Cup of Coffee: July 3, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And That Happened

Because of Tuesday's three rainouts and one suspended game there were nineteen – nineteen! – friggin' ballgames yesterday. I love my job and stuff, if one can even call it a job, but recapping midweek 15-game nights is the hardest parts of it, as it requires either late night or really early morning writing. Which, fine, that's the gig and I've been doing it for more than 17 years now, but 19 games is . . . a lot. Which is to say: forgive me in advance if today's recaps either suck or if they're simply unhinged or whatever.

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Rays 6, Athletics 5: Rays pitchers struck out 17 A's batters to help Tampa Bay avoid being swept. Jake Mangum hit an inside-the-park homer thanks to a misjudged jump at the wall and some poor backup defense in the outfield. Josh Lowe and Yandy Díaz also homered. Díaz, by the way, hit .400/.469/.610 with five home runs and 13 RBI in 100 at-bats the month of June so he's not letting arbitrary time-measurement devices like calendars slow his roll. The Rays built up a 6-2 lead by the ninth when their pen poured a bunch of kerosene everywhere, but they somehow managed to hold Sacramento to three runs, thus escaping with the victory.

Pirates 5, Cardinals 0: Mitch Keller pitched seven shutout innings while Tommy Pham had two RBI singles and Isiah Kiner-Falefa hit a two-run single of his own in Pittsburgh's four-run seventh. The Pirates won all three games of this series by shutout. The Cardinals have either been shut out or have, alternatively, shut out their opponent, in seven of their last eight games. This is important. This means something.

Brewers 7, Mets 2; Mets 7, Brewers 3: Freddy Peralta went six, allowing two, but stood to be the loser until Brice Turang tied it up in the sixth with an RBI double. Three batters later Joey Ortiz hit a grand slam to send the Mets to their fourth loss in a row. In the nightcap, young fireballer Jacob Misiorowski showed us that stuff ain't shit unless you got location and deception and, well, you gotta pitch, not just throw. Because while he was certainly lighting up the radar gun he wasn't fooling anyone, giving up five runs on five hits – two of 'em dingers – in three and two-thirds. Brandon Nimmo, who batted leadoff, hit a second inning grand slam. Francisco Lindor, dropped from the leadoff spot to second, hit a solo shot. Lindor would later single and double in a couple of more. All on the day he was named the starting shortstop in the All-Star Game.

Red Sox 5, Reds 3; Reds 8, Red Sox 4: The first end of this was the continuation of Tuesday's suspended game, which Boston led 2-1 at the time the rains came. A post-resumption two-run homer from Spencer Steer put Cincinnati in the lead but the Sox tied it back up in the sixth and got two more in the eighth to win it going away. Brayan Bello, who is not accustomed to relief work but who was functionally the starter due to the suspended game, went five, allowing two runs while picking up the win. In the game actually scheduled for yesterday Christian Encarnacion-Strand hit a grand slam in the seventh inning which turned a 3-0 Red Sox lead into a 4-3 Reds lead. They got one more in the seventh and three more in the eighth to earn the split. Well, since these games are, per the record book, from two different days I suppose "split" isn't accurate, but no one is reading this recap anymore so I'll move on.

Padres 6, Phillies 4; Phillies 5, Padres 1: The age-old observation: if two teams split a doubleheader, should they have even bothered to get out of bed that day? The Padres got not one, not two, bit three bases-loaded walks in the first one. Two were issued by Mick Abel in the second and the third came from Max Lazar in the fourth. They also got a three-run double from Manny Machado in the second.  Nick Pivetta allowed one run and struck out six in seven innings after which the Phillies rallied but not enough. In the nightcap Christopher Sanchez allowed one over seven while Max Kepler and Brandon Marsh homered, Alec Bohm tripled one in, and Nick Castellanos singled in a run.

