Cup of Coffee: March 23, 2023

Batboys and batgirls are on notice, ESPN and Apple give us what we don't want, a Mad Dogshit take, a documentary for my people, rich people and Ohio suck and coffee rules

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Today we learn that there will be no big adjustments to the new rules for 2023 but the batboys and batgirls are on notice. ESPN gives us something none of us want, AppleTV starts charging for something that was previously free, a barking head has a pretty dogshit take, and we talk about our greatest athletic moments.

In Other Stuff the whitest, most-middle age dude thing ever is about to drop so you know I’m excited, the extraordinarily rich man with multiple homes has some opinions about how workers should work, Jack Daniel’s sues, Ohio sucks, we found a new low in both-sides journalism, and we learn that coffee is actually pretty good for you. But hey, you’re here so you know that.

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The Daily Briefing

There will not be major tweaks to the new rules to start the season

Earlier this week we learned that MLB’s competition committee was taking up player suggestions and complaints regarding the new rules, particularly the pitch clock. The committee has now met and decided and, as Jeff Passan reports, there will be no major changes. There will, however, be a few minor ones that are more along the lines of clarifications than anything.

Mostly those deal with when the pitch clock stops and starts in certain circumstances. Such as when a batter takes a “big swing” that causes him to lose equipment or fall over or when a pitcher has to make a defensive play during the previous at-bat. Basically, umpires will be able to signal for a brief clock delay while everyone recombobulates. They can also do that for the in-between-innings clock if the catcher ended the previous inning at bat or on the base paths.

Hell, the most severe thing that spun out of this involves a warning to the batboys and batgirls not to drag ass. Passan:

New standards will be enforced for bat boys and bat girls, whose ability to quickly retrieve equipment will help efforts to speed up the game, according to the memo. The league will evaluate the performances of bat boys and bat girls and could ask teams to replace them if their performance is considered substandard.

It’s about time someone put them damn kids in their place. They’ve been skating by on their crap way, way too long if you ask me.

Who the hell asked for this?

ESPN announced that Roger Clemens will join their Opening Night broadcast and will be in the booth for the White Sox-Astros game.

I have no idea why anyone would want this. Clemens is not a broadcaster and will clearly not be there to break down game action in anything but the most superficial of ways. His stardom, however, will cause Karl Ravech, Eduardo Pérez, and Buster Olney to ask him questions — “Say, Rocket, what do YOU think of the pitch clock?” will be asked by the bottom of the first inning at the latest — and prompt him to tell war stories, all of which will serve as a massive distraction for people who actually want to watch a couple of baseball teams play a baseball game.

All of that would be bad enough with any ex-MLB star just dropping in. Clemens makes it worse given that he’s a total piece of crap as a human being who, even if one were to put the most Clemens-friendly spin on things, groomed a child for years before beginning a sexual relationship after which he discarded her and then, later, passively watched her get dragged through the mud after which she died by suicide.

No thank you. No thank you at all.

You’ll need a subscription for the AppleTV games this year

Last year Major League Baseball began running Friday night games on AppleTV. Taking games off of cable and putting them on a streaming-only option made some people grumpy, but on the bright side, the games were free. You had to register with AppleTV to see them but you did not need a paid subscription.

That’s changing this year. You’ll need a $7/month subscription to see them. That’s not just for the ballgames, of course — you can watch “Severance” and “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking” and whatever else strikes your fancy — but it’s still a new fee to pay if you aren’t already an Apple subscriber.

Another big change, which may help you if you don’t want to pay for AppleTV, is that this year bars, restaurants, gyms and other establishments that have DirectTV will be allowed to show AppleTV games. They weren’t last year.

