Cup of Coffee: July 16, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

This is the slowest day of the year as there was no baseball and not even a vaguely baseball-adjacent product like the Derby or whatever yesterday. But I'll squeeze as much blood out of this turnip as a I can.

The Daily Briefing

Astros trade Lance McCullers Jr. to Milwaukee

Yesterday the Houston Astros traded veteran righty Lance McCullers Jr. and left-handed reliever Colton Gordon, plus cash considerations, to the Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for outfield prospect Jadyn Fielder. And yes, Jadyn is the son of Prince Fielder and grandson of Cecil Fielder in case you weren't feeling old enough today.

The Brewers are reportedly absorbing somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million of the remaining money on McCullers' deal, with the Astros picking up the rest. It was a five-year, $85 million contract that expires at the end of this season and which is paying him $17 million this year so figure Houston is paying the other $5-ish or $6-ish million that's left.

McCullers has been out since April with right shoulder inflammation, and he didn't pitch well before he went down, but he got up to 77 pitches in his last rehab start, so he's not far from returning. He had a full no-trade clause in his deal and had 10-5 rights on top of that– ten years major league service time and five years with the same team – so the trade required his approval. Given that he's in his walk year and is unlikely to return to Houston next year it makes some sense that he'd want a chance to prove himself with a real contender in a different context down the stretch. The fact that the Brewers seem to possess magic pixie dust which turns good pitchers into excellent pitchers at much higher rates than other teams can manage had to have factored in his decision as well.

Gordon has spent almost all season in the minors, so figure he'll be bullpen depth for Milwaukee, maybe in the big league pen full-time, maybe on the Triple-A shuttle as he has options left. Fielder is 21. He went un-drafted in 2024 and signed with Milwaukee as a free agent, probably as something of a nod to his old man. He’s been in Low-A this year where he has shown very good plate patience but not a ton else. It's something to build on. And besides, the Astros mostly just wanted to save a couple million bucks of McCullers' salary, so anything Fielder does for the club will be gravy.

Yankees in talks to get private equity financing

From Bloomberg:

The New York Yankees are in advanced talks to raise nearly $3 billion dollars of financing from Apollo Global Management Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, as more institutional capital flows into professional sports. The Major League Baseball giant and US private capital firm's sports investing unit are discussing the terms of a package comprising mostly debt and also some equity, according to the people.

I'm sure someone smarter than me can explain why a team that basically prints money needs to go into debt to a private equity firm to the tune of somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion (some of it, but way less than half due to league ownership rules, will be Apollo taking an equity stake) but it sorta baffles me. But hey, if "buy, borrow, die" works for the billionaires with lots of paper wealth who don't like to pay taxes I suppose it can work for the Yankees too. And I suppose that having big debt service is a great excuse for not running high payrolls down the road. Hal Steinbrenner seems like he's wanted that sort of excuse for a long, long time.

Today in Baseball History

1897 — Chicago's Cap Anson becomes the first major leaguer to reach 3,000 hits when he singles off Baltimore’s George Blackburn. Knowing how Anson rolled, it probably really, really bothered him that he had to face a pitcher with the word "Black" in his name.

1902 — John McGraw is named manager of the New York Giants, a post he will hold for 30 years. Connie Mack was the all-time leader in terms of managerial tenure with one team, with 50 seasons. He gets a bit of an asterisk, though, because he owned the team so who was gonna fire him? McGraw was second, but knowing how he rolled he probably had a filing cabinet full of blackmail material and some hired goons on staff to ensure his position. Aaron Boone currently only has nine seasons at the helm of the Yankees, but given how Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman roll, he might break Mack's record one day regardless of how the Yankees actually perform. They just like the cut of his jib!

1909 — Ed Summers of the Detroit Tigers allows only seven hits and pitches all 18 innings of a 0-0 tie – the game was called due to darkness – with the Washington Senators. It's the longest scoreless game in AL history. Yet, somehow, it was still far more compelling than the 2026 All-Star Game.

