Cup of Coffee: September 18, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

As I mentioned yesterday, things are a bit more brief than usual today. Last night I was in Cleveland to see James. Not long after this goes live we'll be driving up to Detroit to see the Guardians-Tigers game this afternoon and then we'll be seeing James again tonight.

If anyone is curious about James in concert, they're actually live-streaming tonight's show for $19.99. It's a pretty small venue and Allison and I will be up front, so if you do you're pretty likely to see my bald head.

On with the day. If you're wondering if I talk about the Jimmy Kimmel thing, it's in the last item.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights

The recaps were the sacrifice for a night out. Sorry, but them's the breaks.

Still: congratulations to the Cubs for clinching a postseason slot. Congratulations to the Astros for re-taking first place in the AL West. Condolences to the Mariners for finally leaving the season of the witch. Condolences to the Mets for losing again but congratulations to them for losing on a night the Dbacks lost too. Congrats to the Guardians for beating Detroit and putting pressure on the Tigers. And for that matter congratulations woman behind the hotel bar last night who, when I said we're on our way to see today's Guardians-Tigers game, said "We're gonna beat 'em! No one wants Cleveland in the playoffs but we're gonna be there!" So I suppose I'll keep an eye on that.

And now, talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor, Roman, nor an Empire. Discuss.

• Cubs 8, Pirates 4
• Reds 6, Cardinals 2
• Orioles 3, White Sox 1
• Giants 5, Diamondbacks 1
• Atlanta 9, Nationals 4
• Guardians 4, Tigers 0
• Red Sox 5, Athletics 4
• Rays 2, Blue Jays 1
• Padres 7, Mets 4
• Brewers 9, Angels 2
• Yankees 10, Twins 5
• Royals 7, Mariners 5
• Astros 5, Rangers 2
• Marlins 8, Rockies 4
• Dodgers 5, Phillies 0

The Daily Briefing

Top Rays executives stepping down on the eve of the team's sale

The Tampa Bay Rays are about to be sold to Jacksonville real estate developer Patrick Zalupski, and in anticipation of that deal closing, the old guard is making way for the new. Specifically, Rays team presidents Matt Silverman and Brian Auld are stepping down. They'll both be moving to advisory roles.

New top execs will no doubt be named in the next couple of weeks after the sale closes. The biggest question is whether president of baseball operations Erik Neander will stay on. Neander, who has been with the organization for 18 years, replaced Silverman as the club's top baseball operations executive when Silverman was elevated to team president in 2017. 

Turn and face the strange.

A telling correction

I like the correction to Dan Hayes' story in The Athletic than the story itself. Kinda says everything that needs to be said:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Minnesota Twins let go of their entire four-person scouting department. The Twins retained one member of its five-member staff.

The Twins have sold off half the roster and now they're firing everyone. I'm sure they have a plan, though.

2026 London Series canceled

Major League Baseball has put on The London Series three times – in 2019, 2023, and 2024 – but they can't seem to find the way to make it stick. After intentionally skipping it this season – they had hoped to play in Paris but no one there was particularly interested in promoting and hosting it – the plan was for baseball to return to London Stadium in 2026 with the Yankees facing the Blue Jays. But now that's not happening. Why? Because football takes precedence:

MLB had hoped to have the New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays meet in London on June 13 and 14, but West Ham is home for its Premier League finale against Leeds on May 24. That left too little time to convert the field to baseball, and MLB was unable to schedule games there for later in June because Fox lacked available broadcast slots due to men's World Cup commitments.

It's early yet, but it's not like West Ham and Leeds will be vying for the league title or anything come June. Indeed, they may very well be fighting to avoid relegation. But as baseball fans know well already, bad football always trumps good baseball. That's the case whether it's played on a gridiron or a pitch.

Baseball By the Rules

Most of the people reading this newsletter know a great deal about baseball. So much so that it just feels like something we were born with. I mean, do most of you remember when you learned that it was one, two, three strikes and you're out? Do most of you remember when you learned the difference between a fair ball and a foul ball? Or why you can force a runner out at some bases in some situations but not others? For most of us knowing how baseball works is a lot like knowing how to walk or use the bathroom. At some point we didn't know that stuff and we had to learn it but we'll be damned if we can remember when and how we learned it. And either way, our brains were a lot more empty and spongy then so it probably wasn't super hard to pick up.

