Cup of Coffee: March 31, 2022

A blowout, an injury, a new competition, a theme song, an anniversary, a flamingo, access journalism, birth control, a character evolution and Nighthawks at the Diner

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

It’s a week early for And That Happened to return, but today I recap a game anyway. I also talk about why Michael Conforto has not signed yet, MLB’s weird new home run derby competition, the Cleveland Guardians’ new Imagine Dragons-esque theme song, and I engage in a little navel gazing and self-promotion.

In Other Stuff I talk about the flamingo who has still not come in from the cold, access journalism, the perils of male oral birth control, check in on a TV show I like, and talk about how art can be improved for those of us who barely understand it but who like it and want to learn more about it anyway.

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And That Happened

Longtime subscribers, longtime NBC readers and even those who first read me back when I was an indy Blogspot blogger when George W. Bush was still president know that, during the regular season, I recap the previous day’s game each morning in a feature called And That Happened. I began that feature in April of 2008. It took its name from this video of the Red Sox and A’s playing in Japan came out in March of that year:

The guy doing the dubious announcing is John Mayer. Yes, that John Mayer. I decided that his sort of clueless, amateurish play-by-play was exactly what I was going for with my recap feature. If you want a serious account of the games you missed you can call the Associated Press. If you just want a quick thumbnail that will, at best, keep you from losing track of what’s going on without too much effort on your part while offering some hack jokes that I’ve been beating into the ground, over and over again for 14 years And That Happened is your huckleberry.

I normally don’t do recaps of spring training games, but yesterday there was one that inspired me to make an exception. If, for no other reason, than to help me knock the offseason rust from my hack jokes and superficial treatment of baseball games. So consider this a shakedown cruise for your newsletter writer, a teaser for non-subscribers, and a way to aggravate the hell out of my Nats fans readers.

Cardinals 29, Nationals 8: There’s a concept in baseball called “wearing it.” That’s what is referred to as a pitcher being required to just gut it out and keep pitching even if he’s getting his butt kicked all over the diamond. An entire team may suck on a given afternoon but once the game is out of hand one pitcher may be required to keep getting shelled — to “wear it” — in order to save the rest of the pitching staff’s arms.

I have seen pitchers wear it for over 40 years now. Never in my life, however, have I seen someone forced to wear it like Cade Cavalli of the Nationals was forced to wear this one yesterday. And that’s the case even if you adjust your filters for the nonsense ball which is often played in spring training.

St. Louis had jumped out to an 11-0 lead when Cavalli came into the game in the top of the sixth, presumably, to get a little work on four days’ rest. No one was out. Cavalli walked a batter, struck out a batter, and then gave up a two-run homer to Yadi Molina. Which, hey, Yadi is probably gonna be in the Hall of Fame one day, so you gotta tip your cap. Cavalli then retired two batters and got out of the inning, came back for the seventh, and set the Cards down in order. If this was a fair and just world, that’d be the end of his day. He’d go get a schvitz, a late lunch, and if he’s lucky, he’d catch nine holes up the road at Lone Pine Golf Club or something. Dave Martinez, however, decided to send him out for the eighth.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the Cards’ bats turn the minutes to hours? Cade Cavalli does. He does because he knows it’s not a fair and just world and because he was a bone to be chewed when St. Louis came to bat that inning.

By the time he walked off the mound he had retired only one batter, had given up six runs on seven hits and left the bases juiced for Francisco Pérez. Pérez let all three of the runners he inherited from Cavalli score too. Pérez didn’t cover himself in glory in his own right, mind you, being charged with six runs — three earned — of his own, but the ignominy of the day certainly belonged to young Cade, who finished having given up 11 runs — ten earned — in two and a third.

The thing about it is that Cavalli is a top prospect for Washington. He led the entire minor leagues in strikeouts last year while climbing from high-A to Triple-A. He had at least an outside chance of joining the Nats rotation when they broke camp. With an eye toward that, Dave Martinez started Cavali against these same Cardinals just five days earlier. In that game he went three innings and allowed three runs, and he was pumpin’ cheese at a hundo as he did it.¹ I don’t think it was enough to push him into serious big league roster consideration, but that start doesn’t happen if the powers that be weren’t at least entertaining the possibility.

