Cup of Coffee: October 23, 2025

Good morning!

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm mailing in today and tomorrow's newsletter due to family stuff.

In the meantime, some odds and ends:

• The San Francisco Giants have hired University of Tennessee coach Tony Vitello to be their new manager. As mentioned the other day, this is the first time a major league team has hired a manager directly from a college program without him having any experience as a professional coach at any level. So, good luck!
• That AWS outage the other day totally bricked people's $2,700 smart beds, causing them to remain in a reclining position and/or with the heat up. People were basically unable to use their beds. The smart toilet scenario I talked about the other day seems pretty damn bad but imagine making a series of life decisions that leaves you in a place where you can't sleep in your own bed because the web is down;
• When Trump announced his ballroom plan he said that the East Wing would not be touched by the construction. Then, earlier this week, when the demolition of part of the East Wing went viral, there was some backpedaling on that, and it was said that some destruction had to happen in order to accomplish some connective work. Yesterday, however, the regime announced that, actually, the ballroom project requires the complete demolition of the entire East Wing. It's expected to be torn down by this weekend. It's all illegal, of course. Trump truly believes that the White House is his personal property and no one in a position to stop it cares even a little bit.
• An Illinois man has been arrested after pretending to be Sammy Hagar. This is him:

I just finished a biography of Stanley Kubrick. In the 80s and 90s there was some guy running around London pretending to be Kubrick, seducing various men with promises of roles in movies and stuff. He was eventually arrested. The thing about it: he didn't look much if anything like Kubrick, so a question a lot of people had was how he was able to get away with it for so long. The best answer anyone had was that when a person walks up to someone and claims to be a celebrity, people are hesitant to call bullshit because they are afraid of not being hip and aware and all of that. I feel like that's what's going on with this fake Sammy Hagar guy;

• In the spirit of sharing work of the Cuppagentsia, my friend and subscriber Shana Bartles has a new newsletter to share:

Hello friends,I recently launched a new free newsletter called Figure Skating for Baseball Nerds. Yes, the name is a bit silly and the concept sounds kind of funny, although it's definitely not just for baseball nerds. Believe it or not, figure skating fandom and the timing of the season is actually the perfect complement to baseball fandom, and the two sports have a lot more in common than one would probably expect.

The season has barely started, so it's the perfect time to jump in. Let's put it this way: when the Olympics roll around in a few months, don't you want to sound smart telling your friends all these things they don't know? I mean, that's a rhetorical question if you subscribe to Craig; we all know you want to sound smart about sports. This is the perfect chance to get in on the ground floor!

So please read my opening pitch and subscribe for free to be part of this fun community and join me on the Olympic season journey! I promise, it's way more exciting than you probably realize. And there's one guy on Team USA who is basically the Ohtani of figure skating. What are you waiting for? This is how we get through the long winter!

xo Shana

• Flying to San Antonio from Columbus always sucks because, in the nearly 14 years I've been flying down here, there has never been a direct flight between the cities. And while American sometimes has a competitive fare, most of the time we're flying Southwest which, eh. But I gotta call out a good travel experience when I have one. Yesterday both legs of our trip – through Love Field in Dallas – were on time and on both legs of the flight I had an empty middle seat next to me. It's easily the most friction-free domestic two-leg flight I've had in ages and ages. Feel like I should go out and buy a Powerball ticket or something.

• Finally, yesterday in the comments, subscriber Bob asked a question:

Craig, your piece today “The golden age of slop” leads me to ask: What percentage of your time writing this newsletter consists of doing research, what percentage writing the initial draft, and what percentage revising/editing the initial draft? Speaking only of my years of experience as a lawyer (tax/corporate, not litigation), the writing I did consisted of about 1/3 each. The revising/editing - the honing - was as important as the initial drafting. That is what I think AI-generated content misses. Yes, the human who is using the AI can ask the AI to refine the initial AI draft. But, from the looks of AI-generated content, that rarely happens.

Good question! Wish I had a good answer!

I actually don't have a hard-and-fast percentage answer because I don't pay much attention to the clock when I'm writing. If I had to guess I'd say I spend half of my time spent finding stuff to write about. That includes surfing around Apple News, the publications to which I subscribe, and social media to find things that interest me, reading it, pondering about it some, and doing any side research or looking up stuff to be able to say something more intelligent about it. Of the half of the time left it's probably 2/3 writing and 1/3 editing.

As my frequent typos and sentence fragments can attest, I should probably be a bit more equitable with the writing and editing parts of the job, but when you turn out the volume of stuff I turn out on a daily basis you're often pretty wiped by the time you're done writing. And that's before you account for the fact that a lot of baseball news happens in the evening – often quite late in the evening in the offseason – which both takes me out of my sharpest morning person mindset and often causes me to be at least a little bit pressed for time. When I was a lawyer it was way more like that 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 that Bob mentions. And it's closer to that when I write non-newsletter things for freelance projects or more deeply considered stuff for my personal blog or whatever.

All of that being said, I agree with most of you that the revising and editing part of things is where the good stuff really happens. And while I've made my peace with the speed and occasional sloppiness with which one has to approach a daily pamphlet like this one, the product is always better when I can take a bit more time to rethink it, think about rephrasing it, and spend a bit more time copyediting it.

[Editor: Agreed!]

Agreed.

Have a great day everyone.