Cup of Coffee: March 27, 2025

Good morning! Welcome to Opening Day and welcome to Free Thursday!

If you weren't aware of it already, I'm running an Opening Day sale this week. If you're not already a paid subscriber, take advantage now and get 20% off an annual subscription:

For those of you who are new, know that every weekday of the regular season I begin each newsletter with my And That Happened recap feature, giving you a quick rundown of the previous night's action. We're entering our 18th season of And That Happened and, frankly, that's the most fun part of this whole jawn, so I do hope you consider subscribing.

Finally, before we get started today, I have a programming note.

For the first three years or so of this newsletter's existence I aimed to publish it by 7AM Eastern each day. For the last year or so, however, I've been publishing it by 6AM Eastern. That was never really intended. I just started doing it because my sleep schedule was skewing extreme and I was done with everything by 6AM so I figured, why not?

Over the past several months, however, I've been working to improve my overall health in a lot of ways which has, in turn, improved my sleep schedule to no small degree. Among the benefits: I'm no longer regularly waking up at like 4:49AM for no reason every single day. I still do some days, but it's not the norm. While that's a good thing for my body and my mental health, it makes writing west coast recaps by 6AM east coast time pretty damn difficult.

So: starting tomorrow morning I'm going to be shooting for a 7AM Eastern publication time instead. Some days it will still be earlier – if I can't sleep or, like, on Mondays when I can do all of the previous day's recaps the night before I may publish by six – but you should now start expecting Cup of Coffee in your inbox at around 7AM instead. Given the metrics to which I am privy this will not affect the vast majority of you – only something like 2% of you open it before 7am anyway – but I didn't want my fellow early birds worrying that something was amiss when it's not in your inbox at six. Thanks for understanding.

Now, let's get on with things.

The Daily Briefing

Happy Opening Day!

We've got baseball folks. Baseball that counts and that is worth watching and all of that. There are 14 games on tap today, with only the Rockies and Rays waiting until tomorrow to get underway for reasons about which I am not clear and about which I really don't care because, jeez, it's just the Rockies and Rays.

Here are today's matchups with starting pitchers in parenthesis. All times are Eastern Daylight Time:

• Milwaukee Brewers at New York Yankees (Freddy Peralta vs. Carlos Rodon), 3:05PM (ESPN)
• Baltimore Orioles at Toronto Blue Jays (Zach Eflin vs. Jose Berrios), 3:05PM
• Boston Red Sox at Texas Rangers (Garrett Crochet vs. Nathan Eovaldi), 4:05PM
• Philadelphia Phillies at Washington Nationals (Zack Wheeler vs. MacKenzie Gore), 4:05PM
• Cleveland Guardians at Kansas City Royals (Tanner Bibee vs. Cole Ragans), 4:10PM
• New York Mets at Houston Astros (Clay Holmes vs. Framber Valdez) 4:10PM
• San Francisco Giants at Cincinnati Reds (Logan Webb vs. Hunter Greene), 4:10PM
• Atlanta at San Diego Padres (Chris Sale va. Michael King), 4:10PM
• Los Angeles Angels at Chicago White Sox (Yusei Kikuchi vs. Sean Burke), 4:10PM
• Pittsburgh Pirates at Miami Marlins (Paul Skenes vs. Sandy Alcantara), 4:10PM
• Minnesota Twins at St. Louis Cardinals (Pablo Lopez va. Sonny Gray), 4:15PM
• Detroit Tigers at Los Angeles Dodgers (Tarik Skubal vs. Blake Snell), 7:10PM (ESPN)
• Chicago Cubs at Arizona Diamondbacks (Justin Steele vs. Zac Gallen), 10:10PM (MLB Network)
• Sacramento Athletics at Seattle Mariners (Luis Severino vs. Logan Gilbert), 10:10PM (MLB Network)

Play ball.

Possible 2025 milestones

Over at MLB dot com Sarah Langs runs down some of the statistical milestones various players may reach in 2025.

Some of them, such as Tyler Glasnow reaching 1,000 strikeouts or Spencer Strider reaching 500, aren't particularly notable beyond the fact that they're nice round numbers that are multiples of 50, 100, or 500 or whatever. Others, like Pete Alonso possibly becoming the Mets all-time home run leader or Clayton Kershaw reaching 3,000 strikeouts, are the sorts of things that will get a bit more of a mention if and when they occur. None of them, however, look like the sorts of milestones that might make the difference between someone getting into the Hall of Fame or not.

But hey, we're baseball fans and baseball fans love round numbers, so why not give the link a click?

