Cup of Coffee

August 1, 2013: One Day More

102 Comments

My daughters get back tomorrow night. I'll be working, annoyingly enough, but even the couple of minutes I get when they come into the store is going to set me right.

102 thoughts on “August 1, 2013: One Day More”

  1. Back home after a week+ away. Home for two weeks now. Will draft Fitness post in next day or two.

  2. The sad fact is that Morneau wouldn't have brought back much of anything, even with the Twins picking up all of his salary. In that sense, I guess it's okay that the Twins didn't trade him.

    If you think about it, this was a club that should have just unloaded whatever they could. And other than Mauer, Perkins, and Burton, they really had nothing to sell.

    1. This is a nothing Tweet. If a player is not traded either he wasn't available or the team didn't get offered what they wanted for him. It was widely known that Morneau was available, so obviously the Twins wanted more than what was offered. I'm sure the Twins will say that everybody else was offering too little for Morneau.

  3. So, since everyone seems to agree that Alex Rodriguez is a fraud and a cheat and just generally the worst person on the face of the planet, why has no one suggested that the Yankees 2009 World Championship is tainted? I mean, it's all about honesty and fairness and the Integrity of the Game, right? How is it fair that the Yankees are allowed to benefit from the actions of this cheat, this fraud? How does that uphold the Integrity of the Game? When Ryan Braun was suspended I heard lots of commentators shed crocodile tears for the Diamondbacks, who the Brewers beat in the 2011 playoffs. What about all the teams the Yankees beat? Wouldn't it only be right and fair and in the best interests of the Integrity of the Game for Major League Baseball to take that 2009 championship away from the Yankees?

      1. Ha! Actually, I won't be surprised when that narrative is trotted out at the four letter. The poor Steinbrenner family was duped into signing a promising young player who turned out to be an ugly, no good, dirty rotten cheat. Boo Hoo.

      1. You have always been the epitome of everything that is wrong with the Cashman-era Yankees—a motley crew of high-priced mercenaries with a championship-or-die attitude.

        Oh, that is delicious. I wonder if Girardi's number shenanigans prove that he's not a True Yankee either? All this championship obsession just detracts from true yankeedom.

      2. “I felt it was important for me that all my years in New York have been clean, and I wanted just to move to the next chapter in my life,” you told the late Peter Gammons.

        OMG. Peter Gammons died!

      3. Were I to comment there, I would just post a link to Baseball Reference's Alex Rodriguez page.

    5. One could make the argument that during the New York Yankees' recent era of dominance the club seem to have employed an undue number of players associated with PED use by the Mitchell Report, implicated in the unfolding Biogenesis investigation, or outright suspended for PED use. A small sample, just for context:

      Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, Chuck Knoblauch, David Justice, Jose Canseco, Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colón, Randy Velarde (NYYx2), Mike Stanton (NYYx2), Jerry Hairston, Jr., Rondell White, Matt Lawton, Denny Neagle, Francisco Cervelli, Jesús Montero, Ron Villone, Glenallen Hill, Brian McNamee (coach), Jason Grimsley, Dan Naulty, Ricky Bones, Todd Williams, Bobby Estella, Darren Holmes...

      Such bad luck for the Yankees.

      1. One could also note that one of the few people willing to cooperate with George Mitchell was the Yankee supplier. I don't think the Yankees were especially likely to use compared to other teams. They just happened to have been caught.

        Off your own list there, Knoblauch, White, Lawton, Neagle, Naulty, and Ricky Bones (Spring Training invite and a few months in AAA) were all Twins at one point.

        1. I wasn't ignoring the fact that other teams have employed PED users or suppliers, but simply noting that one of the teams we know must about - the Yankees - were awfully successful for a sustained period in which they employed a significant number of major users or suppliers, some of them likely Hall of Famers, All-Stars, and MVP and Cy Young award winners. And yet, as Chaps points out, while sports mediots were up in arms about the Brewers beating the Diamondbacks in 2011, there has been hardly a peep about a team that made the playoffs seventeen times and won five World Championships in the last twenty seasons.

