When Ryan Brasier is feeling his best coming out of the bullpen, the right-hander can sling his fastball wherever he wants in and around the zone.
Primarily reliant on a fastball-slider combination, the Chicago Cubs’ newest reliever tends to be locked in when those two pitches are working well. His cutter, added in 2023 when he joined the Los Angeles Dodgers, is a complementary pitch, one that has shown to be an effective third option for the 37-year-old, especially against left-handed hitters.
“Just adding the third pitch where they go up there and they can kind of eliminate certain stuff and certain counts and the cutter was a pitch that I would use to get back in counts,” Braiser said Wednesday. “I threw it a lot when I first got there because it was working so good.”
Braiser’s cutter wasn’t as effective last year. After the pitch had a 16.4 Whiff% and 23.5 PutAway% in 2023, his cutter produced a 3.7 Whiff% and 0.0 PutAway% in 2024 with the expected numbers against it dramatically increasing. Honing his cutter and trying to recapture the 2023 version has been a focal point of Braiser’s offseason and during the four to five bullpens he has thrown.
“Really kind of focusing on cutter and fastball right now, slider is just there off the fastball,” Braiser said. “But wanted to get my cutter back to where it was two years ago.”
A right calf strain cost Brasier 3½ months of the 2024 season. He returned in mid-August to post a 2.76 ERA in 17 appearances over the final six weeks of the regular season. Brasier pitched in eight games in the postseason, including twice in the World Series en route to winning the second title of his career (2018, Boston Red Sox).
Brasier knew the Dodgers had been shopping him before he was designated for assignment last week after they signed reliever Kirby Yates. Once Brasier cleared waivers, the Dodgers informed him he had a few trades they could work out to move him. He received a call Tuesday night that the Cubs had acquired him
.
“I’m super excited to get to play in Wrigley and have it my home field,” Brasier said. “And with the additions that they made this offseason, I’m excited to get going.”
Cubs pitchers and catchers report to spring training Sunday in Mesa, Ariz., with the first full-squad workout five days later. They open their season against the Dodgers in a two-game series March 18-19 at the Tokyo Dome in Japan.
Socrates, of all the philosophers in the history of mankind, was probably the biggest pain in the ass. He believed argument itself was the core to understanding anyone, including himself. He didn’t want to convince you. He didn’t want you to agree to disagree with him. He didn’t want you to agree at all — for therein held one’s freedom. On his deathbed, with a solid conviction about what to expect from the afterlife, he urged friends to argue against the existence of an afterlife.
He lived, and died, to argue.
The man had become so annoying that an Athenian court, having decided he was damaging the morality of Grecian youth, sentenced Socrates to death by self-poisoning.
The man was exasperating.
For a brief time, though, Agnes Callard gave him a run for his money.
Somewhat intentionally.
She had spent most of her childhood not being understood and had found Socrates the key to explaining herself and the way she thought about life. So, long before becoming an associate philosophy professor at University of Chicago, before becoming among the most popular teachers on campus, as well as the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile
(partly centered around how she lived in the same home with both her second husband and her first husband), many years ago, fresh out of high school, Callard gently accosted strangers in line outside the Art Institute of Chicago. She asked them the unanswerable.
She sidled up and asked if they were interested in having a philosophical conversation, and when they replied, Uh… yeah, sure, she peppered them with questions, things that no one could reasonably answer, like What is the meaning of life? And What is art?
It didn’t go well.
For one thing, she wasn’t a philosophy major, she just wanted to understand Socrates better. She had studied ancient Greek, she took Greek history classes. “But there was something more I wanted,” she says now, at 49. “And that was to be Socrates. Not to figure him out. To inhabit him, fill his shoes.” To be possessed by the spirit of the Greek philosopher. She was taken by the way Socrates lived “on the edge of himself,” always eager to turn his beliefs and approach to life upside down after a convincing argument.
She went to the stone steps of the Art Institute, the most classically ancient-seeming space she could think of. She felt good about it. When she asked strangers to have a philosophical argument, no one turned her down. The problem was the arguing part:
“I would ask, oh, ‘What is art?’ And they would say you can’t define art. I would say ‘But you defined it well enough to want to see it here today.’ I was trying to challenge them.”
They weren’t ready to be challenged, I said.
“Yes but is anyone ever ready!” Callard said with a fervor that gives you a hint of her younger self. “The people I accosted had at least heard of philosophy and Socrates — more people have heard of Socrates and philosophy now than they did (when he was alive). It should be easy for me to do this! But no, people found me inscrutable. Was I pushing a religion on them? Was I trying to sell them something? I have a very literal-minded personality and I didn’t understand why this wasn’t working, and the more I tried to challenge them, the more they seemed almost uncomfortable and afraid of me.”
