Cup of Coffee: October 30, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

The Series shifts back to Toronto, with the Jays in the driver's seat.

And That Happened

Blue Jays 6, Dodgers 1: I posted this about 30 seconds before the game began:

Then Snell gave up a homer to Davis Schneider on the first pitch of the game and a homer to Vlad Guerrero Jr. on the third pitch of the game. So much for my needs. That, by the way, was the first time in World Series history that two players hit back-to-back home runs to start the proceedings.

Snell settled down after that and things stayed status quo until the bottom of the third when Kiké Hernández took Jays starter Trey Yesavage out deep to left to make it 2-1. The Jays got the run right back in the top of the fourth thanks to Teoscar Hernández making an ill-advised dive that turned a Daulton Varsho single into a triple, after which Varsho scored on a sac fly. The score remained at 3-1 until the seventh when Blake Snell, who had thrown 116 pitches to that point, left the game with two men on base and the Dodgers trailing by two.

Edgardo Henriquez came in to face Vlad Guerrero Jr., and he was overthrowing like it was his job. His payoff pitch to Guerrero was way outside for a wild pitch which made it 4-1. The funny part: the runner who scored, Addison Barger, had reached on a single and took second and third on two previous wild pitches. Just a real slop-o-rama for the Dodgers.

Bo Bichette came up next and singled to left to plate yet another run after which Henriquez walked Alejandro Kirk and got himself yanked. Anthony Banda finally ended the inning but it was 5-1 by then. Isiah Kiner-Falefa singled in one off of Banda in the eighth to make it 6-1.

Apart from the Kiké Hernández homer, Jays starter Trey Yesavage was a beast. He struck out 12 Dodgers batters, didn't walk a soul, and gave up just three hits over seven frames. He almost caved in the seventh by putting a runner on while looking kinda gassed, but then he induced a double play on his final pitch of the night to end the inning. Just a big, big performance from the young Yesavage. I mean, this photo, taken by David J Philip of the AP, kinda says it all:

The Dodgers, in contrast, looked absolutely terrible last night. They played sloppy defense and, aside from the Kiké homer, they were completely punchless at the plate once again. Even when it was still a close game it didn't feel particularly close. It sorta felt like they were mailing it in, in fact. There are a lot of things Dodgers fans have had to complain about when it comes to Dave Roberts' decisions, but none of it is anywhere near as consequential as the facts that the bats have all gone limp.

Now the sides head back to Toronto for tomorrow night's Game Six with the Blue Jays in the driver's seat, one win away from a World Series title.

The Daily Briefing

Derek Shelton is the new Twins manager

The Minnesota Twins are hiring Derek Shelton as their new manager.

Shelton is someone the Twins know well, as he served as their bench coach under both Paul Molitor and Rocco Baldelli before leaving after the 2019 season to become the Pirates manager. Shelton is actually close friends with Baldelli, who was fired by the Twins at the end of this past season. I wonder what the Dude Code says about getting Baldelli's blessing to take the job in that situation Like, he'd probably have to do so in order date one of Baldelli's exes, but I'm not sure what the etiquette is for jobs. Obviously I'm not too conversant with the Dude Code.

Shelton managed the Pirates for six seasons, compiling a 306-440 (.410) record before being fired in mid-May. Most of that can be attributed to the Pirates damn nigh pathological aversion to putting together a roster with good players on it. Which could be a problem in Minnesota as well given the massive fire sale they concluded last summer. But a bad managerial gig is better than no managerial gig, right?

Miguel Cairo out in Washington

This is extraordinarily unsurprising, but it was reported yesterday that Washington Nationals interim manager Miguel Cairo will not get the job on a permanent basis. Meanwhile, members of his coaching staff, including pitching coach Jim Hickey, hitting coach Darnell Coles, bullpen coach Ricky Bones, first-base coach Gerardo Parra, and third-base coach Ricky Gutierrez are being let go.

This all comes less than a month after Paul Toboni was hired to be the Nationals' new president of baseball operations, taking over for the fired Mike Rizzo. It stands to reason that he has been given carte blanche with respect to the on-field staff, so these departures were pretty predictable.

John Flaherty is out at YES

Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported yesterday that YES Network is not bringing back longtime Yankees analyst and play-by-play announcer John Flaherty in 2026. Flaherty has spent the last 20 seasons in the Yankees' booth. David Cone, Paul O’Neill and Joe Girardi will be returning along with Michael Kay.

