Cup of Coffee: December 4, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go.

The Daily Briefing

Cedric Mullins signs with the Rays

The Tampa Bay Rays and outfielder Cedric Mullins have agreed to a one-year, $7 million deal.

Mullins, 31, had respectable numbers for the Orioles last season, but he hit just .182 after joining the Mets, leaving him with a full season line of .216/.299/.391 (94 OPS+) with 17 homers overall. Meanwhile, his defense in center field has declined.

Mullins' best use would be as the left-handed side of a platoon outfield situation which, as I mentioned last week when the Rays signed a different half-good but half-not-good player, is something they do. It'd probably be a more sustainable strategy if they had 52 roster spots, but they don't, so oh well.

Miguel Rojas returns to the Dodgers

The Dodgers are bringing back Miguel Rojas on a one-year deal. It's worth $5.5 million. ESPN's Alden González reports that Rojas will retire after the 2026 season and move into the Dodgers front office in a player development role.

Rojas, 36, was a solid utility player for L.A., hitting .262/.318/.397 (100 OPS+) over 317 plate appearances in 114 games. And, of course, he played some heroic defense in Game 6 of the World Series and hit a game-tying home run in the 9th inning of Game 7.

Reds bring back closer Emilio Pagán

Also remaining with his 2025 club is closer Emilio Pagán, who agreed to come back to the Cincinnati Reds on a two-year, $20 million contract. The deal contains an opt-out after the 2026 season. He had one on his last two-year deal but some injuries in 2024 inspired him to stick around for 2025.

Pagán, 34, posted a 2.88 ERA and saved 32 games while making 70 appearances in 2025 with good strikeout and walks rates. He's a fly ball pitcher in a hitter-friendly park and gives up some dingers, but he's mostly made it work in Cincinnati so far.

White Sox sign Anthony Kay

The Chicago White Sox have signed starter Anthony Kay to a two-year deal worth $12 million.

Kay, 30, is returning to the U.S. after two seasons with Japan's Yokohama BayStars. He was one of Japan’s best pitchers last season, posting a 1.74 ERA and a 130/41 K/BB ratio in 155 innings. How much of that is a function Kay finally figuring things out after five lackluster MLB seasons and how much of that is a function of the current NPB offensive environment being closer to the Dead Ball Era than modern MLB is a question we're likely to have answered pretty dang early in the season.

Rockies name Josh Byrnes their new GM

A couple of weeks ago the Colorado Rockies hired Paul DePodesta to be their president of baseball operations. He has now hired a general manager to be his second-in-command: Josh Byrnes

Byrnes, 55, has been the Dodgers’ senior vice president of baseball operations since 2014, but he was previously the general manager for the Diamondbacks from 2005-2010 and then for the Padres from 2011-2014. With L.A. he's been involved with supervising the team’s scouting and player development departments, which are both areas in big need of improvement on the Rockies.

Which is to say, I think Byrnes is a pretty good hire for Colorado. Even if bringing in guys who were last in charge of baseball operations departments back when Obama was president gives the Rockies' front office a "Space Cowboys" vibe.

The MLB gambling scandal is quaint

It's certainly a big deal that two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians are facing federal prison time for spiking pitches to benefit gamblers. But it's positively quaint compared to what broke yesterday in the UK.

The broad description of it from the London Times is that Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion of the Premier League, has been accused of operating a secret £600 million gambling syndicate to bet on football matches. To make it happen he's alleged to have partnered up with a guy named George Cottrell, the former chief of staff of the leader of the far right wing Reform UK Party Nigel Farage. To translate for those unfamiliar with the British milieu, that'd be something like if Mets owner Steve Cohen was running a gambling ring to bet on baseball and used Stephen Miller as his front.

The caveats and interesting facts:

• Bloom, the Brighton & Hove Albion owner, is himself a professional gambler who goes by the nickname "The Lizard." He's actually allowed to gamble on sports in the UK, even if most other football owners aren't, because gambling was his business before he bought the club. Another one with that exemption is the owner of my Brentford Bees, Matthew Benham, who is also a professional gambler. You bet your ass I name-searched him the second I opened this article and, thankfully, he does not have any involvement with this;
• Despite the gambling carve-out, Bloom is not allowed to bet on Premier League matches or international competitions in which Premier League clubs participate. There's a person who claims to have been involved in the gambling syndicate who alleges that he's been doing just that, however, using Cottrell as his front man. That seems kinda far-fetched to be given that Bloom has billions to lose if he were betting on Premier League matches, but the claim is out there so tongues will wag;
• Cottrell, the front for the syndicate who was the Nigel Farage political aide, is only 32 years old but he's already done time in the United States for money laundering. He's currently writing a book entitled How to Launder Money. Personally I'd rather take advice about money laundering from someone who didn't get thrown in jail for doing it, but I suppose you take your information where you can get it. Oh, and his mom, a former model, dated King Charles III back in the 1970s.

Can we just skip forward to casting the movie now? Based on the photo above, I'm saying Jeremy Strong can play The Lizard and Tom Holland can play the posh little money laundering creep. Sound good?

Other Stuff

Loser-ass Quote of the Day

Here was Hakeem Jeffries, the putative leader of the Democratic Party in Congress and the putative head of the opposition to the rise of fascism, speaking on national television about Donald Trump:

"The border is secure. That's a good thing. It happened on his watch. He wants to claim credit for it, of course he'll get credit for that. In terms of making sure that we actually deal with the issues that matter, including on immigration, there's a lot that's left to be desired."

