Cup of Coffee: February 12, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Lotta hamate news today, man. Lotta hamate news.

The Daily Briefing

Corbin Carroll suffers a broken hamate

The same day Francisco Lindor was revealed to have a broken hamate – he had surgery on that yesterday – Diamondbacks star outfielder Corbin Carroll suffered a broken hamate bone in his right hand during batting practice. He underwent surgery yesterday as well. That’ll sideline Carroll for spring training and will almost certainly cause him to miss Opening Day.

Carroll is, obviously, an important player for the Diamondbacks and his loss will loom bigger and bigger the longer it extends into the regular season. Arizona doesn't have a ton of backup options either, as their outfield depth ain't great. Looking at the tattered remains of the various free agent trackers out there show that Michael Conforto, Tommy Pham, Starling Marte and Mike Tauchman are still available, though, so go crazy, Snakes!

Jackson Holliday suffers a broken hamate

Let's keep the hamate news going: in addition to Carroll and Lindor we learned yesterday that Orioles infielder Jackson Holliday broke the hamate bone in his hand during live batting practice in early February. Guess everyone kept that one quiet for a couple of weeks. Holliday is slated to have surgery today to completely remove the dang thing. Which, hell, if you can get buy without them, maybe everyone should have theirs removed. They just seem to cause trouble.

While the Diamondbacks and Mets are leaving things open for Carroll and Lindor, the Orioles have already said that Holliday will, without question, miss Opening Day. I guess they're more realistic about such things in Baltimore.

Orioles sign Chris Bassitt

One of the last notable free agents is off the board as the Baltimore Orioles and starter Chris Bassitt have agreed to a one-year, $18.5 million deal. He'll get a $3 million signing bonus and there's a $500K bonus if he makes 27 starts. 

Bassitt, 36, is entering his 12th season as a big leaguer. He spent the past three seasons with the Blue Jays, leading the American League in wins in 2023. He's made at least 30 starts over each of the past four years, going 52-40 with a 3.77 ERA (110 ERA+) during that span.

Bassitt will join Kyle Bradish, Trevor Rogers, Shane Baz, and . . . someone, perhaps Zach Elfin, in the Orioles rotation.

Various transactions

• The Brewers and catcher Gary Sánchez agreed to a one-year, $1.75 million deal. You'll recall that he played for them in 2024 before jumping over to the Orioles last year. It was a tough year for him as he was limited to just 30 games and 101 plate appearances due to wrist inflammation and a sprained knee ligament. Backup catchers often go on seemingly forever, but Sánchez, 33, has a lot of mileage on the old odometer at this point;  
• The Texas Rangers signed starter Jordan Montgomery to a one-year, $1.25 million contract. Montgomery did not pitch in the majors at all last year after undergoing Tommy John surgery before the start of the season. No word on when, exactly, he may be ready in 2026. This is his second stint with the Rangers, having pitched for them down the stretch in their 2023 World Series championship season;
• The Washington Nationals have signed starter Miles Mikolas to a one-year, $2.25 million contract. Mikolas can earn $750,000 in various performance bonuses. He went 8-11 with a 4.84 ERA (85 ERA+) for the Cardinals in 2025. Not great, but he has been durable, having made at least 31 starts in each of the last four seasons. Indeed, his 130 starts over the past four years are the second most in all of baseball, so there's that;
• The Los Angeles Dodgers re-signed reliever Evan Phillips to a one-year, $6.5 million contract. Phillips, 31, is coming off Tommy John surgery and is expected to return around July. He was a workhorse for the Dodgers from 2022-2024, appearing in 187 games and posting a 2.21 ERA (187 ERA+); and
• The Miami Marlins signed lefty reliever John King to a one-year, $1.5 million contract. King was non-tendered by the Cardinals November. He was excellent for St. Louis in 2023 and 2024 but had a rough go of things last year.

Wait, Zack Wheeler did what now?

Just checkin' in with the daily Phillies notes, and . . .

