Cup of Coffee: June 5, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Hey! Ho! Let's go!

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Rockies 3, Marlins 2: The Rockies sweep! It's their first series sweep since they took three straight games from the Padres between May 13-15, 2024, so good on them. Also, per Baseball-Reference.com, they accomplished something else with this win: they no longer have the worst winning percentage among active franchises. Now the Marlins do. They're both at .459, but the Rockies, who have played ten more games than Miami in their mutual 33-season history, win on rounding error. This may very well be the highlight of the Colorado Rockies' 2025 campaign.

Brewers 9, Reds 1:  Isaac Collins hit a three-run homer and Jackson Chourio and Daz Cameron each hit two-run shots as the Brewers won in a laugher. Wade Miley, who the Reds just signed yesterday, didn't get the start for Cincinnati, coming on in relief instead, but still allowed four earned runs in two innings so welcome back to the big leagues, big fella.

Red Sox 11, Angels 9: This looked like a wild one, with the Red Sox coming back from being down 4-0 after the first half inning to take a 5-4 lead after one. The Angels went ahead 7-5 in the second but Boston tied it up at seven in the fourth. Then the Angels led 8-7, the Sox tied it up, the Angels then led 9-8 and, yep, you guessed it, the Sox tied it up. Boston stopped pussyfootin' around and got off the seesaw in the bottom of the ninth when Ceddanne Rafaela hit a walkoff two-run homer jusssst past the Pesky Pole. Indeed, it only went 308 feet and stands as the shortest walkoff homer since people have been keeping track of such things. All of this was certainly exciting. Well, for everyone but the starters, José Soriano and Lucas Giolito, who combined to give up 14 runs on 16 hits in five and a third innings between them.

Pirates 3, Astros 0: Shutout number one of the early evening games had rookie Mike Burros getting his first big league win after handling the first five and a third while three relievers closed out the seven-hit, 12-strikeout affair. Pittsburgh scored all of their runs between the second and third innings and all of them came on outs, with a sac fly, and groundout, and a double play plating the runners.

Nationals 2, Cubs 0: Shutout number two of the early evening games featured MacKenzie Gore working seven innings while allowing just three hits and striking out seven. He was backed by a homer from Ahmed Rosario in the seventh and an RBI double from Nasim Nuñez in the eighth. The rubber match comes this evening.

Guardians 4, Yankees 0: Shutout number three of the early evening games was a four-pitcher effort led by Luis Ortiz (5.2 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 7K) and backed by homers from Ángel Martínez and Kyle Manzardo and an RBI double from Daniel Schneemann. The Yankees hit into three double plays. Sometimes it ain't your night.

Blue Jays 2, Phillies 1: Nick Castellanos homered in the second but the Jays tied it up on a Bo Bichette triple in the sixth. In the ninth Vlad Guerrero Jr. singled and then stole second to get into scoring after which Alejandro Kirk singled him in for the walkoff win. Also happening in the bottom of the ninth: Phillies catcher JT Realmuto exiting after getting hit in the beans by a Bo Bichette foul tip, after which he immediately left the game. I love the AP summary of this which refers to Realmuto "being hit in the area of his protecive cup" and "walking gingerly off the field."

Rays 5, Rangers 4: Brandon Lowe homered in the first and doubled in a run in the third to make it 2-0. Jonathan Aranda then singled in Lowe and Jake Mangum drove in two with an infield single. Which is not something that often happens on infield singles. Texas mounted a comeback with Jonah Heim homering and Wyatt Langford homering in the fifth with Langford singling in another run in the ninth but the comeback fell short.

Diamondbacks 2, Atlanta 1: Lourdes Gurriel Jr. singled in a run in the third and Ketel Marte singled one home in the ninth and a mere two runs ended up being enough thanks to Merrill Kelly's seven innings of one-hit shutout ball. Atlanta picked up one in the ninth because Arizona reliever Justin Martinez walked three dudes and hit a guy in the ninth, but the rally, such as it was, was weathered.

Tigers 5, White Sox 4: There was an hour and a half rain delay to start this one, but Detroit answered the bell just fine, putting up four runs in the first. The White Sox managed to tie things back up by the fifth, but Colt Keith bloop-doubled home the go-ahead run in the eighth after which the Tigers held on thanks to Detroit relievers shutting out the Chisox for the final four and two-thirds. The Tigers got blown out by Chicago on Tuesday but they have won 20 of 25 against the Sox.

Orioles 3, Mariners 2: Adley Rutschman hit a game-tying homer in the sixth and Heston Kjerstad put Baltimore ahead with a two-run triple in the seventh to make it five in a row for the Orioles. They may be righting the ship too late to matter, but they are righting the ship.

