Cup of Coffee: April 30, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Guardians 3, Rays 1: Gavin Williams allowed only an unearned run over seven and two-thirds innings and struck out nine, Chase DeLauter singled in two, and Brayan Rocchio went 3-for-4 with two runs scored and a stolen base. The win ends a four-game losing streak for Cleveland. Tampa Bay had its six-game winning streak snapped. This was also the first time the Rays allowed more than two runs in seven games. It's kinda harsh that allowing just three means a loss, but you live by small ball and you die by small ball.

Cubs 5, Padres 4: Pete Crow-Armstrong homered and drove in three. One of his RBI came on a groundout in the sixth inning that scored Michael Conforto from third base. After the game Crow-Armstrong said, "I just love the aggressiveness, and I love seeing Old Man ‘Forto getting down like that." "Old Man 'Forto" was born in 1993, so the "old man" line in baseball now sits no later than that. How's that makin' y'all feel?

Rangers 3, Yankees 0: Nate Eovaldi was outstanding, shutting out the Bombers for seven innings while allowing just four hits. Josh Jung singled in two in the fifth and Sam Haggerty singled in one in the seventh. Texas avoids being swept. On top of the loss, Jasson Domínguez left the game after getting hit by a pitch on his left elbow. Right now they're calling it a contusion, but he'll undergo more testing.

White Sox 3, Angels 2: Homers from Mike Trout and Vaughn Grissom had the Angels up 2-1 heading into the bottom of the ninth, but Chicago's Tristan Peters reached base via a plunking after which Sam Antonacci ripped an RBI triple to right to score the tying run and send this one to extras. The Angels got bupkis in the top of the tenth. In the bottom half the Sox loaded the bases with a couple of walks and then Colson Montgomery walked it off with an RBI single. That sent the Halos to their sixth straight loss and their tenth loss in their last 11 games. It gave the Chisox the series sweep.

Mariners 5, Twins 3: More ninth inning heroics here, but this time it was the road team rallying. The Twins took a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the eighth but Seattle plated three in the top of the ninth thanks to a go-ahead two-run single from Cole Young and a Cal Raleigh sac fly. Young had tied the game up at two in the seventh with an RBI double. J.P. Crawford – not Brandon, not Justin, but J.P. – homered in the third. The M's take two of three.

Blue Jays 8, Red Sox 1: All Toronto here, with  Ernie Clement hitting a two-run home run, Brandon Valenzuela adding a solo homer, Kazuma Okamoto hitting a two-run single, George Springer returning from the injured list to deliver a pinch-hit RBI single, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. going 3-for-3 with a walk. After winning their first two games under Chad Tracy, the Red Sox have lost the past two. And they've lost eight of twelve.

Marlins 3, Dodgers 2: The teams traded off one run at a time throughout this one, but Miami scored last and they won. Liam Hicks and Esteury Ruíz each homered for the Marlins. Sandy Alcantara allowed two runs over six. Miami wins the series two games to one.

Rockies 13, Reds 2: Hunter Goodman hit two homers, drove in three, and scored four times and Brett Sullivan hit a three-run double on a 3-for-4 night. The Rockies had 15 hits in all which was more than enough backing for Tomoyuki Sugano, to pitched five and a third scoreless innings.

Cardinals 5, Pirates 4: The Cards built and early lead and the Pirates chipped away at that lead in the seventh and eighth to make it 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth. That's when Ryan O'Hearn reached on a single and Nick Gonzales came to bat with two down. He swung at the first pitch from Riley O'Brien and gave it a ride to deep left. It looked like it was going out for what would've been a walkoff jack, but rookie Nathan Church robbed him and that was the ballgame.

Nationals 14, Mets 2: The Mets played a basically perfect game on Tuesday and crapped themselves on Wednesday, with a seven-run fourth inning, capped by a Brady House grand slam, sealing it for Washington. James Wood drove in three runs and scored three as well.  CJ Abrams had three hits and two RBI. Curtis Mead homered late. Cade Cavalli went six, allowed two, and struck out 10. These two teams will play the rubber game this afternoon.

Atlanta 4, Tigers 3: It was 3-2 Detroit from the third until the bottom of the ninth, and the Tigers called on Kenley Jansen to close out the game. He didn't do it. He gave up a leadoff walk to Ozzie Albies, who had homered way back in the first, and then he grooved a 1-2 cutter to Matt Olson who smacked it out of the park to give the Barves the walkoff win. Atlanta continues to roll, winning their 12th of their last 14 contests. Detroit has lost four of five. The sides meet again just after noon today.

