Cup of Coffee: May 25, 2023

Kluber to the pen, the A's may have a deal, a Cubs prospect may have killed a guy, someone thinks baseball is not gay, Target caves to bigots, The “Revolutionaries," Jimmy Carter and Tina Turner

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There’s a lot to get to today, and that’s the case even though I didn’t write an item about Twitter repeatedly crashing as Ron DeSantis tried to make his presidential announcement. I guess I was laughing too hard at the realization of just how Jeb!-y this campaign is gonna be. Still, when you can see not just one but two of your least favorite people on planet Earth embarrassed at once — Elon Musk being the other — you’re having a pretty good day.

Onward, shall we?

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And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights

White Sox 6, Guardians 0: Michael Kopech blanked the Guardians for seven innings and struck out nine, extending his scoreless innings streak to 15 frames. I suppose pitching against bad offenses like the Guardians and the Royals, who he faced in his previous start, helps matters, but that’s still some good pitching on his part. Romy González had a two-run double in the Sox’ five-run fourth. The White Sox have won three straight series.

Rangers 3, Pirates 2: Martín Pérez allowed two over seven and Will Smith inherited a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the eighth, wriggled out of it, and completed the one and two-thirds inning save. Marcus Semien homered in Texas’ three-run first inning. Despite taking the loss, Pirates starter Johan Oviedo pitched an immaculate inning — three strikeouts on nine pitches — in the top of the fourth. That’s always fun. I’d still like to see a pitcher retire the side on three pitches which result in, like, pop fouls to the catcher or maybe slow dribblers to the mound, but the nine-strike inning is pretty sweet in its own right.

Brewers 4, Astros 0: Adrian Houser allowed two hits while pitching shutout ball into the sixth, Willy Adames hit a two-run homer in the first, and Owen Miller and Brian Anderson added solo shots in the seventh. Houser, who pitched six shutout innings in his previous outing, has been a life-saver for the Brewers’ wrecked rotation.

Twins 7, Giants 1: Edouard Julien homered, hit a sac fly, and scored twice. The Twins had four stolen bases, including a steal of home by Willi Castro. It was not a straight steal, however, It was a double steal, which is known in the business as a “coward’s steal.” Well, not really, but I’d like to see it catch on.

Phillies 6, Diamondbacks 5: Trea Turner may be telling anyone who will listen that he’s sucked this year but here he played the hero, hitting a two-run homer in the ninth to help erase an early 5-0 Diamondbacks lead and to force extra innings. The Phillies won it in the bottom of the tenth when a passed ball put the Manfred Man on third base and an Alex Bohm walkoff single ended the proceedings.

Reds 10, Cardinals 3: The Reds pounded out 18 hits and cruised to victory, with Kevin Newman driving in three, Matt McClain homering, Spencer Steer collecting four hits with two RBI, and Tyler Stephenson driving in a couple as well.

Rays 7, Blue Jays 3: Shane McClanahan played stopper a day after the Rays gave up 20, allowing one over seven with seven strikeouts to becoming baseball’s first eight-game winner. He has started 11 games. The Rays have won ten of them. That’s ace stuff. Luke Raley and José Siri homered. That made it a better day for Raley than Tuesday was, when he gave up seven runs as a pitcher, including a grand slam. The Jays have lost eight of 11.

Orioles 9, Yankees 6: Things looked bleak for the O’s as Gleyber Torres homered twice and drove in three and Isiah Kiner-Falefa tripled and homered to helps the Yankees build a 5-1 lead heading into the seventh. But then Adam Frazier hit a three-run homer to pull Baltimore to within a run and pinch-hitter Gunnar Henderson hit a go-ahead, two-run double in what ended up being an eight-run inning. The Orioles have 32 wins. They’ve come from behind in 19 of them. New York’s five-game winning streak comes to an end.

Nationals 5, Padres 3: Washington put up a four-run second inning, with Alex Call hitting a two-run double, Keibert Ruiz singling in a run, and Luis Garcia hitting a sacrifice fly. The pitching staff did most of the rest of the work with Trevor Williams allowing three in five and two-thirds but Carl Edwards Jr. and Hunter Harvey combining for two and a third scoreless innings and Kyle Finnegan working a perfect ninth. Together they held the Padres to four hits.

Atlanta 4, Dodgers 3: Ozzie Albies hit a sac fly in the bottom of the ninth to break a 3-3 tie and to walk things off for Atlanta. Earlier Matt Olson hit a solo shot and Marcell Ozuna hit a two-run homer. Bryce Elder started for Atlanta and scattered seven hits and walked a guy but had six strikeouts while allowing only one run in six innings. The Dodgers had their chances but went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position.

