Cup of Coffee: September 4, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let's get on with it.

And That Happened

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Nationals 10, Marlins 5: Nasim Nuñez hit two homers and drove in four while Brady House went deep and knocked in a couple and Luis García Jr. had two RBI. In winning the Nationals completed only their second three-game sweep of the year and their first at home.

Tigers 6, Mets 2: The Tigers, meanwhile, avoided being swept thanks to a three-run homer from Kerry Carpenter and a two-run single from Riley Greene. Jake Rogers also singled in a run. They got a solid enough start from Casey Mize, as he allowed just one run over five. The bad news: reliever Kyle Finnegan experienced right groin tightness while warming up in the bullpen in this one, so he could miss some time. You certainly don't want to be short of bullpen arms come October.

Diamondbacks 2, Rangers 0: Zac Gallen tossed six shutout innings and four relievers carried it through the rest of the way, allowing just one hit in the final three frames. Gabriel Moreno singled in one of the Dbacks' two runs and the other scored on a Jake Burger error. The Snakes take two of three.

Orioles 7, Padres 5: Baltimore completes the three-game sweep of the Padres thanks to four homers, all of which came off of Nestor Cortes in the game's first three innings. Doing the damage: Jackson Holliday, who hit a homer to lead off the game and Colton Cowser, Coby Mayo, and Alex Jackson who hit back-to-back-to-back shots in the third. Despite the loss the Padres did get an immaculate inning from reliever Mason Miller, with eight of the nine strikes being whiffs. Not that that helps them get any closer to the Dodgers.

Pirates 3, Dodgers 0: Five Pirates pitchers combined for a five-hit shutout of the champs. Bryan Reynolds and Andrew McCutchen went deep and Joey Bart doubled one in. The Pirates have pitched 17 shutouts this season, which leads all of baseball. They have been shut out 15 times too, so it cuts both ways I suppose.

Blue Jays 13, Reds 9: Toronto had five home runs. George Springer, Daulton Varsho, Alejandro Kirk, Addison Barger, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were the culprits. The Jays take two of three and now they roll into New York for the weekend.

Guardians 8, Red Sox 1: Cleveland put up a six-run second inning featuring a two-run homer from Gabriel Arias and a lot of horseshit like catcher's interference, a fielding error, and a wild pitch. Steven Kwan had three hits and scored twice, José Ramírez drove in two, and Joey Cantillo gave up one run on five hits with seven strikeouts in six innings.

Rays 9, Mariners 4: Tampa Bay scored eight runs in the first two innings and it wasn't competitive after that. Yandy Díaz had four singles and a double. Hunter Feduccia knocked in three while Brandon Lowe and Junior Caminero each drove in two. The Rays sweep the three-game set.

Angels 4, Royals 3: Jo Adell had a three-run homer and then singled in another in the eighth as the Angels won a seesaw game. L.A. will try to sweep the series today.

Atlanta 5, Cubs 1: Cade Horton of the Cubs tossed five no-hit innings, walking one and striking out six on 75 pitches. Craig Counsell pulled him to start the sixth, though, as Chicago clung to a 1-0 lead, and that's when the wheels fell off. New Atlantian Ha-Seong Kim hit a three-run homer and Nacho Alvarez Jr. hit an RBI single in the seventh and Ozzie Albies homered in the eighth. Bryce Elder, meanwhile, gave Atlanta seven innings in which he allowed just one unearned run. Atlanta avoids the sweep.

White Sox 4, Twins 3: Minnesota took a 3-1 lead into the top of the ninth when the White Sox rallied. Two men reached and then Brooks Baldwin singled one of 'em. The next batter, Michael A. Taylor, doubled in the tying and go-ahead run. Chicago goes for the four-game sweep today.

Brewers 6, Phillies 3: Milwaukee went up 2-0 in the first on a two-run Philly error and then later that frame Isaac Collins hit a three-run jack so things got out of hand early. Jose Quintana worked into the seventh and got his 11th win.

Cardinals 5, Athletics 1: Matthew Liberatore pitched shutout ball into the sixth while Willson Contreras singled in two and hit a two-run triple. How many RBI is that Willson?

Nolan Gorman went deep. St. Louis takes two of three.

Astros 8, Yankees 7: A bullpen disaster for the Yankees as a 4-1 lead in the sixth turned into them trailing 8-4 by the end of the eighth. Devin Williams spread the most kerosene, giving up a double and three walks and then watching three more of the runners for which he was responsible score from the bench. Cody Bellinger hit a three-run homer in the top of the ninth to make it close but the Bombers couldn't pull off the big comeback.

