Cup of Coffee: June 2, 2022

Negative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

In today’s newsletter Josh Donaldson may be on the brink of an epiphany, but probably not, the Phillies get a tough break, a closer is sidelined for sucking, a once-great player is given his walking papers, a target of a bullshit lawsuit moves to dismiss it, Mike Trout is allegedly bad at something, ESPN is momentarily stymied in its efforts to pull news out of its butt, you’ll never guess who is an obnoxious Little League dad — OK, you probably could guess — and we stumble upon some accidental poetry thanks to Don Mattingly’s irresponsible son.

In Other Stuff I implore you not to mess with bison, I talk about the closing of the last Howard Johnson’s restaurant, and I am pleasantly shocked at how damn good “Top Gun: Maverick” was.

I’d say that I’m not going to be happy unless I’m going Mach 2 with my hair on fire, but I lost almost all of my hair 20 years ago, so let’s forget that and get at ‘er today, shall we?

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And That Happened

As my brother is still in town visiting — and because, for various reasons, I have built up a mondo sleep deficit these past few days — full recaps aren’t happening today. But we can at least run down the high points of the action in summary form.

• The Pirates somehow continued their mastery over the Dodgers, completing a sweep in L.A, the Blue Jays won their seventh in a row, the Mets won their sixth in a row, the Astros won their fourth in a row, and the Phillies snapped a five-game losing streak;

• The Rockies’ Brendan Rodgers hit three homers, with the last dinger walking it off for Colorado in the 10th inning of the second game of their twinbill against the Marlins;

• In that Astros win Justin Verlander took a no-hitter into the seventh but ran into some trouble and ended up with a no-decision. He and Jon Gray of the Rangers can console one another as Gray struck out 12 and allowed one run on three hits over seven innings and also got a no-decision;

• Hyun Jin Ryu wishes all he got was a no-decision as he was pulled from after four innings due to left forearm tightness and a sharp drop in velocity. That’s not good. We’ll likely learn more today; and

• Tarik Skubal of the Tigers was dominant, allowing only two singles and striking out six over seven shutout frames;

• Jazz Chisholm Jr. went 2-for-5 with a homer, four RBI, a walk, and a pair of runs scored. His line on the year: .275/.327/.558 (149 OPS+) with eight homers, 31 RBI and seven stolen bases;

• Dakota Hudson of the Cardinals allowed just one run over seven innings to the Padres, retiring 18 batters in a row at one point. Weird thing: he didn’t strike out anyone until his last inning, but then he struck out the side. Hudson is striking out only 4.9 batters per nine and is walking 4.2 batters per nine. Guys don’t get away with that kind of thing for long these days but he’s gotten away with it so far.

Anyway:

Guardians 4, Royals 0
Mets 5, Nationals 0
Atlanta 6, Diamondbacks 0
Tigers 5, Twins 0
Cardinals 5, Padres 2
Marlins 14, Rockies 1; Rockies 13, Marlins 12
Astros 5, Athletics 4
Phillies 6, Giants 5
Orioles 9, Mariners 2
Blue Jays 7, White Sox 3
Red Sox 7, Reds 1
Cubs 4, Brewers 3
Rays 4, Rangers 3
Pirates 8, Dodgers 4
Anges vs. Yankees -- POSTPONED:

🎶In the city lights
I swear I hear you call my name (call my name)
There's nothing right
I'm stuck here while you're miles away (miles away)
In New York raining
In New York raining
It's too much my babe I need you
It's too much my babe I need you🎶

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The Daily Briefing

Boo Hoo

From the AP:

Josh Donaldson said he was hurt when New York Yankees teammates didn't back him after he made a remark to White Sox star Tim Anderson about Jackie Robinson that Chicago manager Tony La Russa called racist.

Maybe it’s because you were wrong and they friggin’ knew it, Josh? I get that athletes lean hard into “you should have your teammates’ backs” but there are practical limits to that. Or at least there damn well should be.

I was actually quite pleased that the Yankees did not rush to Donaldson’s defense last week. Maybe Donaldson should take something away from that besides being hurt? Maybe it should suggest something else to him?

Jean Segura to miss 10-12 weeks

Phillies infielder Jean Segura was placed on the injured list yesterday as a result of a broken right index finger he sustained while attempting to bunt for a hit on Tuesday night. The finger is going to require surgery and, per the team, his busted pointer is going to keep him out of action until late August or, possibly, early September.

Segura was hitting .275/.324/.407 (109 OPS+). Tough break.

Never bunt, folks.