1920 — Babe Ruth breaks his own season record of 29 homers with his 30th as the New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Browns, 5-2. Ruth would finish the season with 54. Just six years earlier Home Run Baker led the AL with nine home runs. Baker lived until 1963. I bet his friends gave him so much shit for his nickname over the last 40-45 years of his life. Pronouncing it sarcastically, making him funny t-shirts and stuff. It was probably hilarious. "Shut up, you guys. I didn't give myself that nickname. It was a different time!" "Whatever you say, Home Run. Bwahahaha!"

1933 — Red Lucas of the Cincinnati Reds pitches a 15-inning 1-0 win over Roy Parmelee and the New York Giants in the opener of a doubleheader. Lucas was originally signed by the Giants ten years before and played a season with Boston before joining Cincinnati. His signing there constitutes a Great Moment in Nominative Determinism.

1941 — Joe DiMaggio extends his hitting streak to 56 games with a 3-for-4 day as the New York Yankees beat Cleveland 10-3. Yeah, and then what happened?

1948 — After eight and a half years as Brooklyn's manager, Leo Durocher quits the Dodgers and takes the helm of their rival, the New York Giants. Knowing how Durocher rolled he probably had money on whatever the 1948 version of Kalshi was for the proposition "Durocher takes the helm of the arch rival Giants in midseason."

1970 — The Cincinnati Reds beat the Pirates 3-2 before 48,846 in the first game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. If you ever get access to old press accounts from the mid-60s through the early 70s, you find all kinds of glowing reviews of those then-new multipurpose stadiums. People always think stuff is cool when it's new and tend to crap on it later when something else new comes along.

1985 — Sparky Anderson beomes the first manager to lose an All-Star Game in both leagues. This All-Star Game was way better-remembered, however, as the one where Lou Whitaker left his uniform in his car at the Detroit airport. When a replacement uniform failed to arrive in time for the game he was forced to wear a replica from a stadium souvenir stand. The uniform had no number, so a clubbie wrote his number "1" on the back using a stencil and a magic marker. The makeshift jersey is now at the Smithsonian. At least until Trump has it thrown out because a Black player wore it which, in his mind, distorts American history somehow.

1996 — The Rockies beat the Giants 5-3. By doing so, they break a streak in which they had scored seven runs in 11 straight games. That was important. That meant something.

2006 — Chipper Jones hit a two-run homer in Atlanta’s 10-5 win at San Diego to give him an extra-base hit in 14 straight games. That tied a 79-year-old major league record held by Pittsburgh’s Paul Waner. Amazingly, none of those 14 games came against the Mets.

2006 — Mariano Rivera earns his 400th career save. Rivera joins Lee Smith, Trevor Hoffman, and John Franco in the 400-save club. Rivera would end up with 652 saves. Hoffman also made it to the 600-club before he retired. There are currently eight closers in the 400-save club. Aroldis Chapman will make it there soon. No one else is even close.

2009 — Philadelphia Phillies slugger Ryan Howard becomes the fastest player in major league history to reach 200 career home runs, breaking the record previously held by Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner. Howard reached 200 homers in his 658th game. Kiner hit No. 200 in his 706th game. That was basically Howard's peak, however, and he would begin a precipitous decline in production the following season. That April he would sign a five-year $125 million contract extension that was, for a good while at least, considered one of the worst deals in baseball history.

Also on July 16 in history:

• 622 – The Hijrah of Muhammad begins, marking the beginning of the Islamic calendar. It was kind of a big fucking deal.
• 1377 – King Richard II of England is crowned. It didn't take. I'd write an alternate history book about what might've happened if his father, The Black Prince, had not died when he did, but (a) it'd be pretty superficial because I mostly just read popular histories about that kind of stuff; and (b) absolutely no one would read it because the only people who give a shit could probably do a much better job of it than me. I do believe, however, that world history would've changed pretty radically if The Black Prince had lived and his useless-ass son doesn't become king. There would've been no usurpation by Henry IV and Henry V would not have become king, completely changing the complexion of the Hundred Years War, probably eliminated Joan of Arc from the history books, and either greatly forestalling the War of Roses or heading them off altogether. From there you get no Henry VII and, if there even is an English Reformation, it's crazy different. In the final chapter I'd explain how that would've allowed England to win the 2026 World Cup but, again, y'all ain't ready for that right now.
• 1769 – Father Junípero Serra founds California's Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Go Padres.
• 1882 – Mary Todd Lincoln dies. The best thing about her was that she inspired Cole Escola's play "Oh Mary," which caused me to laugh harder than almost anything I've ever seen.
• 1925 – Dr. Frank Jobe is born (he wasn't a doctor yet, though). He's the dude who first performed Tommy John surgery.
• 1945 – The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates an A-bomb in the Trinity Test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. I assume we would've found a way to become Death, the destroyer of worlds without that, but this certainly sped things along.
• 1951 – J. D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye, which will go on to serve as an inspiration to mid-intellect jerks and dipshits the world over.
• 1969 – The Apollo 11 lunar landing mission is launched. It's one big step on the way to one small step for a man which was one giant leap for Mankind.