          I haven't even heard anyone suggest that A-Rod's MVPs be vacated, which is astounding considering it's A-Rod.

    6. a quick scan of that 2009 NYY team, I see Rodriguez, Pettite, Melky Cabrera all been caught. Maybe there are a few more player that I am forgetting.

        1. well, he has some family legacy as well, but that only gets you so far, I suppose.

          Somehow I picture "Walter Mitty" done by Terry Gilliam, for example, and not as a typical "ha ha" farce that it may have ended up. Actually, Brazil has a lot of "Walter Mitty" in it, now that I think about it.

                2. I like to defend the Oscar at times like this because they get it right more often than the Grammys, but then they hand one to Bullock and there's no point in defending them.

              2. The question is, does my rule not to watch her movies cancel out my affinity for his? I think it does.

                    3. yes to Rhu's example. But most space flicks switch back and forth between inside-the-ship and outside-the-ship perspectives. Plenty of room for 'splosion sounds inside the ship. But big mega-explosions with sound in the vacuum of space is just stupid.

  5. Picking up a little on yesterday's discussion of language misuse, I read this today about LeBron's interest in running for president of the player's association:

    If he was elected, James would be the highest-profile player to be union president since Patrick Ewing held the role in the late 1990s.

    When you use the construction of a superlative and followed by a qualifier to describe something, you are suggesting that the example in the qualifier is more whatever than the something. In this example, then, LeBron would be considered high profile, but not as high profile as Patrick Ewing. Heh. I suppose it is literally true that LBJ would be the highest profile player to hold the job since Ewing, though, so hey! He'd also be the highest profile player to hold the job since the last guy to do so (Derek Fisher).

      1. Nope. A Clevelander. Windhorst covered James when he was in high school and all throughout his playing days in Cleveland. When LeBron went to Miami, 4LTR hired him to cover James (and other NBA stuff, but primarily James).

    2. I'm more bothered by the incorrect verb conjugation. Conditional is still a tense, right?

      If he was were elected, James would be...

      2. There are plenty of people who get all bent out of shape about passive voice, to the point where they refuse to recognize it as a valid way of conveying particular points or kinds of information. My own pet peeve is abuse of the conditional mood, particularly when used in writing about past events. (It frequently suggests a counterfactual when misused or lazily deployed.)

    3. Awful construction there. Also, "If he were elected..." (I assume that the election hasn't yet taken place. If it has, I think the original start may be acceptable, but then the independent clause should begin "James would have been...")
      Was this in a blog?
      An editor should have been able to work that into a sensible sentence. I edited my college paper for a semester and had to untangle worse. (Had there been any competition for our writing gigs, most of our writers would not have been writers. But you know how it goes with beggars and choosers and whatnot.)

  6. If you have 18 minutes to spare today, you couldn't find a better way to spend it than listening to 99% Invisible's most recent episode, a feature on Maurice Noble, who was a layout artist with Warner Bros. If you've ever seen a Looney Tunes cartoon, you probably know his work – he was the guy who illustrated all the backgrounds in the Road Runner cartoons, as well as the backgrounds for What's Opera, Doc? and Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century. At other points in his career, Noble also worked on the Disney's Silly Symphonies, backgrounds in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia, the characters in the Pink Elephant sequence in Dumbo, and (perhaps most significantly) with his WWII buddy Ted Geisel as the designer for the TV adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.

    And if you enjoy that episode, I suggest checking out the two other most recent installments: a double episode on Ladislav Suntar and the movie Trading Places (are the film's concluding events feasible?), and another on Heyoon, a strange pavilion near Ann Arbor, Mich.