Giants 6, Padres 5: The Padres built a 5-0 lead by the fifth inning but Patrick Bailey doubled home one in the fifth and Matt Champan hit a two-run homer in the sixth to make it a ballgame. After that Heliot Ramos hit a tying two-run double in the seventh after which Jung Hoo Lee hit a sac fly that put San Francisco ahead. The San Francisco pen held the Padres scoreless for the final four and two-thirds. Not gonna lie, I never would've guessed that the late-May/early June version of the Giants had a big comeback in them but here we are.

Twins 6, Athletics 1: With the Rockies sweeping a series the futility of the Sacramento Athletics had the spotlight to itself yesterday, as the dropped their ninth game in a row and their 20th of their last 21 games. Ryan Jeffers hit a solo shot in the first inning and an RBI single in the ninth. Harrison Bader added a two-run homer. Carlos Correa was scratched from this one with back tightness and will sit in today's series finale, but the club says he'll be fine. Given how Correa's health has been over the past couple of years I'm not at all sure why they're so optimistic, but I suppose hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, Red.

Mets 6, Dodgers 1: Pete Alonso hit a two-run homer in the first inning and a three-run homer in the eighth. Griffin Canning shut the Dodgers out for six. Juan Soto, who reporters who cover the Yankees insists is miserable, seemed to have a good time yesterday. A fan ran out onto the field and that guy was FAST. It was a whole scene.

Royals vs. Cardinals – POSTPONED:

🎶 A misty shadow spread its wings
And covered all the ground
And even though the sun was out
The rain came pouring down

And all the light had disappeared
And faded in the gloom
There was no hope, no reasoning
This rainy day in June 🎶

The Daily Briefing

All-Star voting begins

Voting for the 2025 All-Star Game is officially underway. This year's Midsummer Classic will take place on July 15 at Truist Park in suburban Atlanta. You can vote, as usual, at MLB.com.

Last year's balloting was sponsored by Buildsubmarines dot com, which was all kinds of fun because who doesn't think submarines are cool, but this year they have a new sponsor: Pro Spirit. I don't know what that is. I also don't care, as they aren't paying me a dime and I seriously doubt that a single person is gonna buy/invest in/think more about whatever ProSpirt's product is by virtue of casting a ballot with their name at the top of it. But hey, MLB got a check out of it and, in Rob Manfred's Major League Baseball, that's the most important thing.

As has been the case for several years now, there are two phases of voting, with the first lasting from yesterday through June 26 and the second from June 30 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. Not because that’s the best way to pick and All-Star team, mind you. Rather, it’s so that the ProSpirt people, whoever they are, get a whole lotta impressions of their ads all over the MLB website.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Manfred admits that Trump impacted his Pete Rose decision

The moment Trump posted about Pete Rose a couple of months ago I said that Rob Manfred was going to try to cater to him. The moment Manfred reinstated Rose I said that he did it because he wanted to do Trump's bidding out of either fear or fealty. Yesterday Manfred more or less admitted it. From the owner's meetings yesterday:

President Donald Trump's support of Pete Rose was among the factors weighed by Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred when he decided last month that permanent bans by the sport ended with death, which allows the career hits leader to be considered for the Hall of Fame . . .

. . . "The president was one of a number of voices that was supportive of the idea that this was the right decision . . . Obviously, I have respect for the office, and the advice that he gave I paid attention to, but I had a lot of other people that were weighing in on the topic, as well."

The "advice that [Trump] gave" is rich. Trump just spewed horseshit from his Truth Social account like he always does. He told Manfred to jump and Manfred asked "how high?" He caved to Trump in the same way he did when he ordered his underlings to end the league's diversity initiatives and scrub the website to make it appear as if they'd never existed. He's a bootlicker who did whatever Trump wanted and will no doubt continue to do whatever Trump wants when his increasingly eroded mind remembers that baseball exists.

Rob Manfred is a pathetic excuse for a leader of this sport. He's spineless and shameful. And given that every business or institution that has catered to Trump in the way he has has come to regret it because it simply causes Trump to demand even more, so too will Major League Baseball.

Reds sign Wade Miley

As mentioned up in the recaps, the Reds signed Wade Miley to a one-year major league contract yesterday. The move was no doubt made in response to Reds starter Hunter Greene being placed in the injured list after suffering a groin strain during Tuesday night's win over the Brewers.

If you're asking yourself "wait, wasn't Wade Miley already with the Reds?" you can be excused, because he had signed a minor league deal with Cincinnati, recently opted out of it and briefly became a free agent, but now he’s back on more stable and guaranteed grounds. He had previously pitched for the Reds from 2020-21.

Before yesterday's not great outing Miley, 38, had not appeared in a big league game since April of 2024, when he suffered a torn UCL during one of two appearances he made for the Milwaukee Brewers. He thought about retiring after that but opted for Tommy John surgery instead. Left-handers never die.