Diamondbacks 6, Brewers 2: Arizona got four in the fourth thanks to a three-run homer from Nolan Arenado and a solo shot from Adrian Del Castillo. Ketel Marte and Corbin Carroll each hit solo shots in the ninth to eliminate the chance of a Brewers comeback. Not that there was a big chance of one, as the Dbacks pen tossed four and a third scoreless innings with Milwaukee nary issuing them a challenge.

Athletics 5, Royals 2: Luis Severino allowed just one run over seven while Lawrence Butler backed him with a three-run homer that broke a 1-1 tie in the fourth. Nick Kurtz doubled home an insurance run in the sixth. The Royals got one back in the ninth but that was it.

Giants vs. Phillies; Astros vs. Orioles – POSTPONED:

🎶 This circus is falling down on its knees
The big top is crumbling down
It's raining in Baltimore, fifteen miles east
Where you should be, no one's around 🎶

The Daily Briefing

Garrett Crochet hits the injured list

Bad news for Boston: the Red Sox placed their ace Garrett Crochet on the 15-day injured list with shoulder inflammation.

Crochet has an ugly 6.30 ERA over his first six starts, though a lot of that came while giving up 10 earned runs against the Twins in a disaster start a couple of weeks ago. Crochet most recently pitched six shutout innings on Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles and said he felt fine afterwards, but he obviously wasn't. All that makes it unclear what part his shoulder has played in previous struggles. For his part Crochet said yesterday that he believes he'll be back off the IL after the 15 days are up.  

Boston will almost certainly call up lefty Jake Bennett from Triple-A Worcester to start against Houston tomorrow. He's been lights out down on the farm, posting a 0.86 ERA while walking only three batters in 21 innings on the young season.

Craig Breslow is like that boss you hate

The deep dives in the wake of the firing of Alex Cora and his coaching staff are starting to be written. The most prominent one I've seen so far is this four-bylined article in The Athletic yesterday in which anonymous folks from inside the Red Sox front office and/or clubhouse basically rip Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow a new one.

The through-line consists of the story's sources talking about how it was obvious that Breslow wanted to clean house and bring his own people in from the moment he was hired in October 2023 but that he was only able to do so now. A big part of that are the sources saying that Breslow didn't give the coaches a chance to do their jobs properly and never had faith in them, which served to undermine them and to negatively impact the development of young players. Breslow, obviously, disputes that and says he gave every opportunity to make things work with the staff he had but, finally, decided a change needed to be made.

That sort of he-said, she-said is of limited interest to me for its own sake. But in telling his side of the story Breslow said some stuff that, to me anyway, comes off like like nails on a chalkboard. This passage is about how insiders say that Breslow blamed the struggles of prospect Kristian Campbell on hitting coach Peter Faste, and that Faste's dismissal on Saturday was about that, not about the team's early season struggles like Breslow says it was:

Instead, Campbell failed to pull the ball — a weakness that had been discussed internally — and had a .664 OPS when the Red Sox optioned him back to the minor leagues in the middle of June. He hasn’t been back to the big leagues since, and there was a sense within the clubhouse that Breslow blamed Fatse for Campbell’s inability to live up to the projections.

Breslow, though, said Campbell’s struggles last season had nothing to do with his decision to fire coaches this weekend.

“I think it’s probably a stretch to connect those dots,” Breslow said. “This is the 2026 major league season. Now, when we’re evaluating players and we’re trying to figure out how we can help them reach their potential, we’re constantly questioning everything that we’re doing.”

I will acknowledge at the outset that Craig Breslow can fire or not fire anyone he wants for any reason. He's the boss, and his decisions will ultimately be validated by the success or failures of the team and its players, not some armchair GMing or Fenway Park Kremlinology. So, in my mind, if he decided a year ago that he didn't like the cut of Pete Fatse's jib, hey, whatever. Fire him for that! It's totally legitimate!

Yet here Breslow is pushing back against the idea that that's what happened and claiming instead that Fatse's firing, and the firing of everyone else, was just an objective judgment made after a fresh assessment of the team's strengths and weaknesses a couple dozen games into the 2026 season. Sorry! Not buying it! And it actively annoys me on some level to even hear it.

Every time I hear an Ivy League/McKinsey-esque/Patagonia vest-wearing manager like Breslow say "we're always reassessing things" type-shit, I roll my eyes. I roll my eyes because human beings don't really work that way even if they say they do. Breslow has had that job for over two and a half years, and to expect that he was some objective blank slate, constantly and dispassionately assessing results is silly. Indeed, the one thing I think we can say for certain about anyone who has risen to the height of their power in their given field it's that they are not, under any circumstances, "constantly questioning everything they're doing." They have their opinions. They have their biases. A lot of them are probably valid, too! I mean, they got the job because of their judgment, and they're expected to use that judgment in the job.