Tigers 11, Nationals 2; Nationals 9, Tigers 4: Riley Greene went OFF in the first game, hitting two three-run homers. Jake Rogers hit a three-run blast of his own while Spencer Torkelson hit a solo shot and Trey Sweeney hit a sac fly. Detroit went with a bullpen game in the first one and the bullpen did just fine. Things turned around for Washington in the nightcap, with Nathaniel Lowe driving in four with a bases-loaded triple and an RBI single and Josh Bell going 3-for-4 with three driven in. However the play of the game, though it really didn't have any bearing on the outcome, was this Jacob Young robbery of Riley Greene in which he went full-on Spider-Man:

That's like the fourth or fifth big-time catch I remember seeing from Young in the past several weeks.

Atlanta 8, Angels 3: There were a lotta grand slams yesterday, eh? Here Matt Olson had one. That came in the same inning as Sean Murphy's three-run homer. Big inning. Jurickson Profar, playing in his first game since coming off of his PED suspension, hit a solo shot in the seventh.

Twins 2, Marlins 1: Miami's eight-game winning streak came to an end thanks to Simeon Woods Richardson and five relievers scattered one run on eight hits. Brooks Lee hit a sac fly and Carlos Correa singled one in.

Blue Jays 11, Yankees 9: This was a wild one. The Jays took an 8-0 lead by the third, but New York clawed back to make it 9-7 Toronto by the end of seven. In the eighth Ben Rice walked and Aaron Judge hit one all the goddamn way to Kensington Market to tie things up. Yes, I realize the game was in a dome, give me credit for looking at a Toronto map. Anyway, despite blowing that lead the Jays persevered, with George Springer scoring the go-ahead run on a Devin Williams wild pitch in the bottom half. Addison Barger would single in a run later that inning for insurance. With the win the Blue Jays are now tied with the Yankees for first place. The Rays are a half game behind.

Rangers 6, Orioles 0: Nate Eovaldi tossed five shutout innings, Jacob Webb put in one more, and then Dane Dunning closed things out with a three-inning save. Dunning has always enjoyed supporting roles. That's probably because the closest he ever came to true stardom was when he auditioned for the role of Boyd Copeland in 1951's "Come Fill the Cup," a part which he lost to Gig Young. Young went on to be nominated for an Oscar that year and The Dane has always felt like he owns a tiny piece of that. Marcus Semien and Corey Seager homered. The Orioles get shut out for the ninth time this season. That's one more than they suffered in all of 2024. The season's only half over.

Cubs 5, Guardians 4:  Pete Crow-Armstrong had two hits and two RBI Seiya Suzuki added two hits and three RBI. As Chicago takes its second in a row. They'll go for the sweep tonight. The Guardians have lost six in a row.

Astros 5, Rockies 3: Jose Altuve hit a go-ahead two-run single in the sixth. That hit, his second of the night, gave him 2,315th career hits, which moves him past Jeff Bagwell on the team's all-time list. Craig Biggio is way out in front with 3,060. Houston has won three in a row and 16 of 21 and has won 12 straight series.  

Mariners 3, Royals 2: Randy Arozarena went 2-for-3 with a homer and a sac fly and Julio Rodríguez hit a go-ahead RBI single in the seventh. Arozarena has homered in three straight games, in fact. Seattle earns no worse than a split of their four-game set, which concludes tonight.

Giants 6, Diamondbacks 5: The Giants led 5-3 heading into the bottom of the ninth but the Dbacks picked up before Ketel Marte's two-run homer forced extras. In the tent the Giants got an infield single that moved the Manfred Man over before Patrick Bailey sac flied him home. San Francisco snaps a four-game losing streak.

Dodgers 5, White Sox 4: The White Sox had a 4-2 lead heading into the bottom of the ninth but the Dodgers rallied, loading the bases with the first three batters who came to the plate. Shohei Ohtani then grounded into a fielder's choice, scoring L.A.'s fourth run, Mookie Betts hit a game-tying sac fly, and then Freddie Freeman hit a two-out single to plate Ohtani and to give the Dodgers the walkoff win. Earlier Clayton Kershaw, who wasn't especially good yesterday, struck out three batters to bring him to an even 3,000 Ks for his career. He's just the 20th pitcher in MLB history to reach that milestone. Bad news for the Dodgers, though: Max Muncy was injured and left the game after tagging out Michael A. Taylor as Taylor attempted to steal third base. The team said Muncy had left knee pain. He had to be helped off the field and he'll have an MRI today.

