Cup of Coffee: January 15, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Ready to go die in a shooting war with Denmark? Nah, me neither.

The Daily Briefing

Red Sox sign Ranger Suárez

The Boston Red Sox continued to revamp their starting rotation yesterday, signing free agent Ranger Suárez to a five-year, $130 million deal. The contract includes no opt-outs or salary deferrals.

Boston lost out on signing Alex Bregman, but they've certainly added to their pitching staff this winter, with Suárez joining fellow new additions Sonny Gray and Johan Oviedo.

Suárez isn't gonna knock your socks off with velocity, but the left-hander gets the job done. He made 26 starts in 2025, averaging six innings an outing while posting a 3.20 ERA (137 ERA+) and featuring a K/BB ratio of 151/38 over 157.1 innings. He led the league in inducing soft contact, limiting barreled balls and exit velocity with the best in the game. In an age of high velocity and wicked stuff one might be tempted to say that Suárez does it with smoke and mirrors, but I prefer to fall back on that old thing they say about hitting being all about timing and pitching being all about disrupting the hitter's timing. A guy who deftly mixes in sinkers, changeups, cutters, and other random garbage while screwing with his arm angle is a giant pain in the ass for batters used to seeing pitcher throwing 99 m.p.h. all the damn time. He makes it work.

Suárez will slot in with Garrett Crochet, Sonny Gray, and Brayan Bello in Boston's rotation. The fifth starter spot is up for grabs with Kutter Crawford, Patrick Sandoval and Oviedo among the most likely options. Those options may be necessary given that Suárez has never started more than 29 games in a season.

Still: big signing. One that, even if they haven't yet added the bat they wanted, helps them out in terms of run prevention. And which gives them a chance to trade from pitching depth to improve in other areas.

If you're super happy about this signing, though, please try to be quiet as you celebrate. It'd be a shame if someone woke up the Yankees. They've been sleeping so peacefully this winter.

A former Angels prospect needs help. The Angels aren't giving it to him.

Back in September Los Angeles Angels 22 year-old outfield prospect Rio Foster, who was playing for the Angels' High-A affiliate in Pasco, Washington, was a passenger in a single-car crash. He and two others were ejected from the car as it crashed through a roundabout, hitting a fence and a power pole. The driver, who was drunk, was arrested and remains in jail pending trial.

Foster's injuries were considerable. He was intubated on the scene. The right side of his skull was broken. He also suffered from sinus fractures and, most significantly, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that continues to restrict his ability to move and communicate. His playing career is, without question, over. Now he's battling simply to live a normal life. He was in something akin to a vegetative state for a while and, though he is slowly improving, he has had multiple surgeries and requires considerable physical therapy and assistance in regaining motor and speech capabilities.

Attending to all of that is likely to get harder soon, as it seems likely that the Angels are going to release him which would, in turn, end his health insurance coverage. He already has massive medical bills that insurance is not even fully covering and which were, for a time anyway, being covered by a five-figure GoFundMe to which several Angels players contributed, but those funds have been depleted.

The Athletic published a story by Sam Blum yesterday detailing Foster's plight. The story focuses on Foster's mother, Iris Cleveland, and her struggle to care for her son. The story reveals that when Foster was first injured, the Angels paid for Cleveland’s travel to Washington and for hotel expenses, but that the club has not offered to cover any of Foster’s medical costs. What's more, the club had basically stopped communicating with Cleveland, though once Blum began reporting on the story and contacting the Angels for comment, some communication had resumed:

When asked by The Athletic, the Angels declined to say whether they will cover any of Foster’s medical care, or keep him on their insurance.

“We continue to stay in regular contact with Rio’s family but would prefer to keep those conversations private,” the team said through a spokesman.

Cleveland said the Angels only re-engaged on Jan. 9, after The Athletic asked the team questions for this article. Prior to that, the last substantive communication had been in November.

