Cup of Coffee: January 27, 2022

Urban renewal, minor signings, my ongoing school board vendetta, a MAJOR lack of sports perspective, Justice Breyer, Wordle, and the poetry of our own demise

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There wasn’t much going on in the world of baseball yesterday, but as subscribers know, that doesn’t stop the music here.

In addition to the small potatoes MLB news today there’s a new chapter in my feud with a jackwagon who sits on the school board in my little town, a hilariously awful and over-the-top comment about the importance of sports from a leading figure in the sports-industrial complex, I talk a bit about Supreme Court Justice Breyer’s announced retirement, pick out two very keen observations about how the Internet works in an article that, otherwise, probably doesn’t need to exist, and, finally, Nick Cave and I — with a musical assist from Jason Isbell — get deep and cosmic about the meaning of life and the purpose of death.

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The Daily Briefing

White Sox sign Cuban defector Oscar Colás

The Chicago White Sox have signed Cuban outfielder Oscar Colás. Colás gets a $2.7 million signing bonus.

Colás, who defected in early 2020, is a 23 year-old left-hander who hit .282 with 28 homers and 116 RBIs in 187 games in Cuba and Japan. He was a two-way player in Cuba and has been talked about as a potentially solid big league pitcher, but the White Sox say that he and they are intent on having him work only as an outfielder. His arm, however, is still gonna be on display, of course, with at least one scout saying it’s an “80-plus” tool. So OK then.

The White Sox have, quite obviously, had a ton of success with Cuban players both in recent years and historically. They currently have first baseman José Abreu, center fielder Luis Robert, catcher Yasmani Grandal and third baseman Yoán Moncada, of course, and they have a number of solid Cuban prospects in the minors too. Now Colás joins them.

Padres hire Mike Shildt

The Padres announced yesterday that they have hired former Cardinals manager Mike Shildt to be a consultant on their player development staff. He had already accepted a position with MLB's on-field operations department back in December, but being with a club is probably a better bet for long-term viability in the game.

Shildt was fired by the Cardinals after the 2021 season despite making the postseason in all three seasons in which he was at the helm. He reportedly had some serious philosophical differences with the front office, however, so out he went. While in St. Louis he posted a 252-199 record in three-plus seasons and won the 2019 Manager of the Year Award.

Shildt interviewed for the Padres' managerial vacancy in October before Bob Melvin became available. Now he’s in San Diego in another capacity.

Gordon Beckham retires

Gordon Beckham hasn’t played in the bigs since 2019 but he has now officially retired from professional baseball. His announcement was rather cute:

Gordon Beckham @gordonbeckham

Since my good friend @BusterPosey decided to retire this year, I am officially announcing I will be retiring as well. I want to make sure we get into the Hall of Fame the same year. Start the countdown!!

Beckham, 35, was the eighth overall pick in the 2008 draft and, for a time, was considered one of the top prospects in baseball. He never fulfilled all that promise, but he did enjoy an 11-year career that included stops with the White Sox, Angels, Mariners, Giants, in Atlanta and with the Tigers. He hit .237/.300/.367 (80 OPS+) with 80 homers in 1,069 games and, unless there are some ex-big leaguers reading this, that’s more than you or I ever did.

“How do you pay for it?”

There’s a story in the Kansas City Star about how the Downtown Council — a group which represents residents and businesses in and around downtown Kansas City — wants to remake the entire core of the city. To that end it unveiled a 10-year plan for the area the other day with more than 180 recommendations about how to make downtown more livable, connected and prosperous.

Part of that involves plans for a new downtown ballpark for the Royals. That that’s being lumped in with stuff like affordable housing, bike lanes, and parks and things is rather rich — all public goods, right? — but that’s pretty par for the course in the American sports landscape.

As you can guess, however, all of that stuff, the ballpark included, comes down to money. To that end, the Mayor of Kansas City, Quinton Lucas, offered a pretty on-the-nose quote:

“I think all this stuff is cool, but the question is how do you pay for it? . . . I think that’s the story with baseball and everything else . . . the real question is how is it financed, how are we looking to make sure that it isn’t just public investment coming from Kansas City’s taxpayers to help build all of it? Because I think they have already invested mightily.”

In the end the safe money will be on a compromise. A compromise in which the baseball team gets a billion dollar ballpark and they kick things like affordable housing and parks off to the future. That’s pretty par for the course in the American sports landscape as well.

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Other Stuff

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

You may remember last August that I had a big run-in with the local school board over COVID stuff and, in the process, I busted one of the board members for comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, causing him to get censured? Welp, I went after that jackwagon again.

The reason: a student emailed the board upset about them dropping the mask mandate despite the Omicron surge — ours is one of the only school districts around here not requiring masks right now — and the school board member responded back. In his email he continued to distort science and, more significantly, (a) denied that he ever made the mask/Holocaust comp; and then (b) went RIGHT BACK to comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust in the same damn email! Again, in an email to a 17 year-old high school student.

His fatal mistake: the kid he was sending the email to is a close friend of my daughter’s. A friend who knows that I kept all of the receipts and have a lot of time on my hands.

