Cup of Coffee: February 3, 2022

The universal DH, an amazing 30-30 season, thoughts on prosecuting an NFL owner, Depeche Mode, coffee cake, Judge Mathis, and just one more thing

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Man, you freebies here today will probably wish you were subscribers yesterday, because I lit this place up with good cheer. A few things about that:

• Thank you so much for all of you who commented, emailed, tweeted, DM’d, or otherwise messaged kind and supportive words. I cannot express how much better that made me feel. I know, intellectually, that a hell of a lot of people have gone through what my son is going through and that there are a hell of a lot of family members who have been in my place too. In the moment, however, you have a hard time remembering that. You think that this is all just happening to you and it makes you feel pretty hopeless. Hearing so many of you tell me that you or someone close to you have been there is emotionally buoying;

• Veteran commenter and hardcore Liverpool fan CB went all CB on me and sent me a video of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” In normal times I’d roll my eyes and shoot back, like, “Vindaloo” at him, but in the state I’m in now it made me tear up. My god, that man is decent. After that I laughed because I realized that the group which did the “Trash Island” EP I linked yesterday very well might’ve opened for Industrial Shithouse at Wembley. Yeah, I know that bit is not as common around here these days as it used to be, but Old Cup of Coffee heads know it;

• As for Carlo, he had a hard day but ultimately a good day yesterday and we’ll leave it at that as far as the specifics go. He did, however, make the same observation that some of you did regarding the place he’s in right now carrying the corporate name of Big Lots on it. “Kinda janky,” he said. My response: "Maybe, but the $50 million they donated to get their name on this place helped make sure you’re living in a room that looks more like one of those nice Danish prisons than a shitty American prison, so maybe you should thank the Big Lots people, OK?"

• Seriously, though: if you look past the subtle features designed to keep teenagers-in-crisis safe and just get the general vibe of the room he has, it’s the sort of place that New Yorkers pay like $3,700 a month to stay in and then convince themselves that it’s “spacious” and “minimalist.” Given how the American healthcare system works I’m sure I’m paying that much per day, but at least we’re getting something super useful out of it and the parking is cheaper.

That’s about all I got on that front today, but again, thank you. You all are the absolute best. I have no idea what I’d do without being able to hurl my words, my blood, my sweat, and above all else my tears into the internet void each day and have them come back to me in the form of your caring, insight, humor, and wisdom. I love this community and I’m so very glad you come here every day.

The Daily Briefing

There’s almost certainly going to be a universal DH next year

MLB and the MLBPA met on non-core, non-economic issues yesterday and one thing spun out of that in the evening’s reports: we’re going to have a universal DH in 2022. Jon Heyman reported that, “barring something totally unexpected,” we’ve seen the last of pitchers batting, as “[b]oth sides are in favor.”

Not that this is surprising, as both sides have been pretty clearly in favor of it for some time. The fun part is that the reason there is almost certainly agreement here is that neither side gains a hell of a lot by agreeing to the universal DH or losing much if they don’t, so it can’t really be used as a point of leverage. It’s simply a matter of each side seeing the eminent sense of pitchers no longer batting and are agreeing to put that sensible thing into practice. Imagine.

Heyman also said that the sides are going to meet again on the difficult economic issues either late this week or early next week. No rush, fellas.

In other news, friend-of-the-newsletter and Baseball and the Law author Lou Schiff was interviewed about the lockout by his law school.

Cedric Mullins was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 2020

Baltimore Orioles outfielder Cedric Mullins revealed Wednesday that he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 2020. He began feeling symptoms in spring of 2020 and tried to manage it as best he could via antibiotics that season but he ended up undergoing intestinal surgery in the 2020-21 offseason.

Despite the fact that Mullins lost 20 pounds and had to recover from all of that, 2021 ended up being a breakout year for him. He hit .291/.360/.518, hit 30 home runs and stole 30 stolen bases in 159 games. Which is, I suppose, a testament to how much Crohn’s can sap a person and how much better one can feel when it’s under better control.

Here’s Mullins talking about it with MLB Players Media:

MLB Players Media @MLBPlayersMedia

Today, Cedric Mullins shares a very personal story for the first time. Mullins was baseball's only 30-30 player last season, and he did it while battling Crohn's disease. @cedmull30 | @CrohnsColitisFn

Omar Minaya takes a job with MLB

Former Mets general manager Omar Minaya was hired by Major League Baseball yesterday as a consultant for amateur scouting. He will advise the league’s baseball operations department — yes, they have one, even if they really wish they were just a real estate and gambling company — on both domestic and international scouting initiatives. Minaya will report to Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations.

