Cup of Coffee: July 10, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Five guys hit two homers yesterday. I don't really keep formal track of such things but I do absorb vibes, and that feel like an unusual number of two-dinger days.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

White Sox 2, Blue Jays 1: At one point Sox starter Adrian Houser puked in the dugout between innings. Apparently puking is the new inefficiency because he went on to pitch seven innings of one-run ball and helping end the Blue Jays ten-game winning streak. Baseball is a copycat league so you watch: everyone will be puking in the dugout in between innings pretty soon. Like, if you're not puking in the dugout in between innings people are gonna question if you're really committed to winning.

Brewers 3, Dodgers 2: The Brewers tied the game up when Andrew Vaughn singled home Isaac Collins in the bottom of the ninth and then won it in walkoff fashion when Jackson Chourio singled home the Manfred Man in the tenth. The Brewers have won four straight. The Dodgers have now been swept in back-to-back series and are losers of six straight. The L.A. offense has scored just five runs over their last 42 innings.

Phillies 13, Giants 0: San Francisco has not been a great place for the Phillies in recent years but they had a hell of a good time there on Wednesday afternoon. It would've been enough if Jesús Luzardo had merely tossed seven shutout innings but Philly left no margin for error with Bryce Harper going 4-for-6 with a homer and three doubles and Kyle Schwarber hitting a three-run jack. A seven-run eighth inning made this one comical. Justin Verlander didn't pitch terribly but his record is now 0-7.

Rays 7, Tigers 3: Close for a while but the Rays enjoyed a four-run sixth and a Junior Caminero homer in the seventh. The Tigers' five-game winning streak ceases to be.

Red Sox 10, Rockies 2: Another night, another thrashing of the Rockies by the Sox. Lucas Giolito turned in six scoreless innings while Jarren Duran, Wilyer Abreu, Carlos Navarez, and Romy Gonzalez all went deep. Duran's was a three-run job.

Reds 7, Marlins 2: Elly De La Cruz had a pair of RBI doubles while Noelvi Marte and Will Benson each homered. Andrew Abbott allowed just one while working into the eighth. Miami's 11-game road win streak ends.

Yankees 9, Mariners 6: Jazz Chisholm Jr. homered twice – a solo shot in the third and a two-run job in the fifth – and knocked in another on a grounder. Aaron Judge doubled in a couple. Cam Schlittler made his major league debut for the Yankees, going five and a third, allowing three runs, and striking out seven. His first strikeout was Cal Raleigh, so that probably felt pretty good.

Twins 4, Cubs 2: Ryan Jeffers and Carlos Correa had base run-scoring base hits in the first, Matt Wallner homered in the second, and Royce Lewis scored from third in the fourth inning. I'm too lazy to look to see what specifically happened on that play but per the box score it involved Wallner getting thrown out at second on steal attempt so I'm gonna guess "delayed double steal" or something like that.

Nationals 8, Cardinals 2: MacKenzie Gore struck out seven in six one-run innings while Nathaniel Lowe, Amed Rosario, and James Wood each homered. Lowe's was a three-run shot in the first. If they had known that the Cards would only score two the rest of the way they could've just stopped it then and gone out to an early dinner. Oh well.

Royals 4, Pirates 3: Sal Perez was the hero here, putting the Royals' first run on the board with an early solo homer and then, in the eighth, hitting a solo shot that broke a 3-3 tie to put Kansas City over. Jac Caglianone hit a homer that went 466 damn feet. The Royals sweep the series and take their fourth straight.

Guardians 4, Astros 2: Cup of Coffee subscriber and Friend of the Newsletter Don Wallick texted me this last night:

So Houston goes to LA and clobbers the Dodgers and then comes home to face Cleveland who had lost ten in a row. So of course Cleveland sweeps Houston. Baseball, man.

It blows my mind that anyone gambles on this game.

Ángel Martínez and José Ramírez homered in the first. Jonathan Rodríguez singled in two in the seventh. Starter Slade Cecconi, whose name sounds like something you'd see on a college freshman's fake ID, held the Astros scoreless for seven but ran out of gas and gave up two in the eighth. He's allowed no more than two runs in six of his last seven starts.

Angels 11, Rangers 8:  Mike Trout went deep twice, Travis d'Arnaud hit a solo shot, and Jorge Soler hit a tiebreaking two-run homer in the eighth inning to give the Angels the win in a game in which they came from behind three times. Last is what matters, of course. It took the Halos eight pitchers to get through this one but that's tonight's problem. Marcus Semien hit a two-run homer and drove in four in a losing effort for Texas.

Diamondbacks 8, Padres 2: A fifth inning grand slam from Geraldo Perdomo put this one out of reach. James McCann, Eugenio Suárez, and Corbin Carroll had homers as well. Carroll struck out four times before connecting. Never give up kids. Brandon Pfaadt went eight, allowing two.

