Cup of Coffee: June 19, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Everyone whose rocketship didn't, once again, blow up, take one step forward.

No, not you Elon.

The world's richest man is perhaps the greatest advocate the world has ever seen for the government handling things that are traditionally governmental functions.

And the rocket's red glare, y'all.

Anyhoo, let's get on with our day.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Angels 3, Yankees 2: Each team got two solo homers to make it a 2-2 game by the fifth so, hey, the Yankees scored! Things broke down for them in the eighth, however, as New York reliever Fernando Cruz walked the bases loaded with one out. That's when Jo Adell, one of the solo homer-ers from earlier, hit what should've been an inning-ending double play ball to Anthony Volpe at short but Volpe muffed it with the glove and then threw it away in a panic, allowing Mike Trout to score. People say that Bluesky doesn't have a lot of baseball chatter during ballgames but my feed was nothing but a stream of epithets for Volpe by Yankees fans for a minute or two there. Almost reminded me of the good old days on Weimar Twitter.

Rockies 3, Nationals 1:  Michael Toglia and Jordan Beck hit solo homers and Colorado starter Germán Márquez gave up six hits while pitching shutout ball into the sixth inning. The Rockies win their fourth game in a row, making it their longest winning streak of the year. The Nationals have dropped 11 straight and are on the verge of being swept in a four-game set by the worst team since the invention of shredded wheat, the ferris wheel, and the bottle cap. And no, I'm making that up.

Red Sox 3, Mariners 1: Macelo Mayer hit a solo shot in the second and Trevor Story hit a tie-breaking two-run homer in the fourth. Garrett Crochet gave up a run on a wild pitch but he didn't give up anything more in six innings of work while striking out eight. The Sox take two of three from the Mariners.

Phillies 4, Nationals 2: Philly got a four-run fourth with  Bryson Stott's three-run homer covering 75% of it. Ranger Suárez allowed one over seven. Nick Castellanos was back in the lineup, went 2-for-5, and scored once. Maybe his being mouthy to Robby Thomson was because he was cranky and just needed a day off.

Blue Jays 8, Diamondbacks 1: Bo Bichette had three hits, including a homer and  Vladimir Guerrero Jr. reached base five times – three walks, a double, and a single – and drove in three. The Jays take the series by winning the first two games and go for the sweep this afternoon.

Atlanta 5, Mets 0: Chris Sale was Chris Sale, shutting out the Mets for eight and two-thirds but was pulled after giving up a single in the ninth. Didn't matter much, of course. Atlanta build a 3-0 lead in the first thanks to a Ronald Acuña Jr. homer, an error, and a sac fly. A bases-loaded walk in the fourth and a Matt Olson homer in the seventh made it 5-0. That's five straight losses for the Metropolitans.

Reds 4, Twins 2: The start of this one was delayed over two hours and then, later, storms shortened it to a six-inning affair. Probably a game that, like three others last night, should've been postponed, but hey, the Reds sold some beer. Spencer Steer hit a two-run homer early. RBI singles by Matt McLain in the second and Will Benson in the third extended the Reds' lead to 4-1. The Reds have won four straight and nine of their last 12 and are in the Wild Card conversation. Not that anyone should really be having the Wild Card conversation before the All-Star break.

Rays 12, Orioles 8: Baltimore had an eight-run second inning to take an 8-0 lead. I'm guessing most teams that do that win such games, but you ask for miracles, Theo, I give you the 2025 Orioles. And for that matter I give you the Rays who are owed their props for mounting the biggest comeback in baseball this season. Everyone was involved for Tampa Bay, as Christopher Morel hit an RBI double, Jake Mangum hit a two-run single, and  Curtis Mead hit a two-out triple to get the comeback rolling. Brandon Lowe hit a tying two-run homer in the fifth. Junior Camerino, who had four hits and two RBI, hit the go-ahead RBI on an infield single. Maybe the Rays are just excited because they learn the team is being sold. More on that down below in the Daily Briefing.

Royals 6, Rangers 3: Maikel García hit a three-run homer in the third and tripled in the eighth as he knocked in four of Kansas City's six runs. After an 0-6 home stand the Royals have taken the first two in their three-game set at Texas. Maybe the better barbecue they have in Texas is fueling them.

[Editor: You're just trying to start fights now, aren't you]

Maybe, but honestly, I just wanna feel something.

Guardians 4, Giants 2: Justin Verlander was activated from the injured list yesterday and got his first start in a month. It didn't go great as Daniel Schneemann hit a three-run shot in the fourth to give the visitors a 4-0 lead. Heliot Ramos hit a late two-run homer but that wasn't enough because, you know, math. My prediction that Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw are all gonna retire this fall and make a boffo Hall of Fame class in 2031 continues to look pretty good.

