Cup of Coffee: March 25, 2021

Doctor my balls? Never. Makeup calls? Not anymore. Also: we will sell no wine before its time, and we will not disrespect editors. Best Regards.

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday! Please enter through the gift shop:

Or, if you’re really into it, go to a literal (virtual) gift shop and buy a coffee cup? If you do it and send me a photo of yourself with it I’ll let you write a guest post. Even if you’re not a subscriber, I’ll put it on another Free Thursday. I’m easy.

There’s a lot in here today, so rather than tease it, let’s just get down to it, shall we?

The Daily Briefing

Astros, Lance McCullers Jr. agree to a five-year extension

The Houston Astros and Lance McCullers have agreed on five-year, $85 million contract extension. The deal starts next year, keeping him locked up through the 2026 campaign.

McCullers, 27, went 3-3 with a 3.93 ERA and 56 strikeouts in 11 starts in 2020, which was pretty solid given that he missed all of 2019 due to Tommy John surgery. For his career he’s 32-25 with a 3.70 ERA in 94 games, 91 of which were starts, over five seasons. He was an All-Star in 2017.

Andrew Vaughn likely to make the White Sox out of spring training

Depending on which ranking you look at, 2019 White Sox draft pick Andrew Vaughn is a top-10 prospect in the game. He’s a slugger out of Cal who looks like someone who can smack 25-30 homers right out of the gate. He has not, however, played above A-ball given that his draft year season was short and there was no 2020 minor league season.

Most teams would probably keep a guy like Vaughn down on the farm a bit at the beginning of 2021, citing that “no experience above A-ball” thing and snagging an extra year of service time. Chicago does not seem poised to do that, however, with Sox vice president Ken Williams telling Bob Nightengale of USA Today that Vaughn will not be kept down in the minors for service time reasons:

“We understand the service-time issue that plays here, but our feeling is that when you’re ready to help the major-league club, there’s a spot for you. We’re trying to put the best team out there. We have proven that over and over again."

In the interview Williams said that he’s leaving the final call up to manager Tony La Russa, and La Russa told Nightengale that while Vaughn “hasn’t made the club yet,” he is “making a very good impression.” Between those things one has to assume Vaughn is making the team.

The weird thing: Vaughn, a first baseman, but probably not a super great one, and not one good enough to displace 2020 MVP José Abreu, is likely to start as the Sox’ DH. Which is not normally where you see a young player start out. Still, they did in Baltimore with Eddie Murray in 1977, in favor of keeping veteran Lee May at first, and all Murray did was win the Rookie of the Year Award before going on to a Hall of Fame career, so it’s not totally unprecedented.

Steven Strasburg has body parts he doesn’t need

Last night Nationals pitcher Steven Strasburg pitched for only the second time this spring. He went four innings as he’s working his way back from a calf injury. A calf injury which sounds horrifying, but apparently isn’t?

After the game he told the press that he had “ruptured” a tendon in his left calf, but said that he was told by doctors that he doesn't need the tendon. Who doesn’t “need” a tendon in their leg? Let alone a professional athlete?

Welp, you learn something new every day. A tweet from a doctor who was following all of that said, “Strasburg injured a muscle called the plantaris. We usually don’t hear about it because typically we don’t need it for everyday life (anymore).”

There is a lot about the human body that frightens and confuses me, but whenever I come across one of those “oh, you don’t need that thing anymore” deals, it sort of stops my brain for a few seconds.

More on MLB’s anti-ball-doctoring campaign

Yesterday we talked about how Major League Baseball plans to scan pitchers’ spin rates to look for anomalies which may suggest that foreign substances are being used to give pitches a little extra somethin’ somethin’. Later in the day some more details about that whole plan emerged:

If a pitcher's "normal" spin rate, measured in revolutions per minute, increases significantly, the league may investigate whether the player is doctoring balls. Baseballs taken out of play -- both randomly and prioritized, if they exhibit signs of foreign substances -- will be inspected by a third-party lab, according to the memo. Balls will be tracked back to whomever was pitching when they were taken out of play.