“Morgan Sword,” by the way, is easily the coolest-named person to work for the league since Kennesaw Mountain Landis kicked it. There’s also a non-trivial chance he’ll be the commissioner of baseball one day, just like Landis. At least if the league continues to be a baseball concern and doesn’t transform into some sort of weird hedge fund-like entity that puts the baseball executives on the same level of the org chart as the people who deal with NFTs or whatever the hell. I honestly have no idea where baseball is heading, folks.

As for Minaya, he was a middling at best general manager, but the man made his bones as a very well-respected scout with deep knowledge of talent identification and development, so in a lot of ways this is a perfect job for him.

They should prosecute Stephen Ross for the hell of it

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Brian Flores lawsuit. I spent most of my time talking about the racial discrimination claims and the Belichick texts, but another sexy part of that suit was the claim that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered Flores $100,000 per loss in an effort to tank for a top draft pick.

A reporter contacted me yesterday to ask if I had any comment about that being illegal. I regrettably passed because at the time she contacted me I was sitting with my son at the hospital as we both made fun of what passed for “alternative” music on the in-room TV’s music channels (Carlo: “the Lumineers? I thought this place was for kids, not dads”). I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head anyway and didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to research the answer, so there we were. But then I got home and did a quick bit of research in order to take my mind off things and I think, yeah, actually, there’s an argument that you could charge Ross with a crime, even if I imagine there is plenty of room for him to wiggle out of a conviction.

The law in question would be 18 U.S.C. section 224, which is the Sports Bribery Act, which criminalizes such conduct. The relevant verbiage:

Whoever carries into effect, attempts to carry into effect, or conspires with any other person to carry into effect any scheme in commerce to influence, in any way, by bribery any sporting contest, with knowledge that the purpose of such scheme is to influence by bribery that contest, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

That “or” in the first line is important because it does not require Ross to have entered into an agreement or to have even accomplished the end of offering cash payments in exchange for throwing games or tanking or what have you. It merely requires an attempt. Maybe sharper legal minds will disagree — maybe I’m full of crap, actually — but I think going up to someone and simply saying “I’ll give you $100K if you lose games” is enough to constitute an attempt to influence the outcome of a game, and that’s the case even if Flores did absolutely nothing to suggest he was going to take Ross up on such an offer.

Like I said, I can think of 100 ways Ross could explain away such a thing as innocent even if he did, in fact, suggest that there was $100K in each loss to Flores. And I’m sure the documentary evidence would be hard to come by and could be muddied up a bit. I’m not saying for a moment that Ross is likely to be convicted under the Act.

All I’m saying is that if there is a U.S. Attorney in South Florida who is inclined to make life miserable for a rich guy and make big sexy headlines in the process, he could probably do it with sufficient legal cover to prevent it from being described as frivolous.

Other Stuff

Who’s on Judge Mathis Today?

Samantha Irby is a comedian, author, TV writer, essayist, blogger, and all kinds of other things, but my God, her Judge Mathis recaps from her newsletter are McArthur Genius Grant-worthy. And yeah, that’s exactly what they are: simple recaps of what happens on episodes of the “People’s Court”-style court show, Judge Mathis.

Allison reads each and every one of them and she snorts and guffaws all the way through ‘em. Yesterday, when I had some downtime, I went to the Ronald McDonald Family Room at the hospital — man those are useful and welcome places — checked my email, and found that Allison had forwarded me the latest one. I almost burst my spleen trying to keep from laughing out loud, which is something you have to do in a room full of exhausted people trying to get work and personal business done while experiencing the worst kinds of emotional trauma.

In my defense, how could you not laugh at this, which describes part of a case in which a guy, described as being a poor man’s Billy Dee Williams who was “anywhere between 52 and 137 years old” broke up with a woman and tried to recover items he says he left at her house:

david gives the judge a list of the items he was missing and okay maybe we really are in 1983 because david came to TV court to get his:
-fax machine
-6-tape vhs boxset of roots
-rotary phone
-desktop printer
-half-empty bottle of soul glo
-computer
-royal dansk cookie tin filled with junk and safety pins
-musical keyboard
-signed picture of jesus shaking hands with ronald reagan (probably)

the ruling: greg asks “so how long did you live with her?” and david says “i never lived with her, we were just kicking it” and i’m sorry but if you need to receive faxes at my crib??? we’re doing a little more than just “kicking it.” i could see the judge’s face change as david started down this fuckboy road (FEMINIST KING) and he’s like “there’s no way you brought a keyboard and a fax machine over to this lady’s house if you weren’t living with her!” i know david thinks that it was just his phone and sweatsocks that lived with toni but sorry pal this don’t work like that! outdated technologies make you a resident!!!

They’re all like that. Irby cuts to the damn chase and says what’s really going on in these cases and God bless her for the much-needed laughs.

