Cup of Coffee: June 18, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

The Twins and Rangers got a weird day off in the middle of a midweek series yesterday because of a World Cup match at Jerry World in Arlington. Maybe things would be different if they didn't play in a transit-free suburb, but that's just kinda how exurban Texas rolls.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 9, Reds 1: Nolan McLean was on it, going seven while allowing just three hits and a single unearned run. New York rattled off 15 hits, scoring seven of their runs in one-at-a-time fashion and getting a two-run double from A.J. Ewing. Juan Soto and Mark Vientos also knocked in a pair a piece. No homers in this one. The Mets avoid being swept.

Giants 7, Atlanta 2; Giants 7, Atlanta 5: They resumed the suspended game from Tuesday night yesterday afternoon. It's worth noting that before it was suspended Drake Baldwin hit a 473-foot homer, which is the longest from anyone in 2026. San Francisco had already taken a 3-2 lead before the rains came and nothing changed after yesterday's resumption except for the Giants adding four more runs. Three of them came on solo homers from Rafael Devers, Jung Hoo Lee, and Willy Adames.

Adames homered again in the game that was actually scheduled for yesterday, as did Luis Arráez and Bryce Eldridge, all of whom went deep in the first two innings as San Francisco built up a 5-0 lead by that point. Arráez singled home two more runs for some insurance in the ninth and that policy was good to have given that Atlanta mounted a late rally.

Royals 6, Nationals 2: Luinder Avila took a shutout into the sixth and ended up allowing just one run while Carter Jensen, John Rave, Lane Thomas and Michael Massey each hit solo homers. Rave also tripled and scored on a squeeze bunt. That's exciting, but what do you expect from a guy named Rave? The Royals avoid a three-game sweep.

Marlins 12, Phillies 4: Kyle Stowers homered twice and drove in five and Owen Cassie, Joe Mack, and Jakob Marsee also went deep. Liam Hicks and Xavier Edwards added RBI singles and Esteury Ruiz doubled twice and scored as part of Miami's 13-hit attack. Phillies starter Kyle Painter allowed six runs in two innings of work and saw his ERA shoot up to 7.06. He was optioned to Triple-A Lehigh Valley after the game, which is probably for the best. Kid needs to figure things out. Miami avoids the sweep.

Astros 4, Tigers 2: Shortstop Jeremy Peña homered and knocked in two while starter Peter Lambert allowed just one run on two hits over seven innings of work. Isaac Paredes hit an RBI double and Yordan Alvarez extended his on-base streak to 24 games by knocking in Christian Vázquez on a double. Houston takes two of three.

Padres 6, Cardinals 1: Jackson Merrill hit a two-run homer in the top of the ninth but San Diego already had a 4-1 lead by then so it wasn't super important. Fernando Tatis Jr.'s two RBI – on a double in the sixth and a single in the ninth – were a bit more plot-relevant, as was Manny Machado's first inning sac fly and Xander Bogaerts' fourth inning RBI single. The Dads avoid a sweep.

Dodgers 5, Rays 4: Shohei Ohtani was cruising until the fifth when he gave up four runs but his offense bailed him out when Kyle Tucker drew a bases-loaded walk in the bottom of the fifth to pull the Dodgers to within one and Freddie Freeman hit a two-run homer in the sixth which made Ohtani a winner on the day. At least in the box score. It was rough for him otherwise as a blister he'd been dealing with of late got bloodied, forcing him out of the game after six. The Dodgers sweep the three-game series.

Diamondbacks 8, Angels 1: Tommy Troy tripled in a run in the second and singled one in the third. In between those two at bats Corbin Carroll hit a grand slam, so this one wasn't all that competitive. Ketel Marte doubled in two more in the fifth. That was plenty of run support for Eduardo Rodríguez, who went seven, allowed nothing but a first inning Zach Neto homer and picked up his 100th career win. Arizona takes two of three.

Blue Jays 3, Red Sox 0: This was a seven-pitcher, seven-hit shutout for Toronto. Very effective even if I find such games to be aesthetic nightmares. I like to feel as though I'm going on a little journey with the starting pitchers. Like they're the main characters in a story I'm reading. Guys with beginning, middle, and ending arcs. A bullpen game is hard to get invested in because there's no time to get to known the characters. Whatever. I've ranted about that plenty of times and it's probably pointless to continue to do so. Andrés Giménez and Vlad Guerrero Jr. each singled in a run and Guerrero grounded out to score another. The Jays go for the sweep this afternoon.

