Cup of Coffee: December 11, 2025

Good morning! So, how are my Mets fans doin'?

Before we get to that, welcome to Free Thursday! I'd like to take this chance to remind Free Thursday subscribers that today is the last day of my Winter Meetings sale:

That's 25% off an annual subscription. It goes away when I go to sleep tonight. And I'm an old man who goes to sleep pretty early, so act now!

The Daily Briefing

Pete Alonso signs with the Orioles

In a move that will make Mets fans mad today but which will probably make Baltimore fans mad later, the Orioles signed Pete Alonso to a five-year, $155 million deal. There are no deferrals and no opt-outs. There is a limited no-trade clause. It's still pending a physical, but that's academic. The Polar Bear will soon be prowling Camden Yards.

On an objective level I am pretty sure that Alonso on a five-year deal is not a wonderful thing and that, after a year or two, he's gonna be a drag on the O's. His aging curve is Not Great and he's not going to be producing $30 million+ worth of offense for most of this deal. That said, Mets fans have NOT been OK of late, what with Edwin Díaz going to L.A. and now a fan favorite in Alonso heading out of town as well. It's worth asking why a team goes out and spends three quarters of a billion dollars on Juan Soto a year ago only to let its other stars walk. An immediate answer to that – the Mets are not that good and they need to improve – is a valid one, but who do you get to replace Alonso's production? It's not exactly a super flush free agent market this winter and the Mets have more holes to fill now than they had when we all woke up 48 hours ago.

As for the Orioles, they get a guy who will certainly improve the offense in the short term. Only two players, Kyle Schwarber and Aaron Judge, have hit more home runs than Alonso’s 264 dating back to his debut in 2019. Last year he hit .272/.347/.524 (144 OPS+) with 38 dingers and 126 driven in. His strikeout rate was lower than the year before and his Statcast metrics were all improved, which suggests that he was seeing the ball and squaring it up better in 2025 than he was in 2024 (it also suggests that having Juan Soto on base in front of him so often helped him, so take the numbers with a grain of salt). Also good: apart from the shortened 2020 season Alonso has never appeared in fewer than 152 games. Which is to say, you pretty much know what you're getting with the guy. The only question is whether the 31-year-old slugger declines gradually or quickly. That, more than anything else, will determine how the Orioles have done here.

There aren't a ton of precedents for this kind of deal for a first baseman in recent years. As someone – I think it was CBS's R.J. Anderson – noted a few weeks back, Josh Naylor, who just signed, and Freddie Freeman are the only free agent first basemen to sign for more than four years since 2018. Others to do it over the past decade: Eric Hosmer, Chris Davis, and Ian Desmond. So, one good, one unknown, and three bad deals on long-term pacts for first basemen. We'll have a couple of years to see if Alonso breaks the mold. In the short term, however, this fills a major void in the middle of Baltimore's lineup, which has lacked a serious power threat. I mean, last year's cleanup hitters were Ryan O’Hearn, Ryan Mountcastle, Adley Rutschman, and Tyler O’Neill, none of whom had more than 13 homers, so yeah.

At the end of the day, however, there will be more chatter from the Mets' perspective here than the Orioles' because that's just how the baseball media/social media environment works. My final take on that: As noted, I don't think I'd want Alonso on a five-year deal and it's not like an 83-win Mets team is worth moving Heaven and Earth to keep intact. But I do question whether there is enough talent out on this market for the Mets to build a 2026 winner at the moment, assuming they even want to spend to do it, which is currently unclear. All of which is not gonna sit well with a fan base which has been sold on the idea of the Mets' multi-billionaire owner turning them into a win-always team.

So be happy! Or sad! Because that state isn't gonna be permanent for anyone who cares about this deal, I don't think.

Atlanta signs Mike Yastrzemski

The Atlanta baseball club signed free agent outfielder Mike Yastrzemski to a two-year, $23 million deal with a club option for 2028.

Yastrzemski, 35, started 2025 with Giants, where he struggled with the bat, but he snapped back into form after a midseason trade to Kansas City, hitting nine homers in 50 games while slugging .500. In Atlanta he will likely be a fourth outfielder backing up Ronald Acuña Jr., Michael Harris II, and Jurickson Profar. He'll also be part of a DH carousel, appearing mostly against right-handed pitching.

