Cup of Coffee: November 13, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes are your Cy Young Award winners.

That's big news, of course, but I consider if far more notable that the Tampa Bay Rays announced yesterday that infielder Bob Seymour has been released to pursue a playing opportunity in Asia. Good luck to my man Bob – who I obsessed on for a couple of weeks after I watched him hit three homers in person at a Durham Bulls game in early August – who is gonna rattle some walls in Korea or wherever the hell he's going.

That leaves Major League Baseball, once again, without any Bobs. We used to be a proper country. We're not anymore.

The Daily Briefing

Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes are your Cy Young winners

There were no surprises when the Cy Young Awards were announced last night: Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers and Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates each took home the hardware.

Skenes, a unanimous winner, finished in third place in the voting in 2024. Skubal, who received 26 of 30 first-place votes, becomes the first repeat Cy Young winner since Jacob deGrom of the Mets won it in 2018 and 2019 and the first AL pitcher to win back-to-back Cy Youngs since Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez did it with the Red Sox in 1999 and 2000.

Skubal went 13-6 for the Tigers while posting an AL-leading 2.21 ERA and 187 ERA+. He also led the league in K/BB ratio (7.30), FIP (2.45), and BB/9 (1.5). While he did not lead the league in strikeouts he did set a career high with 241 in 195.1 innings of work. He tossed seven or more scoreless innings in nine of his 31 regular-season starts and had some excellent isolated stretches, including one in which he allowed just one run over 30.2 innings over four starts from May 25 to June 12 and another in which he tossed 19 scoreless innings from late June into July.

Following Skubal in the balloting was Garrett Crochet of the Red Sox who received the other four first-place votes and Hunter Brown of the Astros.

As for Skenes, his 10-10 record was highly misleading, resulting from a punchless Pirates offense that seemed to show up less when he was on the mound than when his teammates were for some reason. Beyond the win column he demonstrated pure dominance, however, posting an MLB-leading 1.97 ERA, a 217 ERA+, a 2.36 FIP, and the lowest home run rate in the league (0.5/9 IP). His 216 strikeouts in 187.2 innings were the second-most in the league and he finished in the top five in the the NL in hits per nine innings, walks per nine innings, and innings pitched. 

Finishing behind Skenes were Cristopher Sánchez of the Phillies, who received all 30 second-place votes, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who got 16 of the 30 third place votes.

Skubal and Skenes are widely considered to be the two best starting pitchers in the game. As such, I don't think there is much room to argue with either of them taking home the 2025 Cy Young Awards.

Pat Murphy, Stephen Vogt named Managers of the Year

This is obviously a day late due to my not publishing a newsletter yesterday, but Brewers manager Pat Murphy and Guardians manager Stephen Vogt were named Managers of the Year by the BBWAA on Tuesday evening. Each of them were repeat winners, having taken home the same hardware in 2024. Each of them have only managed for two seasons in the bigs and each of them have been named Manager of the Year both times.

This is more understandable when you remember that (a) the Manager of the Year Award is almost exclusively based on a good team having low pre-season expectations for some reason and the sense that a manager did more with fewer financial resources; and (b) the Guardians and Brewers, despite each having a nice core of talent, continue to feature low payrolls, which makes their success seem like it has come despite the front office rather than because of it. We can debate whether that's actually true or not, but the voters clearly credit Vogt and Murphy for their team's division titles in 2024 and 2025 more than they credit the people putting the teams together.

Not to take away from what Murphy and Vogt did this past season.

For his part, Murphy presided over a Brewers team that was excellent defensively and on the base paths while featuring a strong and, for the most part, optimally-deployed bullpen. Good performance in those areas is traditionally credited to coaching and managing and when you see bad performance in those areas it's not hard to find a number of contests throughout the season in which a manager's decision can be picked apart. Murphy ran a tight ship and was in charge of the team with the best record in baseball, so he's a pretty good pick, even if one might argue that second-place finisher Terry Francona did a great job with a Reds team that no one really thought would snag a Wild Card.