Yankees 10, White Sox 5: A second straight night of double-digit scoring for the Bombers. Cody Bellinger hit a three-run shot in the first, Paul Goldschmidt hit a three-run homer in the fifth, and Jazz Chisholm Jr. homered in the seventh. Colson Montgomery homered twice and drove in four in a losing cause. The Yankees have won four in a row and have opened up a three and a half game lead over the Rays.

Brewers 9, Guardians 4: Milwaukee jumped all over Guardians starter Gavin Williams, tagging him for five runs in the first two innings and a couple more in the fourth. Christian Yelich and Jackson Chourio homered. Chourio has hit six homers in his last seven games. Brewers rookie Cooper Pratt got played in his second big league game and picked up his first hit and scored his first run. It wasn't all great: Milwaukee starter Brandon Sproat left with a right hamstring cramp later in the fourth inning, so that's no fun.

Cubs 8, Rockies 6: A seven-run second inning decided things here. Every Cubs hitter reached base at least once. Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, Matt Shaw and Carson Kelly had a pair of hits.

Orioles 5, Mariners 3:  Kyle Bradish struck out 12 while pitching one-run ball for seven and a third, Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday homered, and Leody Taveras tripled in a run. The O's snap a three-game skid. rubber match is this afternoon.

Pirates 12, Athletics 4:  Ryan O'Hearn had a big night, homering, doubling, singling, and driving in six. Marcell Ozuna also went deep as part of the Pirate' 16-hit attack. This is the seventh time they've scored at least 10 runs in a game this season. That's how many times they did it in the entire 2025 season.

England 4, Croatia 2: Yeah, I'm in the bag for England for this World Cup. Would you expect anything else from me? I know it won't end well. I also know that, should they win, absolutely no one who isn't either (a) English themselves; or (b) mentally ill about that country like I am will even remotely care. But that's just how it goes sometimes.

The Daily Briefing

Isaac lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.

Quite a scene in Nats park yesterday afternoon after Isaac Collins was left on second base at the end of an inning:

I bet he just wanted to stay there and look up at the early summer sky. Who wouldn't?

They're changing the Home Run Derby again

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported last night that they're altering the Home Run Derby format, changing it from a timed event to a swing-based format.

Drellich outlines that the revised format, which is basically what was used before 2015, in which hitters get 20 swings in the first round and 15 swings for each of the semifinal and final rounds. Hitters get to continue on their final swing until they fail to homer. Ties would be broken by whoever hit a longer home run. In the second and third rounds, a tie would be broken by three extra swings each.

No one from either the league or the union commented, so no justification was given for it. I'm assuming, however, that the players didn't much care for the pace that came with the clock, as they always look completely gassed by the end of each go. I'm sure someone will talk about it soon, but that's my guess.

The Giants' bigot pitchers seem to regret getting the attention they sought

Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, and Sam Hentges, the four San Francisco Giants pitchers who decided that communicating their homophobia in order to get attention on Pride night was a good idea, seem to regret all of the attention they've gotten. That's what came through loud and clear in an interview they gave to the California Post yesterday.

“At the end of the day, I just want this to be done and over with. We’re here to play baseball. This is going on almost a week now. Just play ball, that’s all I want to do.”

That was JT Brubaker. The others, while saying they'd do it again if they had the chance, also seem to be taken aback that their anti-gay protest mounted during a team-sponsored pro-gay promotion in the most gay-friendly city in America caused them to receive negative attention. Which speaks to the entitlement and the disregard for the feelings of others people who roll like they do so very often possess.

Cry me a river. You made your bed, fellas. And hey, you have strong and influential allies on your side:

There were no fines. But I am sure Major League Baseball regrets making such a powerful enemy.

Wenceel Pérez's freak injury

Detroit Tigers outfielder Wenceel Pérez was injured in a freak accident on Tuesday. Not during the Tigers game against the Astros, but after it. How? He was hit in the face by a resistance band in the training room. A.J. Hinch explained:

"He was working with a therapy band, and it snapped off the hook where it was connected and hit him just below the left eye. We have a battery of tests to check out his face, his eye. We're pretty concerned about it."

The Tigers also had to IL Gleyber Torres, but that's just because of a boring old oblique strain. Pérez "wins" the award for most creative injury. Not that it's super funny or anything. He didn't even come to the ballpark yesterday afternoon, so he's probably not doing well at all. Here's hoping it's not too serious.