Here are the AppleTV games announced so far:

• Friday, April 7: Texas Rangers at Chicago Cubs 2 p.m. ET; San Diego Padres at Atlanta, 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, April 14: San Francisco Giants at Detroit Tigers 6:30 p.m. ET; Los Angeles Angels at Boston Red Sox 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, April 21: Toronto Blue Jays at New York Yankees 7 p.m. ET; Houston Astros at Atlanta 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, April 28: Philadelphia Phillies at Houston Astros 8 p.m. ET; St. Louis Cardinals at Los Angeles Dodgers 10 p.m. ET

• Friday, May 5: Chicago White Sox at Cincinnati Reds 6:30 p.m. ET, Minnesota Twins at Cleveland Guardians 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, May 12: Kansas City Royals at Milwaukee Brewers 8 p.m. ET; Chicago Cubs at Minnesota Twins 8 p.m. ET

• Friday, May 19: Baltimore Orioles at Toronto Blue Jays 7 p.m. ET; Seattle Mariners at Atlanta 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, May 26: San Diego Padres at New York Yankees 7 p.m. ET; Chicago White Sox at Detroit Tigers 6:30 p.m. ET

• Friday, June 2: Milwaukee Brewers at Cincinnati Reds 5 p.m. ET; Cleveland Guardians at Minnesota Twins 8 p.m. ET

• Friday, June 9: Kansas City Royals at Baltimore Orioles 7 p.m. ET; Seattle Mariners at Los Angeles Angels 9:30 p.m. ET

• Friday, June 16: Pittsburgh Pirates at Milwaukee Brewers 8 p.m. ET; Chicago White Sox at Seattle Mariners 10 p.m. ET

• Friday, June 23: Pittsburgh Pirates at Miami Marlins 6:30 p.m. ET; New York Mets at Philadelphia Phillies 7 p.m. ET

• Friday, June 30: Milwaukee Brewers at Pittsburgh Pirates 7 p.m. ET; Arizona Diamondbacks at Los Angeles Angels 9:30 p.m. ET

Subscribe now — or pick your pub — if you want to see those games.

Great take, Mad Dog

I appreciate that the World Baseball Classic is not everyone’s shot of whiskey, but when your take on the two best baseball players on the planet facing off against one another with two outs in the ninth inning of the championship game is so bad that even Stephan A. Smith can’t handle it, you probably need to rethink:

Fuzzy @fuzzyfromyt

This is an absolute embarrassment. Mad Dog should never be allowed to talk baseball ever again

The best part of this — apart from Mad Dog Russo saying “Trout does nothing but strikeout” — is that he is literally employed by Major League Baseball, which has done absolutely everything it can to promote the WBC and, of course, wants people to like and get excited about baseball. And here is their guy just crapping all over it. It’s a chaos that is almost beautiful.

Now let’s do better

Someone who is not Chris Russo was more inspired by the WBC Final and tweeted this yesterday:

Still thinking about that great WBC final. What's your greatest competitive athletic accomplishment? What is your personal WBC final, your Game 7, your Super Bowl, whatever? I'll start - I scored the winning run to clinch the Scarborough church league slo-pitch title.

I played baseball and football until was in the tenth grade and bowled until I graduated high school. So let’s see . . .

I was better at football than I was at baseball, but I was an offensive guard in football and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to cover oneself in glory as a lineman. Mostly they just notice when you screw up, such as when, as a pulling guard, our tailback ran for a 63-yard touchdown only to have it called back because I was called for holding. Sure, he wouldn’t have been able to make that run if I hadn’t absolutely mugged the outside linebacker I was supposed to contain when I pulled, but I still say I was robbed of a signature moment in which I booked it down the field to continue blocking and got to celebrate with the tailback in the end zone. Mostly, though, I was a competent lineman whose ability to remember plays and assignments far outstripped his physical gifts, but at that level that gets you a long way. Not a lot of “greatest” to be found there.

So, baseball when I . . . hmm. I hit a double once in a meaningless situation and got stranded on second. I don’t think that qualifies as anyone’s “greatest athletic accomplishment.” I wasn’t a very good baseball player, honestly. I liked playing catch, practicing, and hanging around baseball more than actually playing games.

So it’s probably bowling. I was on youth leagues until I was 18 and I was decent enough. Not all-world or anything, but I could be counted on to rip off a 200+ game once every other week or so and I got trophies in some regional tournaments and things. No single moment stands out, though I vaguely remember once needing three strikes in the tenth for our team to win a series against the other pretty good team in our league and I did it. After which I did a proto-version of the “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I AM!” thing that was only like Pete Weber’s epic moment insofar as it was nonsensical and confusing.

Anyway, as an athlete, I make a pretty good sportswriter. You?