In the same interview he praised Trump's pardon of Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar on corruption charges, saying it was "exactly the right outcome."

To say that this does not even begin to meet the moment is a monumental understatement.

The House Minority Leader has one job and one job only: to oppose the majority and the president. That majority and the president have taken a meat axe to the United States government and the Constitution. The president has unleashed a lawless secret police force which has terrorized and brutalized the American people. The president has authorized the commission of heinous war crimes and has used his office in the most audaciously corrupt manner possible while leaving the running of the country to the most unqualified and incompetent group of hateful sycophants imaginable.

Against that backdrop, going on TV to give the president a win by praising him for "securing the border" – a framing of immigration politics that Republican strategists would kill to hear their own politicians say let alone the Democratic leader – and lauding his continued corrupt use of the pardon power is political malpractice of the highest order. It normalizes Trump's brutal xenophobic and racist anti-immigrant campaign and casts the matter as settled, with Trump standing rightfully victorious. Meanwhile, the stuff about the Cuellar pardon signals to Americans that Democrats, like Republicans, are OK with elites being immune from any and all consequences even if they break the law. And his final bit – casting the rest of Trump's actions as "leaving a lot to be desired" – characterizes the current crisis in this country as a mere matter of mild political disagreement.

It's like someone lobotomized Jeffries. It's like he's a Manchurian Candidate, programmed by people who are perfectly happy with the status quo but who would just like to soften the optics a tad. It's the sort of messaging one would engage in if one's ultimate aim was to merely get a few Republican voters to switch sides regardless of how much it sells out the people being brutally oppressed by this regime, no matter how much it enrages the Democratic base, and no matter how much enthusiasm it saps from them at a time when absolutely everything should be geared toward demonizing the fascists who are currently running the country and energizing those who most passionately oppose them.

I have no idea what the fuck goes on in Hakeem Jeffries' head. I have no idea who he thinks he serves and what he thinks he accomplishes by sleepwalking onto cable news, talking about Trump in terms that Trump and his supporters will 100% construe as praise, and failing to offer anything approaching a fight.

Hakeem Jeffries is an abject failure at his job. He should be removed from it immediately and, barring that, someone should primary his useless ass. Because even if Jeffries doesn't acknowledge it, we are fighting for the very survival of American Democracy right now and he's out there offering aid and comfort to the enemy.

I would like to report a murder

There are bad book reviews. There are vicious book reviews. Then there are book reviews like the one Slate's Scaachi Koul wrote about Olivia Nuzzi's new book, American Canto. A review in which the subhed refers to the book in question as "dogshit" and it only gets more brutal from there. Among the choicest bits:

. . . it is illegible in ways you can’t imagine. Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it’s just not that hard to do. Three hundred pages with no chapter breaks . . . Reading it is like spending time with a delusional fortune cookie: platitudes that feel like they were run through a translation service three times.

And

It’s like a children’s book about good old red, white, and blue—except it was written by Joan Didion in a black turtleneck, and it fucking sucks.

And

Really, just dogshit writing all around.

After quoting one of Nuzzi's many simultaneously juvenile and incomprehensible run-on sentences, Koul writes, "A sentence both delusional and poorly constructed? Good thing she’s a high-profile editor now."

Sometimes I feel bad when I read a bad book review. Writing a book is hard and, having done it, I have at least some degree of respect and empathy for anyone who has actually gotten one published and subjected to public scrutiny. It's hard enough to even finish a book. Making it, you know, good, is even harder!

But I'm not feeling bad here. Nuzzi is absolutely vile and neither she, Kennedy, Lizza, nor anyone else involved with this train wreck is a sympathetic figure. Indeed, the only good thing it has produced is this and the other scathing book reviews which have resulted. There's a hell of a lot of good writing to be found in those, at least.

Anna's continuing encounters with mincemeat

Text from yesterday:

A "My Girl" trigger warning?

Jamie Lee Curtis recently went on The View and talked about the 1991 movie "My Girl" in which she plays the mortician at the funeral home owned by Anna Chlumsky's family. Even scarier: she plays Dan Aykroyd's love interest, which, eww.

Curtis said that at the time the movie came out she told the studio executives that they had to put some kind of warning on the poster because of the way Macaulay Culkin's character dies:

“I called the president of marketing at Columbia,” she told Whoopi Goldberg, “and I said: ‘Guys, you have a poster of the biggest star in the world, Macaulay Culkin, and this little girl laughing on the cover of the poster.’ I said: ‘You have to put a warning. You have to say [there are] issues of life and death explored in this film, because this little boy is going to die on film and you’re going to see him dead in a coffin and you’re going to freak out every child in America!’”

I was 18 and a freshman in college when "My Girl" came out, so I was older than the "oh my God, they killed Macaulay Culkin with bees!" demographic. I have heard many members of that demographic say were traumatized by the movie when they were young. I feel bad for their younger selves, but I still laugh pretty hard when I think about just how damn maudlin and over-the-top that movie is. I laugh even harder when I think about how the pitch for that movie must've went, after which some executive said "yeah, I think murdering the most beloved child actor since Shirley Temple with bees is a GREAT idea!" Of course, given that the movie was a hit I suppose he or she was right.

I see "My Girl" get named in those "most traumatizing kids' movies" lists from time to time, but I'm sorry, I can't. It's just too silly for me to take seriously.

Have a great day everyone.