Cup of Coffee: May 7, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

And away we go!

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Rays 3, Blue Jays 0: Shane McClanahan pitched shutout ball into the sixth and four relievers finished the four-hitter. McClanahan has now thrown 16.2 consecutive scoreless innings. The Rays pitching has been insane lately. They've won 12 of 13 games and have allowed just 17 runs in those 13 contests. They've thrown three shutouts over that time and have given up just one run five times.

Brewers 6, Cardinals 2: Brewers pitchers held St. Louis scoreless for the first seven innings and by that time they had built up a 5-0 lead. Andrew Vaughn's three-run homer in the first inning was the big blow. Thanks to the rainout on Tuesday the rubber match in this series won't be played until July.

Dodgers 12, Astros 2: The good news for the Dodgers: they won easily, thanks in HUGE part to Andy Pages hitting not one, not two, but three homers. It was a three-run homer in the third, a two-run homer in the fifth, and a solo shot in the ninth. L.A. rattled off 14 hits in all, with most of the damage being done against starter Lance McCullers and mopup man Jason Alexander, who was forced to wear it. The bad news for the Dodgers: they lost starter Tyler Glasnow to what is being called "lower back pain." Glasnow threw 19 pitches in the first inning and was warming up to start the second inning when he motioned to the Dodger dugout, bent over and yelled in frustration. So that's not good. I'm sure we'll get an update on his condition later today.  

Padres 5, Giants 1: Padres pitchers combined on a one-run, three-hit, 13-strikeout performance with Matt Waldron (5 IP, 2 H, 1 ER) serving as the bulk guy and picking up the W. Xander Bogaerts hit a two-run homer, Gavin Sheets hit a solo shot, and Ty France tripled in two runs. The Pads take two of three from the Giants who are tied with the Rockies for the worst record in baseball this year, and may be the least inspiring team to watch to boot.

Angels 8, White Sox 2: Travis d'Arnaud hit a three-run homer in the second and the Angels never trailed after that. Here's one you don't see every day: the Angels scored two runs in the fourth via two bases-loaded plunkings. And then the White Sox scored a run in the seventh via a bases-loaded plunking of their own. Painful win. Painful loss. But at least kinda interesting, which is not the sort of thing we've gotten a lot of from the Angels and White Sox for most of the past decade.

Mariners 3, Atlanta 1: Bryan Woo was on-point, allowing just one hit over six shutout innings while striking out nine and Atlanta batters couldn't do much better off the Seattle pen. Julio Rodríguez hit a loooong homer and Cole Young doubled one in. Seattle takes two of three to hand Atlanta their first series loss of the year.

Phillies 6, Athletics 3: The A's led 3-1 after five and a half but Philly woke up a little bit in the bottom of the sixth in the form of an Adolis García homer and then put up a four-spot in the eighth. That's when Edmundo Sosa hit a go-ahead two-run single followed by a Brandon Marsh RBI single and a run-scoring groundout from Justin Crawford. Philly goes for a sweep today.

Orioles 7, Marlins 4: Pete Alonso hit a three-run homer and Adley Rutschman had two RBI doubles. Dylan Beavers put the O's ahead for good with a ground rule double in the fourth. Blaze Alexander tripled in a late run. Baltimore goes for a sweep today. 

Red Sox 4, Tigers 0: Sonny Gray made his first start since April 20, and it was against the same team he faced that day. On this evening he shut the Tigers out for five innings and the Sox pen no-hit 'em over the final four frames. Half of the Boston offense came on a two-run error in the fourth. Caleb Durbin doubled in the first run and Willson Contreras sac flied in the second.

Nationalis 15, Twins 2: CJ Abrahams hit a grand slam and had an RBI double and Drew Millas, Brady House and José Tena also homered for the Nats. The four homers, the ten extra-base hits, and the 15 runs were all season highs for Washington. The rubber match is this afternoon.

Rangers 6, Yankees 1: Nate Eovaldi was excellent against his former club once again, going eight innings and allowing just one run on three hits while punching out eight and beating the Bombers for the second time in eight days. Corey Seager and Evan Carter homered, Seager added an RBI single and Ezequiel Duran knocked in a pair. Aaron Judge homered in a losing effort. It was his 15th of the year which leads everyone. The Yankees' five-game winning streak ends.