The Daily Briefing

"Debacle in the Desert"

The Guardian has an absolutely damning story about John Fisher and his poorly thought-out plan to move the Athletics to Las Vegas.

The short version: despite the recent eyewash groundbreaking of the alleged new stadium on the Strip, construction is nowhere near imminent. Indeed, the stadium is nothing more than vaporware at this point. Fisher still hasn't spent enough money on the project to unlock the public funds it's been allocated. Funds that were approved over two years ago now.

Meanwhile, construction costs have soared – Fisher admitted this past weekend that the price tag is now over $2 billion – and he doesn't yet have anywhere near $1 billion in funds for the project. He's trying to hastily sell off his MLS team for some quick cash, but that won't cut it. His personal fortune is estimated to be $3 billion and while, yes, that's a lot of money, is not the sort of fortune from which one can simply write over a billion dollars in checks without risking personal and professional ruin. You start doing stuff like that and things snowball. Loans are called, Wall Street loses confidence in you, and your company – in Fisher's case The Gap – becomes prey.

Which is to say: Fisher is fucked and the odds that this stadium gets built are approaching nil. At least while Fisher still owns the club. And if he doesn't own the club – if he sells to some white knight who fixes everything – it'll still be a massive humiliation for him and for Rob Manfred, who held a shovel at that bogus groundbreaking and who has personally vouched for this relocation and stadium deal for years now. If Manfred understood that he is the commissioner of baseball and that he's thus supposed to care about the long-term health and vitality of the sport, he never would've approved this debacle. Manfred, however, views his job as being the lackey of the owners and he will do as he has always done, which whatever they want regardless of the consequences for the sport at large.

Read for the schadenfreude. Also read for lots of good quotes from Friends of the Newsletter J.C. Bradbury and Neil DeMause. Finally, read for great passages such as this one:

"Why would Fisher leave nearly a billion dollars for a park on a 55-acre plot, in a top-10 television market in love with its ballclub, for nine acres and a minuscule market with fans who don’t know their A’s from their elbow?"

Brutal.

All-Star Game starters announced

The voting that no one cares about anywhere near as much as we used to care about it back when it was actually done on paper ballots is over and the All-Star Game starters have been announced. They are:

AMERICAN LEAGUE

• C: Cal Raleigh, Mariners
• 1B: Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Blue Jays
• 2B: Gleyber Torres, Tigers
• 3B: José Ramírez, Guardians
• SS: Jacob Wilson, Athletics
• OF: Aaron Judge, Yankees
• OF: Riley Greene, Tigers
• OF: Javier Báez, Tigers
• DH: Ryan O'Hearn, Orioles

NATIONAL LEAGUE

• C: Will Smith, Dodgers
• 1B: Freddie Freeman, Dodgers
• 2B: Ketel Marte, Diamondbacks
• 3B: Manny Machado, Padres
• SS: Francisco Lindor, Mets
• OF: Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta
• OF: Pete Crow-Armstrong, Cubs
• OF: Kyle Tucker, Cubs
• DH: Shohei Ohtani, Dodgers

The pitchers and reserves for both squads will be determined through a combination player ballot and selections made by the Commissioner’s Office. They will be announced this coming Sunday at 5PM Eastern on ESPN.

May the odds be ever in their favour or something.

Spencer Schwellenbach has a fractured elbow

The Atlanta Baseball Club got some pretty bad news yesterday: starter Spencer Schwellenbach was placed on the IL with a fractured right elbow. And yes, that is the one with which he pitches. Per Mark Bowman of MLB dot com, Schwellenbach felt soreness after his last outing this past Saturday and a subsequent X-ray confirmed the bad news.

