Cup of Coffee: October 9, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

The Blue Jays advance to the ALCS while the Tigers, Cubs, and Phillies live to fight another day.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Blue Jays 5, Yankees 2: A cadre of Blue Jays pitchers held the Yankees to two runs on six hits and if you can't score you can't win. The Jays scored, with RBI singles from Vlad Guerrero Jr., Nathan Lukes, and Myles Straw and a sac fly from George Springer. And with that the Blue Jays become the first team to advance to the Championship Series.

The Yankees' elimination means that the American League's representative in the World Series will either be a team that hasn't been to the Fall Classic in 13 years (Tigers), 32 years (Blue Jays), or ever (Mariners). I like that. I like a fresh look, ya know?

And now the Yankees will enter an offseason in which they should probably think about some major overhauls but in which I doubt they'll seriously consider it. Because, hey, they still draw. And make the playoffs. And anyone can get lucky in October. Even if that's not what about 95% of Yankees fans signed up for.

Tigers 9, Mariners 3: For the first four and a half innings of this one it seemed like the Tigers had decided to just let go and walk toward the light. The offense continued to look as listless as it had for the past couple of games and, if we're all being honest, for most of the second half of the season. But then they got to Bryce Miller in the fifth, with four of the first five batters of the inning reaching to tie the game up. Riley Greene's sixth inning solo shot gave them a lead they'd never surrender, but they kept piling on anyway, with Javier Baéz' two-run homer making it 7-3 by the end of the inning. Gleyber Torres added a solo shot in the seventh to make it 8-3 and a Baéz fielder's choice in the bottom of the eighth closed out the scoring. So now it's 2-2, the teams have flown back west to Seattle, and we'll get a decisive Game 5 on Friday afternoon.

Cubs 4, Brewers 3: The script was flipped in this one, as the Brewers got an early lead and immediately handed it right back. It was 1-0 Milwaukee in the bottom of the first when Michael Busch homered to even it up after which Pete Crow-Armstrong singled in two and Ian Happ scored on a wild pitch. The Brewers got two runs back, both thanks to Jake Bauers, who singled in one in the fourth and homered in the seventh. That wasn't enough, though, as the Cubs hung on and we head into Game 4 today.

Phillies 8, Dodgers 2: It was a close game, with Philly holding a 3-1 lead when Clayton Kershaw came on in relief to start the seventh. He got through that inning fine, but when he came back out in the eighth he got smacked around and then some. Both Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto went deep off of the future Hall of Famer, and ultimately he was lit up to the tune of five runs – four earned – on six hits and three walks. Schwarber had homered earlier in the game as well, smacking a 455-foot blast off of Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the fourth. With the win Philly staves off elimination and forces tonight's Game 4. And Dave Roberts discovers the second pitcher on his staff, after Blake Treinen, who he cannot trust again.

The Daily Briefing

Comerica Park to be given a really bad new name in 2027

Comerica Park, the ballpark the Tigers have played in since April 11, 2000 has always been named after a bank. There's a good chance it's gonna get a new bank name to start the 2027 season. Except it's gonna be a much dumber bank name:

Nearly 20 years after moving its headquarters to Dallas, Michigan corporate icon Comerica Inc. is merging with Fifth Third Bancorp. in a deal likely to culminate in a new name for the home of the Detroit Tigers.

Cincinnati-based Fifth Third said Monday it will acquire Detroit-founded Comerica in a $10.9 billion all-stock transaction, combining two major regional banks. The merger will create the ninth-largest U.S. bank, with roughly $288 billion in assets, the companies said.

The fact that Fifth Third Bank is based in Ohio – my mortgage is with them – long ago inured me to the weirdness of its name, but yeah, it's a weird-ass name for a bank. Doesn't roll off the tongue, that's for sure. If you're curious, the name was derived from the bank's two predecessor companies, Cincinnati's Third National Bank and Fifth National Bank, which merged in 1908. I'm guessing there have been many memos from executives over the past 117 years advocating for a change because of how dumb it sounds, but that train apparently left the station a long time ago.

