Cup of Coffee: November 9, 2023

Tell 'em Wash, Harper at the cold corner, some GMs got the scoots, Boras' B.S., more on autonomous vehicles, the delusional J.D. Vance, Great Moments in I.P. Exploitation, and waitin' for your man

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

I went kinda long today so let’s dispense with the introductory pleasantries and just jump in, shall we?

---

The Daily Briefing

Ron Washington is the new Angels manager

Tell ‘em Wash: the Los Angeles Angels have hired Ron Washington to be their new manager.

Washington, of course, managed the Texas Rangers for eight years, between 2007 and 2014, winning two American League pennants and compiling a .521 winning percentage. After resigning from the job due to personal reasons he resumed his coaching career with the Athletics in 2015 and then, prior to the 2017 season, was hired by Atlanta to be their third base coach. He held that job through 2023, winning a World Series ring in 2021.

Despite being out of the managerial game for several years, Washington, 71, remained a highly-respected coach and sometimes managerial candidate who has received considerable praise from both his players and his colleagues for decades. He’ll certainly be faced with a challenge with the Angels who, outside of Mike Trout, are pretty bereft of talent and are unlikely to be contenders any time soon. Team owner Arte Moreno, however, has reportedly been keenly interested in bringing in an experienced manager and Washington certainly fits that bill.

Bryce Harper to be the Phillies full-time first baseman

Phillies GM Dave Dombrowski told reporters on yesterday that Bryce Harper will be the club's everyday first baseman in 2024. “He's happy to do whatever we wanted him to do,” Dombrowski said. "He said he'd play first or the outfield. He feels great. But the more we talked about it internally, we liked the idea of playing him at first."

The other day I wondered about the Phillies not offering Rhys Hoskins a qualifying offer. Well, that settles that. He’s in the wind now.

Harper played a decent first base in a small sample size last year, making just one error in 36 games. Going by the eye test he looked pretty comfortable there too, and his bat certainly did not suffer for it. So, it would seem, this is his new home.

GM meetings end early after becoming the GI meetings

I wish I came up with that term but I didn’t. That came courtesy of Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein, who reported from Scottsdale late yesterday afternoon that, behind the scenes, the General Manager Meetings were the stuff that nightmares are made of:

If it seems that baseball news is developing slowly, perhaps that’s because executives’ bowels are moving too quickly. More than 30 of the 300 or so officials in attendance have come down with an undetermined stomach ailment at Major League Baseball’s annual offseason kickoff event. The GM meetings have become the GI meetings.

Initially there was some debate as to whether it was a food-borne thing or a virus, but even after greater food safety measures were taken on Tuesday, people continued to get sick as of late yesterday, essentially confirming that it was a virus. As a result the remainder of the GM meetings were cancelled last night.

I wonder if Brian Cashman’s irritability the other day had anything to do with all of this. It’d certainly be more excusable if it was.

David Peterson had hip labrum surgery

Yesterday the Mets announced that, on Monday, starter David Peterson underwent surgery to repair the labrum in his left hip. They said that a typical return to play for this type of procedure is 6-7 months. I’ll take their word for it, so I’ll assume that Peterson won’t be back until May or possibly June. One wonders why he didn’t have the procedure a month ago, putting his return in the April-May timeframe, but I got out of the business of trying to understand the Mets medical decisions a long time ago.

Peterson started 21 games for the Mets last season and, before Monday anyway, was listed third in the rotation on most iterations of the team depth chart that I’ve seen. The Mets were already in need of multiple starting pitchers this offseason. Now that Peterson is slated to miss a good chunk of the first half that need is even more acute.

You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war

Headline from Bob Nightengale: “Free agent Shohei Ohtani completely dominates conversation at MLB GM Meetings.”

Reality, based on what I can tell of the GM meetings: a dozen reporters asked a dozen GMs if they are considering signing Shohei Ohtani. The GMs, while acknowledging that “anyone would love to have that guy,” said that they were not discussing individual free agents, because they can’t and because to do so would be dumb anyway.

So, rather than Ohtani “dominating the conversation,” it was reporters asking a question that they know would not be answered over and over dominating the conversation. One gets their content where they can, I guess. Even if they have to engineer it.