After Chris Sale hit the IL Schwellenbach was Atlanta's best starter, having gone 7-4 with a 3.09 ERA (133 ERA+) in 17 starts. Now he'll be shut down for four weeks and reassessed. If all is fine and he gets through ramp-up OK he could be back with the big league club by September. Though let's be honest: at this point Atlanta is in far greater danger of being overtaken by the Nationals and falling into last place than challenging for the postseason, which means that Schwellenbach might just get the rest of the year off out of an abundance of caution.

Atlanta DFAs Alex Verdugo

Sticking with the Atlanta Baseball Club: they designated outfielder Alex Verdugo for assignment yesterday. They did so to clear a roster spot, and a position, for the return of Jurickson Profar, whose 80-game PED suspension ended yesterday. Verdugo hit an ugly .239/.296/.289 (65 OPS+) in 56 games with Atlanta.

For whatever reason, Verdugo got a lot of good press in both New York and Atlanta to the effect of him being a great a clubhouse guy who "goes about his business the right way" and all of that. But none of that ever seems to account for the fact that "playing baseball well" is Verdugo's primary business and he never seems to get that part of the job done.

Which is to say: don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya, Alex.

Other Stuff

Abrego Garcia was tortured

Yesterday Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, filed a complaint against Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Marco Rubio. In it he alleges that he was beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to soil himself, and was psychologically tortured during the nearly three months he spent in Salvadoran custody.

If even a fraction of what Garcia alleges is true, and there is good reason to believe that it is true, there should be Nuremberg-style trials of multiple high-ranking members of the United States government who are responsible for putting these horrors into effect.

Your timing could not be worse, NPR

Here's some stuff no one who isn't a devotee to the fascist regime wants to see in the news this week, that's for damn sure:

I suspect the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence will be celebrated with a sparsely-attended jingoistic schlock-fest on the National Mall featuring Kid Rock, the decaying corpse that is Lee Greenwood, and whatever pathetic bunch of sad sacks Mike Love can gather together and call "The Beach Boys." Meanwhile, as they warble through their sets, federal stormtroopers and their SS overlords will continue doing their level best to recreate the conditions which led to each and every grievance in the Declaration to begin with.

I don't know what this time next year will hold for me personally, but I think I'm gonna ask Allison to transfer as many credit card points as she can towards a flight that takes us far away from here that week.

Indiana Jones and the Ever-Exploitable IP

Disney Parks get a lot of good press for their sustainability efforts. Indeed, Disneyland – the company's smallest theme park – diverts over 30 million pounds of materials from landfill into reusables annually. That's pretty impressive!

Other parts of that company like to recycle too, but it's not as good when they do it:

It looks like Indiana Jones might actually be headed for the reboot treatment. According to a recent report from DisInsider, Disney and Lucasfilm are considering a full relaunch of the iconic adventure franchise. While nothing has been officially announced, The report said, "“Lucasfilm is letting the franchise rest for a bit before they do a full reboot of the franchise. I would expect the studio to announce something next year at the D23 Expo because even though the last film tanked at the box office, Indiana Jones is still an iconic IP and Disney/Lucasfilm do not want to waste that.”

I just started a new book. It's called The Future Was Now. It's about the late 70s/early 80s boom in sci-fi/fantasy movies in the wake of "Star Wars." It primarily focuses on the summer of 1982, when eight sci-fi/action/effects-heavy films were released within six weeks of one another: "E.T.," "Tron," "Star Trek: Wrath of Khan," "Conan the Barbarian," "Blade Runner," "Poltergeist," "The Thing," and "Mad Max: The Road Warrior." I'm just a couple of chapters in, but it has all kinds of fun, dishy studio/development stories, which is what I mostly want from my Hollywood books. I like to learn how the sausage got made.

Early in the book, as it bridges the gap between "Star Wars" and "E.T.", it talks about how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg made "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's a pretty well-known story to people who follow this kind of thing but it's important to note that, for the most part, that era of sci-fi/adventure movies were not yet super intellectual property-driven. Yes, Lucas' ideas for both "Star Wars" and "Raiders" were based on old Flash Gordon and B-movie adventure serials of his childhood, so they weren't sui generis, but it wasn't like he was simply repackaging well-worn IP. There was a creative idea there first, before all of the sequels and all of the merchandising. A desire to tell certain kinds of stories that had not been told before. At least not in any sort of polished and high-budget way. There's a lot to be said about both Lucas and Spielberg, and a lot to criticize them for, but when they were making their names they weren't starting with some known commodity and trying to figure out how to exploit it. They were simply making movies. Telling stories they felt needed to be told.