Max Scherzer is hurt again

The Toronto Blue Jays placed the three-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer on the injured list again yesterday. This time it's back spasms. The decision was made just hours before Scherzer was scheduled to start against the Red Sox.

Scherzer turns 42 next month. He has only made six starts this year – not good ones – and has spent more than six weeks on the injured list with both forearm tendinitis and left ankle inflammation.

The universe is telling you something Max.

Napoleon, Rico, and Pedro bought a baseball team

You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills . . . baseball skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!" From MLB:

The cast from "Napoleon Dynamite" bought a baseball team. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Jon Gries (Uncle Rico), Jon Heder (Napoleon) and Efren Ramirez (Pedro) joined an ownership group for a new Northwoods League team in the small town of Richmond, Ind. It's a team with, of course, a fittingly weird name to go along with one of the weirdest movies of all time: The Flying Mummies. (Richmond was home to the Wright Brothers before they went on to aviation glory in Ohio and also features two Egyptian mummies on permanent, public display. It's known as the Mummy Capital of the Midwest, but that’s a whole other story.)

Gosh!

A reminder that hitting today is harder than ever

In case you don't read the comments, yesterday subscriber Some Guy in Va told us this:

Interesting factoid from last night’s Nats game…

As of last night’s game, James Wood, who’s all of 23 years old with just 310 MLB games on his baseball card, has faced more pitchers in his career than Ted Williams did.

That's absolutely wild. And serves as a good reminder that, in addition to facing radically higher velocity and way more wicked stuff, hitters today have WAY more homework to do that the guys back in baseball's alleged Golden Age.

And that's before you remember that Williams and his generational cohort faced a lot of really tired starting pitchers three and often four times in a given game whereas that doesn't happen much at all today because of a general understanding of the third-time-through-the-order penalty. To see how this worked for Williams, check this out, which the poster shot me after I shared this observation on Bluesky:

Yes, I think Ted Williams would figure out today's pitchers and would still be a top-flight player. But most of his peers wouldn't make it out of the minors. Meanwhile, today's merely above-average hitters would be offensive forces back in 1948 or whatever and today's elite hitters would be gods.

Please copy and paste this item and send it to your favorite baseball curmudgeon of a certain age. It'll break their brains, but you know that I'm right.

Trey Mancini DFA'd by the Angels

A week ago Monday Trey Mancini saw his first action in the bigs in nearly three years. And it was pretty good action, as he went 3-for-4 with an RBI against the Astros. Since that game, however, Mancini has gone 1-for-9 with three strikeouts. Yesterday the Angels decided to cut bait, DFA'ing Mancini.

The move was to make room for Vaughn Grissom who has been rehabbing from a left oblique strain that has had him on the injured list since June 8. The club obviously believes that a barely-rehabbed Grissom is better than Mancini. That's probably defensible, even if Grissom himself is not exactly the second coming of Wally Joyner.

If this is it for the 34-year-old Mancini – and the Angels are usually the end of the line for guys like him – he'll have an eight-year career in which he hit .263/.327/.448 (110 OPS+) with 129 homers to look back on. Oh, and the dude beat Stage 3 colon cancer in the middle of his career too. That ain't too damn bad.

Other Stuff

Cuppagentsia Update

Cuppagentsia member John Bilancini wrote me yesterday:

I found out today that a good buddy of mine in NYC passed away. I haven't seen him much since we moved out of the city during COVID, but he was an integral part of the NYC comedy scene and a huge NY Rangers, Knicks, and pro wrestling fan. Anyway, we were doing this thing a decade ago where we wrote things talking up comedian friends we loved, and I wrote this. I hadn't read it since I wrote it and it's not very good, but it is true. I thought if you wanted, maybe you could share the gospel of John a bit. He was an amazing guy who deserves the shine.

"Not very good but true" is better than good but not true. Indeed, it's often the best stuff.

Read John's piece from 2016 and help share the gospel of John Rosenberger a bit.

A brief thought on the Iran stuff

I'm not gonna deep-dive the U.S.-Iran war or its possible resolution because it's mostly stupid and depressing and you can read news sites for that. But I will make one observation.

Everything that has come out strongly suggests that it, and the war it will hopefully end, represents an absolute failure. The United States is and will continue to be in a worse place than before Trump launched his war of choice. Iran's regime and its elites will be in a much stronger – and much richer – position than it would've been had we not even bothered. And of course thousands of innocents, mostly poor and mostly powerless, are dead and countless lives have been destroyed. It's been a total disaster, the two biggest takeaways from which will be that (a) Iran and other nations now know that the United States simply can't project power like it's convinced the world it can for the past several decades, leaving would-be rogue states to do whatever they want; and (b) the American Empire has basically fallen.

