Cup of Coffee: January 12, 2023
Correa has a home, Comerica Park shrinks, A.I. is trying to steal my bit, chip butties, bad school board members, amnesiac mystery men, moderation, WWE and whether the smell of weed is "unserious"
Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!
Today we talk about Carlos Correa’s deal with the Twins becoming official, a trade, a couple of signings, Comerica Park shrinking, Aubry Huff being a clueless, hateful moron, and A.I. and the gambling industry trying to steal my bit.
In Other Stuff we have a chip butty update, I continue to rail against a local school board member, I indulge in some lottery fantasies, talk about mystery men washing up on beaches, marvel at the New York Times continuing to misunderstand things, wonder where people draw the line with WWE, and wonder how a smell can be “unserious.”
The Daily Briefing
The Carlos Correa signing is official
The Carlos Correa signing became official yesterday. Just before the press conference re-introducing him to Twins fans, the club’s Twitter account posted this:
Because I’m a 40-something white man, I’m a sucker for a reference to “The Wire,” but I’m also sorta puzzled here. Like, if Correa had not had improbably fallen back into the Twins’ fold, how was the team gonna sell their offseason moves and 2023 outlook?
Because from where I’m sitting, pre-Correa, the Twins future looked like a 40 degree day. Ain't nobody got nothing to say about a 40-degree day. Fifty? Bring a smile to your face. Sixty? Shit, Twins fans be damn near barbecuing on that motherfucker. Go down to 20, Twins fans get their bitch on. Get their blood complaining. But forty? Nobody give a fuck about 40. Nobody remember 40. Until the other day, Twins fans was set to have way too many 40-degree days.
Wait, what?
Dodgers acquire Miguel Rojas from the Marlins
The Los Angeles Dodgers acquired shortstop Miguel Rojas from the Miami Marlins for infielder Jacob Amaya last night.
Rojas, who will soon be 34, is a stopgap at short for the Dodgers following the departure of Trea Turner. He hit a poor .236/.283/.323 (72 OPS+) with six homers in 507 plate appearances last year, though he was dealing with a wrist problem that, eventually, required surgery.
Rojas, who actually came up with the Dodgers back in 2014 before being part of that big Dan Haren/Dee-Strange Gordon/Kiké Hernández trade, is still an excellent defensive shortstop, however, so he should be able to hold the position down until the Dodgers come up with a longer term solution. Maybe that’s Gavin Lux. Maybe it’s someone else. For now, though, It’s Miguel Rojas.
Nelson Cruz signs with the Padres
The San Diego Padres signed Nelson Cruz to a one-year, $1 million deal yesterday.
Age seemed to finally catch up to Cruz last season, when the 42 year-old DH fell off to a line of .234/.313/.337 (90 OPS+) with only ten homers in 124 games. The Padres are obviously hoping for one last gasp of a good season from the old slugger.
It’s been a busy offseason for the Padres, who in addition to Cruz have signed Xander Bogaerts, Robert Suarez, Nick Martinez, Matt Carpenter, Adam Engel, Seth Lugo and Brent Honeywell Jr. Buy a program, folks. It’s the only way to tell the players apart.
Athletics sign Shintaro Fujinami
The Oakland Athletics have signed Japanese right-hander Shintaro Fujinami to a one-year deal. The financial details are not yet known but, c’mon, this is Oakland. It ain’t gonna be that much.
NPB writer Jim Allen recently described Fujinami as “unpredictable” and said he has “remarkable stuff but his command is so bad that every game is a crap shoot with dice that may or may not be loaded.” So don’t expect this to be a game-changing signing for the A’s. He did post a 2.77 ERA in 107.1 innings for the Hanshin Tigers in 2022, but his up-and-down nature still leads most people who have seen him to lean heavily on the “perhaps a change of scenery will benefit him . . .” form of analysis.
The Tigers are changing Comerica Park’s dimensions
The Detroit Tigers announced yesterday that they are adjusting the dimensions of Comerica Park. Specifically:
The center field fence will move in 10 feet, to 412, and the wall will be lowered from 8.5 feet to 7 feet;
The wall in right-center field will be lowered from 13 feet to 7 feet; and
The right field wall will be lowered from 8.5 feet to seven feet
This was first suggested back in September, but the Tigers didn’t have a head of baseball operations then. The newly-hired Scott Harris likely had final signoff on it, liked the idea, so here we are.
