Cup of Coffee: March 2, 2023

More minimum wage intrigue, the new pickoff strategy, MLB moves deeper into the local broadcast game, you can't go home again, Ivan Toney is a dead man walking, and a tale of wickedness and Pink Floyd

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Not gonna lie: it’s a weird newsletter today.

I start of almost, kinda, sorta doing actual journalism — which is never a good idea for me — to the point where I ended up writing a pointed written request for documents and correspondence to a county prosecutor’s office like it was 2006 and I was a lawyer again or some shit. I end the newsletter with a very long story about wickedness, Pink Floyd, and my freshman year roommate. In the middle I ask whether or not I should just move back to West Virginia and make a lazy joke about a Padres signing but, hey, you’ll laugh.

It’s all very “This is Your Life” today is what I’m sayin’. Just go with me on it. I think it works out.

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The Daily Briefing

Another Trevor Bauer defamation lawsuit is dismissed

As you will recall, credibly-accused violent sexual assaulter Trevor Bauer fired off a bunch of defamation lawsuits last year. They’re not going too well for him, though. Three of the six lawsuits he filed have been dismissed already.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the third of those dismissals came yesterday when a New York judge threw out Bauer’s suit against Deadspin. The upshot of the ruling is that Bauer’s efforts to read malice into any remotely (though accurate) negative thing said about him and to play the victim despite being the perpetrator didn’t wash for His Honor. Not shocking given that Bauer’s claims are baseless to the point of frivolousness.

Eventually all of Bauer’s lawsuits are going to go away in a manner that is not in his favor. Whether that will push Bauer in even the vaguest direction toward responsibility and ownership of his actions is an open question. It is also a question, however, the answer to which I care very little. I hope for only two things with respect to Trevor Bauer: (1) that he never harm another person again; and (2) that I hear little if anything more about him for however much of my three score and ten on this Earth I have left.

Et tu, Ohio?

Following on yesterday’s item about Major League Baseball seeking to get state-by-state exemptions from minimum wage laws, a tipster sent me a fun document: an Ohio Attorney General’s opinion which concludes that minor league baseball players in Ohio are not entitled to the minimum wage due to Ohio incorporating federal minimum wage restrictions into its own laws. Which is to say that, because MLB lobbied Congress to get the odious Saving America’s Pastime Act pinched off and into law, minor leaguers in Ohio are “seasonal workers” here as well and can be paid a pittance.

The most interesting part of that OAG opinion, though, is not its conclusion. That seems pretty straightforward given how Ohio rolls. What’s interesting is that the opinion to that effect was sought late last year by the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office down in Cincinnati.

I cannot see why minor league baseball player salaries are of interest to the Hamilton County, Ohio prosecutor. There are no minor league teams in Hamilton, County. What’s more, the minimum wage laws in this state are administered and enforced by Ohio’s Bureau of Wage & Hour Administration in the state Department of Commerce, not prosecutors’ offices. And no, the Hamilton County Prosecutor was not likely seeking that opinion on behalf of that office, because state offices, boards, and bodies can obtain such opinions directly if they want them. If the Bureau of Wage & Hour Administration office wanted an opinion on the matter of minor leaguers and minimum wage, it would’ve sought it itself.

It’s worth noting, of course, that ordinary citizens cannot just ask the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to issue an opinion. That’s limited by law. In addition to the state offices, the only entities which can seek formal opinions are county prosecuting attorneys, which was done here. But like I said: what interest would this particular prosecuting attorney’s office have in this? None that I can see. Which leads me to believe that they were asked to obtain the opinion on behalf of someone else. Someone who could not get one on their own but who really, really wanted a declaration from Ohio’s Attorney General that minor leaguers can be paid sub-minimum wages.

So who is the Hamilton County Prosecutors Office doing favors for? Reds owner Bob Castellini? Rob Manfred via Bob Castellini? Maybe. Maybe not. But there’s a limited number of people with both the interest in the answer to that question and the juice to get a pretty large, pretty busy prosecutor’s office to ask the Attorney General about it.

I called the Hamilton County Prosecutors Office yesterday to ask them why they sought this opinion. My call was not returned, so I sent an email to their Public Information Officer. As of press time there has been no response to that either. It’s been a minute since I filed a formal request under the Ohio Public Records Act for anything but I imagine, if I have to, I can remember how to do that. If they make me do that I plan to be thorough. Tediously so.

The new pickoff strategy in action

Last week I linked to the work of former front office guy/analyst Noah Woodward, who had a lot of interesting insights into how pitchers may approach the new rules regarding limited pickoff throws. It was a pretty neat game theory thing in which he explained the incentives and disincentives in play and talked about the situations in which a pitcher may actually burn all of his pickup throws, risking giving the runner an extra base. It was a good overview of things that may not be immediately intuitive to casual fans and may not be adequately explained by broadcasters.