Tigers 6, Royals 4: Zack Short hit a three-run pinch-hit homer in the top of the sixth to turn a 1-1 game into a 4-1 game. Riley Greene homered into the fountains, doubled and scored twice for Detroit.

Cubs 4, Mets 2: Marcus Stroman went eight, allowing only two on a third inning Francisco Álvarez homer and needing only 88 pitches. The Cubs immediately answered that Álvarez dinger when Dansby Swanson and Seiya Suzuki each doubled in a run and Michael Tauchman singled in the go-ahead run in the bottom of the third. Nico Hoerner’s sixth inning homer closed out the scoring. The only negative for Chicago here was that Christopher Morel’s five-game home run streak ended, but those tend to end, don’t they?

Marlins 10, Rockies 2: Sandy Alcantara went six to pick up his second win of the year. He had a lot of run support too thanks to Yuli Gurriel’s four hits, Luis Arráez’s two-run double, Jonathan Davis going 3-for-4 with a solo homer, Jorge Soler going deep for the 14th time this season, and Jacob Stallings hitting two doubles and collecting an RBI. It’s not common to see the Marlins win a blowout, as most of their wins have come by a run or two.

Angels 7, Red Sox 3: Zach Neto — which is totally what I would’ve named a teenage superhero in a screenplay I might’ve written in 1990 — hit a three-run homer to help the Angels build an early 4-0 lead. An inning later Shohei Ohtani hit a solo shot to make it 5-0 and an inning after that Mike Trout’s two-run blast made it 7-1 Angels. Los Angeles sweeps and wins their fourth in a row overall. Boston has lost four straight.

Mariners 6, Athletics 1: Bryce Miller and his amazing stuff shut the A’s out for six on only two hits. Seattle supported him well, scoring five times and sending 11 batters to the plate in the fourth. Miller, per Sarah Langs, is the first pitcher since at least 1901 to throw at least six innings and allow four or fewer hits in each of his first five appearances in the majors.

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The Daily Briefing

Corey Kluber has been sent to the bullpen

The Boston Red Sox are sending Corey Kluber to the bullpen. That according to Alex Cora during his pregame comments yesterday. Worth noting that, three days prior, Cora gave Kluber the dreaded vote of confidence regarding his place in the rotation. Not that anyone can blame the Sox for doing this, as Kluber is 2-6 with a 6.26 ERA and the club has better rotation options in Tanner Houck and, soon anyway, Garrett Whitlock.

Kluber has started 260 of his 265 career games. The last time he came out of the pen was in 2013. So no, I do not expect this will go well.

The A’s have a tentative stadium deal

The Oakland Athletics may be on their way to getting their Las Vegas ballpark. Yesterday Nevada governor Joe Lombardo announced a tentative agreement on a bill for public financing for the proposed new ballpark located near The Strip. The bill will now go to the state legislature. There are two weeks until the session ends so it’ll have to be approved by then.

The amount of public funding is expected to be significantly less than the $395 million the club had recently been seeking and even more significantly less than the original $500 million the A’s said they wanted. And, of course, that $500 million is less than most reports had the City of Oakland proposing for the A’s to stay in the Bay Area. But I’m sure John Fisher and Dave Kaval will come out of all of this just fine, so what the hell else do they care?

Cubs prospect wanted for killing a guy

From Héctor Gómez:

The Dominican National Police is looking for Cubs prospect Josefrailin Alcántara, accused of shooting Darwin Díaz Valerio to death last Friday. The Cubs signed Alcántara in January 2022 with a $500,000 bonus, the fourth-highest among the 30 international players the organization signed last year

The shooting allegedly took place during an argument over money inside one the men’s cars. The Cubs recently released Alcántara, by the way. If they hadn’t, I’m pretty sure they would be now.

As the New York Post reports, this is the second time in a couple of years that a Cubs prospect has been accused of a major crime. Back in March 2021, pitcher Jesus Camargo-Corrales was arrested when Colorado police found 21 pounds of methamphetamine and 1.2 pounds of oxycodone pills in his Cubs logo duffel bag. He got sentenced to 14 years in the clink.

I’m dying to see what the scouts and analysts said about these guys’ character in their reports.

This is my shocked face

The Illinois Attorney General released a report yesterday that Catholic clergy sexually abused nearly 2,000 kids in the state, with hundreds more priests involved than the church had previously named.

But do tell me how bad it is for a small gay advocacy group to humorously mock the church and how bad it is for a baseball team to invite the advocacy group to a game.

