Cup of Coffee: May 26, 2022

Joc Pederson: lefty masher, Yankees anonobots, the Joey Votto show, the Phillies Phiasco, some righteous anger in defense of the mentally ill, and my perpetual disappointment with Democrats

May 26, 2022

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There was not much off-the-field baseball news yesterday but the Phillies defense did something new yesterday, so that’s fun. The Reds did something new too. At least according to Joey Votto who said “We are trying to win a baseball game.” First time for everything, I suppose. Also, Joc Pederson stayed hot, Thomas Szapucki had a bad day, some anonobots powered the Yankees to victory, I talk about snakefish and mudskippers and, no, Rob Deer is not dead.

In Other Stuff, well, there was really only one thing people were talking about yesterday so I talk about it too. Towards the end, though, I at least try to lighten it up with a link to a good James Bond article and another item about my son’s incredibly unrealistic automotive expectations.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Giants 9, Mets 3: On Tuesday Joc Pederson hit three homers. While he normally sits against lefties because, well, he’s Joc Pederson, you don’t sit someone as hot as Joc is right now. That move paid off for Gabe Kapler as Pederson homered off of lefty Thomas Szapucki, who was just called up by the Mets. Evan Longoria homered twice off of him and Mike Yastrzemski did too. Before he was done Szapucki gave up nine runs in an inning and a third and that’s not the kind of thing a team is coming back from. I dunno. Maybe this was less about Kapler going against lefty-lefty orthodoxy and more about him thinking “Christ, it’s just Thomas Szapucki. Let everyone take their hacks.”

Pirates 10, Rockies 5: The Rockies blew an early 4-0 lead as Jack Suwinski and Josh VanMeter each hit three-run homers for Pittsburgh. Suwinski is on a 31-homer pace. He’s also hitting .188/.244/.413 on the year. Kinda hoping that line and the homer totals hold up because that may cause Rob Deer to come back from the dead and place some sort of crown on the kid’s head.

[Editor: Rob Deer is not dead]

Then Jack Cust.

[Editor: He’s not dead either]

Someone name me a dead Rob Deer type, then. We’ll fix it in post.

Atlanta 8, Phillies 4: Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the errors turn the minutes to hours?

Todd Zolecki @ToddZolecki

Haven't seen this before. A wild pitch and E8, although there probably should be an E2 in there, too.

Go to the 40-second mark or so and watch the replay. Realmuto’s throw goes through the gloves of the second baseman, the shortstop, AND the center fielder. And, of course it all started on a wild pitch so it can be said that five different Phillies screwed up on that play, even if only one error was awarded. Mercy. It also turned a tie game into a 5-4 Atlanta lead, after which Austin Riley homered. Swanson, who scored on that fiasco of a play, would later homer and went 4-for-5 on the night.

Reds 4, Cubs 3: Joey Votto homered, tripled, and drove in three. On the triple Votto looked like he was running in slow motion. It was kind of hilarious. Later in the game a Cubs reliever brushed him back so Reds reliever later plunked Patrick Wisdom. Dugouts got warned. Votto after the game:

Votto insisted that Strickland, who earned his first save of the season, wasn't intentionally throwing at Wisdom with the Reds leading 4-2 with one out in the ninth.
"No, you don't put the tying run at the plate with one out," Votto said. "That was absolutely unintentional. We are trying to win a baseball game. We don't get paid for retribution."

“The Reds” and “trying to win a baseball game” have not exactly been two things that have gone together this year, but I suppose I get what he’s saying; and
It’s Hunter Strickland we’re talking about here. That dude spends his offseason tracking the movements of elementary school classmates who wronged him so that he might, one day, throw a baseball at them while they’re mowing their lawns or are waiting in line at the grocery checkout or something. Don’t insult my intelligence here, Joey.

Whatever. I just don’t know why anyone would brush Votto back. He’s delightful.