Earlier this week Noah updated all of that in light of getting to see some actual game action under the new rule. Specifically, he watched Max Scherzer on the mound with the Mets, which gave him some insight as to how teams will approach it. It’s, once again, interesting stuff which gets at how baseball teams might treat a two-throw limit as a one-throw limit and then begin a mind game with runners after that.

MLB is gearing up to take over a LOT of local broadcasts

Major League Baseball announced the hiring of three executives for its new local media department yesterday: Doug Johnson, senior vice president and executive producer of local media, Greg Pennell, senior vice president of local media, and Kendall Burgess, vice president of local media technical operations. They will all report to Billy Chambers, who had been Sinclair's chief financial officer but who was hired away last month to be MLB’s executive vice president for local media which, again, is a new job.

You don’t need to know or care about who those guys are specifically. I’m sure they’re fine fellows, boosters to the last, full of pep and credits to the City of Zenith. All you need to know is that this is all about Major League Baseball preparing to take over the local broadcasts for as many as 17 teams amid the financial deterioration of the Bally and AT&T SportsNet regional sports networks.

If those companies can’t pay the freight for the media rights they bought — and they’re making it pretty clear that they can’t — MLB and the clubs have the ability to take their broadcasts rights back. What I have not yet seen, however, is . . . how they plan to actually get those broadcasts out. Whose cameras will be used. Who will produce and broadcast the games. Where, actually, those games will appear. Over the air? On some new local vertical on MLB.tv?

There’s a lot to figure out. Those executives MLB just hired are the ones who are tasked with doing the figuring.

Padres sign Rougned Odor

The Padres signed Rougned Odor to a minor league deal with an inviation to big league camp.

This is a depth move to be sure, as the Padres are so fat with middle infielders they have one of the best defensive shortstops from last season playing second base and one of the other best shortstops in the business playing right field. But hey, injuries happen and you never know when you might need a guy to come off the bench and punch José Bautista.

Baseball wise, however, Odor has been pretty stinky of late. In 135 games with the Orioles last year he hit .207/.275/.357 (79 OPS+) while not playing particularly good defense. Again: brawls happen and when they do you need an enforcer, but if Odor is getting a lot of playing time with the Padres in 2023 it’s because something went wrong.

By the way: I appreciate that it may be a bit out of date to put a photo of the punch-out up for this item. The way I see it, however, is that Odor probably doesn’t have too much time left in the big leagues, so we have to use this photo while we can. Hope you understand.

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Other Stuff

Should I move back to West Virginia?

From the Associated Press:

West Virginia’s Senate passed a bill Monday that would give $25,000 in tax credits to former residents who move back to the state to work.

The Senate passed the bill unanimously and sent it to the House of Delegates.

Those eligible for the tax credit had to live and work in West Virginia for at least 10 years or were born in the state. They had to live outside of the state for at least 10 consecutive years prior to 2023.

There are only two problems with this as far as I can tell, at least as it applies to this particular West Virginia ex-pat. The first one is a technical one which would require me obtaining some clarification on that “you had to live here for ten years” rule.

I moved to West Virginia in January 1985. I may be able to claim it was late 1984 because that’s when my dad went down there from Michigan to begin his new job, with my mom, brother, and me following down a couple of months later, but it’s no later than January 1985. The last time I truly lived there, however — like slept there and woke up there every day — was the summer of 1992, in between my freshman and sophomore year in college, after which I had an apartment in Columbus near Ohio State. I still had a West Virginia driver’s license as late as July 1995 when I moved to D.C. to go to law school, however, I was still voting there, absentee, as late as November 1994, and I got married there in July 1995, but I’m not sure if the couple of years my parents house in Beckley was still theoretically my permanent address while I was a student out of state counts for my ten years under the tax break law. If not, welp, I can’t do it. I feel like I could talk my way into qualifying, though.

Assuming I were to pass that test, the bigger problem is that I’m pretty sure Allison would not care for it. I sent her the link yesterday and she said she’d consider it if the incentives applied — and she reminded me of a different incentive, about which I wrote about in this space last year, that we could still take advantage of — but I’m still not sure that it’d be the best thing for us. The politics there suck just as bad if not worse than they do here. True high-speed Internet is spotty at best. It’s pretty there, and I feel at peace when I am there, but there’s a lot to be said about people not being able to go home again. Maybe if I decided I wanted to go be a hermit on a mountain ridge who spends all day walking in the woods or something I could see it working, but it’s hard to picture day-to-day life there for us at the moment.

Still, it’s a pretty interesting idea for a place that is struggling desperately with people leaving and never coming back. To be sure, maybe it’d be better if they did stuff to keep people from leaving in the first place, but I suppose that’s too much to ask the sorts of people who run that state these days.

