Money, Guns and Merry Christmas

Let me apologize in advance: I’m about to tell you way too much about a 70-part, vertically shot ReelShort phone series that, frankly, you shouldn’t have to know about. This doesn’t have anything to do with baseball. This doesn’t have anything to do with sports. You don’t deserve what’s coming. You’re just out there living your life, like all of us, trying to make a living, trying to take care of family, trying to be a supportive friend, trying to carve out a few moments of joy whenever and wherever you can.

You should be able to go on with that life without knowing a single thing about Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas.

And you don’t have to know anything about it. You can run now. I’d run now. I’ll throw a couple of baseball thoughts at the bottom. Please just skip ahead.

But as for me: I have to write about it. It’s not even voluntary at this point. I came upon Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas on Instagram during a dark moment when I was desperately speed-scrolling to find photos of my friends being happy, a card trick or two that might drop my jaw and maybe Nick Bargatze’s bit about his wife telling him the time when she was leaving for the airport. I don’t know why I clicked on MG&MC. But I can’t unsee it now. I can’t unring that bell. Heck, I have made my family watch it. 

I’m compelled to tell you about it.

If you want the tl;dr summary: Money, Guns and a Merry Christmas is the Hallmarkish movie they would show in the waiting room in Hell. I know that sounds like a slam, but I don’t exactly mean it that way. I mean it as literally as I can mean it. I mean that if Hell — Gehenna, The Netherworld, Dante’s Inferno, Tophet, Abaddon, Avernus, Nifiheim, perdition — has a waiting room where, you know, you wait (and wait and wait) for your name to be called so you can visit with your personal Hell representative, Money, Guns and Merry Christmas would be the thing on all the televisions.*

Let me get this out of the way: I don’t exactly loathe MG&MC. There are movies and shows that I loathe. I loathed the last Dr. Strange movie. I loathed Earth to Echo.* I sort of loathed Trouble with the Curve. I definitely loathed the last few Superman movies with the intensity of his heat vision.

My feelings about MG&MC are different from loathing, unadalterated loathing. They’re a mixture of distaste, curiosity, confusion, disbelief. How can I describe this feeling? OK, you know what MG&MC is like? It’s like opening up an increasingly stupid series of Russian nesting dolls. You know, you open up the first doll, and inside is a smaller doll that looks like Gina Lollobrigida and eats tuna fish sandwiches. That’s weird! Open that, and you find a second, smaller doll that actually is a tuna fish sandwich, but it plays the bongos. The third doll is an alien spacecraft, and it makes 47% of its three-point shots. The fourth doll is a shrub that kind of looks like George Lucas. And this keeps going and going and going, and you just keep opening the dolls because you can’t figure out a way to stop and because you feel certain that this can’t go on forever, that eventually, you will come to the end of the stupid chain, eventually you will find the tiniest and most bizarre doll.

Only you will not. You will never find the tiniest doll in Money, Guns and a Merry Christmas.

I honestly cannot tell if MG&MC is the worst thing ever made, a Riddler supervillain scheme to hypnotize the world and make us all dumber, or if it actually contains the secrets of the Universe. It’s probably all three.

I will now give you the plot of MG&MC. I offer no spoiler warning.

The thing begins with a shot of our hero, Damian Blaine, exiting his car at a secret military facility. He has an ominous-looking briefcase. We are about to find out he is delivering a new superweapon to the United States government.

See, our hero is the world’s leading arms dealer.

Yes, this is a love story about the world’s leading arms dealer.

Damian is stopped at the gate, however, by a single soldier in fatigues standing in front of a jeep. Oh no! The soldier, apparently, is the only person responsible for security at this facility. The soldier points his weapon at Damian and announces that this is a restricted military facility.

“Easy soldier,” Damian says. “You have some coffee? This weather is freezing my balls.”

I promise you: It is not too late to skip out. There’s baseball on the other side.