Astros 11, Athletics 4: Houston rattled off 20 hits with Jose Altuve and Victor Caratini each hitting three-run shots in a seven-run sixth inning. Altuve, Caratini. Jeremy Peña, Cam Smith, and Jake Meyers each had three hits on the night. The A's have given up a major league-leading 113 home runs this season and are on pace to allow 247 homers. That would tie them for 11th all time with the 2021 Washington Nationals. The record – 305 – by the 2019 Orioles seems safe, but it's still a hell of a lot of dingers to allow.

Dodgers 4, Padres 3: L.A. blew a 3-1 lead in the top of the ninth when some bad defense and reliever Justin Wrobleski being hittable allowed San Diego to plate two. Will Smith, coming on to pinch-hit, smacked an 0-2 pitch over the right field fence in the bottom of the ninth which walked things off and caused the P.A. guy to cue up the Randy Newman. The Dodgers have won five in a row and are now 5-1 against the Padres in the past nine days. They've extended their NL West lead to 4.5 games on the Giants and six games over San Diego.

Pirates vs. Tigers, Cardinals vs. White Sox, Brewers vs. Cubs – POSTPONED:

🎶 Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather since my man and I ain't together
Keeps raining all the time
Life is bare, gloom and misery everywhere
Stormy weather, just can't get my poor self together
I'm weary all the time, the time, so weary all the timeSince he went, the blues walked in and met me
If he stays away, ol' rocking chair will get me
All I do is pray, the Lord above will let me walk in the sun once more 🎶

The Daily Briefing

The Tampa Bay Rays are on the verge of being sold

Sportico reported yesterday that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg is in “advanced talks” with Jacksonville real estate developer Patrick Zalupski about a sale of the franchise. The selling price: approximately $1.7 billion. A letter of intent to purchase the club has reportedly been signed. The Rays have released the following statement:

“The Tampa Bay Rays announced that the team has recently commenced exclusive discussions with a group led by Patrick Zalupski, Bill Cosgrove, Ken Babby and prominent Tampa Bay investors concerning a possible sale of the team. Neither the Rays nor the group will have further comment during the discussions.”

Patrick Zalupski is the CEO of Dream Finders Homes, a publicly traded real estate developer based in Jacksonville. His net worth is reportedly $1.4 billion, which ain't exactly "buy a team for $1.7 billion" money absent heavy leveraging. As for the other guys mentioned in that statement: Ken Babby owns majority stakes in a couple of minor league teams and is the son of a prominent NBA agent. Bill Cosgrove is a mortgage company CEO. It's too early to tell who else might be a part of all of that and what the deal structure would look like, though per the Tampa Bay Times the team is expected to remain in the Tampa Bay area if the sale is completed. Where they'll play no one knows. Or at least they're not saying.

Sternberg's ownership group purchased the Rays for $200 million back in 2004 and has spent almost all of those 21 years trying to get the team into a new stadium. That process seemed to have borne fruit last year when the team, city, and county agreed on a new stadium anchoring a massive real estate development. But Sternberg started being weird about the deal, falsely claiming that the local governments were failing to live up to their commitments, which didn't track with what was known about the deal. Indeed, it felt like he was sabotaging it due to cold feet. Then Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off of Tropicana Field, turning everyone's attention to more immediate concerns and the plug got pulled on the new stadium.

It was not long after that when news began to leak that Sternberg was being pressured to sell the club by Rob Manfred and his fellow owners. Most of whom, you figure, consider it bad form to turn down nearly a billion dollars in public money for a new ballpark like Sternberg did.

And now it seems like that sale is happening.

Mark Walter is buying the Lakers

While one baseball owner looks to divest another baseball owner is adding to his empire: Dodgers owner Mark Walter is in agreement to buy the Los Angeles Lakers.

The sales price: $10 billion, though The Athletic reports that it could reach as high as $12 billion once all the dots and crosses are applied. Of course, even at $10 billion it would set the all-time record for the sale of a sports team.

Walter has had a 27% stake in the Lakers since 2021. His investment gave him the right of first negotiation in the event current owner, Jeanie Buss, ever sold the team. Buss will reportedly remain on as the team's governor after the sale is complete, but you figure Walter will eventually bring in his own people.