These days the tail always wags the dog. To be sure, it's possible for the IP-exploitation approach to yield genuinely good and creative cinema sometimes – the first several years of adapting Marvel comics to the screen were both financially and creatively successful and the inventive adaptation of various graphic novels and a handful of other properties has worked here and there – but the exercise is overwhelmingly cynical and leads to mostly crap films. Especially in the case of Disney, whose recent assembly line production of soulless live action versions of their animated features may be the emptiest and most craven example of IP exploitation ever seen in Hollywood. They make absolutely no secret of the fact that they're just extending their brands without even a pretense of an original, creative idea.

Which brings us back to Indiana Jones.

The first Indy movie was an astonishingly original breath of fresh air. The second was a creative misstep, but the third more than made up for it. And, it's worth noting, it literally ended with our hero and his pals riding off into the sunset, which could have, and should have, been the end of it. But after not just one but two misguided failures born of Disney's desire to exploit the old Indiana Jones brand several years later, the company has learned nothing and will apparently try to do it again. Not because a creative person has a good idea, but because Indiana Jones™ is inventory sitting on a shelf and if you don't move product it spoils. How utterly pathetic.

Not that I'm above making a pitch for a new Indiana Jones movie.

Here's the deal: following a spiritual awakening while working in the field, Dr. Jones --played by whoever; I don't care and we, James Bond-style, never acknowledge the actor change – realizes that his life's work is theft, even if he has long justified it by believing that western museums were appropriate repositories for antiquities. He vows then and there to repatriate artifacts to their places of origin, infiltrating major museums like a spy and then swashbuckling his way into Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and aboriginal lands to return various goods without being caught or exposed as the artifact thief.

Or maybe everyone learns it's him doing it and he keeps doing it anyway, like he's Batman or something. It doesn't matter, because as was the case with all of the original Indy films, the return of the items is just the MacGuffin for setting off chases and fights and other bits of high adventure. And since I think it'd be best to set these, like the originals, in the 1930s, when a repatriation mindset was utterly unheard of among western countries, Jones can still punch out Nazis. He can also punch out British, French, and American agents trying to stop him as well. I mean, he's working outside the law here, so he'd have to from time to time. These movies would practically write themselves and there is basically no limit to the stories you could tell in this mode.

Today's newsletter has no paywall, so if any of you know someone at Disney who wants to give me a big wad of money for this idea, please forward it on. Assuming I can forge a deal I'll use the proceeds to make my Truck Day film, which remains my passion project.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

How many hot dogs would it take to kill you?

Apropos of yesterday's discussion in the comments this pop science article from a couple of years ago with the headline, "How many hot dogs would it take to kill you?" may be of interest to some of you:

In a 2020 study, James Smoliga, a physiologist from High Point University in North Carolina, crunched the records of 152 Nathan’s competitors to see the max number of hot dogs a person could eat per minute for 10 minutes, which is generally how long the contest runs.

He found that, based on the mass and caloric value of a regular hot dog, plus the stretchiness of the human gut, an adult can handle seven to eight franks and buns tops every 60 seconds. If they hold that pace over the 10-minute span, they can mow through 70 to 80 hot dogs—which, if you’re counting, comes out to around 20,000 calories. After that, the body stops digesting food and starts to shut down.

The article warns, however, that the 70-80 number is an outer edge situation given that the test subjects, such as they are, are literal competitive eaters who do actually train for that annual hot dog eating contest in Brooklyn. So in my expert opinion all y'all should probably stop at 50 or 60 hot dogs in one sitting to be on the safe side.

Never say I didn't give you good advice.

Bonus points for whoever can tell me who the singer of this song is. And no, it's not "Corky Jones."

Have a great day everyone.