Shocker: gamblers are not super high on the White Sox

The good news: the various sports books out there have set the over/under on wins for the Chicago White Sox at somewhere around 53 wins (ESPNBet has them at 53.5). That's 12.5 games more than the Sox won in 2024!

The bad news: per ESPN, that's the lowest season win total set by sportsbooks for any baseball team in over 35 seasons.

Take the under, folks. Take the under.

The Dodgers are gonna visit Trump in early April

The Los Angeles Dodgers announced on Tuesday evening that they have accepted an invitation to the White House to celebrate their World Series title. The team will go say hello to Donald Trump on April 7, which is an off-day before they play a three-game series against the Washington Nationals.

Manager Dave Roberts explained the decision:

"It's certainly a huge honor to get the invitation to the White House. It allows us to celebrate our 2024 championship. To my understanding, every World Series champion gets that honor, so it's a great honor for all of us."

There are all manner of reasons to pass on visiting Donald Trump, but to expect a bunch of ballplayers, ex-players, and executives to do so is probably unreasonable when you're aware of how, generally speaking, baseball people lean politically. For every guy on that roster and staff who has no interest in meeting Trump there are five or ten who will consider this the highlight of their year.

Not that the Dodgers don't have a good reason to pass given that Trump and his people thought it was a great idea to attempt to purge Jackie Robinson from the Defense Department website while casting him as a "DEI" beneficiary. And yeah, someone asked Roberts about that:

Roberts, who has frequently spoken about the importance of major league teams deploying more diverse coaching and front office staffs, said he was unaware of what took place with the Robinson story. After being informed by a reporter, he said: "I think I'm happy that the page went back up. I have my strong opinions on DEI and all that stuff, but that's another scrum."

Also Roberts:

In 2019, near the end of Trump's first presidency, Roberts indicated as part of a Los Angeles Times profile that he would not visit the White House if the Dodgers hoisted the World Series trophy later that year. Reminded of that Tuesday, Roberts smirked and said, "Did I?"

"I'm going," he added. "I respect the position. It's the highest office in our country, certainly in the world, so, looking forward to it."

I know better than to expect most baseball people to put themselves on the line with this kind of thing, and I am well aware that a person of color like Roberts would be dragged through the deepest mud by the ugliest parts of the right wing establishment if he spoke out about anything political. But I'm not gonna lie, it's still very disappointing to hear this stuff from him.

I'm still gonna hold out hope that something good might come of this, however. Like, perhaps noted anti-vaxxer and unhinged right wing conspiracy theorist Blake Treinen will give Trump measles.

MLB front offices are the whitest they've been in decades

Earlier this week Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer launched a new baseball newsletter called The Bandwagon. Yesterday, in The Bandwagon's second post, Keyser made a pretty significant observation:

For the first time in at least 20 years, Major League Baseball will open the season with only one non white man in charge of baseball operations for a team. Dana Brown, hired by the Houston Astros as general manager before the 2023 season, is the only non white male GM, president of baseball operations, or similar title to indicate the top decision maker in a team’s baseball hierarchy.

If only Major League Baseball had some sort of formal mechanism which encouraged the hiring of people who aren't white men maybe this could be remedied. A pipeline of sorts that is designed to increase diversity among the league's workforce. Oh well!

Quote of the Day: Jazz Chisholm Jr.

Apropos of the previous item, here's Yankees infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr., who was featured in an in-depth profile in The Athletic yesterday:

“I don’t want to say this — baseball is a White sport. I feel like White people criticize everything that a Black man does. Black men are outspoken. They say what’s on their minds . . . The unwritten rules of baseball are White, and I always broke the unwritten rules of baseball.”

He's not wrong about that, that's for damn sure. If you doubt that, look no farther than the sorts of criticism you see Chisholm get online, a great deal of which focuses on his personal style and habits that either directly repeat or philosophically echo old school "he's a showboat" or "he's too flashy" kind of garbage that Black players used to routinely get in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Most of us know exactly what people mean when they say that and Chisholm himself sure as hell does.

In related news: almost exactly a year ago Chisholm, while still with the Marlins, was featured in another story in which he sharply criticized his former Marlins teammate, Miguel Rojas in some pretty personal terms. Specifically, he said Rojas was "not a good captain," and that he was "not a good person." At the time I criticized Chisholm for that, thinking it was a pretty harsh thing to say publicly based on what sounded like some bog-standard veteran/young player dynamics in the Marlins clubhouse.

In this new feature, however, Chisholm talks about how Rojas was the ringleader of a hazing operation which seemed to single Chisholm out. Among other things, Rojas took a pair of Chisholm's custom cleats and cut them up with scissors. He ruined another pair of custom cleats by filling them with milk. That led to other skirmishes between them. Manager Don Mattingly eventually convened a team meeting to try to calm things down but by then Chisholm was already considered persona non grata by many Marlins players who sided with team captain Rojas.

