Cup of Coffee: February 24, 2022

Dark and deadly days are afoot

Good morning, everyone, both subscribers and those visiting for Free Thursday.

Normally I’m a lot more chipper here but, Christ, there isn’t a lot of room for chipper today. Let’s do our best to get through it, though, shall we?

Today, as always, we’ll start with baseball talk, but yeah, it certainly hits differently today than it usually does what with a war of aggression being launched in Europe and all. We’ll talk a bit about that too, of course, along with some other stuff that, before that war of aggression getting underway last night, seemed at least marginally significant.

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The Daily Briefing

Still no progress in labor talks

The owners and the players met again yesterday. And, once again, there was really no progress. More pussyfooting around the edges with no proposals regarding the Competitive Balance Tax, which is the key to any agreement on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

On the pussyfooting front, MLB increased its proposal on minimum salaries by $10,000 in each year of the CBA. The league’s proposed minimums are now $640,000 in 2022, $650,000 in 2023, $660,000 in 2024, $670,000 in 2025, and $680,000 in 2026. At present the union’s proposal on the minimums starts at $775,000 in the first year and goes up $30,000 each year over the same period.

As for the Competitive Balance Tax, Jeff Passan had a nice primer on that last night, but those of you who don’t skip over the labor stuff to get to the “Columbo” posts know what that’s all about. The owners want to keep their defacto salary cap way behind the growth in league revenues and now want to make exceeding that cap way more punitive than it has been in the past. The players are not willing to negotiate against themselves on that score and are waiting for the owners to come off their retrograde proposals. In the meantime nothing is going to get accomplished as long as that state of affairs persists.

MLB and the MLBPA are set to meet tomorrow. It’ll be their fourth straight day of meetings. The union is expected to make a counterproposal in some areas, but which areas we do not know. All we know is that the sides remain far apart and until there is movement on the Competitive Balance Tax, nothing is getting done. And that there will be no movement on the Competitive Balance Tax unless and until the owners appreciate that the players will not cave on it like they assume they will. At least that’s my sense of things.

MLB is totally cool with another 1972 happening

A Major League Baseball spokesperson reiterated last night that if a deal is not in place by Monday, regular season games will be canceled. And they will not be made up:

“A deadline is a deadline. Missed games are missed games. Salary will not be paid for those games.”

Which suggests that the league doesn't intend to rewrite the schedule if there’s even a modest disruption but, rather, it would simply pick up whenever games began and go from there. Because that worked so well the last time they did that.

The last time they did that, for those who do not know, was 1972. That year the first two weeks of the season were wiped out by the first player strike in the game’s history. The strike — over a disagreement about increasing pension payouts to track inflation — was won by the players, with the owners giving up after only 13 days. It caused the loss of 85 games in all which would never be made up. And which would create a pretty big problem. A problem that Red Sox fans of a certain age still like to complain about.

The 13 days at the beginning of the season lost included scattered off days, which meant that teams had lost an unequal number of games. A debate ensued about what to do about that, but the owners and the players could not agree how to compensate players for the time missed and/or changes in the schedule that would lead to fewer off-days and more doubleheaders. In response Commissioner Bowie Kuhn did what he usually did: nothing. He just declared that the season would start on April 15th, and go on from there with the existing schedule.

Under that setup, teams ended up playing a different number of games. This wasn’t a problem in the NL East, where the Pirates won the division by 11 games, the NL West where the Reds won it by 10.5 games or the AL West where the A’s finished 5.5 games ahead of their closest rival. The AL East, however, featured a wire-to-wire battle between the Tigers and Red Sox. A battle “won” by the Tigers, even though both teams finished with the same 70 losses. Detroit won by a half game, however, because they played in 156 games to the Sox’ 155, finishing 86-70 to Boston’s 85-70.

The last time I wrote about this, a few years ago, I observed that it was “impossible to imagine” that happening again in this day and age. I opined that the internet, talk radio, ESPN, and everywhere else chatter occurs would explode. That fans of any team left out of the postseason by a half game would riot. That today’s MLB would almost certainly deal with that with some sort of mini-playoff or head it off in its entirety by making damn sure everyone played the same number of games. But nah. Now MLB says otherwise. Probably because they’re bluffing and they think we’re all idiots.