Scott Boras is back on his neutral site World Series bullshit

Yesterday Scott Boras made his annual appearance at the General Manager Meetings. Next month he’ll do the same at the Winter Meetings. In both cases all of the baseball press on site stops what it’s doing and listens to Boras talk about whatever it is he wants to talk about and they then dutifully transcribe his words — and his increasingly bad metaphors and puns — and tweets them out into the universe as if they matter all that much beyond Scott Boras trying to stir up interest in his clients.

Boras does, occasionally, opine on things other than how good it would be for teams to sign Scott Boras clients. Yesterday, for example, he mentioned two things: moving the amateur draft away from All-Star weekend, where it’s been the past couple of years, and stumping for a neutral site World Series.

The draft thing is well-taken. It used to be in June but Rob Manfred moved it to the All-Star break in an effort to drum up more public interest in it. That really has not happened and likely never will as there is a practical limit to how many people will tune in for a draft of a bunch of players they’ve never heard of and who will not make an impact in the big leagues for several years. What’s more, moving the draft has over taxed front office staffs who now have to pivot directly from a mid-July draft to the late-July trade deadline. Clubs have beefed about this ever since the change went down. It’s a reasonable beef. Put the draft back in June where it belongs.

The neutral site World Series thing has been a Boras obsession for well over a decade now. He’s never made a strong argument for it apart from vague claims that it would bring baseball “world attention” and put it on a “bigger stage.” And even those vague claims are kinda dumb.

Honest question: how would putting the World Series in Miami or Los Angeles or wherever make anyone, let alone “the world” more interested in it? Most of “the world” consumes the World Series as a TV product. It makes no difference to “the world” if that TV show is coming from one city or another. For TV purposes the stadium in which the game is played is a TV studio and no one has ever tuned in or tuned out because of where the studio is located.

So, we look at it as an in-person event. How would that look?

While 80,000 fans may make a trek to a neutral location for a Super Bowl weekend, does Boras honestly think that baseball fans will travel to a neutral site for an uncertain duration of between four and seven games? Which, because we’d still likely have off-days for pitching staff preservation purposes, could take as many as nine days? And, of course, we’re not just talking 80,000 fans. A neutral site World Series will require the sale of 150,000 to 300,000 tickets depending on how long the Series goes. Hometown crowds will certainly buy those when the games are at home, but how many Dbacks fans, to use the most recent example, would’ve traveled to Miami this year? How many Rangers fans would’ve gone to Seattle or Los Angeles? And if it’s not locals, who are the people buying these tickets?

Ultimately the only thing a neutral site World Series would accomplish would be to allow Major League Baseball and its stakeholders to throw more parties and hold more sponsored events about which most people unaffiliated with Major League Baseball and its stakeholders do not care a lick. Scott Boras may be able to plan some tremendous parties at a neutral site World Series during which he can woo new clients and business partners, but are you gonna buy a plane ticket, multiple game tickets, and a hotel room for several nights to go the Gillette Gala? Or to some B-list celebrity-hosted charity auction? Of course not.

A neutral site World Series would be a complete failure. They’d be giving tickets away, losing money, and the vibe in the stadiums would be pathetic. It’d rob home cities of what is still a singularly exciting event — a World Series featuring the local nine — in favor of some contrived corporate sponsor/VIP-humping baloney. It was a bad idea when Boras first floated it 10-15 years ago and it remains a bad idea.

---

Other Stuff

BlueSky Codes

All ya’ll told me yesterday that the codes you’ve been sending me to share are being quickly used so I’ll keep sharing them. And man, there’s a lot of ‘em today.

• bsky-social-fryfl-tiget

• bsky-social-qerha-mpb5k

• bsky-social-fe7xw-yu2yl

• bsky-social-i75zp-f572v

• bsky-social-amkkl-y2vct

• bsky-social-54u7a-d4ti2

• bsky-social-6a4hh-iprwm

• bsky-social-o6xog-mg5fp

• bsky-social-kmeqi-ku4gp

• bsky-social-3eg74-45vcq

• bsky-social-vyjz7-y2yau

• bsky-social-jy6b3-v2fkl

• bsky-social-qch7c-arrpx

• bsky-social-4r5tu-qgmoj

• bsky-social-5uows-jgzgn

One of the people who shared codes with me said there’s “gotta be some way you can turn yourself into a cult leader with these.” Believe me, I’ve been trying to figure that angle out. No dice so far, so I’ll content myself with feeling like a multi-level marketing guru and/or a drug dealer.