Craig Kimbrel is sidelined for sucking

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before yesterday’s game against the Pirates that closer Craig Kimbrel was unavailable because he was working to clean up his mechanics. Specifically, he said Kimbrel has been “too rotational in his delivery,” whatever that means, so he’s getting a few days off to mess with stuff. He could pitch again by Friday, however.

That’s not enough time to really deal with mechanics, I wouldn’t think, so this seems like a nice way of saying Roberts wants Kimbrel out of his sight for a bit. Which is understandable, as Kimbrel has coughed up runs in five of his last seven outings and has seen his ERA spike from 1.04 to 4.80 over that span.

The Padres release Robinson Canó

Robinson Canó's time with the Padres is over. The team informed him after yesterday’s game that he’ll be DFA’d today. He could theoretically accept a minor league assignment but he can reject that and almost certainly will.

Canó, 39, signed with the Padres in mid-May after being released by the Mets. He couldn’t get anything going with his new club, finishing his time with San Diego having hit in .091/.118/.091 in 34 plate appearances with 10 strikeouts and one walk. He pinch hit in yesterday’s loss to the Cardinals, flying out to left field to end the game. He had previously hit a paltry .195/.233/.268 in 12 games with the Mets.

I’d guess that this is it for Canó.

The Athletic moves to dismiss Trevor Bauer’s lawsuit

Back in March Trevor Bauer sued The Athletic and its former writer, Molly Knight, for defamation. The upshot of the claim was “sure, you accurately reported that I strangled a woman into unconsciousness and beat her up badly enough to where doctors suspected that she had a skull fracture, but it was defamatory for you to not immediately note that, after the X-rays came back, the doctors determined that her skull was not, in fact fractured.” How filing such a claim makes any kind of sense is a mystery to me, but Trevor Bauer and his lawyers are just built different, I suppose.

On Tuesday the Athletic moved to dismiss the claim, noting just how preposterous it is. From the Los Angeles Times:

In Tuesday’s filing, attorneys for the Athletic claimed the report had been properly corrected and Bauer, in alleging defamation, did not deny causing the reported injuries.

“In short,” the attorneys wrote, “Bauer admits to hitting a woman hard enough that doctors worried he had fractured her skull but claims it was defamatory not to explain that he did not manage to do it.”

Despite the ridiculousness of the claim, I suspect that The Athletic’s motion will be denied, however. Not because, in a broad sense, they’re wrong, but only because the case is still at a preliminary stage in which Bauer need not yet supply proof to proceed. Rather, he merely needs to have articulated a claim that, if later proven, would constitute defamation which damaged him in some way.

That’s a pretty low threshold, but I guess we’ll see in a few months. In the meantime Bauer will get to respond, The Athletic will get to reply, and a hearing will be held at the end of August.

Tommy Pham says Mike Trout is a bad fantasy commissioner

In an unrelated story involving someone who doesn’t know when to simply shut up and let crap blow over, Tommy Pham of the Reds came off of his suspension the other day and talked more about the fantasy football arglebargle which led to him slapping Joc Pederson upside his head.

Specifically, he said that the whole fracas could have been prevented if the commissioner of the fantasy league to which he and Pederson belonged had stepped in, but he didn’t. That commissioner was Mike Trout.

Here’s Pham, who was at least laughing when he said this:

“Trout did a terrible job, man. Trout is the worst commissioner in fantasy sports because he allowed a lot of shit to go on, and he could've solved it all. I don't want to be the fucking commissioner. I've got other shit to do. He didn't want to do it. We put it on him, so it's kind of our fault too because we made him commissioner.”

Trout’s response:

Andy McCullough @ByMcCullough

Mike Trout declined to comment on whether Joc Pederson violated the rules of the fantasy league. He said he is unsure if he’ll resign as commissioner for this coming season. “Every commissioner I know gets booed,” he said.

That’s a pretty good quote. Especially for a guy who rarely says anything particularly interesting.

In any event, everyone knows the old saying about how no one cares about your fantasy team, but so few people seem to be taking that saying to heart.

ESPN momentarily silenced as Mike Rizzo says the Nats won’t trade Juan Soto

Yesterday I talked about how I’d love to love anything as much as ESPN loves to pull unfounded Juan Soto trade rumors out of its butt in order to create content. The thing about ESPN pulling content out of its butt, though, is that people tend to treat what ESPN pulls out of there as “news” or “chatter” even if it’s just ESPN doing it, because ESPN and its multiple personalities and platforms tend to create their own sports media weather, as it were.