Finally, game-day compliance officers will monitor dugouts, batting cages and bullpens for violations of the foreign substance rules while filing daily reports of their observations with the league office.

This seems . . . like a lot.

I get why they’re doing it, but practically speaking it seems like one of two things will happen here, and neither of them are all that great:

• Thing 1: MLB will approach this the same way it’s approached a number of new enforcement initiatives in the past, such as pace-of-play violations, and it’ll be pretty toothless and opaque, with warning letters being written and not much else happening. If that happens no one will take the initiative seriously and enforcement of foreign substances rules will be undermined even further than it has been to date, and that’s saying something;

• Thing 2: The initiative WILL be taken seriously and a small army of ball-inspectors and spin-rate checkers dinging pitchers and clubs will create a situation in which people are routinely firing cheating accusations at one another through the media, allegations of selective enforcement are leveled, and the very premise of one of the analytics on which the league is using to sell itself to smart fans — spin rate — is called into question as a means of measuring anything significant. In the end the league, the union, and players get bogged down in a new discipline/grievance process that overwhelms the sport.

I say it has to be one of these things because I believe the people in and around the game who say the majority of pitchers are using foreign substances, be it pine tar, sunscreen and rosin, or whatever other cocktails of sticky goo have been developed for the cause. That state of affairs matters.

It matters because when you have isolated, or easily detectible rule breaking afoot, a crackdown can be effective. In contrast, when you have a massive flouting of a rule, the nature of the rule-breaking is, by definition, a matter of deception, and the matter of detection is subjective, enforcement is either going to be ineffective, catching no one, or massively disruptive, catching the very many cheaters who are out there. I don’t think Major League Baseball’s creaky and bottleneck-addled discipline apparatus is prepared for that. It’s not like there’s a lab to which they can outsource this.

A better idea, I think, is some sort of legalization regime. The creation of some sort of common safe harbor that still allows pitchers who have come to rely on certain means of gripping and ripping baseballs to do so, but which presents an even playing field for them to do so. Everyone is allowed to use X, but not Y, and if you use Y — which would be pretty clear if you were looking for anything that is not-X — you’re in big trouble. Doing that would require the league to be pretty upfront with what it knows about what pitchers are doing now, however, and I don’t think it wants to do that even if it knows. That’s because, it would then have to admit that it’s been turning a blind eye at ball-doctoring for so long, and Major League Baseball doesn’t admit to such things, even if it’s pretty transparent.

In the end I think we get Thing 1: this will be talked a lot about in the next several days and, in the early going, we’ll hear reports about guys being warned and whatnot. In the end, however, nothing will really happen because the fight against gooey baseballs is not one Major League Baseball is truly capable of handling as things are currently constructed.

When makeup calls go bad

We’ve all seen it: an umpire gets a call wrong against one team and then, a few minutes later, gets one pretty conspicuously wrong in favor of the other team. Or, after an argument or some bit of umpire-player controversy, the ump suddenly has a much smaller or bigger zone depending on who he’s pissed at.

Makeup calls. Or grudge calls. They’re not rampant — and they’re less common today than they used to be in my estimation — but they happen. Players have learned to live with them for the most part and, unless there is behind-the-scenes discipline, the umps get away with it. The less you talk about such calls the better, the thinking seems to be.

And in no case should the umpire himself admit that he’s doing that. If you doubt that, look what happened in the NHL yesterday.

Nashville and Detroit were playing on Tuesday night. Early in the second period Predators forward Viktor Arvidsson was called for tripping Red Wings defenseman Jon Merrill. It was a pretty questionable call that Merrill seemed to flop on in order to sell more. Referee Tim Peel, who called the penalty, was heard a few minutes later on a hot mic, saying “It wasn't much, but I wanted to get a fucking penalty against Nashville early.” The audio went viral.