Zack Wheeler has four kids under the age of six, and I can guarantee you that one day one of them is gonna go into the closet, drag out that rib, and show it to one of their friends. After that everyone involved is gonna agree that, in hindsight, there was really no need to have kept the rib around.

In the meantime, someone get eyes on Jackson Holliday's hamate bone. We gotta start keeping track of these things.

Wanna buy Cy Young's house?

Well, it isn't Cy Young's house anymore, as he has been dead for 70 years. And I think he moved away from there when he was a teenager (though he's buried nearby in Peoli Cemetery). But it is the house that Denton True Young was born in:

The full listing is here. And a story about it can be read here. It's on 35 acres and lists for $795,500. Which is a lot for middle-of-nowhere Tuscarawas County, Ohio, but I suppose that's what a lot of land and a lot of history costs someone these days. It's around 105 miles from my house if you wanna buy it and come visit me sometime.

The core of the house is an 1835 log cabin, but it's been greatly added onto and updated. Still rustic, but rustic in a way that Cy Young would not recognize. Because it has, like, modern appliances, indoor plumbing, and a garage and stuff. There are a couple of outbuildings, one of which is a four-bedroom lodge and another of which is an art studio. Which makes sense given that the current owner is an apparently well-known ceramic artist named Tom Radca.

I've sorta had my fill of Ohio after 30 some-odd years, so I'm not about to buy more property here, but you could do worse if you wanted to buy a fortified rural compound someplace and shut out the world.

Update on the oversharing biathlete

Yesterday I talked about Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid who, upon winning the bronze medal in men's biathlon, decided that the best use of his time in front of the media was to talk about how he cheated on his ex-girlfriend and not-so-subtly attempt to win her back. Which is to say, he (a) betrayed someone's trust and broke their heart; and then (b) made their private business the stuff of international news stories without her consent.

Predictably, the press tracked her down. From SkySports:

Now his ex-girlfriend, who wants to remain anonymous, told Norwegian outlet VG that she "did not choose to be put in this position, and it hurts to have to be in it". She added that Laegreid's infidelity was "hard to forgive, even after a declaration of love in front of the whole world".

The woman said she had been in contact with Laegreid and that he knew her stance on this.

The woman did express her gratitude to those who have helped her navigate the fallout, thanking “my family and friends who have embraced me and supported me during this time. Also to everyone else who has thought of me and sympathized, without knowing who I am."

The takeaway here is obvious: don't date Sturla Holm Laegreid. He's a piece of crap, man.

Other Stuff

Stopping America's concentration camp network

Reports have emerged over the past week that ICE has spent nearly three quarters of a billion dollars purchasing warehouses around the country and intends to convert them into concentration camps. They can call them something else if they wish to, but they are concentration camps by every legal, academic, and purely reasonable sense of the word. That's on top of the current network of prisons and camps it and other DHS agencies are already operating across the country in what amounts to a larger, and more populated system of concentration camps than Nazi Germany had on the eve of World War II in 1939.

Earlier this week friend of the newsletter and noted expert on concentration camps Andrea Pitzer wrote about what's going on right now and how it compares to the camp infrastructure of past authoritarian regimes. It's an unsettling but necessary read.

Pitzer notes at the outset, for example, that "concentration camp regimes in their early stages often make use of large open infrastructure to convert into detention spaces. Dachau was converted from a shuttered factory into a concentration camp in 1933." We have fewer factories than we once did, but we do have warehouses, and in the government's nearly billion dollar purchase of warehouse space for the housing of human beings it's impossible not to see the parallels between what the Nazis and other authors of atrocities have done and what we are doing right now.

Pitzer goes on:

The Trump administration is not taking these actions for border enforcement purposes. The mission has crossed over into explicit ethnic cleansing to entrench political power . . . The fact that the U.S. is currently planning an ongoing and expansive network of camps holding 5,000, 7,500, or even 9,500 people at a single site is beyond concerning. It’s not just part of the larger shift made possible by the war on terror. But when you consider the number—again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labor camps in the People’s Republic of China. The administration is actively aspiring to a system of that magnitude to reshape society to its racial, political and cultural preferences for generations to come.

