Cup of Coffee: October 15, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

As you are reading this I am about to get on a train in Frankfurt to get up to Amsterdam, where Allison and I will be until we get home very, very late Tuesday night. I will still be checking in with postseason updates and observations and any major baseball news while I'm gone, but most of the rest of today's, tomorrow's, Monday's, Tuesday's, and Wednesday's newsletters will consist of responses to the great many mailbag questions you sent in last week.

A lot of the questions are about baseball. A lot of them are about random nonsense. Which means the subject matter will be pretty similar to typical newsletters, except instead of me responding to the news to write it, I'll be responding to your prompts. Which is actually more fun and interesting but I don't think they'll allow me to remain a member in good standing in the International Brotherhood of Bloggers if I do that, and the advice column business isn't unionized so that's probably out.

So, sit back, relax, and watch me totally mail it in in response to you literally mailing it in.

And That Happened

Brewers 6, Dodgers 2: Quote of the year from Max Muncy after this game:

"It's a pretty simple answer. We're playing like shit, and they're playing great. No reason to overcomplicate it."

No lies detected.

I was over the Atlantic Ocean during this game but, weirdly, I had free WiFi. Thank you Singapore Airlines.* So while I could, obviously, not see the game I could follow along with it via various Gamecast products, depending on whichever worked best with the always-dicey but nonetheless welcome in-flight WiFi.

*We flew Singapore to Frankfurt and we're taking a train from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. The only way you can travel like we do is to look for the best deals first and if it causes you to do weird things and go a bit out of your way, well, that's what you do. It's actually a lot of fun.

Anyway, if the Dodgers are gonna put up a fight in this series they should probably think about getting around to it. There certainly wasn't much of it here as Brewers starter Robert Gasser blanked them for five innings. Will Smith hit a two-run double off of Abner Uribe in the sixth but then DL Hall held them scoreless for two and a third, and Trevor Megill closed it out in the final inning and a third. The Dodgers offense continued not to show in this series. Five hits, with Smith's double the only one going for extra bases. As Max Muncy said: they're playing like shit.

On offense, a lot of people are probably gonna talk about Dave Roberts leaving Blake Snell in too long, as he started the seventh with a one-run lead, walked a guy, and then gave up back-to-back homers to Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell. And sure, maybe he should've been out of there by then, but when you have no run support it kinda doesn't matter. The Brewers' adding a few runs in late innings seems inevitable and, again: the Dodgers are playing like shit. They've scored seven runs in three games and that isn't gonna cut it.

Offensively it was feast or famine for Milwaukee, but the feasting well-outweighed the famine. Dodgers pitchers struck out 12 Brewers batters but in addition to those seventh inning homers Jackson Chourio went deep on the first pitch of the game, they got a run on a couple of singles and a wild pitch in the eighth, and Joey Ortiz singled in run number six in the top of the ninth. Brewers batters only walked twice so this wasn't even a Three True Outcomes kind of victory. Two outcomes was plenty.

Malwaukee has a 3-0 lead and the Dodgers have looked deader than Vaudeville. It's not if Milwaukee is gonna win the pennant and end the idea of a Dodgers three-peat. It's when.

Related: Miguel Rojas will very soon need a new pair of cleats:

Elsewhere:

• As you no doubt know by now, the original times for today's games have changed. The Rays-Guardians game in Cleveland has shifted from a 6PM start to a 1PM start due to a poor weather forecast in Cleveland tonight. And, since there is no longer a risk of that game bleeding into the Brewers-Dodgers game, that one has been moved up an hour, from 9PM Eastern/6PM Pacific to 8PM/5PM.
• The Phillies named Don Mattingly their permanent manager, signing him to a two-year contract. Once Alex Cora told them he wasn't interested they seem to have lost the desire to do a proper search. Mattingly led the Phillies to a 79-55 record after taking over in late April. Which is fine, but he didn't make Philly fans too happy, what with his overly-sunny disposition, to the point of comical denial, in the face of the team's late-season collapse and his over-reliance on a small number of relievers and the like. Honestly, though, I don't know if anyone else would really want that job seeing as though the club is pretty clearly in the beginnings of a competitive decline and whoever is at the helm won't be around when it returns to whatever passes for glory in Philadelphia. If you're gonna have a caretaker manager it may as well be one who knows the parking situation;
• The Astros made the worst-kept secret in baseball official: Joe Espada has been fired. Or officially announced that his contract will not be renewed, which, same difference. As I mentioned the other day – Yesterday? I have no idea what day it is right now – they gave him permission to talk to the Mariners. They would've given him permission to go anywhere;
• Rawlings and Major League announced the finalists for the Gold Glove Awards yesterday. As is often the case with awards, the term “finalists” is misleading. I’m pretty sure that the winners have already been decided and that these are just the top three vote getters at each position as opposed to guys who are actually facing off in a final round, but if they wanna build anticipation for it, go for it. Not that they're really good at that. I can't remember if it was 2024 or 2020, but one year they held the broadcast awarding the Gold Gloves on election night, when about zero people were paying attention;
• Over at The Columbia Journalism Review Nicole Noren, an award-winning former ESPN producer, talks about how she couldn't remain at the network once the business side of the company went all-in with the promotion of sports gambling and the editorial side began rejecting and watering down stories that tried to cover gambling addiction. It was particularly galling in her case as she had multiple family members who struggled with sports gambling, including her brother who lost everything and died unhoused on the streets of Las Vegas. She tried to pitch stories about the issue and they rejected them out of hand so she quit. She, quite accurately, noted how much pressure there is on journalists who work for major sports media companies, all of which have made themselves dependent on gambling revenue, to avoid the issue entirely.