So allow me to change my assessment from last year and say screw Miguel Rojas.

The annual Forbes team valuations are out

Forbes released its annual financial workup about Major League Baseball and its 30 clubs yesterday. Among its findings:

• The New York Yankees have sat at the top of the Forbes rankings since they were first published in the late 80s. They're still there but this year they have broken the $8 billion mark, with a valuation of $8.2 billion;
• The Yankees are followed by the Dodgers at $6.8 billion, the Red Sox at $4.8 billion, the Cubs at $4.6 billion, and the Giants at $4 billion;
• The Miami Marlins are last among the 30 teams with a $1.05 billion valuation, though that is up 5% from last year's estimate;
• The Sacramento Athletics saw their franchise valuation increase a whopping 50% , to $1.8 billion. That's largely based on their move out of Oakland and their vaporware stadium in Las Vegas, so it's quite possible that that valuation will change depending on future events; and
• The average MLB franchise is valued at $2.6 billion this year which is up, but not all is rosy, as four clubs – the St. Louis Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, Colorado Rockies and Tampa Bay Rays – are flat year-over-year. The Chicago White Sox actually declined 2%, to $2 billion this time around.

It’s worth noting at this point that not everyone believes that the Forbes valuations and profitability estimates are worth all that much. Some of that skepticism is agenda-driven, with team owners and people like Rob Manfred routinely throwing cold water on Forbes' numbers because they don’t want the world to think they’re rolling in dough. Less biased skeptics will note that Forbes doesn’t have any greater access to team finances than you or I do (i.e. almost none) and that these should all be taken as educated guesses at best. Ultimately, a team's value is based on what someone will pay for it, which is why watching potential future sales of clubs like the Twins and, perhaps, the White Sox and Rays are far more instructive than this annual listing.

Still, this list comes out every year and I read it every year. When team sales do come along or when we do get fleeting glimpses into team finances out of the corner of our eye, the Forbes estimates seem to at least broadly conform to reality, so I feel they’re worth sharing with you.

Baseball in Memoriam

Each year for many years Paul Sullivan of Sully Baseball has produced an Oscars-style In Memoriam segment for baseball. It's the best of this sort of thing I've seen and I'm happy to share it every year. It's a thoughtful and touching rundown of those who have moved on to Baseball Valhalla since Opening Day 2024:

Other Stuff

Free Rumeysa Ozturk

America is not a free country. No country can be free when the regime can simply abduct someone off the street and whisk them a prison a thousand miles away without any legal process whatsoever because they don't like what the person says.

The regime is using a secret police force to illegally disappear dissidents. That is literally what is happening. The United States of America is a fascist state.

The Atlantic calls the regime's bluff. And reveals what looks like a war crime

All day Tuesday Trump and his team attempted to defuse the scandal I've chosen to call SignalGhazi by claiming that the messages sent via the unsecured messaging app to its participants' unsecured cellphones in the runup to the recent attack on Yemen were not classified. That's an obvious horseshit position to take, so just after 8AM yesterday morning The Atlantic published them (here, as of yesterday, was a non-paywalled version).

The texts include specifics about the timing and targets of a secret military strike, the specific weapons used, and intelligence about the targets in question. Not surprisingly, everyone has continued to lie about it since the texts were released yesterday morning. Oh, and in addition to the abject and possibly criminal amateurism outlined in the text conversation reported by The Atlantic, the conversation contains an apparent admission that the United States has committed a premeditated war crime.

Specifically, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz announced on the group text that American forces targeted and destroyed an apartment building in which the girlfriend of one of the attack's targets lived, presumably killing her and others who lived inside of it (there are unconfirmed reports of 53 deaths in the attack). If there was any lack of clarity about that, when Vice President J.D. Vance says "what?" Waltz explains, in detail, that they knew it was a civilian building with civilian targets inside of it and fired missiles at it anyway:

It's worth noting at this point that, earlier this month, the Defense Department took steps to ensure such a thing would occur:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving to terminate Pentagon offices and positions that focus on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations, according to three defense officials.

Employees at the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which deals with policy matters related to limiting the risk to noncombatants, were informed on Monday that their office would be closed, the officials said.

To sum up: the National Security Advisor admitted in a chat, the veracity of which has been verified, that a military operation bombing civilians was intended and planned in advance and that civilians were, in fact, bombed during the operation. The Vice President was pleased with this and all of this happened less than two weeks after the Pentagon eliminated existing safeguards which might've served to civilian deaths in military operations.