I rarely if ever watch Yankees broadcasts because I can't stand Kay, but to the extent I have, I found Flaherty to be competent enough. He's not exactly engaging or exciting or charismatic or anything, but he got the job done. He's not at Cone's level but I'd probably prefer him to O'Neill. I haven't heard Girardi much. But like I said, I'm only an occasional tourist when it comes to the Yankees' TV booth.

Berninger's baseballs

Brendan Quinn of The Athletic has a wonderful story about how Matt Berninger, the lead singer and songwriter of the band The National, has spent the past few years writing song lyric fragments on baseballs.

Berninger was suffering from depression and dealing with writer's rut a few years ago and his usual method of writing in notebooks wasn't working well for him. One day he didn't have a notebook handy so he wrote the little lyrical bit that came to his head on a baseball in his backpack (Berninger likes to play catch to clear his mind on the road and always has a ball with him). The experience was satisfying and the change in routine activated a different part of his brain, so he kept doing it. He did it for a couple of years, in fact, and now the barn on his rural Connecticut property is filled with baseballs with lyrics on them. Many of them are pictured in the article.

The story also dives a bit into Berninger's Cincinnati upbringing and his love of baseball growing up. Because of it, something that happened last year makes total sense to me now.

Some time ago I learned that Berninger and I have a mutual friend. Through that friend Allison and I got to meet Berninger backstage after The National played near Cleveland last fall. We didn't talk for too terribly long, but he knew through our mutual friend that I'm a baseball writer and he asked me my opinion of Pete Rose. Knowing he's from Cincinnati but not knowing how he rolled when it came to baseball, I was worried. Worried that, as a 50-something white guy from Cincinnati he was going to be one of those crazy Pete Rose truthers/worshippers everyone from Ohio has encountered at one time or another. I was worried that he was not going to want to hear my opinion about Charlie Hustle and I was loathe to disappoint a guy whose work has meant so very much to me for a very long time.

Ultimately I decided that honesty was the best policy, my worries notwithstanding, and told Berninger that I thought Pete Rose was a piece of garbage. Berninger smiled immediately and made a short, pithy, and colorful analogy between Rose and a particular human anatomical feature that, like opinions, everyone possesses. We both laughed, became a bit more comfortable conversing and, after I became probably the 10,000th middle aged white guy to thank him for writing songs that helped him through his divorce, we went our separate ways.

And now, thanks to the article in The Athletic and an anecdote from Berninger's father, I know why he feels the way he does about the jerk:

Paul Berninger loved hunting, fishing and camping (still does), but always had room for baseball. He coached Matt’s tee-ball team and got tickets to a few games a year at the new Riverfront Stadium. Father and son would watch Pete Rose fly around the field, careen into second base, get up and shake the dirt from the folds of his jersey. There’s no more indelible image of Cincinnati in the ’70s than that. Except then Paul would lean over to tell his son about the Pete Rose he knew. See, Paul grew up not too far from Pete, in the Western Hills section of the city. The two worked at the same golf course as teenagers. One night, the story went, when Paul was trying to close the caddie shack, Pete came in, demanding a candy bar or something. Paul told Pete the shack was closed. Pete, according to Paul, responded by urinating on the counter.

“They didn’t exactly get along,” Matt says.

Color me unsurprised. Almost as unsurprised as I was at the passage which explained The National as having "a status as patron saints to middle-aged men with emotional impairments." Which is a horribly cruel thing to say. Doubly so because it's a 100% accurate thing to say. It's so cruel that I'm almost afraid to admit that I own a National hoodie they've been selling which says "Sad Dads" on it.

Whatever the case: excellent article. I love when I read about non-baseball people's connections to baseball. Stories about how even a little corner of the game can and does mean so much to people. It's a reminder that, even if baseball is no longer truly the National Pastime, it's still deeply embedded in the national subconscious.

One more text from 2013

Just to follow up on yesterday's item in which my then-nine-year-old daughter was desperately hoping I'd be home from the 2013 World Series in time to take her trick-or-treating. This was a post Game Five update:

And, thanks to John Lackey tossing six scoreless innings, Shane Victorino hitting a three-run double in the third and driving in four, and Stephen Drew homering, the Red Sox did win Game 6 and the Series. I was home a little more than 12 hours later.

