Cup of Coffee: February 9, 2023

An arbitration buyout, a new bandbox, Arte's pipe dream, a new MLBPA logo, an odious Florida book-banning, Joe West's retirement, the Birds, a Dystopia Watch entry, Hopper, Charlie Cale, and Columbo

Good morning!

Subscribers who read yesterday’s missive should know that, following my no-sleep-for-two-days jag, I powered through without napping and then went to bed a little after 8pm on Tuesday night and slept until about 6:30 yesterday morning. I can’t remember the last time I got even eight hours of sleep let alone 10+, so I woke up in a strange new world, that I can tell ya. Not sure I like that world, as too much sleep leaves me loopy for a long time after I wake up, but I certainly needed it.

Whatever the case, today is, once again, a normal Cup of Coffee day. And it’s Free Thursday!

Today we talk about a key player on a contender who got his arbitration years bought out, the park in which that same player plays could seriously boost his home run totals going forward, a team owner has a pipe dream, I riff a bit on the MLBPA’s new logo, a county in the fascist state of Florida has banned kids books about Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente because, I presume, they want to please their fascist governor, and we look in to see how Joe West is spending his retirement. You’ll not be shocked to learn it’s with something petty.

In Other Stuff, there’s a reason to root for the Eagles on Sunday even if you don’t care about football, we have a new entry in our periodic Dystopia Watch, we learn what the status quo was in a famous artist’s house, and we get a different artist’s rendering of a team-up we totally deserve but which, sadly, we’ll never get.

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The Daily Briefing

Blue Jays, Bo Bichette agree to a three-year deal

Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette and the club have agreed to a three-year deal. The financial terms are not yet known, but Bichette was seeking $7.5 million in arbitration this season while the Jays filed at $5 million. This was Bichette’s first year of arbitration eligibility, so the deal buys out all three of those years, leaving him eligible for free agency after the 2025 season unless there is a team option in there that has not yet been reported.

Bichette, 24, hit .290/.333/.469 (127 OPS+) with 24 homers, 93 RBI, and 13 stolen bases in 159 games while leading the league in hits in 2022. He may hit more homers in 2024. Why? Because . . .

. . . Rogers Centre could become a band box

Travis Sawchik of The Score posted an interesting thread about the new dimensions at Rogers Centre. If you missed that change, know that the outfield walls are coming in, particularly in right field, while the fence is growing taller as a means of compensating. The Blue Jays are claiming that this will be home run neutral.

Sawchick is not having it, however. Mostly because of geometry:

Here's some physics 101 . . . the average HR fly ball *descends* at about an angle of 45 degrees, or much more steeply than it ascends. The tangent of 45° is 1. So for every 1 foot a fence moves in, it must be raised by a 1 foot to maintain HR neutrality

First off, a big shoutout to Sawchik for making me think of “tangent” in the geometrical sense for the first time since the ninth grade. Then a second big shoutout for Sawchick noting that, when you bring a wall in by 16 feet but only raise it by four feet, you are not doing home run-neutral things, at least if the geometry of of it all holds up.

Sawchick goes on to overlay a spray chart from last year on the new dimensions which strongly suggests that a great many flies to right that were either caught or bounced off the wall as doubles last year will be dongs in 2023. He believes it will play a lot like Yankee Stadium, which already features way, way more opposite field homers from right-handed hitters than any other park, which suggests we’ll see a bunch of Vladdy bloop homers, for example. Or maybe Bo Bichette homers. Same, to a lesser extent, applies in left field where the wall was brought in more than it was raised.

To be sure, the walls will also be raised in deep right center and left center without a corresponding change in distance, so figure those areas will take away some home runs to make up for the added ones to right and left, but I’m skeptical that those will balance out, thereby undercutting the “home run neutral” claim by the Jays. Guys pull the ball more than they hit it straight away.

Ultimately, of course, we can’t really know what will happen until games are played. Sometimes other, unexpected factors affect homers besides the distance to and the height of the wall. For example, sometimes Major League Baseball just switches juiced balls in and out without telling anyone. So we’ll see.

Arte Moreno wants to keep Shohei Ohtani

That’s what he told the New York Post anyway.