The Dodgers have apparently heard the criticism

Between their silence on ICE reads and the militarization of Los Angeles, their telling that woman not to sing the National Anthem in Spanish, and their turning away of that fan who was wearing a serape at the gate, it's been a bad week or so of press for the Dodgers. It would seem, however, that they have been listening to it and are trying to correct course. From The Athletic:

The Los Angeles Dodgers are expected to announce their plans Thursday to assist immigrant groups affected by recent militarized raids in the city by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two team officials told The Athletic.

Though it’s not immediately clear what the plans entail, this is expected to be the organization’s first official response to the raids, which have spawned massive protests throughout the United States. 

Public pressure works, folks. Eventually, as people, businesses, and institutions become more bold in voicing opposition to The Regime, it will bear fruit.

Red Sox fans had best hope this isn't true

More Joon Lee on the Red Sox:

Yahoo! Sports reporter Joon Lee joined NBC Sports Boston's Arbella Early Edition on Tuesday and reported that the Red Sox used an AI bot to conduct interviews with a baseball operations job candidate.

"What's happening with the Red Sox, with Sam Kennedy, with Craig Breslow, with Alex Cora, is a state of organizational dysfunction," Lee said, as seen in the video player above. "I heard last night about an interview with – the Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department, and during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them.

"And this wasn't just one round. It wasn't just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization.

Based on his previous story, it seems pretty clear that Joon Lee is sourced by some disgruntled folks in the Red Sox' ranks. Which means this could cut either way, of course. It could mean that he has insight into some serious dysfunction due to having a well placed person or persons inside. It could also mean that he's talking to someone with a serious axe to grind and that stories are being played up by his source(s) in a way that is aimed to make the Red Sox appear maximally dysfunctional.

The fact that no one else has this story doesn't necessarily mean anything – Red Sox reporters are famously tight with the front office and spend a lot of time carrying its water – but it's also the case that five rounds of AI interviews seems, frankly, insane and I feel like maybe there's more, or less, to this than what Lee is saying. I don't know.

I sure hope for Red Sox' fans sake that it's not true because if it is, woof.

Other Stuff

Obama

In an ideal world it would not fall to a former president – especially one who has been out of office for over two presidential terms – to be a voice of active political leadership. In an ideal world currently serving or campaigning politicians would lead. Former presidents are no longer seeking office and their time commanding the stage is in the past, whereas active leaders are accountable and are seen as having a stake in the future. Age, too, has traditionally provided a limiter on the political saliency of former presidents. Most of them have simply been too old by the time they've left office to be effective advocates or opponents when it comes to the pressing matters of the day.

Barack Obama, however, is in something of a unique place. He's still genuinely popular in ways that no political figure has been popular since he first took office and certainly more so than any of his successors at the top of the Democratic Party. He's also still younger than most of the current Democratic leadership. Hell, he's nearly two decades younger than our current and previous president.

Above all else Obama, unlike virtually any nationally-known Democrat, is someone who seems to both understand the issues of the day, the stakes of the current moment, and possesses the ability to speak compellingly and even passionately about them. Hell, if he hadn't already served two terms in office, he'd be the ideal Democratic candidate for president in 2028.

Except Obama is not really willing to take a visible leadership role these days, even in a narrow capacity such as being an attack dog or, alternatively, an above-the-fray figure whose legacy can be invoked as some sort of aspirational or nostalgic kind of thing. That stance is described in this article from yesterday's New York Times:

His comments were unlikely to satisfy Democratic officials and voters who have grumbled about his reluctance to wade into contemporary politics, wanting him to offer more vocal and frequent criticism of the Trump administration. But he has made clear that he does not intend to become a leader of the opposition. Audio and video recordings of his remarks on Tuesday night were forbidden, hampering their widespread transmission.

While he opposes much of Mr. Trump’s agenda, Mr. Obama believes that offering a steady stream of criticism of the administration would dilute the power of his voice, according to people who work with him.

I honestly do not know why Obama fears "diluting" the power of his voice. If things are as dire as he makes them out to be when speaking in private – and they absolutely are – what else would he be saving it for? The easy, cynical answer would be that Obama doesn't want to stop being invited to Davos or to high-priced speaking engagements or fancy parties or whatever, but in the article itself Obama criticizes the "I'll only be as progressive as I can be while still maintaining my jet set lifestyle" stance when taken by others, so he he seems to get it.

I honestly do think it'd be way better to have younger, currently active politicians serve as leaders for the opposition because a healthy society has to look forward, not backwards. But we're in the midst of a fully-blown social and political crisis, the likes of which this country has not seen since the Civil War and we currently have a profound lack of effective leadership at the top of the Democratic Party. As such, I don't think having Obama out there in more conspicuous ways would hurt anything. Indeed, I could see it helping a great deal. It's a shame he doesn't feel that way.

