The White Sox are in a bad place (and not just with Joe Kelly’s latest injury, though we’ll get to that). The White Sox, expected by many to be a contender this year, are two games under .500, five games back of playoff position, and staring a month of an empty ballpark dead in the eyes.
This isn’t surprising to those of us who’ve been paying attention. The White Sox, as we’ve noted a few times now these last four years, aren’t trying to win. Their rosters have been good enough to compete in the AL Central, the worst division in baseball, but they haven’t been good rosters. Using FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds model, which accounts for schedule, Chicago’s American League franchise hasn’t opened the season with a roster expected to win 90 or more games at any point in this current “window of contention.” They’ve been expected to compete within their bad division, but they haven’t been reasonably expected to contend league-wide. They’ve only been unreasonably expected to contend league-wide.
No, the White Sox aren’t trying to win. The White Sox are trying to make their fans think they’re trying to win, and at that, they’ve largely succeeded. But this is the reaping of what they’ve sown: If you stink, people may be upset. If you stink and you made people think you were going to be good, people will be furious.
Joe Kelly’s Hurt Again
Battling through another outing for his teammates Friday night, Joe Kelly took a groundball off both legs, ultimately leaving the game. The haters—those who don’t understand baseball and therefore can’t appreciate a 3.40 xERA and a 3.35 FIP and the greatest vibes any pitcher’s mound has ever seen—criticized him anyway? Pretty messed up. These people must have hated Kirk Gibson.
Gaining a Union, Losing More Minor League Teams
The MLB Players Association is trying to add minor leaguers to its membership, a welcome development as currently, minor leaguers are effectively subject to the MLBPA/MLB collective bargaining agreement despite not being represented at the negotiating table and currently, minor leaguers are subject to some rough living conditions as they try to chase their dreams.
Those living conditions have improved recently, and with that, the minor leagues have contracted, and I doubt those aren’t independent events. It costs MLB franchises money to run their minor league systems, and they evidently don’t see enough of a return on that money to keep doing it if those minor league systems start costing more. Presumably, then, as minor leaguers’ lot improves (should they agree to unionize), there will be fewer minor leaguers, and therefore fewer minor league teams, and therefore a big letter from Bernie Sanders to the world posted on Twitter and retweeted into oblivion by a bunch of people who want to have it both ways.
Yes, minor leaguers deserve better wages. They’re among the most talented people in the world at what they do, they work hard, and the thing they do is something we love: Baseball. But if baseball fans aren’t interested enough in attending minor league games or following the minor leagues at a level that makes this a profitable investment for MLB franchises, MLB franchises aren’t going to invest. I wish as much as the next Cubs fan that Tom Ricketts would try out the idea of spending a lot of money on the minors and seeing if that leads to better prospect development, but I also haven’t been to a minor league game in thirteen months and I’ve never watched a minor league game online, even though that product’s available and part of my job includes covering baseball. Part of the reason baseball’s minor leagues are as large as they are, relative to football especially, is that teams have always been able to pay players nickels. Congress fairly recently gave them an exemption to minimum wage law to do exactly this. Now, if the union does form, living conditions will improve and we’ll get a corresponding decrease in the size of the formal minor leagues. That’s just how the world works.
Pain in His Eyes
Celtics forward Danilo Gallinari tore his meniscus in a World Cup qualifier, and when asked about it, Italy’s coach, Gianmarco Pozzecco (I am already obsessed), is reported to have said: “I hope and I pray that nothing bad will come out. It was…it is an honor coaching him. I saw pain in his eyes.” (I said I was already obsessed!)
I want from my mentor figures what Danilo Gallinari has from Gianmarco Pozzecco.
Gary Harris also tore his meniscus but his coach failed to make me care.
Fargo Loves the Rug
Gonna have to document this with video soon, but we got a new rug a few weeks ago and Fargo is all about it. It’s in the office—a room she used to never enter, for reasons known only to her—and her evenings now consist of grabbing a toy from the living room, waving it around at us, bringing it in to the office, lying down on the rug with it, chewing it for a bit, then getting up and repeating the process. I came in this morning and there were eight toys in a pile on the ground.
Also, she ate either zero, one, or two unidentified objects last night when I took her down for her evening wee. Hopefully nothing more to come on that. She’s at daycare today since I was bringing the car in (and expected it to get taken care of today, since I had an appointment, but evidently the move that place is to just show up and hope for the best, as I was informed it’s still going to take a couple days. At least the shuttle driver’s a nice semi-retired guy who used to live in Crystal Lake. Worked right by Country Donuts.)
Are Mason Ramsey and Addison Rae Friends? Enemies?
Earlier this month, we wrote to you about Mason Ramsey’s latest beef, this time with evident rapper Yung Gravy. I thought little of it at the time. What young musician wouldn’t be jealous of Mason Ramsey’s greatness? In an interesting twist, though, Yung Gravy showed up at the VMA’s last night with Addison Rae’s mom as his date, then called her the queen of MILFs on the red carpet. Who is Addison Rae? I’m not entirely sure. I think she got famous on TikTok. Who is Addison Rae’s mom? Well, she’s Addison Rae’s mom, but I think she’s maybe also on TikTok? Co-opting her daughter’s success, perhaps? Who am I to say. I just blogged to you about my dog.