Then yesterday happened and the dude just got destroyed. The searchers all say he’d have made Whitefish Bay if he’d put just six more strikes behind him. Now he’ll open the season in a musty old hall in Rochester thanks, in part, to the score board chiming 'til it rang twenty-nine times when the Birds of St. Louis came slashin’.

The Daily Briefing

Why Michael Conforto has not signed yet

Outfielder Michael Conforto remains the last high-profile free agent without a job. I had wondered why that was, but I wonder no more because Ken Rosenthal reported last night that Conforto injured his right shoulder during a workout in January when he fell and landed funny on it. Rosenthal says that Conforto has regained his arm strength, is back hitting and throwing normally, and has resumed negotiations with teams. He gets that from Conforto’s agent, Scott Boras, not a doctor, so obviously a physical will tell the real tale.

Conforto, 29, had a down year last year, hitting .232/.344/.384 (101 OPS+) with 14 homers in 125 games. His peripherals were still pretty good, though, so many see him as a bounceback candidate. Over the course of his career he is a .255/.356/.468 hitter who has averaged 28 homers every 162 games.

MLB announces “Home Run Derby X”

Yesterday I talked about a tease video MLB tweeted out about some new initiative, saying that we should all prepared to be underwhelmed because last time they did that it was dumb NFT stuff. I’ll tip my cap to MLB on this one, though, as what they were teasing has turned out to be a legitimately interesting thing: Home Run Derby X. The idea: a gonzo home run derby which will feature a set cast of competitors that will embark on a global tour of four cities: London, Seoul and Mexico City.

The competition will consist of four four-person teams, representing the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs. Each team will have one former big league star. MLB’s press materials calls them “legends” but that’s goin’ a bit too far given that it’s Adrián González, Jonny Gomes, Geovany Soto and Nick Swisher. I suppose González has the best claim for “legend” status, but eh. The other three members of each team will be a woman from either softball or women's baseball, a player from the minors, and a “wild card” whom MLB describes as “influential content creators.”

The format is what’s most interesting. As far a scale goes, it’s to baseball what indoor soccer is to regular soccer or, like, a tabletop bowling game you might see in a bar is to real bowling. As far as rules go, there’s no small amount of video game action and Calvinball. From the press release:

Home Run Derby X is played on a reduced version of a baseball field, with Home Plate mounted on a stage and the Pitcher’s Mound on a podium. The field of play is adaptable and has been designed to fit within a variety of environments, from festival sites to stadiums . . . Each batter has one at-bat of 25 pitches. They’ll be swinging for the fences, while two of their opponents patrol the outfield. A Home Run scores one point for the offense and a catch is one point for the defense. In Home Run Derby X there are also additional ways to score, inspired by video games, including Target Hits in the infield and beyond the fence. Each batter also has a Hot Streak – five consecutive pitches where Home Runs and Target Hits count double but a catch in the Hot Streak is also double points for the defense.

The dimensions are radically different from a normal baseball field:

Michael Clair of MLB.com has more on it here.

One’s first impression may be that this is silly. That it’s not baseball. And that, given there are fielders and targets and crap, it’s not even a home run derby. But as I sat with the idea and chewed on it a bit yesterday, I have to say I sort of like it for a few reasons.

For one thing, it’ll likely be silly and silly is fun. More importantly, though, this may very well be a nice little intro-to-baseball vehicle that could, quite conceivably, spur interest in the game among some folks who might not be into it or might not be too familiar with it.

That may seem like a crazy assertion, but there are some essential elements here: hitting, pitching, and fielding. The presence of actual baseball players who are not too far removed from actual playing days and high-level softball players — people who could probably compete for spots on pro leagues in some countries — will give people a taste of the actual skills of a pro hitter. The smaller dimensions of the field could lead to some fun, kinetic play in the field. Big personalities like Swisher and Gomes playing to the crowd. Between all of that and the tweaked rules, there’s almost a sandlot element to all of this.

