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This fuckin' guy ⚾️

Yesterday, Commissioner Rob Manfred held a press conference following the MLB’s owners meetings. This has, of course, been covered pretty thoroughly by the usual baseball writers and I continue to grow more appalled every time I read a new iteration of that coverage.

First, Keith Olbermann worked it into the sports segment of his daily Countdown podcast, in between his latest takes on the Trump indictment. This, I found fitting because, while Rob Manfred has certainly not done as much damage to something so important as the United States of America as has Trump, he continually forces the comparison (at least in my mind) with his repeated smugness and apparent disdain for the people he claims to serve. And, while he has not accounted for any real or imagined damage to the nation (that I am aware of, anyway), every time Manfred speaks publicly I again feel that same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I felt throughout Trump’s presidency and that I again feel every time a new revelation comes to light outlining the myriad and despicable ways he abused the power of that office: a mixture of disgust at watching something I love so much being destroyed from the inside by someone who claims to be helping and a powerlessness to do anything to make it stop.

That said, there is one clear difference between Manfred and Trump, and that is the cause of the hopelessness part of the feeling I described. With Trump, that hopelessness was caused by the fact that so many folks around me–including many, many people who I otherwise hold (or held) in high esteem or who were, for all intents and purposes, normal insofar as I consider myself relatively normal–were seemingly participating in a version of reality that was altogether different from mine. This person, who was repeatedly saying the most vile, ignorant things imaginable and repeatedly proving himself to be unfit for the both the office of president and for life in civilized society, was somehow appealing to these folks. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand that appeal (and every plausible explanation is too simple and depressing to dwell on for too long). And that inability (or unwillingness) to understand led to that hopelessness. If I had so misunderstood so many of my friends and colleagues, how could I hope to convince them that my way of seeing the world was in fact the correct one? If we we’re essentially experiencing different realities and speaking different metaphorical languages, what hope was there of finding a common ground or of making sure things were better the next time around?

With Manfred, that hopelessness is entirely different. All the normal people in my life–friends and family, colleagues, baseball writers, etc.–think this guy sucks. From baseball fans, at least, it’s nearly universal agreement and this guy is an awful person hell bent on making baseball worse. So, it’s nice to feel like I’m experiencing the same reality as my peers, but it’s no help when the commissioner of baseball is not elected by my (or really anyone else’s) peers; his power is not awarded by us normals, but by the owners, and the owners have a lot more in common with Trump than with any “normal” people by any definition. But I’ve got the same chance of wresting control of baseball from the owners as I do of ever understanding Trump’s appeal to so many.

Anyway, the second recap of these Manfred comments that got me wound up enough to write a blog post was the incomparable Craig Calcaterra at his excellent Cup of Coffee substack. I’m going include a lengthy excerpt because Craig says it all so well.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic faithfully transcribed the Q&A with the press. I’ve been writing about baseball and the crappy men who run it for a long time now and even I was shocked by just how horrible Manfred came off.

Here he is talking about how Major League Baseball, which Manfred claims prefers teams to not move, has come around to being OK with the Athletics moving:

I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not like this outcome, I understand why they feel the way they do. I think that the real question is, what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just John Fisher. You don’t build a stadium based on the club activity alone. The community has to provide support and you know, at some point, you come to the realization, it’s just not going to happen.

This is objectively false. There was an all-but-done deal with Oakland to build a stadium at Howard Terminal. It was a hell of a lot closer to being done than anything in Las Vegas at the time. The A’s broke off negotiations with Oakland, however, not because they weren’t getting an offer on a stadium deal but because one was imminent, it was quite clearly going to be a much better offer than anything Las Vegas was offering, and would’ve, in fact, been much better than what the A’s eventually got in terms of public money to be spent and out-of-pocket expectations for John Fisher. It’s an offer that, once official, would’ve been very hard for the A’s to turn down and still leave town, that’s for sure.

The problem was that if Oakland’s offer was hanging out there, waiting for the A’s to accept or reject it, it would screw up Fisher and Kaval’s “Oakland doesn’t want us here" rebop that, in their minds, justifies the move. And yeah, the fact is that they, and Major League Baseball, want the A’s to be in Las Vegas, not Oakland, full stop. They want the close associations with the gambling industry, they want the glitz and glamor that comes with it, they think they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money by virtue of corporate partnerships, and I suspect Fisher and Kaval themselves believe they will stand to benefit far more personally from the relocation than they would if the A’s stayed in Oakland. It’s their business, of course, and if they want to make decisions like that they can make decisions like that. They just didn’t want to say it out loud and now they’re weaving lies in order to trash Oakland and rewrite history to cover for it. It’s a horrible look.

