Cup of Coffee: September 8, 2022

The Mets and Yanks are not dead. The Brewers may be. Max Scherzer is hurt, the MLBPA joins the AFL-CIO, O's drama, a funny apology, more gambling content is coming, mask capitulation, and Big Country.

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

So much to get to today, so let’s just get to gettin’

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And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 5, Pirates 1; Mets 10, Pirates 0: Huh, losing three games in a row did NOT doom the Mets for the rest of the season. Who could’ve predicted it? In the first game Chris Bassitt struck out ten in seven innings, Tyler Naquin hit a three-run homer and Eduardo Escobar followed that up directly with a solo shot. In the nightcap Jacob deGrom shut the Buccos out on three hits for seven innings, two relievers finished the job, and the Mets hitters rattled off 17 hits and were never in trouble.

Yankees 5, Twins 4; Yankees 7, Twins 1: Between injuries and ailments and paternity leaves and everything else the Yankees put out a lineup in yesterday’s first game that made it look like Aaron Boone has money on the Rays to win the AL East. The obvious exception, of course, was Aaron Judge. For reasons that aren’t clear to me given the dreck which surrounded him, however, Twins starter Louie Varland gave him a pitch to hit in the fourth inning and, yeah, Judge hit it, getting himself his 55th homer in the process. That homer seemed to wake the Yankees up who, after falling behind 3-0, tied it up at three on a sixth inning homer from Gleyber Torres. The game went to extras where the Yankees somehow loaded the bases with no one out in the 11th and still didn’t score. An inning later that was fixed, with Isiah Kiner-Falefa singling in the Manfred Man after which he stole second, reached third on a single and then was singled home with the game-winner by Oswaldo Cabrera.

Game two of the twinbill was a bit more straightforward, with Gerrit Cole striking out 14 while working into the seventh, Kiner-Falefa hitting a grand slam, and Aaron Hicks hitting a bases loaded double, plating three.

Atlanta 7, Athletics 3: Maybe the A’s aren’t mailing it in, but their TV production staff sure the hell is:

That <AWAYPITCHER SHORTNAME> may be a rookie, but he sure has great stuff.

Oakland got off to an early 2-0 lead but <AWAYPITCHER SHORTNAME> — who some claim was Spencer Strider, but who can be sure? — settled down, Vaughn Grissom and Dansby Swanson homered, and Robbie Grossman, Marcell Ozuna and Ronald Acuña Jr. all drove in runs.

Rockies 8, Brewers 4: Kyle Freeland threw six innings of one-run ball and Michael Toglia and Alan Trejo homered for the Rockies who, with this win, took the three-game series. In addition to the loss itself, which hurt the Brewers’ already-fading playoff prospects, starter Eric Lauer exited in the third inning with left elbow tightness. When it rains it pours.

Tigers 5, Angels 4: Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout each homered but two less-heralded teammates, Detroit’s Kerry Carpenter and Ryan Kreidler, hit back-to-back homers in the top of the ninth to bring the Tigers back from behind. Eric Haase went 5-for-5 with a homer and two doubles, Spencer Torkelson went deep, and the Tigers snapped their four-game losing streak.

White Sox 9, Mariners 6: Eloy Jiménez homered, doubled, and drove in three but the bigger contributor to the Sox’ offense was the Mariners defense, which committed three errors which led to six unearned Chicago runs. The White Sox took two of three.

Dodgers 7, Giants 3: Two Johnathan Villar homers gave the Giants all three of their runs and the game stood tied at three after seven. L.A. rallied in the eighth, however, with Trea Turner doubling in one run and Max Muncy smacking a three-run homer to put it away. Justin Turner hit an earlier three-run shot for the Dodgers, whose magic number for their inevitable NL West title is now just six games. They could clinch at least a Wild Card as early as tomorrow.

Rays 1, Red Sox 0: Five Rays pitchers tossed a six-hit shutout and Taylor Walls hit an infield RBI single for the Rays only run. The Rays won for the eighth time in nine games, they lead the Wild Card race, and they are five games behind the Yankees.