Cubs 7, Reds 6: Chicago had a 4-1 lead in the early going but the Reds came back with homers from Matt McLain and Spencer Steer getting them part of the way there, a JJ Bleday single tying things up, and a rare two-run sacrifice fly from Elly De La Cruz putting Cincinnati ahead in the top of the ninth. Pete Crow-Armstrong sent it to extras, however, with a two-run blast in the bottom half. After holding serve in the top of the tenth Chicago bunted the Manfred Man over and then accepted two intentional walks. That's good strategy because it creates force outs at every base, most especially home, thereby reducing the chance of a run scoring. The only problem: when you do that you have nowhere to put the next batter. Who, in this case was the red hot Michael Busch who walked on five pitches to give the Cubs a walkoff win. Sorry, Tito Francona, you kinda played yourself.

The Cubs have won all three games of this series so far in walkoff fashion. That'll eat at ya, man.

Guardians 3, Royals 1: Chase DeLauter singled in two in the fifth and a groundout from David Fry scored Cleveland's third run. Guardians pitchers held the Royals to one run on just four hits, with Joey Cantillo leading the way (5 IP, 3 H, 1 ER) and four relievers one-hitting the Royals over the final four. Almost as good as the Red Sox relievers did to Detroit, but not quite.

Mets 10, Rockies 5: A lot of offense for a game in which it was 41 degrees at first pitch and fell into the mid-30s by the end of things. Marcus Semien went 4-for-5 with a home run, a double, two RBI, and three runs scored and Juan Soto homered as well. The Mets are 4-1 to start their nine-game road trip which I figured would be Carlos Mendoza's Waterloo. The Rockies have lost six straight and seven of their last eight.

Pirates 1, Diamondbacks 0: You don't often wake up to see a score like this from a home Dbacks game, but not every Dbacks game features them facing Paul Skenes, who allowed only a pair of singles over eight innings while striking out seven and not walking a soul. His counterpart, Mike Soroka, was almost as good, but he gave up a solo homer to Brandon Lowe in the first that, quite unexpectedly, proved to be enough.

The Daily Briefing

Carlos Correa to undergo season-ending surgery

Yesterday I said that Carlos Correa's ankle injury looked bad and would cause him to miss considerable time. Turns out it was even worse than I thought, as the Astros announced yesterday that Correa has a torn tendon and will undergo season-ending surgery. Recovery time for the operation is expected to be six to eight months.

Correa sustained the injury while taking a swing during batting practice on Tuesday. He said that he “felt a pop” and then went down in pain. This, by the way, is not the ankle that had given him trouble for years and which caused him to fail physicals while a free agent. It was the other ankle.

Correa joins a lot of other Astros on the injured list, including the team's ace Hunter Brown, its closer Josh Hader, regular shortstop Jeremy Peña and catcher Yainer Diaz. Entering play yesterday the Astros were 15-22 and were just a game ahead of the Angels for last place in the AL West. My guess is that that's the only competitive race Houston will be in for the rest of the season.

Framber Valdez gets suspended

In a surprise to absolutely no one, Tigers starter Framber Valdez was suspended yesterday for hitting Trevor Story with a pitch during Tuesday night's game against the Red Sox. His sentence: six games. Though it was immediately reduced to five, on what is yet another one of those instant appeals that I don't quite understand, but whatever. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch also got a one-game suspension, which he served last night.

In addition to the game circumstances making his throwing at Story obvious – Valdez was getting shelled and the previous two batters had homered – a look at the pitch Valdez threw in the plunking makes it even more obvious. It was a four-seam fastball, and Valdez had not thrown a four-seamer all season long. A four-seamer has less lateral movement and is generally more controllable than Valdez's usual two-seamer. He threw it because he wanted to be sure he hit Story.

So, whether it be sooner or later, Framber, you're gonna miss a start.

Matt Boyd hurt himself playing with his kids

Here's one you don't see every day: Chicago Cubs starter Matthew Boyd injured his left meniscus while playing with his kids at home yesterday morning. He will undergo surgery. Craig Counsell told the press yesterday that, "[It was] kind of an innocent, going down to the ground and getting back up" injury. Which, hey, I get it. I never truly injured myself playing with my kids, but I did feel it on occasion.

Boyd's joins fellow starters Justin Steele and Cade Horton on the IL. Steele is due back soon. Horton is out for the year. Boyd's recovery timeline is not yet known, though the Cubs do expect him to be back some time this season.