But that's obviously not the case for everyone! I've met a few folks in recent years who were from other countries or who simply were not introduced to the game in any real way, which required at least some basic instruction on my part about what the hell is going on on a baseball diamond. And folks, it's hard to teach that! You gotta forget what you know and try to explain it in a straightforward way, and that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. At the very least it demands a lot of concentration and trying to remember why things we've always just known are the way they are because people ask questions when you try to teach them things.

Cup of Coffee Subscriber Tony Forbes has obviously thought about that stuff because, as he told some of us in the comments yesterday, he has launched a website that gets at all of that. It's called Baseball By the Rules, and it's aimed at teaching people who don't know much about baseball how baseball works. But rather than lecture the reader, it uses decision trees and explainers. Based on some cursory farting around I've found that it roughly apes the way a person might explain what's happening in a baseball game, as it happens, to a novice.

Seems like a pretty neat and a pretty useful site. Go check it out!

Bull Durham: The Musical

So this was brought to my attention yesterday:

This is being put on by the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey from October 2 through November 2. From the website:

Bull Durham brings the classic 1988 film to the stage. Veteran catcher “Crash” Davis is tasked with mentoring hotshot rookie pitcher “Nuke” LaLoosh, while baseball muse Annie Savoy must choose her seasonal protégé. Directed by Marc Bruni (The Great Gatsby) and adapted by its original screenwriter, Ron Shelton, with music and lyrics by Susan Werner, this pitch-perfect musical delivers a winning blend of comedy, drama, and romance as passion, ambition, and America’s favorite pastime collide.

Though I played the narrator in a high school production of "Into the Woods" one time, I'm not the biggest musical fan in the world. But I can kinda see this working. Honestly, you can probably make a decent musical out of any story which involves a love triangle between three pretty heightened characters. The fact that it takes place in a baseball context instead of a workplace or a neighborhood or something is a secondary concern. In the end the songs get you most of the way there, so if the songs work it'll be OK.

Free advice to the Paper Mill Playhouse, though: for box office, you need to stunt cast with a new celebrity every few weeks to play the manager, who sings the show-stopper "Lollygaggers!" It'd be like a half-rapped song like Bernadette Peters did as the witch in "Into the Woods":

Skip: What's our record, Larry?

Larry: Eight and sixteen!

Chorus: THAT'S NOT GREAT!

Skip: Eight and sixteen? How'd we EVER WIN EIGHT?!

Fuck it. I'm all-in.

Other Stuff

A family's love

From the New York Post:

"Prez" has three sons, actually, in case you want to know how healthy and well-adjusted that family is. Did dad forget young Baron or did Eric? Or are they forgetting Don Jr.? Who cares! Just thank your lucky stars you aren't those jackwagons and that your family actually loves you. Or, at the very least acknowledges you.

Business Insider is going to let writers use A.I.

The Status newsletter reports that Business Insider, which is owned by the German publishing house Axel Springer, informed its staff this week that they are allowed and encouraged to use ChatGPT to generate first drafts of their stories. And, it told its staff, that it will not disclose such A.I. use to readers.

I realize I'm just a janky-ass newsletter-writing crank who works from a couch instead of a newsroom, but please believe me when I tell you that the first draft is the most important draft. That's where the thinking and the writing actually gets done and where the humanity of a thing you're reading comes into it. Editing and subsequent drafts are obviously important, but that's refinement and polishing and the addition of finer points. Sitting down in front of a blank screen and beginning to put the words down is the work.

Which is to say, I can almost understand running a first draft through ChatGPT to handle copyediting. I wouldn't personally do it if I was editing someone else's work because mistakes will obviously come through, but I can at least see it. Having ChatGPT generate a first draft, however, is to cede the very craft of writing and reporting to the machines.

I am not so precious about writing that I think every post and article in existence should be treated like hand-woven cloth or the delicate work of an artisan or whatever. A lot of it is, in reality, just bashing out stuff on a keyboard. But even the bashing is the product of human thought and human communication. And if you do not view the news you read as a means of humans communicating information to other humans because what happens in the world affects humanity, I don't really want to know you.