We do not have the time to go through this setup scene frame by frame — though it would be well worth the time — but it’s important to say that the soldier is utterly convinced that Blaine is a con man. As you will see, this is the singular plot point of MG&MC. Nobody ever recognizes the world’s leading arms dealer. Everybody will assume, repeatedly, continuously, irrationally, nonsensically, that he’s a con man. This will go on for SEVENTY mini-episodes. You’ll see.

The General shows up and is furious at this one soldier who protects this whole secret facility. The General displays his displeasure by taking off the soldier’s hat, throwing it to the ground, and stomping on it. “You #^# fool!” the General shouts. “He singlehandedly controls the global arms trade!”

The soldier is chastened.

Everybody then goes into a secret room, where the General explains that the U.S. military’s best intercontinental missile takes 27 minutes to hit targets. “It’s a weak spot,” the General admits. “But we can’t do any better. It’s impossible.”

“Impossible,” Blaine says, “isn’t in my vocabulary.”

Obviously, he says that.

He then offers them a weapon that will hit its targets in just three minutes. They are obviously skeptical. But he then proves it by sending a missile, which promptly blows up something. They stand and applaud him and invite him to dinner with the president. But Damian must decline the invitation. He has plans.

“What could be more important?” the General asks.

“General,” he says. “as you can imagine, I sell weapons for a living, and my father’s worried that I’ll die single. So tonight, I’m going on a date to find my future wife.”

And now the story begins.

I’m now realizing why the movie hooked me: It’s basically Michael Scott’s “Threat Level Midnight” … only about 73% dumber. The amazing writers of The Office tried to write the single most hilariously brain-dead movie they could think of for Michael Scott, and they didn’t even come close to MG&MC.

Here’s what happens in short order.

First, Damian Blaine — could that name be more perfectly AI-generated? — goes on a blind date with Sarah, the woman he intends to marry. The date was set up by Sarah’s father, but he also apparently didn’t tell her that he was setting her up with the world’s leading arms dealer. She immediately asks him how much money he makes.

Pay attention! This is where the whole thing turns!

“In a good year, I make 50 or 60 … “

“Sixty grand?” Sarah asks in the most disgusted voice imaginable. “Good lord, you can’t even get a one-bedroom rental on that! … I cannot believe my daddy set me up with someone so poor!”

It does seem hard to believe, yes.

She’s bailing on the date after that (“Money is all that matters,” she says, a real thing people often say on blind dates), but as she leaves, we get an inner monologue from Damian that explains what just happened: “I passed up dinner with the president for this date. Talk about a waste of time. And I meant $50 or $60 million.”

Yes! This “Three’s Company” misunderstanding will guide us through the next 68 episodes of MG&MC. He meant $50 or $60 million! She thought he meant $50 or $60 thousand! Come and knock on our door! We’ll be waiting for you!

Over at the bar, our heroine, Iris Olson, has been watching this scene. It turns out she’s in a predicament! See, she’s CEO of her family’s struggling business — we never actually learn what that business is, but like everything else in this movie, it seems to be arms dealer adjacent — and her father is trying to marry her off to someone rich to save the company. She doesn’t want to get married to some rich stranger, so she tries to marry a poor one. She offers Damian $10,000 to marry her or pretend to marry her or something. As a poor salesman who only makes $50 or $60K, she’s hoping he will jump at the opportunity.

He does jump at the opportunity. But he insists he doesn’t need her money.

She looks at him with a mixture of surprise and pity. It’s $10,000!

Then she says they have to go to her home to meet the family.

I suppose I’ve gone through all of this just so I can tell you about the money gun scene. Citizen Kane has its Rosebud scene. The Wire has the scene where Omar takes the stand. The Farmer’s Only commercial has the talking dog. And MG&MC has the money gun.