Then, yesterday morning, the NHL took action, announcing that Peel will “no longer will be working NHL games now or in the future.” The statement went on:

“Nothing is more important than ensuring the integrity of our game. Tim Peel's conduct is in direct contradiction to the adherence to that cornerstone principle that we demand of our officials and that our fans, players, coaches and all those associated with our game expect and deserve. There is no justification for his comments, no matter the context or his intention, and the National Hockey League will take any and all steps necessary to protect the integrity our game.”

There is no question that suspect officiating is bad and should not be tolerated. But there’s also no question that suspect officiating of this type has been around forever, and everyone knows it. The transgression is not that Peel was looking to pop the Predators for whatever subjective reason. The transgression was saying so out loud, thereby denying the league’s ability to claim that everything, always, is on the up-and-up and done with the utmost integrity.

That may have been merely a matter of optics for a sports league before, but now, with every league hitching its financial future to gambling interests — and with legitimate gambling interests like casinos and big gaming companies abhorring the idea of a fix ever being in because such a thing could doom their businesses — the mere suggestion that outcomes are anything less than 100% clean could cost them millions.

Because of that, you’re going to see the hammer come down in situations like this far more swiftly and far more severely as time goes on. You’ll also see an increasing amount of responsibilities and judgment calls taken from officials in their entirety, as the leagues attempt to stamp out any aspect of the game which could even conceivably be compromised and thus harder to monetize through gambling.

Wait, did I just identify a positive externality of sports gambling? Dear God, what is this world coming to?

Clowning on Bauer

On Monday night Trevor Bauer pitched against the Seattle Mariners. He was solid through four innings. Then, in the fifth inning, he gave up five runs on three homers. After the game he was asked about the buzzsaw he ran into in that fifth inning. He downplayed the M’s accomplishments, claiming that he wasn’t really trying. Bauer:

“The fifth inning. There really wasn’t any thought of sequencing or whatever. I was just throwing pitches. That’s not a really good mind frame to be in when you’re trying to get guys out. But I was just finishing off the night, trying to get my pitch count up.”

While I’m obviously not a big fan of unwritten rules and cliches and all of that, the fact is that that’s not the sort of thing a big leaguer tends to say when the other team owns him. They tend to say stuff like “gotta tip your cap to their hitters” or “I wasn’t locating my pitches well” or something. The idea is that you don’t discount the success of the other side lest you be accused of showing up or disrespecting your opponents. Again: I don’t make these rules, and I don’t particularly care about them, but that’s how it tends to go.

In the event, it’s pretty clear that the Mariners heard what Bauer said and didn’t much care for it. Get what M’s Manager Scott Servais said the next day, when asked about his team’s hitting. All of this should be read in a deadpan tone:

“Certainly Bauer was on top of his game early. I just wanted everybody to know our guys weren’t trying the first four innings. We decided to try in the fifth inning last night and it worked out. Our guys started trying. I know he had said maybe he wasn’t trying in the fifth, but our guys were trying in the fifth. We just didn’t take it seriously the first three to four innings.”

Servais then made a comment about his hitters having only one eye open, referring to Bauer pitching like that a couple of weeks ago:

“No, our guys were hitting with one eye shut for the first four innings. We were also trying to breathe through our eyelids as we are focusing on different things that will help us throughout the years. I just want to make sure everybody understood they weren’t trying the first four innings.”

I don’t think the big takeaway here is that Bauer went off the regular cliche script as such. I actually like it when guys say original things or honest things or what have you. I think the interesting thing is that Servais bothered with this sort of retort at all. Because normally, if someone steps out of line like Bauer, an opposing player or manager is most likely to deflect or say something like “I just focus on my game” or “we just go about our business” or something oblique like that.

The fact that Servais went in on him like this suggests that he really, really, really dislikes Bauer. And I’m guessing he doesn’t feel free to do this unless he’s pretty sure that a lot of people around the league feel the same way.