Meanwhile, in England

This was late Tuesday night, around the time Trump arrived in the UK for his state visit. He wasn't at Windsor Castle at the time this image was projected on there but he was there for various events yesterday and will be again today.

The BBC reports that four men were arrested for this, "on suspicion of malicious communications" which is apparently a thing. We'd never do that to protesters here. We'd just call their bosses and get them fired, probably.

How to set up a burner phone

I do not, needless to say, have much of an offline, off-the-grid existence. I live on my computer and use my phone a great deal and if, for some reasons, the feds or some tech-enabled bad guys wanted to track me down I would not be very hard to find. If I were to go on the run for some reason I'd likely be caught within a few hours. Which is one of the top six or seven reasons why I have made the decision to not become a crime lord or an international terrorist of some kind.

But that doesn't apply to everyone! And, in these scary times, it doesn't even apply to just criminals and various other ne'er-do-wells. These days even protesting or, for some people, simply existing exposes them to risks of surveillance or worse. Folks like that could stand to create buffers between themselves and the technology they use. Which is why Wired published a story earlier this week about how to properly buy, set up, and use a burner phone.

It's harder than you think, at least if you want to truly keep it anonymous. Because it's not just about the phone itself. It's about where you bought it and how you paid for it. It's about how you got to the store in the first place. It's about where you are when you turn it on and where you keep it when you're not using it. I build in a lot of stare-into-space time into my schedule and I think about stuff like that a lot but the article pointed out a few things that I had never considered.

Even if you're not someone who may ever need a burner phone, the article is pretty neat just as a thought experiment or a novel or script-writing tool for those of you who are into that sorta thing. And who knows? Maybe someday one of you may have to go on the lam? Before reading this the only real advice I had was to duct tape your existing cell phone to the bumper of a Greyhound going the opposite way of which you're fleeing so as to buy yourself some time while they try to track you. I'm pretty sure, though, that such thinking is pretty out of date by now.

James in Cleveland

I was in the venue early because we got tickets to the VIP soundcheck thing, so that's where I was when I saw the Jimmy Kimmel news.

This regime has done objectively worse things since coming to power – its lawlessness already has a considerable body count – but it's hard to imagine an act it could take that is more contemptuous of American values. The government identified a voice it did not like, it threatened ABC with reprisals if it did not silence that voice, and so that's what it did. It's one of the most shameful governmental acts in our nation's history. Not for who it harmed – Jimmy Kimmel will be alright – but for what it represents. I mean, you could not find a more textbook case of state censorship than that. It's a flagrant and arrogant attack on the most central and fundamental right in the American experience.

It's an act, of course that could have been stopped if there was anyone at ABC with a spine or a conscience. Or if there was even a bare majority of people in Congress who at least pretended to honor and fulfill their oaths of office. The country is under attack from the Trump regime but it's the cowardice of the men and women in positions of authority within our government and our most important civic institutions which has made Trump's attacks successful. One day Trump will be dead and his psychotic reign will be over. But the abject failure of our lawmakers, the media, law firms, universities, and businesses to do even the bare minimum to help defend the American Experiment is something from which it will take a very long time to recover.

I tried not to scroll and spiral before the show started last night and I managed it pretty well somehow. But then, midway through the show, James played the song "Heads" from their 2018 album "Living in Extraordinary Times."

"Heads" was one of two songs on that album in which James' singer, Tim Booth, who is a dual UK/United States citizen, took aim at Donald Trump. Those songs had been in the attic for the past few tours but now at least "Heads" is back out. And it's angrier than it was back in 2018. The drums are bigger and energy is off the charts. Best of all, Tim changed the chorus-closing words about the freedoms we'd already lost from "and we can't get back" to "that we must take back." I liked that change. My mental state has been all over the goddamn place for the past several months, but it's always better when I remember that I'm not just ranting into the void.

I don't know how we get through this, but we will. And we'll do it in spite of the cowardice of those who pretended to be our leaders and our protectors. We'll get our country back. No matter how long it takes.

Have a great day everyone.