Brentford is gonna need a new striker

The best player on my soccer team is likely gonna be taking some involuntary time away soon:

Brentford striker Ivan Toney has pleaded guilty to multiple charges of breaching Football Association betting rules.

The forward was originally charged in November for alleged breaches of rules on 232 occasions, which were said to have occurred between February 2017 and January 2021.

Toney was further charged by the FA with misconduct in relation to 30 additional alleged betting breaches between March 2017 and February 2019, bringing the total number of charges to 262 . . . The 26-year-old was given until Wednesday, January 4 to provide a response but The Athletic has learned that he has admitted many of the charges, though is contesting others.

As that passage suggests, Toney’s gambling issues first made news a few months ago, but it sounds like this is all gonna come to some sort of a conclusion soon.

The other day when mentioning that minor league player who got placed on the restricted list for betting on baseball, I noted that the idea that broad, theoretical hypocrisy applies to such cases is a valid one. In soccer I think it’s even more salient than in baseball. The sport — and the whole of the UK, frankly — is steeped in gambling. Toney has played for five clubs across two leagues in his still-young career. The league in which he has spent the most time — the Championship — is sponsored entirely by a betting company. At least three of his clubs across both the Championship and the Premier League, including Brentford, have gambling company kit sponsors. The degree to which European soccer depends on gambling money is so great that it’s even more ironic to see football league authorities cracking down on gambling than to see MLB doing it. I mean, if you force young people to endorse addictive products — and Toney was doing so as a teenager — don’t be surprised if they use said addictive products.

All that being said, the same considerations apply to Toney that applied to that ballplayer I talked about. Sure, the vibe of all of this is way, way off given that broad hypocrisy, but the fact remains that participants in a sport cannot be allowed to gamble on said sport and a rule to that effect does not actual conflict with the league’s gambling addiction, even if it cosmically conflicts. Toney is no idiot. He knows this.

It’ll suck for The Bees to lose him for however long the FA decides he should be suspended, but it’ll not be an injustice.

Wicked Music

This is a long, rambling story. I’m sorry if that’s not your jam. I’ll go on some political rant tomorrow.

I guess I’m what you’d call a casual Pink Floyd fan. To wit:

• Like millions upon millions of other people I own their four BIG albums of the 70s: “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Animals” and “The Wall”;

• Like millions and millions of other people I went through a sad, pathetic period when I was 16 in which I listened to “The Wall” like six straight times five times a week because some girl didn’t like me as much as I liked her or something. It happens;

• I have “Obscured by Clouds” on cassette for some reason and I probably only listened to it twice. Someone probably gave it to me;

• At one time I owned “Momentary Lapse of Reason” on CD but I have no idea where it went and I don’t really miss it, even if I like two of the songs on it — “On the Turning Away” and “Learning to Fly” a good deal;

• I saw that post-Roger Waters lineup live on the “Division Bell” tour in 1994 or 1995 or whenever that was because it was at Ohio Stadium and everyone I knew was going and I had a pretty good time. It was like a Hotblack Desiato/Disaster Area show in all the best ways.

I suppose what separates me from actual Pink Floyd fans is that:

• I’ve only listened to “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” “Ummagumma” and the other early stuff a little bit and I never got super into it;

• I likewise don’t have strong feelings about the politics of the band’s various eras and lineups. Syd Barrett may have been a genius but I feel like hardcore fans give him that college backup quarterback treatment I talk about a lot in which people assume he’d have continued being a genius if he had kept it together. I don’t know if that’s a safe assumption;

• I think David Gilmour was sufficiently important to the band to where it’s silly to pretend, as a lot of Pink Floyd fans I’ve met do, that it ceased truly being Pink Floyd after Waters left. That’s especially true given how far Waters managed to crawl up his own ass in the post-“The Wall” era. Even a little before that, actually. He’s an absolute nutter now and is — and maybe always has been — an antisemite too, so screw him.

I mention all of that because yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” I don’t mention that because I want to sit here and laud the album, however. I mean, it’s amazing as everyone says and everything. It’s still as fresh and deep now as it was 50 years ago or the first time you heard it. It’s still an album worth getting stoned and listening to even if that’s the most impossibly cliched thing ever. Sometimes you just set aside what you consider to be cool and just go with it.

No, I mention it because I want to tell the story of how I acquired my first CD copy of “The Dark Side of the Moon.” And yes, some of you may have seen me tweet about this yesterday, but it was early and Twitter was still recovering from an outage, so it’s a story worth telling again.

In the middle of my freshman year of college I transferred from one dorm to another, because my original roommates were insane. On my first day in Morrill Tower — that’s the one on the right in the photo up above — I met my roommate Scott, who seemed nice enough. With him as I moved in was his girlfriend Heather, who lived a couple of floors up. She seemed nice enough too. I think they even helped me get stuff from my car and bring it upstairs.