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Other Stuff

“Running with our Eyes Closed”

I’m struggling to imagine something more geared toward a middle aged white dude than a documentary about Jason Isbell that is produced by Bill Simmons and the Duplass Brothers and directed by the guy who has done previous documentaries about Wilco and Mumford and Sons. Like, there’s no further one can go down that particular rabbit hole unless it was sponsored by an IPA or something, and that’s not gonna happen given that Isbell is sober.

But will I watch it? You can bet your life I’m gonna watch it. Some things are just made for people like me. And by “some things” I mean “almost everything” but I suppose that’s another conversation.

Tell us more about our poor work ethic, plutocrat

Former Obama Administration official — and extraordinarily wealthy investment banker — Steven Rattner has penned an op-ed in the New York Times — headlined “Is Working From Home Really Working? — in which he rails against people working from home, “quiet quitting,” and what he perceives to be America’s poor work ethic. He laments that people have “$900 billion of excess savings” due to stimulus checks and admires China’s work culture in which 12-hour days, six days a week, is the ideal.

Rattner concludes by pouring water on talk of a four-day work week, saying, “[p]roponents argue that with an extra day of rest, diligent workers can accomplish as much as they did in five days. Perhaps. But put me down as skeptical about that and much of the notion that when it comes to work, less can be more.”

In other news, this came from Rattner’s Wikipedia page:

They have four grown children, live in a Manhattan apartment, spend summers on Martha's Vineyard, and own a horse farm in North Salem, New York.

Yes, this is a man who truly has his finger on the pulse of the modern worker, modern work day, and modern work ethic. And unless he typed this op-ed from a desk in the New York Times newsroom, he’s a hypocrite to boot.

This is the line Jack Daniel’s has drawn?

Jack Daniel’s was at the Supreme Court yesterday, and not just in Sam Alito’s coffee mug. JD was party to a lawsuit. What’s their beef?

Jack Daniel's, the famous Tennessee whiskey company, is trying to stop production and marketing of a chewy dog toy called Bad Spaniels. The toy, shaped and decorated like a Jack Daniel's bottle, features a spaniel and the name "Bad Spaniels" on the label instead of the iconic Jack Daniel's name. And instead of promising 40% alcohol by volume, it promises "43% poo by volume, 100% smelly."

Maybe things are different now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was so much knockoff Jack Daniel’s stuff out there it’s not even funny. If you went to a place like Myrtle Beach you could walk into a crappy shop and come away with Jack Daniel’s beach towels, t-shirts, and little bar mirrors, none of which I would guess were actually licensed by Jack Daniel’s. There is likewise all manner of non-Jack Daniel’s signage and merchandise out there which ape the black and white of the JD label, complete with the fonts and things, except they have your last name or some eye-rolly political slogan on it about owning guns or whatever.

Which, come to think of it, is probably why Jack Daniel’s is so vigilant about this kind of thing now. It’s just a shame that universal truths like “43% poo by volume, 100% smelly” has to bear the brunt of their defense of their intellectual property rights.

This tracks

Someone asked ChatGPT to list 20 great things about Ohio. It hung up and then supplied only one answer:

I can’t say there are any lies here.

Great moments in both-sidesism

From the Springfield (MO) News-Leader:

I appreciate the need for reporters to be impartial but, at some point, I think it’s OK to weigh in even a little bit, don’t you?

The Coffee Achievers

Yesterday I wrote that I would give up alcohol before I’d give up coffee. That is not because of the comparative health effects of booze and java — it’s because I just frickin’ adore a cup of coffee and it makes my life brighter in a number of ways — but it is good to know that the beverage I drink far, far more of than anything else is actually pretty good for me:

The research showed that coffee has striking effects on physical activity levels, causing people to move more, taking, on average, 1,000 extra steps a day — a significant boost in activity that might help explain why coffee consumption has long been linked to better health.

That comes from a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine which was summarized in the Washington Post. The summary doesn’t explain where those extra steps come from but I imagine that it’s a function of walking to get that coffee plus having that extra caffeine to get you motivated.

The downsides — and there are always downsides — don’t seem too bad. Coffee drinkers get less sleep, which, duh. Been livin’ that life for years. And we are more likely to have a certain kind of heart palpitation, but not one that is particularly serious. Once you add in the generalized studies that show decreases in overall mortality and lower incidents of diabetes, cancer, and depression, welp, keep me on the Joe, yo.

Have a great, caffeinated day everyone.