Ultimately you’d love to see real baseball games played in a lot more places than get real baseball games now — and that is coming per the new Collective Bargaining Agreement — but as far as ambassadorial initiatives go, MLB could do way worse than this. And hell, it might even prove to be fun enough in practice that they’ll tour around with it in the U.S. too, maybe with even bigger names. The fact that it is separate from baseball — it’s own little game — is a feature, I think, not a bug.

I know I have a reputation for hating on everything that comes out of MLB’s offices, but this all seems kind of fun. And maybe even useful.

The Guardians have a new theme song

With that bit of positiveness out of the way, let’s get back to hating on things, shall we?

I got an email from the Cleveland Guardians marketing folks promoting a new theme song for the baseball team. It’s called “We Are Cleveland.” It’s . . . well, listen first:

The Cleveland Guardians? Eh, it’s more like the Cleveland Imagine Dragons. Except it’s apparently all local artists, so it’s an Imagine Dragons tribute act maybe? Not that the issue is musical accomplishment. It’s fine as far as . . . whatever that genre of music is. The problem is that its chest-beating aggro-stomp is tonally inappropriate for baseball which is, by its nature, a way more laid back thing. It’s trying hard to create a big roar-along chant thing for a team that will play its games on lazy summer evenings to about 1/4 of a packed house at best for the foreseeable future.

I suppose it’s possible that, one day, this team will be so good and will pump up the city so hard that 35,000+ fans will be screaming this song before a Game 7 in October, but by then this will sound so dated that it won’t even be funny. Hell, the song screams 2012 as it is.

The song is bad, man. And it’s gonna make going to a Guardians game — where a soft hum will prevail for an hour before first pitch, interrupted by this bombast, at which point the soft hum will come back for the next three hours — an unintentionally comic experience.

I talked about Rethinking Fandom with the Philly SABR chapter

Last night I was privileged to be the guest of the Connie Mack-Dick Allen Chapter of SABR — that’s the Philly chapter, duh — to talk about my book. It was basically a Q&A, during with I was aided by a Wolf’s Ridge Dire Wolf Imperial Stout, talking about different ways to think about sports fandom.

Best part: the host, Matt Albertson, was also a bald guy with glasses. *raises fist in solidarity.* Second best part: at the end I got in some digs at “Field of Dreams.”

Happy Anniversary to me

Sticking with naval-gazey self-promotion, today marks the thirteenth anniversary of NBC hiring me to contribute to their new baseball blog, then called Circling the Bases, but within a year called HardballTalk. The blog would go live six days later. Facebook reminds me of the vague little post I made about it that day:

It would only be a part time job at first. I’d contribute to it while still working my day job at the Ohio Attorney General’s office for several months. Which, given that I had only had that job for about a month and a half at that point — after being fired from my law firm in the depths of the financial crisis — was absolutely stupid of me. Like, If I had screwed up the AG job because I was too busy writing about Manny Ramirez being suspended for PEDs or Carlos Zambrano beating the Gatorade machine with a bat in the dugout to get to my actual legal work — paid for by people’s taxes and, putatively at least, to serve their public interest — I would’ve ruined myself and my family. I turned off that part of my brain, though, and kept writing for them. To steal a saying from a good friend of mine but which applies equally to me: everything I’ve ever done that mattered was done while I was supposed to be doing something else.

That summer, after consuming maybe one too many bourbons, I wrote an email to Rick Cordella, telling him that things would be better if he let me run the damn website full time. After a couple of days of silence during which I was pretty sure I had crossed a line and was about to get fired, Rick emailed me back, agreed with me, and by November I had left the practice of law to work for NBC.

A lot has happened over the past 13 years, obviously, but one thing is certain: I haven't worked a day in my life since. Not really, anyway. I’m pretty damn happy about that. Thank you, all of you, for supporting what I do to allow me to continue to do it all these years later and, hopefully, forever.

