Cup of Coffee

July 27, 2020: Eighteen

69 Comments

Gladden, through his experience playing in Japan, mentioned that the ace on a Japanese team usually wears the number 18, and he was right! I did not know that. Apparently Garver gave the number up to Maeda when he joined the team. That's super cool and I dig it.

All that said, the idea of the Dazzleman living in Japan fascinates me.

69 thoughts on “July 27, 2020: Eighteen”

  1. Talking to Rhu_Ru last night, I think we are going to have a Zoom Chat during the Wednesday night game. Hopefully a few folks can stop by for awhile and chat.

    1. Yep. I'll post the link info on Wednesday. Would be nice to have a weekly Zoom during a ballgame instead where folks can drop in any time for however long, and Citizens have mentioned how the current Sunday night time can be problematic.

      1. I am honored you name these meetings after me. A lot of people talk about how good I am at meetings. I very bigly knock these meetings out of the park. Some guy walked up to me the other day and asked 'how is it possible you are so good at meetings?" and I just told him it comes naturally to me.

        That being said, I gotta participate in one of these meetings soon!

  2. Strat-o-Matic finished their 2020 simulation. Good news! The Twins came roaring back to win the Central and met up with Tampa Bay in the ALDS. (Of course, they were eliminated in three straight.)

    2. But over on The Athletic, Gleeman's simulated team won the world series over the Dodgers.

  3. I enjoyed this baseball season.

    1. I came here to post the exact same tweet with the exact same sentiment. It was a good run MLB.

      1. This will give Justin Verlander a chance to get his inevitable Tommy John surgery and probably not miss a game.

  5. We're all coming here to say the same thing. It's not going to work. It was never going to work. Meanwhile, there are reports that the Missouri Valley Football Conference, a conference that includes the 3 time defending FCS Champion (eight in nine years, in case you didn't know), will announce that they are playing in 2020. I expect that to go pear-shaped, too.

    1. Come on, SBG -- we all know that college students are much more responsible in their free time than pro athletes!

      Frankly, with pro athletes I've been relatively okay with what has been happening -- surely I would make different decisions but generally their labor groups have professional representation and some thought has been put into it. I think I'm going to wind up being pretty angry about the college situation.

      1. Of course they are. Pro athletes are very often just college-aged guys with a lot of money and free time!

        1. They may have the same proclivities, but the pros have the advantage of not living on a college campus.

    1. It need not pain you. I think we've seen that, while Selig was/is terrible, Manfred is on a whole other level of suck.

          1. This was a joke when I first posted it, but given what has been announced about the Marlins, I now mean it.

            1. You would think Jeter would take communicable diseases a little more seriously....

        2. He is a reflection of the owners, but he's also uniquely positioned to be able to lead and influence the owners. Maybe he would have to stick his neck out and put his job at risk by going against an influential owner or five, but in general the owners have a commissioner because they want to delegate some responsibility to him -- they don't want to sit around a conference room with all 30 owners and decide everything by consensus.

          On the Astros punishment, I somewhat give him a pass for not forcing the Astros owner to sell (which to me is the only worthwhile penalty in that situation -- on top of that suspending coaches/players would probably be good but responsibility starts at the top), since that would really make every owner sweat and he'd almost certainly not be able to get that through. But I don't give him a pass on the hunk of metal comment--Selig at least was a fan of the game, Manfred seems like he's a fan of being an executive.

          And in terms of handling this season, he gets a big, fat F because this is where he needed to push back against the owners and push for them making short term concessions to the players to get them on board with the fastest and safest way to hold the season, because making this season successful -- even at a 2020 financial loss -- would really be important for the long-term health of the game. If it goes as badly as it looks like it is going to go, he'll probably lose his job anyway, not that it helps the fans or the players for everything he's screwed up so far.

  7. Rob Manfred has a lot of explaining to do - how did MLB let the Marlins play yesterday after 4 positive tests? How many Phillies players, stadium workers, support staff, etc. were stupidly exposed to the 10 additional people that tested positive?

    The NHL planned the safest return by choosing play in Canadian bubbles.

    1. The NFL will still play because they can just cut players who test positive.

      In other news, ND is planning on having high school football. But they are taking measures to ensure player safety. One rule is that they are gonna have only one player from each team come out for the coin toss. Another rule is that the teams can move between the 10 yard lines instead of between the 30s to allow for social distancing.

      Okay, why not just give the ball to the away team to start the game and the home team to start the second half? Why not designate which goal the teams will defend in each period? Why do you have to have a coin flip. Why not allow players to move between the goal lines on the sidelines?

      Also, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic didn't address the main problem with its inaugural voyage. It turns out that there was a big hole in the side of the ship. And here that type of problem is that players are gonna bang heads for 80 or so plays a game. But of course, the virus doesn't exist in small town ND! (I know of six people in SBGville -- population ~400 -- who currently have COVID-19.)

      1. rearranging the deck chairs

        Thanks for your caveat. I was going to say...the coin toss seems like the least of their worries...

      2. My hometown county has 8 deaths. The county population is around 9,000. (You can probably find it.)

        This means 1 in 1,000 people in the county has died from COVID. The reaction is:
        * Local radio station has a daily chatterbox hour or two that talks about Darth Walz
        * Folks are passing the word around, "When you go to a store, just tell them that you have asthma and they can't make you wear a mask"
        * The largest retails store in town has assured customers they will not enforce the mask order

        This is what happens when an entire community decides to play the head-in-the-sand strategy of coping.