If you're remotely hopeful that the bank would not change the name of the stadium in which the Tigers play, sorry, they're totally gonna do it, as naming rights are a BIG thing for the Fifth Third folks. Indeed, there are already a bunch of sports facilities carrying that moniker:

• Fifth Third Field, Toledo, Ohio, home of the Toledo Mud Hens, the Tigers' Triple-A affiliate;
• Fifth Third Arena, Cincinnati, Ohio, home of the University of Cincinnati's sports teams;
• Fifth Third Arena, Chicago, the practice facility of the Chicago Blackhawks;
• Fifth Third Bank Stadium, Kennesaw, Georgia, which is home of the Kennesaw State Owls teams; and
• Fifth Third Park,Spartanburg, South Carolina, home of the Hub City Spartanburgers, the High-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers.

I prefer to call ballparks by their traditional, non-sponsored names if at all possible. So, like, if Dodger Stadium suddenly became "Guggenheim Capital Stadium" or something I'd never, ever use it. I'm a little more lax when it comes to stadiums that have always been corporately sponsored, such as Comerica, because even if it's been on the signs for 25 years, it's not like it's something to be honored or revered. Maybe I'll call it "Fifth Third Park" when the name changes, maybe I'll autopilot back to Comerica. Game-time decision I suppose.

Hell, maybe I should just start calling it Tiger Stadium. They're not paying me to honor their advertising, after all. As long as you all know what I'm talking about who cares?

Shocker: the new Rays owner want a taxpayer-funded commercial district that will benefit only them

On Monday, the new Tampa Bay Rays owners – Patrick Zalupski, Ken Babby, and Bill Cosgrove – held their first press conference since buying the team. During the presser they announced an aggressive schedule for getting a new ballpark, saying they want it to be up and running by Opening Day 2029.

The biggest reason that's aggressive is because they don't even have a site picked out, let along secured, as of yet. Nor do they have financing. And it's not like they just want 10-15 acres on which to plop a stadium. They wanna do the whole Ballpark Village thing, with a giant real estate development attached to it:

The new site will be a roughly 100-acre development with hotels, office and retail spaces, restaurants, bars and more, Zalupski said, adding that the stadium will be fully enclosed. The site will host 150 to 180 events per year, including concerts. Zalupski said he views the Atlanta Braves stadium, Truist Park, as a model.

As our friend sports economist J.C. Bradbury noted on Bluesky, calling Atlanta "the model," while not surprising, should be a big red flag for the communities in the Tampa Bay area which are interested in attracting the Rays.

That's because while the real estate development around Truist Park, The Battery, has certainly made the owners of the Atlanta Baseball Club a considerable amount of money – money which is exempt from MLB revenue sharing and from baseball revenue calculations which enter into collective bargaining and paying players – it has been a negative as a public investment. Indeed, as Bradbury has rigorously researched and documented, Truist Park and The Battery cost local taxpayers something like $15 million more a year than the tax revenues they bring in. This state of affairs has led to library closures and reduction in city services, because so much money was given to the baseball team and so little of the promised public benefits have been realized or will ever be realized.

The Rays will want the same sort of community-damaging gift. Indeed, Neil deMause of Field of Schemes notes that, per one Hillsborough County, Florida official, word on the street is that the Rays are seeking $1.1 billion in public subsidies for their 100+acre Xanadu.

Stuart Sternberg spent a couple of decades trying to get that kind of investment out of governments in the Tampa Bay area. He eventually got something less than that, got cold feet, and bailed. Good luck to the new guys, though.

Other Stuff

Here we go

From the Columbus Dispatch:

The other cities into which the regime pretty clearly plans to expand the police state: Birmingham, Alabama; Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Louisville, Kentucky, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; St. Louis, Missouri; and six cities in Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Sunrise, Jacksonville, Fort Myers and Naples.

Basically all urban areas in either red or purple states, likely because they don't want to provoke another governor like Illinois' J.B. Pritzker or California's Gavin Newsom, who are doing a pretty good job of drawing negative attention to what the feds have done in Los Angeles and Chicago.