Phillies 4, Marlins 3: Edmundo Sosa homered again en route to a three-hit, three-RBI game, Jean Segura went deep, and Bailey Falter didn’t, allowing two runs while pitching into the sixth. With Milwaukee’s loss the Phillies hold a four-game lead for the second/third Wild Card slots, tied with the Padres. The NL East’s second place team, whichever it is, is certain to get the first.

Blue Jays 4, Orioles 1: Alex Manoah allowed one over eight. That run came in the first and he didn’t allow another baserunner until the sixth. He and Kevin Gausman are a pretty good 1-2 combination. I’d offer some sort of “Spahn and Sain and two days of rain” thing for them, but the only thing I can think that rhymes with “Manoah” and which is appropriate is “Noah.” Which, yeah, you can use to invoke the idea of rain, obviously, but it’s too close a rhyme I think. And honestly, we only need 2-3 days of rain, not 40, so it’s suboptimal. Oh well, I have a month or so to figure it out.

Reds 7, Cubs 1: Aristides Aquino hit two homers and Mike Minor somehow only allowed one run despite giving up ten hits in five and a two-thirds. Maybe it has something to do with the Cubs stinking. I’ll put an agent on that and get a report back to you later this week.

Cardinals 6, Nationals 5: Tommy Edman hit a two-run, two-out double in the bottom of the ninth to complete the Cards’ five-run ninth inning and the comeback walkoff win. The Cardinals are the first team this season to win a game after trailing by four or more runs entering the ninth. Paul Goldschmidt homered. Jordan Montgomery allowed one run on three hits over 6.2 innings. The Cardinals are 25-4 since picking him up at the deadline.

Royals 2, Guardians 1: Cleveland tried to make a 1-0 lead hold up for six innings. They managed five, but then Emmanuel Clase walked the first two batters he faced, MJ Melendez singled in a run, and Sal Pérez hit a walkoff sac fly. The Guardians still lead the AL Central by two games, but they can’t lose games late like this and expect that to stand. Or, hell, maybe they can? It’s the AL Central. Entropy will be the division champ.

Astros 4, Rangers 3: Texas took an early 3-0 lead, but Yuli Gurriel singled in a run in the fourth, Kyle Tucker hit a two-run homer in the sixth, and José Altuve scored the winning run on a wild pitch with two outs in the 10th. With that the Texas Series ends for the year, with the Astros taking 14 of the 19 games against the Rangers.

Padres 6, Diamondbacks 3: Jurickson Profar hit a two-run homer, Jake Cronenworth, and Wil Myers went deep as well, with Myers’ blast breaking a 3-3 tie in the fourth. Yu Darvish wasn’t at his best — he gave up two homers to Daulton Varsho — but he went six and got the win. Like Philly, San Diego now has a four-game lead in the Wild Card race over fading Milwaukee.

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The Daily Briefing

Max Scherzer heads to the injured list

When Max Scherzer left his start early on Saturday due to “side irritation” he said it was not a big deal and that he’d probably make his Friday start. Nah. The Mets placed Scherzer on the 15-day IL yesterday.

Buck Showalter said the team expects Scherzer to miss one or two starts. Scherzer himself said that the injury will sideline him for “days, not weeks.” Now is a good time to remind readers that sometimes stories include unreliable narrators.

In more relatable news, Scherzer said his left side “just feels achy.” Give the 38 year-old Scherzer two more years and he’ll only be making a point to talk about when things don’t feel achy. Once you’re 40 most things low-level hurt most of the time.

Yankees President says team will be “extraordinarily competitive” in efforts to re-sign Aaron Judge

Aaron Judge and the Yankees negotiated for a long-term contract extension last winter. The Yankees did not step up to the plate and come close to meeting his demands or his worth, however, so Judge bet on himself and went into his walk year. That bet has paid off like nobody’s business, as Judge has not only put up the best season of his career, but one of the best seasons any Yankees hitter has put up in some damn time. Which, of course, now puts the onus on the Yankees to sign him.