I do know one thing for sure, though: previously the union said that if players are not paid for a 162-game season this year that they will not assent to expanded playoffs. I guess the owners don’t take the players at their word on that and are trying to play chicken. We’ll see how that goes.

We really doin’ this, Associated Press?

Ronald Blum of the Associated Press led off his story on yesterday’s labor talks thusly:

New York Mets pitcher Max Scherzer arrived in a black Porsche and Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole joined the talks Wednesday as baseball players and management met for a third straight day in an attempt to salvage opening day on March 31.

The AP’s Twitter account teasing the story led with that too:

Oddly, neither Blum nor the AP felt it necessary to note that most of the owners and MLB brass took private jets to these talks. Or that, for some owners, Porsches are quaint. The owner of the Dodgers, for example, is way past that:

LA DODGERS CHAIRMAN MARK WALTER BUYS ANOTHER MULTIMILLION DOLLAR NEWPORT ESTATE

I know this much: Max Scherzer earned the money to buy that Porsche by winning three Cy Young Awards and being among the best pitchers of his generation. More than half the owners bought whatever it is they’re driving or flying or living in because their daddies were rich. The other half did it by moving other people’s money around.

Screw Blum and the Associated Press for this idiotic framing. Absolutely inexcusable.

George Steinbrenner IV to move into Yankees role

Speaking of the dichotomy between earning something via hard work vs. getting something because of what your last name is, George Michael Steinbrenner IV — the son of the late Hank Steinbrenner and grandson of The Boss — has spent the past few years running an IndyCar team. Now he’s being called home, with him telling Racer.com that he will now “take the dual-role approach that we’ve been talking about internally for years of getting involved in the family business.” Meaning the New York Yankees, for whom he will have an “unspecified role.”

Not shocking given that as long as six years ago Hal Steinbrenner was talking about getting the third generation of Steinbrenners involved with the team. It’s a family business and like most family businesses ownership, wealth, and power is a matter of inheritance. It’s always worth remembering that when it comes time to talk about who has earned this and who is worth that and who really has anything truly at stake when it comes to the operation of major league baseball teams.

I wonder if young Steinbrenner drive from his IndyCar facility to Yankee Stadium in a Porsche and if the Associated Press will make a note about it.

Marcus Stroman goes off on the Mets again

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman attacked his old club, the New York Mets, for hiring Billy Eppler as their GM. He added that he hoped free agent Michael Conforto would, like he did himself, sign elsewhere.

This one — clearly referencing the death of Tyler Skaggs, which occurred when Eppler was the Angels’ GM — has been deleted, but the Internet never forgets:

Regarding Conforto, he said “Just ran into my guy Conforto out here in AZ. What an unbelievable human being who works/prepares to the highest degree. He automatically upgrades any team in all facets. Will rake all future and play great defense. Worth every penny. Pay that man what he deserves!” He then tweeted “I’m hoping he’s well-paid elsewhere” and added a shrug emoji.

Stroman has not hid his displeasure with the Mets and the end of his time in New York. When asked by someone if could expand on that following these tweets on Tuesday he replied, “The world isn’t ready for those answers to be honest.”

I dunno. Anyone can and should do and say what they want. Especially athletes who are conditioned and strongly urged to keep their opinions to themselves. On a personal level, though, I can’t imagine that letting a place you’re no longer playing occupy so much real estate in your head is particularly great for a person.

Julio Cruz: 1954-2022

The Seattle Mariners announced that Julio Cruz, a member of the club’s inaugural team back in 1977, and a Spanish language broadcaster for the club since 2003, has passed away at the age of 67.

Cruz signed with the California Angels out of San Bernardino Valley College in 1974 and was taken by the Mariners in the expansion draft in 1976. He made his debut with the Mariners in their first season and stayed with them through the middle of the 1983 season when he was traded to the Chicago White Sox for Tony Bernazard, becoming part of a division winner which still lives in the hearts of South Side fans. He’d finish his career with the White Sox following the 1986 campaign.