        1. It's flabbergasting. You would think that 8 deaths out of 9,000 would be enough so that a large majority of the population knew one of the victims or their close relatives personally.

          Were the deaths clustered in a nursing home or in an insular ethnic population (i.e., brown people)?

          1. We think they are all over 80. Mix of nursing home and not. The response for those in denial is of the “they were gonna die soon anyway” variety.

            My cousin drives ambulance. One patient late last week ended up dying of Covid. She was never told, spent the whole weekend at my aunt and uncle’s cabin, and now I guess we wait and see what happens.

    2. I was hugely skeptical that the MLS plan would work even before FL went entirely south, because clearly the FL government valued business interests over life. But the two teams that got thrown out of the tournament (Dallas and Nashville) both seem to have gotten sick before getting to Orlando and their protocols were good enough that isolating Dallas and Nashville has resulted in no positive tests for the rest of the league for about two weeks now. I still think it's a bit insane to be having a tournament in an area with such overrun ICUs, but it seems as though even in an area with a ton of cases, it's possible to safely quarantine the players to hold games--and there is a lot more chance for transmission between soccer players than baseball players.

      The hope for MLB would be that this is a moment of reckoning for the players and they start to realize that if they don't follow the protocols, they will lose their season, because I guarantee the Marlins were not strictly adhering to whatever their protocols were.

  8. In the spring, we were optimistic enough to sign our kids up for outdoor sports and expected them to be somewhat normal. Obviously that is not the case and I'm struggling with the situation and questioning how I'm balancing the risk vs. reward (some sense of normalcy for a kid).

    Our travel baseball team is struggling to find enough players for this week's games as 3 have confirmed COVID exposure that requires them to sit out for two weeks. Because of the state of testing, the kids come back to play as long as they aren't showing symptoms vs. having to get a negative test result.

    The organization is doing a relatively good job all things considered, the kids stay distanced with an "extended" dugout, the umpire is in the middle of the diamond, no post-game handshakes, and enough hand sanitizer to make it smell like a bar, no concession stands, etc.

  10. I bet if the NFL and MLB pooled resources, they could effectively eradicate COVID-19 in Hawaii. They could use their testing money to test people coming in and out of the airport instead of testing the players, and organize a quarantine for people coming on island before their test results come back. Would be great for Hawaii and they could probably even have fans in the stands. Could serve as an example for what could be done in the rest of the country.

    2. “Out of an abundance of caution” should really read “the least we can do to be remotely responsible”.

      Looks like they postponed their game today—maybe they are learning a little?

  12. I'm back in CT after 2 months in MN, mostly due to NBBW's father's hospitalization/funeral.

    Overall, my impression is that MN doesn't take this seriously. In Stillwater, I saw about 30% maskination. At the Marine Store the old folk wear masks, but in general, nobody bothers.

    Back in CT, both my wife and I got temperature-checked (her at work to sign some stuff, me at my club to swim). Luckily they pulled Minny off the CT-no list recently so we're not in quarantine.

    1. It really depends on where you are. I'm guessing being on the border with WI makes it pretty tough there. I know Becker and Ottertail County are more affluent than other counties but mask usage has been good there. Not 100% but I haven't been back since the mandate.

      1. My dad says that he thinks there's been a shift in Grand Rapids, perhaps due to Walmart's corporate decision. Before: people in grocery stores and Target generally were masked, people in Walmart generally were not. Now, people in Walmart are generally masked too.

          1. Just to be clear I'm not trying to downplay this. I'm currently refusing to stay in Fargo, and when I absolutely have to be in the office (essential business) I stay alone at the family cabin in ottertail and commute in for my temp check (and I'm the only one who wears a mask before entering and when leaving). Wear an F'ing mask.

      2. Well, I can say that the Somerset fire chief refuses to believe the science of mask wearing, if it's any indication of what you have to deal with on those border towns around Hudson and Stillwater.

  13. I mentioned earlier I'm not buying books in 2020...
    So I learned the Hartford Publc Library has many eBook services available. One of them is Biblioboard. I just registered and downloaded Appomattox, but found you can also get this from the Lee Family archives, unless that's been made useless by ransomwarery.

  14. I for one count on Garmin to track/spreadsheet my Schwimmbad Arbeit und SWOLF. They have been down for several days due to ransomware, probably the Russkies. This is impacting the stick runners, but also pilots. If Garmin can be taken down like this, what's to stop the WGOM from being hijacked by out-of-work-Cosmonauts?

    1. It is pretty BS that my watch won’t sync to my phone without a Garmin server—that should really just require a bluetooth connection to the phone.

  15. Mrs. Twayn's not feeling well tonight so I'm on my own for dinner. French bread pizza (not a sandwich, by the way) with Davanni's sauce, diced ham, pepperoni, green onion, green peppers, olives, Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. Grain Belt Premium to wash it down.

    1. What if you fold it? That sounds delicious. Also I've recently had access to my grill after moving and I've already made pizza on it 5 times. Quickly approaching burger #'s.

    1. Managers shouldn’t be in the dugout if they are symptomatic, even if their test is negative. It’s dumb to risk that it might be a false negative.

      1. Because I had shared the original tweet about his being tested, I wanted to share this followup that he had tested negative. But, I concur.

  17. I am treating this as baseball and celebrity news:

    You have to be the world’s most insecure celebrity to pretend that you were invited to throw the first pitch at a baseball game.

    In related news, I’m declining my 2021 spring training invitation. With the CBA in the air, I don’t feel comfortable making a commitment like that at this time.

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