Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

Comments

  1. The fact that we haven’t had disease outbreaks thanks to vaccinations makes anti-vaxxers possible. Young people today don’t know the pain of these diseases. We should be praising science that these vaccines exist and using them universally.

  2. A couple very minor corrections:
    – In the Jennifer Rubin article on the Trump economy, did you mean to say “we’re seeing the Trump economy and it’s not good”. The extra not through me off.
    – What’s happening in NC-9 is actually election fraud, changing or just throwing away votes, not voter fraud. Nate Silver was pretty adamant about this distinction.

    The Camden ballpark reminds me of a local boondoggle. Back in 2010, a new Independent league team called the Lake County Fielders (with Kevin Costner as an owner) was started and a new permanent 7,000 seat ballpark was supposed to be constructed. The team folded after 2011 and only a temporary ballpark was ever constructed. However, even it cost the town of Zion millions of dollars to construct and maintain. The article below lists out all the costs.

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/news/ct-lns-zion-development-st-0119-20170118-story.html

    • That was supposed to say “NOW seeing” so I’ve fixed it.

      I used the term “voter fraud” deliberately, because that’s been the rallying cry of Trump and other hoaxers for at least three years now. We finally see fraud in an election, and it’s not by voters, but by a political operative, and it’s not by Democrats, as we so often hear, but by a Republican.

    • Fair enough. Strange though that we haven’t heard anything about the fraud from Individual 1. And why didn’t Kris Kobach’s Commission on Election Integrity find it? McCrae Dowless has allegations of voter/election fraud going back to 2016, so certainly they should have found it if they wanted to look for it. Unless, of course, they only looked at one side for fraud.

  3. I LOL’d at this line in the rawstory link: “More and more of this personality type are taking on leadership positions, including of corporations, whereas 20 years ago one would mostly find them in jails and prisons.”

    Obviously it’s not funny in the traditional sense; it’s more of a nervous laughter, like a tic. I find myself quoting Lenny’s line from “That Thing You Do!” a lot: “How did we get here?” Unfortunately I’m using it in a different context.