Vogt's award was no doubt a function of the Guardians' near-miracle comeback down the stretch, in which they won the Central devision despite being back 15.5 games just before the All-Star break and 12.5 games back in late August. The Guardians went 20-7 in September, and at that point you pretty much knew he was getting the award, even before factoring in Cleveland's low payroll and the fact that the team's ownership doesn't care a lick about winning baseball games.

Vogt is the first manager to win the AL Manager of the Year Award in consecutive campaigns since Kevin Cash did it with Tampa Bay in 202o and 2021. Murphy is the first Senior Circuit skipper to have pulled off the feat since Bobby Cox did it with Atlanta in 2004 and 2005.

The Rays will be back in Tropicana Field next season

The Tampa Bay Rays announced yesterday that they will return to a repaired and updated Tropicana Field for the 2026 season. This after playing their entire 2025 home schedule at Single-A/Spring Training ballpark Steinbrenner Field in Tampa due to the damage to the Trop caused by Hurricane Milton in October 2024.

The team's home opener is scheduled to be played against the Chicago Cubs on April 6 after the Rays start the season on the road. The club said that, among the upgrades to the old place, there will be an expanded main video board, new video displays behind home plate and along both foul poles, a new sound system, and updated suite interiors. Makes me think the Rays, whose previous owners spent years looking for a new ballpark only to blow up a deal they had for one a little less than a year ago, aren't going to be moving for a while.

Joe Maddon's sour grapes

Joe Maddon, who has spent the last three years out of baseball following his leading the Angels to a .477 winning percentage, has some opinions about the San Francisco Giants hiring Tony Vitello to be their new manager despite has having only coached in the college ranks.

Maddon, who joined KNBR 680's "Murph & Markus" yesterday, said that he was "insulted" by the Giants decision to hire Vitello, and compared it to New York electing Zohran Mamdani mayor, which he also pretty obviously thinks is a bad idea. Maddon:

"Quite frankly, I'm using the word 'insulting' only from the perspective that you don't have to have any kind of experience on a professional level to do this job anymore. Because when I was coming up, you had to have all that, you had to go through the minor leagues, you had to ride your buses. I was a scout, I started in 1981, I finally get a managerial job in 2006. There was a rite of passage, a method to get to that point. So to think somebody can just do what you took 20-some years to be considered qualified to, it is kind of insulting . . . I guess the overarching point is, in today's world, prerequisites to get jobs of this caliber, even jobs like the Mayor job of New York City now, it doesn't require the years of experience that you may have had to have gone through in the past. I think communication skills, perceived leadership skills, those are the kind of things that become more valid or important and not necessarily having kind of like, internal knowledge, working knowledge of the craft at hand, which would be Major League Baseball or running a city. It's not just baseball, it permeates throughout the entire world right now."

I think it's OK to be skeptical about whether a guy with no professional baseball experience whatsoever is going to do OK in his new job, but Maddon's comments here aren't really that. They're a grievance that someone got a job that it took Maddon 25 years to get. Maddon has no better information than you or I do about how Vitello will do, but he's definitely angry that he didn't jump through the hoops that Maddon had to. Those are two very different things.

I doubt he's alone among baseball lifers in this opinion, but it's all rather disappointing coming from Maddon, who spent a long time giving off the impression that he appreciated new ideas and new approaches and that he wasn't your cliche "back in my day" kind of baseball dude. To be sure, he began trending in that direction after he joined the Angels and he didn't have forward-thinking bosses above him his team's front office like he had in Chicago and Tampa Bay, but I still would've expected Maddon to be more open to the idea of someone from an unconventional background succeeding than some of his contemporaries.

Angels VP says MLB was aware of Eric Kay's drug addiction before Tyler Skaggs died

The civil case brought by Tyler Skaggs' family against the Los Angeles Angels continues to drag on. Like, really drag on, as the judge is getting upset at the lawyers for taking way, way too long. Not that we're not getting interesting stuff out of it.