Giants 10, Rockies 8: Matt Chapman got a one-game suspension for the business that happened on Tuesday night but he appealed it so he was eligible to play in this one. That worked out great for the Giants as he went 3-for-4 with two homers and four knocked in. Drew Gilbert also hit a home. Chapman, Heliot Ramos and Patrick Bailey all scored twice. The Rockies plated a few in the bottom of the ninth because it's Coors and shit just happens but they couldn't quite get there. The Giants sweep the series. Viva collective bargaining and a disciplinary process with safeguards for the accused.

The Daily Briefing

Roman Anthony likely out for the rest of the regular season

On Tuesday Roman Anthony of the Red Sox left the team's win over the Guardians after over-swinging on a pitch. The team said it appeared to be an oblique strain but that a full diagnosis and prognosis might not be available for a day or two. It took just a day and the news is not good.

Anthony does, indeed, have a left oblique strain. Manager Alex Cora did not have a firm timeline for Anthony's return, but he noted that such injuries typically take four to six weeks to heal. If that's the case here Anthony will miss the remainder of the regular season and, potentially, a good part of the playoffs assuming the Red Sox hold on to their spot in the Wild Card race.

Anthony, who was called up from the minors in mid-June, has hit .292/.396/.463 (138 OPS+) with eight home runs and four stolen bases in 71 games. His loss will be felt.

Discipline for the Kyle Freeland-Rafael Devers thing

Yesterday Major League Baseball leveled discipline in the wake of Tuesday evening's dustup between the Rockies and the Giants:

• Giants third baseman Matt Chapman was handed a one-game suspension for pushing Rockies pitcher Kyle Freeland; and
• Fines were issued to Freeland, whose barking started the whole deal, Willy Adames who, like Chapman, ran in and tried to get at Freeland, and Rafael Devers, who had the audacity to admire a home run and then not passively sit back when Freeland barked.

Chapman appealed his suspension and, as I noted up in the recaps, that worked out pretty damn well for San Francisco in last night's game.

On the Framber Valdez "cross-up"

I had missed Tuesday night's drama involving Astros pitcher Framber Valdez before posting yesterday. Let's talk about it for a moment.

With two out in the top of the fifth inning of the Astros game against Yankees, Valdez ignored catcher César Salazar's instructions to step off the rubber. He instead followed through with his pitch, which was a sinker that Trent Grisham deposited over the fence for a grand slam, blowing the game wide open. Two pitches later, this happened:

For those unaware, a catcher gets "crossed up" by a pitcher when the catcher calls for a certain pitch or a certain location but the pitcher throws something different which the catcher was not expecting. Historically that occurred when a sign got missed. These days, in the PitchCom Era, however, there isn't much room for that to happen. Which strongly suggests that Valdez purposefully threw Salazar this pitch in the zone despite the fact that Salazar was clearly expecting some junk low and away.

Valdez is, to put it kindly, a creature of habit and has had instances in the past where he has reacted poorly to mistakes or being thrown off his rhythm or whatever. Looking at this sequence – Salazar, waving at him to step off, Valdez not doing it, and then Valdez crossing up Salazar – seems to fall into that category. If there was much doubt, Valdez's deportment immediately after the pitch hit Salazar and Salazar's own reaction makes it look like both of them knew that Valdez crossed up Salazar on purpose.

Not that anyone is admitting it. The team said late Tuesday night that Valdez apologized to Salazar, but the fact that that came after a meeting in the manager's office and not immediately on the field was pretty telling. Valdez's agent made the media rounds yesterday claiming that Valdez would NEVER do such a thing and that speculation that he did was baseless. Given how over-the-top his defense of Valdez was – lots of Trumpian exaggeration and the use of the word "preposterous" – my man doth protest too much and his denial doesn't really pass the smell test. Whatever the case, you don't have your agent doing damage control in a situation where there was a legitimate mistake.

Seems to me that Valdez was rattled, acted petulantly, did something really stupid and dangerous, and now everyone has circled the wagons.

Salary cap shenanigans in the NBA

In the latest episode of the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast, Torre reported that Los Angeles Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard was given a bogus, no-show endorsement gig from a company with ties to Clippers owner Steve Ballmer in a scheme to circumvent the NBA's salary cap rules. From The Athletic, which transcribed parts of the podcast:

“We went through a litany of really, really top-tier name contracts, and then (someone would say), ‘Oh, by the way, we also have a marketing deal with Kawhi Leonard, like a $28 million organic marketing sponsorship deal with Kawhi,’” a person described as a former financial official for Aspiration said on the Torre podcast. “And (they’d say) that if I had any questions about it, essentially don’t (ask), because it was to ‘circumvent the salary cap. LOL.’ There was lots of LOL when things were shared.”

The Clippers deny this, but you have to assume the NBA, which had previously investigated claims of the solicitation of improper payments to Leonard by his agent six years ago, will be digging into this.