“Baseball is not gay”

Newsmax's Greg Kelly, after listing all of the problems with baseball and how he hates it, claims that teams having Pride Nights is the final straw for him. He objects to Pride Nights because, “there's nothing gay about baseball.”

Well, not with that attitude there isn’t.

Whatever you do, don’t show Greg Kelly this. If they turned that clip into a feature-length film, by the way, it’d be like the third best baseball movie ever.

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Other Stuff

Target caves to the bigots

In the latest example of clueless, cowardly corporate types caving in to the worst people on Earth, Target has announced that it has removed some of its LGBTQ+ merchandise from its Pride Month collection because bigots, homophobes, and nihilist right wing culture warriors complained.

Target has offered products celebrating Pride Month for more than a decade. But this year they got threats. Not because there’s anything newly problematic about celebrating Pride Month, but because hateful elements on the political right have cynically decided over the past couple of years that attacking the LGBTQ+ community is a winning political strategy. Given how readily Target CEO Brian Cornell has sold out the LGBTQ+ community here, emboldening the extremists, he has validated their decision to launch homophobic attacks. Great job, dipshit.

Whether it’s Bud Light or the Los Angeles Dodgers or Target or book publishers or school boards or anyone else, people need to wrap their minds around the fact that the outrage they’re encountering for simply acknowledging the existence of gay and trans people is not some organic groundswell of genuine public opinion. It is a calculated and systematic campaign of hate and eliminationist sentiment from a small politicized minority that has as its end the exact reaction that Target has now given them. Again, congratulations.

Wake the hell up, corporate America. Stand for something for once. And if you can’t stand for anything, at least stick with the decisions you made in trying to make a quick buck off of Pride stuff. Indeed, it’d be better not even trying to do things for Pride than it would be to start to do something only to subsequently capitulate to the hate-mongers.

The “Revolutionaries?” Eh, fine

My law school alma mater, the George Washington University, announced last year that it was getting rid of its “Colonials” nickname, because it glorifies colonialism and “can no longer serve its purpose as a name that unifies.” Which, fair. Colonialism sucks. I’d add that it also sucks having a university named after a man who held hundreds of slaves, but ain’t no one about to take old George’s name off of anything. And frankly, I’d only advocate for that myself in a performative manner in an effort to be a pain in the ass to people, but hey, that can be fun sometimes.

Anyway, GW has finally settled on a new name:

After 12 months, 47,000 points of feedback and 8,000 moniker suggestions whittled down in a comprehensive community engagement process to four finalists, the university announced on Wednesday its new moniker: the Revolutionaries . . . The full adoption of the Revolutionaries moniker will be implemented during the 2023-24 academic year. Over the coming weeks and months, GW will develop the visual identity for the Revolutionaries moniker and begin the process of bringing it to life on athletic uniforms, campus signage and merchandise.

They say they’re keeping George himself as the actual mascot, so I’m not sure what else you can do with a “visual identity” to match the new name, but I’ll note that if you do a Google image search for “revolutionaries” these are the first several photos that pop up:

If you go down one more column you get Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Robespierre, and a number of Black activists. George Washington does not appear anywhere on there. Maybe because, when he was fighting a war of liberation, he and his buddies were referred to as “colonists.”

All of which is to say: GW can have its new nickname, but it needs to change the mascot to Che Guevara, Florence L. Tate, or Rosa Luxemburg. And really, if you go with Luxemburg, you have in her speech before the Spartacist Uprising some great ready-made lyrics for a new school song:

“Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all. Nay, more; not merely are we today in a position to perform this task, nor merely is its performance a duty toward the proletariat, but our solution offers the only means of saving human society from destruction.”

I cannot think of anything that would get me more hyped before a big basketball game. And no, we don’t need to tell anyone that Luxemburg was arrested and murdered by authorities and had her body thrown in a river like three days after she gave that speech. She was rolling.

Speaking of George Washington University . . .

A law school friend noted on Facebook that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of our graduation ceremony. Several people chimed in in the comments with happy memories.

I was unable to do that because I did not go to the graduation ceremony as we wanted to move back to Ohio before then for reasons I can’t recall, but I’m sure it had to do with our lease on one end or the other. I was OK not going to the ceremony, in which Hillary Clinton gave the keynote, because I’m not big on such things. I didn’t go to my Ohio State graduation either. It just didn’t seem particularly important to me. I knew what I had accomplished.