Manfred was then asked if he was aware of Oakland fans’ “reverse boycott” on Tuesday night, when fans showed up to protest the team’s imminent move to Las Vegas and show their support. See if you can detect the shitty sarcasm:

It was great. It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.

If you’re the Commissioner of Major League Baseball and you’re finding yourself giving quotes gleefully shitting on passionate baseball fans who were desperately trying to keep their team in town, you may want to ask yourself what in the actual fuck your problem is. Tuesday night’s showing in Oakland was one of the coolest and most inspirational fan moments in recent memory. It was a genuine show of love and support on the part of baseball fans who, despite likely knowing the gesture would be futile, wanted to express their love for their team. And then in wades Manfred with this shitty and backhanded wisecrack. I’d call him a turd in the punchbowl, but I have too much respect for turds to tar them with such a disparaging association.

Manfred was then asked about whether he sees it as his job to help baseball owners get public funding for stadiums. He kinda dodged for a moment but then said “it is in fact good business to have a public-private partnership to get those facilities built.” This was the followup question and answer:

How do you reconcile that there’s a large volume of academic studies that say these stadium subsidies do not produce positive benefit?

I love academics, they’re great. I think, take the areas where baseball stadiums have been built, OK? Look at what was around Truist Park before that was built. Look at the area around Nationals Park before it was built. I lived in that city. You know, academics can say whatever they want. I think the reality tells you something else.

Rob Manfred is not a dumb man and he knows better than this. He knows what the studies say and that just because there are shiny new buildings near a ballpark that it does not mean that public subsidies have created a net benefit. Indeed, he has hired bought-and-paid-for-experts to try to combat those studies when it suits him and he’s never been able to do so convincingly. The fact is that Rob Manfred is simply an asshole who has contempt for everyone except the 30 men who pay his salary so he has no trouble whatsoever spouting anti-intellectual claptrap like this which he knows to be false. Doing so helps him get past a question he doesn’t want to answer and ingratiates him to his employers, so he does it.

Manfred was then asked if he thinks Oakland fans will or should support the A’s once they move.

I hope so. I hope that they stay baseball fans, whatever they decide to affiliate with. Again, I’ll say it again: the piece of this particular series of events that’s the most disturbing to me is the idea of fans that have supported the team losing a team. We hate that idea.

Yeah, he hates it so much that a mere three minutes prior he was making fun of A’s fans for showing up and supporting their team. So you know it’s a totally genuine sentiment.

No matter how hard Manfred tries to be ambassadorial — and he tries less these days than he used to when he first got the job — he’s actually a petty and unpleasant little man. It comes through fairly often, but it’s been a minute since he packed this much slimy, disingenuous crap into one public appearance. It was a truly bravura performance.

Rob Manfred is a bad guy all around. Many in the game knew that already, but it’s remarkable how little he tried to hide it yesterday.

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📚 Loved “The Stars Have Eaten the Costco Parking Lot” by Chelsea Sutton in the Mooncalves collection.

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Finished reading: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson 📚

This one felt like it took me about ten years to finish. Pretty good climax and some interesting science to it all, but it was definitely a slog. Was far more interested in one of the storylines (Laks) than the others and those chapters tended to be far shorter throughout most of the book. Also was a bit turned off but what I can only refer to as “dirty old man” humor…

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I have always loved the color combination of a clear sky and sunlit spring leaves.

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🔗 Turns out, plants make a lot of noise when they're stressed

Justine Calma, for The Verge, summarizing research from Tel Aviv University:

Tomato and tobacco plants in particular make clicking sounds when they’re dehydrated or being cut [. . .] Distress sounds were more prolonged for plants deprived of water. They made increasingly more noise in the first few days without water, reaching a crescendo before quieting as they dried out.

Seeing this after reading about the “panpsychist” movement earlier this week is striking me as incredibly sad.

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🔗 The Lost Art of Being Stuck With An Album

Felix Kent, writing at Defector1:

For either my 12th birthday or the Christmas before my aunt gave me a copy of R.E.M’s Green, which has an orange cover. She also gave me a copy of Belinda Carlisle’s Runaway Horses (Belinda looking sultry in black and white and a crochet sweater thing) and a third album. I can’t remember what the third album was; it might have been the Bon Jovi album with the cover that looked like denim.

While Felix ultimately comes to the conclusion not that this now old-fashioned tradition of being “stuck” with an album and listening so much that you learn to love it was a good thing, but rather that “it was bad and annoying that getting music was so hard,” it still conjured some particularly nostalgia for me that I couldn’t resist.

