Cup of Coffee: July 25, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Let’s get to it, shall we?

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Rockies 20, Red Sox 7: Brenton Doyle hit a grand slam, Ezequiel Tovar homered and singled twice, Jacob Stallings also homered, Brendan Rodgers had four hits, and Kris Bryant singled three times as the Rockies trounced Boston.

Despite the fact that this game was in no way close, Rockies pitcher Cal Quantrill was all jacked up after retiring Sox catcher Reese McGuire on a fly out to end the fourth inning. Quantrill, who has always been a bit more demonstrative than your average pitcher, pumped his fist when he recorded the out. McGuire said something to him and then Quantrill shouted “you jacked off in a fucking parking lot, you dumb fuck” at him, which led to the benches clearing.

Which is not a lie! Back in February 2020, McGuire was indeed charged with a misdemeanor count of indecent exposure after he was found masturbating in his car in a shopping center parking lot in Dunedin, Florida, near the Blue Jays spring training complex. He pleaded no contest to a charge of disorderly conduct and was fined $500.

I guess that’ll teach McGuire? I don’t know. I suppose when you have his baggage you just gotta keep your head down and play out the rest of your career as inconspicuously as you can.

Mets 12, Yankees 3: Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor and Tyrone Taylor homered off Gerrit Cole and Lindor added a second homer — a three-run shot — after Cole left. Mark Vientos went deep too. With this win the Mets won all four of the Subway Series games this year. It was their first season series sweep of the Yankees in 11 years. And this is fun: since June 15, the Mets have the best record in baseball. Since June 15 the Yankees have the second-worst, ahead of only the Chicago White Sox. Yikes.

Here was Aaron Boone after last night’s game:

“We’re right there” is a hell of a thing to say about this team. Right where, exactly?

Reds 9, Atlanta 4: They had a doubleheader planned to make up for Tuesday’s rainouts but they only got one of the two games in. As it was, Spencer Steer, Elly De La Cruz, and Jake Fraley each had three hits. Steer drove in three runs via two doubles and a triple. Fraley hit a two-run homer and De La Cruz hit a solo shot. Atlanta has lost four in a row.

Pirates 5, Cardinals 0: Martín Pérez pitched six scoreless innings and Rowdy Tellez hit a homer that landed in the Allegheny River.

*checks to make sure the game was in Pittsburgh and not St. Louis*

Yeah, an impressive home run but not as impressive as I suppose it could’ve been. Pittsburgh takes two of three and has won eight of ten overall.

Twins 5, Phillies 4: It was tied at four entering the bottom of the ninth. Phillies reliever Gregory Soto hit Trevor Larnach with a pitch and he advanced to second on a wild pitch. He then moved to third on a sacrifice bunt by Austin Martin. That brought up Max Kepler who hit a two-hopper up the middle against a drawn-in infield, second baseman Bryson Stott couldn’t get to it in time to make a play anywhere, Larnach scored. That’s about as small as ball gets, folks.

Brewers 3, Cubs 2: This one was tied at two entering the top of the ninth when Blake Perkins led off with a single and William Contreras doubled him in. Jackson Chourio singled in the Brewers first run in the first inning and Brice Turang hit a pinch-hit RBI single in the sixth. Milwaukee takes two of three from Chicago.

Astros 8, Athletics 1: Chas McCormick homered, Jose Altuve had three hits and two RBI, and Hunter Brown scattered eight hits over six innings, struck out eight, and allowed just one run. With this win and the Mariners’ loss, the Astros end their virtual tie and assume a one-game lead in the division.

Angels 2, Mariners 1: Griffin Canning allowed one run over five and four relievers went four scoreless innings against the punchless-of-late Mariners.

Guardians 2, Tigers 1: Tanner Bibee and four relievers tossed a combined two-hitter. Indeed, Bibee gave up both hits in his five innings — one was a Matt Vierling solo homer in the first — and the pen no-hit Detroit the rest of the way. Josh Naylor singled in his brother Bo to break a 1-1 tie in the eighth. I took my brother to the zoo yesterday and bought him bottled water that cost like $5.79. We’re very much alike.

Marlins 6, Orioles 3: Jazz Chisholm Jr. broke a seventh-inning tie with a two-run double and Bryan De La Cruz capped the three-run inning with an RBI single. Josh Bell homered and Xavier Edwards had three hits and a walk. Miami goes for the three-game sweep this afternoon.

Padres 12, Nationals 3: San Diego rattled off 20 hits, including homers from Jurickson Profar and Kyle Higashioka. Jackson Merrill hit two singles, doubled, and tripled. The Nats trotted out infielder Ildemaro Vargas to the mound in the ninth and he threw a 33 mph pitch, so that was something. He didn’t give up a run, though, so he was ahead of the game for the Nats. The Padres have won four in a row.