Crypto bros don't know ball

From the intro to a Defector story about the goals of the ever-growing and ever-more-powerful cryptocurrency establishment:

"We often talk about baseball games as a metric for where we are, and we're literally in the first inning," one of the Winklevoss twins gloats. "And this game's going to overtime."

I'm the last person to gatekeep, but if someone who is trying to conquer the financial world with his scammy-ass products cites baseball as the framework for his initiative, and then immediately makes a reference to "going to overtime," which is not a thing in baseball, you may want to hitch your wagon to another star.

Friends don't let friends mix metaphors. Especially about investors who are about to step up to the plate and put their cards on the table.

Other Stuff

Is that good?

Imagine you're a government attorney involved in a case before a federal judge. The judge has been hearing your arguments defending the government's actions and your opponents' argument that the government has abused its power. Then the decision comes down and it begins with an extended recitation of the plot of Franz Kafka's The Trial.

Do you keep reading? Do you submit your resignation? Do you just walk directly into the ocean? I feel like doing anything short of that represents a failure on your part to understand just how badly you and your client have messed up and just how firmly on the wrong side of the law and of history you are.

The return of "Phineas and Ferb"

From 2007 until 2015, the Disney Channel and Disney XD ran a cartoon called "Phineas and Ferb." The premise: stepbrothers, the titular Phineas and Ferb, decide that they want to make the most out of their summer vacation so they do everything they can to make every day amazing via the most insane and unhinged plots they can imagine. This annoys Phineas' teenage sister Candace, who tries to foil their plots. Meanwhile, the boys' pet platypus, Perry, is an undercover secret agent who does daily battle with the evil scientist, Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, whose mission is to conquer and terrorize "the entire tri-state area!" Perry and Doofenshmirtz's battles usually end up intersecting with the boys' activities by the end of the episode, usually in such a way that Candace's efforts to expose them fall flat.

Honestly, though, it's not as complicated as that sounds. It's just a fun as hell cartoon in the old Bugs Bunny/Droopy/Marx Brothers mode. It's inspired insanity with no small amount of wit, intelligence, and randomness. Stuff like Dr. Doofenshmirtz being far more kind and sensitive than he is evil when push comes to shove, partially because he's trying to be a good father to his gothy daughter Vanessa who, while demonstrating typical teenage rebellion, is evil just like her dad and often helps him in his schemes. Some of which would actually succeed if he listened to her.

Given the timeframe in which it appeared, you will not be surprised to learn that my 2003 and 2005-born kids absolutely loved "Phineas and Ferb." And, honestly, I did too. I'd even watch it sometimes when they weren't around. Between it, "Adventure Time," – which I also watched myself – "The Amazing World of Gumball," "Regular Show," and older reliables like Spongebob, Gen-Z had some of the best damn TV ever, and no amount of Boomer, Gen-X, or Millennial nostalgia can change that fact. The 2005-2015 era had to be a high point for kids programming.

Now, per Variety, we learn that "Phineas and Ferb" is returning. Same voice cast and, it seems, same premise. The primary reason: several "Phineas and Ferb" bits and songs – there were songs in basically every episode – have found new life on TikTok, where the kids who grew up with "Phineas and Ferb" now spend a lot of time. Reruns, likewise, continue to do big numbers on Disney+, so it's sort of a no-brainer.

I often roll my eyes at mindless IP-exploitation, with Disney being the most egregious recycler in the entertainment business, but I approve of this reboot. "Phineas and Ferb" absolutely slaps, as the Gen-Zers used to say like a decade ago, and more people than just young twenty-somethings and their parents should see it.

DEI's "Image problem"

The Columbus Dispatch ran a story the other day about how local companies are re-branding their corporate diversity initiatives in order to not draw the ire of the Trump Regime and its sycophants in state government. Which is totally understandable. There has been a lot of that floating around in these dark and stupid days.

The way the article couches it, however, is a hell of a damn thing, though:

DEI has an image problem, but local leaders in the field hope employers keep the mission of diversity, equity and inclusion even if they change the terminology.

The headline likewise refers to this as an "image problem":

Calling it "DEI's Image Problem" because a bunch of Nazis began a white supremacy campaign against the very notion of basic human equality is the kind of thing that makes me want to walk into the sea. What will it take for base racism to have "an image problem?" Is that just not on the table anymore?

Someone think of the white British people

For those who are unaware, a great many UK conservative types – and a good number of otherwise not-so-conservative types – are every bit as racist and xenophobic as their American counterparts. As a result, immigration has played just as big if not a bigger part in UK politics for the past couple of decades than it has here. Brexit, for example, was at its core a nativist initiative. And if you talk politics with certain sorts of British people long enough even the stuff you'd think has nothing to do with immigration eventually, and quite astoundingly, turns into an immigration debate.