I’ve been to a lot of games at Comerica Park over the years. It’s certainly a pitcher-friendly ballpark, even if it’s not quite as pitcher-friendly as when it opened up 22 years ago. When it opened it was absolutely ginormous. Indeed, Comerica opened up with a left-field power alley of 395 damn feet. Before the 2003 season the Tigers moved the left-field fence in to its current 370 feet. It was too late to save Juan González’s career, but the park has played a bit more fairly for right-handed hitters for the past 20 seasons. These moves dealing with center, right-center, and right, will help out lefties and righties who aren’t dead-pull hitters.
Ultimately, though, the Tigers need more good players. Because they won when Comerica was bigger and, I suspect, they’ll continue to lose after these changes, at least for a while.
Aubrey Huff: spot-on as usual
I can’t remember if or why Aubrey Huff has some sort of beef with Brandon Belt. If there is beef it’s probably tied up with the Giants shit-canning the washed-up Huff in favor of the vastly superior Belt in 2012. To be sure, most ballplayers understand how that works and, even if they don’t like it, they don’t hold it against their replacement. Huff, however, is a hateful moron, so when Belt made the news this week by signing with the Blue Jays, Huff tweeted (and later deleted) this trash:
Probably worth noting that, in 2012, Huff made $10 million while hitting .192 for the season with one home run, seven RBI, and a 0.2 WAR. But I suppose he has his reasons as to why that was better.
A.I. is trying to steal my bit
I don’t take the Baseball’s Most Handsome Managers rankings particularly seriously, but one’s turf is one’s turf. So, when this landed in my inbox this morning — and was later sent to me by like 100 people — I’m not gonna lie, I got a bit perturbed:
Buck Showalter, the 66-year-old in charge of the New York Mets has been crowned the Most Handsome Manager in the MLB, research from Gambling.com can reveal.
As we all know, beauty is subjective. However, with technology being an ever-increasing factor in people’s daily lives (and as a bit of pre-season fun!), researchers at Gambling.com turned to popular beauty measurement app Golden Ratio Face to help determine which MLB Managers are ageing like fine wines and whose side-line stresses and strains have taken their toll throughout their managerial careers’.
Yes, the misspelling of “aging” was in the original email. And don’t even get me started on “the MLB.” Or the fact that a gambling site is behind it all. I can’t cast aspersions at typos, but it’s as if the rest of this crap was formulated in a laboratory by an evil scientist with specific instructions to piss me off.
As for the rankings, they have Showalter first, Rob Thomson second, and Terry Francona fifth. Previous winner Rocco Baldelli is 24th. Two-time winner and this year’s runner up, Gabe Kapler, is 12th. My 2023 number one, Skip Schumaker, is 17th. Dead last is the quite handsome Matt Quatraro. It’s an omnishambles wrapped in a catastrophe, wrapped in a disgrace. The only thing the ranking accomplishes is the undermining of the market value of the “popular beauty measurement app Golden Ratio Face.”
Don’t fall for imitations, people. Don’t trust any manager handsomeness rankings that do not come with the Cup of Coffee™ seal of approval.
Other Stuff
Chip Butty update
There was WAY WAY more of a response to the chip butty item in yesterday’s newsletter than I ever would’ve anticipated. Not only do you all have strong opinions about french fry sandwiches — a lot of ‘em wrong, but good for you — but you also educated me about po’ boys and all manner of other things.
The most startling thing I learned yesterday, however, came courtesy of Cup of Coffee’s Chester, UK correspondent, Nathan, who said that if chip butties threw me for a loop, I should check out “pie barms.” Not knowing what in the actual hell a pie barm is, I took Nathan’s advice and Googled it:
Yes, it’s a meat pie sandwiched between halves of a buttered roll. Yes, it’s a PIE SANDWICH. And now, some pie barm commentary:
This ingenious manner of pie degustation ensures the fastest consumption of hot, meat-filled pastry, no utensils needed, because the bun protects hands from getting burnt. The pie sauces are absorbed in the barm cake, meaning a no-mess meal on the go.
When I come across things like these I become deeply convinced that the world would’ve been a better place if the Spanish Armada had won.
Meanwhile, in New Albany, Ohio . . .