Atlanta 9, Athletics 2: Ronald Acuña Jr. hit two solo homers – a leadoff shot to start the game and another in the fourth – to pace Atlanta, which had five homers in all. The others going deep: Drake Baldwin, who had a three-run blast, Austin Riley with a two-run shot, and Marcell Ozuna with a solo number. All of 'em came off of A's starter Mitch Spence, who Mark Kotsay made wear this one.

Mets vs. Orioles – POSTPONED:

🎵 Procession moves on, the shouting is over
Praise to the glory of loved ones now gone
Talking aloud as they sit round their tables
Scattering flowers washed down by the rain
Stood by the gate at the foot of the garden
Watching them pass like clouds in the sky
Try to cry out in the heat of the moment
Possessed by a fury that burns from inside 🎵

The Daily Briefing

The Roboump will be used in the All-Star Game

Yesterday it was announced that they'll be using the automatic ball-strike system – know by its acronym, ABS – during the All-Star Game.

The same process that was used during its testing phase this past spring training, and which has been part of the minor league game for a few seasons now, will be used in the All-Star Game next week. Specifically, each team will be given two challenges with the ability to retain them if successful. Only a pitcher, catcher or hitter can ask for a challenge and it has to happen almost immediately after the pitch. The player will tap his hat or helmet indicating to the umpire he wants to challenge. No one in the dugout or any of the other players on the field are allowed to assist.

MLB's competition committee will meet later this summer to determine if ABS will be instituted next season. I suspect it will be. Major League Baseball pretty clearly wants it and while player reviews have been mixed – and people who are familiar with MLB's camera/sensor technology have made some valid criticisms as to its accuracy – the opposition does not seem to be so great that the players or anyone else will put up a huge fuss.

The Yankees DFA DJ LeMahieu

A day after the Yankees moved Jazz Chisholm Jr. to second base and benched DJ LeMahieu they did what makes the most sense: DFA'd LeMahieu.

This despite the fact that LeMahieu is still owed nearly $22 million on the remainder of his six-year contract that runs through the end of next season. But sunk costs are sunk costs and LeMahieu really has no place on the roster. He was already becoming a defensive liability at second and at this point he has no chance of handling third or being a particularly useful utilityman. If he was hitting it may be another story but he's now into his third straight season of below average offensive production which, for a guy who doesn't bring great leather, is pretty much a death knell.

On the season LeMahieu is hitting .266/.338/.336 (91 OPS+). Over the past three years he's at .237/.315/.350 (85 OPS+). He turns 37 on Sunday.

It's possible that the Rockies, where LeMahieu played seven seasons in the early part of his career, or some other team could sign him for the hell of it, but it's also quite possible that this is the end of the line for him.

Trevor Williams to have elbow surgery

Nationals starter Trevor Williams has been diagnosed with a partial tear of his ulnar collateral ligament and will undergo surgery. It won't be full Tommy John but, rather, internal brace surgery. Either way he will miss the remainder of this season and most if not all of 2026 as well.

Williams last pitched on July 2 against Detroit in a game in which he was lit up for seven runs on nine hits in three innings. Overall he is 3-10 with a 6.21 ERA (65 ERA+) in 17 starts this season. He is in the first year of a two-year, $14 million deal after an excellent, if abbreviated, 2024 campaign in which he went 6-1 with a 2.03 ERA. Given his contract status one assumes he's going to push to at least make some appearances in late 2026 to show people he's healthy, but he obviously has a long way to go before considering that.

Tough break.

The Royals sign Dallas Keuchel

Last year, on July 18, I wrote the following:

Dallas Keuchel cleared waivers and elected free agency after being designated for assignment by the Brewers. I hadn’t seen the DFA happen, but I suppose I miss a lot of stuff. Not that it was hard to miss Keuchel’s tenure with Milwaukee. He made four starts for the Brewers, posting a 5.40 ERA while giving up 23 hits in 16.2 innings, striking out 11, and walking eight.

I’ve declared Keuchel’s career dead like three times already so I won’t do it again, but dudes, it’s probably dead now.

Shows you what I know. The Kansas City Royals signed him to a minor league deal yesterday.

Keuchel, 37, has not pitched anything approaching a full season in the bigs since 2021. He has not been effective in the bigs since an 11-game stint with the White Sox in 2020.

Keuchel will start at Triple-A Omaha and will earn a prorated $2 million salary if he reaches the big leagues. Then, after that doesn't pan out once again, I'll probably write something else snarky that itself will not pan out.

John Fisher finally closes a real estate deal

No, not one connected to the construction of his vaporware Las Vegas stadium. It was on a nearly $30 million house in an exclusive Las Vegas residential enclave. He purchased it via a straw buyer six months ago.

