Cup of Coffee: January 11, 2024

Stroman and the Yankees, Shota's money, the Sunday Night Baseball schedule, dangerous driving, Ohio once again chooses evil, kids are leaving red states for a reason, and dystopian ice

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

With a free newsletter there’s no need to tease what’s a-comin’, so let’s jump on in, then, shall we?

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The Daily Briefing

Marcus Stroman to the Yankees? Why the hell not?

Yesterday the Yankees were reported to be the favorite to sign free agent starter Marcus Stroman. To be sure, that came from Jon Morosi of MLB Network and he has whiffed mightily this offseason, but we’ll leave that aside. The fact is that the Yankees need to bolster their rotation and Stroman doesn’t yet have a job, so why not?

Subscribers know that I don’t talk all that much about trade or free agent rumors in this space but I’m sort of taken with this one. Why? Because Stroman has talked shit about the Yankees before and the Yankees have said publicly that they’re not interested in Stroman, with Brian Cashman saying in 2019 that he wasn’t “a difference maker” and that he’d be a reliever in New York. Add in the fact that (a) Stroman is always good to say something provocative or stupid — or provocative and stupid —; and (b) the Yankees do NOT handle outspoken guys in their clubhouse very well and it seems like a recipe for chaos.

Where’s the popcorn?

Shota Imanaga’s deal is NOT $100 million

I wrote up yesterday’s item about Shota Imanaga signing with the Cubs before the financial details were reported. I likewise said, based on some earlier prognosticating from some various people, that the deal would be in excess of $100 million. Welp, I was wrong about that.

Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported yesterday that Imanaga will actually be guaranteed only $53 million over four years. After the second and third years, the team will have an option that could push the guarantee up to $80 million over five. If the club declines to do so, Imanaga can opt out and become a free agent.

The lesson: don’t write about numbers just before bed.

ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball schedule has dropped

At least for the first half of the season. You’ll not be shocked to see that there will be three Dodgers games in that seven-game set.

Which compels me to make a quick point: with the hopefully obvious proviso that I have no issue with the Dodgers spending a ton of money on marquee free agents in an effort to turn themselves into a dominant, alpha team, I will have absolutely zero patience for any the Dodgers player, coach, executive, or fan who complains about them having to play so many late getaway day games. You bought the ticket, you take the ride. If you wanna be done at 3:30pm on Sunday afternoons go be the White Sox.

Anyway, here’s the early season schedule, and no I do not know why they’re basically taking May off but I presume it has something to do with the NBA playoffs:

• March 31: St. Louis Cardinals vs. Los Angeles Dodgers

• April 7: Houston Astros vs. Texas Rangers

• April 14: San Diego Padres vs. Los Angeles Dodgers

• April 21: Texas Rangers vs. Atlanta Braves

• April 28: Chicago Cubs vs. Boston Red Sox

• May 26: Chicago Cubs vs. St. Louis Cardinals

• June 9: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. New York Yankees

• June 16: New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox

Beyond the Sunday night schedule, MLB released the game times of every other game in 2024. There are night games. There are day games. The former tend to start between 6 and 7:30 or so. The latter start in the 1PM range, with some variations. You know how it works. No one is reinventing the wheel here, man.

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Other Stuff

Dangerous driving has surged. Why?

For a number of reasons, automobile fatalities had been in decline for the past several decades. A lot of this was due to safety devices such as airbags becoming standard. A huge part of it is because of seatbelt usage becoming the norm beginning in the 1980s and onward when it really wasn’t before. Cars have backup cameras and blind spot sensors now. And, of course, cars are simply better-built now, so when crashes do occur, they are more survivable than they were in the past.¹

But, as this in-depth story from the New York Times reveals, those positive trends have reversed themselves since 2020. Why? Driver behavior, mostly:

Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver . . . In 2020 and 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has calculated, approximately a quarter of all fatal wrecks in the United States involved vehicles traveling above the posted speed limit; a significant percentage of the dead, whether passenger or driver, were not wearing seatbelts . . . national intoxicated-driving rates have surged to the extent that one in every 10 arrests is now linked to a suspected D.U.I. And aggressive driving, defined by AAA as “tailgating, erratic lane changing or illegal passing,” factors into 56 percent of crashes resulting in a fatality. (Distressingly, this statistic does not cover the tens of thousands of people injured, often critically, by aggressive drivers, or the 550 people shot annually after or during road-rage incidents — or the growing number of pedestrians and cyclists deliberately targeted by incensed motorists.)

The Times spoke to an emergency room doctor from Nevada who has made a point to study these trends. She believes that the pandemic basically turned Americans into aggressive, reckless drivers, saying “My own theory is that whatever personal conflicts they had were exacerbated because they’d been sheltering in place during Covid. So they’d get on the road having self-medicated with drugs or alcohol, or they’d just be incredibly reckless.”

The article goes on to cite statistics about people’s general levels of stress, aggression, and hopelessness and suggests that there’s a link between those things — all exacerbated by the pandemic — and bad driving. I don’t know enough about that kind of stuff to have a strong opinion about it, but it seems plausible.

Obviously distracted driving — which the article also talks a lot about — is a huge factor too. A lot of us like to think that “everyone” got a smart phone in 2010, but smart phone usage continues to rise each year, even if incrementally. And app makers have gotten way, way better and delivering products which immerse us in our phones. As time has gone on people have likely become more dependent on them and more comfortable, unfortunately, with using them when they shouldn’t.

That’s not all the article is about, of course. It’s a pretty massive and all-encompassing thing about the state of road safety, traffic laws, and road and city planning stuff, much of which is super interesting though much of which will not be surprising. Shocker: traffic calming measures, protected bike and pedestrian lanes, and speed cameras all work, even if they annoy people. Americans, of course, hate to be annoyed. Or, rather, hate to be even mildly inconvenienced, so it’s always a greater struggle for those things to be implemented here compared to other places.

I think the most telling thing from the whole article, though, is that on the whole, most Americans agree that driver behavior has gotten terrible and is a huge problem. Except they almost always believe they, themselves, are just fine. Everyone else is an idiot or a maniac. That’s probably the most American thing of all.

Ohio, yet again, chooses evil

Yesterday the Ohio House of Representatives voted to override a veto of a bill that will ban transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care including puberty blockers and hormone therapy. It will also prevent transgender athletes from playing women’s sports. To put the nature of the bill in perspective, it was even too extreme for our Republican governor who himself issued a bunch of anti-trans executive orders literally last week. The override effort now turns to the senate where it will, 100%, be overridden. This bill will be the law of the State of Ohio before the month is out. It will, inevitably, inflict massive harm on trans kids and their families.

It’s probably worth noting that a great many of the legislators who voted to override the governor’s veto have received campaign donations from a man who, on Tuesday, was revealed to have had sex with trafficked teenagers. All of them, if you ask them, will tell you that they are supporting the bill in the name of morality.

There is obviously evil and hate behind this effort and many of these legislators voted for it with glee. But it’s also the case that this law would never have made it to the floor for a vote if Ohio was not gerrymandered to the nth degree. That’s because, the true zealots aside, there are many Republicans who would prefer not support a law that is so transparently hateful and unnecessary. They voted to override, however, because thanks to gerrymandering the only threat to their power in their districts is being primaried from the right. They are vulnerable if they even nod at moderation or, in this case, basic humanity. They are politically safe if they punch down hard on trans youth.