Right around the same time in my life – I am almost certain is was the Christmas after my 12th birthday – our big family gift was a desktop computer. An Emerald Green Acer Aspire. It was the first computer our family ever had and eventually became the gateway to our first internet access. But before it was that gateway, it was also our first CD player. I remember that the big surprise was given away2 ever-so-slightly because three of the gifts shoved in my enormous stocking that year, which was traditionally opened before all the presents (especially any big family presents), were CDs: Queen’s Greatest Hits I; Weezer’s Blue Album; and Goo Goo Dolls' A Boy Named Goo.3

I relentlessly listened to these three CDs. I can still sing along to all three of them. For two of them, this is not surprising: a greatest hits compilation by one of history’s greatest rock bands and a seminal 90s post-grunge album that would serve as the cornerstone for the development of my musical tastes to this day. But that third one sticks out a little bit. A Boy Named Goo is not, now, one of my favorite albums of all time. It is not one that I remember as having had an outsized influence on my overall musical taste or one that I would hand-pick to be among the first to play through my car’s speakers years later on my 16th birthday. For the Goo Goo Dolls, it was a bit of a transitional album as I have come to understand. The success of the mega-hit “Name,” the sixth track on that CD, undoubtedly changed the future trajectory of that band and sounds, in many ways, like a lot of their future radio hits. But a lot of A Boy Named Goo is faster paced and has a harder edge representative of the punk sound of their pre-“Name” albums. (Truthfully, I never really listened to another Goo Goo Dolls album nearly as thoroughly as I listened to A Boy Named Goo, but the sound of the majority of that album is nothing like the sound that I think is most frequently associated with the band. Their Greatest Hits album, for example, does not contain a single song from any of their four albums that preceded A Boy Named Goo and contains only “Name” from that record.)

But, because, at the time (for the next couple years, anyway, before Napster and the rest ushered in a new era), “getting music was so hard,” I wore that CD out. Even though it wasn’t what I expected. I’d heard “Name” and “Naked” on the radio and loved them. Sure, this CD had those two tracks but most of it sounded quite different4. Had I heard those two singles in the new era of music availability, the algorithm would have recommended more songs that sounded like those songs, rather than songs by the Goo Goo Dolls, specifically, and I may have never heard the rest of the album. But because it was one of three CDs that I owned for some time, it was in the regular rotation and I grew to love it. Maybe that doesn’t happen if music is more available at the time. Probably it wouldn’t have. And I think I probably land on the same side as Felix that “the fact that good things can come out of contingencies does not make the contingencies good,” but there’s definitely something I miss about the way this all used to work.

  1. Yes, I know it’s paywalled, which sucks for any one who happens to read this who does not subscribe to Defector but, seriously, what are you waiting for? That’s the best site on the internet. Yes, I am a shill and proud member of the Defector Buddies Street Team. ↩︎

  2. This was not a dead giveaway, but I had my suspicions as, after having been exposed to the wonders of computers both at school and at a few friends' houses to that point, I had been working on my parents for some time to take the plunge. ↩︎

  3. I finally, after all these years, get the reference. My 12-year-old self was less familiar with Johnny Cash, though I’d probably heard the song at that point. ↩︎

  4. And, as a kid whose music prior to this Christmas had come on cassette tapes or my parents old vinyl, I know that the major technological advancement of CDs was that you could easily skip tracks (!), but that was never the way I listened to music. Probably because my formative experiences with owning music were with cassettes, I’ve always been a “listen through the album, at least when its new” kind of person. Maybe that’s the real thing I miss. It’s still certainly possible with Spotify and the like, but the recommendations seem to steer toward singles and playlists rather than full albums. ↩︎

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Finished reading: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Really enjoyed this. Could see a TV series or a series of short stories or more novellas set in this world. First I’ve read through a full novel by Emily St. John Mandel (though I started and abandoned Station Eleven, and then watched and throughly enjoyed that HBO series). Was completely hooked and intrigued with the first half and must admit that the back half was not what I expected and left me wanting a bit… but was intriguing and kept me turning pages nonetheless.

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The Garden-Spade Technique 🔗

I’m a little ashamed to admit how hard I laughed reading this admittedly silly piece by the always great Albert Burneko at the always great (and, to quote the piece, “incredibly deranged”) Defector about the recent Daily Beast story about the eating habits of Ron DeSantis.

The quote in the Daily Beast story from a former DeSantis staffer is great – and probably because of that, I’ve seen the same line quoted in probably half a dozen other summaries since it was originally published. In it, the staffer claims that DeSantis “would sit in meetings and eat in front of people [. . .] like a starving animal who has never eaten before.”