Max Scherzer is confused

Yesterday Toronto Blue Jays starter Max Scherzer told reporters that he's confused about why the tendinitis in his forearm isn't getting better and that he's going to seek further opinions from more doctors. Scherzer:

"I can still tell there's something off in my arm. So, it's as confusing as anything I've ever had because, usually, you go get an MRI, you would see something. I would think that would show up, and yet there's nothing in there on an MRI. There's no strains; there is no inflammation per se. So, I'm going to have to talk to more doctors to figure out a course of action here . . . we've given it enough time outside of a start, like, I should be ramping back up."

Is anyone gonna tell him that this is just how bodies work after you turn 40? If y'all are afraid to tell him, I will. He's gotta know eventually. It doesn't make life any easier, but it does make it easier to accept.

Like, seriously: I strained my right deltoid muscle a few months ago. It feels fine at rest and for most things I do, but if I fully extend my arm to reach for something – a thing people do more often than you might think! – it friggin' kills. Maybe it always will? Maybe, like any other number of ailments I've experienced in the past 15 years, it'll just stop one day and I'll forget all about it? Hard to say, but that's the magic and beauty of middle age! Embrace it, Max. Embrace it!

Guest Post: Happy 10th Anniversary to Bartolo Colon's home run

By Dave Doyle

I was glancing at my phone when I heard the distinct pop of a bat making solid contact with a ball.

There seemed no particular reason to pay attention when Bartolo Colon stepped to the plate to face James Shields in the second inning of the New York Mets’ May 7, 2016 game at the San Diego Padres. The big lug was hitless on the season and had just two extra-base hits, both doubles, since joining the team in 2014.

Huh, looks like he got under that one.

I’ve been to 18 big-league ballparks in my day, beginning with Fenway Park while growing up in Boston and most recently adding Coors Field to the list. Petco Park is one of my favorites, to the degree that during my 15 years living in Los Angeles, if I had a day off and wanted to go to a game, I’d more often head to San Diego than go to Dodger Stadium.

He got it pretty good! That’s got to be heading foul, though.

Section 126 at Petco, the small triangular area kitty-cornered with the Western Metal Supply Co. warehouse down the left-field line, is my single favorite spot in any ballpark I’ve ever visited. If I could wave a magic wand and be transported to a major-league game, I’d find myself in Section 126, ideally leaning against the brick wall with beer in hand.  

Is that coming my way? It can’t be. This might land in the corner for — well, a double for nearly anyone else, but probably a long single for him.

The mammoth edifice looming 336 feet from home plate has got to be a tantalizing target for every right-hander who steps to the plate, which means, as a fan, there’s a much better than usual chance something is coming your way. It helped to be prepared at all times, like the guy who I once saw nonchalantly put down his nachos as a fly ball approached, open his backpack, catch the homer inside the bag, then put the bag down and resume eating as if that didn’t just happen.

You even need to be on guard, apparently, when the nearly-300-pound Colon, 17 days shy of his 43rd birthday and still homerless nearly two decades into his major-league career, is at the plate. 

Are you kidding me? Is this really coming right at me? This cannot be for real!

When the moment of truth arrived, I froze. My brain simply could not accept this was actually happening. My body shut down and wouldn’t let me make a play for the ball. Things seemed to play out in slow motion as I watched the ball take one hop off the concrete two seats over from me, then saw what looked something like a mosh pit break out. 

If you watch this Jomboy Media breakdown of the homer, around the 1:42 mark, when the camera zooms in on Section 126, you can see me, the tall dude in the hideously mismatched blue hat, grey shirt and maroon shorts, staring at the spot where the ball touched down as if a meteor had just landed from outer space:

I could have sworn I saw a little kid grab the ball when it bounced to my right, but the video shows an adult ending up with it, with a kid in the vicinity. Maybe he gave the ball to the kid later, and that’s why I remember it. Nearly everything about that moment was a blur — my only concrete memory is looking up at one point and seeing Colon waddling between second base and third.

A giddy sense of disbelieving delirium enveloped Petco, no doubt spurred by the hordes of Mets fans who seemed to have taken over the park (this was during the very long period of time in which the Padres sucked). Even the majority of San Diego fans seemed swept away by the coolness of the moment. When the pandemonium settled, everyone seemed to grasp they had just seen something they’d talk about for the rest of their lives.