I don't want Major League Baseball to have a salary cap for many, many reasons I have written about over the years. But I'm not gonna lie: writing about such things in baseball would be a hoot. Mostly because I tend to think baseball owners and players are a bit dumber and less savvy than their basketball counterparts, so the details of an MLB salary cap-circumvention scandal would likely be hilarious. There would, at a minimum, be trucks and ranches involved.

There's nothing more American than this

Recently SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, announced significant service cuts because Pennsylvania's legislature could not come to an agreement on the transit authority's funding. The first round of cuts ended express service to the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, where the Philadelphia Eagles play. But now that has been at least temporarily remedied.

From an Eagles press release:

FanDuel has stepped up to provide resources to help fully restore service on SEPTA's Broad Street Line [B] for Thursday, September 4 so that Philadelphia Eagles fans can safely and efficiently get to-and-from Lincoln Financial Field for the home opener.

SEPTA will run regularly scheduled subway trains, plus Sports Express trips, before and after the game . . . The FanDuel sponsorship covers free rides home for fans. The free rides from NRG Station begin at halftime and continue through the end of service.

This is better than there not being any service at all, of course. But what the hell does it say about America right now that all levels of government are either unable or unwilling to provide basic services, requiring a gambling website to cover things so that people can get to a football game?

Other Stuff

Great Moments in Gerontocracy

There has been some excitement in Maine as a man named Graham Platner, a 40-year-old oyster farmer, has announced that he is running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Susan Collins next year. In the week or two since Platner announced his candidacy he has drawn raves from crowds for his impassioned and forceful approach, his clear-eyed denunciations of Trump and Trumpism, and his advocacy for popular, progressive policies. He's been attracting both donors and positive media attention in a race to displace a senator who has historically thrived when facing cautious, institutional Democrats who fail to energize the electorate.

So of course the leaders of the Democratic Party are trying to stop him:  

The Senate primary in Maine looks like the next test of old guard vs. new for Democrats. Despite being a political novice, Platner raised over $1 million in the first nine days. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reportedly is working behind the scenes to get 77-year-old Gov. Janet Mills to enter the race.

I don't know much about Mills other than the fact that, earlier this year she admirably stood up to Trump when he threatened the State of Maine. But I do know that while she is 77 now, she turns 78 in December and that if she ran for Senate and won she'd be 79 when she took her oath of office.

I also know that, given what's going on in this country right now, you can't just win an election – assuming Mills can win the election – and do nothing. There are several years of unprecedentedly hard work ahead of us to try to undo this fascist slide, and that work has to begin with the fascists being punched in the face, and hard. A lifelong institutionalist Democrat who would owe her office to passive losers like Chuck Schumer and who would turn 80 during her first year of a six-year term is not going to be able to commit to that, let alone accomplish it.

I understand that many might take what I just said as ageism, but I prefer to think of it as realism.

Separate and apart from being someone who would like to see some younger blood elected who can lead us into a future in which they themselves have a decades-long stake, I'm someone who has been taking care of his nearly 82 and 77 year-old parents for a good bit. And I don't mean playing nurse to them or anything like that. My parents live independently. They drive. Technologically speaking they are pretty savvy for people their age. They have not suffered any notable cognitive decline. Despite some conventional and expected age-related ailments, both of them are as mentally and physically fit as the median Member of Congress in their late 70s or early 80s.

But it's an unavoidable fact of being that age that everyday things take a large amount of time, energy, and stamina. Which is fine when unless you're trying to fight an existential battle for the continued existence of America. The job ahead is going to require a surfeit of mental and physical exertion over several years. It's the sort of work that is gonna be hard on the people doing it if the job is done right. It's not the sort of work for which you want your rookie Members of Congress to be octogenarians.

I'm not gonna sit here and tear Chuck Schumer apart issue-by-issue or strategy-by-strategy because I spend enough time doing that, but the fact is that we've descended into this hell we currently inhabit while he and his generational and ideological cohort have had a stranglehold on the Democratic Party for the past 30 years. We're well past the point when the torch should've been passed to younger leaders, and such a torch-passing will never happen when candidate recruitment continues to be run by people born in the Truman administration and focuses on those who were born before FDR's body was even cold.

I'd like to see Democrats fight Trump and the rest of the fascists as heartily as they fight progressives and younger people in their own party. If they did, we’d be in much better shape as a nation. Maybe they can start doing it now.

Don't go to Florida

Yesterday Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo announced that Florida will soon become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren. This flies in the face of proven decades-long advice from public health experts which has had an astonishing track record of limiting the spread of infectious diseases, including deadly ones, saving millions of lives.

“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Ladapo said yesterday. “Your body is a gift from God," he added. "And because of this your children and a hell of a lot of other people stand a much increased chance of meeting God sooner rather than later," he did not add but which is implicit in his words and his actions.

People – including a hell of a lot of children – are going to needlessly die as a result of this idiotic choice. They're going to die because Republicans want them to die. There is no other reason for it.