Joe Buck wins the Ford Frick Award

The Ford C. Frick Award is presented annually for excellence in baseball broadcasting. Yesterday was that annual presentation and the award went to Joe Buck, the longtime voice of baseball on Fox Sports and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Buck joins his dad, Jack Buck, as the only father-son duo to win the honor. Buck, who is 56, is the second-youngest Frick Award winner, trailing only Vin Scully, who was 54 when he was named the 1982 recipient. Buck is the sixth broadcaster to win both the Frick Award and the NFL's equivalent, the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, joining his father, Dick Enberg, Curt Gowdy, Al Michaels, and Lindsey Nelson.

I'm sure all of us have our opinions on Joe Buck as a broadcaster. I didn't care for him for several years but he grew on me. He never became a favorite or anything, and I'm not sure that I consider him to be Ford C. Frick-worthy, but like him or not he was a baseball institution for more than a couple of decades, and that sort of thing tends to get honored, so good for him.

The Rule 5 Draft

The Rule 5 Draft went down yesterday afternoon, marking the end of the Winter Meetings.

For those unaware of how that works, the Rule 5 Draft allows clubs to select players from other team's systems who are not on their 40-man roster but who have been in the team's system for four or five years, depending on the player's age at the time they were signed or taken in the amateur draft. The idea is to keep teams from stockpiling young talent in the minors and giving them a chance to see some major league time. Which is why all players selected in the Rule 5 draft must be placed on the selecting team's 40-man at the time of selection and must be on the 26-man active roster during the season.

The fun part: if the player is removed from the 26-man by their new team, the player is sent back to his old team. The exception: the player can go on the big league injured list and remain with his new team. Which is why Rule 5 dudes who don't perform always seem to get oblique injuries, "general soreness" and "fatigue" that takes a long time to get better. Damndest thing, really. Maybe someday someone will figure out that that's all about.

If you want the lowdown on the Rule 5 players selected this year – none of whom either I or most of you know – your best bet it to go check out Baseball America. They do a great job with this stuff while I just make dumb jokes to deflect from the fact that I don't have the bandwidth to cover the minor leagues.

Diamondbacks, Padres to play in Mexico City next season

Yesterday Major League Baseball announced that it will stage a series in Mexico City next season. It will feature the Arizona Diamondbacks taking on the San Diego Padres on Saturday, April 25, and Sunday, April 26, 2026, in Estadio Alfredo Harp Helú Béisbol.

This will be the third regular season series played in Mexico City, with the previous two coming in 2023, featuring the Giants and Padres, and 2024, featuring the Astros  and Rockies. Given that Mexico City is 7,349 feet above sea level and given that the dimensions of Estadio Alfredo Harp Helú Béisbol are cozy (325 feet down each line and 400 feet to dead center) there's a good chance of some big offensive numbers. Indeed, in the four previous MLB games played there the teams combined to score 61 runs.

Publishing lead times are tough

Even when it's just printing up baseball cards:

At least now we know that advent calendars are printed before late July.

Also: Clase never had 48 saves in a season. He saved 47 games in 2024, but that's the least of his problems.

Other Stuff

The AI Plagiarism Industry

Rolling Stone published an article earlier this week about the rash of AI-generated books appearing on Amazon that are blatant ripoffs of real books written by real authors. What's worse, they are on Amazon thanks to Amazon's self-publishing feature which, quite obviously, makes no effort whatsoever to determine whether what's being uploaded for self-publication is original material as opposed to theft:

When journalist and author [Tal] Lavin first searched online for [their] new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, [they] expected to find the normal things that accompany a book the week of its release: a preorder link, the odd list, and maybe a review or two. But instead, [they] found at least five complete rip offs of [their] work on shopping retailer giant Amazon – almost all of them seemingly created with the help of generative AI.**

These were not just generic knockoffs. Many of them simply took Lavin's book, which is a memoir, and cast it as a "biography" of Lavin, largely stealing her own written content and casting it in the third person. Many of them even used their name:

The books had titles like Talia Lavin Prosopography: You Need to Have a Wild Faith to Succeed, and, Talia Lavin Biography: Why You Need Wild Faith to Succeed and Tania Lavin Biography: The Wild Faith to Take Over America – all of which had titles and paragraphs similar to [their] work but full of spelling, factual, and grammatical errors.**

[Update: Since the Rolling Stone article was written Tal Levin announced that they had transitioned and now identifies as male. I have updated, in brackets, their name above because deadnaming sucks, even if it's inadvertent or happened before anyone knew or what have you; I did not change their name on the titles of the AI-generated books because, well, that's what the books are titled at present]

As Rolling Stone notes, this isn't an isolated incident. There are hundreds of these quickie knockoffs, many of which are no doubt being purchased by people who searched for one thing and got a ripoff version of it. Amazon's response to Rolling Stone – delivered in classic P.R. speak in which it claims its top priority is exactly the thing it quite obviously does not give a shit about – is that it cares deeply about copyright law and that it does everything it can to remove such books, but that's obviously a joke. As another author who has been victimized in this way told Rolling Stone, the moment one work of plagiarism is removed another pops up in its place.