AI Cheerleaders

I'm sure that to most of you I sound like a broken record when it comes to AI and LLMs and stuff. I'll admit that a lot of the time I feel like an unhinged, out-of-touch luddite myself. I generally don't care for that stance, so I get a bit concerned about whether my always above-moderate curmudgeon factor is transforming into blatantly reactionary rejectionism when it comes to this stuff.

But then I read things like this podcast transcript between The New York Times' Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and physically recoil at the notion that what they have to say on the topic represents the mainstream.

What follows are snippets from their conversation. For full context click through, but you can trust me when I tell you that just excerpting this does not rob it of any necessary context:

NEWTON: My boyfriend is probably the biggest power user I know. He’s a software engineer at Anthropic, and he will give his A.I. assistant various tasks, and then step away for long stretches while it writes and rewrites code. A significant portion of his job is essentially just supervising an A.I.

ROOSE A.I. has essentially replaced Google for me for basic questions: What setting do I put this toaster oven on to make a turkey melt? How do I stop weeds from growing on my patio? . . . A friend of mine just told me that they now talk to ChatGPT voice mode on their commute in their car — instead of listening to a podcast, they’ll just open it up and say, “Teach me something about modern art,” or whatever.

ROOSE: Another person I know just started using ChatGPT as her therapist after her regular human therapist doubled her rates.

NEWTON: And let’s just say: If you’re a therapist, this is maybe not the best time to double your rates.

ROOSE: The mental model I sometimes have of these chatbots is as a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time. But also, the bar of 100 percent reliability is not the right one to aim for here: The base rate that we should be comparing with is not complete factuality but the comparable smart human given the same task.

ROOSE: Casey, you and I both work in a creative industry. We write words, and say them into microphones, and make videos that go on the internet. How worried are you that the A.I. tools of today, or the ones that are coming, will make it harder for us to earn a living?

NEWTON: I am worried. I think that already the value of text feels lower than it did two years ago. My job is basically to analyze and synthesize the news for readers, and that is a skill that chatbots are getting pretty good at. So it does have me thinking about what the next iteration of my job looks like. And I don’t love most of my options.

There are a bunch more things these two say that make me want to scream. Partially because they come off as unabashed cheerleaders for AI. Newton, in particular, notes that (a) his boyfriend works for the AI startup Anthropic; and (b) he uncritically quotes the CEO of Anthropic about the glory and wonder of AI's future. No conflicts there!

My biggest problem, though, is that as they pro and then very lightly con their way through this conversation, they offer nothing more than a surface level, utilitarian assessment of the technology. What great things can it do and what hiccups must be overcome in order for it to do even greater things! To them, every conceivable task one of these engines can do is good because it prevents a person from having to actually do something. What they and most other AI boosters never seem to consider is that doing things is the stuff of living and that a good deal of those things are enjoyable and fulfilling to some of us.

So much of their pitch and the pitch of the industry at large is about dispensing with the business of information-gathering, assessing that information, and doing useful or illuminating things with it. But for me, working through a problem and figuring out what's true or what's good or what's useful is, in and of itself, a rewarding experience! Coming up with just the right way to write something – the labor-saver most often cited by AI adherents – brings me more joy and satisfaction than almost anything else I do in my life.

This is not just the case now that I get to empty my head into this newsletter every day. It was also the case when I practiced law. A good deal of that work was dreary, yes, but being presented with a problem, researching the caselaw, finding the parallels and analogies, constructing the legal arguments, putting them into a brief in a way that is both persuasive and engaging, and then later coming up with a means of effectively presenting my case at oral argument was an immensely satisfying process. I felt like I learned things when I did that. I felt like I accomplished things when i did that. I felt like I pushed myself and challenged myself when I did that. And that's the part of that job, my current job, and any number of other jobs and daily human tasks AI vows to take away!

I cannot imagine wanting to short-circuit that. I can't imagine what, if AI takes away reading about new things, learning about new things, and writing things – things which give me more happiness and satisfaction than anything else I do – I'm supposed to get from this technology. What, exactly, is it freeing me up to do?

I appreciate that I'm talking about myself here and that what I find enjoyable is not what everyone else finds enjoyable. But I don't think that I'm the only person who gets satisfaction and self worth from a set of tasks and pursuits that, at the moment, AI is not just promising but threatening to take away from us. This would bother me even if AI was perfectly competent and accurate and cost effective and didn't have deleterious impacts on the planet. Even if all of those problems and externalities were solved, I don't WANT these tasks taken from me. I don't know what I would do or what I would be without my doing so many of them.