Damian is nervous about meeting the family — so nervous that he has bought everyone in the family presents worth several millions of dollars, at least. This will later lead to a “gift-off” with Damian’s rival, Marcus Walton (these names!), who is ALSO in the military weapons business, but we’ll get there. It turns out, he should be nervous because the family immediately hates him. They hate him because he’s poor, and they need Iris to marry someone rich. They cruelly and endlessly berate and belittle poor Damian, who singlehandedly controls the global arms trade and is directly responsible for the death of countless people. At one point, Iris’ cousin Amanda puts a dog food dish in front of Damian at the dinner table.

“I think someone confused me for the dog,” Damian says.

“Good one, sis,” Iris’ other cousin Tom says.

But the money gun! Tom’s daughter is 12-year-old Lesley, and she wanders over to Damian and asks if, for Christmas, he can help her fill up her money gun. Apparently, this is just a thing the kids do. Damian explains that he doesn’t have any cash, but he promptly writes her a $50,000 check, which the family, of course, thinks is a forgery, so much so that Tom crumples it up and throws it to the ground.

But Lesley picks up the check and, OK, you know, how 12-year-old kids will often break away from the family and go on their own to try and cash large checks at totally open banks on Christmas? So she does that. The woman at the bank is skeptical at first, but then she sees that the check is from Damian Blaine, and she immediately apologizes and gives this 12-year-old girl $50,000 in the fakest-looking dollar bills ever to appear on the screen.

This leads to the scene where Lesley walks in and shoots bills out of her money gun.

This actually happens.

Now, the family finds itself in a conundrum. How can a poor salesman write a $50,000 check on a lark to a girl he just met? Do not worry. This is only episode 15 of 70. They will find ways to believe he’s a poor salesman for another FIFTY-FIVE episodes. This time they assume he has cashed in his life savings to impress them somehow or something like that.

But this is nothing. As time goes on, they will find a way to believe he’s a poor salesman even after he gives Tom a yacht, even after he gives Iris’ mother the original Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” even after he gives Iris a dress worn at the previous year’s Met Gala. They will find a way to believe he’s a poor salesman after he gives Iris a $100 million necklace (which Tom smashes with a hammer he somehow procured), after he saves Iris’ grandfather’s life* by calling his personal doctor (who has “won the Nobel Prize for Medicine!”), even after he is specifically and repeatedly identified by the Stanley Tucci-esque character Harvey Lambert, who is supposed to be the big shot of the movie but is actually just Damian’s employee.

There’s also a scene where some bikers are about to kill Damian but are stopped because the head of their gang wants to buy military-grade weapons from him.

But I don’t have the strength.

The stupid just keeps going, on and on, Russian nesting doll after Russian nesting doll, until you feel numb inside. Maybe that’s the draw? I really do want to know: Why did I watch all of this? Why did my family watch all of this? Why did I write this essay? Why have, apparently, millions of people watched all of this? Why are there Reddit threads about this titled “Possibly the best ‘movie’ I’ve seen?” Are we truly living in a simulation? Has AI entirely taken over our world? Is there any hope? Can I really buy a money gun for $22.49? So many questions.

I don’t want to leave you in suspense: Everything works out happily in the end as they do in fairy tales. Damian financially ruins Marcus and his family. Damian fires and destroys the life of one well-meaning but incompetent employee who, for some reason, kept trying to have him arrested and jailed as an imposter. The biker gang seems to be back in Damian’s good graces and just might get those weapons after all! Damian saves Iris’ family business by shifting some of his billion-dollar arms deals to them. And finally, Damian awkwardly kisses Iris, who still seems to think he might be a poor salesman. Also thanks to Damian’s ingenuity, the military can wipe out civilian populations in record time. It’s a Christmas miracle.

A little baseball to cleanse the palate, though some of this is crummy news:

Gerrit Cole is hurt and it’s a bummer

Gerrit Cole is an anomaly in these troubled pitching times — he’s a power pitcher who has somehow stayed healthy. It just doesn’t happen. From 2017 to 2023, he made just about every scheduled start. Because of this, he piled up numbers that seemed much closer to the sorts of numbers we used to see from starting pitchers. He has 153 career wins — almost 50 more than ANY OTHER PITCHER BORN IN 1990 OR LATER!