Up in the room later I was unloading my CDs. Apart from the Bob Dylan, my CDs were what you might expect from an 18 year-old guy who skewed toward alternative music in early 1992. Heather noticed my copy of Jane's Addiction’s “Nothing Shocking.” She said, brightly, “oh, you like that kind of stuff?” I said yeah. She left. About ten minutes later she came back into the room with like 10-12 CDs of her own. Those CDs were also what you might expect. Some Beastie Boys, Guns ‘N Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, a bit of edgier-than-hair-metal 80s metal, and a couple more late 80s-early 90s alternative albums. A lot of it was stuff I already had, but also included in there were copies of “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall.”

Heather handed the stack of discs to me and said “here, you can have any of these you want.” I was confused. Why was this person I had just met a few minutes earlier giving me a dozen pretty decent CDs? So I asked her.

“Because they're wicked,” she said.

She did not mean “wicked” in the cool/bitchin’ sense of the term. She meant it in the “the Bible tells me this stuff is evil and morally wrong” sense. Heather, it turned out, was a newly-converted evangelical Christian. Converted with the help of my new roommate Scott not long after they got together when they met in the fall. She still had the wicked music in her dorm room, but she had decided that she needed to rid herself of it and, hey, Scott’s new roommate seemed like he likes wicked music, so there we were. I protested a little, suggesting that she could take them to record stores near campus and sell them, but she insisted that it’d be wrong to take money for them, so they were mine. I thanked Heather for the CDs. I gave away or sold the ones I had copies of already, but I kept the Pink Floyd albums because I only had them on cassette and beyond scratched-up LPs in my parents’ basement. It’d be nice to have a fresh digital copy.

For the next four or five months, I got on pretty good with Scott, Heather, and the other guys who made up our eight-man dorm suite. Scott and Heather usually did their own thing separate from the rest of us, but Scott joined us for pickup basketball nearly every day and we all got along pretty good. Scott and Heather didn’t try to preach to us or convert us and if they judged us for our beer drinking or pot smoking, they kept it to themselves. We likewsie didn’t say disrespectful things about their religion or habits, at least that I can remember. Honestly the worst thing was that Scott liked decidedly non-edgy 80s hair metal a great deal, with Winger being a personal favorite. So much of a favorite that he insisted that their cover of “Purple Haze” was better than Jimi Hendrix’s. I let that slide but I still get mad thinking about it. Either way, I’m not sure how Winger was not wicked given that their best-known song was about macking on a 17 year-old girl, but I can only spend so much of my time thinking about Winger. All I’ll say is that Kip Winger was 27 when he recorded that song which, eww.

Fast forward to fall of our sophomore year. Six of the eight of us from that suite decided we wanted to live together again because it was a good setup. Heather likewise decided to live in the dorms again too, and she was going to try to get a room on our floor or nearby. When I got back to school in September, however, Scott was not there. I had a new roommate, Doug, who had transferred in from another school. Heather was nowhere to be found either. For a while we assumed that the two of them broke up over the summer and they just made different housing plans so they didn’t have to see each other, but eventually we learned otherwise: Heather got pregnant somewhere near the end of Freshman year. They had dropped out, gotten married, and Scott had gone to work in Wherever, Ohio. Maybe they were listening to more wicked music than they had let on.

Right now you’re thinking that this story is some dumb Midwestern retelling of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” but I want to assure you, that is not the case.

For starters, Doug and I became good friends. Where Scott loved Winger, Doug was over 21 and had a mini-fridge full of Rolling Rocks set up five minutes after he got the keys to the place and no matter how much we drank that year, the fridge never got emptied and Doug never asked me to chip in for more. He and I still get together and have a beer once in a while — it’s better beer than Rolling Rock, there’s less of it and we mostly just talk about how our kids scare us and everything hurts — so that worked out.

Just before writing this yesterday I Googled Scott and Heather, which I can’t remember ever doing before now. It wasn’t hard to find them given that they each had unique last names. For various reasons that are not specifically important I can’t tell if they’re still together. Given that there are limits to how much effort I devote to stalking, I’m not gonna scorch the Earth for that. But I could find that Scott graduated from a different college a couple of years after the rest of us did. If LinkedIn is to be believed he seems to have a pretty decent job in the insurance/financial services world.

Heather is a doctor now. She was late into that world — she graduated med school in 2011 — but she seems to be a pretty damn successful doctor based on the press releases and career announcements I saw. Like, she’s the medical director of an important discipline for a pretty big healthcare company doing what — and you know a person like me doesn’t say this kind of thing often — can only be described as God’s Work. It goes to show you that you don’t always have to go down the fast lane of the straight roads to get someplace good.

Anyway, if you manage to read this, Heather, I still have those copies of “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall” you gave me. I think about you, Scott, and wicked music whenever I put ‘em on. Hope it’s all going well!

Have a great day, everyone.