Cup of Coffee: January 30, 2025

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

Some awful stuff happened yesterday. But as I said right after the election, I can't handle writing about every single awful thing that comes down the pike while keeping my sanity. There will be too many, especially in the early going of this new presidential term, and if I try to make it my job to talk about all of it I'll wind up in some not good mental places.

So today, after talking about baseball stuff, rather than go down the litany of awful things that happened yesterday I'm gonna focus more on a couple of things that made me laugh from yesterday's news. That stuff is all still based in awfulness, though, so don't go thinking that I'm gettin' soft. Oh, and at the end I tell a story about high school chemistry and Todd Rundgren. It makes sense in context. At least I think.

That's life living in a hellscape, I guess. You just gotta take the laughs where you find 'em.

The Daily Briefing

Rays sign Ha-Seong Kim

The Tampa Bay Rays have signed infielder Ha-Seong Kim to a two-year, $29 million contract that includes an opt-out after the first season. Kim will make $13 million this year and has a shot at $2 million in incentives. If he doesn’t opt out he’ll make $16 million in 2026.

Kim, 29, is an elite up-the-middle defender but he hit just .233/.330/.370 (96 OPS+) with 11 homers in 2024 before undergoing labrum surgery in August. The shoulder no doubt impacted that performance, and it's going to keep him off the field until May. He is nonetheless expected to take over at shortstop for the Rays when he's ready.

The hope for the Rays, I suspect, is that Kim can put up a big year and exercise that opt-out, thereby clearing the way for top prospect Carson Williams. If he can't, well, having a great veteran glove man around in 2026 to mentor and/or caddy for Williams is not the worst outcome. My guess, however, is that if Kim proves he's healthy, he'll have a lot of value on next year's free agent market and the problem, such as it is, will resolve itself. In the meantime, the Rays will get a nice upgrade at short over what they had last year.

Mets re-sign Ryne Stanek

The New York Mets re-signed reliever Ryne Stanek yesterday. The deal is for one year and $4.5 million.

Stanek was flipped from the Mariners to the Mets last season. The Mets are bringing him back despite his 6.06 ERA post-trade, but that ERA is a bit misleading as he gave up three runs in his first appearance with New York and four runs while facing his old team, Seattle, two weeks later. He was otherwise fine, so let's chalk it up to life-change disorientation and over-familiarity on the part of the opposition, respectively, shall we?

Either way, Stanek strikes out a lot of guys, walks too many guys, and has a tendency to get hit hard when he does get hit, which means I know some M's fans who were happy to see him go last year. This year he'll, at best, be a setup guy in front of Edwin Díaz and stands a good chance of giving the Mets value in that role.

Tigers sign Tommy Kahnle

The Detroit Tigers already had a strong bullpen. Indeed, it helped push the Tigers into the playoffs last year despite the fact that they had just one reliable starter down the stretch. Now that bullpen is stronger thanks to their signing Tommy Kahnle yesterday. It's a one-year, $7.75 million deal.

I don't want to overstate how much stronger this makes the Tigers' pen, given that Kahnle, 35, has dealt with a lot of injuries over the past few years. But when he pitches he pitches well. Last year, for example, he posted a 2.11 ERA (196 ERA+) with 46 strikeouts in 42.2 innings for the Yankees. Those 42.2 innings, however, were the most he logged since 2019 and he's pitched only 97 innings going back to 2020. Still, the worst of those owies seem to be behind him and that changeup is still pretty damn deadly.

Royals sign Carlos Estévez

The Kansas City Royals have signed reliever Carlos Estévez to a two-year, $22 million deal. There's a $13 million club option for 2027 with a $2 million buyout.

Estévez, 32, has racked up 57 saves over the past two seasons for the Phillies and Angels. In those two seasons he tossed 117.1 innings with a 3.22 ERA (135 ERA+) with 128 strikeouts and 43 walks. That came after six years with the Rockies which, really, how important is a reliever's track record with the Rockies?

Lucas Erceg was poised to be the Royals closer, but I guess not now.

Pirates sign Adam Frazier for some reason

I think this one happened on Tuesday, actually, but I missed it: The Pirates signed utilityman Adam Frazier to a one-year $1.525 million contract.

I'm not entirely sure why they signed him given that he hit .202/.282/.294 (63 OPS+) for the Royals last year, but the Pirates seem to go out of their way to waste what talent they do have – Paul Skenes, Oneil Cruz – by filling the roster out with less-than-filler talent. Just a pathetic excuse for a front office that either doesn't know how to build a roster or doesn't really care to do so.