Cruz’s calling card was his speed, which helped him compile 343 career stolen bases, including 59 steals in 1978 and 57 in 1973. He remains second on the Mariners’ all-time stolen base list behind only Ichiro.

Cruz, who continued to make his home in the Seattle area even after leaving the Mariners, was hired as a Spanish language broadcaster by the club in 2003 and held that position until his death.

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Other Stuff

War

It was fashionable in the 1990s for otherwise smart people to write things about how the era of wars between industrialized, westernized nations was a thing of the past. Maybe the most famous example of this came from Thomas Friedman who wrote in a 1999 book, that “[n]o two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.” Friedman's point was that, due to globalization, industrialized countries with mature economies have too much to lose to ever go to war with one another. Well, both Russia and Ukraine have McDonald’s, so there goes that theory.

Not that it was a theory that anyone who understood human nature — and who didn’t have their heads up their asses and didn’t get high on western exceptionalism like so much of the pundit class does — bought into that. When power and greed and corruptible seed is all that there is, war is never out of the question because those things are insatiable. Which brings us to what has been going on in Eastern Europe of late, culminating in last night’s invasion.

The whys and hows of this aren’t terribly hard to figure. Vladimir Putin has chosen war because he’s a leader whose source of power in his own country is the projection of power and the belief he has instilled in those who back him and who have enabled his autocratic rule that Russia is, indeed, powerful. The problem, though, is that Russia is not powerful. At least not in the way Putin and his base of power like to pretend it is or desperately wish it to be through the filter of Soviet-era nostalgia.

Whereas once Russia was one of two major powers and had considerable influence on damn nigh half the world, Russia's economy these days is smaller than South Korea's, one-fifteenth the size of the United States, and — quoting a friend of mine — “largely consists of oil, gas, and resource extraction, because they can't make anything else that the world wants to buy.” The country is likewise undergoing a demographic collapse. Between those things, the presence of a large democracy on its border which is turning its back on Russia and toward Europe and the West, and Putin’s own brutal nature and paranoia, you get what we have now. A desperate, destructive lashing out of a country which is weaker than it wishes it was, wants no one to know it, but which is still plenty powerful enough to cause considerable damage.

You also, however, get a war that seems impossible from Russia’s perspective. Yes, Putin pulled this off with Crimea, but Crimea’s population was and is overwhelmingly Russian, which meant that an overwhelmingly large part of it was pretty cool with Russia’s annexation. The same goes for the eastern provinces of Ukraine over which Putin has had defacto control for some time. That’s not the case with the rest of Ukraine which is less than 20% Russian. They will fight back and, if they lose, there will be a protracted and deadly insurgency. It will not be pretty and, despite whatever declaration of victory Putin makes, neither he nor Russia will be able to hold, let alone control and absorb, Ukraine for any significant amount of time. It’s hard to see how this ends well for Russia in even the short term, frankly.

To the extent that is “comfort” it’s ice cold comfort, of course. Until Russia stops bombing and, if it attempts to mount a full scale occupation, that occupation is ignominiously withdrawn, there will be death and destruction and disease and possibly famine, all brought on by the same sorts of people and the same sorts of impulses that have always inflicted those things upon the world. Whether or not they had McDonald’s.

Transphobia is the official state policy of Texas

In what can only be described as an evil, disgraceful, hateful, and utterly immoral act, Texas governor Greg Abbott has officially unleashed the power of the government to persecute trans children. Specifically, on Tuesday he issued a decree ordering Texas’ Family and Protective Services to investigate all trans children, prosecute their parents as child abusers, and order all teachers, doctors, nurses, and caregivers to begin reporting any trans students they see to the state:

This will likely be received by putatively savvy people as a purely political document aimed at “shoring up Abbott’s right flank” or some such thing, but such a take is vacuous in the extreme. Indeed, it’s a damn nigh criminal act of denial.

To the contrary, this is, quite simply, a call for state-sponsored violence against trans children. This is a letter which seeks to utilize the machinery of the state to mistreat trans kids, to deny them necessary medical and mental healthcare, and to set into motion legal processes that could literally take kids away from their parents or, in some cases, contribute to their deaths.