The Angels are, legally, not obligated to keep Foster on their insurance or to help him out given that his injuries were not related to playing baseball. But there has been a notable tradition, particularly in recent years, of clubs helping to take care of players in these sorts of circumstances, even if it simply involves signing them to minor league contracts so that they can maintain their health insurance. From The Athletic:

In 2022, the Phillies covered insurance and numerous other costs after prospect Daniel Brito’s brain hemorrhage. The Red Sox covered medical costs for top prospect Ryan Westmoreland in 2010, after a malformation in his brain required multiple surgeries.

Former minor league pitcher Matt LaChappa suffered a heart attack in 1996 while warming up for a game; he has difficulty walking and speaking. The Padres sign him to a minor league contract every year to keep him insured. Similarly, the Dodgers sign former outfielder Andrew Toles to an annual contract to keep him insured as he deals with mental health disorders.

Cleveland's take on the Angels helping her son out is both clear-eyed and heartbreaking to hear: “It would be the right thing to do. Legally they don’t have to. I don’t have any legal backing. It would be a great thing to do. It would be wonderful. But billionaires are billionaires because they don’t give people money.”

The billionaire who owns the Angels, Arte Moreno was recently forced into an eight or nine-figure settlement with the family of Tyler Skaggs after it became abundantly clear that a jury was about to find that the club did not exercise proper care with respect to Skaggs' drug problems. One would hope that, this time, the Angels could do the right thing by one of their players even if a court isn't going to tell them that they have to.

How many homers will the new fences at Kauffman Stadium add?

The other day the Royals announced that they are moving the fences in at Kauffman Stadium. Yesterday, over at FanGraphs, Ben Clemens took a stab at estimating the effect that will have on the offensive numbers in Royals home games. Clemens:

What will this do to run scoring? I can hazard a guess, though it’ll still just be a guess until we see actual games in the new dimensions. Swap in, say, 50 new homers (a nice round number close to the average increase from above), swap out the aggregate mix of doubles, outs, and triples that they “used” to be, and you get an increase in total run scoring of 57.2 runs across 81 home games. That’s for both teams, of course, since I used every batted ball to bulk up the sample size.

A little over a third of a run a game per team doesn't sound like a lot, but it's not insignificant over the course of 81 games. Beyond the specific numbers involved, the article is well worth your time if, for no other reason, than it goes pretty deeply into all of the factors that impact run scoring when it comes to stadium design separate and apart from home run totals. Interesting stuff.

José Ureña Signs With the Rakuten Eagles

The Rakuten Golden Eagles announced yesterday that they’ve signed José Ureña to a one-year deal for the 2026 season.

Ureña, 34, is an 11-year veteran who has pitched for 11 clubs, including five different teams in 2025 alone. He pitched 55 innings in 2025, posting a 4.58 ERA, not striking out many batters while walking a whole lot of them. Which means that going to Japan is probably a pretty smart move for him, because everyone over here has an opinion about him at this point and that opinion is pretty much, "eh, someone else can have him." He was unlikely to get anything other than a minor league deal and an invite to big league camp here. Now he has a guaranteed deal for 2026 and at least an outside chance of coming back to MLB in better standing.

Other Stuff

Europe moves to check American aggression

NATO went the entire Cold War without ever once engaging in a genuine military operation against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, which were the adversaries it was specifically set up to combat. The reason for it was simple: for whatever other Cold War intrigues took place, there was never a time when the Soviets and their client states credibly threatened to invade NATO territory.

The United States is now actively threatening a NATO country, however: Denmark, and its sovereign territory of Greenland. So NATO nations are mobilizing against a superpower for the very first time:

On Wednesday, January 14, France and Germany said that they will send troops to Greenland along with other European countries, as US President Donald Trump ramped up threats to conquer the Arctic island.

The move follows an announcement by Denmark earlier today that it will beef up its military presence in Greenland "from today," the country's defense ministry said . . . France, the European Union's only nuclear power, also confirmed that it would send troops to Greenland, after a high-stakes meeting between US, Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington. Sweden has also said it will take part in the European military mission.

The troops and military assets being sent to Greenland are more symbolic than anything. Small units on putative training and observation missions. But the deployment is nonetheless significant, as those troops will constitute a tripwire force which guarantees that, if America does try to take Greenland by force, it will at least theoretically be drawn into a larger conflict with larger consequences. A deterrent, really, not unlike the ground forces NATO deployed to West Berlin during the Cold War. Forces which, by their small numbers, could obviously not stop a Soviet invasion but whose sacrifice would ensure that the Soviets' aggression would trigger World War III if they tried to take over Berlin. It seems pretty unlikely to me that the European countries would actually go to war with the United States over Greenland, but they have to do something here and this is something.