My old law firm is using AI

I got an email for some Columbus-based business trade magazine yesterday and it had a story in it about how local law firms are using AI. One of them was the firm for which I worked the longest in my otherwise short and mostly undistinguished legal career:

Thompson Hine is also working to incorporate AI as a tool to be used by lawyers, not as a replacement for them.

“We’ve invested a good amount of time into custom development, and in a couple areas we’ve had early wins,” says Matt Coatney, the law firm’s chief information officer . . . Thompson Hine has had some success using algorithm-based prediction models. For example, suppose a client walks in the door looking for help navigating a corporate acquisition. How many billable hours and how many lawyers will be needed to make the transaction happen, and at what cost?

By plugging in various factors—the geographic location of the company involved, the past characteristics of similar deals, and so on—“that allows us to predict how much effort will be required to bring it to its logical conclusion,” Garcia says.

First off, I've been out of that place for over 16 years so I don't know any of those people.

Secondly: I am trying to picture what the reaction to this would be from my old bosses from back when I did work there.

Bill Wilkinson, Odin rest his big swingin' dick soul, would almost certainly have sent a terse email to the executive committee of the firm informing them that he would not use such a tool in his practice nor would he let anyone else use it. Not because he was opposed to AI out of principle or anything – Bill had a surprisingly gee-whiz attitude toward technology for someone of his age and disposition – but because he'd NEVER give a client a hard and fast expectation of how many billable hours a matter would take. If he had done that he'd assume he was leaving money on the table and that he was limiting his ability to later say "look, I told you this was gonna be expensive." One of the first things Bill taught me was to never leave a paper trail, man.

Which is to say, this is probably a good use case for AI in a law firm context, actually, because back in my day you couldn't trust us as far as you could throw us when it came to bill-padding. Er, I mean when it came to the abstract concept of bill padding which we would never, ever do, I swear to frickin' God.

[Thunder rumbles, the lights flicker ominously, Bill Wilkinson waits for me to join him in lawyer Valhalla where he can lecture me about not revealing the secrets of the trade]

Help me before I Gen-X again

Part of the reason I give a lot of hell to Boomer politicians is that I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to break one's generational habits and proclivities and how self-defeating it is to even try.

Take me for example. In November Allison and I are taking a trip to Spain. We've never been! We may make a brief side trip, but we're mostly be in Madrid for a few days for some general touristing and – not gonna lie – some theoretical expatriate life reconnaissance. The trip is mostly driven by some dirt cheap airfare and hotel rates, however, so we're open to anything.

This is anything:

Radiohead have announced their first tour in seven years, after teasing it with a series of mysterious flyers that appeared in cities across Europe. The revered band will play four nights at London's O2 Arena on 21, 22, 24 and 25 November 2025, with other dates in Berlin, Bologna, Copenhagen and Madrid.

We'll be in Madrid for two of the four dates on which they'll be playing. Which means that, this Friday, I'll be sure to be up at 5AM to register for the right to purchase tickets on their website.

I've seen Radiohead twice. Once in New York in 2016 and once in Columbus during that last tour seven or eight years ago. The New York show was transcendent. The Columbus show less so due to some bad seats and an overall not-great vibe in the arena. So obviously I need a tiebreaker, right?

Wanna buy The Smiths?

I did not win the Powerball again last night. But if I had I would've seriously considered taking up Morrissey on this offer:

Morrissey has no choice but to offer for sale all of his business interests in "The Smiths" to any interested party / investor. This would include Morrissey's full and exclusive rights to :

1. The name 'The Smiths', as created by Morrissey.
2. All Smiths artwork, as created by Morrissey.
3. All Smiths merchandising rights.
4. All Smiths songs lyrically / musically.
5. All synchronisation rights.
6. All Smiths recordings.
7. All contractual rights for Smiths publishing.

In his own statement Morrissey said this:

"I am burnt out by any and all connections to Marr, Rourke, Joyce. I have had enough of malicious associations. With my entire life I have paid my rightful dues to these songs and these images. I would now like to live disassociated from those who wish me nothing but ill-will and destruction, and this is the only resolution."

Let me point out at this point that there's a 50/50 chance that "I Have Had Enough of Malicious Associations" is an album track on "Southpaw Grammar" or "Ringleader of the Tormenters" that I have forgotten, but I'm too busy to check right now.

Whatever. Morrissey is, without question, the most over-the-top dramatic dipshit in the music business. I dearly love many of the songs he wrote, both with the Smiths and in his solo career, and I will never not listen to his music, but he's become so comically insufferable that it's hard to put it into words.

Just say you're broke, dude. There's no shame in being broke.

For those unwilling to click on something involving Morrissey, know that this is an instrumental, so he has no involvement in it save, perhaps, the shaking of a maraca or the striking of a triangle or something.

Have a great day everyone.