Cup of Coffee: February 6, 2025

Hey everyone.

Midday yesterday some personal stuff came up that took me offline for the day and prevented me from writing a proper newsletter. Below is what I had completed at the time that all broke – plus a late evening Pete Alonso update – and I figured, what the hell, just send it out as-is.

I suppose a partial newsletter is best on Free Thursday, right? You get what you pay for and all of that?

Eh, whatever. Sorry, all. I'll see you again tomorrow.

The Daily Briefing

Pete Alonso signs with the Mets

It took almost all winter and it took a pretty damn team-friendly contract, but Pete Alonso is returning to the Mets. It's a two-year, $54 million deal with an opt-out after 2025. He'll make $30 million this year. The player option is $24 million.

Alonso was looking for a big long-term deal this winter but that never materialized. He was reportedly offered a three-year deal from the Mets earlier in the offseason. It was reported last night that that deal, which he rejected, was for $71 million. That and what he just agreed to both seem low given Alonso's star power, his postseason production last year, and his status as a New York fan favorite, but his overall production has been down the last two regular seasons, in part because his strikeout rate is up, and it's just a fact that 1B/DH types, even the best ones, don't really cash in in major league baseball now like they used to. Indeed, Freddie Freeman is the only free agent first baseman to get a deal longer than three years in recent memory.

So, the Mets get a guy back who will likely still be productive for the next couple of years and Alonso goes back where he both fits best and where he's super popular. It may not be for the dollars he expected, but it was the best he could do in a tough market for a guy like him.

Cubs acquire Ryan Brasier from the Dodgers

This was from Tuesday night but blinding rage at the destruction of my country's government caused Allison to take my computer from me before the news broke, preventing me from writing about it. She was absolutely right to do that, by the way, because I'm pretty sure I've been operating on the knife's edge of a rage stroke for the past week or so. We watched "Suits" instead, which also enrages me, but in a more comical and benign way.

Anyhoo, the Cubs acquired righty Ryan Brasier and cash from the Dodgers for a player to be named later or cash. Brasier was DFA'd off the Dodgers’ 40-man roster after L.A. signed Kirby Yates. Which is not to say Brasier is chopped liver. Far from it. He was a key part of a Dodgers relief corps which played a big, big role in their run to the World Series title, posting a 3.54 ERA (110 ERA+) and a 25/5 K/BB ratio across 28 innings in 29 appearances during the regular season.

Brasier will most likely handle setup duties for Chicago in front of closer Ryan Pressly.

Twins sign Harrison Bader

The Minnesota Twins have signed outfielder Harrison Bader to a one-year deal with a mutual option for the 2026 season. Bader is guaranteed $6.25 million and can earn another $2 million in incentives.

Bader was an everyday oufielder for the Mets in 2024 but was overexposed in the role, hitting.234/.298/.373 (86 OPS+) with 12 homers and 17 stolen bases. He’s still a solid defensive player but he's best utilized as a fourth outfielder, which the Twins probably will do.

The jackwagon who grabbed the ball from Mookie Betts speaks

We're in a Golden Age of giving platforms to outrageous assholes. If you do something stupid, dangerous, and/or malicious and your actions are caught on camera you can take it to the bank that, eventually, some reporter is going to write an article about you in an effort to humanize you. In the case of Austin Capobianco, the outrageous asshole who pried a ball out of Mookie Betts' hand while his buddy grabbed Betts' wrist during Game 4 of the World Series, that reporter is Brandon Kuty of The Athletic, who tried to give Capobianco the soft-focus treatment yesterday.

As is usually the case with these things there's nothing of note here. Capobianco cops to making a huge mistake but generally talks about the incident as if it's a thing that happened to him rather than something he did. He's upset that people have given him shit – like, literally, people have mailed him boxes of human feces – and he's upset that he is banned for life from MLB facilities. Indeed, much of the article seems aimed at him trying to stir up sympathy that he can use in an appeal to MLB to lift his ban at some point. Which I can't imagine they'll ever do because why would they?

This near the end pretty much sums things up:

More than anything, Capobianco hopes to simply fade from public consciousness.

No more assumptions that this was premeditated. No more harassing calls or nasty voicemails. No more mysterious packages.

“I’m a hero in Yankees land. I’m a villain in America,” he said. “I don’t really care. I just want to be forgotten about. That’s it. I want people to forget about me.”

A great way to be forgotten about is to say no to a New York Times-employed reporter when he calls you and asks for an interview for a feature story about you. Of course if you say no you can't act like you're the victim so I understand my man's dilemma here.