More on autonomous vehicles

Yesterday I wrote about an article that described a startup which aims to sell artificial intelligence software to the U.S. military that would enable the deployment of, for lack of a more pithy term, robot attack drones. In the item I said “I’d really like it if the bleeding edge of science perfected the process of getting an unmanned Hyundai Santa Fe across a medium sized city without mindlessly running down pedestrians before it takes over the business of launching missiles at people.”

A close friend of mine who subscribes to this newsletter and who is deeply knowledgable about AI and all manner of other things Silicon Valley, messaged me and pushed back on both my flip assertion about driverless cars and military robot attack drones. That led to some reflection and deeper thinking on my part.

On the first point, my friend shared with me a study that Waymo — Google’s driverless car subsidiary — authored in early September in conjunction with Swiss Reinsurance Company that purported to show that driverless vehicles reduce the frequency of personal injury and property damage claims. On the second point he argued, not un-compellingly in my mind, that deploying robot attack drones would be the least bad of uniformly bad options in terms of loss of life, cost, and other metrics if a major war broke out. I am way, way too ignorant about military matters to stake out a strong, informed position on that — and I maintain my belief that making wars easier and less visibly bloody to fight is gonna lead to more war — but I will say that my friend, who is far better-versed on such matters than me, made some pretty compelling points. Points that, some time down the line, I’ll take up again once I’ve had a chance to read and think about them more.

I’m not going to detail those points now because I’m not writing about this again as a means of either furthering a case that AI = Bad or to simply submit to my friend’s arguments that, to use a phrase he used in our conversation, “robots are better.” To the contrary, if my conversation with my friend did anything it was to help me focus on what, exactly, my issues are with driverless cars specifically or whatever other serious application of AI technology, such as military applications, may come in the future. “Focus,” though, is a misleading word here because that implies movement toward a more singular view. If anything, our conversation and my later pondering of it broadened my perspective and made me realize that my points about this kind of stuff are not as sharp as I sometimes portray them as being, and I want to talk about that a bit.

I feel like I skew luddite when I bring this topic up and, with my Hyundai Santa Fe comment yesterday, I was definitely being recklessly flip. I mean, it was a good line, but good lines do not necessarily make for good analysis. I think the impression I give off of skewing luddite on this is because the luddite position in this case is the contrary position. And, though I’ve tried to shake it as I’ve grown older, I still tend to approach complicated matters from at least a mildly contrarian point of view, at least at first, because that flows with my legal/Socratic training and it’s just how my brain is wired. I try hard to avoid being reflexively contrarian because that’s a gateway to close-mindedness — I’m really shooting for skepticism, I suppose, not contrarianism — but even the best tightrope walkers fall sometimes and I’m no exception.

But no, I’m not a luddite when it comes to this sort of technology. I actually do believe that, when the technology is fully realized, driverless cars will be better than human drivers because humans fuck up and get drunk and get distracted and go too fast and all of that stuff. We kill and injure a frighteningly large number of people on the roadways and have for over a century. To the extent things have gotten better in this regard it’s because the cars have gotten safer and the laws, like seatbelt laws, have gotten more sensible, not because the drivers have gotten better. Which is to say that technology has improved things. Eventually the technology of driverless cars will be as close to as perfected as one can reasonably hope, driverless cars will be the norm and the roadways (and bike lanes and sidewalks and front yards and everywhere else cars run down people) will be safer because of it.

Still, I have issues. These issues arise not from either the theoretical or the increasingly practical deployment of driverless cars, however. They arise from my mistrust of the people and companies behind driverless cars and my skepticism that their incentives are such that they’re being honest with us.