Other Stuff

Brilliant governing, you guys

Remember the government funding-freeze memo from the other day which fomented a Constitutional crisis? Yeah, never mind, the Trump administration rescinded it yesterday. It did so in a two-sentence memo which said, basically, "The last memo is rescinded. If you have any questions, talk to your department's general counsel."

Of course, because this is the Trump administration, it couldn't be that straightforward. Within an hour of the new memo coming out Trump's press secretary tried to argue that while, yes, the original memo was rescinded, the order behind it – a freeze on all federal grant spending – was still in "full force and effect."

Call me crazy, but what this looks like to me is the president's press secretary saying "yes, a federal judge entered a temporary restraining order against the funding freeze on Tuesday, but that was just against the memo! Now that the memo is gone, the court's TRO doesn't matter!" Sort of like Mac eating legal documents on "It's Always Sunny."

If that was the plan it failed pretty spectacularly less than three hours after the memo was rescinded.

To wit: there was a hearing yesterday in a parallel lawsuit to the one which resulted in that TRO on Tuesday. This case was filed by state attorneys general, arguing the same things about the initial memo being illegal and seeking a TRO of their own. During the hearing the government lawyer did, indeed, try to argue that the case was moot because the OMB memo had been rescinded. Counsel representing the attorneys general countered by citing Leavitt's tweet in response. Based on that tweet, the judge agreed that Trump still thinks he's banning federal spending and gave them their TRO:

What a self-own. My God. It certainly makes the New York Times' story sucking up to Leavitt from yesterday morning look pretty damn hilarious!

Say what you want about those allegedly irrelevant veteran reporters, but at least they didn't shoot their boss in the dick by tweeting something stupid yesterday. And, for as bad as the journalism industry is these days, I bet most of those reporters will have their jobs longer than Leavitt will given how she's going. Either way, let this all be a lesson to you young lawyers out there: judges really don't like it when you try to act cute in an effort to put one over on the court. Indeed, sometimes it'll get you threatened with contempt.

Whatever ultimately happens with this whole shebang, we are witnessing clownshoes governing from a clownshoes president. A clownshoes president who, I suspect, will try to take credit for "resolving" this crisis even it gets resolved by a court smacking him down for trying to usurp Congressional spending power. Given how the New York Times rolls, they're probably already praising him for yesterday's masterful gambit.

Some political advice

No one ever takes political advice from me, but I figure I'll offer some anyway.

Assuming Trump is ultimately smacked down for trying to usurp Congressional power, I strongly believe that Democrats should take a page out of his book and not only mock him for backing down and/or losing, but also loudly and continuously vow to investigate Trump's attempt to act illegally. They should promise to do this in the form of hearings when they retake the House. Yes, that's two years from now at the earliest, but (a) in this case it'd be a legitimate act of Congressional oversight, which cannot be said for the stuff the Republicans make a sport out of investigating when they hold the House; and (b) it's a great way to keep Trump's lawlessness and fecklessness in the news.

Does that seem like too much? Like it'd be exhausting? Maybe. But the whole reason we have Trump in office again is because we did not dog his ass and follow up on his crimes as diligently as we could have the first time around, thereby allowing him to rehabilitate himself and change the narrative. We cannot let that happen again. And yes, that's the case even though Trump cannot run for office again, as there are a lot of young, toxic jackwagons in this administration who will be part of America's political life for the next few decades. If we're ever going to get past this awful stage of American history they need to own this stuff. Someone needs to be held responsible.

Finally: yes, this particular spending power episode will no doubt be forgotten by many in a couple of years, but if history is any guide – and in this case it 100% is – the illegalities of this administration are going to continue at a regular pace. We must continue to call them out, continue to make it clear that criminality and corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trump's world, and we must keep adding them to the list of things which will be followed up on.

In the end, the real point here is less about sending a message to Trump, as he's senile and likely doesn't care. Rather, it's to send a message to the people in his administration and to the people who will be angling to pick up his political mantle. Make them afraid to be criminals. Make them know that, even though Trump managed to evade responsibility, they won't.

What good timing!

The other day I wrote about the tech meltdown caused by the introduction of China's DeepSeek, which apparently does everything the current AI leaders do but does it much, much cheaper. In response to that I wrote that we should expect the big tech movers like OpenAI to turn to Trump, to whom they have all been kissing up, for a bailout of some kind or another.

