You’re on your own, kid
Yesterday, Taylor Swift announced that after a protracted battle, she had secured ownership over the master recordings of her first six albums. If you’re unfamiliar with the saga, the short version is that while as the writer of all her songs (though sometimes with co-writers), she owned the songs themselves, her initial contract allocated the rights to the master recordings of her first six albums to her production company, Big Machine Records. This is a pretty common structure in the music industry.
But Swift wanted to own her own music, and after her initial deal expired, she tried to get the rights to her original work, and so changed production companies to Republic, which gave her the rights to her future work. That left the question of her first six albums. To hear Swift tell it, she had long made clear to Big Machine’s CEO, Scott Borchetta, that she wanted to buy the rights to those albums. But Borchetta sold them out from under her, without giving her the chance to buy them. Borchetta’s story differs slightly, though I’ll spare you the details. To make matters worse for Swift, the man Borchetta sold the work to, music mega-producer Scooter Bruan, is someone Borchetta knew to be one of Swift’s least favorite people on the planet. Although Swift has never publicly clarified exactly why she hates Braun so much, whenever she’s talked about it, I have understood her comments to have strong undertones of some kind of abuse or at least misogyny. Braun later sold the albums to an investment vehicle run by the Disney family.
This led Swift to begin rerecording her first six albums. Since she owned the songs, just not the recordings, she could record them all over again and own those recordings. The existence of those alternate versions, and her fans’ loyalty to listening exclusively to Taylor’s Versions collapsed the financial value of the stolen versions. That was presumably one factor in convincing the new owners to sell to her.
If this all strikes you as, well, a bit much, that’s a reasonable gut reaction. But Swift felt that her fame and the passion of her fans made her uniquely situated to try to force some change in the music industry. Indeed, many recording artists have credited Swift’s project with inspiring them to negotiate harder for the rights to their own recordings, and the industry standard does seem to be shifting some power from capital to labor. But the reason I bring all this up is that it’s important to consider why this would all matter so much to Swift in particular. The thing that makes Taylor Swift so successful is that her songs let us in on her feelings and experiences on an atypically raw, personal, vulnerable level. It’s one thing for Drake to want the rights to “Hotline Bling.” But Swift was fighting for “Back to December,” “All Too Well,” “State of Grace,” and “Dear John.” It’s that angle that’s always made me more sympathetic to this endeavor than the typical entertainment biz news story.
After all is said and done, and no matter how many collaborators and supportive friends and family she had, those songs are hers in a deeply personal way. At its core, the work is her whole life. That’s worth a long battle. And after years of fighting, yesterday, she won.
So, after a week of Mariners baseball in which we’ve had no choice but to take the long view, I find it helpful to see stories of long, hard-fought battles that are ultimately won. The Mariners, the only franchise to never appear in the World Series, are coming off a stretch of losing three of four in Houston, two of three to the Nats, and an opener to the Twins. Houston walked-off the series, and the Nats and Twins each won in extra innings in heartbreaking fashion on back-to-back nights. And then the Twins jumped out to an early 3-0 lead tonight, feasting on a returned-from-the-IL Bryce Miller who looked as broken as ever. And then despite the Mariners working back to a 4-3 lead, the Twins tied it in the ninth. Again. And then the Mariners essentially ran out of pitchers and had the bottom of the order as their last hope before they’d have to turn it over to Casey Lawrence and a prayer for the 12th inning and beyond. The vibes were running rancid, and hope was thin on the ground.
That said, when Miller first got on the mound, he looked rejuvenated. He struck out his first two batters, Byron Buxton on a vintage splitter and Trevor Larnach on a vicious knuckle curve. He touched 96.7 mph when facing his first batter, a velocity he’d only bested on eight pitches all year before hitting the IL. A fly out ended the inning 1-2-3. Then he had to go back out. His velocity dipped back to 93-94 after the first-inning adrenaline wore down. He started the second inning with a walk on four non-competitive pitches and left a 94 heater middle-middle that Matt Wallner took for a ride. From there, the Twins beat up on Miller like we’d seen teams do all year, with the big Texan laboring through at-bats, failing to command his fastball, and unable to put batters away. Even Harrison Bader got a 107-EV double. On a limited pitch count, Miller ultimately made it through just four innings, not striking anyone else out after those first two batters. He did at least say after the game that he felt fine, physically.
For the offense’s part, they had trouble getting much going against MLB’s most underrated starter, Bailey Ober. But I will note that Cal Raleigh’s first inning strike out looked uglier than I think it actually was. While some people I was texting with said it was brutal, I noted that his reaction after strike three was not a string of Kelenician swear words, but rather a look of “aha.”