Bad gas travels fast in a small town, folks.

FIFA President: More World Cups will keep African refugees from dying at sea

There’s a lot in my upcoming book about how the sports industrial complex is really good at trying to pass off what’s good for it as what’s good for society at large. One aspect of that is how sports figures, the sporting press, and a hell of a lot of fans will tell tales about how sports actually address real world suffering and misery and lift up downtrodden communities.

It’s horseshit, of course. Misguided and lacking perspective at best but, in some cases, it’s deployed as cover for what is, in reality, a money grab. Usually you see this stuff when a team from a downtrodden city like Cleveland or Detroit challenges for a championship — “the Cavaliers have healed a broken city!” — or when someone wants to disguise a big commercial undertaking as a civic or philanthropic one.

An example of it just popped up in soccer, however, that is the most over-the-top example of it I’ve ever seen and, my God, I wish the book wasn’t already off to the printer’s so I could include it.

The background: FIFA, the international soccer governing board which puts on the World Cup every four years, now wants to do a World Cup every two years. The real reason for that is, quite obviously, money. But FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino just offered a humanitarian justification for it and, boy howdy, it’s a pip. Speaking to a human rights council in Europe, he offered the following thoughtful words:

“This topic is not about whether we want a World Cup every two years, but about what do we want to do for the future of football. If we think about rest of world, and the vast majority of Europe, then we have to think about what football brings. Football is about opportunity, about hope, about the national teams. We cannot say to the rest of world give us your money, but watch us on TV. We need to include them.

“We need to find ways to include the whole world to give hope to Africans so that they don’t need to cross the Mediterranean in order to find maybe a better life but, more probably, death in the sea.”

Maybe he has a point? I mean, there’s always a decent chance that the World Cup will come down to two European powers and, if history is any guide, the European powers always do right by Africa, right?

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this term. He’s 82. He’s been on the Court for 27 years. If the GOP wins the senate back this fall they’ll simply block any Biden nomination for two years because they are shameless and no one will stop them. All of which is to say, yeah, this is the right timing.

My guess is that this will launch a crap-ton of political commentary about how “the pressure is on Biden” to make a pick that will satisfy people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but unless they say something super unexpected in the next day or so, don’t pay much attention to that. I say that because they (a) have voted to confirm literally every single judicial nominee Biden has put up in the past year; and (b) have shown that they understand that, whatever they do to Biden’s domestic agenda, one of the single biggest reasons they are caucusing as Democrats is to ensure that Democrats control the judicial nomination process which Republicans have perverted over the past several years. Yeah, I know that a Supreme Court slot is a different beast, politically speaking, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t line up behind whoever Biden nominates.

If Biden holds to his word, he’ll nominate a Black woman. We’ll see. I have no idea if he’ll actually follow through on that but I hope he does. Preferably a young one who will be on the Court a long, long time.

Until he does, however, I am certain of only two things:

• A bunch of national pundits will write columns proposing that Biden nominate some septuagenarian with DNC/New Democrat bonafides or, even better, some arguably moderate Republican they’ll tout as a “unity nominee” as a means of mollifying the GOP. Never mind that (a) no one ever asks or expects Republicans to reach across the aisle to Democrats — their self-interested partisanship is just taken as a given and is never challenged; and (b) there is zero chance whatsoever that they will ever be mollified by anything or anyone because, unlike Democrats, they know how zero-sum games and bare knuckles politics work; and

• Every Republican will act like any possible Biden nominee is the Antichrist and their nomination will represent the literal end of the world.

Wake me up when they’re finally up for a vote.

The Internet is Eating Wordle Alive

I do not offer this item from The Atlantic’s Galaxy Brain newsletter for anything it has to say about Wordle specifically. If anything I think, on those merits, it’s a rather silly article in that it’s a LOT of words saying that we should probably not think so much about Wordle. While I am 99% sure the author is aware of that irony, the rule of goats applies here, as always.

But there are a couple of really good observations in this article about how the Internet works and how it tends to destroy anything good. Two specific passages to that end jumped out at me.

First there’s this bit, about how Wordle quickly went from something people simply did to something people wrote articles and thinkpieces about:

On an algorithmic, platform-based internet, this type of slightly obsessive behavior sends a Red Alert signal to content creators of all kinds. In this case, it is to Deploy Wordle Content. We get Wordle origin stories, Wordle strategy articles, and “How Wordle Went Viral” articles. Then there’s the second-order content, which is even more overwhelming: “Which Wordle Board Are You?”, “This Mother Taught Her 2-Year-Old to Wordle and I Can’t Right Now,” “A Utah Couple’s Wordle-Inspired Gender Reveal Has People up in Arms.” It is too much information.

As someone who used to create content for an online media company, that sure as hell had me nodding my head in appreciation.