Rays 5, Marlins 4: A five-run first thanks to RBI doubles from Wander Franco and Randy Arozarena and a two-run shot from Harold Ramírez put the Rays on too tall a hill for the Fish to climb. Yeah, fish climb. Snakehead fish have evolved to “walk” on land, sort of propelling themselves forward by moving their head and back fin in opposite directions. And don’t even get me started about mudskippers. Open your damn mind, man. There’s a big world out there for you if you drop your preconceptions. *takes long drag*

Yankees 2, Orioles 0: JP Sears, who I am pretty sure is not an actual person, threw five shutout innings for the Yankees and four relievers, most of whom I have not heard of, finished the five-hitter. It still absolutely slays me that these two have played 13 games before Memorial Day, but I suppose if the Yankees keep turning their roster over due to injuries and keep trotting out these anonobots it’s like a totally different team out there.

White Sox 3, Red Sox 1: Sox win! Lucas Giolito held Boston to one run over six and Jake Burger’s three-run blast in the sixth supplied him with a sufficient cushion. That homer came on slow-as-hell Rich Hill breaking ball that hung out over the plate. Burger blasted it 444 feet.

Astros 2, Guardians 1: Cristian Javier struck out nine while pitching into the sixth. Both the Astros runs came on sac flies. Cleveland’s only run came on a wild pitch. Feel the damn excitement.

Rangers 7, Angels 2: Mitch Garver and Kole Calhoun homered, with the former driving in two runs and the latter notching three hits and scoring three runs. Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani combined to go 0-for-7 with six strikeouts. That’s not somethin’ you see every day.

Tigers 4, Twins 2: The Twins took a 2-0 lead but Harold Castro hit two homers to tie it up and then Jeimer Candelario hit a tie-breaking two-run homer in the top of the 10th. The Twins loaded the bases with nobody out in the bottom half of the tenth but got bupkis and thus endeth their six-game winning streak.

Nationals 1, Dodgers 0: Erick Fedde tossed six shutout innings and three relievers completed the six-hit shutout. César Hernández hit an RBI single for the game’s only run. Washington avoids the sweep.

Brewers 2, Padres 1: Yu Darvish held Milwaukee to one hit through six, but in the seventh Rowdy Tellez doubled in the tying run after which Tyrone Taylor hit a go-ahead sacrifice fly. All the Padres could manage was one unearned run.

Athletics 4, Mariners 2: Seth Brown and Elvis Andrus homered and Luis Barrera hit an RBI single. Oakland took two of three.

The Daily Briefing

Giancarlo Stanton placed on the IL with right ankle inflammation

The headline is basically the whole story. He did it in Tuesday’s game.

There’s no official word as of yet regarding how long Stanton will be out, but Aaron Boone sounded optimistic yesterday that it’d be a short time on the shelf. Of course this is Giancarlo Stanton we’re talking about here, so one should take nothing for granted when it comes to injuries.

Stanton is hitting .285/.339/.523 with 11 homers and 35 RBI on the season.

Today in degenerate sports gambling news

A professional poker player named Cory Zeidman was indicted yesterday for a scheme — which spanned years — in which he and a bunch of unnamed co-conspirators claimed to have inside information about sporting events and charged people money to access their “information.” From ESPN:

"As alleged, Zeidman preyed on individuals who were led to believe he had inside information that would lead them to easy money," Homeland Security Investigations New York acting special agent in charge Ricky J. Patel said in a release announcing the arrest. "In reality, he was selling nothing but lies and misinformation -- bilking millions from victims along the way, leaving their lives in financial ruin and their bank accounts empty."

Exploiting gambling addicts by selling them access to gambling content which, despite what is being advertised, makes the gambler’s bets no more likely to pay off than mad, random chance is shameful.

Well, it’s OK when sports media companies do it, but that’s different. Somehow.

Other Stuff

Don’t scapegoat mental illness for our gun problem

As I wrote yesterday, we have the country we have — a violent, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and undemocratic country which does not care about the vulnerable but which cares deeply about the rich and powerful remaining rich and powerful — because a great many people want the country to be that way. It may not be the case that, in sheer numbers, more people want that than don’t, but in terms of how the nation’s will is communicated and realized, that’s what America has determined that it wants. It’s what our system produces because that’s what those who control our system want.