Usually this is where I’d offer some analysis, but when I hear that Moreno wants to keep Ohtani, all I can think of is what an old coworker used to say when someone asked him for something: “yeah, and people in Hell want ice water.”

The MLBPA has a new logo

The Players Union has a new logo. Via Sports Business Journal:

Not exactly a major refresh but at least it acknowledges that hardly any players wear old-school stirrups anymore. Plus, the batter’s overall form now looks like someone who could actually handle a pitch these days as opposed to a guy who somehow got 492 plate appearances in 1967 despite both batting and slugging his weight. This, according to the SBJ article and MLBPA spokespeople, is by design:

The new MLBPA image is not a silhouette of a specific player, the way the NBA logo is of Hall of Fame player Jerry West. Rather, the new MLBPA logo represents a compilation of the best power hitters in baseball today. 

“The idea was to be representative of everyone and not one particular player,” said Gretchen Mueller, MLBPA managing director, digital media and creative strategy. 

The MogoSME team reviewed hundreds of player photos, outlining the swing from different angles, and video of players on every team in the league. “There was extensive research to go through the swing of the modern player,” Mueller said.  

That all makes sense, even if I think there was a missed opportunity here:

As for the bolder red highlights. I’m just gonna assume that’s a nod to the inherent and glorious communist ideals of labor unions.

[Editor: Craig, Tony Clark was quoted by SBJ as saying that it “reflects our union’s strength through unity as well as its standing in professional sports and the labor movement.” Please grow up. Pretending to be a communist when you’re really just a boring-ass New Deal liberal who lives in an affluent suburb and is, as we speak, on a plane heading to California to hike around Marin County in unnecessarily expensive hiking gear is tired]

I hear ya, comrade [*winks and then flashes the secret communist baseball hand signal*]

Florida banned picture books about Henry Aaron and Roberto Clements

As far as ballplayers go, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente are about as unassailable as they come. Each were among the greatest players of all time, but each was much more than that.

Aaron overcame racism and segregation to become a massive superstar who would go on to break the most hallowed baseball record of all time, all while putting up with death threats against him and his family. He’d later go on to a decades-long career as a top baseball executive and ambassador who was in life and remains in death one of the most beloved figures in the history of professional sports. All Clemente did, apart from dominating on the field for 18 seasons and serving as a Latino baseball pioneer, was die a genuine hero while delivering humanitarian aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake.

Which is to say, if literal salt of the Earth had a voice, it would look at Aaron and Clemente and say “damn, I’m a fraud. That’s some serious salt of the Earth right there.”

So it makes total sense that Duval County, Florida has banned two children’s books about Aaron and Clemente: Henry Aaron’s Dream by Matt Tavares and Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter. Why? The author of the Aaron book could only speculate that it was because the book acknowledges that racism exists. Here’s the same author, speculating about the Clemente book:

“There’s a tiny bit about racism, but it’s mostly about how much everyone in Pittsburgh adored Clemente. So maybe they just don’t like inspiring stories about people who aren’t white? The whole thing is moronic.”

The “tiny bit about racism” is all that matters, I suspect, because what’s going on in Florida is pure, Orwellian reality-creation. It’s part of a Republican campaign to stoke delusions of persecution among white people and to erase America’s history of white supremacy from the public record. They clearly believe that the best way to do that is to ban Black history of any kind. I mean, they even banned a children book about Rosa Parks.

Does a book about Henry Aaron harm anyone? Of course not. But you can’t lie about American history or justify the ratcheting-back or repeal of measures aimed at combatting racism if you acknowledge that racism is an actual thing, so his story, Clemente’s story, Rosa Parks’ story, and the story of the Black experience in general must be scrubbed from the record. It’s evil. It’s odious. It’s racist. It’s fascist. It’s par for the course for Florida and, increasingly, anyplace else where Republicans are in charge.

Major League Baseball gives out two prestigious awards named after Aaron and Clemente, each of whom it rightly considers inspirational figures worthy of honor and emulation. MLB also spends a great deal of time each April talking about its role in the Civil Rights Movement with reference to Jackie Robinson. Half of the teams in Major League Baseball are about to kick off spring training in Florida next week and the semi-finals and finals of the MLB-sponsored World Baseball Classic will take place there next month. In light of that, you’d think the league might have something to say about what’s happening in that fucking state right now, but all I hear are crickets and the sound of Rob Manfred’s knees shaking at the prospect of upsetting public officials who might throw MLB, the Rays, or the Marlins money.