For example, on Monday, Angels VP Deborah Johnston, the team's top human resources executive, testified that the Angels were working with Major League Baseball to treat Eric Kay’s drug addiction years before Skaggs died. She testified that Kay, then the Angels’ director of communications, “was drug tested under the MLB policy, not the Angels policy. She said, "when we go through an investigation and we find somebody has used illegal substances on property, one of the options is to terminate, but another option is to work with MLB, as we did in this case.” Per The Athletic, which has had a reporter at the trail every day, this is the first time a witness has said that Major League Baseball was on notice about Eric Kay’s drug addiction.

Major League Baseball issued a statement denying that it had any awareness of Kay's drug use or, for that matter, anything that was going on in the Angels' front office prior to Skaggs' death. That said, the way in which the Angels cleaned house afterward, with multiple team attorneys and other officials being let go – and the fact that former Angels' executive Tim Mead suddenly resigned as the Baseball Hall of Fame President after Kay was implicated in Skaggs' death – has always made me think that MLB was way more aware of how much of a mess the Angels were than they've ever let on.

I haven't been following the case on a day-by-day basis, but just about every report I've seen so far makes the Angels look pretty bad in all of this. And now it's spinning out collateral damage for the league. Makes me think that someone is gonna lean on Arte Moreno to settle this thing pretty soon.

David Fletcher retires

David Fletcher's retirement announcement does not really merit a full writeup by me, so just know that:

• He played seven seasons in the bigs, mostly for the Angels, parlaying his lone good-hitting season in the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign into a $25 million contract;
• When it became apparent that his bat wouldn't carry him on a big league roster he tried to become a knuckleball pitcher and that didn't work; and
• He was prominently mentioned as having placed bets with the same illegal bookie that Shohei Ohtani's interpreter placed bets with yet, for some reason, Major League Baseball didn't so much as offer a two-sentence memo suggesting that they had a problem with it even though Fletcher was still an active player at the time.

A full career, that I can definitely say.

The Giants new hitting coach . . .

. . . is named Hunter Mense. He was the Blue Jays assistant hitting coach until yesterday.

I don't care too terribly much about hitting coaches – good for him and the Giants on the hire – but when I heard that there was now a guy on the Giants named "Hunter Mense" I immediately thought that that was a fake name that Hunter Pence used circa 2014 when he checked into hotel rooms on the road.

Other Stuff

The walls are closing in

A new trove of damning emails in which it is pretty clearly stated that Donald Trump knew about Jeffrey Epstein's pedophilia and sex-trafficking ring –  and that Trump himself regularly took part in it – was released yesterday. One of the emails featured Epstein saying, “of course [Trump] knew about the girls” that Epstein procured for his illegal activities. Another said that Trump “spent hours” with one of the victims at Epstein’s house. There's a lot more in there too, and people were still poring over them when I knocked off last night.

You know that this stuff freaks Trump out and that he knows that his involvement with Epstein could cook him, because within an hour or two of those emails being leaked Trump called Members of Congress to the literal goddamn Situation Room of the White House – the room which is typically used for secret national security planning – to pressure them into covering all of this up for him.

Meanwhile, both his press secretary and a Congressional Republican spokesperson accused the Democrats who released the emails as “cherry picking” in order “to generate clickbait,” yet none of them claimed that the emails were fake or denied the obvious implications of their content. They likewise did what losing parties in litigation always do: they released tens of thousands of documents of their own in an effort to flood the zone and put out the fire. Of course, if they had something exculpatory or damning vis-a-vis someone else they would've just released that rather than backing up a truck full of documents. It was a desperate move.

A big part of what has driven me insane over the past decade of Trumpism is how none of the rules seem to apply to him. How, almost every single day, he can say or do something that, prior to 2016, would've ended literally any other person's political career and, in many cases, would've landed them in prison, yet Trump just keeps skating on, subject to his own personal law of gravity. So the fact that he and his people are pretty clearly shaken by Epstein-related stuff whenever it comes out is pretty damn telling. It's almost the sort of thing that gives a person hope that, eventually, we can bury this motherfucker, metaphorically or otherwise.

John Darnielle

GQ published an outstanding feature article about John Darnielle, the founder, singer, guitarist, and everything else of consequence behind The Mountain Goats.