Cannot wait to see what he gets for it when he's forced to sell the Athletics and skulk out of town.

Joe Coleman: 1947-2025

Fifteen-year major leaguer and 1972 All-Star pitcher Joe Coleman has died. He was 78.

Coleman came up as an 18 year-old with the Washington Senators in 1965. In 1970, after six seasons in D.C., he was traded to Detroit in a deal which sent two-time Cy Young winner Denny McLain to Washington. The Tigers also got Aurelio Rodríguez, who would man the hot corner in Detroit for several years.

Coleman would become a major workhorse for managers Billy Martin and Ralph Houk, turning in four straight seasons of 280+ innings pitched and another 200-inning season in 1975. Coleman's performance began to decline near the end of his time in Detroit, after which he'd become a journeyman with the Cubs, A's, Blue Jays, Giants, and Pirates, mostly in a relief capacity. Following his playing career he'd coach in the Angels organization for several years before becoming the St. Louis Cardinals' pitching coach in the early 1990s under Joe Torre. He'd continuing coaching in both the majors and minors until about ten years ago.

Coleman was the second in a three-generation big league family, with his father Joe pitching for the Philadelphia Athletics, Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers between 1942 and 1955. Joe's son Casey Coleman pitched for the Cubs from 2010 through 2012 and for the Royals in 2014.

Joe Coleman was a player who I knew basically only from baseball cards. We 1970s Michigan kids always had a lot of 1970s Tigers cards so we always had a lot of Colemans. I used to marvel at the back of his and Mickey Lolich's cards which featured statlines that caused me to assume that EVERYONE tossed 280+ innings a year for years on-end. How little did I know that the 1970s were a very special place and a very special time for starting pitchers.

RIP Joe Coleman.

Other Stuff

J.D. Vance takes time from his vacation to espouse some unadorned Nazism

Vice President J.D. Vance was recently on vacation in San Diego. But it was at least a working vacation, as last Saturday he gave a keynote address at a dinner hosted by the MAGA-aligned Claremont Institute.

During his speech he said that “identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time." Vance went on to argue that instead of ascribing to American values, being a real American is far more about one's heritage. About having been descended from people who can trace their ancestry back to before the Civil War. He likely chose that particular point in time because, before the Civil War, birthright citizenship had not been enshrined in the Constitution.

Vance likewise adheres to the "heritage not values" definition of an American because it serves his racist and white nationalist ideology. After all, people from foreign countries could agree with American values, and then people like Vance might be forced to accept them. Vance further argued – like, he explicitly argued – that, under a values-based system Confederates in the Civil War and modern American-based hate groups might not be considered real Americans because they actively opposed and oppose concepts central to the Declaration of Independence such as all people being created equal. To be 100% clear here: Vance thinks that marginalizing Confederates and modern hate groups is a bad thing, because those people can trace their ancestry back here a long time and isn't that more important?

What Vance espoused during that speech was the textbook definition of "blood and soil nationalism." The notion that the arbiter of true citizenship should not be whatever legal regime happens to exist at the moment or a function of one's adherence to values and norms which demonstrate that a person is a member of a given society. Rather, it's all about who you are genetically speaking, where you live, and how long you have lived there. It's an ideology that was first called Blut und Boden, in the original German, under the Nazi belief that a racially defined national body – the blood of certain types of people – and the soil on which they live is what truly matters. This sort of distinction was, of course, a necessary precursor to the creation of a state which decided whose blood was pure enough to truly be German and which sorts of people could be said to be properly of the land. And we know what happened once they began making such distinctions.

"Blood and soil" was a key component of Nazi ideology. It is also a key component of J.D. Vance's ideology. This is no coincidence.

We are not, as a matter of law, allowed to have nice things

Earlier this week a U.S. federal appeals court struck down the FTC's “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required companies to allow consumers to cancel subscriptions and other services using the same method they used to sign up. The rule, which was aimed at combatting scammy and manipulative practices which made it extraordinarily difficult to cease doing business with companies, was wildly popular and much-desired by consumers. And now it's gone because, the court said, there were "fatal" procedural errors in its enactment.

I understand that procedures matter, but it's amazing to me how the courts, while scrutinizing agency rules that seek to protect everyday people from crass and obvious exploitation with brutal exactitude, claim to be powerless to stop the president and his cronies from shredding the Constitution, usurping the powers of the other two branches of government, and otherwise ignoring every law imaginable while enriching their crony benefactors and pursing a fascist agenda.

They can wrap that appalling dissonance up in whatever pre-textual legal reasoning they want to, but it's clear what's happening here. Money and right wing power are being served. Everyone else can fuck off.