Will they? On the New York Post’s The Show podcast yesterday, team president Randy Levine made it sound like the team would try, but forgive me if my reading between the lines makes me feel like this is something less than unequivocal.

Levine said Judge is “an all-time Yankee” — which is a statement of fact, not of intention — and said that the team “will be extraordinarily competitive” in its approach to keeping the MVP candidate in pinstripes. Which is the kind of thing teams say when they lose out on free agents, right? “Hey, we made a competitive offer.” Levine went on to say “we know his worth and what he means . . . I don't know what's in his mind. All we can do is show him how much we'd like him to remain a Yankee.”

All free agent prognostication is more vibes-based than fact-based, but man, those vibes don’t sit well with me. They seem more attuned to creating a story later that will endeavor to put the Yankees in the best possible light following their failure to sign Judge. It doesn’t strike me as part of a damn-the-torpedoes effort.

MLBPA joins the AFL-CIO

The Major League Baseball Players Association joined the AFL-CIO yesterday. Joining the AFL-CIO puts the players union in a formal alliance with nearly 60 other labor unions. Like, say, UNITE HERE, which represents thousands of ballpark concessions workers, hotel workers, and others who intersect with baseball. Or, for that matter, the NFL Players Association and the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association, each of which are AFL-CIO members already.

Practically speaking, the AFL-CIO functions as a powerful lobby for organized labor, helping look out for the interests of its member unions legislatively, and coordinates matters between various unions operating in different industries. By being affiliated, there is almost certainly going to be more support from MLBPA members to striking or locked out members of other unions, particularly ones which share the same general space as baseball, and vice-versa. For more on the implications of the MLBPA joining the AFL-CIO, our friend and subscriber Eugene Freedman is the go-to guy, of course.

Given the recent minor league unionization effort and yesterday’s AFL-CIO announcement, the MLBPA is doing more than it ever has to embrace the larger labor movement as a whole these days. You love to see it.

Orioles ownership drama continues apace

You may recall that back in June that Louis Angelos, one of the sons of longtime Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, sued his mother, Georgia and his brother John, who is the Orioles controlling owner, over control of the team. The upshot of Louis Angelos’ suit is that his father, who has been medically incapacitated since 2017, intended for the two brothers to control the team equally and set up that scheme via a trust, but that John has grabbed power and, aligned with his mother, has frozen Louis out. Louis further claims that John Angelos secretly wants to sell the team or move it to Nashville.

The Baltimore Banner, the publication which broke the news of the lawsuit earlier this summer, reported on the latest filing from the John/Georgia side yesterday, and it includes a couple of interesting nuggets. Most interesting is this assertion, which came in service of trying to establish that John Angelos’ hands-off ownership, as opposed to Louis’ alleged meddling in baseball operations, is why the Orioles have turned things around competitively speaking:

In November 2018, the Orioles hired a new general manager in Mike Elias. According to court records, Elias was pursued aggressively by the San Francisco Giants, but he accepted a job with the Orioles on condition that he would report to John only.

I’d be curious to know if the Giants actually did pursue Elias “aggressively” in 2018 or if that’s just puffery on the part of Georgia Angelos and her lawyers aimed at making John Angelos’ hands-off, delegating style look good. I suspect that the assertion at least a little overhyped, actually, because the Giants hired Farhan Zaidi ten days before the Orioles hired Elias in November 2018. If the Giants were “aggressively” pursuing Elias, why would they break off that pursuit and hire someone else more than a week before Elias committed to the Orioles job? At the very least, the portrait Georgia Angelos is trying to paint — “Elias was going to San Francisco if John didn’t act decisively!” — is complicated by that timeline. My guess: the Giants kicked the tires on Elias out of due diligence but wanted Zaidi. Litigation, man. It’s wild.

Also in that story is the claim that Brady Anderson left his front office job with the team because he was a Louis Angelos guy and Louis was paying him $900K and letting him weigh in on stuff that Mike Elias didn’t want him weighing in on. Brady Anderson, knowing when he was not wanted, raced out of there. And based on his history I bet he raced really quickly!