A cryptocurrency exchange is naming an arena

The cryptocurrency exchange FTX is close to finalizing a 19-year, $135 million deal to take over naming rights for the Miami Heat’s arena, formerly known as American Airlines Arena. The venue will be renamed FTX Arena.

I like sports, and until pretty recently I’ve generally liked to at least think about and engage with sports business a fair amount. But these days, between the sports gambling stuff that keeps popping up, cryptocurrency seeping into sports business, and the never-ending coverage of sports-related SPACs, I’m longing for the days when the worst thing afoot on that front was sports business reporter Darren Rovell trying to put a price tag on everything that moves. How quaint that all seems now.

Other Stuff

Internet poisoning test

Tell me, when I say the phrase, “The Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp guy got milkshake ducked,” what does it mean to you? Does it make sense or is it an indecipherable mélange of dumb and senseless verbiage? Hmm . . . interesting.

*writes on notepad*

Hire Dana Carvey

Dana Carvey was last seen doing a “Wayne’s World” UberEats commercial during the Super Bowl. I wrote about that at the time, happy that he was getting a silly payday, but a bit sad to see it because, really, there was a time when he, and Mike Myers for that matter, were above that kind of stuff.

I don’t pay a ton of attention to who’s doing what on “Saturday Night Live” these days, but if someone is looking for a go-to Joe Biden impression, someone needs to back up the money truck for Carvey because he has Biden down perfectly:

Rob Delaney @robdelaney

Dana Carvey’s Biden is A+. He’s so cool.

Ahh, the French!

If you’re an old person like me you might remember cinema legend Orson Welles doing commercials for the less-than-great Paul Masson wine — "We will sell no wine before its time"— in the late 70s and early 80s. If you’re not an old person, you may know of the commercials due to cartoon parodies of them or, more likely, because of a bootleg video of outtakes from one of the Paul Masson commercial tapings featuring a clearly inebriated Welles which spread like crazy on YouTube.

Here’s one of the commercials as it aired on TV in the late 70s. Here’s the infamous drunk outtake of a later spot:

If you know a little about Welles, particularly his later years, you don’t really need an explainer for what went down here. He was a man of voracious appetites of all sorts, booze included, he was basically unemployable as anything but a pitchman toward the end of his life. He was pretty damn good at being a pitchman given the instant gravitas and class he leant to the products, however, so, (a) Welles got drunk sometimes; and (b) the company still tried to get the commercials made because, really, who knows anything about Paul Masson wine if it’s not for the Welles endorsement?

Still, for those who are curious, there IS a backstory here. It can be read via this article in which the production supervisor/clapboard operator of that commercial writes about what went down in that ill-fated taping. It involves Vegas, a limo, sleeping pills, and a lot of other stuff that might make one ask “wait, this is the guy who made ‘Citizen Kane?’”

I have a soft spot for Welles, so rather than fixate on the outtake reel, I prefer to think about the note in the story about how Welles, even in his diminished state, was still working to try to improve the spots in which he’d appear. He may have just been a voice and the suggestion of authority by the time the 1980s rolled around — and he was clearly doing that work for the money — but for all of his many faults, the man was and remained a genius and retained no small amount of pride. Even when he was selling out to make ends meet, he was Orson Damn Welles, and I’ve always been fascinated by him. Indeed, I’ve always been fascinated with any figure of stature who, in the end, turned out to be their own worst enemy.

Self-sabotage and and a stubborn insistence on principle has brought down a lot of great artists, thinkers, and writers, but at the core of that self-sabotage is always something intriguing and, as someone who has sabotaged himself a few times, often relatable. Sometimes even admirable. Welles is like that. When you read about his life you want to stop every ten pages and scream “OH MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?!” but then you catch yourself and think “really, is there any chance he wasn’t going to do that?” His personal mash bill of brilliance and ego, weakness and drive, stubbornness and amiability, independence, self-delusion but, at times, keen observational skills was to say the least unique. When you fully appreciate what Welles was and what Welles wasn’t, there is no way to retcon a post-“Citizen Kane” career for him that was going to be anything other than a disaster. Yet you see his work, read about him, and watch interviews with him and you can’t help but try.