Not that I really blame Capobianco for the existence of this story. It's a choice to write a story that attempts to humanize an infamous jerk who did something really stupid either out of drunkenness, sociopathy, or both. It's a choice news outlets make all the time these days because, hey, content is content. But it's a choice that bolsters the unhinged idea, held by many, that every story has two sides and that no one can or should judge people for what they do. We all get second chances and blah, blah, blah.

Austin Capobianco did something dumb and dangerous. He got banned from attending baseball games when he could've been charged with battery or something if someone had wanted to do it, so he should count himself lucky. It's really OK if he just fades into obscurity like he claims he wants to. Maybe we should just let him, eh?

Other Stuff

Congratulations on ending racism, Roger Goodell!

The other day it was reported that NFL officials will change the slogan stenciled in the back of an end zone for the upcoming Super Bowl from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” "End Racism" has been there for the past few years.

This comes despite the fact that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the other day that the league, unlike scores of other businesses and institutions, is not caving in to the ascendent segregationist mindset in government and in America at large by scuttling its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. That's kind of surprising given how authoritarian-friendly the NFL usually is, but hey, good for the NFL on that narrow score.

So why erase the "End Racism" slogan? Probably because Donald Trump is reportedly going to be at the Super Bowl and Goodell is afraid of bad optics and bad publicity. So, no, do not break your arm patting the NFL on the back for its DEI stance.

Honestly, I'm not going to get too terribly worked up by this. It's stupid and it sucks and it's yet another example of the cowardice of basically everyone in a position of authority or importance in this country, but it's also not a big deal in context. The context being that the NFL, and many, many other public-facing institutions, don't really give a shit about combatting racism and promoting equity or anything like that beyond the extent to which they can get good press for it. Or, more to the point, beyond the extent where they can avoid having their bottom line harmed with bad. press.

I mean, let's be real here: this was a league that, just a few years ago, blackballed a starting quarterback for protesting police violence against Black people. This is a Super Bowl featuring, for the fifth time in six years, a team which crassly coopts/perverts Native American iconography and whose fans do a racist, whooping gesture the whole damn game. It went after Colin Kaepernick because doing so pleased the people the NFL wanted to please at the time. It keeps its hands off of Kansas City football stuff because racists buy NFL Sunday Ticket too. It put "End Racism" in the end zone for a while because, for a brief couple of years, they calculated that it was better for business to engage in performative anti-racism efforts. Now that calculus has changed so erasing some writing on Astroturf is no big deal.

The NFL, just like Target, Amazon, McDonald's, Walmart, Ford · Lowe's, Harley-Davidson and all the other companies ending diversity initiatives, has no values other than the pursuit of profitability. Sometimes that pursuit coincides with positive social messaging for a brief period but it will drop such messaging like a bad habit the moment there's even a hint of risk to business line. When they do it we probably shouldn't wring our hands about it. Just as we shouldn't praise them for clearing the absolute lowest of putatively progressive bars on occasion.

Musk's coup targets NOAA

The unelected, lawbreaking neo Nazi who has taken over the United States government has now turned his eye to a new agency to destroy:

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Later in the day Wired reported that, as was the case with USAID, one of Musk's criminal hackers, Nikhil Rajpal, has taken complete control of NOAA's systems. Wired dug into what it could in Rajpal's online footprint – which was difficult because like Musk's other minions he has attempted to wipe his online identity clean – and found that he has a history of reading and praising right-wing and white supremacist accounts and espousing radical libertarian ideas. He has no experience or expertise in anything even remotely related to the work that NOAA does. Before doing what he's doing now he worked for Twitter and Tesla. There is every reason to think that he will lay waste to NOAA's systems, intentionally or otherwise.

As I've mentioned here many times, my father was a career employee of the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA. Based on what I saw there, and from what I've seen from and read about NOAA at large over the years, I can tell you that you will not encounter a less-political and more publicly beneficial organization. It's filled with scientists, technicians, analysts, and support staff who entered their fields because they absolutely love what they do. The competence-to-fat ratio is probably higher at NOAA than any governmental agency going and higher than many if not most private companies.

Because of my dad's career I'll admit that I'm not fully objective here. But one need not be biased to see that an organization dedicated to science and which gives its valuable, life-saving work to the public for free is an Absolute Good and that destroying it for no reason whatsoever is abhorrent. As one of my BlueSky followers said yesterday, "every tornado warning that tells people to get to a basement NOW, or hurricane warning that says it's time to head inland, or winter storm watch that makes sure road and power crews are ready to go, we owe NOAA/NWS." Now those efforts will be totally hamstrung. People will die because of what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their criminal accomplices have done.

It's senseless. It's Orwellian. It's kleptocracy in action. It's state-sponsored terrorism.

Personal matters taking me away from the newsletter notwithstanding, it was probably good for me to stop here anyway. I'm hangin' by a goddamn thread right now. I figure a lot of us are.

Have a great day everyone.