Blue Jays 6, Rays 3: Justin Turner had three hits including one which broke a 2-2 tie in the eighth inning. After that the Jays piled on three more runs as things quickly got out of hand. Earlier in the game Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homered — it was his fifth dinger in six games — and hit an RBI single. The rubber match in this three game set goes down this afternoon.

Rangers 10, White Sox 2: Big day for Nates as Eovaldi went seven innings, struck out ten, and allowed just two runs while Lowe hit a three-run dinger and knocked in four. Corey Seager had four hits including a homer and Adolis García had three hits. Texas has won four straight.

Diamondbacks 8, Royals 6: The Royals took a 4-3 lead in the fourth and held it until the ninth but then the wheels fell off. The Dbacks plated five in that frame, with Grabriel Moreno doubling in two and Ketel Marte hitting a three-run homer. Earlier Eugenio Suárez homered and Joc Pederson and Christian Walker hit back-to-back shots. The Snakes take two of three.

Giants 8, Dodgers 3: San Francisco salvages one thanks to a six-run eighth inning that featured four RBI singles — one a two-run hit from Heliot Ramos — and a run-scoring groundout. Robbie Ray got the win pitching five no-hit innings. They weren’t five perfect innings by damn sight, though, as a run scored in the first thanks to Ray hitting two guys, throwing a wild pitch, and walking two more, the second of which forced in a run. No one could touch him otherwise, even if it took him 86 pitches to make it through five.

Reds vs. Atlanta — POSTPONED 

🎶 The flies have quit their buzzing
Even Bear has stopped his barking
They all sense something brewing
Up the James and headed this way

Bobby sips his morning coffee
Says 'Have you finished with the funnies?
Looks like a storm's coming honey
Guess we'll have to stay in bed today'

I've heard that into every life
A little of it must fall
If there's any truth to the saying,
Lord, let it be a southern rain 🎶

The Daily Briefing

Red Sox, Alex Cora agree to a contract extension

Red Sox manager Alex Cora was a lame duck entering this season but he’s a lame duck no more: he and the club have agreed to a three-year, $21.75 million contract extension. He’s now locked up through 2027.

Cora has led a Red Sox team that most figured would finish in last place in the AL East for the third year in a row to a 54-46 record and Wild Card contention. He, of course, led the club to a World Series title in 2018, his first season at the helm. He’s currently in his sixth season as the Red Sox manager, having sat out in 2020 in the wake of the Astros sign-stealing scandal, of which he was an architect while serving as the team’s bench coach. He was re-hired prior to the 2021 season and has held the job since.

If Cora keeps the job through the length of the extension he will be the second-longest tenured manager in Red Sox history behind only Joe Cronin (1935-47).

Brewers place Christian Yelich on the injured list with a potentially serious back problem

The Milwaukee Brewers have placed outfielder Christian Yelich on the injured list because of inflammation in his lower back. Yelich has had a sore back for some time, but it has gotten way worse lately. He’s scheduled to see a spine specialist today. The club says that season-ending surgery is a possibility.

Yelich, 32, has had a great season to date, hitting .315/.406/.504 (153 OPS+), leading the league in batting and on-base percentage and earning his third All-Star Game appearance. But he is 1-for-19 over his past six games and left Tuesday’s game against the Cubs early.

The Brewers are currently leading the NL Central, but losing that bat could be a big blow for ‘em.

Christian Scott avoids surgery for now

On Monday Mets rookie righty Christian Scott had an MRI which revealed an ulnar collateral ligament sprain and inflammation in his right elbow. Yesterday the team said, however, that Scott will not require Tommy John surgery. Rather, according to manager Carlos Mendoza, Scott will be shut down for two weeks before ramping him back up with an eye on returning in 2024.

Such plans aren’t often successful, but the calendar makes it a fairly low risk proposition. Because, really, if Scott were to have Tommy John right now, he’d Probably miss all of next year anyway, because teams don’t like to rush rehab. As such, he’d be unlikely to pitch until at least August or maybe even September. Practically speaking, the Mets would probably push him out until the offseason so he can come back at full strength in the spring of 2026. And if he does rehab and tries to come back in 2024 and that doesn’t work and he needs Tommy John anyway? Well, then he’s out until . . . spring 2026.

Doing it this way at least gives Scott and the Mets a chance to see if he can pitch meaningful games in 2025. No real downside.

One more on Walls

Yesterday I wrote a thing about Rays shortstop Taylor Walls’ pro-Trump stuff. I was reminded by a Rays fan I know that this is not new territory for Walls. Two years ago he made a point to go all-in with Ron DeSantis’ efforts to bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports:

But sure, Taylor. You’re not about being publicly political.

I laughed

Other Stuff

OK, this is badass

Subscriber Seán Ó Máille sent me this video of Aston Villa midfielder Youri Marion Tielemans with a body cam. It’s not a new video but it’s new to me and it’s pretty damn amazing:

When you watch a football game you can’t help but notice just how little time a player has with the ball before the defenders close in, but it’s even more extreme when you see it from this perspective. I still maintain that hitting a 100 mph fastball with movement is the hardest thing to do in sports, but trying to move more than a few yards with a soccer ball is right up there.