We should be very worried that, when a Cruise car ran over a woman in San Francisco recently, the company was not forthcoming with regulators. We should be skeptical of studies they produce like the one linked above. Not because they contain lies — I don’t think that one does, for example — but because they leave things out. Things like the fact that a GREAT many of the miles driverless car companies log, and then cite in papers like this, are logged in the middle of the night on relatively empty streets, which no doubt skews the data, which is couched in averages. Things like cars getting “bricked” in the middle of streets, tying up traffic and even blocking emergency vehicles. Those things do not lead to insurance claims, which was the bogey of that study, but they do cause problems that companies like Waymo have a vested interest in downplaying. We’re not talking about peer-reviewed science here. These are profit-driven companies trying desperately to stake out market share in order to become the Coke or Pepsi of their sector rather than the RC Cola and we should thus not simply take their word as the final one.

The tech sector has had a pretty spotty history of late when it comes to frankness and willingness to admit its flaws and failures. That’s somewhere between eye-rolly and problematic when it comes to software, smart phones, social media, and the like. It’s another thing altogether when it comes to cars out on the street. Or, for that matter, missiles streaking through the sky. We can also add my skepticism of where governmental regulatory authority stands these days compared to what existed in decades past. The regulatory state was never perfect, but for the past 43 years its been gutted so that companies can make more money and that doesn’t make me feel great when it comes to the testing and rollout of new technology that presents a real threat to human life and limb.

I am hopeful when it comes to transformative technology. Far more hopeful, in fact, than I tend to come off when I write about it in this space. But I am skeptical. Skeptical that those leading that technological transformation are any morally or ethically superior to the industrialists or robber-barons of history. Skeptical of the robustness of the regulatory regime, such as it exists, that aims to keep the excesses of the industrialists in check and which encourages caution and prudence when it comes to rolling out potentially dangerous products.

“Move fast and break things” was not a term skeptics like me came up with on our own as a means of criticizing technology companies. It’s a term that prominent people who still lead top tech companies coined and which they followed up with action in accordance with the phrase. Many in that world have since downplayed it or have publicly backed away from it, but a corporate or industry-wide culture which leads to a lot of people becoming insanely wealthy is not readily or easily abandoned. There is still a strong element of that ethos floating around Silicon Valley, of this I am certain.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think that speed and destruction are ideas that go well with safe and responsible automobile technology. So I’ll keep wearing my skeptic’s hat, even if I’ll endeavor to be more measured in the manner in which I voice that skepticism in the future.

J.D. Vance is delusional

My U.S. Senator/nemesis J.D. Vance was strongly opposed to the ballot issue that enshrined abortion rights into the Ohio constitution on Tuesday night. Yesterday he decided that he’d try to use its defeat as a means of pretending he’s the adult in the Republican room by offering up a game plan for how anti-abortion folks can move forward and, eventually, get what they want.

Before we get to the specifics of it, I’ll observe that, circa 2015-16, Vance rose to fame by trying to be the adult in the Republican room via criticizing Donald Trump and reactionary forces on the right that, to hear him tell it, simply didn’t understand the common man and didn’t fit in the modern world. Then, the moment Donald Trump and the reactionary forces on the right came to power, Vance repudiated everything he had previously said and joined in with them with great fervor and enthusiasm. Indeed, in many ways he surpassed many of his new MAGA friends by offering extremist, white nationalist rhetoric and giving voice to replacement theory. It was an easy pivot as Vance has no real principles or cogent ideology beyond a keen desire to do and say whatever he can to obtain fame, wealth, and power. He’s the emptiest possible suit and nothing he says should be taken seriously because he only says things that he believes will advance the J.D. Vance brand.

As for Ohio’s abortion amendment and abortion politics in general, Vance simply believes that Republicans have made strategic mistakes. That they haven’t done well enough with fundraising. That if they just tweak their proposed anti-abortion bills and laws people will support them because, he believes, at heart people aren’t in favor of abortion rights, they’re just opposed to the absolute extremes in which there are no exceptions for rape and incest. He doesn’t come right out and say it but he seems to be advocating for abortion bans with those narrow exceptions which he believes will pass muster with the populace.

And, of course, he’s full of shit in that regard.