Thus, when he came back for a second chance, he was ready. With Williamson having reached in front of him (after one of his more impressive ABs), Cal pounced on a fastball about a foot above the zone.
The decent mid-game kept rolling when Gabe Speier came out to replace Bryce Miller and struck out four of the six batters he faced. When he finished the fifth on a nasty strikeout of Carlos Correa, he ended it with more flourish than we’re used to seeing out of him. Spicy Speier. Speier Fire. His move was wide and melodramatic, calling to mind what a bitchy wizard might do after embarrassing someone in a duel.
The bottom of that inning was less fun, with another good Williamson at-bat and a J.P. water balloon putting runners on the corners with nobody out and Cal-Julio-Arozarena coming up. That chased Ober, but Minnesota has the type of bullpen depth we can only dream of, and they brought in Louis Varland. Two strikeouts, a soft fly ball, and a collective groan across the Pacific Northwest.
The Mariners were able to strike in the seventh, when J.P. Crawford took out an LED panel on the ribbon board below the old Hit It Here Cafe, punctuating it with the best bat flip of his career.
By the ninth, the Mariners were up a run but had burned through Speier for 1.2 innings, Eduard Bazardo for 1.1, and Kowar for an inning. Each of their remaining trustworthy arms had pitched each of the past two days. With Matt Brash returning from Tommy John surgery and Andres Munoz having thrown 24 pitches last night, Carlos Vargas was the least-bad option. And his pitching was actually pretty OK. But he fielded a swinging bunt and threw the ball down the right-field line, allowing Buxton, who might have been out if Bryan Woo or Matt Brash had fielded it, to get all the way to third base, and then tie the game on a Larnach flare.
Still, Vargas limited the damage and sent the game to the bottom of the ninth tied. Young got his first MLB hit. When J.P. moved him to third on a double, the Twins opted to intentionally walk Cal rather than pitch to the game’s best non-Aaron Judge hitter with the winning run on third base. But Julio promptly struck out swinging, and the groans grew even louder. As Ryan Blake has pointed out, Julio has more PAs in high-leverage situations than anyone else in baseball since his debut. And even though he has a 158 wRC+ in those PAs, it means we still see him fail in big moments seemingly all the time. It’s hard to keep your eye on the war in the midst of so many soul-crushing battles.
Julio would redeem himself a bit with a play in the tenth that he had no business making. While we’re used to his spectacular catches at this point, his arm has historically been his weakest tool, with his excellent arm strength totally wasted by his Yohan Ramirez-level accuracy. But he’s made visible improvements on his accuracy this year, and it finally paid off with this game-saving play to throw out the go-ahead run at the plate.
That helped Collin Snider somehow get through two touch-and-go innings unscathed. It was now four hours since the game began, time that saw a few highlights, but was mostly a brutal and hopeless slog. At the tail end of a week in which the Mariners had blown the division lead, something they’d done each of the past two seasons. The road back to the playoffs since 2022’s sugar rush hasn’t been joyless, but it’s been two years of failing when victory was in sight. It’s been hard at times not to just give up and do something else with your time. And there’s still a long way to go.
But four hours after tonight’s game started, we found ourselves in the bottom of the 11th with the game still tied at 4-4. Leody Taveras got the bunt down to move the ghost-running Master Bunny to third and bring Cole Young, tonight’s Sun Hat Award winner, to the plate.
Here at Lookout Landing, we make a habit of linking back to Lou Fish-Sadin’s gorgeous paean to MLB debuts. I just did it again. Because it’s wonderful. It correctly focuses on how communal an MLB debut is. It’s about everyone who helped get the guy there. It’s about a whole fan base being excited for him and thinking about who’s helped us to get where we are. It’s about how even the opposing fan base can experience the same good will. And that’s all right.
But when you press past it, a debut is, ultimately, one person’s moment. To get to MLB, it has to be your whole life. No matter how many collaborators you had or how much support, it’s the player who has put everything they possibly have into the endeavor. Others put in a lot, but no one’s put in more than the man himself. Literal blood. Literal sweat. Literal tears. And he has to stand there and try not to waste it. He has to let himself risk failure on a stage so big most of us can only imagine it. He’s forced to be publicly vulnerable in the moment that culminates his whole life’s work. We all feel like we’re a part of it, but it’s a profoundly personal moment. So he can and should share it, but it’s only just that he get to be the one to own it.