In addition to being something no one who was there will ever forget, the homer was also consequential: Shields, who might end up with “guy who gave up Bartolo Colon’s only career homer” as the first line of his obituary, was shipped to the Chicago White Sox soon thereafter in a deal that sent prospect Fernando Tatis Jr. to the Padres. It’s not that hard to envision San Diego brass starting to work the phones the moment the homer touched down.

In addition to Colon’s legendary blast, Petco was also home, five years later, to what will probably go down as the last wonder-inducing pitcher homer hit by someone not named Shohei Ohtani. Career minor-leaguer and San Diego-area native Daniel Camarena blasted a grand slam to kick off a huge Padres comeback win over Washington, making him the first pitcher since 1898 to hit a granny for his first big-league hit.

It would be overwrought to claim that baseball was ruined when the National League implemented the DH in 2022. The position’s universal adoption was one of a number of recent changes, many of which have been good, like the pitch clock and bans on ridiculous fielding shifts. You’d have to pretend last year’s all-time epic World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays didn’t happen to make the case that new wrinkles, on the whole, have hurt the game.

But when the NL took bats out of pitchers’ hands, so too went the chance of experiencing improbable random moments like this one that went down when I showed up at my favorite spot in one of my favorite ballparks simply because I had a rare Saturday night off (I used to work as a reporter covering mixed martial arts, which is a whole ‘nuther essay) and decided I wanted to go to a game.

Colon’s career slash line was. 084/.092/.107 with five extra base hits in 326 plate appearances over 20 years, and I got to watch his only home run on a straight line from his bat to just a spot out of my reach. Being there in person when my Boston Red Sox clinched the World Series at Dodger Stadium in 2018 is my favorite moment in more than four decades attending MLB games, but this is an easy second. 

The fact there will never be another such moment feels like a another marker in corporate America’s ongoing enshittification, as everything spontaneous and joyful in life gets optimized out of existence with ruthless precision. And we’re all a little poorer for it. 

A Boston native, Dave Doyle is a former sports reporter who started at The Boston Globe and went on to cover combat sports for Fox Sports, Yahoo! Sports, SI.com and Vox Media. He currently lives in Fort Worth, Tex. and writes sports cards for Panini America. He can be found on Bluesky and can be reached at davedoyle.writer@gmail.com

Other Stuff

Somebody think of the people in multi-million dollar houses

I live very, very close to a major children's hospital. It's a multi-building complex that dominates the main drag closest to my neighborhood. Some of the hospital's buildings are best measured in yards, not miles, from my house. Indeed, if I want to, I can look out of my kitchen window and see the lit-up name of the place on the roof of the building closest to me. The absolute farthest away part of the hospital is the helipad, where life flights land fairly often. Per Google Maps, the helipad is a one mile walk from my front door, though it's less than that as the crow and the helicopter flies.

I'll admit that after 18 years in the suburbs it took a minute to get used to the helicopters where I now live. But not much more than a minute. I think I had tuned it all out in the space of a couple of days. After nearly three years here I rarely if ever notice it. It wasn't hard to get used to. Helping that adjustment process along, of course, was my knowledge any helicopter flying in to a children's hospital represents a dire situation where minutes could be the difference between a child's life or death. It's also the case that one of my own children was once a patient at that hospital. That sort of thing focuses the mind and gives one at least something of an idea of how the parents of the children in those helicopters feel when they're coming in over beautiful German Village. It makes one fully understand that the occasional sound of rotors is a comically low price to pay for living where I chose to live.

Someone should probably tell that to the people in Seattle's Laurelhurst neighborhood who, per this article in The Stranger, have spent over 30 years trying to limit helicopter landings at Seattle Children's Hospital:

Seattle Children’s is the go-to specialized pediatric care center for Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. When children from near and far away need urgent treatment, they’ll get swooped up by a helicopter and taken to Seattle Children’s. This, the affluent North Seattle neighborhood will tell you, is quite the nuisance.  

Such a nuisance that a neighborhood group wanted to make sure the hospital wasn’t landing flights on the helipad for non-emergency reasons, according to meeting minutes from 2021. “There needs to be a medical justification form for each flight (one was a broken leg for example),” said one member. In the six years of documented meetings The Stranger looked at, they had a lot more to say.