Meanwhile, the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard –  whom many of you may recall me talking about due to my son being a big fan – removed their music from Spotify back in July in protest of the company’s policies and its chief executive, Daniel Ek. Guess what happened next:

Clearly attempting to fill the void, earlier this month a new artist appeared on Spotify called King Lizard Wizard, featuring AI-generated takes on the band’s psychedelic rock, identical song titles, and AI-generated artwork that weakly imitated the band’s fantastical album sleeves.

Spotify has now removed King Lizard Wizard from its service, saying: “Spotify strictly prohibits any form of artist impersonation. The content in question was removed for violating our platform policies, and no royalties were paid out for any streams generated.”

Stu Mackenzie, King Gizzard’s frontman, said he was “trying to see the irony in this situation” after the band’s earlier departure from Spotify, but added: “Seriously wtf – we are truly doomed.”

This is likewise not an isolated incident, as there are millions upon millions of AI-generated songs on Spotify, with an untold number of them constituting ripoffs that were trained on copyrighted music. In related news, my family has had a Spotify family account for several years now, but as soon as the kids are home for winter break next week we're going to move off the platform.

Back in the 19th century, Charles Dickens was widely plagiarized in America due to lack of US copyright laws. He railed against that, no doubt in part because it was costing him a great deal of money. But he also made the argument, during U.S. speaking tours, that a nation which sees merit and value in new ideas and inventions passes laws which seek to preserve them. We did OK with that for a while at least. Now we don't care. Now everyone with money and power in this country is all-in on technology that is anathema to new ideas. Because hey, there's money to be squeezed out of other people's ideas so, like, get with the program, losers.

"The Knowledge"

One of the more interesting things I've learned about over the past, oh, decade or so, is "The Knowledge." That's the test that London transport authorities give to would-be London taxi drivers. From the Transport for London site:

London's taxi service is the best in the world, in part because our cab drivers know the quickest routes through London's complicated road network. There are thousands of streets and landmarks within a 6 mile radius of Charing Cross. Anyone who wants to drive an iconic London cab must memorize them all: the Knowledge of London.

The Knowledge was introduced as a requirement for taxi drivers in 1865.

Mastering the Knowledge typically takes students three to four years; it's a challenge, but plenty of help and support is available if you are determined.

If anything, that undersells just how involved it is. London cab drivers must be able to navigate from any one place – street, square, business, church, tourist attraction, pub, restaurant, hotel, you name it – to any other place in the city without reference to maps or GPS or anything. The test is a series of oral exams, in which prospective cabbies are simply given a starting point and a destination and they have to quickly rattle off the route. As the tests get harder so do the variables. Such as "go from X to Y without encountering a stoplight." Or "without making a right turn." And even if you get 99% of the route right but your answer would have you arrive on the wrong side of the street, sorry, you're wrong. Screw up enough and you have to start over, erasing months if not years of progress.

I've been in a number of London cabs over the years and I've never had one come close to screwing up or even momentarily questioning the route. At least in a way I could tell. Reps matter, I suppose, and after years and years of testing, I suppose they have that stuff just locked in their brain forever, all while keeping some room in there for newly opened businesses. All of which is crazy, especially when you look at a London map for a few minutes and realize how many nooks and crannies there are in the capital and how a couple thousand years of development have made it so that seemingly one street can change names four times in the space of five blocks.

I've been wondering over the past couple of years whether GPS is gonna put an end to The Knowledge. Because you can take an Uber in London too, those guys aren't memorizing anything, and in my experience with them they always get you there too. Despite that, everything I've seen thus far suggests that that won't happen. Partially because UK culture is such that they do NOT abandon their institutions, even ones that seem crazily antiquated, unless absolutely forced to do so. Doing things the way they have always been done is just a point of national pride there. It's also the case that, like the medallions in New York and other cities, The Knowledge serves as a means of limiting the number of cabbies in London. Once you get your license you're a self-employed small businessperson and that can be pretty lucrative. There has to be a barrier to entry and London has decided that The Knowledge is it.

I was inspired to think about all of this again because a couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story about a guy in London who is studying for The Knowledge. He's an immigrant from Kosovo with a wife and kids who has been driving an Uber for a long time but now he wants to have a business of his own and the higher pay and respect that comes with it. It's a pretty great story which gives one a sense of just how big a job it is.