Republicans lost on this issue because their position, even if it included rape and incest exceptions, which Ohio’s anti-abortion law did not, is deeply, deeply unpopular. It’s a theocratic position that Vance and a good chunk of elected Republicans hold but which is shared by only a minority of the citizenry and its a shrinking minority at that. Roe was overturned, not because it was unpopular, but because Republican politicians spent decades packing the court with hacks and partisans, even if they had to circumvent the Constitution and/or over two centuries of practice to do it. There was no appetite, let alone a majority appetite, to outlaw abortion in this country. We’ve seen that in the seven states which have put successful abortion rights measures on their ballots over the past two years. We’ll see that more in the future.

J.D. Vance and folks like him will say a lot about abortion rights over the next year or so. The one thing they need to acknowledge, however, is something that they likely never will acknowledge: that they are on the wrong side of the abortion issue. That they always will be on the wrong side of it. That, absent anti-democratic efforts, they will continue to lose when abortion is on the ballot. In his post Vance says he wants to “win the war,” but the “war” he wants to win is against the majority of his very own constituents whose decisions he believes, are “sociopathic.” It’s the very definition of being on the losing side and utterly failing to acknowledge it.

Which is in keeping with what Republicans basically always do. They simply will not acknowledge that they aren’t entitled to get their way on every issue. They refuse to live with that reality because they are not a small-d democratic party and they abhor the very concept of political pluralism. They believe that they and only they know what’s best for everyone and it’s their way or no way. I cannot see what, if anything, will cause them to shake that dangerous and undemocratic belief, but until they do, they will continue to lose. On abortion, yes, but increasingly on other things as well.

Let no IP go un-exploited

I’m not sure who was asking for yet another Ghostbusters movie, but we’re getting another “Ghostbusters” movie:

I am once again imagining what life would’ve been like if “Zero Effect” had been a hit at the box office and we got like six Daryl Zero movies. Or if the Elliott Gould movie, “The Silent Partner” had made $100 million and it resulted in a bunch of taut, smart, cool-ass neo-Hitchcock flicks. Hell, an entire franchise of Robert Altman-helmed, revisionist Phillip Marlowe movies could’ve been cool too. Basically, movies started going to hell when Elliott Gould stopped getting leading man parts.

But hey, we get more Ghostbusters movies.

Great Moments in Awkward Weed Buying

The other day I talked about how the best part of legalized marijuana is that one no longer has to engage in the tedious rituals which surround illicit pot sales. Pretending that your dealer is your friend, the obligation to hang out for a long time on either side of the transaction, listening to their terrible music, and all of that stuff.

This, I probably should not be surprised to have learned, revealed a generational divide.

Everyone around my age who reacted to that — people who were in their late teens and twenties in the 1980s or 1990s — basically nodded their head, chuckled, and knew what I was talking about. People younger than me yet who had still bought on the street instead of via some legalized means, were somewhat perplexed. They described to me a sane, efficient system in which they met with their dealer or their dealer came to them, the interaction lasted a professional two minutes or so and everyone went their separate ways. It sounded positively civilized.

There’s probably a big thought piece to be written about that generational contrast. About the democratizing and efficiency-driving effects of the Internet. About Gen-X gatekeeping, conformity, and the attendant entrenching of rigid subcultures. About younger people simply not having the time or patience to get hung up on stupid crap because they have other things to do. To be sure I will not be writing that thought piece, but I can sort of see it floating out there a few feet just out of my grasp. If you wanna save time, just take the famous “In my day, ballplayers were for shit” editorial and swap out the baseball references for buying weed. That’s basically where I’m at with all of this.

That two-day discourse has also caused some of you to share some hilarious stories with me about how exhausting and dumb it was to buy weed in the bad old days.

The best stories I’ve heard so far were published yesterday by writer, and Cup of Coffee subscriber, Dan Epstein over at his newsletter Jagged Time Lapse. You should go read it yourself if those kinds of stories interest you, but know that it involves white boy wannabe Rastafarians, an extreme Pat Benatar fan with a flirty girlfriend, and someone who thought that they were Todd Rundgren. None of that stuff ever specifically happened to me but I know exactly how those scenes unfolded. I can smell each room and can hear the cadence of the voices Dan describes as if I had lived it myself. Such was the monoculture of buying weed back in those days.

Hell, rather than write that essay, maybe I’ll just do an oral history thing and ask every 50-something I know to tell me their worst weed-buying story. It’d sell dozens of copies, I am sure.

Have a great day, everyone.