is that if Major League Baseball is going to lock out players and prevent us from having baseball, the last thing we need to be doing is rewarding such behavior by subsidizing the lockout.

So: if you are an MLB.tv subscriber, and if you agree with that sentiment, you should turn off your auto renewal, which is, again, set to go through on March 1 for annual subscribers. It’s really easy to do:

• Log in;

• Click “Account” in the upper right corner;

• Go to “Manage Subscriptions”;

• Click “Current Subscriptions” and it should give you an option to cancel auto renewal, which it will process like a cancellation. When you do it, you’ll get a drop-down menu for “why are you canceling?” that looks like this:

There is not an option for “I am not renewing because you guys are a bunch of asshats” but since all they care about is your money, your withholding it will send the appropriate message.

To reiterate: this is not a “boycott” or some symbolic gesture. The moment baseball comes back and there are games on the schedule we know will be played I, and I hope most of you, will re-up for MLB.tv which, dumb blackout rules aside, is a good product. All I’m suggesting is that we not give Major League Baseball the use of our money while they’re denying us the product that that money is supposed to provide.

Wanna feel old?

Look, I feel old every day of my life, so it’s y’all’s turn: CC Sabathia’s son, Carsten Sabathia, just committed to play baseball at Georgia Tech.

I still remember having my mind blown when Sabathia debuted for Cleveland — which seems like 15 minutes ago sometimes — and thinking “HOLY CRAP, PLAYERS BORN IN THE 80s ARE PLAYING IN THE MAJORS NOW!” And here we are with his kid being just a couple of years away from getting drafted.

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Other Stuff

Help me become the most hated man in Columbus, Ohio

I got word today that a Columbus Monthly Magazine is gonna run a chapter from my book as an excerpt around the time it comes out. The chapter they’re running is the one in which I explain why I’m not an Ohio State Buckeyes football fan anymore. Given that most of this town already hates me for a bunch of other reasons, it’s good to do mopup duty to make sure there are no stragglers in the “Christ, that Craig Calcaterra is an asshole” department. Given the relationship between the Buckeyes and this city, it’s a perfect chapter for that, really.

If you’re in media or are media adjacent and would like to help rile up the pitchfork-wielding mobs against a book that, the more it marinates, the more I think it will piss off a lot of people, both in and outside of Columbus, I’ve got you covered. You can get a review copy! You can interview me on your radio show/podcast/tv show! You really should, actually, because as you all know by now I'm charming as hell and, while this book will piss off a lot of people, it’ll be all the right people.

If you fit that bill: send a Twitter DM to @belt_publishing or send an email to Belt’s publicist, Phoebe Mogharei at phoebe@beltmag.com. And, of course, if you simply want to preorder the book for yourself and several dozen of your closest friends, just follow the link up at the top of this newsletter.

A big day for people who claim they didn’t do anything wrong

Earlier this week, within, like, a couple of hours, the families of Sandy Hook victims reached a $73 million settlement with Remington, the maker of the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack, and Prince Andrew settled a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of raping her when she was a teenager, back when she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and the Duke of York was his . . . associate? Client? Hard to say. Andrew’s payout is said to be something like $16 million.

Sometimes lawsuits are settled by people who have no actual legal culpability because it’s too much of a nuisance to fight them to a conclusion. Sometimes they are settled because there is serious legal exposure and a full comprehension on the part of the defendants of how negligent, reckless, malicious, or some combination of the three of those things they were.

I have my own personal views about which category Remington and His Royal Highness fall. What say you?

One more bit about the Sarah Palin lawsuit

I talked a good deal about the Sarah Palin defamation lawsuit against the New York Times this week. In so doing I nodded to the idea that there are conservative interests out there who, while no doubt wanting to see media institutions like the New York Times take it on the chin, might be sorry if the end product of all of this is an easier defamation standard for plaintiffs because, after all, conservative media figures lie their asses off on the regular.

What I did not mention is that there are conservatives out there who don’t give a crap about that at all because they are not part of the conservative media and they would be just fine with all media, whatever its leanings, being neutered.

Who? This bit from Slate, talking about the courtroom in the Palin case, gives you a good guess:

Sitting in the observer section at the trial . . . was one especially intriguing figure. Charles Harder was the lead attorney when Hulk Hogan sued Gawker out of existence. And Harder watched every minute of the testimony in this trial, taking copious notes on a legal pad. He wasn’t working with Palin’s legal team (though he’d worked with them before, in that Gawker case). He was just watching . . .

. . . Hulk Hogan didn’t pay his own legal costs (meaning, in part, Harder’s invoices) when he took Gawker to court. Silicon Valley grotesquerie Peter Thiel famously footed Hogan’s bill—secretly at first, until he was outed as Hogan’s backer. When it comes to this trial, I just can’t bring myself to believe that Palin paid for it out of pocket. If indeed she didn’t, and someone else was funding this, I wondered where that money was coming from. I asked Harder if he knew. He said he didn’t.