So I gave GW my forwarding address for my diploma. But instead of mailing it to me at the address I specifically gave them, they mailed it to my parents' house in Nashville, Tennessee. There were two problems with that:

• My parents' address in Tennessee was never on any official GW record of any kind, mostly because I never lived in Nashville, Tennessee. They moved there after I stopped using their home as my permanent address, which occurred before I ever applied to GW. I did not apply or enroll using their address and my folks did not pay a dime for law school and were not included on any financial aid documents, so I have no idea how GW decided that that was where it should be sent; and

• My parents had actually moved away from their home in Nashville, back up for their second tour of living in Flint, Michigan, six months before I graduated.

Which meant that my diploma was delivered to total strangers in Nashville, who happened to be living in my parents’ old house, which had never been my house. Even better: the new people were away on vacation when it arrived so it was stuck in their storm door for three days, and yes, it got rained on while they were out of town. I eventually got it and, somehow, it was not damaged by the rain. Just the cardboard around it was.

As always: George Washington University delivered!

Jimmy Carter is still alive somehow

Three months ago, former president Jimmy Carter went into hospice care. Given that he’s 98 years old and has had a lot of health problems recently I cannot say that I expected him to be hanging around come late May, but he’s still chugging along. Indeed, he is reported to be “happily meeting with family” and “enjoying ice cream.” Given that I’m only 49 and I find both meeting with my family and ice cream to be problematic and fraught pursuits at best, my hat’s off to the old guy.

In other news, this is the last time I ever do the Proper Journalism Thing and pre-write someone’s obituary, because this has been hanging around in my drafts since February:

Not that I hope that anything bad happens to Jimmy Carter just so I can cut and paste some easy content. But I do hope I don’t wind up being one of those writers who dies before the subject of obituaries he writes do.

The grooviest coffins around

Sticking with death . . .

When a person dies in this country they have three choices: get buried, get cremated, or have their body donated to medical or forensic science. For ages and ages burial was the most popular choice, but in the past several years the rate of cremations has surpassed the burial rate. My preferred choice — having my corpse thrown out in the hot sun on one of those body farms for a month or two — continues to lag for some reason. Likely because y’all are cowards.

Part of the reason burials have dropped is because people consider them to be wasteful and not so ecologically friendly. A dude in the Netherlands is trying to change that:

A Dutch intrepid inventor is now “growing” coffins by putting mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, together with hemp fiber in a special mold that, in a week, turns into what could basically be compared to the looks of an unpainted Egyptian sarcophagus.

And while traditional wooden coffins come from trees that can take decades to grow and years to break down in the soil, the mushroom versions biodegrades and delivers the remains to nature in barely a month and a half.

I’m not sure if burial will ever make a true comeback, but if does it’ll be because multiple generations of stoners demanded to be put six feet under in mushroom and hemp coffins.

Tina Turner: 1939-2023

The legendary Tina Turner, an eight-time Grammy-winner, a 1991 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and a 2005 Kennedy Center Honoree, died yesterday in her home near Zurich, Switzerland. She had been suffering from many illnesses in recent years. She was 83.

Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Tennessee and raised there and in St. Louis. It was in St. Louis where she met her future husband, Ike Turner. Theirs began as a musical partnership, grew into more, and the two were married in the early 1960s. They had a series of R&B hits, with occasional pop crossovers, in the 1960s and 1970s, but as has been well documented in her memoir, “I, Tina,” books by others, movies, and interviews, Ike Turner was an abuser and a drug addict. Tina left him while traveling through Dallas in 1976 with only 36 cents and a gas station credit card in her pocket. When their divorce was finalized two years later she was deeply in debt due to the courts assigning her responsibility for the duo’s IRS liens and unfulfilled concert obligations. She was forced to rely on public assistance at times.

Turner continued to perform and record but reached a level of success miles above anything she had previously experienced in the wake of her 1984 album “Private Dancer.” The record spawned three top-10 hits, sold five million copies, garnered four Grammy Awards, and led to multiple sold out arena tours as well as a pretty damn great starring role as the antagonist, Aunty Entity, in 1985’s “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” She continued to record and tour until her retirement in 2000.

Readers know that, at this point, I am about to drop a Tina Turner song. It’s something of a fraught exercise here, though, as the stuff she did that I consider to be her most amazing and impressive work involves horrible men like Ike Turner or Phil Spector — and hell, she starred opposite another jackass in Mel Gibson in “Thunderdome” — and who wants to think any more about them than we have to? Her 1980s-90s pop output is some of the best stuff that came out during those years, but it lacks some of the grit and verve you find in the older stuff and man I love that grit and verve. So I suppose I’ll try to split the difference and go with a banger of a song from the early 70s, but one for which Tina Turner has sole songwriting credit, the semi-autobiographical “Nutbush City Limits.”

Rest in Peace Tina Turner. And have a great day everyone.