This is not just a fantasy. It is something for which the administration has acquired the funding and a path forward. It lacks only the personnel and enough detention spaces.

Somehow, through all of this, and through all of the horrible atrocities that she has documented and discussed, Pitzer remains positive. Not optimistic, necessarily, but focused on what must be done to stop all of this.

To that end she talks about the ways in which we can attempt to disrupt these ongoing, and soon to be escalated crimes against humanity. About focusing on the warehouse acquisition process and attempting to gum up the works on the state and local level in order to prevent the Trump Regime from establishing an American gulag archipelago. On how, if these human warehouses do get up and running, we need to highlight their existence, make them visible, and to keep them from blending into the towns and countryside like the concentration camps of Nazi Germany eventually did. About how to harry, stigmatize, and discourage ICE and Border Patrol agents in an effort to keep the Regime from staffing these facilities with the number of people they will require to operate. There are no magic bullets here, but we can apply sustained pressure and do whatever we can to at least try to stop the Regime from doing what it plans to do.

Pitzer closes:

We’re in a race now. We need to act before the administration has the personnel and the detention facilities to broaden the scope of its actions. It’s up to us to break the existing momentum on this front. For many, this has been a faraway issue debated conceptually in the mind, something a person can take a side on, as with the Super Bowl.

But faced with whole communities being upended and strong-armed into hosting concentration camps, many will begin to see this mass deportation movement for what it is. Something abhorrent, something truly vile, and something we have to stop.

Here's hoping we can.

Great Moments in "Civic Discourse"

Last year the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature ordered The Ohio State University to create an "intellectual diversity" department. It was a nakedly political act, couched in Republicans' racist "anti-DEI" agenda and aimed, primarily, at giving faculty jobs to right wing weirdoes who don't believe in science, education, modern medicine, or most other post-Enlightenment concepts in any real way and thus could never otherwise have hoped to become university professors. It was all about inserting conservative propaganda and misinformation into the educational ecosystem.

On Tuesday night Professor Luke M. Perez, one of those alleged champions of free speech who was hired by the intellectual diversity department, viciously attacked a reporter who was attempting to film a high-ranking member of Ohio State's administration as he was being asked questions in the hallway of a university classroom building:

You can read an account of all of this from D.J. Byrnes (a/k/a "The Rooster), who was at the scene at the time and is the one who took this video.

Perez, who is described on his faculty page as, "a scholar of American Grand Strategy, the ethics of war, and religion and international politics," has now been placed on administrative leave following the victim and Byrnes reporting him to University police. It's worth noting, however, that before they could do that, Perez himself appeared to have filed his own complaint claiming that he was being harassed. He must've been unaware that he was being filmed and assumed he could get away with that lie, but it's looking bad for our boy here now.

It's almost as if there is a reason why these sorts of people didn't have jobs at major universities before Republicans created an affirmative action program for them last year. It's almost as if they have neither the temperament nor the intellect for the gig and, contrary to their credos, don't really appreciate diverse viewpoints or basic civil liberties.

Here's hoping this guy gets fired and jailed.

Trump imposes Soviet-style economic central planning

Yesterday Trump ordered the Pentagon to use government funding and Pentagon contracts to sustain U.S. coal-fired power plants. He did it via an executive order in which he directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to enter into agreements to buy electricity from coal plants for military operations.

On hand as Trump made the announcement: coal executives, coal miners, and other energy industry people, all of whom would shoot you on sight if you accused them of being socialists but who are now all happy to be the beneficiaries of a scheme in which the government is forcing the purchase of the products of an industry which could not survive if it was not propped up by tax dollars.

In other news, every coal miner in the United States could fit into Angel Stadium in Anaheim and there'd still be room left over. It's a dying industry whose externalities vastly outweigh its benefits, yet it's the priority of the U.S. government to prop it up for some reason.