Whatever the case, it's insane that we've gotten to this point. It's insane that a U.S. president seems hellbent on simply conquering another country's territory. An ally country's territory, no less! It's insane that we're poised to have the guns of Western Europe trained on us, even symbolically, because of our unhinged belligerence.

The United States is an outlaw nation. A pariah nation. And now it stands closer to an actual shooting war with Western Europe than the Soviets ever did. Vladimir Putin, a proclaimed enemy of NATO who desires nothing more than to see it disintegrate, could not have planned this any better if he tried.

Exhibit A

You ever see a tweet that you just know will be an exhibit in a criminal trial?

One aim of this tweet was no doubt to intimidate the public and to dissuade them from confronting ICE agents as they continue their lawless reign of terror. But I suspect that it has another aim as well: to rally agents who, as we noted yesterday, are growing wary of their mission and are concerned that they will suffer consequences for their massive and widespread violations of people's civil rights. Stephen Miller, who is not a lawyer, is lying to them about the scope of their immunity in an effort to head off internal dissent and general wobbliness.

I have no doubt that, eventually, when the dust settles, there will be lawsuits and prosecutions over ICE's conduct in Minnesota and elsewhere. And when they happen, the defendants will cite this tweet and similar directives from Miller and his accomplices as justification for their acts while the plaintiffs point to it as evidence that agents were told it was OK to break the law.

Stephen Miller, however, does not make the laws and he cannot change them by posting shit from his phone. As such, the people who work from him had best tread carefully if they don't want to be imprisoned and/or ruined once this madness ends.

Great Moments in Authoritarianism

Yesterday morning Trump's FBI raided the home of a journalist reporting on the Trump administration:

F.B.I. agents conducted a search at the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday, as part of what officials said was an investigation into the possible sharing of government secrets, according to people familiar with the matter . . . The reporter, Hannah Natanson, has spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the work force to enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the changes the administration was making.

Such a thing would be ominous and appalling no matter the circumstances but, as noted, this was a reporter working on stories about federal workforce reductions and layoffs, not on national security or classified military information or anything like that. That alone renders the "sharing of government secrets" rationale transparently disingenuous.

To be sure, the government often pursues leak investigations and they routinely discipline or even prosecute those who leak – and in this case they have apparently arrested a government employee who leaked information – but they rarely if ever go after a reporter in this way. They'll make requests to her employer about her sources – requests that are routinely ignored on Constitutional grounds – but raiding a reporter's home like this has rarely if ever happened in America. And in the small number of cases when it has, it has been met with massive legal, political, and popular blowback.

But it's happening now. It happening because they want to intimidate a reporter – and to send a message to other reporters – that journalism that is critical of The Regime will not be tolerated and will be punished by the power of the state. It's just the latest of countless examples of the disdain the Trump Regime has for the Constitution and for basic civil rights. It's just the latest bit of evidence that we live in an authoritarian dictatorship.

Improving Wainwright's Coast-to-Coast

One of you sent me an article about improvements being made on the Wainwright Coast-to-Coast path that I hiked a couple of years ago. Specifically, they're putting stepping-stones and plank walkways over treacherous bogland, putting up signs that actually mark the trail, updating the Ordnance Survey maps so people don't get lost, adding gates so hikers don't have to scale stone walls, and stuff like that.

On the one hand, this is good because I'm fairly certain that part of the reason my ankle gave out 75% of the way across England came from the repetitive stress that came from walking awkwardly over the bogs to keep from going in up to my neck in the muck and from jumping down from the tops of the stone walls onto uneven ground a dozen times a day over the course of two weeks.

On the other hand, like every other old person, I want everyone else to have to suffer like I suffered because that's just how old people are, so you can have your improvements you softy whippersnappers.

Being a curmudgeon can be complicated business, y'all.

Have a great day everyone.