Burneko picks out the most hilarious and disturbing nugget from the story and gives it the full Defector treatment:

The story’s most vivid detail concerns DeSantis once memorably slurping chocolate pudding out of his own bare goddamn hand like a fucking freak:

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert–by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

It’s the “three of his fingers” detail that really makes this anecdote sing. Because now you kind of can’t help but picture it, right? Not just “with his fingers” or “out of his hand,” but specifically three fingers. Really disturbing stuff!

While I laughed embarrassingly hard while reading this story, Burneko is 100% wrong about one thing:

The likeliest possibility seems to me to be a pincer type of deal: The index and middle finger, plus the thumb, sort of gently pinching a glob of pudding like a wad of chaw and lifting it to the face of Ron DeSantis, to be slurped at by his large wet tongue, with the now spit-sucked pincer then returning to the chocolate pudding dessert, like the world’s most accursed prize-machine claw, for another disgusting saliva-impregnated clot of chocolate goop.

Having been, in my younger and more vulnerable years, party to a similarly disturbing display in which a friend of mine1 drunkenly devoured corn syrup from a makeshift honey pot as part of a dismantled Winnie the Pooh Halloween costume, I can say with some amount of confidence that the method employed to eat pudding with one’s fingers is much more likely to be the “garden-spade technique":

Three fingers lined up and pressed tightly together, stabbing down into the pudding dessert and scooping out a little heap. This could be the index, middle, and ring fingers (a Large spade) or the middle, ring, and pinky fingers (Small).

  1. Not someone to whom I wish to draw unfair DeSantis comparisons, but this was not one of his better moments, obviously. ↩︎

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Finished reading: Lark Ascending by Silas House 📚

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⚾️ I cannot stop laughing at this. Protect this man! He’s a national treasure. Spring Training Speech Turns Terry Francona Into Mr. Bean - Defector

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📺 Through 2 episodes, I absolutely adore Shrinking.

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Finished reading: This Census-taker by China Miéville 📚

Read this for Defector Reads A Book’s February discussion. First book of fiction that I’ve read in physical form (not audio book) in a long, long time so it feels like something of an accomplishment. I absolutely loved this book. First I’ve read by Miéville and now I can’t wait to dig deeper into his catalog.

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The Resort | 9/10 | Peacock

Truly enjoyed this. Hit a very specific soft spot for me reminiscent of some other things I’ve loved even if they weren’t perfect (like Jeff Who Lives at Home, Donnie Darko, probably some others that I can’t think of now.)

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“A dillion is ten thousand and twenty-two.” –My five year old’s new favorite number.

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📺 My Favorite TV Shows of 2022

  1. Andor, Disney+
  2. Severance, Apple TV+
  3. Station Eleven, HBO Max
  4. Only Murders in the Building, Hulu
  5. House of the Dragon, HBO Max
  6. The Bear, Hulu
  7. Barry, HBO Max
  8. For All Mankind, Apple TV+
  9. 1899, Netflix
  10. The White Lotus, HBO Max

I added the streaming services where I accessed each both as a reminder and because I was interested to see the distribution. It’s interesting to me that Disney+ and Netflix each only had one entry in my top ten, despite the fact that those are easily the two most-watched services in my household (I have two children five and under so Disney is a given, and Netflix has become the de facto basic cable for us like so many other cord cutters).

Other notes

  • Hulu: I think I only watched three complete seasons on Hulu this year, one of which (Bob’s Burgers) is technically a network show that I was watching the day after air. Not sure whether The Bear should technically fall into that category since it’s an FX thing, but, anyway…
  • Apple TV+: Several other series on Apple TV+ were on my extended list (Slow Horses, The Afterparty, Mythic Quest, Black Bird). I’ve come to the realization this year that, while Apple TV+ doesn’t have as many shows that interest me, an extremely high percentage of shows that I watch on this service really make an impact. I think they’ve got to do better in terms of marketing because I still don’t feel like these shows are talked about as much as shows on other services (with the exception of Ted Lasso and, to an extent, Severance). Several other shows on this platfrom deserve a wider audience than it seems like they’ve found thus far.
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I know this is like, a well recognized thing, but I’ve been mainlining the Mission: Impossible movies over the last week or so and nobody sells a dead sprint quite like Tom Cruise. 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

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📺 Introduce yourself with 5 TV shows, via Jarrod Blundy

  • The Leftovers
  • Halt and Catch Fire
  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Bob’s Burgers
  • Magnum, P.I. (80s version)
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Just giggled to myself about some particularly whimsical bit of animation in the new Readwise Reader, which is now open as a public beta. Have grown to depend on Readwise for syncing highlights of just about everything I’m reading these days, and, so far at least, Reader is very impressive.

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Indeed.

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Finished reading: Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte 📚