Cup of Coffee: June 4, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

It's a kinda regular newsletter today but doing the hospital shuffle meant that I just didn't have the capacity to do recaps yesterday. So we'll imagine those, but I got to some news items so I didn't completely mail it in for another day.

As for the hospital shuffle: I'm not usually a softie about much of anything, but the hospital where my mom is plays Brahms' Lullaby over the PA system every time a baby is born down in the maternity department. It's really goddamn sweet and makes being in a place where a lot of people are having a bad time of it much nicer. And that's the case even if that is, more or less, the lyrical narrative of the song "Lightning Crashes" by Live, which I really, really hate.

Anyway, Like I said, slightly more of a real newsletter today.

The Daily Briefing

Cristopher Sánchez's scoreless streak ends

Cristopher Sánchez took his scoreless innings streak into the seventh inning of the Phillies game against the Padres last night, getting it to 50 and two-thirds straight shutout frames. But the streak came to an end when Ty France got on base with a double and Jackson Merrill singled to drive him in.

Still, it amounted to the longest ever such streak by a lefty and stands as fifth all time behind Orel Hershiser, Don Drysdale, Walter Johnson, and Jack Coombs, so well frickin' done, Cristopher.

Blue Jays acquire Simeon Woods Richardson

 The Toronto Blue Jays acquired righty Simeon Woods Richardson from the Minnesota Twins for cash considerations last night.

Woods Richardson was DFA'd by the Twins over the weekend. He was 0-7 with a 7.74 ERA in 12 and have up a league-leading 41 earned runs with Minnesota, so the change of scenery is definitely called for.

All-Star voting has begun

Voting for the 2026 All-Star Game opened yesterday. This year's Midsummer Classic will be held Tuesday, July 14 at Citizens Bank Park in Philly. That's my 53rd birthday! And Tim Hudson's 51st! And Robin Ventura's 59th! And Phoebe Waller-Bridge's 41st! And Harry Dean Stanton's 100th! And Gerald Ford's 113th! And Woodie Guthrie's 114th! And Murakami, the 62nd Emperor of Japan's 1,102nd! I could go on but I've already beaten this bit into the ground.

Anyhoo, as always, the starters will be determined by fan vote and as has been the case for several years now it'll be determined by a two-step process, with the first step lasting from yesterday through June 25 and the second phase from June 29 through July 2. Phase One allows you to vote for whoever you want to, after which things are narrowed down to the finalists, while Phase Two allows fans to “vote for the starters.” Each person can vote up to five times per day in Phase One and four times in Phase Two. Not because that’s the best way to pick and All-Star team, mind you. Rather, it’s so that "Konami eBaseball" – the ballot's sponsor – can get a whole lotta impressions of their ads all over the MLB website, just as Abner Doubleday allegedly intended.

The All-Star starting lineups as voted on by fans will be announced on July 2. The full rosters, with backups and stuff, will be unveiled on July 6. 

Nick Castellanos got DFA'd

The San Diego Padres designated Nick Castellanos for assignment yesterday. This after he hit a mere .191/.221/.339 (57 OPS+) with just four home runs in 122 plate appearances in 2026. The kicker: they did it while he and the team were in Philadelphia to play the Phillies, with whom Castellanos famously fell out last season, so one assumes he was already not enjoying the trip. Well, it got worse.

Castellanos seemed like a low-risk gamble when the Padres signed him given that the Phillies are still paying him $20 million this year, but low-risk bets can be losers too, and Castellanos just didn't produce.

The biggest downside to all of this is that if It Happens during the 2026 baseball season, it now seems extraordinarily unlikely that a Castellanos home run will serve the Glorious Happening's harbinger. But Joc Pederson could fill in, I figure.

The OutSports MLB Pride Night Guide

Each year Ken Schultz of OutSports writes a guide to the 29 Pride Nights put on by MLB teams. The new one came out the other day:

With that comes another deep dive into how each team is celebrating June with the 2026 Outsports MLB Pride Guide. This year, all the usual MLB Pride titans are back with new eleganza rainbow jerseys. Happily, a few teams who were safe last year also really stepped up their games.

Of course, there are a few clubs whose Pride Nights can be summed up as “at least we’re gayer than the Texas Rangers.” And alas, said Rangers are still approaching Pride like they plan to move to Belarus.

Still, this is the best time of year to be a baseball gay and many of these teams are about to show the sports world why.

As for those Rangers:

Most baseball teams would want their ratio of Pride Nights to segregationist statues to be a positive number. But the Rangers have taken a different approach. Let’s see if that works out for them!