Anyway, family suing family is always fun. No one ever comes to regret that kind of business.

A tweet you never wanna have to write

Back on June 29 Fox Sports Radio host Doug Gottlieb claimed that Freddie Freeman’s agent, Casey Close, never communicated a contract offer he asserted that the Atlanta Baseball club made to Freeman before Freeman signed with the Dodgers. If true, that’d be a serious breach of ethics on Close’s part and would be horrible for his professional reputation. Thing is, though, it was not true, and Close sued Gottlieb for defamation in mid-July.

We hadn’t heard anything about that until yesterday when Gottlieb tweeted this humdinger of a statement:

“On June 29, I commented on alleged circumstances surrounding Freddie Freeman’s negotiations with the Atlanta Braves and his relationship with his former agent Casey Close,” Gottlieb wrote. “While I always strive to report accurate information, I prematurely reported on these events and simply got it wrong. Upon further vetting of my sources, a review of the lawsuit filed against me in this matter, and a direct conversation with Casey himself, I have learned that the conduct I alleged did not occur and that there is no credible basis for stating that it did. My ultimate investigation into this matter confirms that Casey Close did, in fact, communicate all offers to Freddie Freeman and the sources I relied on were incorrect, in no uncertain terms. I appreciate the damage that misinformation like this can cause and have been in touch with Casey Close to apologize directly. I have also deleted my original tweet.”

I am absolutely DYING at “. . . after a review of the lawsuit filed against me . . ." It’s like some movie where a guy pulls a gun on another guy and the second guy says “well, I suppose I see your point!”

Later in the day yesterday Close’s agency tweeted that Close “considers the matter closed,” so I presume that means the lawsuit was dropped. If so — and if there hasn’t been some confidential financial settlement — Gottleib should consider himself lucky that the worst thing that happened out of all of this was his being humiliated.

There will soon be more sports gambling content. And it’ll be shittier.

The JohnWallStreet newsletter reported yesterday that major sports gambling companies are ratcheting back their massive advertising outlays, celebrity endorsements, and come-ons of allegedly “risk-free” betting and, instead, are going to lean more heavily into content as a means of driving their marketing efforts:

“[The industry is] definitely seeing an expenditure reallocation away from outsized promos and celebrity spokespeople and towards performance marketing and content-based approaches,” Lloyd Danzig (managing partner, Sharp Alpha Advisors) said.

Which means get ready for sports media companies affiliated with sportsbooks (i.e. almost all of them) to write up more news and analysis and to produce more videos that, actually, are marketing vehicles masquerading as journalism. Bonus:

[Patrick Keane, CEO, Action Network] explained how SEO is crucial for this type of content, because much of the audience for these articles, videos or podcasts find the content—and the embedded promo—through search. But much of that traffic belongs to affiliate networks, not the operators themselves.

Paid-for content and cynical SEO strategies. THAT, my friends, is what makes for great journalism!

While this is depressing, the increasing shittification of sports media makes this newsletter and the few other outlets out there not dependent upon gambling bucks a hell of a lot more attractive, I reckon, so I’m personally all for it.

Speaking of sports content

Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of ESPN’s launch. In commemoration, ESPN’s social media accounts and P.R. apparatus shared a bunch of things about its founding and offered many a huzzah to itself.

On a personal level I probably have to be grateful for ESPN’s existence. If it wasn’t for the advent of ESPN and its creation of the 24-hour sports news cycle, I doubt that there would’ve been the appetite for sports websites and sports blogging that developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I doubt that companies like NBC would’ve tried to compete with them which, eventually, led to NBC hiring me which, in turn, gave me a platform from which to to launch this newsletter. If sports was and always remained the way it was on September 6, 1979, I’d probably still be practicing law right now.

On the other hand I think it’s fair to say that, however good the 24-hour sports news cycle has been to me, it’s been a bad thing overall.