If there’s an origin story to Agnes Callard, that’s as good a place as any to start. Her superpowers as a philosopher sprung out of the frustration at getting her thoughts and herself across to people who would care less about philosophy. She began university life as an academic philosopher, writing for academics, but after she was named the philosophy department’s director of undergraduate studies, she became a public philosopher. She began thinking harder about ways that philosophy should be inserted into everyday life. She decided philosophy had to matter to students in Hyde Park who didn’t take philosophy. She started the ongoing “Night Hawks” series of late-night philosophical debates, among the most popular regular activities on campus.
She wrote for publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times and Atlantic about morals and philosophy, as well as anger and ambition and marriage. Her new book, “Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life,” is her most direct act of public philosophy yet — a self-improvement narrative centered on Socrates’ insistence that we live a more interesting life through the hard work of facing ideas we’re not comfortable with. It presents, in a way, an intellectual roadmap for four more years of a Trump presidency. For most of us, she argues, Socrates is a watered-down “sauce” poured over simplistic affirmations about staying open-minded and fearing the unexamined life (not worth living, Socrates said). His true relevance to 2025 would be that the only thing he knows is the fact of his own ignorance. He was never big into zero-sum arguments.
His famed Socratic Method, Callard writes, only works when you argue with someone “who has taken on a role distinct from yours.” Anything else tends to be performative.
Then, because Callard is nothing if not provocative, she used her employer, University of Chicago, as an example of performative commitment to freedom. She brings up the school’s much-discussed statement that free speech extends to all subjects, insisting this “principle can neither now nor at any future time be called into question.” Freedom to question, Callard replied with a smirk, apparently “extends to all subjects but one.”
None of this, of course, is easy or quickly understood.
Callard gets that. She seems to regard her everyday life as an extension of the struggle to get across big ideas in an approachable way. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, a fellow student once took her aside to say the class thought of her as a kind of crazy lady that nobody understood. “So I feel like since then I have gradually pulled myself up by the bootstraps of intelligibility to make myself more coherent to people.”
The second you step into her office you wonder if she’s overcompensating.
The room resembles the set of an aggressively cheerful children’s TV show. Colors and patterns explode in every corner. The door is covered in a Warhol-like repetition of Socrates faces; the blackboard is framed with more busts of Socrates. “Refute and Be Refuted” is scrawled in large block letters on the ceiling above an alcove. There’s a tree made of yarn. Lego castles climb walls. Keith Haring’s cartoon person dances along a wall. Callard enters wearing bright pink tights and a black dress covered in unicorns that, in a different decade, might have done double duty as a black-light poster.
When I attended one of her classes, she wore a striped dress and striped leggings that looked like a lesson in friendly clashing. She was teaching Descartes. It was the second class of the semester and she wrote in a corner of the blackboard: “Nothing is certain.”
A moment later, she scribbled: “Except this claim.”
She told her students, all freshmen, she was so excited to introduce them to Descartes. She bounced on the balls of her feet as she spoke, and when she spoke, she had a slightly vowely drawl suggesting she grew up on a surfboard in Southern California; when she talks on podcasts, listeners leave comments that she doesn’t sound like a professor or philosopher. The truth is she grew up in Hungary and then Lower Manhattan.
She notes that she sounds the same to everyone, regardless of who she is talking to. She doesn’t speak in different registers. She speaks to her kids the way she speaks to her students and her coworkers. Words tumble out and stack up and need a second to be spliced apart before they get replaced with a new pile of words. Her problem, she smiles, is “reconstituting the demand to be intelligible with the desire to be enthusiastic.”
More than a decade ago, she was diagnosed with autism. However, she said she is still so much “in the early stages of trying to understand it myself, it’s hard for me to say anything (about it) that isn’t me being pulled in by the gravitational force of some cliche.” Callard thinks she probably became a good teacher because “when you are teaching you tend to be very self-conscious about the question of how you are coming across.”
She’s spent a lifetime doing that.
“Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life” by Agnes Callard, published Jan. 14. (W.W. Norton & Company)
She didn’t have many friends as a child. She read a lot of novels, “Because, what do humans do?” It was hard to feel like she was on the same page with anyone, she said. Her mother was an oncologist and her father was a lawyer, “and we left Hungary because of a lot of antisemitism and so much corruption.” They struggled in New York. She attended Orthodox Jewish schools, “which treated me and my sister as charity cases because we were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. But we were not religious. Kids couldn’t come over since we didn’t keep kosher. My mom worried about me being indoctrinated: ‘Don’t worry how you do in religion classes — there is no God.’ The rabbi would say, ‘You are a smart girl, you need to study.’ I’d say it’s all fake, why bother?” She memorized Shel Silverstein poems because “children memorized poems in Hungary,” and when her teacher in New York asked her to write a poem, she wrote a Shel Silverstein poem. The teacher spoke to the class about plagiarism and called Callard’s mother. Her mother said they were jealous because American children are stupid. “Childhood was like that. I do the wrong thing then insist my way was just fine.”
One day in fifth grade, a popular girl sat with her at lunch and they became best friends. A year later, she asked her friend why she sat with her that day. “She told me she heard a rumor that after fifth grade, everything is reversed and the least popular kids suddenly become the most popular kids and she wanted to get in on the ground floor with me.”
Philosophy — which Callard said she initially studied via the philosophy shelf of a Barnes & Noble — presented her with a way of living, an ongoing conversation in which the challenge is being understood, maybe profoundly. To this day, with her own kids, dinner comes with a question: Should you ever lie? Would you rather fly or be invisible? Christmas dinner was served with a side of: Should you ever take revenge? Understanding, real thought, Callard said, happens best in person, socially, among people who disagree but are open to arriving at some kind of an answer.
What Socrates teaches us, she writes in “Open Socrates,” is that we only avoid ignorance by having the right kind of arguments with people who disagree — conversations in which those who are talking regard one another as equals, always pushing toward some truth.
Good luck with 2025, Socrates.
Callard has been studying how conversation works, how pauses happen, how people take turns. “Communicating without that structure is close to impossible for humans,” she said. “Yet it appears possible. Writing, for instance, is hard, it takes a long time to get good, realize what an audience might expect and so on. On social media, a bunch of people who can’t write try to communicate through writing. It’s a bunch of people walking around with eyes closed assuming when someone bumps into you, they’re evil.”
Socrates, Callard explains, believed that being understood happens when both sides of a conversation talk in good faith. “One of the things Socrates convinced me of was I don’t have opinions — I have words. I have an illusion of opinions and not until I get into conversation do I get to think about the questions.” You should not, for instance, move to Portugal, or Vermont, assuming everyone there would agree with you. Where people tend to agree is where you hear more honest conversations, revealing shades of agreement and disagreement. It’s probably true within your family.
“In a place where everyone seems to agree,” Callard said, “that’s where the real conversations might happen.” And yet Socrates, she said, thought that every argument is resolved.
It just takes more than five minutes in front of the Art Institute.
“Even among people who never agree, there can be hope,” Callard said. “When in life are you most often surprised? Conversations are when surprises most often happen. And because we can never eliminate the possibility of surprise, that means hope.”
Or as Socrates would put it, the only thing we shouldn’t do is remain as we are.
Families are complicated, which gives TV writers plenty of fodder to draw from. But what if the results are neither high stakes nor funny, so much as warm and pleasant? Well, you take what you can get these days, when the definition of “comedy” has become so expansive as to also mean “light drama,” including Amazon’s “Clean Slate” starring Laverne Cox and George Wallace.
Cox plays Desiree, a native of Mobile, Alabama, who returns home when her glamorous life in New York falls apart. It’s been decades since she’s been back, and now she’s on her father’s doorstep looking for a soft place to land. The only catch is that she hasn’t talked to Dad (Wallace) in all this time, and he doesn’t know she’s transgender. But he quickly acclimates and they work to rebuild their relationship as Desiree creates a new life for herself.
Considering the rapid and alarming threats directed toward the trans community in the first weeks of the new presidential administration, “Clean Slate” arrives as an elegant and defiant pushback: A show built around a talented Black trans actress whose charisma is reason enough to watch.
If only the series had a little more comedic bite. Occasionally a line will land. “It’s like Black to the future,” Desiree says of her father’s house, which has remained unchanged in the 23 years she’s been gone. When she offers him chia seed pudding for breakfast, he tells her, “Chia seeds need to make up their mind: Ya either be a pudding or a pet, but you can not be both.”
But their first fight, fueled by mutual lingering resentments, lacks depth or even much emotion. It’s too perfunctory, too muted, too nice, as if the scene were a placeholder for something rawer to be written later. Just because the show is fundamentally gentle and kind doesn’t mean it can’t take those kinds of risks.