I'm more of a pamphleteer than a bomb-thrower. But it's also the case that people who cannot be easily compromised – people who are not at risk of being fired or deported or and those who do not have a bunch of folks depending on them on a day-to-day basis – are the people who need to be the most active when the bad guys start marching. And it's especially true that the normies among us need to be visible in opposition, so that other normies see just how insane all of this is. It's easy for a lot of people to watch protests, demonstrations, and even arrests of involving college kids and those who they perceive to be radicals and dismiss them. It's harder for them to dismiss those who they think of as their peers and their neighbors.

Which is why, if the regime comes to Columbus, Ohio like they've come to Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and other places, I'll be out there. It's important that the normies among us to be out there. Because what's going on is not just some fringe thing. It affects us all.

The Dream

Dr. Fred Ramsdell, an immunologist, just won the Nobel Prize for medicine. He didn't know about it, though, because he was hiking and had his phone off:

US scientist Dr Fred Ramsdell was on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O'Neill and their two dogs, deep in Montana's grizzly bear country, when Ms O'Neill suddenly started screaming. But it was not a predator that had disturbed the quiet of their off-grid holiday: it was a flurry of text messages bearing the news that Dr Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC's Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, "You've won the Nobel prize" was: "I did not." To which Ms O'Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.

I love the statement from his lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, which said that while the committee was trying to reach him, Ramsdell, "was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip."

If that ain't the dream I don't know what is.

Kevin Costnerfreude

I've always been at least a bit put-off by Kevin Costner. This, to be clear, has nothing to do with my loathing of "Field of Dreams," which I considered to be a failure of writing and directing more than a function of anything Costner did. Indeed, I have no issue with Costner's performance in that movie. He did the best with what he had, I think. I also think he was fantastic in "Bull Durham" – no one else could've played that role as well as he did – and several other movies, including "Fandango," "No Way Out," "Silverado," and "Tin Cup." Really, there were several years there when Costner did a pretty good job of being a Gary Cooper of the 1980s and 1990s and there's always a need for a guy like that in Hollywood.

But I've been reading Hollywood books and magazines and stuff since I was a teenager, and I've always been skeptical of him as a behind-the-scenes figure. This thanks to many, many stories about him trying to take over productions, second-guessing and sometimes bullying directors and writers, and being an all-around pain in the ass. Some of that stuff was no doubt overblown because Hollywood loves to pull out the knives for certain sorts of successful people as a means of deflecting blame when big projects fail. But such stories have followed Costner around more than most, whether he was at the top or in a career rut, which has long made me suspect that there was a hell of a lot of fire to accompany that kind of smoke.

Against that backdrop comes a big story in the Hollywood Reporter about Costner being a big pain in the ass. Initially on the set of "Yellowstone" whose creator killed his character off rather than continuing to work with him. It then gets into how over-his-head Costner seems to be with his big four-movie "Horizon: An American Saga" project. Only one of those movies has come out, it flopped terribly, and the second installment cannot find distribution. Chapters three and four have yet to be filmed and may never be filmed even if Costner is trying his damndest to get them made.

Probably not an interesting story for people who (a) don't pay attention to Hollywood business stuff; and (b) don't have low-level issues with Kevin Costner. I'm a sicko when it comes to that stuff, though, so I ate it up.

One more thing on "Wish You Were Here"

Following yesterday's bit on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," one of you hipped me to this story from back in August:

Ronnie Rondell Jr - who was famously set alight for the front cover of Pink Floyd's iconic Wish You Were Here album cover - has died at the age of 88.

The Hollywood stuntman and actor died on 12 August at a care home in the US state of Missouri, according to an online obituary. Rondell was involved in the production of a number of films and TV shows during his long career, including Lethal Weapon, Thelma and Louise and Star Trek: First Contact.

The story is pretty good, as it describes the career of a guy which took place in what, to me anyway, is the golden age of stuntmen: the 1950s through the 1990s. A period in which budgets and spectacle were amped up but in which digital effects were not yet sophisticated, so you just had to drop dudes from buildings, set them on fire, and crash cars all over the damn place to get the shots you wanted.

Also: sounds like the "Wish You Were Here" cover shoot was a nightmare. I'm guessing Rondell liked the paycheck he got for it, but he probably spent the rest of his life wondering who in the hell thought it was a good idea.

Which, for the record, was a design team called Hipgnosis. The story is here.

Rest in peace, Ronnie Rondell Jr.

Have a great day everyone.