Yet you always hear the Breslow-brand of baseball executive acting as if they're not engaged in the exercise of judgment. They'd have you believe that they're engaged in the business of taking scientific measurements instead of managing people. It always strikes me as a copout. An abdication of their responsibilities, even. If you're "constantly reassessing" the buck never stops with you. It's always the data that changed, not your vision or your decision or the people you chose. It's weak as hell.

I dunno. I may be really far in the weeds on this. I had a lot of dental work yesterday morning so I was cranky as hell all day. More to the point, I haven't had an actual person managing me for a long damn time, so maybe I'm reading this all wrong. But I just bristle at that kind of bloodless, measured manager-speak. I'd rather have Kevin Malone telling the press "there's a new sheriff in town" and then living or dying by decisions that he owns. Sure, there's a lot of risk with that kind of thing – Malone was a fartknocker who ended up being a disaster – but at least it's human.

Youth baseball nightmares

The Houston Chronicle ran a story the other day about a youth baseball authority that governs a league for homeschooled kids called The Texas Home Educators Sports Association. Recently the Association, which is responsible for organizing and staffing the home school leagues, hired a baseball coach they were pretty high on. It's a guy who once played in the Astros system, making it all the way to Triple-A in fact. As anyone who has been around youth baseball knows, a former pro player of any level is a nice get, so the Association had to have been pretty chuffed to hire an almost big leaguer.

There's only one problem: the former minor leaguer, a guy named Tommy Whiteman, is a registered sex offender. And not just any sort of sex offender. He was popped for online solicitation of a minor. He also has previous domestic violence and assault convictions on his CV. This was who was in a position to be coaching a bunch of kids.

If you think this is one of those situations in which the Association hired the guy only to find out later that – oh no! – he's a sex offender, and that the news story was about the Association trying to fix this obviously horrible mistake, you'd be wrong. The folks in charge wanted to keep him despite knowing that he's a sex offender and figured that the best way to fix it would be to have parents sign an "it's OK if my kid is coached by a sex offender" waiver. That's bad enough, but the waiver they circulated wasn't even really a waiver! Most notably it didn't even disclose Whiteman's past. To the contrary, it tridently defended Whiteman and essentially told parents who did not agree to let him coach that they were on the side of Satan.

Here's what they sent the parents:

"Coach Tommy can speak first-hand about the dark shadows of sports, especially professionally. He, himself a talented athlete, spent many years praising himself and feeding his flesh. The Lord so graciously refused to let the world have him and rescued him from his sin in a tremendously dramatic, yet necessary way. Tommy now spends his time pouring into young men around him, helping them navigate this tricky culture with Christ. His heart is to not only share his vast knowledge of baseball skills, but more importantly, the freedom he found in his Redeemer. Before you commit to Coach Tommy's leadership, check out his testimony here." 

Then it linked to a video of Whiteman in which he only spoke of his consumption of pornography. Buried in an "about me" section he admitted that he got busted in a "To Catch a Predator"-style sting, though he diminishes it by saying, "but it was never a minor . . . it was a police officer.  The sting went down exactly like you would imagine on T.V.  It was no question the worst day AND the best day of my life." The "best day," you see, because it brought him closer to Christ and yadda, yadda, yadda.

Someone with a watchdog organization uncovered and began to publicize all of this, which apparently caused the Association to hastily part ways with Whiteman. He was still listed as the coach as late as a week ago Sunday, but his name is gone from the Association's website now. The Chronicle story came out last Friday, so everything changed within a five-day span that coincided with the threat of bad press.

Evangelical Christianity of this ilk seems to exist for only two purposes: to control people and to provide a Get Out of All Responsibility For One's Actions Free card. It's insane, yet it's an ethos that a huge percentage of local, state, and national political figures subscribe to and are attempting to foist on what is supposed to be a secular society.

Other Stuff

Quote of the Day: The Death of the Voting Rights Act

From legal writer Mark Joseph Stern:

"The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead. The 15th Amendment has been repurposed to greenlight racism. It's a dark day."

This is in response to yesterday's Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down the creation of a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. The ruling basically re-writes the Voting Rights Act to make it virtually impossible for any litigant to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of Black voters. The justices have no issue whatsoever with districts that are drawn to favor whites and Republicans, however, and this decision will massively exacerbate that process across the country.

This decision stands the Voting Rights Act on its head, transforming it from a law that enforces the 15th Amendment's prohibition against denying a citizen the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," into a license to use gerrymandering to dilute the Black vote with impunity. And, on a broader structural level, it takes the decision making about how to implement the Reconstruction Amendments out of the hands of Congress, which was explicitly tasked with doing so, and has placed it in the hands of a six-justice right wing Supreme Court majority which has been appointed for life and is completely unaccountable. Six judges who decided yesterday that they like the version of the Voting Rights Act that exists in their heads better than the one that actually exists in legislation passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives and signed into law by the President.

