Cup of Coffee: May 4, 2023

Trash talk, Scherzer lays an egg, the Cubs are getting sued, home runs are being elaborately celebrated, and we talk about the killing of Jordan Neely, The National, and parking

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

We had some genuine trash talk after the White Sox-Twins game last night. Max Scherzer returned but I think he’d like to take a Mulligan on that. Elsewhere, I apologize in advance for the transaction item which leads off The Daily Briefing, the Angels are being unapologetic jackwagons with their latest media policy, the Cubs are being sued over a ticket sales thing and, if they agree to a settlement, I imagine it’ll include an apology. We also talk about the home run celebration boom, a retirement, and we have a sweet guest post today.

In Other Stuff we talk about the killing of Jordan Neely, a go on a bit more about The National, and I learned something new about parking. The fact that that excites me tells you everything you need to know about the sort of person I am: a profoundly boring person.

Let’s get at ‘er.

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And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

White Sox 6, Twins 4: Break up the Pale Hose, who have won three in a row. Luis Robert Jr. homered. Eloy Jiménez hit a tie-breaking RBI single in the seventh. Tim Anderson and Yasmani Grandal each had three hits. Keynan Middleton saved the game, ending it by striking out Carlos Correa. Afterwards he said “I knew I was going to face Correa, and I don't like him. So it was kind of cool. I like that. I enjoyed that a lot . . . I mean, he's a cheater.” This is the most excitement the Midwest has seen since someone thought to put tater tots in a casserole.

Tigers 6, Mets 5; Tigers 8, Mets 1: Eric Haase homered and drove in five and Javier Báez also went deep in the first game of the twinbill. Haase homered again In the nightcap. In that one Max Scherzer returned from his suspension and got chased before he could finish four innings. The final line: 3.1 IP, 8 H, 6 ER, 1 BB, 3 K. Justin Verlander returns against the Tigers today. If they beat him after beating Scherzer I’m pretty sure they then move on to face Rick Porcello, Aníbal Sánchez and, the final boss, Doug Fister.

Diamondbacks 12, Rangers 7: Walker Texas Ranger Killer. Christian Walker, that is, who hit two homers, drew a bases loaded walk and drove in five. Ketel Marte and Emmanuel Rivera also homered for Arizona, who snapped Texas’ four-game winning streak.

Nationals 2, Cubs 1: Washington pitcher Jake Irvin made his major league debut. He plunked the first batter he faced square in the back on his first-ever big league pitch. In his defense he probably heard somewhere that you wanna announce your presence with authority. Irvin calmed down after that, allowing just one run and a couple of singles while working into the fifth. then four Nats relievers tossed four and two-thirds innings of shutout ball. Washington scored one on a double play and CJ Abrams singled in the tie-breaker in the seventh. He did that on Tuesday too, which I am pretty sure is evidence that we’re living in a simulation.

Giants 4, Astros 2: Logan Webb allowed two while pitching into the eighth, Wilmer Flores homered, and Joey Bart and Austin Slater had two hits each as San Francisco takes two of three.

Dodgers 10, Phillies 6: Philly had a 5-0 lead after the top of the third, L.A. took a lead by the eighth, but the Phillies tied it up in the top of the ninth. Craig Kimbrel pitched the bottom half and reminded Dodgers fans of just how fun the Craig Kimbrel Experience can be by loading the bases with a single and two walks. That brought up Max Muncy with just one out, so he needed to only watch a wild pitch, take a walk, hit a single, or even just put the ball in the air to win the game. He decided instead to walk it off with a grand slam. Always better to leave nothing to chance. Bryce Harper doubled and reached base five times but the Phillies have nonetheless lost four in a row. They gave up double-digit runs to the Dodgers in all three games of this sweep.

Yankees 4, Guardians 3: Yesterday, before this game, Yankees GM Brian Cashman said “Don't count us out. Don't give up on us . . . This is a championship-caliber operation.” I’m not too sure about that but they did show some gumption here at least, falling down 2-0 early but tying things up with homers from Willie Calhoun and Jake Bauers. They fell behind again in the top of the ninth but Calhoun struck once more in the bottom half, forcing extras with an RBI single. Jose Trevino came on as a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the tenth and walked it off by singling in the Manfred Man. It wasn’t all good, though: Harrison Bader, just one day back from the injured list, left after a ninth-inning collision with Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Oswald Peraza left the game after after hurting his right ankle as a pinch runner.