The Telegraph, which inspired all of those words about my Anglophilia the other day thanks to its propagandizing for the Prince of Wales' feudal lands, has a new story out that is aimed right at the dead center of UK conservative cultural resentment. It's about immigration and demographic trends, and it's sounding an alarm!

White British people will become a minority in the UK population within the next 40 years, a report has predicted.

An analysis of migration, birth and death rates up to the end of the 21st century predicts that white British people will decline from their current position as 73 per cent of the population to 57 per cent by 2050 before slipping into a minority by 2063.

The research, by Prof Matt Goodwin of Buckingham University, suggests that by the end of the century, the white British share of the population – defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent – could have fallen to around a third (33.7 per cent).

You all will think that I've lost my mind when I say this, but I agree that, at least in certain cases, we should cast these sorts of people right off of the island! I mean, to think that a person without two British parents should be able to take what belongs to others is an affront! A person like this:

Yep, his dad was born in Greece and was a member of the Danish royal family when he married up. Which, per the definition in that article, means that King Charles III is not a "white British person."

UK conservatives like to demonize people with immigrant parents for mooching off the public dole. It's usually broad and misleading racist claptrap, but this one has actually suckled at the teat of Great Britain's public revenues his whole life! So yes, I wholeheartedly agree that, at least in some narrow cases, the government should take a hard line and do whatever it can to get rid of this sort in order to ensure the future of a healthy Britain.

Navigation

This made the rounds Tuesday evening and into yesterday:

There's a decent chance this was rage-bait, intentionally posted to make people my age do that whole "back in my day we drank from the hose!" old person horseshit we like to do for some reason. If there's doubt about it, the fact that it was posted to the "AskHistorians" group may be a giveaway.

I won't take the bait, though, because I'm a full convert to modern digital navigation and I use it all the time. Indeed, I even, increasingly, find myself using it in the town around which I've been driving for 34 years and, as I said on Tuesday, I know like the back of my hand.

Sure, as someone who began driving in the late 1980s I know how to use maps, memory, and my general sense of direction to get around, but it's not like I deserve a reward for having done it. It's so much better now knowing exactly how to get to a place without having to do a bunch of advance research, without the hassle, while being able to see traffic jams, construction, or road closures well ahead of time, all while having a shockingly accurate estimate of my time of arrival displayed for me.

There are many people my age and older who like to pound the table and say how they got their Chevy Cavaliers and Volkswagen Rabbits from place to place by use of sextants, dead reckoning, or a preternatural ability to divine the cardinal directions by their gut alone, but if a magical voice suddenly interrupted "It Takes Two" by Rob Base and D.J. EZ-Rock while it blasted from your Pioneer tape deck back in 1990 and directed you the way Google Maps can direct anyone now, you would (a) soil your drawers at the awesomeness and terror of what could only be God's personal intervention in your life; and (b) use that shit all the time going forward.

All that being said, yeah, I actually do have a pretty damn good sense of direction. You can drop me almost anywhere and I can tell you which way is north, south, east, or west. One of the lamest things about me, going back to my early childhood, is my love of maps – especially road maps – which I would just sit and read like other kids would read comic books. We had an RV so there were always a few Rand McNally's floating around in there, so it was a good time-killer.

Later, and until like five years ago, I kept a more compact, spiral-bound Rand McNally North America road map in my nightstand and, when I didn't want to read a book, I'd just look at the maps to help me get drowsy. I'd just think of a place in North America and figure out the best way to get there. Maybe that was the fastest way, using interstates. Maybe it was the most scenic way, eschewing all but country roads. If you give me a bit of time today I could probably still work out in my head, without referencing a map, how to get from here to Walla Walla, Washington using only U.S. highways or state roads or in such a way that allows you to hit the most national parks or whatever. That and pre-2000 baseball statistics just live in my brain cells and will never, ever go away, even if my reliance on navigation and Baseball-Reference.com have, increasingly, made it harder to recall some of that stuff.

But like I said: you don't get a medal for that. And even if you memorized the road maps and kept all the old AAA TripTiks, and have an internal navigation engine in your brain on par with a DRADIS unit from Battlestar Galactica, you're still gonna make mistakes sometimes. More so than the occasional ones that Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, or whatever else one uses still make. And the navigation is just easier, so go with it.

People often talk about technology making us dumber. There is truth to that, of course, but it's a very narrow truth. Because the promise of technology, when it's not doing evil things, is that it makes it possible for you to not have to know or do certain things. Things like how to drill a well or boil your laundry or buy a set of encyclopedias. It also can keep you from having to figure out directions. While I still love maps and still think people should know how to use them as a failsafe, I don't have much of a problem with that.

Have a great day everyone.