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Other Stuff

The Pink Floyd Identity

A flamingo — named Pink Floyd of all things — escaped from a Kansas zoo nearly 17 years ago and has been on the run ever since. It was spotted in Texas earlier this month, however. It’s quite the survival story.

There’s a lot of information about Pink Floyd in the story, obviously, but what fascinates me the most is the audio they captured from the scene. It’s absolutely astonishing. I have transcribed it for you:

Flamingo: I don't want to do this anymore.

Zoo Keeper: I don't think that's a decision you can make.

Flamingo: Pink Floyd is dead, you hear me? He drowned two weeks ago. You're gonna go tell 'em that Pink Floyd is dead, you understand?

Zoo Keeper: Where are you gonna go?

Flamingo: I swear to God, if I even feel somebody behind me, there is no measure to how fast and how hard I will bring this fight to your doorstep. I'm on my own side now.

What kind of flamingo has a safety deposit box full of money and six passports and a gun? What flamingo has a bank account number in their hip? A flamingo comes in here, and the first thing he’s doing is he’s catching the sightlines and looking for an exit. Damn.

Great Moments in Access Journalism

There’s a controversy going on over at CBS News because they hired former Trump Administration official Mick Mulvaney as an on-air commentator. This despite the fact Mulvaney would, while working for Trump, repeatedly assert false claims and bash the press. Things like saying that the media’s purpose in covering the pandemic in early 2020 was “to bring down the president.” The sorts of thing that, you know, tend to make it inappropriate for you to be hired for a high-profile gig at a major media organization.

Why hire Mulvaney? CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani was recorded during a staff meeting earlier this month saying this:

“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms. A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

This sort of thing is not exclusive to CBS, of course. Or to political or hard news reporting. You see it in sports. You see it everywhere. Access is prized. As is celebrity.

You can get access even without hiring mendacious jackwagon who have contempt for the very idea of the press, of course. But, for whatever reason, these news organizations choose not to. They continually hire and re-hire truly awful people who have done damage to the country. Why?

I think the reason is that the ones who do the hiring are of a class that is not really affected by that damage. They are people who, even if their politics are, on paper, completely different than that of the hiree, have more in common with the awful person who is hired in most of the aspects of their lives. If you're an executive at a big company like CBS who makes this call, your wealth and status is not threatened by the Mick Mulvaneys or Newt Gingriches or whoever else of the world. You'd do well even under an autocracy which cracks down on the foundations of liberal society. Even if your news show gets transformed into infotainment by virtue of a tyrant, the checks will still clear, your club membership will still be good, and you’ll still get priority status everywhere you go. It's all basically a game to you. The damage inflicted by tyrants tends to come down most harshly on ordinary people.

I’ve believed that access and status are mostly what matters in these sorts of situations for a long time. It sure is nice, though, to see a media executive admit it out loud like that.

Sure, I took it, baby

Reports emerged this week that a new male contraceptive was found to be 99 percent effective when tested in mice. That’s according to the American Chemical Society. Obviously we’re still pretty far from there being an approved oral contraceptive for men.

Approval, though strikes me as less of a problem than practical application in the field. Because I am struggling to imagine a single woman I’ve ever met who would — or should — take the word of some guy who says, “yeah, baby, I’m totally on the pill.”

Introducing Viktor Hargreeves

I’m a pretty big fan of the TV show “The Umbrella Academy.” It’s not exactly prestige TV — indeed, it’s rather ridiculous in a hundred ways — but it’s often great fun.

The biggest star on “The Umbrella Academy” is Elliot Page who, in the show’s first two seasons, played the character of Vanya Hargreeves, daughter of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who assembled the show’s titular dysfunctional family/ superhero crew. Page, of course, publicly came out as transgender in late 2020, a few months after the most recent season of the show ended. In light of that some wondered how the show, which has been renewed for a third season, would incorporate or address that.

Elliot Page revealed that himself on Tuesday:

Elliot Page @TheElliotPage

Meet Viktor Hargreeves ☂️ @UmbrellaAcad

The character formerly known as Vanya will now be known as Viktor, with the character coming out as trans just as Page did.