How Joe West is spending his retirement

Mostly, it seems, he’s spending his retirement editing his Wikipedia page to remove stuff that make him look bad.

I didn’t look too closely, but I assume that part of what was removed was any reference to West being thin-skinned and dismissive of even the most basic and justified criticism. You know, like the other true stuff being removed.

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Other Stuff

Go Birds?

I, obviously, don’t write all that much about football here. Hell, on Sunday, when the Super Bowl kicks off, I’ll be on the back end of a 15-mile hike from Stinson Beach to Mount Tam and back, caring less about the game and the commercials and the halftime show and all of that than almost anyone. But I did read a neat story yesterday that is at least kinda pegged to the Super Bowl. It answers the question, “which Philadelphia pro sports team has the most championships?”

My first answer was the Eagles, as I knew they won a couple of pre-Super Bowl NFL championships and then won that Super Bowl a few years ago. I further knew that the Phillies have only won two, the Sixers have won three and while I didn’t know off the top of my head how many Stanley Cups the Flyers had won, I figured it had to have only been a couple. So Eagles it is, right?

Nope. It was . . . the Athletics, with five World Series wins — 1910, 1911, 1913, 1929, and 1930. The franchise would, of course, go on to win four more in Oakland, but those five Philadelphia championships is the most the City of Brotherly Love has witnessed in a single sport. If the Eagles beat Kansas City on Sunday they tie the mark.

The story itself is a fun one, too. Bobby Shantz, who won 24 games and the AL MVP for the 1952 A’s, gets interviewed. He’s 97 now, but still lives in the house he bought just outside of Philly back in 1954. If you would’ve told me that a guy who actually played for Connie Mack was still kicking, I would’ve thought you were joking, but here we are.

Dystopia Watch

It’s not often that you can read about the destruction of the planet and the human race via nuclear war and have that not be the most depressing part of the headline, but Yahoo Finance pulled it off:

If you’re not the richest person on the cinder after the apocalypse you only have yourself to blame. Never stop grinding, you fleshy-headed radioactive mutants.

“Status Quo”

On Monday I talked about Edward Hopper, who was best known for his oil paintings of lonely, inward-looking figures in large, mysteriously empty, and evocative cityscapes. Via a subscriber, who hipped me to a blog post which then linked me to an article on the matter, I learned that Hopper also was something of a pencil-drawn editorial cartoonist too.

At least he was inside his home when he was passive-aggressively complaining about his wife’s babying of her pet cat, which gave old Eddie the jealous sadz:

Kinky.

Columbo Face

The “Poker Face”/“Columbo” comparison is obvious and oft-noted, but artist Adam Perocchi took it next level by creating a thing that pretty much needed to be created:

Yeah, that’s also a ripoff/homage of the movie poster for “The Sting” but we’ll let it pass.

My travels

As you’re reading this — at least assuming you’re reading it before, oh, 3PM eastern — I am on an airplane en route to San Francisco where I’ll be spending the next few days hiking with one of my oldest friends. The tentative plan:

• Today: some sort of Peninsula Redwood option. Maybe Purisima Creek if it’s open again following recent storm damage, maybe Los Trancos;

• Tomorrow: Mt. Diablo. Maybe the Grand Loop, maybe Mitchell Creek to Diablo Summit if we’re feeling frisky;

• Saturday: The San Francisco Crosstown Trail, which is basically what it sounds like, starting down near where Candlestick Park used to be and ending up near Sea Cliff or someplace up that way;

• Sunday: That Stinson Beach to Mt. Tam trail, followed by a big ass dinner at a place in Mill Valley; and

• Monday: TBD. Maybe down in the Peninsula again. Maybe something up in Point Reyes. I dunno. I fly home Tuesday.

As I mentioned yesterday, I will be posting something tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday, but there’s a chance it’ll be a bit more brief than usual. Let’s just play it by ear. For now, though, I’ll meet you up there where the path runs straight and high.

Have a great weekend everyone.