If anyone doubts this, just look at Representative Brett Hillyer. He is a Republican but he has never been a zealot. He abstained from voting for this bill prior to its initial passage. He, actually, sponsored a bill called the Ohio Fairness Act which sought to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression. Yet, when it came time for the override yesterday he voted in favor. The reason — the ONLY damn reason! — is because he is from a gerrymandered red district, there are virtually no votes to be gained by being a reasonable, moderate person, and if he didn’t vote to override he’d be targeted by the state GOP who would fund a primary opponent who is even farther to the right than he is. The Republican Party is already mostly captured by right wing zealots, but when you add gerrymandering on top of that it ads rocket fuel to the extremism.

Reasons, of course, matter little. Actions are what matter. And if you’re the sort of person who acts to inflict pain and hardship on trans children, many of whom will end up taking their own lives if left without supportive care, you are a fucking monster. I hope each and every one of the people who supported this override are haunted in all of the worst and most insidious ways for the rest of their hopefully short, miserable lives.

Why are the youths leaving red states? It’s a total mystery!

In extraordinarily related news, the governor of Mississippi used his inauguration speech yesterday to decry the trend of young people leaving the state to pursue careers elsewhere. He said “For too many decades, Mississippi’s most valuable export has not been our cotton or even our culture. It’s been our kids . . . They made other places better, and we missed out on all they could have done here at home.”

This is not an uncommon thing to hear from officials in red states. You hear it in Ohio which, apart from the oasis that is Columbus, is hemorrhaging young people. You hear it in West Virginia, where I’m from and which I left after high school. You hear it from officials in places like Iowa, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Idaho too. There is a fair amount of overall migration to some red states — particularly Texas — but most of that comes from retirees and other older people. There is considerable brain drain when it comes to kids leaving for college and work in other states and younger professionals hightailing it for the border.

It’s not a mystery why this is.

Republican officials who run these places have aggressively pursued policies that are tailor made to alienate young people and young professionals. Abortion restrictions are the most obvious example, but GOP officials have also pushed theocratic policies on public schools and have worked to drain them of resources while favoring private religious education. They have eviscerated higher education and have, more broadly, stigmatized the idea of education in general. They’ve demonized gay people, trans people, and people of color. They have eagerly pursued every possible anti-environmental policy they can conceive. They have enacted all manner of measures that make it harder to raise kids. They have aggressively sought to enact antidemocratic, anti-pluralistic, and in some cases abjectly authoritarian policies in order to neutralize any pushback.

And now they have the gall to turn around and pretend to wonder why promising young people want no part of the place? Fucking spare me.

Dystopia watch: Greenland ice in Dubai cocktail bars

From The Guardian:

Frozen daiquiri anyone? Drinking a cocktail on top of a Dubai skyscraper may seem decadent enough, but a Greenland entrepreneur wants to add ancient glacier ice scooped from the fjords to the glass, for the ultimate international thrill.

Arctic Ice harvests ice from the fjords of Greenland and then ships them to the United Arab Emirates to sell to exclusive bars.

The entrepreneur in question talks pretty defensively about how this enterprise has “low carbon-intensity” and that, though he’s not there yet, he is “committed to becoming fully carbon-neutral.” In this he sounds a lot like someone who gets a 10% off coupon code from some unnecessary store, spends $379 dollars, and then claims he’s “saving money.” It’s also worth remembering that this was literally a “Simpsons” joke back in the day.

I’m not going to suggest that every choice to be made in this world must be made with an eye on what it means for the environment. And even when we do take the environment into account the choices to be made aren’t always easy ones. But I would hope that “shipping ice over 9,000 nautical miles in refrigerated freighters so the ultra-wealthy can optimize overpriced cocktails while sitting in the middle of a desert” would not be on the table in this day and age. I mean, it’s the sort of thing that even Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t write because it’s too on the damn nose.

Have a great day everyone.

1. That fatality rates continued to decline even as the size of cars and trucks dramatically increased beginning with the SUV boom in the 1990s, and as the power and speed of cars has likewise increased, is something of a miracle. Though experts, not surprisingly, believe that fatality rates would’ve declined even more if so many people weren’t driving luxury tanks with relatively mind-boggling 0-60 capabilities.