I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that they should all be tried for war crimes. They won't be, but they should be.

Hegseth and Waltz are walking espionage targets

Two additional bombshell stories came out yesterday afternoon in the wake of the SignalGhazi reporting:

• First, Der Spiegel reported that the contact data of some of the officials on the chat, including mobile phone numbers and some passwords, are freely accessible on the internet. The Spiegel story says that, "[i]t is conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group.”
• Then Wired reported that National Security Advisor Waltz and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles left their Venmo accounts exposed, linking them to other politicians, their doctors, their custom tailors, various lobbyists, and more.

Anyone who has read books about how espionage actually works, as opposed to how it's portrayed in the movies, knows that it ain't usually about spy satellites, suave agents involved in cloak and dagger intrigue, or super geniuses in front of a bank of monitors saying "I'm in." Rather, it's usually about taking advantage of human frailty and sloppiness that allows hostile parties to get close to their targets who have become compromised by their carelessness, their stupidity, or their greed.

If you're a foreign agent wanting to get inside on a target, you absolutely want to know who his doctor or his tailor is. You want to know where he eats and spends his money. You want to know who his mistress is. You want to know as much about their day-to-day existences as you can so you can find a point of leverage or a way in. Mundane stuff like bank activity or what they do online or who they spend their time with gets you there way, way faster than any amount of James Bonding it up, and the highest-ranking members of the Trump Regime have simply handed that over to anyone who wants it. And you can bet your bippy that if a couple of magazines could get hold of this stuff foreign governments were able to a long time ago.

I know that nothing seems to matter in Trump World, but even in that bizarro reality someone has to understand that sacking Waltz and Hegseth, at the very least, is preferable to keeping them on. If not because of their abject incompetence and the dangers that poses to the country, but because of just how much they are embarrassing the regime right now.

Duke University is poised to learn a lesson about The Streisand Effect

Are you familiar with the "Streisand Effect?" It's that dynamic via which someone attempts to hide, remove, or censor something but where the effort to do that actually increases public awareness of the information at issue. It got that name back in 2003 when Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress the publication of a photograph intended to document coastal erosion but which incidentally included her Malibu house in it. It was only after Babs raised a stink about it that anyone realized it was her house, thereby creating way, way more interest in the photo than there ever was in the first place. A total shoot-yourself-in-the-dick kinda moment, ya know?

Someone should probably tell the folks who run Duke University about the Streisand Effect, because they're poised to learn a pretty big lesson about it. Specifically, in connection with the TV show "The White Lotus."

Mild spoiler alert here, but there is a character on "The White Louts" who is contemplating committing suicide. The character is a Duke University alum and, in two scenes across two different episodes, he has been shown holding a gun to his temple while wearing a Duke sweatshirt. In one scene – which turns out to be imaginary – he actually pulls the trigger. As of the most recent episode this past Sunday the character is still alive, though not particularly well for a host of reasons about which faithful viewers of the show like me are well aware.

Whatever the case, Duke doesn't like that:

“The White Lotus not only uses our brand without permission, but in our view uses it on imagery that is troubling, does not reflect our values or who we are, and simply goes too far . . . Duke appreciates artistic expression and creative storytelling, but characters prominently wearing apparel bearing Duke’s federally registered trademarks creates confusion and mistakenly suggests an endorsement or affiliation where none exists.”

It's probably worth noting that while "The White Lotus" is a popular show by certain standards and is discussed quite a bit on the Internet by weirdos like me, it's still a pretty niche show on a pay cable network. Like, it's not getting the ratings of "FBI" or "Matlock" or whatever else it is that your parents are watching on CBS. Indeed, last Sunday's episode was the highest-rated installment of the show in the three seasons it's been running and it had about half the number of viewers that the latest episode of Neilson-topping "Tracker" had.

I don't know if Duke getting mad at the scenes referenced above will mean that a lot more people will be tuning in this weekend's "The White Lotus." But I highly suspect that screencaps of that scene will see a pretty big uptick in usage on social media. Indeed, given how sports fans roll, that'll especially be the case if Duke struggles in tonight's Sweet Sixteen matchup against Arizona. The memes compose themselves.

Now let's play ball

It's been a long winter, my friends. But spring is now here and with it, for the next seven months and a little change, is baseball. No, it won't fix any of the problems in the world, but it'll give us a few hours a day during which we can do our best to put them out of our mind for a bit. Even the most engaged of us have to do that sometimes lest we go crazy. And there are few better ways of doing that than watching a ballgame.

OK, that song isn't really about baseball, but we'll let it go.

Have a great Opening Day everyone.