The guy on the New Albany, Ohio school board who I helped get censured because he compared wearing masks to the Holocaust has launched a website because he feels he's not getting his points across. It reads like it was written by a college sophomore who has only seen Ricky Gervais videos.
I went after it yesterday on my Facebook page — a lot more people local to me are on Facebook than other platforms, so there we are — but I feel like this dude’s site, if he keeps it up, is going to give me ammo against him until the creek thaws.
If you can dream it you can do it
I don’t buy lottery tickets very often because I understand how odds work, but sometimes the jackpot gets so damn big it’s fun to waste a couple of bucks on a few minutes of fantasizing. So yeah, I picked up a couple of Mega Millions tickets yesterday. My promise to you: if I win the $1.35 billion jackpot, every day will be Free Thursday.
Honestly, I wasn’t even gonna spend the couple of bucks on the tickets, but I read something yesterday that inspired me:
“Blaze editor whose New Year's goals were to ‘shoot guns and watch college football’ shoots self in foot during college football championship.”
If some hack website editor can manifest such a glorious thing into her world, God knows this hack newsletter editor can manifest winning the damn lottery into his world, right?
Mystery Man
A guy washed up on an English beach three months ago. He claims he has no memory of who he is or how he got there. British authorities have nothing to go on apart from a guess, based on his accent, that he’s Latvian. Of course he might have foreign accent syndrome. Which is a real thing! Not to be confused, of course, with that thing that happens with Republican politicians who suddenly begin speaking in southern accents even if they’re from Cleveland.
As someone who has watched a lot of TV and a lot of movies over the years, I am going to assume, until told otherwise, that the guy who washed up on that beach is either a foreign agent or a fraudster. Although subscriber Paper Lions posited an equally plausible explanation yesterday when he said, “when I saw this story all I could think was, ‘I bet he went to England to do some cross country walk and got lost.’”
Paper Lions doesn’t know anything. If I get lost on my Coast to Coast walk I’m far, far more likely to fall from a fell or die of exposure on some windswept moor. On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at, y’all.
Moderation update
Last week I spent a lot of time talking about how, contrary to what the national press corps believed, the Ohio Legislature pulling a Crazy Ivan and picking a different Republican than the one everyone expected them to pick for the Speaker of the House position was not an act of political moderation. Rather, it was a function of a years-long GOP rat-fucking of the presumed speaker that had nothing to do with policy.
Enter New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, who wrote this yesterday in service of a piece about how both parties should back away from extremism:
Ohio provides a second example of an intraparty battle, with a different but parallel resolution.
At the start of this year, Derek Merrin — a hard-edged anti-abortion conservative supportive of so-called right-to-work laws — was assured victory in his bid to become speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.
Merrin had won majority support from the 67-member Republican caucus in the 99-member Ohio House. His ascent would have marked a significant shift to the right in a state Republican Party known traditionally for its centrism.
On Jan. 3, however, when the full Ohio House met to pick a speaker, Merrin was defeated by a bipartisan coalition of 32 Democrats and 22 Republicans, a rarity in this polarized era. The coalition supported a less conservative, less confrontational Republican, Jason Stevens, who told the House after his victory, “I pledge to respect and to work with each and every one of us to address the many concerns of our state.”
Worth noting that this guy’s characterization of Ohio Republicans as “centrists” is at least 30 years out of date. Maybe longer. That alone should’ve been reason enough to dismiss this.
But honestly, I cannot get over the fact that a national political columnist with serious academic credentials was allowed to characterize a situation in which a hardcore GOP megadonor made a large donation to a Democrat while simultaneously orchestrating a lurid sting operation which outed a closeted gay man in order to swing the Democratic coalition and some homophobic GOP reps behind a different candidate as “moderation.”
It’s almost as if Edsall has no idea what he’s talking about but is, rather, looking at Ohio from 30,000 feet in the air and auto-piloting through the sorts of “gee, ain’t bipartisanship great!” cloudspeak, the likes of which national political journalists have been addicted to for decades. Remember that the next time you hear these types talking about how bipartisanship is always good and division is always bad.
Where you draw line
I stopped paying much attention to professional wrestling around the time Dusty Rhodes won his third Bunkhouse Stampede, but there are so many people in and around baseball Twitter who are super into wrestling that I still hear a lot about it passively. As such, I’m aware that, via WWE palace intrigue and McMahonian machinations, wrestling’s most famous company is, perhaps, but perhaps not, poised to go the way of Newcastle United F.C., Cristiano Ronaldo, and a bunch of professional golfers and be sold to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund as a means of furthering the country’s sportswashing campaign.