Padres 7, Reds 1: Brett Sullivan doubled in two and hit a two-run homer. Juan Soto went 1-for-3, drove in three, and walked three times. That’s the most Juan Soto batting line I’ve seen from him in like a year and a half. Seth Lugo and a few relievers scattered eight hits and allowed one run.

Atlanta 14, Marlins 6: Ronald Acuña Jr. won April Player of the Month honors yesterday. Then he went out and hit a three-run homer. The big man on the night, though, was Marcell Ozuna, who went 3-for-5 and homered twice, one of which was a grand slam. Atlanta hit six dingers in all with Austin Riley, Michael Harris II, and Ozzie Albies all going deep as well. Bad news: Atlanta starter Kyle Wright left with shoulder soreness. He opened the season on the injured list with right shoulder inflammation and had a cortisone shot in January and now it seems it’s back again.

Rays 8, Pirates 1: Shane McClanahan became baseball's first six-game winner, allowing one run on five hits over six, striking out nine, and dropping his ERA to 2.03. Josh Lowe and Wander Franco homered for the juggernaut Rays. The Buccos are on their first three-game skid of the year.

Red Sox 8, Blue Jays 3: Make it five in a row for Boston. Enmanuel Valdez, Triston Casas and Masataka Yoshida each drove in two. Nick Pivetta went six innings, giving up three runs, including solo home runs by Daulton Varsho and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Guerrero’s went 450 feet over the Green Monster, they say, but based on the looks of it off the bat I’m pretty sure it landed in the Cracker Barrel parking lot just off the I-93 exit in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Royals 6, Orioles 0: Zack Greinke picked up his first win of 2023 — and his first win in fourteen starts going back to last August — by shutting out the O’s for five innings. Four of his friends in the bullpen finished off the six-hitter. Vinnie Pasquantino was the big man on offense, homering and hitting two RBI doubles.

Angels 6, Cardinals 4: St. Louis clung to a 4-3 lead entering the ninth but then Jake Lamb tied it up with a solo shot and Mike Trout put the Halos ahead with a solo shot of his own. Anthony Rendon singled in Shohei Ohtani with an insurance run. Ohtani started this one as well. He wasn’t stellar, allowing four runs in five innings, but he managed to strike out 13 Cardinals hitters. The top three batters in the Cardinals order — Lars Nootbaar, Paul Goldschmidt, and Nolan Gorman — whiffed a combined eight times. That ain’t gonna get it done.

Rockies 7, Brewers 1: Break up the Rockies too as they’ve won three straight. Kyle Freeland tossed five scoreless and five Rockies relievers allowed just one the rest of the way. Kris Bryant and Charlie Blackmon homered. Only three of Colorado’s seven runs were earned but even those three would’ve been enough on this day.

Mariners 7, Athletics 2: AJ Pollock tied the game with a solo home run in the ninth. Eugenio Suárez hit a three-run homer in the tenth and J.P. Crawford singled in two more after that to put this one away with authority. After the game Seattle manager Scott Servais said, “Not the prettiest win. They don’t ask how you got there as long as you get there, and we got there.” Servais is originally from the Midwest, however, so he’s clearly lying because you cannot arrive at someone’s house in the Midwest without someone asking “so, how’d you come?” If they’re over 70 they’ll be sure to tell you there was a better route. If they’re under 70 they’ll just think it.

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The Daily Briefing

First, a transaction

Yesterday the Diamondbacks called up right-hander Brandon Pfaadt from Triple-A Reno and designated infielder Seth Beer for assignment.

This marks the first time someone has gotten Pfaadt after giving up Beer.