I wish they cared but I suppose they don't. But at least the Kansas City Royals scheduled their Pride Night for next Wednesday, when the Rangers are in town. I'd like to think that that will force them and their fans to acknowledge the existence of love, joy, and basic humane reality rather than allowing them to pretend that the bigoted shit they've been pulling of late is normal, but again, that may be too ambitious a thought.

As for the rest of the league, Schultz talks about which teams have changed their Pride-themed jerseys (and which ones could stand a change), the nature of the festivities going on at each park and the like.

As for the scheduling: San Diego has long had theirs way earlier in the season, often in April, but this time they had theirs back on the first of May so as not to conflict with RuPaul’s Drag Race Grand Finale (no I am not making that up). The Reds, likewise, have already had their Pride Night, doing so last Friday. The Mariners do a neat thing: one Pride Night on the first of the month and a second one at the end of the month to bookend things. Houston's and the Angels' was last night. Everyone else's is in the future.

Next up: Atlanta's, which is tonight. Check out Ken's story for all the details.

Other Stuff

Like we should give a shit

Over at The Athletic, they ran a story yesterday with the headline, "How Knicks-Spurs NBA Finals put sportsbooks into a lose-lose scenario." They talked to DraftKings' sportsbook director about it:

The Finals will feature the stark contrast of the Knicks, representing the top television market with A-list celebrities courtside, against the Spurs, understated yet led by a 7-foot-4, 22-year-old superstar in Victor Wembanyama. The common ground is their underdog paths that have converged to create a lose-lose scenario for the house.

“We did not want those two teams to meet because there’s no good outcome for us at this point,” Avello said.

The Spurs and Knicks represented the two most significant liabilities to almost every sportsbook’s bottom line, given each team had long-shot title odds throughout most of the regular season. 

Here's hoping that (a) The Finals are entertaining and competitive; and (b) every single thing that maximizes casino losses occurs.

The State of Things

First off, I'd like all of you to know that yesterday my mom actually got the mac and cheese with her lunch, and it was worth the wait. Like, I had a couple of bites of it too and it was shockingly good for institutional mac and cheese. It wasn't like what you might get at a barbecue place or whatever, but it was closer to that than it was to the Kraft boxed crap, so I call that a win.

That aside, I'd like to thank all of you for your kind words, positive thoughts, and general well-wishes these past couple of days. It can be rather isolating when bad things happen and you have to move into crisis mode, but knowing that there are a whole bunch of you out there who care makes things much more endurable.

Now that we're breathing a bit easier I can tell you that my mom had a stroke late Sunday night/early Monday morning. She still had enough of her faculties about her when it happened to wake my dad up, who then called for an ambulance. She was at the hospital by a little after 3AM and they had performed a thrombectomy – going in through her leg and zapping the clot all the way up in her brain via relatively non-invasive means – by 4AM. Getting on it that fast made a gigantic difference in her recovery. Like, when I first saw her just after she came out of surgery early Monday she had a bunch of classic stroke symptoms: drooped mouth, slurred speech and a lot of left-side weakness and deficits, but by Monday evening almost all of that had cleared. If you were in her hospital room with her as of Tuesday afternoon you'd not know for sure why she was here.

There are still some challenges, of course, as she's in her late 70s and has other stuff going on. For the past decade she has had a pretty severe essential tremor that affects both of her hands and makes a lot of basic stuff like eating and drinking difficult even at the best of times. Over the past year or so she's had a mystery hip/leg thing that has impacted her mobility in pretty significant ways as well. All of that is more or less manageable when she's at home, as my parents' house and their routines are pretty optimized for it and my dad can help her with most things, but those conditions make the curveballs a lot more wicked when they're delivered.

As we're all aware, the Cuppagentsia is a . . . mature community. A great many of you are around my age or older and have dealt with elderly parents and all that goes with it. Hell, a good number of you are around my mom's age yourselves so you know what can touch you in these Golden Years. This kind of stuff comes for us all. The kicker is that we're lucky if it does, actually, because growing old and all that goes with it sure as hell beats the alternative.

As I mentioned yesterday, my mom has some rehab and other things in her future. Indeed, she's about 95% likely to leave the hospital for the rehab place today. I'll no doubt be helping both her and my dad as they navigate all this horseshit, and that may require me to take some more PTO here and there. Given the specific ways in which my brain is broken and my senses are wired, taking time off is really, really difficult for me, but knowing that you understand makes it a lot easier to do. So again, thank you.

Have a great day everyone.