Stick to baseball, 3/23/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week – my annual breakouts column and my first scouting notebook from Arizona, covering prospects from the Padres, Dbacks, A’s, and Royals. I’ll have a draft blog post up this weekend looking at four potential first-rounders, including presumptive #1 overall pick (today, at least) Adley Rutschman. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

There will be a fresh email newsletter in the next 2-3 days as well. You can sign up free and never miss a word.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New Republic looks at the nihilist governing philosophy of Mitch McConnell and how it has broken our federal government for decades to come.

• Our diet has declined in quality as it has increased in quantity, and the results are killing us, literally, according to the Guardian’s The Way We Eat Now column.
• The California Sun has a great profile of Olympic ski jumper Elizabeth Swaney, who was excoriated last year for her performance at Sochi and the unusual way she qualified.
  
• We should be eating a lot more fiber, and a lot of different kinds of it. I exceed the daily recommendation when I’m home, eating homemade granola (with oats, almonds, coconut, and pepitas) with yogurt every day for lunch and usually getting plants into my dinner every night.
  

• An Oregon pediatrician with over 15,000 patients claims vaccines cause autism and has said he would rather his grandchildren not be vaccinated. This has to become cause for loss of your medical license in every state. With Oregon in the grip of a measles outbreak, state Republicans are rallying around the bullshit argument of “vaccine choice,” because the GOP hasn’t met an anti-science position it won’t adopt.

• Marie Claire has a piece on the perils of sharing your name with an infamous person … by a writer named Elizabeth Holmes.

• The great Jasper Fforde writes about how living in Wales influenced his latest book, the novel Early Riser.

• Pete Buttigeig’s interview in the Washington Post is too short but shows why he’s sort of come out of nowhere to capture some early support; his answers are thoughtful and on the issues he discusses he mostly lines up with my personal positions, at least.

• Expiration dates are a myth, and public reliance on them is a major cause of food waste. My test: use your eyes and your nose. You’ll know if food is spoiled.

• One San Diego pediatrician is responsible for a third of all “medical exemptions” in the city, because, it appears, she’s realized she can gain patients by doing so – even though she’s granting them for bogus reasons.

• A Kentucky student who refuses to get vaccinated against chicken pox (because of a bogus belief about the vaccine) is suing to be allowed to play basketball, since he obviously thinks his “right’ to play supersedes other students’ rights to not get chicken pox. Kentucky’s governor didn’t help matters this week, of course.

• GoFundMe will no longer allow anti-vaxxers to raise funds on its site. Although this is just one outlet and the direct impact may be small, the more major sites do this the better chance we have that others – including Twitter, still a holdout in clamping down on denialists – will follow suit.

• Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook have been mobilizing to spam doctors’ pages with fraudulent information and even threats against the physicians, so some physicians find themselves unwilling to speak out about vaccines or even reach out to patients to let them know when flu shots are available.

• After one such coordinated attack on the public pages of a Pittsburgh pediatrician’s office, researchers examined the comments to find common factors among the trolls – and found that the attacks were coordinated from inside those closed anti-vaccine groups on Facebook.

• Dr. Paul Offit, inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, explains the mumps outbreak at Tufts and why herd immunity matters in a 13-minute audio interview with WHYY.

• The Globe & Mail’s editorial page is just the latest to argue that the media needs to stop providing false balance by listening to anti-vaxxers, who rely on debunked ‘studies’ and refuse to debate in good faith.

• These so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills are medically illiterate, and the press needs to catch on and call them fetal pole cardiac activity bills, because that’s what tests are actually detecting, not a heartbeat.

• For The Athletic subscribers, this piece on wearable technology is a good introduction to the topic, although I think it leaves a few key questions unaddressed, and I have an issue with the use of “genetic” here to describe physical characteristics (nobody is checking players’ genes, at least not that I know of).

• There’s a new Kickstarter up for an expansion to Valeria: Card Kingdoms, a dice-rolling tableau builder, which also includes a new standalone title within the Valeria family of games.

• There’s also a Kickstarter up for a new campaign for the RPG Symbaroum.