So no, I don't suppose I'll ever be objective about this shit. And if I'm gonna talk to a therapist about it it's going to be a human one, goddammit.

Deliver Me From Nowhere

The trailer for the Bruce Springsteen biopic, "Deliver Me From Nowhere" dropped yesterday:

I'm a big enough Springteen fan to where this interests me but not a big enough one to where I'll care all that much if it's good or if it misses the mark. Like, I was sorta personally invested in the Chalamet/Dylan movie being good and might've felt bad if it sucked, but no such considerations apply here. I'm open to whatever it is.

I'll say this much based on the trailer: (a) so far I've never been disappointed in a Jeremy Allen White or Jeremey Strong performance, even if they've done some artistically questionable things, because both of those dudes go hard all the time and I appreciate that; and (b) I'm a big fan of the slice-of-life biopic rather than the whole career retrospective approach that this one, and "A Complete Unknown" before it, sought to do. Springsteen, like Dylan, is too well known and has too wide, deep, and long a career to responsibly handle in a single movie without it turning into some sort of Dewey Cox situation.

Again, none of which says this movie will be good, but it at least looks like it has a chance to be good in ways that I didn't allow when I first heard that they were doing a Springsteen biopic. So sure, I'll go see it.

Tattoos

A lively discussion of tattoos arose in yesterday's comments. It was sparked, I believe, by my sharing a photo of myself on Monday that just barely revealed that I have a second tattoo now. Which, yes, I do. The first one is the coffee cup tattoo on my left arm. The second one, which I got back in December, is a skull/flower memento mori deal on the other arm:

Quick question: as someone who favors balance and all things symmetrical, I'm finding that I don't like how much smaller the coffee cup is than the skull. Anyone have any ideas as to something I could do to or around the cup to balance things out? Laurel leaves? A globe? A roundel? The face of George the Animal Steele? I've been struggling with this.

Anyway, as I think I talked about sometime last year, I never got tattoos earlier for a couple of reasons. The first being stigma, which is a function of my age and upbringing. My parents are pretty anti-tattoo and their view – which was the same view a lot of the adults I grew up around had – was that tattoos were for sailors and criminals and other disreputable types and that anyone who had one must fall into one of those categories. To be sure, I saw through that when I was still pretty damn young and I dropped any personal judgment I had about tattoos when I was still in college, if it was even that late.

My reluctance over the next 30 years to get a tattoo was partially based on my conservative profession and my fear of the judgment of others, but it was mostly based on my failure to have any tattoo ideas I was so taken with that I'd consider devoting the rest of my life to them. This too, I came to realize, was based on a fallacy which held that tattoos have to truly mean something and must justify their permanence if they are to ever be considered. Which is horseshit.

I've been writing things for publication for like 25 years now. Print, and its Internet analogue, is every bit if not more permanent than ink on mortal skin, and I'd be dumb to think that at least some of the things I've written won't outlast me in at least some form. If, however, I thought about that each time I sat down in front of my keyboard I'd freeze with terror and never write a damn thing because I know damn well it may one day look cringey and wrongheaded and may otherwise age poorly. I and every writer I know has made some sort of peace about that so it's not hard to make peace with the fact that I may not love a little picture I put on my arm and that it may not match my life, my tastes, and my world view 20 or 30 years in the future. And even if that happens, hell, unlike some of the things I've written it'll at least die and get burned up along with me, so who cares?

Which is to say that I've gotten on board with the stance that most tattooed people I know assume: a tattoo is just a little picture that you like. It does not require deep meaning. And even if it does have such meaning when you get it, and that meaning changes as you age, it still stands as a marker of where you were when you got it, and there's value in that too. This is certainly something that my wife Allison, who has somewhere between 28-31 tattoos, depending on how you count a couple of little clusters she has in a couple of spots, rolls. Like, she thinks capybaras are cute so she got a capybara on her ankle last year. Most of them are really not any deeper than that. Even one she regretted – a Morrissey-themed one from 20+ years ago – was easily covered up by a penguin once Morrissey proved to be horrible. It's best not to overthink these things.

None of which is to say that anyone needs to get a tattoo. Not getting one is just as valid as getting one and doing something significant because of peer pressure or trends is a bad idea, pretty much always. We all know ourselves. For 50 years my speed was "no tattoos" after all. Then I changed my mind. If I never had changed my mind I am certain that my heavily-tattooed wife wouldn't have cared and my life would not be any worse off for it. Just do what you wanna do. It's all good.

And even if it's not all good, as the tattoo on my right arm reminds me, we're all gonna die someday anyway, and then none of this will matter.

Have a great day everyone.