But the thing about it is that Trump's war was so stupidly ill-advised, ill-conceived, and ill-executed that there is literally no other way out of it besides basically rolling over and giving Iran whatever it wants. It's important to remember that when the recriminations over this putative peace deal begin flying. There will be some who want to paint Trump as a weak and surrendering figure, and I get that, but there is and has been no more bold or bellicose course that would've changed things. I wish this had never happened, but I'd much rather see it end with America's tail between its legs than any other alternative.

So, while I understand the desire to mock Trump for his pathetic peace deal, don't cheer too hard for anyone – and there will be many – who will inevitably argue against it from a hawkish position or vow to do better next time or what have you. Because we earned this defeat. We should accept it and everything that comes with it with clear eyes rather than visit any more death or destruction upon the world to make some kind of dick-measuring point.

This is wholly unnecessary

I know I've written about this before, but "Ocean's Eleven" is one of my favorite movies. It gets there most of the way on its own merits, but it gets a definitive boost because it was on HBO like ten or 15 times a week when my daughter was a newborn.

Anna was a colicky rage-cryer in the long, dark winter of 2003-04. I would usually take the night shift, holding her in my arms while she either cried it out or while she slept and I was too afraid to put her back down in her crib lest she start crying again. So I watched "Ocean's 11," with Anna in my arms and with my headphones on, in front of the basement TV, approximately a gabillion times over those first few months. It became a source of friendly, familiar comfort that kept my own nighttime fears and anxieties about parenthood away. To this day, if it's on TV I'll watch it the rest of the way through. Sometimes I'll fire it up from the beginning when I really need a comfort watch.

But this I find distressing:

Oscar nominee Wagner Moura (“The Secret Agent,” “Civil War”) is in negotiations to join Margot Robbie and Bradley Cooper in the new “Ocean’s” prequel for Warner Bros.

Cooper is directing the film, dated for release on June 25, 2027, and is also producing the project alongside LuckyChap, the company led by Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara, Milan Popelka and Robbie. Cooper wrote the screenplay, plot details of which are “locked in the vault.”

As that's just a casting item I suppose this project was announced before, but I had missed it. Or blocked it out of my memory.

According to Variety the movie, "will take place at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix and will follow the crafty parents of con-man Danny Ocean, the ringleader of the Las Vegas casino heist in “Ocean’s 11.” Which I suppose is something you could make a movie out of.

But it does make me think of this exchange:

Rusty: I need the reason. Don't say money. Why do this?

Danny: Why not do it?

[Rusty shakes his head]

Me too, Rusty. Me too.

Your sleep type

There was a New York Times personality assessment kind of deal circulating yesterday which helps you figure out your sleep type. Are you a night owl? A true morning person? A moderate morning person? Something in between? That kind of deal. It's 20 questions or so and they're at least slightly more detailed than just "when do you like to wake up and when do you like to go to bed."

I actually took the test twice. Once when one of you sent it to me the other night and again yesterday afternoon. I changed two answers the second time because I'd thought about them a bit more deeply and it pushed me into a different category, but each of them were of the morning person variety:

While I realize I am famous around these parts for being an extreme early riser, things have shifted at least a little bit over the past couple of years. These days I think The Robin is more accurate, because I simply cannot go to bed as early as 9pm. Indeed, it's rare that I ever go to bed before 10:30. As for waking up, it's very rare for me to sleep past 6:30 in any circumstance, but the up-at-5am stuff I was doing almost every day when my kids lived with me has slid a bit. It happens maybe once a week or every other week now at most.

The actual thing with me is not when I wake up but how little sleep I've come to need. It's about six and a half hours most nights, and I can go six for seven days on end without really feeling the need to make it up. Less than six hours and, yeah, I'm dragging but I can get by with a lot less than most people I think. And that's not a brag or anything. I wish I could sleep more. On the extremely rare occasions I manage to sleep for seven or seven and a half hours I feel really damn good. I just can't do it that often. I bet I haven't slept more than eight hours more than twice in the last year. It kinda sucks, but my brain just wakes me up and tells me it's time to get up and do something.

The other possibilities are "Hawk" and "Owl" and folks, those people are like aliens to me. And I say that even though I was that until before I started watching "Ocean's Eleven" with a baby in my arms every night.

What are you?

Have a great day everyone.