Cup of Coffee: January 2, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

There wasn't any baseball news of consequence on New Year's Day but (a) there was as signing a couple of days ago; and (b) I had somehow missed the fact that baseball lost a pretty notable personality this past weekend, so I talk about both of those things. In Other Stuff I talk about the miracle drug that is coffee, magic links, some bangers being released into the public domain, and some helpful and instructive New Year's thoughts from Billy Bragg.

The Daily Briefing

Cubs sign Caleb Thielbar

The Chicago Cubs signed lefty reliever Caleb Thielbar to a one-year deal. Terms are not known but it's just Caleb Thielbar so I'm guessing the deal is not huge and the structure is not super complicated.

Thielbar, who will turn 38 before pitchers and catchers report, posted a 5.32 ERA (78 ERA+) in 47.1 innings of work with the Twins last year. He has spent parts of eight seasons in the bigs, all with Minnesota, beginning way back in 2013, despite a mid-to-late-teens odyssey through the minor league systems of the Marlins, Tigers, Padres, and Atlanta. He was back on the Twins and performed admirably for them from 2020 through 2023 before stumbling last year.

In other news, "Caleb Thielbar" sounds far more like the name of the rightful king of a mighty dwarven nation which resides beneath an imposing mountain, and to suggest that he is a baseball player rather than a mighty clan ruler is to deny his claim to power.

Lenny Randle: 1949-2024

I missed this earlier in the week but 12-year MLB veteran Lenny Randle died last weekend at the age of 75. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Randle was a highly-recruited multi-sport athlete out of Compton, California, but rather than go pro at 18 he decided to go to college. He played both football and baseball at Arizona State University, which he helped win the College World Series win in 1969 and ended up as a first-round pick of the Washington Senators in 1970. He debuted in Washington in 1971 and then relocated with the franchise to Texas, playing for the Rangers through the 1976 campaign.

Randle enjoyed his best season with the Mets after being traded there in early 1977 – more about that below – and remained in Queens through 1978. After a couple of minor league stops in the Giants and Padres organizations in early 1979 Randle suited up for the Yankees later that season. He had been in the minors but was called up to the big club to fill Thurman Munson's roster spot following Munson's death in a plane crash. He joined the Cubs in 1980 and then moved on to the Mariners in 1981 and 1982 before calling it career. For that career he hit .257/.321/.335 (87 OPS+) with 156 career stolen bases. Randle played more third base and second base than anything else but he appeared at every position apart from first base and pitcher during the course of his career.

The stat/career line is almost secondary when it comes to telling the story of Lenny Randle, however, as the guy was both a character and, at times, a chaos agent during the course of his career.

In a May 1981 game Royals center fielder Amos Otis hit a slow roller down the third base which caused Randle, then Seattle's third baseman, to get on his hands and knees and blow the ball over the foul line. The umpires disallowed his action and ruled it fair but the highlight of Randle blowing that ball still gets played fairly often today.

Another highlight that gets played, albeit mostly on the Internet as opposed to on the big scoreboard at ballparks, took place in a Cleveland-Texas game down in Arlington in May 1974.

The game had already been super chippy, including a particularly hard slide by Randle at second base to break up a double play. The next time Randle came up Cleveland pitcher Milt Wilcox threw a pitch behind him. Randle bunted the next pitch down the first base line and then went out of the baseline and deliberately smashed into Wilcox with his forearm as Wilcox attempted to field the bunt. Randle then attempted to continue to first base but was tackled by other Cleveland players and a bench-clearing brawl ensued:

Following the brawl Rangers fans threw beer and debris at the Cleveland dugout. When asked if he was worried about Cleveland fans doing the same to the Rangers when the teams were to meet a week later in Ohio, Rangers manager Billy Martin quipped that Cleveland doesn't draw enough fans for him to be concerned. That caused the Cleveland media to spend the intervening week riling up fans, including publishing photos of Chief Wahoo wearing boxing gloves with the words "be ready for anything!" underneath. It just so happened that that next meeting, on June 4, 1974, was Ten Cent Beer Night. Most people aren't aware that Cleveland had held similar cheap beer promotions multiple times before that with no incidents to speak of, but thanks to the hype and fan anger heading into that game – and with no small amount of that anger directed at Randle – the June 4, 1974 edition of that promotion became infamous.