I tend to limit how many black cabs I take in London. They're the most expensive way to get around, so it's usuallt a last resort. It's also the case that, these days, it seems like every other London cabbie I encounter has a tattoo of the Saint George's Cross (which has baggage) and, when they find out I'm an American they like to tell me just how much they appreciate our good President Trump. These cats definitely fall into a certain, uh, demographic. It's not a total dealbreaker, of course. Like, when I was there with my parents back in May we took cabs often because my folks' mobility is not great, but for the most part Allison and I take the Tube to save expense and those occasionally cringey cultural moments.

Still, I find The Knowledge fascinating and I have crazy respect for the people who manage to pull that off. Viva nutso old school stuff like that.

Blast from the Past

I got an email from Sharper Image yesterday. This was surprising because (a) I have never bought a single thing from Sharper Image in my life; and (b) I was unaware that Sharper Image still existed. After looking it up I learned that the original company actually went out of business in 2008 and was restarted by others, in what was probably just a vulturing of the original IP, in 2010. Good for them. People gotta buy weird air-purifiers, massage chairs, and gifts that will look good on desks from the 1980s someplace.

But this email did have something relevant to my interests. At least to my interests 41 years ago:

Yep, they're still selling Electric Football. That game which was first invented in 1948. And, really, it doesn't appear to have changed all that much. Here was me, with my edition of it, in the early 80s:

Back then they used to include the most recent Super Bowl participants with the game. That appears to be the Raiders and the Washington NFL club there, which would make this Christmas 1984 and would make me 11. For the record that would make my mom 36, which is impossible because no one's mom has never been as young as 36. Also: major upset that she didn't have an Eve Light 120 in her hand in this pic. Maybe she's hiding it for the photo (glad you finally quit smoking, Mom!)

I was a bit older than some kids are when they got their first Electric Football game. There was a reason for it, though: I had always played the game at my friend Teddy's house. Had for years at that point actually, as he and I were the only two people among our group of friends who had the patience to play such a frustrating game. We were moving to West Virginia soon, however, and I wasn't going to be able to play with Teddy anymore, so I asked my parents for a version of my own, which I got on Christmas. I would play around with it for a couple of years before outgrowing it, but I liked it.

I said above that Electric Football was a frustrating game. And boy howdy it was. In his book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, Bill Bryson described electric football as "The worst toy of the decade [the 1950s], possibly the worst toy ever built." I think that's putting it too strongly, but it was certainly an acquired taste. There was a reason why "The Simpsons" and "The Critic" each made fun of it.

Basically all you could do was line up your guys in a big rugby-style scrum, clip the little foam football on your Marcus Allen, John Riggins, Walter Payton or Billy Sims or whoever your running back was, and hope that the electric vibrating caused your guys to out-push the other guys before your ballcarrier was "tackled" (i.e. touched by an opponent). The bases had little dials you could spin that would, in theory, cause the players to curve left or right or around in circles, but it was always an extremely inexact science. There was a combination quarterback/kicker that came with the game – a yellow plastic ball-flicking/kicking device that was far from being accurate – so it was rare that anyone bothered trying to pass. I got pretty good at practicing field goals in non-game situations, though.

In addition to the Raiders and Washington I remember asking my parents to order me the Lions, Bears, Cowboys, and Steelers too. As if it mattered given that all the figurines were basically the same. I mean, yeah, sometimes the plastic at their ankles would break or bend giving you a player that leaned over super far, and that was always fun, but it didn't make much of a difference. The real fun was that, when you got the new players, they didn't have numbers on them. Rather, a sheet of numbered stickers came with them in the team's colors so you could customize your roster with the actual numbers of the current stars. I honestly enjoyed doing that more than playing. It's probably related to why I always thought it was more fun to build rosters on computer baseball games than actually play the games. World building has always been more fun to me than kinetic experiences.

I suppose the fact that Sharper Image is sending this ad to a 52 year-old man means that this is purely a nostalgia product now. And, given the sorts of technology kids have access to today that makes perfect sense. They'd probably think Electric Football was dumb. Which, to be fair, it kinda is.

But I suppose the fact that I very, very quickly rattled off a few hundred words thinking about all of this – and went through a closet to find a 41 year-old photo – means that the nostalgia play is a wise one. I don't want a new Electric Football game, but I'm guessing a good number of Boomers and other Gen-Xer dorks like me do. And on some extraordinarily dumb level, I kinda like that you can still get it. At least if you wanna spend $79.99 for nostalgia.

But honestly: why would you do that when you can pay $52.50 a year while my sale is still going on to get it in this newsletter?

Have a great day everyone.