There are loads of directors who were more accomplished than Orson Welles was, whose truly great work can be pretty quickly catalogued. There are also many directors whose genius was on par with or exceeded his. Some big Welles fanboys may push back on that, but it’s a lot easier to overstate genius when it’s apparent but unfulfilled, because it gives one a big blank screen on which to project anything. I mean, Kurosawa, Fellini, Wilder, Scorsese, and a bunch of others demonstrated both genius and productivity, after all, so it’s wrong to suggest that Welles was singular to the extent so many often do.

But dammit, if I could sit down and have wine and a steak dinner, followed by brandy, with any director in history and just listen to them talk about, well, anything, it’d definitely be Orson Welles. And I’d do it even if the wine and brandy was Paul Masson.

On editors

Orson Welles, I have written before, was badly in need of an editor for most of his career. A tweet has made the rounds in the past couple of days, however, which questions whether anyone needs editors:

Chris Sacca 🇺🇸 @sacca

Even if the Substack/newsletter economics are a wash, a lot of reporters will make the jump just so they don’t have to deal with their shitty editors. (Employed journalists: Be sure to switch to your burner account before hearting this.)

I’ve been a full-time writer for over 11 years now, and have been committed to a writing career for about 14 years. Hardly ever in that time have I had an editor.

At NBC my boss was a “producer.” He didn’t edit my work before it went live (no one did, as those familiar with my infamous typos can attest). He also only rarely gave me story ideas. A couple times a year there’d be an email which went something like “hey, Tom Brady told Mike Florio about how he liked baseball, so if you want to do a post about Brady and baseball, we could probably get a lot of traffic from it” or whatever, but that was rare and was always optional. I had a stupid amount of freedom at NBC, with no one in between my keyboard and readers. And I obviously have no editor now that I’m a newsletter guy.

In light of that, you might think I’d be on board with that guy and his “be happy to get away from your shitty editors” sentiment, but nah. Not at all. Indeed, it’s a stupid sentiment.

A good editor makes everyone’s work better. Everyone’s. I’ve worked with a few on freelance things or one-off assignments — and my early amateur days doing odd things for The Hardball Times gave me access to a truly great editor, about whom I’ll post below — and they make an obvious and tremendous difference. The economics and model of NBC was such that assigning my counterparts and me one didn’t make sense for them — speed mattered most, and everything could be fixed with an after-the-fact edit later, we reasoned — but the work would’ve been better if there were editors.

I don’t know exactly how I could make an editor work with Cup of Coffee. At the moment it’s academic because I can’t afford to pay one, but that could easily change in the not terribly distant future. Logistically it’d be hard given that I post the newsletter so damn early, but I could find someone living in England or some west coast night owl who’d do it. It’d be a surmountable problem. And the work would be better. As the subscriber base has grown, it’s a thing that has become less and less theoretical, even if I’m not there yet.

And I’m not just talking about copyediting and typos. Which, truth be told, I could be better about on my own if I wasn’t hellbent on getting the newsletter out before 7AM. No, I’m talking about broader stuff like coming up with ideas for things to write about. Or telling me, “Craig, you’ve written about that too much lately” or “maybe think harder about that, hmm?” from time to time. When you work alone it’s pretty easy to get high on your own supply of bullshit, and there have been many times in the past 11 years when I’d have been better off by having someone tell me to put the bullshit pipe down. The readers and commenters I’ve attracted over the years have actually been better about that than most readers and commenters — y’all aren’t afraid to tell me when I’m full of it — but having someone with actual professional experience in that role would be way better.