It's a very long article, but if you're even passingly familiar with The Mountain Goats it's absolutely worth your time. It's particularly good if you're a 50-something year-old writer who skews pretty normie and lives a comfortable and conventional-seeming domestic existence while still finding the same sort of meaning and purpose in your work now that you did when you were young, but you certainly don't have to be one of those wretches to enjoy it.

And yes, it's paywalled, but if you have Apple News you can read it.

"Pluribus"

As I mentioned the other day, I decided to watch the first couple of episodes of "Pluribus" – or is it "Plur1bus?" – on my flight home on Tuesday. And, hoo boy, so far so great. I will not talk substantively about it yet because it's a show people should experience as cold as possible, but I will make one non-spoilery observation.

A lowkey great thing about "Pluribus" so far is that unlike almost every other sci-fi/horror/mystery show or movie – including Vince Gilligan's own "X-Files" – the characters in this show ask the sorts questions real people would ask and behave the way that real people would behave in the face of something crazy or scary happening. Like, they don't just run or scream or immediately decide to fight who they perceive to be their enemy reflexively in order to maintain drama or suspense or what have you.

Specifically, there's a scene I won't say anything about other than it involves a television and a lot of plot exposition. People who have seen it know what I'm talking about. It's a scene that, in a horror or sci-fi movie, I would fully expect the main character to not engage or inquire or ask the many questions about what's going on that the viewer is obviously meant to have at that point. Rather, you'd get a lot of "WHAT IS HAPPENING?!" exclamations or maybe someone smashing the television or running out of the house in the most dramatic way possible. Or, alternatively, the people or entities in a position to provide an explanation would, instead, speak cryptically and never really get to the heart of the matter because they're too busy trying to come off as sinister. All of that, which you see in TV shows and movies all the time, has the effect of delaying the communication of information and keeping everything annoyingly and unnecessarily mysterious.

In "Pluribus," however, the character in question responds how I think most real people would respond and asks questions that I, as a viewer, had in the moment. There was no sense whatsoever that information is being withheld from the audience just for the sake of withholding it and building suspense. Other, more subtle versions of this straightforward business have happened in this show as well, almost from the get-go.

To be clear, I fully expect there to be all kinds of misdirection and plot reversals and stuff that will make my observation here look silly, because that's how shows and movies like "Pluribus" work. But, two episodes in, "Pluribus" is confounding genre expectations in subtle ways that I find to be rather refreshing. There is a satisfying flummoxing of expectations about character behavior that I'm pretty happy to see. When the credits rolled after each of the two episodes which have dropped so far I thought, “I have no idea where this is is going.” That is not something that happens very often in a genre that tends to have well-worn formulas and rules.

I cannot wait until a new episode hits tomorrow. Which is also great, because Fridays are the perfect night for this kind of show to drop. Which is a big reason why "X-Files" was at its best before it moved to Sundays back in the day.

Stolen air passenger valor

Our return trip from Spain on Tuesday ended up being about as smooth as one could hope for, even if it didn't feel like it would be smooth for a good bit of it. And it ended with me feeling like I did something wrong even though I didn't do anything wrong.

The announcement from Sean Duffy that a bunch of flights would be canceled because of government shutdown-driven air-traffic control staffing issues happened just after we left for our vacation last week. As a result, we were a bit stressed about getting home at the end of the trip. Based on what we read we were confident that our Madrid to Boston flight would be fine, but getting from Boston to Columbus on our 7PM flight on Tuesday evening felt like it'd be a crap shoot.

Allison has a premium-tier membership on the Flighty App. It allows a person to easily track plane positioning, equipment changes, and flight scheduling and rescheduling in an almost insanely granular level. The upshot is that, if you know how the app works and you understand a few basic things about how U.S. air traffic works, you can predict delays and cancellations and stuff even before your airline tells you what's happening and well before most other passengers know what's going on. To be sure, I'm personally an idiot about this business. I find Flighty to be a stress-inducing app which provides almost too much information for my very slow, very linear-thinking brain, so I don't even have it. But Allison is a god-tier travel planner so she's all over it before and during travel.