But it’s not enough for them to get what they want. It’s not enough for them to witness a mass murder of children, to know that the policies they favor contributed greatly to the mass murder of children, and to ignore any calls for anyone to take responsibility. No, they need to punch down at the vulnerable as a means of distracting from their complicity:

Without putting too fine a point on it and without sharing more specifics than I have already shared in this space, my family — going back for more than a century, but certainly at present — is quite familiar with mental health difficulties. I have days on my calendar when there are so many therapy appointments to keep track of that I get the “three more items” prompt at the bottom. If I have to fill out one more psych patient intake form for anyone I’m related to I’m pretty sure I get a free sub. I’m getting the “NORM!” treatment when I walk into the pharmacy to pick up everyone’s prescriptions. In short: I know what the hell I’m talking about here.

And I know that these motherfuckers do not. I know that these motherfuckers simply do not care. I know that these motherfuckers, knowing that the national gun fetish they’ve stoked has an incalculable body count at this point, will automatically look for something — anything — else to blame. As is so often the case, they blame the vulnerable. They blame the mentally ill.

I know a few more things:

That only 3%–5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population;
Despite the sort of lip service like Carlson is offering above, Republican budgets frequently slash mental health care, either directly or indirectly. Republicans have routinely, as a matter of policy, have proposed and/or enacted billion or even trillion dollar cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Disability Insurance. Those programs are by far the largest payers of behavioral health services in the country. When it comes time for belt-tightening, mental health care is always going to cut before chest X-rays and cardiac care; and
The mentally ill are far more likely to use guns on themselves than on other people, and when mental illness and deadly violence coincide, ready access to a gun is a major risk factor for suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control there were 24,432 gun suicides in the United States in 2018. Three-quarters of them involved handguns. Our suicide attempt rates in this country are not significantly higher than in other countries but our “success” rate is considerably higher given how much more access people have here to the most lethal means of committing suicide. The guns are the driving factor, not the mental illness as such.

That last item is one that is not a mere academic matter. In my fun travels through the world of mental health care these past few months there have been countless times when psychiatrists and therapists have had to go over various checklists with me. One of the first questions on those checklists is “are there firearms in your house.” Once, after answering “no” to that for the third or fourth time I made a mild crack about it. The response back from the doctor, while polite, was serious. The upshot of it was, and I’m paraphrasing, “we can do all kinds of things to treat serious mental illness. We cannot do anything about someone with a gun in their hand.”

Blaming Tuesday’s mass murder or any other act of violence on mental illness is classic scapegoating. It’s ignoring a real, demonstrable problem — the clear connection between gun ownership and gun violence — and disingenuously targeting the mentally ill as the cause of the problem. It also ignores the fact that there are a great many people who commit horrific acts without being mentally ill. Indeed, psychological factors which are not mental illnesses — things like hostility, aggression, anger, alienation, misogyny — are far more likely predictors of violence than depression, anxiety bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.

The fact that Republicans don’t attribute violence to aggression, misogyny, and the like says a hell of a lot. The fact that they, instead, punch down at the mentally ill says a hell of a lot too.

Yeah, we get it. You’re “Horrified and heartbroken”

The degree to which Republicans — and Democratic lawmakers who consistently enable Republicans — don’t care about 19 kids getting murdered can be seen in their centrally-drafted, focus-grouped expressions of sadness:

There is no doubt GOP comms consultant out there who sent a memo telling lawmakers to replace “thoughts and prayers” with “horrified and heartbroken” which, near the end, also reminded them to do a shoutout to “first responders.” I would really love to meet the person who drafted that memo and look them in their black, black, doll-like eyes.

They might be too busy to meet with us though because, based on what we learned last night, they’re likely frantically editing the “pray for first responders” part.