As anyone who watches the show knows, Vanya/Viktor was alienated from the family in a number of ways and had no apparent supernatural abilities. It was revealed, however, that he was actually more powerful than any of the others, possessing the ability to convert sound waves into physical force. This ability was suppressed by his father, however, because he considered it too powerful to control.

There are times when “The Umbrella Academy” is a bit silly as far as plotting goes. Given both the character’s and the actor’s history, however, they have the chance to make something pretty fantastic and, potentially, groundbreaking with this next season. I’m pretty damn excited for it.

Moving “Nighthawks”

Edward Hopper is my favorite artist. I’ve never been under any illusions that that is a particularly bold or refined choice of favorite artist, mind you. When it comes to fine art I’m something approaching a moron. I just like what I like and I like Hopper.

The problem when your favorite artist is someone as famous and as accessible as Edward Hopper, though, is that it’s really easy to lose sight of the art for what it is, as opposed to what it has come to represent in secondary and tertiary ways. His work is often coopted into pop culture and parody and stuff and through that process becomes something else. It’s also the case that when a museum gets a Hopper the painting often gets set aside as its own separate deal. The permanent or even temporary acquisition of one of his paintings is an event unto itself and, as a result, the work is often presented as its own end, with context and, often, the original intent of the painting, getting lost in the hype. I’m happy to see a Hopper, but it’s not usually a thing you can just stand in front of in a quiet corner of a museum and think about. It’s usually surrounded by a bunch of morons like me who are pleased that they are familiar with something in a museum for once in their lives.

My appreciation of Hopper caused me to seek out other artists like him. Not that there are really a ton of artists like Hopper, of course. There’s a fine line between mid-century realism like his work and idealistic, overly-sentimental Norman Rockwell stuff which does nothing for me, and most of it tends to fall on the latter side. I’ve had much better luck with artists who practiced a style Hopper did early in his career referred and who are referred to as the Ashcan School.

The thing about the Ashcan artists, in contrast to Hopper, is that, apart from maybe George Bellows, most of them never got famous enough to where their work gets the standalone celebrity treatment like Hopper gets. If your local museum gets an Ashcan exhibit it’s usually a proper exhibit of a bunch of works as opposed to one big painting used as a draw. The art is thus presented in a context that helps you understand things rather than just marvel at a famous painting. I like that, even if nothing any of the Ashcan guys ever did was as good as, say, “Office in a Small City” or “Early Sunday Morning.”

I offer up all of that as a means of highlighting this article which talks about how the Art Institute of Chicago is moving Hopper’s most famous work — “Nighthawks” — off of a wall in which it has long stood by itself and onto a wall alongside similar works. And yes, there are similar works once you get outside of the old school art orthodoxy in which only the famous white dudes mattered. The move is part of a movement called “curatorial activism” and it’s such a damn good idea:

This new setting, where it is flanked by oil paintings by the (woman) artist Gertrude Abercrombie to the left and the (Black) artist Hughie Lee-Smith to the right, seeks to undermine the “art system,” as Reilly puts it, as “an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists.”

With no heavy-handed explanatory text, the museum allows the works to speak for themselves, and, perhaps more importantly, to speak to each other. As a pseudo-triptych, they paint a portrait of figurative art at midcentury that fleshes out just who took part in that movement, and how each artist added to it.

I know everyone gets something different out of art, but I like to learn things and contextualize things. I will never be savvy enough about art to be able to truly grok the techniques which make any individual work the masterpiece that it is in and of itself, but I am very much able — when taught — to understand where a great work falls within a tradition or an era and how it explains that tradition and era and vice-versa. That makes me feel like my moronic stumbling around a museum is worth its while in ways that just looking at a particular painting or sculpture or whatever doesn’t always do it for me given my pretty extreme ignorance when it comes to this stuff.

Viva learning things.

Have a great day everyone.

1. I totally stole that from this tweet, BTW:

sam.csv @RealSamSchultz

I love baseball cause you can say stuff like “pumpin cheese at a hundo” and people know what you mean