We can fart around all we want with elections, but the project of democratic governance in America is basically over unless and until this lawless Supreme Court is reined in and radically reformed. We cannot exist as a country when one of the three co-equal branches of government has decided that it is the legislator of the nation.

Ok, sure

From the New York Times the other day:

I have done no small amount of genealogical research over the past several years, and I still find it to be interesting to fart around with that stuff, but it's a straight fact that distant cousins are pretty much meaningless in any way that matters.

We share almost zero DNA of significance with people who are our sixth cousins and beyond. Saying that someone who is your 15th cousin is roughly akin to saying that they are the same species as you. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. Either way, I could likely walk out of my house right now, take a stroll around downtown Columbus and unwittingly pass multiple 15th cousins. Hell, I could take a stroll around most cities on Earth and say the same thing. You could too.

I find the research of direct descendants interesting not because of genes or anything but because I like to learn about the historical dynamics, decisions, and events which resulted in me being spit out where I was spit out. The decision of one of my great-whatever grandparents getting on a boat in 1630 rather than staying home could've been the difference between me existing or not. The fact that a few more recent someones died young, chose a certain career, or moved to one city or another played at least some role in what my life ended up actually looking like. But distant cousins? They're not just bullshit from a genetic perspective but they're mostly bullshit from an historical perspective as well.

Not that you'll convince certain people who are super into genealogy of that. Or news editors looking for hooks.

The Prepper Delusion

Kit Dillon of the New York Times wrote a good column the other day about a very specific thing but which contains some wisdom that is much more broadly applicable than the topic at hand.

The topic at hand: what actually helps people in natural/environmental disasters. Dillon talks about his experiences with wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and even a blackout. He's been pretty unlucky! But as he notes, climate change and everything that goes with it is going to make his experiences far more common. What Dillion has found is that the biggest factor in saving people from and helping people through the disasters in question is not the "prepper" mindset that has become an obsession with a certain sort of person who stockpiles ready-to-eat meals, survivalist gear, and even weapons. Rather, it's about community cooperation and support:

Much of America’s mainstream doomsday-readiness culture assumes that preparation begins (and ends) with the individual or the single family. On YouTube, channels such as Corporals Corner, City Prepping and American Outlaw share tips for surviving extreme situations, often alone. Go down these rabbit holes and you’ll find a jargon-heavy community whose insiders speak in acronyms that paint vivid pictures of the civilizational collapse they seem to expect. Instructions to build and maintain a bug-out vehicle, or B.O.V., to escape a world without the rule of law, or W.R.O.L., means “I’m never coming home,” INCH . . .

. . . I’ve tried to build a bug-out bag. But I found it overwhelming to plan that carefully for every possible contingency. And then at some point I realized I’d never once needed one. The bug-out bag prepares us for a world we can abandon, a disaster we can survive on our own . . . But true preparation isn’t something you can buy off Amazon or stuff in a bag, and it certainly won’t be found on YouTube. It’s built by people and our commitments to one another.

We've become an individual-focused, even selfish society in almost every way that matters. But human beings are primates and primates are social creatures and social creatures cannot go it alone. Especially when shit starts going sideways. We need each other and we need to create a society in which doing things for each other is encouraged and rewarded, not demonized.

The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters

If I know anything I know that lists rile people up. The latest list rile-em-up list dropped in the form of the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters list. That should be a gift link, so you can read it and either get mad or not mad as is your wont.

I feel the same way about "Greatest __" lists as I do about halls of fame, in that I dislike taking something subjective and trying to put it on some sort of objective matrix like this. When I first saw this I had a visceral "oh my God, why isn't Jason Isbell on here?!" reaction. Then I stopped and remembered that my loving Jason Isbell doesn't mean others have to and the New York Times leaving him off this list doesn't make me love him any less nor does it render his songwriting any worse. You just gotta let this sort of thing wash over you, even if it's hard to remember to do so.

Still, some of the arguing and reaction can be fun. Like this from Reddit, where someone was upset about someone not included on the Greatest Living American Songwriters list:

Full disclosure: I made basically the same comment on Bluesky when I first saw the list the other day, having also failed to fully process that it was about Americans only. I deleted my post. This person hasn't, likely because they rightfully wanted to keep that wonderful response in line. I thank them for that.

Anyway: hash it out amongst yourselves. Getting more page views and comments makes no difference to me given that I live on the subscription model, but I do like to see y'all argue.

Have a great day everyone.