Mailbag!

On the CBA and lockout

Q: What is your expectation for how the CBA works out and when it works out? Does it change if a small market Rays or Guardians team wins the World Series vs the Dodgers winning again? – Matt

A: I got a great many questions in which I was asked, in one way or another, how I think the CBA negotiations are going to go, whether we'll have a lockout, how long that lockout will last, and whether the outcome of this year's postseason has any bearing on it. Matt gets the credit for asking it because his question came in first, but consider this an answer to the couple dozen of you who asked it as well.

First off, do not believe for one moment that Rob Manfred's and the owners' position on anything will change if the lower-revenue Brewers, Rays, or Guardians win it all instead of the crazy-revenue Dodgers three-peating. Yes, the owners have long been characterizing the need for a salary cap and their willingness to do whatever it takes to get it as necessary because baseball is an allegedly unfair game in which only the rich teams have a chance. Yes, a lot of pretty bright people seem to think that the outcome of the World Series will impact the CBA talks. But Rob Manfred and the owners neither believe it themselves nor do they particularly care about who wins the World Series, regardless of what they're saying.

Baseball's owners want what every CEO in America wants: they want to limit their labor costs as much as possible while making profit margins as predictable as possible. That's it. That's what they want. That's what nearly every single company, from Amazon to Starbucks to the big tech firms, and everyone in between seeks to do. That's why corporate and tech executives and business-aligned politicians have aggressively promoted AI. It's all about cracking down on labor, organized or not, in an effort to limit wages, limit benefits, and to otherwise render the line items related to workers as predictable and invariable as possible which, in turn, allows one to more accurately predict future profits. These efforts have only accelerated in the wake of the pandemic, when workers obtained a modest and temporary measure of leverage and independence. It's worth noting that peasants in post-Black Death Europe experienced the same sort of thing! Those poor sods got a poll tax and a violent crackdown in response to their assertion of rights. Coders and customer service reps at Amazon get AI-driven redundancy and wage and benefit pressure apart from all the killing and everyone being covered in mud and shit all the time, it's basically the same thing.

Major League baseball owners aren't dealing with peasants or coders, but they want the same thing because they've always wanted that thing. In some ways they're even more desperate for it because they see how their peers in the NFL, NBA, and NHL got that thing and are incrementally more rich than they would've been without it. And no, it doesn't matter if the extra money would be rounding error for these billionaires. When there's another boy with a balloon these spoiled children want a balloon as well and if they don't get it you'll never stop hearing about it.

Except Rob Manfred and the baseball owners can't come out and say that. They need a P.R. spin, so that they can justify to fans why they need to imperil the 2027 baseball season for it. "Because that other boy has a balloon" won't fly, but "because only the Dodgers can win the World Series anymore" plays well with a lot of sports fans and talk radio hosts and reporters. So that's the line. But if events don't cooperate – such as the Guardians or Rays beating the Brewers in the World Series – they'll just dismiss it by saying it was the exception that proves the rule or otherwise tweak their rhetoric to explain why the Dodgers not winning again doesn't change anything.

Will there be considerable hypocritical inconsistency tied up in all of that? Obviously! But, in the Age of Trump, liars and assholes have figured out that there is no penalty to be paid for hypocrisy anymore. Indeed, the only people who get into trouble these days are the people who admit fault or let on that they know that they had been dishonest. Only losers care about intellectual consistency in the Warring Twenties. Mendacity and nihilism is all the rage!

So, however fun it may be to say that the Brewers, Guardians, or Rays beating L.A. will impact the CBA talks or stick one to ol' Rob Manfred and the owners, know that they do not care. It will not affect their strategy or their desires. They'd be gearing up for this exact same fight and talking about the allegedly dire need for a salary cap even if the Rockies, Reds, and Athletics had won the past three World Series. Everything else is theater.