Randle was involved in another violent incident in 1977, though this one was not particularly funny. That spring, rookie Bump Willis was named the Rangers' starting second baseman over Randle. Randle had taken issue with this and, in response, Rangers manager Frank Lucchesi told the media that he was tired of "$80,000‐a‐year punks" complaining. During batting practice before a late spring training game Randle approached Lucchesi and, according to Randle, Lucchesi told him, "what do you got to say, punk?" at which point Randle punched him in the face three times. Lucchesi was hospitalized for a week and required surgery to repair his cheekbone, which Randle had broken in three places, among other injuries. The Rangers suspended Randle for 30 days without pay and fined him $10,000. Randle was criminally charged in the incident and later pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery, receiving a $1,050 fine. Texas ended up trading Randle to the Mets for cash and a player to be named later, who ended up being Rick Auerbach. For what it's worth, Lucchesi ended up getting fired less than three months into the season. Lucchesi then sued Randle, claiming that, in addition to the injuries he inflicted, Randle was partially responsible for him being fired. They settled for $20,000.

Following his retirement from major league baseball Randle became the first American to play professionally in Italy and he maintained a home in Italy for many years after his playing career was over. He attempted a comeback in 1995 – he was 46 years old and was one of a handful of ex-major leaguers who crossed the picket line in an effort to become a replacement player during the 1994-95 players strike – but that obviously didn't go anywhere. In his later years he performed standup comedy. In 1982 he released a funk song "Kingdome" by Lenny Randle & the Ballplayers. He spoke five different languages. He was once dubbed "The Most Interesting Man in Baseball" by Rolling Stone magazine. That may or may not have been true, but he was a unique dude, that's for damn sure.

Rest in peace, Lenny Randle.

Other Stuff

Viva Coffee

Some good news from the abstract of a study titled, "Impact of coffee intake on human aging: Epidemiology and cellular mechanisms":

The conception of coffee consumption has undergone a profound modification, evolving from a noxious habit into a safe lifestyle actually preserving human health. The last 20 years also provided strikingly consistent epidemiological evidence showing that the regular consumption of moderate doses of coffee attenuates all-cause mortality, an effect observed in over 50 studies in different geographic regions and different ethnicities. Coffee intake attenuates the major causes of mortality, dampening cardiovascular-, cerebrovascular-, cancer- and respiratory diseases-associated mortality, as well as some of the major causes of functional deterioration in the elderly such as loss of memory, depression and frailty. The amplitude of the benefit seems discrete (17 % reduction) but nonetheless corresponds to an average increase in healthspan of 1.8 years of lifetime.

What will my fellow coffee drinkers do with your extra 1.8 years of good livin'? Personally, I plan to drink more coffee and be real smug about not being dead yet.

Why this site doesn't allow you to log in with a username and password

One thing that I never liked on Beehiiv and which I still don't care for on Ghost is that, rather than logging in with a username and password, the platforms employ magic link logins via which you enter your email and you're then sent a login link.

Part of my displeasure with that is that, on Beehiiv at least, the same trouble it had properly delivering the newsletter to so many people was replicated in the sending of the magic link, thereby exacerbating the "people who paid good money to subscribe can't read the newsletter" problem. I mean, at least with a username and password setup people could read it on the site. The delivery issues have been mostly solved on Ghost so now my displeasure with it is merely me being an old man who does not like it when things are different. Based on so many of you telling me how old you are in response to the "Carter Country" item the other day, I'm sure many of you can relate.

Helping me get over the magic link annoyance was this article from 404 media. That site also uses Ghost and thus its readers are also forced to use magic links. The article explains, however, why Ghost and many other sites have moved on to magic links and, I'm not gonna lie, it makes sense. The short version: most data breaches occur when a website, as opposed to an individual user, is hacked and if a website never had your login credentials to begin with, no one can steal that info from it. And while someone's newsletter login is not, in and of itself, all that critical, given that a hell of a lot of people use the same password or minor variations of it across many sites, such a hack can get pretty dangerous pretty quickly.

So yeah, I get the annoyance with magic links. And I share it. But I also understand why they exist and I'm gonna do my best to get over it.