Coffee Cake

I mentioned yesterday that I make an almond flour coffee cake every Sunday. The point of the cake is so that Allison has something that is portable, celiac-friendly, and packed with protein and fuel for on-the-go, at-work breakfasts each weekday. It makes six nice-sized pieces or eight smaller ones if you’re not a big eater. She has one each day and I have the sixth at some point during the week because it’s a nice changeup from the Catalina Crunch.

Anyway, some of you asked for the recipe. Here is the impetus for it, but I make it really different from that so ignore it. Basically, I do not do the topping. I axe the honey, and I incorporate the cinnamon from the topping into the cake itself. So it’s really not a coffee cake. It’s more like a cake-shaped cinnamon power bar when it’s all said and done, but it’s good. I make it from memory. Here’s what I do:

Pan

Grease a nine inch round pie pan with coconut oil (or whatever oil you want, but there’s coconut oil in the recipe, so);

Wet ingredients:

In one bowl beat together three eggs, 1/2 cup maple syrup, and 1/4 cup of melted coconut oil. Just beat them all together, but make sure the oil has cooled a bit after melting it (if you don’t know, coconut oil is usually a solid kind of deal, especially when it’s even slightly cold) so you don’t scramble your eggs.

Dry ingredients:

2.5 cups of almond flour, two tablespoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of salt. I put all of that into a sifter and sift it together and then, once it’s sifted into a bowl, I take a whisk and make extra damn sure it’s mixed together nicely. You can probably skip the sifter and just whisk it, but I’m weird. Just know that almond flour is coarse and hard to deal with sometimes, so just be damn sure you have it all mixed together.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and mix together. I just stir it vigorously with a fork to incorporate it, but you could whisk or even use a hand mixer if you want, but a fork — with some side-scraping with a spatula — works just fine. The batter will be moist and mostly smooth, but don’t worry about it too much. This is crude business.

Pour into the pan, and if it doesn’t naturally flow to the edges to fill it — it often won’t because it’s thick — just shake the damn pan back and forth to force it to flatten out and fill it all. Like I said, crude business. Bake at 350 degrees for about 26 minutes or so (oddly specific baking times rule) and let it cool.

Congrats, you now have six filling but non-fattening and power-packed pieces of cake, one of which is perfect for breakfast each day. They’re substantial enough that you may forget to eat lunch and not even care.

Good energy food, my friends, and pretty good for ya too. At least until you remember that almond farming is killing the planet and that you are now a bigger part of the problem than you ever were before.

The Crows Have Eyes

While I like Depeche Mode a great deal, Allison is huge fan. So for Christmas I got her the new box set of the newly-remastered “Depeche Mode 101” documentary/concert film and we watched that last weekend. Then last night we watched “Touring the Angel: Live in Milan,” which is a concert film from their 2005-06 tour behind the “Playing the Angel” album. She had seen it before but I never had.

I have two general observations.

First, the legendary D.A. Pennebaker, who directed “Depeche Mode 101” — and who, of course, made the legendary Bob Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back” — knew what the hell he was doing. Specifically, he knew that in almost every single case, the subjects of the documentary are more important than the filmmaker, thus you make sure the subjects are the star of the show. While the music and performance captured on the “Touring the Angel” concert itself was excellent, whoever directed and edited it seemed to think that people wanted to watch copious jump-cuts, unnecessarily extreme closeups, and random and pointless video effects more than Dave Gahan strutting around the stage in a black leather vest and low-cut pants while crooning like a god, and folks, that is not the case.

Second, while I greatly appreciate most everything about Martin Gore and his copious talent, his look was . . . quite a lot that night in Milan. Here’s Martin:

And here’s all I could see while looking at Martin:

I think that God's got a sick since of humor too, Martin, but it has nothing on how funny you looked that night.

That aside, it was nice to unwind from another harrowing day in what has become a series of harrowing days with some stone cold jams. There are a lot of Depeche Mode songs you may not want to hear when you’re going through the stuff we’re going through this week, but it’s heartening to know that both they and their fan base have survived a long damn time, so leaning in is the way to go.

Just one more thing . . .

There are a handful of “Columbo” books out there, but the recently-published Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7 — from an academic press, no less — seems like next-level stuff:

Columbo is fifty years old. A global smash in the 1970s, it is now a cult TV favourite. What is the reason for this enduring popularity? In this fascinating exploration of a television classic, David Martin-Jones argues that Columbo reveals how our current globalized world – of 24/7 capital, invasive surveillance and online labour – emerged in the late 20th century. Exploring everything from the influences on Falk’s iconic acting style to the show’s depiction of Los Angeles, Martin-Jones illuminates how our attention is channelled, via technologies like television and computers, to influence how we perform, learn, police and locate ourselves in today’s world.

And you think that I think too much about this show.

Have a great day, everyone.