Fairly late in my run at the National Broadcasting Company, someone who, in the normal course, did not have day-to-day supervision of me or my work, suggested that “we should try to find 'next-day' angles on things.” The person then rattled off a couple of phony headlines of the sorts of stories we should do that were very, very much like this. Takes riding waves created by trending topics, whether or not they had anything to do with baseball. Takes the content of which did not matter as long as the articles pressed all the appropriate SEO buttons and got us on that algorithmic wave before it broke. Thankfully we were able to ignore that kind of advice for the most part — no one ever demanded that I write whatever the 2019-2020 equivalent of a baseball/Wordle mashup article — but I can't look around the Internet without constantly seeing that dynamic in play with content providers.

Second, there’s this bit about the dynamic in which people liking Wordle began to annoy some people, who decided to make a big show about hating Wordle:

“Wordle’s public reception fascinates and unnerves me because it’s an example of how the internet flattens things—in this case, the stakes of this particular, Twitter-bound discourse. We are conditioned to project strong feelings about things we don’t feel all that strongly about. At the same time, we’re conditioned to interpret other responses to low-stakes content as high stakes, perhaps even threatening. We end up arguing about things we don’t feel that strongly about because we can’t remember that the other side of the argument is subject to many of the same forces. There’s no real sense of proportion to any of it, and that absence makes us feel both more frustrated at the other person, and also, like we’re maybe losing it.”

This describes a great many Internet arguments. It certainly describes a great deal of political discourse in which every possible policy difference, even ones that 30 or 40 years ago would’ve been rather benign, are cast in life-or-death terms. It also applies to fanboy stuff about pop culture. Message boards and social media platforms aren’t super amenable to someone offering a mild personal preference or mild personal dislike of something. Everything becomes so pitched so fast that people are not simply saying they prefer this writer’s interpretation of a comic book character to another writer’s interpretation, they’re drawing battle lines. There’s just immediate polarization with almost everything. It’s not at all how you’d interact with people in real life but it’s practically the default when it comes to Internet discourse.

There are a lot of reasons why I am in a very happy place, career-wise, these days. But (a) being able to ignore whatever topic doesn’t interest me; and (b) having a community of readers who have some perspective and rarely if ever run off the rails are two of the biggest.

“We live our lives within the poetry of our own demise”

Several years ago, when I was still working in an office, I got into a conversation with a coworker that somehow turned to the meaning life, the universe, and everything. It touched on religion, mortality, the possibility of immortality, and all of that. It was a long, deep conversation that, I am pretty sure, we billed to a large corporation under the entry “discussion re: case issues. 0.8 hrs”

One of the things my colleague kept coming back to was the pointlessness of life given the inevitability of death. At least if death was really the end which he suspected but about which he was not sure. For my part I have always been pretty sure that life is a one-way ticket to oblivion and that death really is the end. I was not at that time very sure about life’s purpose, probably because I did not know what I was doing with my own life at the time and whether it mattered all that much. I was open to it mattering — I wasn’t in some horribly dark place all the time in those days — but outside of making sure wolves didn’t eat my babies I sort of felt that there was not much more to life. In the end we didn’t reach any good conclusions about the purpose of life so we resumed writing nasty letters to opposing counsel and being obstructionist jackasses in an effort to make sure our rich clients kept all of the money they couldn’t possibly take with them when they died.

I still believe that when we die we die. That we just turn off like a light and enter a phase of non-existence exactly like the non-existence we experienced prior to our births. The prospect does not frighten me or unsettle me like it kinda did 15 years ago when I was having that conversation with that coworker, because I’ve gotten to a way better and content place with life’s meaning.

That meaning, I have concluded, is inextricable from our inevitable deaths. It revolves around the idea that all the things we do matter precisely because we will one day die, we know it, and we have thus chosen to use a finite piece of our existence doing any given thing. And no, that thing need not be the writing of epic poetry or ending the world’s suffering. It could be as simple as telling someone a funny joke, to watching a cat bathe itself, to writing nasty letters to opposing counsel and being obstructionist jackasses in an effort to make sure your rich clients keep all of the money they can’t possibly take with them when they die. All of our choices and acts, by definition, matter precisely because one day there will be no choices to make or things to do.

This is far from an original idea, of course. Tons of people, be they philosophers or ditch-diggers, have reached the same conclusion. But it is one that I arrived at at my own speed and with no small amount of comfort. It’s also one that I am always happy to see or hear about in the wild, as it were. When I do, I like to share it.

Today I share the latest entry from Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files, in which Cave, when asked if he would choose to be immortal if he could, talked about that idea way more eloquently than I ever could because, well, he’s Nick Cave:

Elise, you asked if I would live forever if I could, well, the answer must be no. I wouldn’t because, as far as I can see, the meaning of life is nested within the set terms of our own mortality. ‘Forever’ is both incomprehensible and utterly meaningless. I don’t believe we live just for the sake of it; rather we live our lives within the poetry of our own demise, within our own time, and our own limitations, and for that very reason alone we do so meaningfully.

His explanation involves cuckoo clocks, Instagram, kids in the playground across from his house, and all manner of other things, again, because he’s Nick Cave. It’s definitely worth your time. He’s a wonderful writer and thinker.

And so is Jason Isbell for that matter. He wrote a song about this very topic a couple of years back too, and it’s just as beautiful in its own way:

Have a great day, everyone.