Keep up this messaging, guys!

I’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing about Kamala Harris from some very well-followed right wing accounts over the past several days:

J.D. Vance, of course, has a well-documented record of saying that people without children are somehow suspect and should not have the same sort of political power or even rights of people with children. He’s said it specifically about Kamala Harris, in fact. It’s all part of that whole fascist birth rates/Great Replacement Theory to which so many Republicans adhere these days.

But no matter how odious their political beliefs happen to be, I’m really struggling to understand how any of them think this will play well with the electorate. It’s toxic stuff to most of us and even many who lean to the right find it supremely off-putting. It sure as hell isn’t going to attract swing voters that both sides need in order to win.

Which is to say: please keep this rhetoric up, Republicans! Make sure every single voter knows that you think adults who decide not to have children are suspect and unqualified for positions of power!

What Trump’s mass deportation plan really is

Despite all of the Biden-steps-back/Harris-steps-forward excitement of the past several days, it’s worth remembering that Democrats cannot campaign on good vibes alone. They and the rest of us who don’t want to see fascism ascendant in this country need to remind people that a Trump victory will mean that the scores of goons on the far right who have cooked up Project 2025 will get a free hand to implement some of the most odious things imaginable. The most odious of which involves the Trump/Project 2025 promise to remove some 20 million people from the United States via mass arrest, internment in deportation camps, and forced expulsion.

Writer/historian Andrea Pitzer is the author of the book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which chronicles and analyzes the history of mass civilian detention without trial from its 19th-century origins in Spanish-occupied Cuba through the British camps of the Boer War in South Africa, to the death camps of World War 2. In her recent column for Scientific American she observes that Trump/Project 2025’s mass arrest/detention/deportation plan repeats the sort of rhetoric that, throughout history, has led to civilian detention camps, with horrific, tragic results:

With this horrifying ideological groundwork laid and the sheer size of the undertaking acknowledged, it is inevitable that what Trump and the right are proposing will lead to death and disaster. Even attempting to implement it in part would require the hasty deputization of thousands of new government agents and jailers, making this, by definition, a less-than-professional effort. It will attract those who want to brutalize immigrants and it would unleash what Pitzer calls “deliberate and collateral mayhem.” She adds that, “if history is any guide, a system of camps built to punish millions represents a threat to every American.”

I highly recommend Pitzer’s article. It’s not super long but it’s chock full of links to sources which demonstrate just how similar Trump’s mass deportation plan is to the policies of authoritarians and fascists which, in the past, led to concentration camps and inevitable atrocity.

“A Complete Unknown”

I have long maintained that the movie “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” rendered music biopics completely obsolete. At least ones involving Boomer-era musicians whose 1950s-1970s progression has long since been reduced to easily-satirized cliche. These days even the thought of one makes me think of unfortunate machete accidents and “THE WRONG KID DIED!” 

Yet they keep making them. And now they’ve made one — well, another one — about my favorite musician of all time, Bob Dylan. It’s called “A Complete Unknown.” It stars Timothée Chalamet as Bob. It comes out in December. A teaser trailer came out yesterday:

My son, also a Bob Dylan fan, has seen stills from the production and strongly believes that Chalemet “lacks the swag,” to use Carlo’s term, of the original Bob. Which, fair, but I don’t think anyone but Cate Blanchette has ever captured Bob’s swag. It’s a tall order. I will give him credit for his singing on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in the trailer. It’s always bad when they dub in a different voice and I think our boy Timothée has done a more than serviceable job.

I can’t imagine what someone who knows every weird and minute detail of Dylan’s life like I do is going to get out of this movie, but I at least hope it serves as a good and enjoyable entry point for the Dylan-curious. And of course I’ll go see it anyway, if for no other reason than to get some nitpicking material for a newsletter during the slow post-Winter Meetings period.

So that’s how they did it

This is fun: archeologists and geologists have discovered a long-dried-up-and-buried branch of the Nile River which (a) flowed very, very close to where the pyramids are now; and (b) was very likely employed to transport the massive blocks used in the pyramids’ construction:

Their research suggests that the branch of the river largely dried up during a major drought roughly 4,200 years ago, after which it became silted-over. This timing, the article says, “coincides almost perfectly with the end of the Sixth Dynasty (around 2340 BC), when pyramid construction largely halted.”

Who knew that the aliens who came here to built the pyramids — and Stonehenge — used our rivers instead of their transporter rays? How very eco-friendly of them. Humanity has so much to learn from the outer space visitors!

Have a great day everyone.

And jFYI: there will not be a regular newsletter tomorrow. I may send out some scores and a stub for comments or something but my day today is gonna be consumed with travel home and I won’t have time to write anything proper. Thanks for understanding.