Then I asked Harder one last thing: Why exactly was he here? He was taking all those notes—was it for an article he’s writing, or a book? No, he said, “I’m just here to observe and learn.”

It’s pretty obvious that someone was footing the bill for Palin’s case because she does not have the sort of dough to pay the sorts of lawyers required to mount the sort of case she just mounted. And no, such a case would not be taken on contingency. She had backers. And those backers were not the sorts of clowns you tend to see paraded on Fox News.

No, they were sorts of people who have their own agenda. People who, while requiring useful idiots in public office and while impacting the media in certain ways are, to use the phrase a friend of mine used yesterday when we were discussing this, “doing their insane libertarian best to make sure that rich people are constrained by nothing.”

It would not shock me at all if it was discovered that Peter Thiel is backing the Palin case. And if it’s not him, it’s someone very much like him. For all the sideshow clownery which typifies American conservatism these days, the real bad actors are the quieter ones.

Professor Turley

I am a 1998 graduate of the George Washington University Law School. Since I moved away from the D.C. area I have had four different physical addresses and, I think, three different email addresses. Despite this, GW Law has consistently tracked me down and, for 24 years and counting, has sent me requests to give them money. I, however, have never given them a dime.

For much of my legal career I didn’t do so because, in addition to being irked by a few minor things GW did while I was there which unnecessarily inconvenienced me, I was a generally unhappy person in a career I didn’t much like and wasn’t about to thank anyone, with words or with dollars, for putting me where I was in life. It was only later that I appreciated that, actually (a) I put myself where I was in life; and (b) I got a pretty good education at GW, all things considered. Of course by the time I appreciated that I was no longer making law firm bucks, I had two young children to raise, and I was thus in no position to do things like donate to well-endowed private law schools just so that I could see my name in the alumni magazine.

These days I’m in a better position to donate to GW, but I don’t. The biggest reason for that is that there are WAY better uses of my philanthropic budget than donations to a law school, but there’s another one: Professor Jonathan Turley.

I never had a class with Turley when I was at GW but, at the time anyway, he was well-regarded. He was a very public-facing professor, too, appearing on the news and testifying before Congress a lot and taking on high-profile cases of his own while simultaneously teaching classes. Philosophically speaking, even when one disagreed with him — which was often — there was at least a certain consistency to his views.

As the years have gone on, however, he has been hired by House Republicans to go after Obama and as an intellectual front for a number of other of the right’s various odious initiatives. At the same time he has become a fixture on Fox News and he has taken increasingly outlandish positions which seem, more than anything, calculated at getting him invited back on Fox News as much as possible. Particularly odious was his defense of Donald Trump during his impeachments — Bill Clinton, he argued back in the day, should’ve been impeached for lying about a blow job, while Donald Trump could do anything he wanted with his power — and his erroneous claims in late 2020 and early 2021 that voting machines In Michigan had switched “thousands of votes“ from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. He has become a total crackpot and an utter embarrassment to George Washington University Law School.

His latest came yesterday, when he was back on Fox to go after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to end the trucker blockade. I have no idea if Turley is an expert on Canadian law — I doubt it, but I don’t know that — but the substance of it is beside the point when you’re out there saying ridiculous things like this:

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley, on Canada PM Justin Trudeau invoking emergency powers to deal with the "Freedom Convoy" blockade: "By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the Civil Rights movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King."

Gee, what ever would’ve happened if someone had . . . arrested Martin Luther King?

So, nah, George Washington. I’m not gonna give you any money. Not as long as that jackass windbag is on your faculty, let alone serving as its most visible faculty member by orders of magnitude.

Just one more thing . . .

There are a lot of “Best ‘Columbo’ Episodes” lists floating around out there, but there is a certain sameness to them, I have found.

That’s not a terrible thing, mind you. There are objective factors which logically push some episodes up and some down in a broad sort before subjective opinions enter into it. It’s not hard to say, for example, that a nimble and expertly-crafted episode like “Murder by the Book” is better than a silly, turgid, overlong, and less-than-compelling episode like “Mind over Mayhem,” even if you’re the kind of person who really, really loves robots and kid actors. The cream will inevitably rise to the top.

I particularly like this latest best-of-“Columbo” list which dropped yesterday, however, which my dad of all people sent to me. Yes, a lot of the usual suspects are on it, but it also branches out into some of the 1980s-1990s revival episodes which are rarely included in best of lists and it does give some more love to the 1970s episodes which coasted more on Peter Falk’s chemistry with the actor playing the murderer than on plot mechanics. I find myself appreciating that aspect of things more and more as I watch “Columbo” as comfort TV, and the person who put together this list seems to as well.

Have a great day, everyone.