The Angels are screening requests to speak with Angels coaches for “negative” questions

Sam Blum, the Angels beat writer for The Athletic, has a new feature about Anthony Rendon. It’s a fine enough feature if you care about its subject as Blum is a good writer, but this is the most interesting part of it:

The Athletic requested to speak with Angels hitting coach Marcus Thames. However, under a recently revised policy, the Angels allow coaches to speak to the media on a case-by-case basis. They did not permit Thames to speak to The Athletic about Rendon because the potential line of questioning was deemed too negative. The team said it prefers manager Phil Nevin to handle such questions.

While such an approach to the media is pretty damn obnoxious from anyone, it’s also pretty stupid and self-defeating. If someone is gonna slam you, dudes, they’re gonna slam you. If you talk to them it does not guarantee that they won’t slam you, but it’s more likely than not that whatever story results from the interview will be more nuanced than one that results from you giving a reporter the high hat like this.

This business is particularly rich coming from the Angels. I mean, you’re the goddamn Los Angeles Angels. You should be ecstatic that anyone wants to cover anything or anyone connected to your franchise not named Ohtani or Trout. They really need to get over themselves.

The Cubs are being sued for soliciting ticket sales over text message

Our friends at Baseball and the Law have hipped me to a putative class action lawsuit that has been filed against the Cubs over text messages soliciting ticket sales.

The upshot: the plaintiff claims he received texts from the team trying to sell him tickets but that he replied “STOP” to the messages only to have ticket sales solicitation texts continue. That’d be a violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which aims at ending robocalls and texts to cell phones without consent. As The National Law Review explains, the plaintiff seeks to represent a class consisting of other people to whom the Cubs sent at least two text messages within a 12 month period despite having been sent a “STOP” reply.

As is the case with a hell of a lot of class actions, the key to this one going places involves mandatory statutory damages. In the case of the TCPA, each violative text message carries of penalty of up to $1,500, so it adds up. The plaintiff says he’ll recover at least $3 million. He may get a nice check. His lawyers will certainly get a nice check. The other class members will get like $2.50 off their next Cubs ticket. In closing: our system is not a perfect one.

The home run celebration boom

It’s been building for a year or two but 2023 is turning out to be The Year of the Choreographed Home Run Celebration. Props, costumes, you name it, and the more contrived and silly the better. The Angels wear a samurai helmet. The Brewers have cheeseheads. The Reds wear viking regalia and pretend to row a longboat. The Orioles do that water-filled beer bong thing. The Mariners wear a blue and yellow Darth Vader helmet — well, half of one — and wield a trident.

Over at Sports Illustrated Emma Baccellieri writes about all of those celebrations, how they came to be, and the surprising people who are putting the most time and effort into creating them:

One feature many of them have in common? Plenty of celebrations, like the Reds’ Viking, were started by a pitcher. Just because they aren’t hitting any home runs themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t invested in how to enjoy them . . . This is partly an interest in contributing to the game however possible even while not on the field. That manifests in how welcome the dugout celebrations have become, too: A pitcher isn’t going to be offended by a perceived slight if he was the one to orchestrate his own team celebration. And it’s partly that pitchers simply have the time. No one has more days off to sit around and ruminate.

In just a few short years we’ve gone from a league in which a guy could expect a ball in the ribs if he watched his own home run for a couple seconds too long to one in which entire teams are dressing up in costumes and performing song and dance routines after every dinger with pitchers being the ones egging it on rather than having their feelings hurt about being “shown up.”

Which is pretty wonderful, eh?

Robinson Chirinos retires

Veteran catcher Robinson Chirinos announced his retirement yesterday. 

Chirinos, 38, played 11 seasons in the bigs. He came up with the Rays for a cup of coffee in late 2011 then suited up for the Rangers between 2013 and 2018, primarily serving as a backup. After a season in Houston in 2019 he split 2020 between a return to the Rangers and some time with the Mets before spending 2021 with the Cubs and 2022 with the Orioles. He was unable to find a club for 2023 after hitting .179/.265/.287 in 220 plate appearances in Baltimore, but he did play for Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic a couple of months ago.