As is the case with 24-hour news — which began when CNN launched, a little under nine months after ESPN went on the air — there is not, naturally speaking, 24 hours worth of sports content to present and to talk about all day. That means that ESPN, and CNN, and other 24-hour content purveyors, must employ some mixture of sensationalism, gossip, repetition, the elevation of non-stories into major ones, and even self-created “news” in order to fill up the schedule. In the face of competition, which ESPN has had from time to time, an impulse exists to amp all of that sensationalism, gossip, repetition, and fabrication up to another level so that ESPN can separate itself from that competition. In this landscape, the more a story can be overblown the better. The more controversies can be pumped up — legitimate ones or things that are actually non-controversies that are cast as controversies — the better. The more ESPN can convince viewers that sports are essential parts of lives — even the most important part of someone’s life! — and not just a form of entertainment, the better.

ESPN launched on a September 7, 1979. The tail began wagging the dog on September 8, and within a few years we found ourselves with a culture in which the line between sports and the truly important things in life and society became forever blurred. My efforts to turn sports into a 15-minute read after which one can go on with their day notwithstanding, there’s no going back at this point, I don’t suppose. But it’s still worth reminding ourselves of the true nature of the 24-hour sports cycle from time to time and reminding ourselves that we do not need to take it particularly seriously.

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Other Stuff

Great Moments in Capitulation

Yesterday the State of New York made masks optional in some places where they had previously been required, including on mass transit. In announcing this change, the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, tweeted out this bit of signage to get the message across:

I’m struggling to think of a way the state could’ve more effectively undercut the purpose and utility of masks than to show a picture of someone wearing one wrong with the joke “you do you.” If you want masks to be optional, fine, say they’re optional, but this messaging mocks the very idea of wearing masks — and directly mocks over two years worth of useful messaging by New York before now — and in doing so plays right into the hands of all of the bad faith actors and nihilist politicians who, quite successfully, created the conditions for the pandemic to be far more deadly and damaging than it would’ve otherwise been.

Someday there will be a new, deadly spike of coronavirus or a different pandemic altogether. If that happens, thanks to this sort of messaging, the science which shows the clear utility and effectiveness of wearing masks will be even more thoroughly drowned out than it is now. Congratulations, New York. Great work.

In a Big Country

One of my favorite Instagram follows is the British photographer Kevin Cummins. While he’s still active, Cummins is probably best known for his photography of rock stars for NME back in the late 70s through the 90s. Given that he’s from Manchester this means he has provided some of the definitive shots of all the biggies, from Joy Division to The Fall, to The Smiths, to Oasis and a zillion in between. If there’s a band — particularly a British band — of the past 40 years for which you’ve seen an iconic photograph, there’s a more then decent chance that Cummins shot it. And he may even have a book of collected photos of them, a couple of which I own.

Cummins posts a lot of his classic pics on his Instagram account and provides at least a little background for the shoot of the circumstances of a given photo’s publication. Yesterday he posted this very famous photo he took of The Smiths:

Cummins writes:

On this day in 1983 - 7 Sept - I photographed The Smiths for their first NME cover feature. The features editor had a last minute change of heart and put Big Country on instead. He told me: “The Smiths will never be big enough for an NME cover.” 😂 #TheSmiths . The band shot is now in the permanent collection of the @nationalportraitgallery

While The Smiths are one of my favorite all-time bands, and while whoever at NME said they’d never be big enough for a cover was off his rocker, I love the shoutout to Big Country, a band which absolutely slapped, even if most Americans only know them for their eponymous song that got heavy rotation on MTV back in the day. That song also slaps, of course — and check out this fantastic countryish cover of it from the late lead singer Stuart Adamson’s daughter — but their first two albums in particular have many more good songs to recommend them.

“Chance” is an absolute revelation. And “Fields of Fire” is a song that’ll make you want to march the entire 400 miles the song itself mentions:

If you think that isn’t gonna be on my Coast to Coast playlist, you’re nuts.

Have a great day, everyone.