Cup of Coffee: June 29, 2023

Another weird installment, but we're getting there.

Good morning!

We’re continuing a bit of a mailed-in week as I continue to settle into my new digs. More on that below. For now, let me just finally admit that it was silly of me to think I’d actually be able to properly work this week, that I should’ve probably just taken the week off, and that the usual format of this newsletter will not return until Monday.

In the meantime, let’s do what we did yesterday and highlight a couple of things with some quick hits.

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Baseball Stuff

Domingo Germán pitches a perfect game

Yankees starter Domingo Germán pitched baseball’s first perfect game since 2012 last night, going 27 up and 27 down against the Athletics in Oakland. He needed only 99 pitches to do it, to, which makes it a Maddux. Germán struck out nine batters.

Get this: Elliott Kalb of NBC Sports predicted that there’d be a perfecto mere hours before Germán pulled it off:

There can’t be a perfect season without a perfect game, so I will predict the first perfect game since Felix Hernandez threw one (against the Rays on August 15, 2012).

He predicted it’d be John Means, but really, that’s one you can strut on for a bit.

Man, not sure what else to say here other than congratulations to Domingo Germán, who joins one of baseball’s most exclusive clubs.

Dane Dunning almost pitches a Maddux

As most of you probably know by now, A Maddux is when a pitcher throws a shutout of nine or more innings while expeding fewer than 100 pitches. They’re pretty rare these days but pretty spiffy all the same.

Last night Cup of Coffee’s favorite starting pitcher/favorite mid-century B-movie actor, Dane Dunning, almost pulled it off against the Tigers. Indeed, he was only one strike away from doing so, with his 98th pitch of the evening constituting the second strike of a 1-2 count to Andy Ibáñez with two men down. Pitch number 99 resulted in a single. Needing a pickoff to complete the Maddux, Dunning instead induced a foul ball from Kerry Carpenter to lose it and then, two pitchers later, watched as Carpenter hit an 85 m.p.h. changeup over the right field fence. That cost Dunning the shutout and, since Bruce Bochy came out to get him at that point, cost him the complete game.

Still, a hell of an outing for the Dane. Easily his best performance since he played Dr. Charles Cargraves in “Destination Moon.” Whereas this game ended in an almost-Maddux, that one ended in an almost sacrifice. Seems like Dunning has been building up to this for some time.

Speaking of the Maddux . . .

As I’ve mentioned before, the inventor of “The Maddux,” is baseball writer andCup of Coffee subscriber Jason Lukehart. He credits me with helping popularize it by spreading the word of his original column explaining the Maddux, but I’m pretty sure it would’ve found its way to broad acceptance regardless. It’s a cool little gimmick stat and those things are so damn fun.

Anyway, Jason emailed me last night just as Dunning was finishing his near-Maddux to hip me to that and to hip me to something super cool: he’s on a new History Channel podcast about Greg Maddux and the new pitch clock. It was just released yesterday. Here is the link. From Jason’s email to me:

Maddux himself, Anthony Castrovince, and James Taillon were the other guests, and understandably they only used maybe 90 seconds of what I said during the half hour we spoke (between the 11- and 14-minute marks). They didn't include me mentioning your name, but the "friend, who is also a baseball writer" they refer to around the 12:20 mark is you, and maybe half a minute later Greg talks briefly about learning of the existence of the Maddux.

I was already separated from Greg Maddux by only one person via multiple means — interviewing Jeff Francoeur is my favorite degree of separation — but I’m gonna count this too.

Steve Cohen speaks

As expected, Steve Cohen met the press yesterday to talk about how ass the Mets have been this season. The big takeaway: Cohen said both manager Buck Showalter and GM Eppler would "absolutely" finish out the 2023 season, at the very least. He offered some words about top-down stability to justify that and I think he’s right.

Buck Showalter hasn’t always made the best decisions this year but he hasn’t suddenly forgotten how to manage. I’m not a big fan of Eppler’s, but firing the GM in June, just a few months after giving him carte blanche to put this team together, seems like a knee-jerk thing. GM changes are large, course-correcting maneuvers. You gotta plan that kind of thing out, yeah?

Cohen did say, however, that he's still looking to hire a president of baseball operations to oversee Eppler or whoever the GM is. You’ll recall that the Mets planned to do that a year or two ago but couldn’t attract the right candidate. It’s not surprising that Cohen wants to take another stab at if as it’s pretty standard industry practice to have a team president.

Cohen also said that “If we don't get better we have decisions to make at the deadline.” So a sell-off is not out of the question. Which is kinda nuts for a club with the majors' highest payroll and sky-high expectations heading into the season. But that’s why they play the games.