All of that aside, here's what I think will happen:

• The CBA expires on December 1 at 11:59PM. The owners will lock out the players effective at midnight, December 2;
• There will be increasingly acrimonious and unfruitful negotiations from before then until everyone breaks for Christmas. This will be the time when the sides do their best to explain, publicly, how unreasonable the other side is being;
• Things will quiet down a great deal in January, and from then until well into February it will seem like an agreement will never be reached;
• In early March, the owners will begin to experience revenue loss. No one will be buying tickets, no one will be going to spring training games with just minor leaguers playing, and none of the counter-programming the league set up over a year prior will be particularly successful;
• The owners – many of whom are leveraged like crazy and have debt payments to make – will be staring at serious, serious revenue loss in a matter of weeks. And no, it doesn't matter that most of them are billionaires and can cover the debts of the holding companies which own their teams with personal funds. Billionaires DO NOT pay money out of their own pockets if there is even the slightest chance that it can be avoided. It's simply not the done thing. To do so will get you disinvited to all the good billionaire parties and orgies and stuff;
• By mid-to-late March great movement will be made, primarily because the owners will drop their demand for a salary cap. A new CBA will then be hammered out relatively quickly and an extremely abbreviated spring training will be held. That may not happen in quite enough time for Opening Night on March 24, but they'll race to get as close to it as possible. They may very will figure out how to squeeze in a 162-game season like they did in 2022, in fact, but at worst they'll do a 144-154-game season like 1995.

Maybe it won't go that way. I don't know. But if I had to tell a mysterious, elderly bridge-keeper how I think it'll go in order to secure safe passage, that'd be what I'd tell them.

Baseball Memories

Q: What is your first baseball memory? – Kathryn B

A: Memories are weird things and they can totally be fake.

When I was very young my mother told me about how, when they brought me home from the hospital, I was crying and crying and that my brother, then two years-old, was annoyed and said he wanted to go to our grandma's house in order to get away from me. Obviously I don't remember that because I was like three days old. And obviously my brother doesn't remember that because he was barely two. But at some point over the years I created a false memory of it – as did he! – because we heard our mom tell us that story several times when we were of a very young and impressionable age. Is that my first memory? No, of course not. But in some ways it sorta is!

Baseball memories work like that for a lot of people. They say they remember seeing Chris Chambliss hit that big home run in Game 5 of the 1976 ALCS, but it's probably because their dad told them about them being there or watching it on TV with him when they were too young to remember. TV highlight packages do the rest of the heavy lifting.

I think I'm mostly immune to that with respect to baseball because my parents are not and never have been baseball fans. They did take me to some games when I was very young, but those were family outings driven by my great uncle/defacto grandfather Harry, who was the big Detroit Tigers guy and had the ticket hookup. So my parents can say that they took me to my first Tigers game on the Fourth of July 1978 – and we do have documentary evidence of that game – but I don't remember anything about it because I was too young to remember anything specific and they wouldn't have told me much about it because they were there for the family outing, not the baseball as such.

I do, however, remember going to a game on June 17, 1979, when the Tigers played the California Angels and Alan Trammell hit a home run, after which he became my baseball hero. Yes, I had to go back and piece together the date later, when Retrosheet became a thing, but I remember the Angels and the Trammell home run, neither of which my parents or even my brother remember, so it has to be a genuine memory. After I presented them with my memory and my Retrosheet evidence, my folks were reasonably certain that corresponded with a trip we took to the ballpark with Uncle Harry, so I think that has to be it.

There are other, earlier, and more impressionistic memories. For example, I remember messing with some baseball cards we cut off the back of a package of Hostess Twinkies and the weird 3D cards that came in Kellogg's cereal that predated that 1979 game. I also remember listening to Tigers games on WJR in my bedroom at night because I didn't like being in a quiet, dark room and my mom let me fiddle with the radio. Those radio games almost certainly predate the Trammell home run game, but those aren't really concrete memories to which I can apply a date as much as they were ongoing impressions from the late 1970s. So we'll call that Angels-Tigers game in 1979 my first baseball memory.

Joy

Q: What brings you joy during these times? – Mike Higgins

A: Joy has been damn hard to come by of late, that I can tell you.

It's not just because [gestures at everything], though that doesn't help. Regular readers have heard me talk about how I've dealt with depression over the past year. As I've mentioned, for me depression manifests itself less as sadness and blackness and more as flatness and anhedonia. So even when I'm doing or experiencing things I tend to enjoy I'm not really feeling it. It can be something as simple as looking at a sunset. Indeed, this actually happened a couple of months ago.