So July 16 an eventful day I'd say.

Sometimes I think I'd have fun doing nothing except riffing on This Day in History stuff. If Rob Manfred manages to kill baseball, maybe I will.

Other Stuff

Kill the prediction markets with fire

Apropos of the Leo Durocher item up in This Day in Baseball History, Phil Lewis of the Huffington Post shared this photo he took yesterday in Union Station in Washington D.C.:

So the message here, I guess anyway, is that if Kalshi existed in 1947 people would've been able to bet on Jackie Robinson integrating the major leagues? And that that would've been a cool, better thing? I say "I guess anyway" because I'm not sure what else it could be saying. Though the "250 Years of American Predictions" on the bottom right corner sorta muddles things. Maybe they're saying "people have always been predicting things so Kalshi is just part of a grand tradition?" I'm not sure!

But let's assume that Kalshi is trying to paint a picture of what things would've been like if it did exist in 1947 and people could bet on stuff like Jackie Robinson integrating baseball. In the real world, Robinson had already integrated the minor leagues, with Montreal, the year before. Which means that by 1946, at the very latest, just about everyone with a half-informed opinion knew that he was bound for the majors the following year. Yet, in Kalshi's imagination, only 31% of Kalshi users were betting on MLB integration in 1947? Brilliant, dudes. Brilliant.

I don't know. I'm just hoping that this is one of those parody ads that protesters and activists use to make companies look bad. Because if someone at Kalshi actually thought this was the right message and tone for advertising its business, they're even more toxic than I already thought. Which is a level of toxicity that I figured would be hard to top.

It's not coming home

As anyone who cares knows by now, it's not coming home. Argentina beat England 1-2 in the World Cup semifinal yesterday afternoon.

It turns out that you can't go up 1-0 and play prevent defense for the next half hour and expect good things to happen. Especially against an Argentina team which, in basically every game it's played in this tournament, farted around for 70 minutes before turning on the afterburners. And of course they did so once again here. England got away with super conservative lead-protection strategies against Mexico because Mexico doesn't have the talent Argentina has. But you'll never pull that off against a truly elite side. I feel like that's something England manager Thomas Tuchel should've been aware of but I guess not.

Any comment, Tommy boy?

My brother in Christ: my wife and I are about as casual as you can be when it comes to soccer fandom and, from the moment England scored, we were both screaming that you can't stop attacking and just sit back and hope to run out the clock like you did yesterday. That there was copious evidence that a 1-0 lead with nearly a half to go was not enough to win that match and never would be. Besides, the best way to defend a 1-0 lead is to make it a 2-0 lead anyway.

My social media feeds, which are full of genuine soccer-knowers, was saying the same thing. And I'm guessing that every single Englishman from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Lizard Point and all around the world for that matter was saying the same damn thing. They were saying it as your players continued to allow Messi to have the ball in open field because you had them playing a super deep and narrow defensive line. They were saying it as Argentina took shot after shot on Jordan Pickford after you ordered your side to park the damn bus. England choked this one away, yet, but it was not by their execution. It was because of the game plan, which would not have been successful under almost any circumstances. And that was all you, my man.

Oh well, go Spain. I think they will dismantle Argentina because they are the better, deeper team anyway, but they're also way better coached (and they'd have probably dismantled England too, so it probably doesn't matter). I want them to win because I enjoyed my vacation in Madrid last year and that's as good a reason as any.

Oh, and it's definitely coming home in 2030. Of this I am absolutely certain.

Have a great day everyone.