Chuck Schumer: We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas

A day after another deadly mass shooting , Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “there is a plague upon this nation.” But then said he’d do nothing about it because “my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue.” There will be no legislation here. There will not even be symbolic resolution or anything.

I get that we’ve decided as a nation that having one chamber of Congress that doesn’t adhere to democratic principles and a corrupt Supreme Court is totally cool and that those things effectively prevent needed legislation from being enacted, but that does not excuse inaction. There is value in holding votes on things that are certain to not pass as a means of defining issues for future elections and requiring the opposition to stake out its position. There is value in staking out a moral position and advocating for it, even in the face of certain defeat.

Republicans certainly understand that. They just do it with shitty things like opposition to vaccine mandates and, however stupid that was, it has largely paid off with their policy positions emerging victorious. They did it with abortion for years and are now finally getting what they want. It’s effective politics. It signals priorities and puts matters of importance into public discourse in ways simply reacting placidly to events in the news does not. It’s a means of signaling to one’s supporters that their concerns matter and that they are not being hung out to dry. It signals to them that someone will fight for what they want, even in the face of great odds or certain defeat because, hey, at least it’s defeat with dignity. There is a great deal of value in firing up one’s supporters in such a fashion.

Democratic leaders either don’t understand that or they don’t care. They’re content to say that they will not fight for what we want if it’s going to be difficult or if it’s going to lead to short term setbacks. They’d prefer to not even try because trying is hard, man.

Then, of course, after having made it clear that they will not make maximal use of the power they do possess to advance their constituents’ interests — substantively or symbolically — they act appalled when people aren’t inspired to show up to vote for them.

What a fucking party.

On the Bond Films

Keith Law watched all 25 of the Eon James Bond films and came to some conclusions. It’s not a straight ranking, though he does say which movie he thinks is the best, which is the worst, and assesses the various Bonds. I agree with his conclusions basically 100%.

Great Moments in My Son’s Unrealistic Expectations

Last week I talked about how my son, who at the time had had his driver’s license for five days, begged me to buy him a 36 year-old sports car. I spent several days after that explaining to him that I was not buying him such a thing as an old, likely unreliable little rocket ship with no airbags because to do such a thing would be highly irresponsible. He finally accepted it and stopped asking me to buy him the 36 year-old sports car.

Now he’s asking me for a 37 year-old sports car:

I said no, and then the bargaining began. Part of that bargaining involved his insistence that this was mostly going to be a project car for him to tinker with:

Someday he’s gonna out-argue me. But not today.

The fun thing about this particular car is that my dad had the same model year 300ZX. His was a different color, but it was the same car. He hated it, actually.

He had previously owned a 1980 Toyota Supra and absolutely loved it. Thought it was fun to drive and sporty and everything. He figured he’d feel the same way about Nissan’s little sports car, but nah. While the Toyota was nimble, the Nissan drove like a tank. A lot of it had to do with the fact that, unlike the Toyota, the 300ZX was an automatic, which he reluctantly bought thinking that it might inspire my mom, who can’t really drive a manual, to drive it more. She didn’t and he was stuck with the tank. He also wasn’t crazy about the all-digital dashboard, which was novel at the time and which he was certain would go on the fritz at some point and cost him $1,500 or something.

Anyway, he got rid of the 300ZX within a year or two. First for a 1987 Maxima, for reasons I can’t recall. Then when he realized a 1987 Maxima was not exactly the best car when you have two large teenage boys to cart around he got one of those conversion vans. He liked that on road trips but hated it otherwise. Following a weird dalliance with a Ford Taurus — I dunno man — he got himself a 1988 Chevy Blazer. He really liked that and kept it for many years. There’s no point to all of this other than to say that my dad has gone through a LOT of friggin’ cars in his life, and my son is so, so, so not getting a 1985 300ZX.

If Carlo was smarter about this he’d find an ad for a 1980 Supra and send it to his grandfather. He liked that car so much he’d probably buy it for Carlo just for the vicarious thrill.