2025 welcomes some bangers into the public domain

As of yesterday, any and all published works from 1929 and any and all published sound recordings from 1924 officially entered the public domain in the United States. Among the works with which you can now do anything without worrying about being sued:

Books

• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Rope by Patrick Hamilton
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolfe
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• Seven Dials Mystery, by Agatha Christie
• The first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
• Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by E. B. White and James Thurber
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

Movies

• The Marx Brothers' "The Cocoanuts"
• The first five Disney "Silly Symphonies" animated shorts, including "The Skeleton Dance," which totally slaps

Songs

• “An American In Paris” by George Gershwin
• "Singin’ in the Rain" by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
• "You Were Meant For Me" by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
• "Am I Blue?" by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke
• "Ain’t Misbehavin’" by Fats Waller, Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf
• "What Is This Thing Called Love?" by Cole Porter
• "Bolero" by Maurice Ravel

Note: on the songs, that's just for the song itself as a published work (i.e. the sheet music) from 1929 or earlier or for recordings from 1924 or earlier. Later recordings have their own copyright from their date of recording. So you can record and publish your own version of the song "Singin' in the Rain," but you cannot take Gene Kelly's recording of it for the 1952 film of the same name and slap it on a commercial for umbrellas or outerwear. Unless, of course, you get permission from whoever holds the rights to it. Got it?

I totally understand if you don't get it given that U.S. copyright law consists of a crazy patchwork thanks to corporations like Disney pressuring the government to extend IP protection over the past several decades. Eventually, however, human creativity is liberated and is made available for the public as it was always intended to be.

Now, go out there and remix history, y'all.

A helpful New Year's Day message from Billy Bragg

English singer-songwriter/activist Billy Bragg posted a thread on Bluesky yesterday morning that was exactly the sort of thing I needed to read as I woke up to 2025. My hope is that it's something many of you need to hear as well.

For the sake of convenience I've mashed the 11-post thread into a few paragraphs:

Sitting down to compose a hopeful message for 2025 is a tough ask given the year we’ve just had. Even glib sentiments are hard to come by. The defeat of pro-democracy forces in the US presidential election still weighs like a heavy anchor on my attempts to move on. Couple that with my growing disillusionment at the seemingly doctrinaire lack of compassion shown by the incoming Labour government in the UK and perhaps I can be forgiven for feeling pessimistic about the prospects for the coming year.

The news is a daily litany of depressing dispatches from around the world: the ongoing genocide in Gaza; the meat-grinder conflict in Ukraine; The rape of Gisele Pelicot; the rise of the far right; the climate crisis; the shadow cast by Trump’s presidency; the juvenile cruelties of Elon Musk. To add to our sense of disorientation, the notion of an inclusive society based on universal rights feels constantly under attack. Those who have long wished to reverse the tide of progressive reform are poisoning the discourse by promoting mistrust and division. Scare stories of the woke mind virus are deployed to marginalise those who believe that respect should be extended to the most vulnerable in society. Empathy is demonised on a daily basis. The cumulative weight of these developments is enough to make anyone question their faith in humanity.

Yet those of us who hold progressive ideals have always understood that we live in an unjust world. It’s what fires us up, what drives our activism. But lately, the injustice has seemed overwhelming. The urge to reach for our comfort blanket is understandable. But we must guard against letting our disappointments curdle into cynicism, allowing an understandable need for some respite turn into a sullen mood of resignation.

I believe a cynic to be someone who has given up on humanity, wallowing in their despondency to the extent that they think the worst of everyone. Cynicism is an impulsive urge to kick everything down, a resentful rage that drove the vote for Brexit & put Trump back in the White House. And for those of us who wish to create a fairer society, cynicism is the antithesis of the empathy that is crucial to such an endeavour.

So by all means, take a break from the struggle. Spend some time recharging your batteries. But don’t succumb to the idea that nothing will ever change, that no one gives a shit anymore and resistance is futile. We all have days when we feel that way, but cynicism is a cancer on the body politic and my new years resolution is to do everything I can to curb its pernicious influence on my reasoning.

And the closer:

It's a big ask. One I'm not always sure I will be able meet. But dammit, there's no other way lest we consume ourselves with rage and negativity and, folks, that's no way to live.

Have a great day everyone.