Stick to baseball, 2/19/22.

My prospects ranking package is now all posted for subscribers to the Athletic. Here’s the complete rundown of everything that ran:

• The top 100 prospects
• The prospects who just missed the top 100
• The ranking of all 30 farm systems
• The org top 20s:

I also did two Q&As over at the Athletic, one the day the farm rankings went up and one the day the top 100 went up.

Since my last stick to baseball post, I’ve reviewed several board games over at Paste as well, including Nidavellir, one of my favorite games from 2021; Equinox, a new version of Reiner Knizia’s game Colossal Arena; The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game based on the 1991 cult classic; and Wilson & Shep, a cute bluffing game for players as young as five.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and radio things related to the top 100, including the Seattle Sports Union; the Update with Adam Copeland (talking Giants prospects); Press Box Online (Orioles); Sox Machine (White Sox); and Karraker & Smallmon (Cardinals).

My own podcast returned in late January, with three episodes since my last roundup: Michael Schur, author of How to Be Perfect and creator of the show The Good Place; the post-punk band Geese, an episode where I answered a bunch of reader questions on the top 100 too; and union labor lawyer Eugene Freedman, who gave his thoughts on the MLB lockout. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: There is no evidence that wearing masks in school harms children’s mental health or educational development. None. I’ll repeat: There is no fucking evidence, people. Every one of those anti-mask grifters you see on Twitter hawking their $80 a year substack is full of shit.
• In 2003, a woman in Australia was convicted of smothering all four of her babies to death. Several researchers believe she is innocent, and that a mutant gene was the real cause of the tragedy.
• MIT Technology Review has a very long piece on the scientist at the center of the lab-leak conspiracy theory.
• The scourge of private equity is now causing rapid inflation in housing prices, with PE firms buying up apartment buildings, hiking rents, and skimping on or even forgoing basic services to tenants.
• WIRED looks at how personal finance apps are making phone scams even easier.
• The Harvard Gazette ran an excerpt from Kevin Birmingham’s 2014 book on Ulysses’ long and tortuous road to publication. I reviewed The Most Dangerous Book back in 2016.
• MEL gives us the subterfuge behind the surprise pop hit “Tubthumping,” and how the anarcho-communist band Chumbawamba used its success for their own ends.
• Are you getting cardboard shipping boxes from U-Line? Not only does the family that owns U-Line fund the far-right site The Federalist, they’ve given millions to other right-wing extremists, including some of January 6^th terrorists. If you use U-Line in your business, find another vendor. If you get a package in a U-Line box, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else for their boxes.
• Space elevators are a staple of hard science fiction novels and stories, but if one breaks, it’s a massive and potentially fatal disaster. The plot of Green Mars includes the sabotage of a space elevator, and while I don’t care for the novel, Kim Stanley Robinson does a reasonable job of getting the science right on what happens when the broken cable hits the ground.
• REI sent this union-busting email to all of its employees, then published a podcast full of dubious rationalizations for its anti-union efforts.
• The Washington Post profiled the woman who led the first successful effort to unionize a Starbucks store.
• COVID-19 becoming “endemic” doesn’t mean it’s becoming harmless.
• In fact, there’s evidence that the claims that the omicron variant is less severe than prior ones are due to greater population immunity, not to any reduced ability of the virus to cause serious illness. Also, there’s a subvariant of concern, too, although once again, vaccination confers substantial benefits.
• COVID denialists on the right seem to think the virus is actually a person – at least in the language they use to minimize it.
• Right-wing pundits, including Jordan Peterson, were up in arms because a Boston hospital denied a heart transplant to a man who refused the COVID-19 vaccines – but such rules are routine to increase the likelihood of the patient’s survival.
• Anti-vaccine loon Christiane Northrup has become a major donor to Maine Republican candidates, including former Governor Paul LePage.
• Two Long Island nurses have been charged with selling fake vaccine cards and entering the false information into vaccination databases, taking home $1.5 million in the process. But what happens to the people who bought them?
• An inevitable consequence of all of this anti-vaccine misinformation is that now measles vaccination rates are falling in the UK.
• Meanwhile, Republicans in 14 states are pushing bills that would block medical boards from censuring doctors who spread misinformation; in Tennessee, the Know-Nothings in the state legislature even pressured the medical board into removing language from its website discouraging such doctors.
• Speaking of foundations of misinformation, Fox News was happy to talk to an anti-vax state trooper … until he died of COVID-19.
• A New Jersey police officer was driving drunk when he struck a pedestrian … and then put the body in his car and drove home with it. He didn’t call 911. He now faces a dozen felony charges.
• The story about the Los Angeles train robbery a few weeks ago, which made news across the country and even in Europe, is really about how Union Pacific laid off 4/5 of its security force – and how the mainstream media increasingly just buys whatever corporations are selling.