The people who live in Laurelhurst – or at the least the ones active in this effort – genuinely believe that too many helicopters land at the hospital and that they should, instead, be diverted to the farther-away helipad at the University of Washington, from where the patients would be driven the final mile or two to Children's. The article details over 30 years of other sorts of the community's nimbyism which, in addition trying to initially stop and then limit the use of the helipad, has included opposition to multiple hospital expansions as well.

It's probably worth noting at this point that Seattle Children's has been at its current location since 1953 and that it started landing helicopters there in 1992. Which means that absolutely no resident was living in this tony little enclave before the hospital was built and the vast majority of residents bought their homes knowing full well that helicopters were going to be flying overhead. If they didn't like that I'm sure they could've afforded to purchase in some other wealthy neighborhood. But they didn't. So screw them.

All I know for sure is that if one of my neighbors came to my door with a clipboard in their hands in an effort to organize action against the children's hospital near me – the children's hospital which saves thousands of young lives every year and which, once upon a time, saved my own child's life – I would be sorely tempted to do something that might require them to seek medical assistance of their own. Something that might, possibly, require them to be life-flighted there, now that I think about it.

Ted Turner: 1938-2026

Former Atlanta Braves manager Ted Turner died yesterday at the age of 87. He did some other things too.

And they were some weird and random other things! He won international sailing races, bought sports teams, married movie stars, invented cable news, brought southern wrestling to the masses, brought baseball broadcasts to folks who, like me, were living in places without baseball, gave a massive boost to classic movies and vintage cartoons, bought like 2/3 of Montana to preserve and restore literally millions of acres of prairie land, convinced a non-trivial number of people that bison burgers tasted pretty good, and supported the United Nations in ways that the United States couldn't be bothered to. I tend to believe the idea that the existence of billionaires represents a policy failure, but if we have to have billionaires, it's probably better to have mostly benign weirdos like Turner than the actual supervillains we have today.

I mean, read this unhinged 1978 Playboy interview with Turner and tell me if you think that guy had the attention span to be truly evil. He was extraordinarily messed up in 100 ways – and at the time of that interview seemed to be in desperate need of medication – but he was mostly just a chaos agent. Sure, for a few years there Turner was obsessed with colorizing black and white movies, but no one died because of that and he eventually got it out of his system. He said a lot of rather crazy and controversial things but I don't think any of them were as bad as the sorts of things Elon Musk tweets out on a random Thursday. Hell, some of the stuff he said actually seem pretty wise with the benefit of hindsight, even if you had to wade through a lot of insanity and bullshit to get to the good stuff.

A few years ago I wrote about the time Turner named himself Atlanta's manager. His tenure lasted one day, but it was a pretty fun day. The exercise also allowed me to note a couple of other things about his early years as the team's owner:

• Such as when Bowie Kuhn suspended Turner for a year for tampering with free agents after Turner promised to sign Gary Matthews “at any price.” I'm pretty sure that suspension, which was later repealed, was less about tampering and more about Kuhn and the other owners not liking Turner wanting to spend big bucks on free agents. And, in the event, he did sign Matthews;
• Such as when Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium debuted a new $1.5 million video board in 1977 that Turner installed for the specific purpose of running replays of calls that went against his team that he felt were blown in order to rile up fans. Such replays would soon be banned after umpires complained, and you still don't see those kinds of replays in ballparks very often;
• Such as when, in the early 1990s, when Bud Selig and the small market owners were spearheading the plan to bust the union and impose a salary cap and Turner took issue with it, saying "we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we're fucking it up." They didn't listen to him. They probably should have.

Turner eventually settled down to some and became a way more hands-off owner. That ended up being better for the club overall, but it wasn't as fun. And things got a lot more boring when he sold his team and his media empire in the Time-Warner merger in 1996. It became abjectly lame when Time-Warner flipped the club to Liberty Media a decade later. No small number of Atlanta baseball fans has wished that Turner still owned the club over the past 30 years.

Turner's funeral will be this Friday at 11:05. If it rains, mourners will be shown episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show" until the proceedings can resume. Afterward there will be a showing of "Two Mules for Sister Sara," so please stick around.

Rest in peace Ted Turner.

I couldn't think of a song that applied to Ted Turner, but the fact that the opening theme to 1980s Atlanta baseball has stuck in my head for the past several decades is something of a tribute to the guy all the same.

Have a great day everyone.