Eleven years as a backup after not even making it to the bigs until you’re 27 is not too shabby. And Chirinos had a couple of nice seasons, posting an .866 OPS in 88 games for Texas in 2018 and getting a lot of starting time for the 2017 Astros, for whom he hit 17 homers in the regular season and two in the World Series. Though I presume Kenyan Middleton has some opinions on those homers.

According to Baseball-Reference.com Chirinos made around $21 million in his career. Here’s hoping he enjoys it over the course of a nice, long, and enjoyable retirement.

Guest Post: Lois Miklas

I sell Cup of Coffee coffee mugs here. If you buy one, and send me a photo, you can write a guest post about anything you want. Today’s guest post is from Lois Miklas. Take it away Lois!

Tribute to a baseball lover

I credit my mom, Lucy Miklas, with my love for baseball. My dad was also a fan, but memories of my mom’s quirky take on the game still add to my enjoyment. My mom was a lifelong St. Louis resident and therefore, of course, a Cardinals fan. The longevity of her fanhood goes back to a story of her stint in first aid at Sportsman’s Park (Busch I) after being hit by a foul ball. I have a vivid memory of her running down the front steps of our house to greet me with news of the Cardinals World Series victory when I returned home from school on an October day in 1967. She was old-school enough to slip up and occasionally call the Dodgers “Brooklyn” into the 21st century.

Her single-minded devotion to Cardinals’ baseball was consistent with the sensibilities of a city that lost an NBA team and, not one, but two, NFL football franchises. When I had moved away, I remember trying to engage her and my dad in a conversation about the big news of Wayne Gretzky playing for the St. Louis Blues. My mom quickly dismissed the topic, instead wanting to talk about the Cardinals’ star d’jour, who I believe was Brian Jordan.

Some of her observations vie with Yogi-isms—both inexplicable and insightful. She wondered who would follow the Mets, since it’s not like they have a “hometown.” She took a dim view of expansion in the late 1990s since “there already aren’t enough good pitchers to go around.” And, oddly prescient, she repeatedly referred to Mark McGwire as “that so-called slugger,” even from the beginning of his days with the Cardinals. Loyal and pessimistic and the same time, she told me via a long-distance call in August of 2011, “Well, the Cardinals are completely out of it.” When I baited her a bit, saying that I hadn’t realized that they were statistically eliminated, she had to admit that this was not the case. Note: the Cardinals won the World Series in 2011. Another favorite story is my mom insisting that we always take a sweater to Cardinals’ home games—as if St. Louis was not known for its sweltering summer nights.

My mom was fortunate to live into her early 90s. In the last years she had trouble concentrating or staying up late enough to watch her beloved Cardinals. Finally, she even stopped checking the box score in the Post-Dispatch the next morning. One of my last good baseball memories is taking her on a public tour of Busch Stadium III, which she seemed to enjoy, even though she had professed not to like retro stadiums—particularly the lights(?). As I’m sure many of us do, I still think of my parents, and especially my mom’s love for baseball, whenever I attend a game. And, Mom, I promise to take a sweater!

Thanks, Lois! And always listen to your mothers, people. Even if they’re kinda full of it.

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Other Stuff

The killing of Jordan Neely

As you likely saw, a man named Jordan Neely was killed on a New York subway train on Monday. Neely, 30, entered the train and began yelling about how he was hungry and desperate and didn’t care if he went to jail or died. He did not physically assault or attack anyone. Despite that, a 24 year-old man jumped up and placed Neely in a chokehold. Another couple of people helped hold Neely down. Neely was held that way for several minutes — possibly as long as 15 minutes according to some reports — was choked into unconsciousness, never regained consciousness, and died. The police briefly took the man who choked Neely to death into custody, questioned him, and then released him without charges.

Much of the initial media coverage referred to what the younger man did to Neely in the passive voice or referred to him as “restraining” Neely, in much the same way the media rarely refers to police killing people but, rather, uses phrases which imply that bullets fly and people die via some inevitable act of nature as opposed to a human’s decision to commit an act of violence. Lots also refer to the man who choked Neely as “an ex-Marine” which is wholly irrelevant to this incident but which works to cast him as someone who somehow has a greater right to use violence.