It was one of those late summer days where the haze made for a really great goddamn sunset one evening. I was in my living room, the windows of which face west, and I noticed it out of the corner of my eye. So I got off my couch, walked to the window, and looked at it. But I wasn't really experiencing it. It was like I was watching myself watch a sunset and commenting on how I should be experiencing it. I had an incessant inner monologue going that went basically like this:

This sunset is objectively beautiful. You're supposed to be enjoying this sunset. I wonder if anyone is actually looking at this and enjoying it. Man, it'd sure be nice to feel what one is supposed to feel looking at this sunset. Hmm, if Allison walks in and sees me looking at the sunset, how am I going to respond? What does one say when one looks at a beautiful sunset? I think I'll say "look at the sunset, Kazoo. Isn't it nice?" Hmm, if that happens I should be careful not to sound like I'm too into it or it will be weird. Maybe just a casual "nice sunset, huh?" Yeah, that'll work. That will keep her from worrying about me.

Brains are positively fucking stupid.

I talked to my therapist about it the following week and since then we've been talking about how I can get out of my head and just try to feel. Things like the "five senses" exercise where you stop and observe your surroundings and think of five things you can see, four you touch, three you hear, two you smell, etc. etc. in an effort to just observe and feel as opposed to intellectualizing everything and remaining detached. There a re also various physical reconnection strategies like planting your feet and being aware of yourself, setting timers, micro-pauses, etc. It feels corny to talk about all of that but they help. It's about trying to get yourself to a place where, when you are experiencing something nice or even joyful, you're able to take a step back and offer up one of those Vonnegut-esque "if this isn't nice I don't know what is" sentiments.

I've had some success to that end. It's not perfect yet, but I feel like at least know how to be better about just clearing my mind and meeting my experiences for what they are.

Anyway, some examples of joy I've felt of late:

• Anna has been back in Columbus since May and we meet up for dinner or go to a movie or something and it's wonderful. Carlo and I bought tickets to go see the new Godzilla movie when it comes out in early November and I'm looking forward to that more than I look forward to vacations. My kids are so damn cool, they make me so happy, and any time I see them I get a spring in my step;
• Vacations have been nice. You all know that Allison and I travel a good bit – we're traveling now! – and while the experiences themselves are enjoyable, I think it's the context change that helps me more than anything. I sort of forget everything for a few days when I travel and I've needed that;
• Going to my parents' house every Saturday morning for coffee. I'm usually there about two hours, sometimes a bit longer, and we eat pastries of some kind and just shoot the shit. We talk about stuff in the news, usually a day or two after I'd first heard it, which helps me rethink and recontextualize some of that stuff, usually for the better. We talk about what I've been reading – usually history these days – and I get to play professor about medieval history and Golden Age Hollywood stuff, which my parents seem to enjoy. And of course just spending time with them is nice. A lot of people my age don't have their folks around anymore. I realize and appreciate that I'm very lucky that I do;
• As I said in Tuesday's recap of Game One of the Guardians-Rays series:

I watched a lot of this game on mute while listening to The Mountain Goats 2025 concept album/rock opera "Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan." I've decided that it's the Official Album of A Certain Kind of Person's Midlife Crisis.™ It's about the predicament of existence, surviving it, aging, coming to terms with one's place in the world, confronting mortality with clarity and grace, and making sure that we all take care of one another while we can. It's sad. It's also joyous and triumphant and true. It makes me cry a good, warm kind of cry whenever I'm worried that I haven't felt anything for a while.

I was gonna expand on that a bit for today but I think I covered it pretty well in the recap I spit out in like 49 seconds on Monday night. Anyway: that Mountain Goats album has been saving my life lately and giving me joy. And as I sit here writing this in the airport on Wednesday, I just realized that The Mountain Goats played Utrecht, Netherlands tonight (i.e. Wednesday night), so I missed the chance to see them by ONE DAMN DAY. Sigh. If you need me I'll be grabbing for equanimity and inspiration in the face of darkness by listening to "Dawn of Revelation" a dozen times while shout-singing "NO ONE HERE IS GONNA DIE ALONE!"

• The cooler weather. I talked about how I don't do well in the summer, but over the past couple of weeks it's been nice and crisp most of the time and I've gone out for some of those 3-4 miles walks most days and that's really improved my mood;
• Soccer being back is nice. It's not like I was without it for long, what with the World Cup and how short the offseason is to begin with, but I've really been enjoying the new season. It helps that Brentford hasn't lost a match yet.

That's not the most ambitious list I don't suppose – enjoying one's family and some vacations seems like a pretty low bar – but when the world is bleak and your brain isn't working like it's supposed to you can forget about even those things sometimes. But I'm working on it. I haven't felt like I've had to lie about enjoying a sunset for a few weeks now.

Have a great day everyone.