That “chatter” got loud enough yesterday that it caused some sports talk dudes to ask Nationals GM Mike Rizzo about it. He rejected it out-of-hand:

“We are not trading Juan Soto. We've made it clear to his agent and to the player. We have every intention of building this team around Juan Soto. We've spoken to his agent many, many times — recently sat with him when he was in Washington D.C., made it clear to him that we are not interested in trading him, and I guess the rest of the world just doesn't believe it. But that's our position.”

While, obviously, Rizzo would not say “yeah, we’re totally shopping out biggest star” even if he was, the fact that, again, all of this is a function of Buster Olney and a couple other ESPN people just making shit up in order to fill podcast minutes and column inches leads me to trust Rizzo here.

I’m sure ESPN got the message too, because I just looked and there hasn’t been any Soto rosterbation over there for over 24 hours. Indeed, they may be so cowed by Rizzo’s denial that they don’t run another “where might Juan Soto land?” piece until Friday afternoon.

Clay Travis: Obnoxious Little League Dad

Is there is anything more on-brand for Clay Travis than his being an obnoxious Little League dad? Because if you had asked me “is Clay Travis an obnoxious Little League dad,” I would’ve said “oh yeah, for sure.”

I’d say that Travis is the biggest dipshit in all of sports media, but I hate to insult dipshits like that. Some of them are actually OK once you get to know them, even if they are dipshits. Travis, on the other hand, is just a garbage person.

Accidental Poetry

I do not share this story of Jordan Mattingly, son of Marlins manager Don Mattingly, getting arrested for DUI and trying to sell his SUV after he crashed but before the cops got him for the gossipy angle to it, because it’s a sad story, of course. Mattingly could’ve killed someone or himself, and I hope that he gets whatever help he needs so that this does not happen again.

No, I share it because the way it was formatted on this local news website makes it read like poetry of a sort:

Really, aren’t all of our fathers are Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly when you think about it?

*sips espresso and snaps fingers in lieu of applause*

I was on the League of Fans podcast

The League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to, in their own words, “fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.” Given that description, it’s not a surprise that “Rethinking Fandom” is something they’d be interested in.

To that end, earlier this week I joined The League of Fans’ Ken Reed on a podcast to talk about the book and the matters contained therein. If you’re not already sick to death of me talking about this stuff, check it out.

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Other Stuff

Every Time

Headline: “Woman dies after bison tosses her 10 feet in the air in Yellowstone Park.”

My internal monologue: “Don’t be from Ohio . . . don’t be from Ohio . . .”

Article: “A 25-year-old woman from Ohio died after being gored by a bison and tossed 10-feet in the air at Yellowstone National Park.”

Me: “God DAMMIT!”

In related news, I went snowmobiling in Yellowstone in January of 2006. We were warned to be wary of bison, but given how snow works and how trails/roads work, it’s impossible to stay the suggested 25 yards away from bison at all times. They walk on the clear-ish areas over which snowmobiles and those tourist vans with the treads and stuff run and, no matter what you think may be fair or just, bison always have the right of way because they’re bison and they have no time for man’s traffic rules.

That dynamic leads to a few places where you have to put-put, very slowly and very carefully, next to a line of bison who are going wherever it is bison feel like going. They tend to ignore you because, again, they are bison and they cannot be bothered with man’s petty concerns, but the guide told us that they will, on occasion, absolutely wreck a snowmobile and not think too much about it. If that happens a good plan, our guide told us, is to get as far away from the snowmobile as possible and hop a ride with one of your friends because that snowmobile is gone, man.

In further related news, snowmobiling in Yellowstone is probably super bad for the environment and one’s karma and everything else, but I’m not gonna lie: I had a goddamn blast. And, since I was not attacked by bison and did not die in one of the scores of other ways Yellowstone likes to kill dumbass Ohioans, I considered the trip a success.

There's a Howard Johnsons . . . wanna eat some clams?

Howard Johnson’s, the first restaurant chain in America, is officially no more. The last Howard Johnson’s restaurant — in Lake George, New York — closed this week.

Although to be fair, it’s pretty questionable whether the Lake George location was really a HoJos. It had previously closed several years ago and then reopened under the HoJos name, but it had a dissimilar menu and did not retain the design elements of other Howard Johnson’s restaurants. It was basically just an independent restaurant — and, based on its reviews, a rather crappy one — with a claim to some intellectual property that had been unconnected to anything else for a long time.