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Other Stuff

So, Day 3 in the new place — the second full day — is now in the books. We’re not much closer to being unpacked but there were a lot of doings. To wit:

• I forgot to mention that on Tuesday night Allison and I walked to the dive bar that’s 440 feet (I checked on Google Maps) from our new front door. There were two seats open at the bar next to a guy sitting by himself at the corner. He turned to us when we sat down, looked at Allison and asked, loudly, “IS YOUR NAME RHONDA?” When she said no, he told us a story about a woman he once loved named Rhonda. And by “once loved” he meant, to use his exact words, he “popped her cherry back in high school then lost track of her for 20 years until Facebook happened.” They got back together and that didn’t work out and now Rhonda is off in the wind someplace. And yes, he did know that Allison was not actually Rhonda but he said she looked just like her and it made him think of her;

• The guy then started telling everyone, loudly, that he as from Pittsburgh and he is a fence contractor working in town for a month. He’s staying at an Airbnb nearby and comes to this bar every night. “This bartender is probably gettin’ sick of me,” he said, “because I’m a TALKER.” I caught the bartender’s eye and he pretty clearly acknowledged that he is, in fact, sick of this guy. To be fair, I was kind of egging him on at that point because it was entertaining to me, but when we left Allison told me not to strike up conversations with weirdos anymore. I told her that he started it with that Rhonda stuff and she said “oh yeah.” Then we agreed that we can’t go to that bar until this dude’s job in Columbus is over and he’s found some other people to loudly tell his cherry-poppin’ daddy-ass life story to.

• Yesterday was busy. I had a plumber come over to fix the connections to my washer which were messed up. He was good and efficient and actually pretty cheap by plumber standards but he also spit tobacco juice into my basement floor drain while I was talking to him and that seemed . . . off. But hey, the washer works now;

• So too does the drier, as I successfully changed out the four-prong plug for the three-prong. It was as easy as y’all said it’d be. The scariest part was worrying that I’d drop one of the screws into the housing of the drier and I’d never find it. Neither that nor electrocution happened to me so I declared victory. My prize for that victory: having to do a shit ton of laundry which had piled up. Good for me?

• I also got my new furnace and air conditioning installed yesterday. It was not totally smooth sailing at the outset. When the guys showed up they told me that they had my furnace but that the air conditioning unit hadn’t shown up so, if it was all the same to me, they’d just do the furnace and come back sometime with the AC. I told them that was not happening because, if they hadn’t noticed, it’s summer outside. More to the point I told them that their boss told me the day before that if they couldn’t get my unit on a day’s notice, they’d either upgrade me free of charge to a nicer, more expensive model or put in whatever spec system they had until the one I wanted came in at which point they swapped ‘em out. They went back to their truck, made some calls and, miraculously, my unit showed up a bit later. Furnace only in late June? Ah, no;

• They system cools my house down nicely. I have retuned to civilization. I am pleased;

• While those guys were working at my new house under Allison’ supervision, I went to pick up Carlo and Anna, whom I had not seen for a couple of days due to all the chaos. We made one last trip back to our New Albany house because they left their posters and various other things on their bedroom walls and we needed to collect it. We also needed to get all of Carlo’s completed Lego sets, which the movers refused to take responsibility for and, frankly, I don’t blame them. They’re seriously fragile. The three of us then ferried them to their mother’s house and, amazingly, we didn’t have any breakage as we did so. Quite the upset, really. I felt sure one of these $300-400 sets Carlo builds and displays would be destroyed, but nah. I credit the driver of the car for the safe delivery. Which would be me.

Before taking the Legos away, the three of us said goodbye to the house we called home since 2014, when Carlo was nine and Anna was ten. It wasn’t a tearful goodbye. The house, on Griswold Drive, served us well. It was, however, always a liminal space of sorts. Comfortable, sure, but a place I moved us to as a reaction to my divorce a couple of years earlier and no small amount of pragmatism as opposed to romanticism. I knew we’d only be in for a set period. And, going back and re-reading what I wrote about it when I bought it nine years go, I had that set period just about perfectly pegged:

So I made a life choice: I decided to sell this big old house and buy a smaller, more reasonable one. A week ago I put an offer on a townhouse. As of this morning I am in contract to sell this place. Assuming things don’t go sideways, I’ll be out of here and into the new place by the end of October. It’s not radical change. The townhouse is in the same neighborhood. I’m literally moving two blocks away. Good schools still rule everything, after all. But it is more reasonably sized and more reasonably priced . . .

. . . Someday, maybe nine years from now when Carlo is starting his freshman year in college, I’ll finally get to where I belong. Maybe that’s an old, 1920s house in a leafy in-town neighborhood like the one I fled in a panic nearly ten years ago. Maybe it’s an apartment above a shop in a large city on the coast. Maybe it’s a fortified compound in the middle of nowhere. I go back and forth on this stuff all the time.

​For now, though, it’s going to be a three-bedroom townhouse on Griswold Drive. And that seems wholly appropriate.

It was wholly appropriate. But now its time for us has passed. There were some good memories there. There were some harrowing times too. It was never the kind of place you’d hire a local artist to do a little painting of so you could frame it and put it up in the foyer. It was a place we’ll always remember — Carlo spent half his life there — but it’s not the kind of house people talk about with grand nostalgia in later years. It was comfortable, it served us well and, again, it was appropriate. It was a house that, as the kids say, understood the mission.

Now that that mission has been accomplished I’ve moved on to something down in town. Anna and Carlo, continuing college and college-bound, will be here some over the next two months but maybe not a lot as they’re too old for visitation schedules these days and their friends live out closer to New Albany and their mother’s house. I knew that’s kind of how the summer would go and I get it, but it is a bit sad. But I also suppose it’s no different than my folks moving away from West Virginia when I was in college. None of their houses since 1993 were ever my home, but that’s OK. They’re just houses and it’s not the houses themselves that matter.

Have a great day, everyone.