Instead, it settles for sweet and touching. Co-created by Cox (who is from Mobile herself), Wallace and Dan Ewen, there’s another name that stands out. Norman Lear, who died in 2023, is credited as an executive producer, and if his most popular shows became famous for their willingness to tackle — and then pointedly skewer — retrograde ideas, “Clean Slate” is aiming for something much safer.
From left: Laverne Cox and Jay Wilkison star in the comedy series “Clean Slate.” (Amazon)
The show’s little corner of Mobile includes a rakish single father who works at Dad’s car wash (Jay Wilkison) and there is considerable chemistry and sexual tension between him and Desiree. He has a precociously smart preteen daughter (Norah Murphy) whom Desiree befriends. There’s also Desiree’s best friend in town, the choir director who is in the closet (D.K. Uzoukwu), and his loyal mother (Telma Hopkins) who also has a long history with Desiree’s father. Together, they form a found family of sorts and rally around each other.
I’m not sure the series benefits from cameos by Padma Lakshmi and Nene Leakes; the ensemble is good enough that it doesn’t need those kinds of stunts. The episodes tend to center around a loose theme, but they’re primarily about people just living their lives. I think that’s the right choice, and I appreciate the way “Clean Slate” tackles Desiree’s complicated feelings about wanting to return to the church where she grew up, despite its bigoted pastor. He might be the only person who doesn’t accept Desiree with open arms, and if that feels idealized, who cares? Why should her character be subjected to hate when there’s another story to tell?
High school and local college results and highlights from the Southland, Aurora, Elgin, Naperville and Lake County coverage areas.
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WEDNESDAY’S RESULTS
HIGH SCHOOLS
BOYS BASKETBALL
Andrew 42, Oak Forest 37
Carmel 51, Joliet Catholic 48 (OT)
Carmel (10-15, 1-6 ESCC): Tommy Hills GW 3-pointer as time expired. Evan Henderson 23 points. Evan Matz 15 points.
A suburban commuter lives and dies by the weather, and at this point in the year she may feel like she’s through the worst of the winter slog. However, a wise commuter knows it could still snow anytime from now through April. To survive this lifestyle, you have to be able to balance hope with the harsh realities of Midwestern weather.
But hope and optimism have their limits, even among the heartiest suburbanite, who likely saw the news about the Kennedy construction delay debacle and felt put upon and frustrated — but not surprised. After all, suburban commuters are just supposed to take it. Still, this one stings.
We wondered how the Illinois Department of Transportation could magically reopen the Kennedy reversible lane temporarily for the Democratic National Convention. Now we find out that this decision allegedly caused an extra 32 days’ worth of construction delays, just so we could improve traffic for out-of-town VIPs, even though there was a special, frequent train they could have taken.
Few did. Why bother when you had your own bespoke express lanes?
Come March, we get to suffer all over again, when construction begins on outbound lanes. IDOT says the project will be done by “late fall,” which apparently can go well into January.
It’s not just the roads where suburban commuters get a rough deal — they’re constantly on guard against Metra fare hikes. Fares increased last year, and now Metra is threatening fare hikes again — plus service cuts — as the agency stares down the proverbial fiscal cliff.
So the suburban commuter faces tortuous traffic on the highways, higher prices and worse service on the trains — yet the city wants them back downtown to buy their $20 lunches and restore the Loop’s economy. Businesses want the suburban commuter back downtown to occupy vast commercial office spaces to justify the rent. And everyone wants them to boost foot traffic, creating safety in numbers and making everyone feel a little safer walking to the office.
And you know what? Many suburban commuters want those things, too. They remember a time when working downtown was a badge of honor — yeah, it’s always been a hike, but it set them apart from their neighbors. Many of them used to live in the city and love it, only having left to raise kids near family or some other milestone reason. City dwellers may resent suburbanites’ claims that “they’re from Chicago,” but they’re really only doing it because, honestly, who’s ever heard of Rolling Meadows?
But the city often lacks warmth for the people trekking downtown. Not too long ago, the mayor of Chicago floated weaponizing taxes on suburbanites to extract more tax revenue via a Metra “city surcharge” and a “commuter tax” as a way to “make the suburbs … pay their fair share.” See above — they’re already paying a lot to get downtown.
A hostile relationship between the city and the suburbs is no good. Suburban willingness to come to work downtown is a direct reflection on the city’s health. Is it safe? Is it clean? Is the restaurant scene thriving? If so, people will hop on the Metra and gladly make the trip. The more suburbanites, the better.