Most wins for pitchers born in 1990 or later:

1. Gerrit Cole, 153

2. Aaron Nola, 104

3. Zack Wheeler, 103

4. Kevin Gausman, 102

5. Michael Wacha, 101

That’s it. That’s all the pitchers 35 years old or younger who have 100 big league wins. Cole remains our last best hope for a two-hundred-game winner. It’s wild.

Then, last year, suddenly, he had elbow issues. As we talked about here then, once you have elbow issues in the 21st century, there’s no going back. You will end up getting Tommy John surgery 100 out of 100 times. But Cole defied those odds. After missing the first two and a half months of the season, he returned and made every start, and while he wasn’t exactly his old self — the fastball was a bit down, he threw a lot more cutters to compensate — he was still awfully good. There was some hope, real hope, that he would escape the inevitable.

That hope is gone now. Cole’s elbow blew up again this spring training. He and the Yankees are supposedly looking for a second doctor’s opinion, but that’s because the first doctor’s opinion was that he needs the inevitable Tommy John surgery and will have to miss the next 12 to 18 months. Even for an admitted Yankees loather like me, this is an all-time bummer. Gerrit Cole is fantastic. The game is something less without him.

The Yankees have already taken some massive hits. Cole looks to be gone. Luis Gil is out for at least three months and, realistically, probably longer. Giancarlo Stanton’s body continues to break down. This is a team now counting on the veteran know-how of Paul Goldschmidt and the mercurial stylings of Carlos Rodón. They’ll probably figure out a way to be playoff contenders because the American League is pretty light on contenders right now, and that’s just what the Yankees do. But it stinks just the same. We gotta figure out something to do with pitchers and elbows.

A Trayce of gold?

Trayce Thompson was a second-round pick of the Chicago White Sox back in 2009. He is the son of Mychal Thompson* and the brother of Klay Thompson, both excellent NBA players who starred on championship teams. I suppose there’s something in the Thompson family about getting the letter Y into otherwise typical male names.

Anyway, Trayce was regarded as a high-ceiling, high-risk prospect. Baseball America wrote: “He has everything scouts look for — athleticism, bat speed, power, speed, arm strength. … Thompson has a lot of work to do as a hitter.”

They got that exactly right: Thompson desperately struggled to put bat to ball. When he hit the ball, he hit with some power. When he got on base, he had the speed to steal bases. But he struck out repeatedly and wallowed in the minor leagues.

Way back in 2015, when he was 24, the White Sox gave him his first shot, and in 44 games, he hit like crazy: .295/.363/.533. The White Sox promptly attempted to cash in, dealing him to the Dodgers in a three-way deal to get back Todd Frazier. The Dodgers gave him a few brief trials over the next couple of years, but he couldn’t recapture the magic, and he was released. The Yankees picked him up and released him two days later. The A’s picked him up and traded him back to the White Sox for, to quote Baseball Reference, “a player to be named later or cash.” I assume that was cash.

Then, he signed with Cleveland, then with Arizona, the Cubs bought him, he signed with San Diego, he signed with Detroit, the Dodgers bought him back, the Dodgers then traded him BACK to the White Sox in the Lance Lynn deal. He then signed with the Mets. He also signed with the Cubs again.

Finally, three weeks ago, he signed with the Boston Red Sox.

And in 11 games with Red Sox the 33-year-old is hitting .391/.533/.1.261 with two doubles, a baseball-leading six home runs, and three stolen bases.

“We’re going to keep playing him,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora says. “I’m glad he’s here. We’ll see what happens in the future.”

These are the stories that make spring training wonderful. Trayce Thompson keeps playing baseball through it all because he loves it, and now he’s the hottest hitter on earth, and maybe he will make the Red Sox team, maybe some other team will give him a shot, maybe this will end and he’ll find himself looking for another team and another chance. As Cora says, you never know about the future. But for now, the dream lives on, and there’s nothing better than dreams.