Here I was not long after that game ended:

The longer ago it becomes, the more I think that 2013 was one of the better years of my adult life. Just a lot of fun stuff going on that year. But I will always remember how damn happy I was that I got home in time to be with my kids on Halloween when that still meant something to everyone.

Other Stuff

An update on peppercorn rents

I had an item in yesterday's newsletter about Prince Andrew having to pay only a peppercorn-a-year for the use of his home, Royal Lodge, in Windsor. I received some clarification in the comments from subscriber Rugsy:

English-qualified lawyer here. A peppercorn rent is a fairly common legal fiction in Britain so as to satisfy the doctrine of consideration, i.e. that both parties are giving something of value to the other in order for the contract (lease) to be valid. There is no requirement that the consideration be adequate, just something of value. I technically owe a peppercorn rent to my landlord for the long lease of my Victorian terrace in Lancashire (even though the lease has another 870 odd years to run so practically speaking it’s like a freehold… English property law is quite odd)

Now that he says that I realize it should've occurred to me that it was a matter of symbolic consideration. In this it's not unlike someone's dad asking for a dollar bill when signing over the title of the family junker to his kid or whatever. It's something that, practically speaking, isn't really necessary because no one is challenging the contract that underlies the deal, but people nonetheless do it out of habit and ceremony.

Still, using a peppercorn for that purpose is a bit extra if you ask me. In my mind it does more to draw attention to the gratuitousness of the transaction than it does to create the fiction of an arms-length deal. But I suppose I gotta admit that it sounds kinda cute. Say it: "peppercorn."

Peppercorn, peppercorn, peppercorn.

Loud and clear

It was reported yesterday that two federal prosecutors have been placed on leave at the direction of the White House. Why? Because they filed a sentencing memo seeking 27 months in prison for a man who brought illegal guns and ammunition to President Obama's house in 2023. It just so happens that the man was also arrested and convicted as a January 6 rioter, but was subsequently pardoned by Trump. It appears that the reason for suspending the prosecutors was that they dared to mention January 6 in the sentencing memorandum.

So not only were the insurrectionists pardoned despite going on a violent rampage for which they are wholly unapologetic, they now seem to have perpetual immunity from committing crimes as long as the regime stays in power. Meanwhile, anyone who seeks to hold allies of the regime accountable for their criminal activity – or who acknowledges the regime's previous attempt to overthrow American democracy – is at risk of being fired.

Making a deal with the devil has its downsides? Crazy!

Not long after Trump took office he took aim at a number of prominent law firms with punitive executive orders. The orders were and remain pretty obviously unconstitutional, but many law firms displayed abject cowardice and caved into Trump and his numerous illegal demands. Demands which, in addition to massive and extortionate cash payments, obligated them to perform work for free on Trump's and the government's behalf.

Now, per the New York Times, we learn that their cowardice has created a big problem that will either cost them a great deal of money and/or land them in ethical trouble:

"Months after law firms made deals with President Trump to ward off punitive executive orders, the ethics committee of the District of Columbia Bar is warning that such arrangements may require firms to drop or obtain waivers from all clients who have interests at odds with the government" . . . Any lawyer or law firm that contemplates making a deal with a government that includes conditions that may limit or shape their practices, the opinion said, “must examine whether the arrangement would prevent the firm from providing conflict-free representation to clients — existing and new — who are adverse to the relevant government.”

It's worth noting that there were more law firms targeted by Trump than those who made deals with him. The firms that resisted the pressure from Trump (a) did not have to pay him millions and millions of dollars; (b) did not experience a mass exodus of clients and top legal talent like many of the coward firms did; and (c) have not experienced any adverse actions by the government. The collaborators, meanwhile, have paid close to a billion dollars into Trump slush funds and have now jeopardized their relationship with any clients who have or who may one day have interests that are at odds with the government. Which is almost any and every client of a large law firm at one point or another.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, I figure. If only more of our institutions could figure it out.

Oh, we're ranking problems?

An Apple News teaser of an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Wait until they hear about all of the problems CEOs are causing.