• This is horrifying: San Francisco police used DNA from a woman’s rape kit to identify her as a suspect in another crime. And we wonder why women don’t come forward to report their assaults. I’ve already reached out to two state Senators in Delaware, and to the Attorney General, to see what can be done to make sure this does not occur here.
• Over 650 Philly cops who claim they’re too sick or injured to work are fine holding down other jobs.
• A tax cheat and father of a child murderer has bankrolled a right-wing streaming network that has given Steve Bannon a platform again. It’s available through most major streaming platforms, too.
• A tremendous piece of local journalism led to the resignation of the police chief of Brookside, Alabama, who had set up a racket that scammed drivers out of over $500,000 a year in fines and forfeitures – often when they were no closer to the town than the local interstate.
• A Republican state senator in Texas has sworn in a declaration that the state’s Republicans violated federal voting rights laws in a recent redistricting.
• Minneapolis police insisted on a no-knock warrant in a predawn raid – raid, a word that should be reserved for war, or perhaps when there’s a lost ark involved – on an apartment in the city. They ended up murdering an innocent civilian sleeping in that apartment.
• Spokane district attorney Larry Haskell is under fire, again, for his wife’s long history of racist and white nationalist comments online. It’s more disturbing that voters keep electing him.
• Families in West Virginia are suing a school that held a Christian revival on campus during school hours, with some teachers forcing students to attend. This isn’t the first such incident in this school district.
• I liked Encanto, and assume it’s going to win the Oscar for best animated film, but I noticed the script glossed over the weird power dynamic between the Madrigals and the townsfolk. Jim Vorel wrote about that very topic for Paste.
• Hannah Keyser has a great piece at Yahoo! Sports asking why people get so mad over Hall of Fame voting. The abuse was worse than ever this year.
• Ohio’s extreme gerrymandering leads to more extreme laws from legislators who don’t have to worry about re-election, even though the laws are often opposed by a majority of Ohio voters.
• The mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, a suburb of Jackson, decided to order the city’s libraries to remove all LGBTQ+ materials before he’d release their funding. The city’s leaders are denying this is what’s happening, but a local nonprofit group has raised all of the missing funds from donations.
• This feels like old news now, but McMinn County, Tennessee, banned Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its school curricula because there are naked mice in it.
• Who’s behind all the book-banning movements? Major conservative dark-money donors, of course.
• And they’re also pushing educational gag orders across the country, with over 120 such bills introduced in the last 13 months.
• Like the one in Florida, supported by the death-loving governor there, that wants to force LGBTQ+ kids back in the closet. (DeSantis can’t even bring himself to condemn a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando.)
• Or the laws targeting the chimera of critical race theory in schools, which threatens teachers’ livelihoods and even their freedom.
• LZ Granderson writes about the extreme illogic of Michelle Tafoya leaving the media to campaign against racism education, when she herself lives in a town that has become majority white thanks to racial covenants in housing contracts.
• The British government recently moved to make something called “virginity repair” surgery illegal. I didn’t know this was a thing, but it is clearly founded in some seriously deranged religious beliefs.
• Matt Walsh, espouser of misogynistic and homophobic views under the guise of Christianity, tried to trick a bunch of trans people into participating in a documentary attacking trans rights.
• This is from before the Oscar nominations were announced, but the LA Times‘ Justin Chang implored the Academy to nominate Drive My Car for Best Picture – which they did.
• Craig Calcaterra continues to expose New Albany, Ohio, school board member Philip Derrow as a science-denying history-ignorant turnip.
• Is a building at Florida State University causing cancer in the people who work there? Cancer clusters are often matters of chance, but in this case, there’s evidence of actual carcinogens in the air ducts, and the school has closed the building to investigate.
• Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt courted snitches among parents opposed to mask mandates, setting off a series of pointless, expensive battles that probably did way more to harm kids than wearing a mask ever could.
• Instagram is doing nothing to suspend or block accounts promoting hate speech.
• I don’t often agree with Jennifer Rubin’s editorials in the Washington Post, but I think her take here is correct: The only way Democrats can hope to fight Republican voter-suppression efforts is to change the venue to local elections and referenda, taking the message directly to voters – and even that may not be enough.
• I can’t love this tweet enough.
• Board game news: I saw a prototype of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game from Inside Up Games, at PAX Unplugged, and from what I saw it looks right up my alley. It’s on Kickstarter now.
• So is Trekking Through History, the third Trekking game (following Trekking the National Parks and Trekking the World) from Underdog Games.
• And so is Rolling Heights, the new roll-and-write game from the designer of Mystic Vale.
• Tiwanaku, the game previously known as Pachamama, will relaunch on Kickstarter on March 9^th.