Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

My first mock draft for 2018 is now up for Insiders, as is a short post on the Ronald Acuña show. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I did some podcasts with friends this week. I appeared on the Productive Outs podcast to talk some baseball and music. Then I talked with Seth Heasley on his Hugos There podcast to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, one of my all-time favorite comic novels (and a Hugo Award winner). And of course on Thursday I was on the BBTN podcast with Buster Olney.

By the way, if any of you happen to live in/near Stockholm, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be there for a conference in the near future. Let me know in the comments what I should try to do or see in the few hours I’ll have free while there.

And now, the links…

• I am quoted in this longread from Tim Grierson on the complicated legacy of sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, who invented the noxious save stat, ruining the sport for decades.
• ProPublica investigates a private trash hauler in NYC that covered up the death of an off-the-books worker, claiming he was a homeless person who’d jumped under their truck.
• Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources approved a plan to divert public waters from the Great Lakes to a Taiwanese electronics factory in Mount Pleasant.
• Baseball Prospectus’ Matt Trueblood wrote about how Albert Pujols appears to have outed himself as age 40, at least if you follow the math as Trueblood did. Although rumors around Pujols’ real age have been around since he debuted in 2001, there’s never been anything more tangible than third hand hearsay. Also, if you’re a BP subscriber, Russell Carleton, author of the new and very good book The Shift, explains how many fans and writers misuse his ‘stabilization’ concept when looking at small, early-season samples.
• Parker Molloy writes for GOOD that the White House Correspondents Dinner has always been a bad idea. I agree – it’s far too chummy for what should be an arm’s length relationship. And Charles P. Pierce wrote the best defense of comedian Michelle Wolf’s set at the WHCD in a column for Esquire.
• Senate Republicans are prepared to ditch the so-called “blue slip” protocol by confirming a hard-right Ninth Circuit Court nominee over the objections of both of the candidate’s Senators (Democrats from Oregon).
• Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history, according to the former CEO of Intuit and Paypal. I’m not worried: I’ve invested my entire 401k in tulips and South Seas stock.
• The Arizona teachers’ strike is over, but not before Republican opponents came up with some bizarre conspiracy theories to attack the educators, who were fighting for living wages. Supermajority tax laws in many states, backed by the Koch brothers and other Republican donors, make raising teacher salaries difficult.
• Speaking of the Koch Brothers, it turns out that George Mason University, the largest public college in the state of Virginia, gave the Koch foundation a say in hiring and firing decisions after taking a donation from the group.
• Gilead update: Oklahoma’s House voted to let adoption agencies turn down LGBTQ couples (as well as single moms, Muslims, atheists, etc.). Meanwhile, Iowa has now banned nearly all abortions with a likely unconstitutional law that prohibits the procedure after a ‘fetal heartbeat’ is detected, around six weeks after conception.
• Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams writes in Fortune why her $200,000 personal debt shouldn’t disqualify her from public office. Given the student loan burden of Americans, any stance that holds that people with large outstanding debts can’t be elected officials is awfully elitist and antithetical to democracy. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pay off the last of my own grad school debt until I wrote Smart Baseball.
• The ‘biohacker’ Aaron Traywick, who injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience, was found dead earlier this week at some sort of weird spa. The life-extension advocate was 28.
• Evolution in real time: Lizards on Redonda Island are evolving more quickly now that two of their main predators have been eradicated.
• There’s a bird of paradise whose feathers are so black that they absorb 99.95% of visible light when faced head-on. It made the news in the last few weeks due to a new paper demonstrating there are two distinct species of this bird, rather than one, as previously believed. You can read the original research paper for free on PeerJ.
• Orac details Chelsea Clinton’s #vaccineswork tweet and how it unhinged the denialists, including Andrew Wakefield’s partners in fraud.
• Former anti-vaxxer moms say empathy is the way to get through to parents who still refuse to vaccinate their kids.
• If you live in or near London, do not touch these caterpillars.
• Private equity firm Alden Global Capital continues to turn big profits by gutting local newspapers.
• Young Fathers’ third album, Cocoa Sugar, dropped in March, and their video for “Toy” features little kids as world leaders, with what appears to be a subtle jab at the President of the U.S.
• Two board games designed by the CIA for internal training are now public and playable thanks to some FOIA requests and the print-and-play community.
• Empyreal: Spells and Steam, a new fantasy-themed train game from Level 99, just hit Kickstarter this week.
• Ruben Bolling’s latest Tom The Dancing Bug comic strip is titled What Trump Supporters See, although its ultimate target is the gullible media.