    1. backgrounds in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, ... the characters in the Pink Elephant sequence in Dumbo

      Well that's some mighty fine work there. Backgrounds in Snow White are phenomenal. I think Disney veered away detail from that after the one film because they spent way too much time on it.

      And the Pink Elephant scene is the Yeezus of the early 1940's.

      1. One of the interesting things they discuss on this episode is how Noble didn't care for the animation work that Disney was doing for feature films because the lush backgrounds were in conflict with the flatter characters.

  9. So... Sheenie and I get health insurance through the State because I'm a State employee. As you can imagine, we get a pretty sweet deal, but it comes with having to work with the State's giant negotiating power and sifting through the bureaucracy from time to time. Anyway, we kept our PCP that we had from her job when we switched insurance.

    Unfortunately, we got a letter saying that our PCP was switching to "Medicare and Medicaid" coverage only in March, so we would have to pick a new PCP. Not really a problem. We picked a new PCP in April that was near us only to find out that they do "all" their stuff internally and won't make referrals to outside doctors (like, for example, the neurologist Sheenie has been seeing for three years for her MS). Sheenie happened to see her neurologist without realizing that and BOOM - out of pocket. That was obviously a deal-breaker once we found out, so we switched again last month. She called others nearby and found one that only is an internist, so he's willing to refer us to anyone we like outside of his specialty.

    She just spoke with the new PCP (our switch always takes effect on the 1st of the next month, so today) to schedule an appointment to get a referral. They mentioned that they were just bought by (____, a competitor of the one that does everything internally). This means they will no longer be able to make outside referrals beginning next month.

    While having to constantly call and switch our PCP is annoying, at least it doesn't cost us any money. Still, it just goes to show how goofy our current health care system is.

    1. Dude - spoiler that Forbidden Zone s#!t - you can't talk about the healthcare system out in the open!!!

      1. I'm not complaining or criticizing. I'm just relaying this comical experience.

        1. Spoiler SelectShow
    3. Spoiler SelectShow
      1. Spoiler SelectShow
    4. Spoiler SelectShow

  10. Doogie is reporting that the Wolves offered AK47 3/$21 million, which he turned down. Left $15 million on the table.

      1. I'll be keenly interested in how many draft picks the Nets lose from this, which I'm assuming will be zero.

      2. Because when you have an opportunity to stop developing a good prospect against the best talent after he's shown improvment from a horrible start in a lost season, you do it.

        The Twins are trying my patience these days.

        1. He's shown improvement? Check what he's done lately. Since going 4-for-4 on July 8, it's been all downhill.

          I guess Clete has proved Hicks can take a break, I suppose. Mastroianni shouldn't be that far away.

          2. Y'know, that might not be that far off. Considering the Twins are out of it, the guys whose options have been burned this year haven't been raking in the majors, and aren't selling tickets in Minneapolis either way, why not?

            I remember grumblings a few years ago right before the Redwings re-upped that the team stunk and there were no decent players. A regular cycling through of "Rookie of the Year Candidates" has got to help mend some bridges there, along with the winning. Now considering this, I'd guess that Deibinson and Albers might not even get their September calls until the AAA playoffs are finished.

            Another thing I remember is that a lot of clubs are holding their AAA affiliates tightly now, fearing the game of musical chairs could leave them with the Vegas 51s.

              1. Is he even on the 40-man?
                Wait, Butters got moved and the Twins didn't get a player back: that opened a spot.

    3. The Twins really handled Hicks well. I suppose he sits at Rochester rest of season. #servicetime

      1. This year I've pretty much given up trying to make sense of the Twins moves and have just gone to reporting tham.

      1. Not only that, I've seen them accept incorrectly spelled answers for the adults.

        The worst I ever saw--well, besides this one--was on Concentration, also with Trebek. The answer to the rebus was "A Pleasant Surprise." But the guy pronounced it, "A Pleasant Suh-prise." He lost.

        1. sometimes, the answer is just a scribble like " G_-___--l " and the judges deem it correct.

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