Anyway, the biggest question for us, the Mason Ramsey stans in the room, is whether our guy has any stance on this, and I think that comes back to how Addison Rae feels about Yung Gravy and her mom. If Addison Rae’s cool with the relationship, well, no quarrel here. I’m sure Mason Ramsey’s too much of a gentleman to let the feud escalate beyond just himself and the gravy man. If Addison Rae’s against them dating, though, we could very well see a Mason Ramsey/Addison Rae diss track which would, I’m sure, break the internet. Wow.
Burnley Won
The lads did it. Went over to Wigan and won big. Five goals scored, one goal allowed, and the highest-scoring team in the Championship is now, against some odds, Burnley, long known for being so unfamiliar with the net that 0-0 draws were reasonable bets.
It was a reprieve, and an encouragement ahead of the transfer window closing this week, and pardon my use of the expression but Wigan is Burnley’s bitch now and I think that’s helpful. It’s nice to have one team in the league who says, “Oh no, it’s Burnley,” when you walk down the block. Maybe it’ll even start to spread around a little bit.
Standings update is that the lads are now sixth in the table and third among the big five, with only 1.5 points per match (2.0 is the target to finish top-two and avoid having to go the playoff route for promotion) but another winnable one tomorrow when Millwall comes to Turf Moor.
NASCAR: Wet and Wild
NASCAR’s at its best when it’s chaotic, and little is more chaotic than taking stock cars (which, in order to be capable of driving 200 miles per hour, were made to only be drivable in dry conditions) and sending them through a rain shower. For those that didn’t watch: It was kind of like that bit they do in movies where the heroes drop a bunch of marbles in front of the villains and the villainous, pursuing crowd all slips and falls at once. Except, you know. 200 miles per hour. With a lot of flammable fluids around.
Somehow, everyone survived this, so credit to NASCAR for that, but it might’ve ended at least one career, as for some drivers making the playoffs is necessary to secure sponsorship for future Cup Series seasons and it’s pretty likely Austin Dillon would not have won had these idiots not trashed two thirds of the field. This, though, is what you sign up for when you try to be a professional stock car driver.
I do wonder a little bit if the people who run motorsports are just dumb. As in, stupid. Maybe their brains just aren’t very good at the thinking thing. F1 hasn’t figured out how to avoid arbitrary decisions. NASCAR hasn’t figured out how to avoid arbitrary decisions. Both sports are nepotistic and pay-to-play, which one would think hurts the notion of a meritocracy the same way cousins procreating hurts our species’s ability to weed out bad recessive genes.
Speaking of F1, they figured out a way to let drivers pass each other (run races in dry weather at the track in Belgium) but they didn’t figure out a way to do that which leaves the race exciting. Too much passing. All by one guy.
This Is Nuts!
We’re trying a new thing with these notes where we give attention to something that is just, well, nuts. In today’s case, it’s this Texas Tribune article about how in 2019, a woman here in Austin decided to challenge the results of an election over in Fredericksburg, Texas (a great tourist town a couple hours west of here, effectively known as the capital of Hill Country). The election was a small one. Roughly two thousand votes were tallied, in total, which made it very easy to do her requested recount. The recount found that the result—roughly a 60% to 40% victory against the woman’s preferred cause of removing fluoride from Fredericksburg’s public water supply—was correct.
Long story medium, what started with an anti-fluoride crusader incorrectly challenging fluoride election results turned into Gillespie County—the county where Fredericksburg is located—having no election officials while taxpayer dollars go towards raising the wages of these jobs by, in the case of the senior position in the office, at least twenty percent (we’ll see if anyone applies). How did it get to this point? Well, the Gillespie County Republican Party saw what the anti-fluoride crew was doing and asked them to do it for the 2020 presidential election, even though the presidential vote in Gillespie County has been, for five straight elections now, between 78% and 83% in favor of the Republican candidate. When the anti-fluoride-turned-pro-Trump poll watchers weren’t allowed access to things like secured public voting locations after hours (ironically, they were concerned the locations weren’t secure), they made a national story of it in certain circles, leading to the senior election official receiving expletive-laden emails, some threatening, until she quit. Long story short? A county chapter of the GOP used a group of local conspiracy theorists as their farm system for harassing election officials, and now Gillespie County doesn’t have anyone to run this fall’s election.
There’s a lot that can be said here about irony and election security and grift and just plain sadness, but I think we should focus on the bright side: If you yell loudly enough about something deranged, you can become so beloved by certain groups of people that they’re willing to be unhinged assholes at your request. There’s hope for all of us.
**
Viewing schedule:
7:07 PM EDT: Cubs @ Blue Jays, MLB TV
Just the Cubs tonight. Trying to cause some trouble in Canada. As we all are, really.
