So Ohtani's position is the "Ippei straight-up-stole money-from-me" scenario. Which puts the wire transfers at the forefront. The feds/forensic investigation can figure that out. If it's born out, Shohei is in the clear and Ippei is in tons of serious trouble. If true, Ippei gave a 90-minute interview to ESPN of straight up lies, backed up by Ohtani's PR/crisis communications people, all while his agent stood by.

May be time for some personnel changes!

No holiday comes within ten miles of Thanksgiving. The best weather for a major holiday. Chill pace which lends itself to a nice multi-hour buzz. A lotta great sports on TV. No gifts, no bullshit. What's not to like.

I never watch football anymore but I like turning on the Lions game on Thanksgiving. One of the best Thanksgivings ever involved my parents taking my brother and I to the Lions game -- they beat the Cliff Stoudt Steelers 45-3 in the Silverdome -- and then we had dinner at an aunt's house down near Detroit.

"Andor" Season 1 was absolutely amazing. But low-key the best part of it is just how readily Cassian is to straight up shoot a motherfucker with no warning because it simply makes sense to do it. Just cuts through all the usual bullshit in the best way. He was already great in Rogue One, but the way they've made Andor such a hero while simultaneously making him a ruthless pragmatist takes it to the next level. Such a great character and so perfectly acted by Diego Luna.

Ever have a dream in which your brain tries to keep you from accessing information? The weirdest kind of anxiety dream. Had one last night. I was certain, in the dream, that there was a ballplayer for the 1970s Orioles who kinda looked like Paul Newman and who, actually, had a minor acting career too. He hit 38 homers in 1975, that much I knew. So in the dream I kept trying to remember his name.

A lot of people have pinged me this week re: the This American Life stuff about Ohio gerrymandering. It's jarring how eye-opening it is to everyone -- as it should be! -- but how it's no longer news in Ohio. Republican lawlessness is simply a fact of life here now. Not hyperbole. If you're unaware, over 70% of the population passed an anti-gerrymandering amendment. The GOP ignored it and gerrymandered severely. A GOP Supreme Court struck it down multiple times. The GOP imposed it anyway, daring someone to stop them. No one did.

You don't need to get to politics to make the case that Jason Bateman > Ricky Schroder. Bateman's next show was the all-timer "It's Your Move." Schroder: doing a bad David Caruso imitation while getting outclassed by orders of magnitude by the rest of the case of "NYPD Blue." "We're the Dregs."

#IYKYK. And the only person On Here I've ever encountered who knows is @StaceGots.

I went a week and a half without doing any sort of exercise when life spun sideways but got back to it yesterday. Despite the fact that "it" for me is "incline fast walking on a treadmill, unweighted squats, and some pushups" I'm basically crippled today. Never hit your late-40s. Me: *does some old timey man-with-silly-mustache-touching-his-toes-and-throwing-a-medicine-ball-style nearly non-exercises*

Me: *dies*

Everyone loves the Jim Downey scene from "Billy Madison" but his finest work was probably First CityWide Change Bank from SNL.

Also: I was today years old when I learned that he is Robert Downey Jr.'s half brother. Wait, I was just informed he's his half UNCLE. Imagined the "Jr." mentioned in his Wikipedia page.

Major League Baseball would like nothing more than for the foreign substance conversation turn into a game in which fans accuse rival players of cheating, villains are identified and pilloried, and the league's knowing institutionalization of ball-doctoring is largely ignored. In this it'll be a replay of the PED scandal. Some high-profile and/or really inept cheaters are gonna turn into personae non grata, everyone else will skate, and MLB will declare victory over a problem its own inattentiveness to competitive integrity helped bring about.

Not the same situation, but I remember when Bradshaw was injured at the end of his career, couldn't play, but was undermining Cliff Stoudt by throwing passes on the sidelines, causing the crowd to chant for him and to boo Stoudt even more.

https://twitter.com/uSTADIUM/status/1389556631407583232?s=20

I have a Terry Bradshaw story. I probably told it before, but I'll tell it again. It's really my dad's story, but I tell it better than him.

Nodding furiously at this whole article, but particularly the last paragraph. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… The graf:

New hat Before people chime in with fan crap, I have a lot of hats. Currently I have this, Atlanta, Dodgers, Cleveland (Block C), A's, Cardinals, and Tigers. At any given time I have a good half-dozen hats in rotation and have probably owned 20-25 different team caps in recent years.

When GOPers get riled re: most things it *seems* like they're full of shit but requires some research to see exactly why. Them being full of shit about baseball, a thing I know about more than them, is a clarifying reminder of how blatantly full of shit they are from the get-go. Their assumptions about the economic impact of things like the All-Star Game, their beliefs about MLB's racial/political orientation, both historical and current, the antitrust exemption -- they just comically have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Baseball getting called out as "woke" is the most hilarious shit I've seen in a dog's age. There is none less woke a thing than baseball this side of the Eisenhower era. There are blue 1952 DeSoto Diplomats that are more woke than Major League Baseball.

The primordial time of the mid-to-late 2000s were a golden age for blogging collectives. Most of them have gone extinct. Victims of small environmental factors like social media or large impacts from pivot-to-video or gambling #content asteroids. [cont'd] Many of us from that world were wiped out. Others retreated to caves. Others adapted. Either way, massive upheaval was the order of the age.

I know that I'm promoting a shit-ton today. Which, given how hard I promote, is saying something. In my defense it's Opening Day, so I'm stoked. But I'm also stoked for a different reason. When I launched this newsletter, I had a modest short term goal and a bolder longer term goal. The modest goal was that it'd provide enough money that, combined with my NBC severance, I'd be able to ride out a tough job search and not have to consider reactivating my law license.

This very good story about Marcus Thames reminds me of one of the worst baseball columns I've ever read, which also featured Thames as its subject. theathletic.com/2489366/2021/0… That column was by T.J. Simers, then of the Los Angeles Times, who decided to take the lowest of roads possible in using Thames to (I think?) make a point about the Dodgers' roster construction. latimes.com/sports/la-xpm-…

We could've had Wide Carolina but we fucking blew it.

https://twitter.com/curtainsdc/status/1374406667287158786?s=20

Lotta non-Ohioans gonna see this map and suddenly realize why the university in Cleveland is called Case Western Reserve.

My thoughts on Republicans' refusal to accept the election results: like everything else, it's driven by Trump and fear of Trump. And, for the moment anyway, I think it's all about optics more than it is about actual ratfuckery or attempts to change the outcome. [cont'd] At the moment even GOP election officials on the state level are not buying this. It all changes if they do, but for now they're not. In the meantime, it's about everyone being afraid of being the first one to break with Trump so they don't get MAGA base wrath.

Today's newsletter is out! In it: my analysis of Jeff Luhnow suing the Astros. The word "chutzpah" comes to mind. But the definition of "chutzpah" does not include "dumb."

In fact, Luhnow is probably creating a very big problem for Major League Baseball. cupofcoffee.substack.com/p/cup-of-coffe… There's a lot more in there too. This may be one of the more packed newsletters I've written. The little warning button that tells you you're reaching the limit was PARTICULARLY insistent today.