A change of plans with the capybaras

Yesterday I talked about how it seemed perfectly rational to my wife and me to fly to London and then travel over three hours by train and by bus way the hell up beyond Norwich to go to a cafe where you can pet capybaras.

Then, less than an hour after posting the newsletter, one of Cup of Coffee's UK correspondents alerted me to the existence of Beale Wildlife Park, which features collections of small exotic animals, farm animals and birds amidst landscaped gardens and woodlands and things. And yes, there is a "Meet the Capybaras" experience available.

The best part: it's just west of Reading, which makes it only like a one-hour train ride from Paddington Station with a 10-15 minute bus ride tacked on. Which, in turn, makes it close to the Museum of English Rural Life, which is in Reading and which I've wanted to visit ever since I started following their absolutely adorable account on BlueSky.

So it's totally, totally reasonable for us to fly to UK again, yes?

Online media's traffic apocalypse

New York Magazine has a story about "media’s traffic apocalypse" in what news publishers are calling "the post-Google era." The upshot: with large social media platforms walling off their ecosystems, throttling outside links, and generally downgrading any sort of news content, and with Google making radical changes to its search algorithm to prominently feature AI summaries as opposed to actual search results, all of the traditional spigots for web traffic for online publishers are going dry:

“Search engines now deliver answers instead of links, while social platforms aim to keep users within their walled gardens,” a senior New Yorker editor explained. The social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, once a modest traffic generator that nevertheless functioned as a network for journalists and media organizations to share their stories and seed wider dissemination, has become virtually useless for media companies since owner Elon Musk throttled news links. “We don’t get shit from Twitter anymore,” said Tom Ley, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Defector. “You tweet out a link to an article and it just disappears.”

This is supremely bad news for sites with an ad-based or product recommendation-based revenue model, or for anyone else who relies on people finding them via search or socials to make money. But it's not quite as bad for everyone:

“The good news for any digital publisher is that the new game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct relationship with your core readers."

There were times in the first few years of this newsletter when I wished that I was able to reach millions of people and get tens of thousands of subscribers via old school Google-and-Twitter viral dynamics, the sort of which I got pretty good at manipulating in my NBC days. But I soon started noticing just how useless Twitter and Facebook were becoming for traffic, while having a paywall made Google fairly useless to me even before it went AI crazy. That didn't cause me too much agita, though, because I soon started feeling very comfortable talking specifically to all of you rather than generally to some larger, faceless number of people.

Which is to say: I feel pretty good about where I've ended up. I feel good about the fact that this newsletter is built on a solid and loyal core community. It may not be gigantic or fast-growing and it may not allow me to fill up a big media lane like I might've been able to a decade ago, but it's sustainable. And fulfilling. And friendly. And even comforting. And at this point in my life, with the way the world is spinning, I'm really damn happy about that.

Don't do it, Peter!

From the Associated Press:

Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species . . . On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa – which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall – with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh.

Normally when rich people with a lot of time on their hands announce some harebrained scheme I roll my eyes because those guys – the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world – are generally pretty full of shit and either fail spectacularly on their big swings or quietly back away after the press stops caring.

But Peter Jackson is another matter. He has taken a lot of big swings and he's always been successful when doing so. Which in the case of bringing back some extinct mega-bird is positively terrifying. Please, Peter: reconsider this! Or at least outsource it to someone less competent than you!

Superman

Because right wing culture warriors are incapable of allowing anything to exist outside of a culture war context, the worst people you know are now mad at the Superman movie which opens this weekend. They're mad, see, because the movie's director, James Gunn, gave an interview recently in which he said "Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places . . . for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

The right wing is outraged at this, of course, with all of the usual suspects accusing Gunn and DC of "going woke." Never mind the fact that Superman literally is an immigrant and many Superman storylines are explicitly about being a stranger in a strange land. Never mind the fact that Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were the sons of Jews who escaped to America to avoid the pogroms and who, in turn, experienced the antisemitism that often plagued immigrants, which makes it pretty damn clear that the story of Superman was informed by the immigrant experience. Indeed, Superman comics have explicitly commented on the immigrant experience for like 90 years now, so this cannot possibly be news to anyone.

Not that I expect that to sway Republicans. Reactionaries don't think, they just . . . react. Which is a shame, because there's a great deal in nearly a century of Superman stories for arch conservatives to love. Just take the first three Christopher Reeve Superman movies for example:

• The first one featured a scheme to nuke California as part of a real estate play;
• The second one centered on the desecration of the White House and the destruction of the American way of life by an evil whack job who constantly demands fealty from others; and
• The third one featured a bad guy billionaire fixated on financial domination via technology and the final boss of the movie was a some insane sentient, A.I. computer monster thing. The shit's relatable.

Of course Superman stopped all of those things from happening. No wonder Republicans hate him.

Have a great day everyone.