Allison had been tracking the Boston-to-Columbus flight in the days before we headed home, and it felt dicey. While it did not seem like the FAA-imposed cancellations were affecting it, the flight was routinely very late and it was, in fact, cancelled on Monday night, the night before we were to take it. It's a commuter route on a small regional jet so if anything is gonna get axed, that flight it gonna get axed. As a result of that – and because that 7PM departure is the last scheduled flight to Columbus from Boston each evening – Allison made some contingency plans. First, she reserved a hotel room for Tuesday night. Then she identified Wednesday flights that could work so that we might switch to them before the airline tried to switch 75 people once a cancellation officially happened and chaos reigned. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, don't you know.

While en route from Spain to the U.S, Allison figured out that the plane that would be handling the Boston-to-Columbus route that night had been delayed forever in Charlotte, then was stopped with a lot of other traffic at LaGuardia because of high winds. It was still being listed as on-time from Boston, but common sense and experience made it abundantly clear that we would be facing, at minimum, a two-hour delay but more likely three hours or more, and a cancellation seemed very much on the table.

Once through customs, we sought out a Delta desk agent about it. If you're polite and seem like you know what you're talking about, the good agents will tell you, informally, what delays and cancellations are likely to happen before they're official and can help you change your itinerary before everyone else rushes to do it. So we got to the counter where Allison expressed our skepticism about the 7PM flight given what was happening with the plane.

This agent, however, flatly told us "your flight is still on time." Allison politely countered by saying that we understand that that's still the official status, but that it seemed pretty clear that the status would soon change and, hey, what then? "Your flight is still on time" they said again, "there's nothing you need to do." Rather than argue, Allison told the agent that we'd just like to switch to a Wednesday morning flight. The agent, without looking, said "that will cost you a lot of money" which, in addition to coming off really rude and dismissive, was factually wrong for several reasons having to do with Allison's Delta status, how we booked, and how the airlines have been handling changes this past week in light of the air-traffic/shutdown chaos. Allison, not wanting to fight with this person, said "we'll deal with it ourselves," and we walked away from the counter. Less than 30 seconds after we did so the board changed to note that our scheduled flight was delayed for two hours. That didn't surprise us, obviously, but it must've been jarring as hell to that gate agent.

When we noticed the board change, however, we noticed something else: a much-earlier Boston-to-Columbus flight – one which we never even looked at because it was scheduled to leave two hours before we were set to arrive from Spain – had itself been delayed for over three hours and had still not left. We decided not to deal with the desk agent again. Instead, we went through security to the gate to see if it was actually gonna go and to see if we could get on it. And there it was at Gate 2, originally set for a 2:30 departure but now set to leave at 5:40PM. It was about 5:10PM at this point and the gate area was filled with miserable-looking people. The Delta gate agent, unlike the desk agent, was fantastic and put us on it. The lengthy delay that made everyone at that gate miserable had served to be a great benefit to us. Of course we did our best not to look ecstatic about it.

So, we took that flight and got home way before we were originally scheduled to be home. And because Delta's computer system apparently treated everyone on that earlier flight as if they had always been booked on it and had been waiting three hours, both Allison and I were sent a QR Code with a meal voucher that does not appear to have an expiration date and seems like it'll work at any airport, not just Boston. So, even if we had scored a coup and had an unexpectedly BETTER flight experience which got us home even EARLIER than we had planned, we were treated like poor, put-upon people who had been sitting at a gate at the Boston airport all day rather than two lucky people who just strolled up and hopped on at the last minute. As I sit here on Wednesday morning writing about this I almost feel guilty. Like I have stolen air passenger valor or something.

But I don't feel too bad about it. Because when I woke up yesterday morning I looked at what happened with the 7PM flight we were supposed to have been on. The one which the desk agent insisted, against all facts, was "still on-time":

So that saved us many, many hours of airport hell. Or a night's stay at a Boston airport hotel and a bunch of flight re-jiggering yesterday morning.

Just living a charmed life, I suppose.

Have a great day everyone.