The article itself is pretty hilarious in that it consists primarily of high-ranking CEOs, some of whom are billionaires, talking about how great and exciting and useful meetings would be if only everyone would pay attention and be engaged. It never occurs to anyone being quoted here that so many meetings are useless and that the only people who really care about them are the people who call them. Which, in the case of meetings which involve billionaire CEOs, is ALWAYS them.

I'd love to see CEOs get dragged into meetings that other people set up about stuff that really has nothing to do with them. Meetings which conflict with their other responsibilities and which could've quite easily been accomplished by a memo or an email. I'm guessing that if that happened they wouldn't be sitting there, quietly engaged.

Yes, your iPhone is making typos against your will

I recently upgraded the operating system of my iPhone. And, as has been the case with numerous other upgrades in the past, the first thing I noticed upon using it was that the spellcheck function is erratic as hell. In addition to simply not recognizing many misspelled words it also changes some properly spelled words into gibberish. The most annoying thing about it is that I can press the letter "K," for example, only to have my phone type the letter "J" or some other vaguely-in-the-vicinity letter.

It's gotten so bad that part of me was starting to wonder if I'm just being crazy, but yesterday I stumbled upon an article in Macworld in which someone PROVED that the new iOS is messed up when it comes to spelling:

To investigate, Michi recorded a slow-motion video of himself typing the same phrase repeatedly in the Notes app on an iPhone running iOS 26.0.1, the latest public release. The footage shows that the system often replaces one letter with another for no apparent reason. For instance, pressing “U” sometimes results in “J.”

There’s no clear pattern: the same word can produce different errors on separate attempts. “As a fellow longtime iOS user, I’ve noticed this for a couple of years now and have been pulling my hair out trying to figure it out,” one user wrote. Another simply said, “I knew I wasn’t crazy" . . . Curious, I tried the same experiment myself. Using my iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26.1 beta 4, I filmed a slow-motion video while typing a few phrases, and the bug showed up immediately. In one test, I repeatedly typed “thumbs up,” and several times the system replaced letters I had correctly tapped. In one case, pressing “H” produced a “U” instead.

I'd like to say that this is the reason I make so many typos but even I'm not so irresponsible that I'd compose the newsletter on my phone. Still: it's good to know that I'm not insane or incapable of properly typing or whatever. That's not exactly a striking example of personal validation, but every little bit helps these days.

Shyster Dog

Some of the older readers of this newsletter may recall that, from 2007 through 2009, I maintained an old-timey weblog – or "blog" as they used to say – called "Shysterball."

Shysterball was actually a spinoff blog from an older one that was simply called "Shyster." Shyster was dedicated to legal topics. After about a year of writing it, however, I decided that it was way too dangerous to maintain if I wanted to keep my job as a practicing lawyer. It was pretty spicy and, though I didn't commit any ethical violations with it, it did contain some content that I'm sure my clients and the senior partners in my law firm would not have appreciated. Shysterball, in contrast, was about the harmless and benign topic of baseball. Ironically enough, the harmless and benign baseball spinoff still contributed pretty significantly to getting me fired. It's almost enough to make me think that the issue was just me and the way I'm wired rather than the content of my blogs. But thing obviously worked out OK for me in the end so let's not examine it too deeply.

I bring all of that up because yesterday I read about another frustrated lawyer who has taken on the nom de guerre of Shyster, except he's doing it with a hot dog cart:

Nearly one month into the government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain on furlough.

Isaac Stein is one of them. Normally, he's a lawyer for the IRS who writes tax regulations. But on a sunny Sunday afternoon on a corner in his Washington, D.C. neighborhood, he's wearing a suit and tie, working his hot dog stand, "Shysters Dogs." Its motto: "the only honest ripoff in DC."

"I am having a grand old time slinging hot dogs," Stein said . . . "I got all the permits in late September, and then I was furloughed on October 8th," Stein said.

Stein is, quite admirably, bringing some attitude and panache to his hot dog cart.

He's serving RC Cola rather than Coke or Pepsi because, dammit, he likes RC Cola. And while he'll serve you a dog with anything you want, he has a "correct hot dog" on the menu which is just a dog with mustard and sauerkraut. If you order something else it costs you a buck more. Would I do that? Nah, eat what you want. But I respect the gumption and audacity.

So, hail fellow Shyster. May you use the name in peace and prosperity.

Have a great day everyone.