This happened Tuesday afternoon, right on cue:

OpenAI on Tuesday announced its biggest product launch since its enterprise rollout. It’s called ChatGPT Gov and was built specifically for U.S. government use.

The Microsoft-backed company bills the new platform as a step beyond ChatGPT Enterprise as far as security. It allows government agencies, as customers, to feed “non-public, sensitive information” into OpenAI’s models while operating within their own secure hosting environments, OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil told reporters during a briefing Monday.

What a happy coincidence! Right when it looked like OpenAI was gonna get eaten alive by cheaper Chinese competition it has a new product designed specifically to sell to the government on what will, no doubt, be overpriced no-bid contracts that will likely never end. What a happy, share price-preserving coincidence!

They're also turning to irony

Sticking with OpenAI:

David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto “czar,” said in an interview on Fox on Tuesday that there’s “substantial evidence” that Chinese AI company DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models, a process that Sacks compared to theft.

Sacks, who didn’t cite the source of this “evidence,” suggested that DeepSeek used responses from OpenAI models to train its own. “I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” Sacks said.

This would be the same OpenAI which is being sued by The New York Times and multiple other outlets and creators for copyright infringement due it using their copyrighted material to train ChatGPT, after which it regurgitates near-verbatim content, claiming it to be its own. And OpenAI is not coy about it! I mean, check out this statement, which they gave to the UK House of Lords committee which is investigating such matters and which it has echoed in various legal filings over the past year:

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials”

I have no idea if DeepSeek ripped off OpenAI's models, but if it did I cannot imagine a company with less standing to complain about it.

Deface the Music

In the fall of 1989 I was a high school junior. I was also taking AP Chemistry and doing really, really poorly in it. My brain could simply not connect with the material at all. A lot of kids in that situation would blame their teacher for not making it easier to understand but I knew it wasn't my teacher's fault. Mr. Ketz knew his stuff and he did more than I imagine almost any teacher in his place would have done to make the topic accessible to teenagers. I was just not good in advanced science classes. Or advanced math classes for that matter, but that's a story for another time.

Another thing going on in the fall of 1989 was my new job working at the local top-40 radio station, about which I've written before. That job, believe it or not, helped me pass AP chemistry.

I was promoted from being a gopher to being the weekend overnight DJ a couple of months into my junior year. Beckley, West Virginia is a small town so a lot of people around school became aware of it pretty quickly. It didn't make me a celebrity but it did make me something of a curiosity. People would call me by the extremely dumb DJ name that my boss at the station had forced on me – Craig "Mad Man" Miller – while I was walking the halls. Kids I knew who were out joyriding after midnight on Friday and Saturday nights would stop at pay phones to call me at the station to gab and to ask for requests. Sometimes they even showed up at the studio, where I worked alone, unannounced. It was all pretty fun. It beat the hell out of working at McDonalds.

One day in early January I was sitting in chemistry class, which I had barely passed with Ds in the year's first two grading periods. We were doing some sort of busy work that didn't require Mr. Ketz's attention. At some point he looked up, pointed at me, and said "hey, Mad Man, back here" and pointed to the little lab prep area through the door behind his desk. I assumed he wanted to talk to me about how badly I was doing in class, but nope, that's not what he wanted to talk about.

Mr. Ketz closed the door. Then he reached into the pocket of his coat which was hanging on the back of the door. In it were two homemade Memorex cassette tapes. One of them was Todd Rundgren's "Hermit of Mink Hollow" album. The other was a full 90-minute greatest hits-style mix of various things Rundgren had done from the 60s through the 80s.

"You know, Todd?" Mr. Ketz asked me.

"Um, a little," I said. But honestly, the only thing I knew for sure by him at the time was "Bang on the Drum" which had already begun to be used in movie trailers and stuff. I did know the song "Hello, It's Me" but I don't think I yet knew who sang it. I was mostly just confused.

Mr. Ketz told me that he heard I was working at the radio station. That probably meant that I liked good music, he said, and if I like good music I HAVE to get into Todd Rundgren. It was a very evangelical sort of situation. He was definitely looking for a convert. The only other times I've been around someone who was so clearly trying to get me to like what they liked is when I've was around Rush fans. I'd later learn that Rundgren had a whole prog phase with the early incarnation of his band Utopia, so in hindsight it made sense. Prog guys are just like that.