James Van Der Beek: 1977-2026

James Van Der Beek, best known for playing the titular lead in hit 90s teen drama "Dawson’s Creek," died yesterday at the age of 48. He had announced in late 2024 that he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

In addition to "Dawson's Creek," Van Der Beek also appeared in movies including the American football teen flick "Varsity Blues" and "The Rules of Attraction," which was the adaptation a Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name. Later in his career he expanded into more complex roles, such as an interesting turn as a Donald Trump organization employee in the first season of the TV series "Pose" and a a meta/satirical version of himself in the show "Don’t Trust the B-— in Apartment 23." He seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor and a healthy self-awareness about stardom's fleeting nature.

Van Der Beek leaves behind a wife and six children. Forty-eight is far too young. May he rest in peace.

Bud Cort: 1948-2026

Also passing away yesterday was Bud Cort, most famous for playing the role of Harold in the classic May-December romance “Harold and Maude." Well, it was actually more of a February or March-December romance, but let's not split hairs because the movie is impossibly sweet and poignant and if you haven't seen it you should. Cort was said to have been suffering from a long illness. He was 77.

Cort also starred in Robert Altman’s "M*A*S*H" and “Brewster McCloud. Later he provided the voice for the neurotic/psychotic/romantic computer Edgar in the 1984 film "Electric Dreams," which is a movie for which I probably have some undue affection for having watched it a million times in the 1980s. His other credits include small parts in "Heat," "Coyote Ugly," "Pollock," and "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." In addition to "Electric Dreams" Cort did extensive voice work in animated shows, including multiple installments of DC Comics productions as Superman's enemy Toyman.

Bad day yesterday, man. Bad day. Rest in peace Bud Cort.

"Welcome To The Group Chat"

If you've ever been in a group chat – especially one with a lot of guys over 40 – and/or if you are really, really displeased with how tech companies are ruining every digital project imaginable with AI and other intrusive and disruptive technologies, you have to read this.

I won't say any more. Except that it includes Richie Sexson and Russell Branyan, sending it even higher up the "must read" charts.

What in the hell happened in El Paso yesterday?

Early yesterday morning the FAA announced that it would close off the skies around El Paso, Texas to all air traffic for ten days for “special security reasons." It was a surprising, even shocking announcement of measures that have not been seen in this country apart from the immediate aftermath of 9/11. What was going on here? A terror threat? Classified military operations? No one would say!

Such a shutdown would, needless to say, be highly disruptive to both commerce and people's health and safety. Thousands of air travelers and untold planeloads of cargo heading to and from a metro area of over 800,000 people would have to be diverted or grounded for more than a week. Even medical helicopters and planes would be grounded. Just a total shit show!

Then, an hour or two later, the order to close the sky around El Paso was rescinded with no more explanation than was provided about the initial decision to shut it down. What in the hell had happened?

A bunch of administration types initially claimed that drug cartels from Mexico were sending drones over the border, requiring a military response. That sounded like complete horseshit. Later yesterday Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported that, according to her sources, it did involve drone defense but that, actually, no drones were involved at all. Rather, it was a damn mylar balloon:

The unexpected airspace closure in El Paso stemmed from disagreements over drone-related tests, sources told CBS News. Pentagon had undertaken extensive planning on use of military tech near Fort Bliss. Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser. Earlier this week, tech was used to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down.

Given how CBS News has become a tool of the Trump Regime of late I'm not putting much stock in that either, even if I can believe the incompetence involved.

The Associated Press said that it was just about the Pentagon wanting to test its big anti-drone laser, not coordinating with anyone about it, and forcing the FAA to scramble to shut down air traffic as a means of preventing some sort of disaster. And, of course, no one decided it was important to let the El Paso government, police, hospitals, airport authorities or anyone else who might be affected by this know what the hell was going on. The whole "let's shoot down balloons" affair ended after someone at DoD finally got the message that they had created chaos.

This is what happens when your Secretary of Defense is an incompetent drunk and everyone else in the administration is simply incompetent. All that's left now is for World War III to start because we're, maybe, shooting at balloons.

Hey, that gives me a great idea for today's outro song . . .

The judges would've also accepted Soul Coughing's "Unmarked Helicopters."

Have a great day everyone.