There is a lot of pushback on this, claiming that it’s a symbolic, as opposed to a binding act, but that provides minimal comfort at best. A great many county and local officials in Texas will take up Abbott’s letter as if it had the full power of law and those who oppose it, like some of the larger city officials who spoke out against it, will nonetheless come under fire for not complying and will have to fight hard against attempts to undermine their resolve and to retaliate against them for not doing what Abbott says. It will force fights on a matter that should not be the subject of a fight to begin with. And, of course, it will embolden transphobes and those who practice and preach hated, bigotry, and cruelty.

However this plays out, I don’t know how anyone who makes it their mission to demonize and attack trans and nonbinary kids can sleep at night or live with themselves. I don’t know what makes them think the god they believe in approves of, let alone demands, that children be treated with brutal hatred simply because of who they are and that their loved ones and caregivers be persecuted and potentially prosecuted for being supportive and caring for the children whom they love and/or whom they are obligated to protect.

Greg Abbott and anyone who supports this monstrous policy and the monstrous sentiments behind it are evil. It’s that simple. They are evil, hateful people and nothing else they say or do can or should be seen as coming from anything other than an evil place. This cannot be met with dismissal or some sentiment which holds “yeah, that’s a bad policy but I support his tax and regulatory positions, so I’m still donating some cash to him” or whatever. A lot of corporations are likely to do that, by the way, and their doing so should be highly-publicized.

You cannot negotiate with evil in that way. You cannot hedge your bets. If you stand with Abbott or anyone who supports this in any way, shape, or form, you stand with evil and it makes you evil. There is no other rational conclusion.

How insurance would work in superhero movies

Let’s say you own a small business in New York in 2012 when — bam! — a bunch of aliens descend from a portal above the city and start blasting everything, after which a giant green monster and a literal god begin smashing and zapping everything in sight. You’ve got broken windows. Your inventory is incinerated. Your delivery truck is probably smashed. Yeah, it’s great that you’re not enslaved by aliens and stuff, but you definitely have some problems.

So you call your insurance company. How does that go? Insurance agents have some ideas:

“Around the office, superhero movies have been discussed quite a few times, and someone always says that they can’t watch those movies without looking at the property damage,” says New Hampshire-based insurance broker Randy A. MacArthur Jr. “When you’re in the insurance industry for a while, it’s really hard to watch one of those movies without thinking about how someone’s family and livelihood would be impacted by the destruction. Or to think things like, ‘That’s not covered. That’s definitely not covered. Is that considered terrorism?’”

I always think about it in terms of legal liability, but the insurance angle of it is pretty interesting too.

All I know for certain is that if we actually lived in the Marvel Universe, there would be a ton of exclusions for super villain and/or superhero-inflicted damage in policy language. And the insurance guy in that article agrees:

MacArthur says that it wouldn’t take long for the entire insurance industry to be rewritten with that in mind. “The first time a superhero event caused damage, the insurance company would likely pay out, but after that, you’d start seeing exclusions for superhero events.”

Living in New York would become even harder than it already is, that’s for damn sure. It’s almost always New York that gets blasted with this crap.

Gary Brooker: 1945-2022

There are some artists for whom most people know only one song. And that’s OK when it’s a song as transcendent, evocative, and beautiful as “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The band that did that was Procal Harum and the singer and pianist of that band was Gary Brooker. Brooker died last Saturday at the age of 76.

Procol Harum lasted decades, moving from psychedelia into prog rock and eventually doing work with full-blown orchestras, but if they did nothing else but record “A Whiter Shade of Pale” their legend would’ve been secured. As this article about it from The Guardian explains, the song instantly struck a nerve in the popular consciousness when it was released in April 1967. Talents no less than John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson hailed it as an instant classic which made them rethink what they themselves were doing as artists.

That influence was only fleeting, of course. It was a song and a moment that, had it come six months prior or six months later may not have hit like it did due to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it life cycle of the psychedelic era. But as this version of the song from 2006, performed with an orchestra in Denmark, makes clear, Brooker’s voice remained amazing well into his latter years and the song definitely could stand on its own.

That 2006 rendition was nifty, but let’s close today with the classic one which, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, never grows old:

Rest in Peace, Gary Brooker. And have a great day, everyone.