From what I can tell, this has caused a lot of angst among wrestling fans who, quite understandably, won’t feel great about rabidly supporting the entertainment product they love if it’s owned by evil, oppressive interests. Which, fair!
What I don’t get, though, is why they didn’t arrive at this same place sometime before now given that Vince McMahon has multiple sexual assault allegations against him which involved tens of millions in hush money being paid out and that he and others in and around the company have been credibly alleged to have contributed to, covered up, exploited, or acted absolutely deplorably in connection with multiple untimely deaths, murders, and other incidents which fill up nearly every square on the scandal bingo card. Maybe McMahon has never killed a journalist with a bone saw, but it’s a bad company that’s run by a bad guy and which has done an immense amount of harm to the people who have helped enrich it and him.
All of which is to say “This? This is the deal-breaker for you?”
“Unserious?”
This little thread went viral yesterday:
A few thoughts:
He’s not wrong in his basic observation. Any place I’ve been that has legalized recreational weed — and in certain places in states which just have medical marijuana, like Ohio — smells like weed, it seems. Michigan, D.C., Illinois, California, you name it. It’s just a thing that happens. I think it’s a thing that tapers off to some degree over time as the novelty wears off, but yeah, sidewalks, parking garages, passing cars, and anyplace else people have gone to smoke cigarettes since indoor smoking went out of style now, quite often, smell like weed;
That being said, has he walked around New York much in the past? I don’t say this to cast aspersions on a truly great city but, objectively speaking, New York often smells really bad! Especially in the summer! The smell of marijuana may or may not be your stick of tea, but for my money it beats the aroma of garbage, exhaust fumes, gross deep fryers, and urine that even my New York readers will agree is not an uncommon thing in the Big Apple. Or most other large cities for that matter;
I cannot believe he’s playing the “someone think of the children” card. Do you know what you say to children who ask what that smell is? “It’s marijuana, Billy.” And if it requires explanation it’s no different than when you explain how there are a lot of things that adults do along those lines. It’s why Uncle Fred smells like a brewery and why you make Aunt Ethyl go out onto the back patio when she wants to fire up a Marlboro Light. The reason marijuana is being legalized everywhere is because society has generally come to accept that it’s not particularly dangerous for adults to use and adults like to do things to enjoy themselves sometimes. It should be treated the same way as other things along those lines, socially speaking;
I cannot get my brain around the idea of the smell of a sidewalk being “deeply unserious.” I feel like this guy has a very strong philosophical/puritanical aversion to marijuana and its legalization in general, which he probably views as “unserious,” but rather than make that argument head-on he casts the smell of it as “unserious.” Make your case or don’t, man, but I feel like, contrary to what you’re saying here, you do care if people smoke but you don’t want to wade into it;
This is the best response I’ve seen yet to the “unserious” line:
I’m sorry, but I likewise cannot get my mind around the idea of marijuana smelling worse than tobacco. Talk about being unserious. That may be the worst take I’ve seen in a month, and I’m saying that two days after the “wind power is bad because if it were not for wind the slave ships never would’ve made it to Africa” tweet dropped.
In closing, I think it’s somewhat bad form to walk around smelling like weed all day, particularly if you have things to do, people to meet who may not be into that, or what have you. In this, however, it’s no different than carrying around with you any other odor. Hell, I’m old enough to where every old dude smelled like Old Spice and every young dude smelled like Polo or Claiborne and that was way worse than weed.
No matter the odor, there’s a pretty simple rule, I reckon: be courteous always, be professional if and when you have to be, but otherwise just let people live their lives.
You gotta listen to all of it, kids. Sorry. Those are the rules.
Have a great day, everyone.
There will be no greater hell for Aubrey Huff than if his children grow up to be progressive rally-attending activists whose favorite sport is soccer. Fingers crossed.
I'd also like to complain about the East Coast bias of the Cup of Coffee comment section. I usually have Craig's post read by 7 a.m. PT, but there are close to 100 comments here already by the time I'm done. The discussion has left the station. And then the guys like Skip Bayless and Mad Dog talk about how much better commenting is along the Atlantic Coast. How do my comments get the full appreciation they deserve?