Sometimes other people behave in ways that make us uncomfortable. Or possibly even afraid. That does not issue anyone a license to kill them, however. We shouldn’t have to say that, but it’s true. And that’s the case even if police, the courts, and a great many other people disagree.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about Jordan Neely in the coming days. Whatever else can and will be said about him, however, the fact remains that he was likely a man suffering from mental illness or distress and the city’s, state’s and country’s social safety nets all failed him as they have failed countless others. When his illness or distress upset some people, he was killed. I’m not OK with that. I hope you aren’t either.

The National 101

I wrote a lot of words about The National’s new album yesterday. If you know The National well those words were likely none too surprising for you, even if your views on the latest album may differ. If you do not know The National but wish to, there was an excellent profile of them in The New Yorker recently, which one of you forwarded me yesterday. The best part of the profile explains that whole Sad Dad/washed/middle aged vibe I’ve flippantly referenced about them a few times.

The key point that I’ve always appreciated about the band but have never been quite able to put into words the way the piece’s writer, Amanda Petrusich, does is that when The National’s sadness or moroseness is not necessarily in response to life’s extremes. It can be, but it’s often about the day-to-day, low-level sadness, fear, or as Petrusich put it on Twitter recently, “the strange grief of adulthood” which is a basic part of the human predicament. “Ambient sadness” is another way the article refers to it. And it’s not always so bad, really:

. . . the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair . . . not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human . . . Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses . . . A thread of Midwestern humility—a kind of gentle self-abnegation—still runs through the National’s work . . . Much like his songwriting heroes Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, Berninger understands that true misery can also be kind of funny.

Aging normies like me can only relate so much to songs about heroin addiction, dying young, or legitimately horrible trauma. That sort of thing may touch our lives but, like most people, our lives just sort of shuffle on with highs and lows. If you’re a person of a certain age who has accumulated some of those quotidian losses referenced above, and if you’re the sort of person who reflects on that kind of thing rather than denies it or easily sloughs it off, the National pretty much nail it for ya.

Parking minimums

I’m sensitive to the sorts of concerns that today’s brand of young urbanists have but I’ll be honest: I’m ignorant about a lot of the policies and positions relevant to the matter. Density is better. We need more transit and walkable cityscapes. That broad stuff is easy. Since I’ve been in the damn suburbs for so long, however, I have a lot of work to do to hip myself to the, ahem, street-level policies relevant to all of that.

Which is why I like to read articles like this one in the Washington Post which talks about a seemingly minor thing that has massive implications for how cities function: parking minimums. As in municipal requirements setting forth how many parking spaces certain sorts of businesses and buildings must have. They’re pretty granular and, at least at first reading, can seem rather random:

San Jose at one point required miniature golf courses to have 1.25 parking spaces per golf tee. In Seattle, bowling alleys needed five spaces per lane. Dallas, meanwhile, determined a sewage treatment plant must have one parking space for every million gallons of sewage treatment capacity.

As the article notes, most of these laws greatly overestimate how much parking is actually needed, leading to a lot of wasted space. But it’s worse than just wasting space. Building parking costs money, so when developers are forced to put in a certain amount of parking, they pass the costs of those spaces — or those garages — on to you in the form of higher rents or higher prices for the businesses the parking serves. There are multiple other downstream effects of deciding that you cannot have an apartment building or a store without 3x the number of spaces that are actually necessary.

Several cities have eliminated minimum parking rules in recent years and, yes, there are now fewer parking spaces per business or apartment or whatever in these places. But it has led to the building of more housing and more affordable housing. And the transit-heavy downtown areas which have eliminated the rules in places like Buffalo and Seattle have actually thrived. It’s pretty neat stuff.

One other thing I learned in the article was less than neat:

The first parking minimum was implemented for an apartment building in Columbus, Ohio, in 1923. By the 1950s, with the expansion of the suburbs and personal automobile ownership, they were a nearly universal feature of new urban development.

Knowing absolutely nothing about the history of municipal minimum parking space rules before reading this, I still would've bet my children that the concept was invented in Columbus. This place is basically the “what about the parking?” capital of the world. Welp, I was right.

Have a great day, everyone.