There are still a few hundred Howard Johnson motels around because Marriott bought those separately several decades ago and kept the brand alive, and it’s now owned by Wyndham. But Marriott spun off the restaurants, getting rid of all the company-owned locations and leaving only the franchisees. Over the past few decades those began dropping like flies. Whereas, at its peak, there were over 1,000 HoJos restaurant locations, there were fewer than 100 by the mid-90s and there were only three by 2007.

In light of all of that, you probably have to be pretty old to feel nostalgic about HoJos restaurants going away. If you’re under, I’d say, 40, your closest point of reference to one of those joints was probably due to the famous product placement in “2001: A Space Odyssey” or that fifth season “Mad Men” episode where Megan and Don go to one upstate and get in a really nasty argument. And, even if you are of a certain age, unless you lived east of the Mississippi or in Los Angeles proper, Howard Johnson’s were not all the easy to find. As a road trip phenomenon they were far more a creature of driving up and down the east coast than across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

All that being said, let’s pour one out for yet another icon of Mid-Century America biting the dust.

“Top Gun: Maverick” was shockingly good

My brother and I went to go see “Top Gun: Maverick” last night. I had heard good things about it but I was truly shocked at how good a movie it was.

At the outset I should note that, yes, I was 13 when the original came out, I saw it in the theater, and that because of that I obviously have something of a nostalgic connection to it. But not that much of one. I mean, I liked the original as much as the next kid, but I wasn’t that into it back then. Not as much as a lot of other people my age were anyway. Indeed, when the first teaser trailer for the sequel dropped a couple of years ago — the movie was delayed because of the pandemic — I was not particularly enthused about it. I assumed it’d be kind of bad and possibly cringeworthy or even embarrassing. I wasn’t worried that it’d “ruin” the original, thouh, because I never really thought the original was anything much more special than any number of other 1980s action films.

But nope, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a freakin’ banger. Yes, there’s a good deal of fan service contained in it but there is way more to it than just that. The movie actually tells a good story that flows from the original movie and expands on it. It also expands on the characters who carried over and introduced new ones who, while archetypes meant to ape some of the old characters, were still well-written and well-acted. The movie certainly looked great. Practical effects and actual planes and actual flying go a long damn way (thank you, military-industrial complex!). The movie moved briskly. It was expertly edited. Indeed, it was edited in such a way that you could always tell what was going on where, so as to avoid the all-too-common thing you get in modern action movies where confusing, quick-cutting kinetic energy is mistaken for action. It just clicked in every way a big blockbuster should click.

As for Tom Cruise: he’s not the best actor on the planet. He’s not a particularly likable person based on what is publicly known about him. But he is an absolute fucking movie star. I’ve said this about him before, but he never mails anything in. He does everything he’s supposed to do and does it damn well. He knows the assignment, as they say, and carries it out wonderfully, even after all of these decades. There are a lot of actors I like more than Tom Cruise, but you gotta tip your cap because the guy just nails it, even when the material is bad, and here the material was very, very good.

Otherwise:

• It’s not a spoiler to say that the plot involves some dangerous mission in foreign skies. I chuckled, however, at how out-of-its way the movie went to never identify the enemy country. Like, it was practically distracting how faceless the bad guys were here and it, quite obviously, was a function of not wanting any country on the planet to think the movie was talking about them, causing them to prevent the movie from being shown there. It was such a 1980s movie in every other way, but in that bit of preemptive pandering it was the most 2020s movie ever;

• I have almost no insight into military tactics or strategy, but part of me is pretty convinced that the mission at hand is one that could’ve been or should’ve been handled without fighter planes. Like, I suspect there’s some sort of guided missile or bunker-busting bomb or something that could accomplish the mission presented, but I’m gonna file that under “forget it, they’re rolling.” After all, just because a movie is otherwise well done does not mean you don’t still have to suspend a little disbelief;

• Since it’s been written about it’s also not a spoiler to say that Val Kilmer has a cameo as Iceman. I won’t say anything specific about his role, but they did a great job of working around and writing-in Kilmer’s real life health issues in a useful and even sensitive way. A big part of that involved doing things to build up Iceman’s post-first movie character without him having to do it all himself. At the risk of hyperbole, I’d say that it was almost Harry Lime-in-“The Third Man”-like. That kind of thing can be a tough trick — and could’ve resulted in a really uncomfortable or awkward scene — but they pulled it off. If this was Kilmer’s last film, it was a worthy coda to his fascinating career;

• Who is the most beautiful woman in the world and why is it still, after like 30 years, still Jennifer Connelly?

That’s all I got right now. But, dudes, it was pretty damn great.

Have a great day, everyone.