I thanked Mr. Ketz for the tapes and, over the next couple of weeks, I listened to them a lot. And whaddaya know, I liked them. I didn't go crazy or anything but over the rest of the school year I'd occasionally talk to Mr. Ketz about Rundgren and ask him for recommendations. He seemed to genuinely appreciate it. And he was cool about it. Like, he didn't insist I listen to more and more Rundgren like some Rush fan telling me that I REALLY needed to give "Caress of Steel" another shot. Rather, he was content enough to know that I thought "Hermit of Mink Hollow" was a fun album and that a couple of songs on the mix tape had inspired me to grab the radio station's copy of "Something/Anything" and burn a copy for myself.

Oh, and for my last two grading periods of AP Chemistry I got Cs. They were totally undeserved Cs, that I can tell you, but seeing as though Mr. Ketz knew I had no intention of doing hard sciences in college he probably figured that there was no harm in grading me on the Gentleman's Curve. Thirty-five years later I can say that no, there has been no harm in that.

I mention all of that for two reasons:

First: upon searching yesterday morning I realize that I, somehow, had never told that story before. I am pretty sure I tweeted about it in the past, most notably during a half-drunk rant from a St. Louis hotel room following Game 3 of the World Series, but I've never put it in the newsletter or on my personal site.

Second: An early morning Wikipedia hole yesterday led me to the brief John Lennon-Todd Rundgren feud of 1974. That happened when Rundgren gave an interview to Melody Maker about how John Lennon had become a rich, obnoxious sellout who had turned his back on real rock and roll and Lennon responded with an open letter in which he slammed Rundgren in his usual Lennonesque, "I'm actually above all of this and really don't care so I'm going to feign confused politeness while actually being super bitchy" way. Neither of them came off very well in that exchange, I don't think, but I suppose things were different 50 years ago. We had not yet invented Kendrick Lamar.

After reading that I read some accompanying stuff about how Rundgren, like so many rockers who came of age in the 60s, was hugely inspired by the Beatles. Which is pretty damn obvious even if you know nothing about him. Yes, he has always been experimental and all over the map stylistically, but Rundgren's most straightforward and most commercially successful work is firmly rooted Paul McCartney mode, both in terms of his melodicism and in his "I'm going to play every instrument on the track and produce it as well" control freak work ethic. That rarely wears well on artists, but it works for Rundgren, who is a mercurial polymath and can pull it off.

What I did not know, however – probably because nothing from it appeared on the Mr. Ketz tapes – is that in 1980 Rundgren and Utopia basically did a Beatles album. No, it was not covers. The album, titled "Deface the Music," consisted of all original songs done in the style of the Beatles. As if they were outtakes, maybe. It was basically chronological, too, with its 13 tracks beginning with songs that could've been taken from "With the Beatles" or "A Hard Day's Night," moving on to songs which might've appeared on "Rubber Soul" or "Revolver," and ending with some pastiches of "Penny Lane," "Strawberry Fields Forever," and "I Am the Walrus."

The album is original and accomplished enough to not come off as mere parody, but it's not merely a collection of songs inspired by the Beatles either. This was an obviously intentional project, and an uncanny one at that, only a half-step below "The Rutles" in obviousness. I'm sure real Rundgren fans know more about it all and can talk about whether (a) Rundgren was still holding his grudge against Lennon six years later and it was done to take the piss out of the Beatles; or (b) it was a loving homage. Maybe a little of both, I figure. Either way, it was a project that kinda sank the minor new wave cred that the new, non-prog version of Utopia had been building in the couple of years leading up to it. I don't know that much about Rundgren, but I do know that he can be restless and changeable and that he doesn't chase trends, so that too may have been intentional.

I spent yesterday morning listening to "Deface the Music," partially because it's a fun little record, partially because I can't decide if Lennon and McCartney could've, if they had wanted to, sued the pants off of Rundgren – there are some straight-up ripped off riffs – and partially because I am doing my very best to make sure I don't get trapped in doom loops while reading the news of the day and that was as good an hour or two distraction as anything else.

Anyway, hope you're still out there somewhere, Mr. Ketz. If you are, know that I don't remember a lick about AP Chemistry if, indeed, I ever learned anything. But I still like Todd Rundgren a great deal, and frankly, that's been far more valuable to me over the years than knowing about intermolecular forces and shit.

Have a great day everyone.