All of this is coming from a guy who has almost exclusively worked alone, and who has done pretty well with it, for over a decade. If you listen to people who actually report things instead of merely spouting off like me, and who have worked closely with good editors for any amount of time, you hear countless stories about how editors have made their work better, or saved it from disaster, or brought it all into being in the first place and without which the writer would be totally lost.

Personally, I choose to believe them and not some venture capitalist/entrepreneur type making uninformed claims about “shitty editors.”

Best Regards

While I was reading Bill James Abstracts and would lurk on sabermetric forums in the 1990s, my real immersion into thinking about baseball in different ways, all the damn time, was Baseball Primer, which later changed its name to Baseball Think Factory (which still exists, by the way). No small number of you first met me there, including a couple of you who played a very, very big part in getting my mostly-unseen early bloggy output seen by people who mattered. You know who you are.

One of the people I interacted with a great deal at Baseball Primer and who, later, at The Hardball Times, would be a kinda colleague of mine, was John Brattain. Unlike a lot of people in that crew, Brattain was not overly math-y and statistic-y in his writing. His calling card was his humor, but it was a humor that didn’t get in the way of the analytical points he was making in whatever he wrote. In the comments at Primer and on emails and things, though, all bets were off. People write “LOL” a lot, but only rarely do people every truly laugh out loud. John would make me laugh out loud often. His sense of humor was right up my alley: punny, a little sick, and indefatigable. No matter how dark the subject matter, you could always count on John to crack wise. And, in forums, his jokes, no matter how dark or savage, would conclude with “Best Regards, John Brattain.”

John died 12 years ago yesterday. He was only 44. He had battled serious health problems about which he was always a tad oblique, and passed away while undergoing heart surgery which he had, in his typical style, both joked about and downplayed in the days leading up to it. When word got around that he had passed some of us thought it was an elaborate John Brattain joke and were just waiting for the “Best Regards.” It never came. I miss John a lot.

Yesterday, in a fellow old school baseball forum person’s remembrance of John on Facebook, I learned of the recent passing of another soul from that era. And, actually, from a previous era too: Joe Distelheim, who died at the end of December. He was 78.

Old newspaper people knew Joe as a reporter and editor for nearly 40 years, including a stint as the sports editor for the Detroit Free Press from 1980-85. While there he hired Mitch Albom, actually, giving that guy his start. As I told Joe in an email once, I am sure his judgment there was otherwise sound. In addition to Detroit, Joe worked for the The Charlotte Observer and smaller papers in Alabama and Delaware.

After Joe retired, his love of baseball led him to work as an editor for The Hardball Times, which was when I (virtually) met him. My deal at THT was different than most people’s in that I was allowed to just post my little bloggy bits without going through Joe, which Joe did not mind. He’d still shoot me emails early in the morning, though, to tell me about mistakes I’d made or things he wondered if I had considered. I’d almost always go back and incorporate his suggestions and I am certain my writing improved by virtue of his input.

One time, in May of 2009, when Manny Ramirez got popped for PEDs, Dave Studeman of THT asked if I’d be willing to write a real piece instead of a bloggy piece, about the whole affair. I agreed and, per the rules of writing a real piece, I submitted it to Joe who tore it limb from limb because, while it was pretty good content-wise, it was a structural and grammatical mess. Joe’s tearing it limb-from-limb was a wonderful experience, though, because he was kind and generous and almost professorial in how he explained why this or that should be changed. In the end the piece, if I remember correctly, was pretty darn good. Way better than it had been when I had submitted it. And I had learned a great deal.

We lost John in 2009. I lost touch with Joe many, many years ago. As someone only at the periphery of the periphery of their lives, my feelings about them and our loss of them are not super important in the grand scheme, but I’m thinking a lot about them this morning. Thinking that John Brattain was someone who could’ve done what I’ve done for these past 12 years and that he would’ve done it better. Thinking that, if I had had the guidance of someone like Joe Distelheim these past 12 years, I could’ve done what I do better.

Best Regards.