My short series on the best tools in baseball continued with my ranking of the players with the best hitting tools and the best fielding tools in the majors. I also had two draft blog posts, one on the Perfect Game All-American Classic and one on the Under Armour game.
I was the guest host of the Baseball Tonight podcast on Wednesday, with guests Tim Kurkjian and Alex Speier.
Chat is still down, so I did another Periscope video chat instead.
And now, this week’s links… 
- Back in N.W.A.’s heyday, Dr. Dre severely beat female journalist Dee Barnes, and she’s not happy the NWA biopic omitted the incident.
- The Guardian had the best op ed I saw this week on the controversy over Josh Ostrovsky, aka “the Fat Jew,” stealing jokes on social media.
- Is it the beginning of the end for online comments? I tend to hope so. Most comment threads quickly devolve into digital septic tanks.
- Major food-processing companies are fighting to reduce what you know about the food in their packages. Regardless of your views on genetic modification, organic versus conventional, and so on, any laws that reduce transparency are losses for all consumers.
- The best longread of the week is from the New York Times, on how poor people get caught in a cycle of prison time for inability to pay their bail or other court fees.
- San Francisco Giants scout Stan Saleski took his own life while advancing the Royals and Orioles for the World Series last year, and his daughter, Whitney, has turned her grief into a photo project to reduce the stigma around suicide.
- The global populations of certain species of bats has been threatened by a fungal disease, but there’s a new treatment on the horizon. It matters to us because bats are one of a handful of species, along with bees and monarch butterflies, that helps pollinate crops essential to our food supply – and the populations of all of those species are declining.
- A few weeks ago, I linked to an LA Times investigative piece on an antibiotic-resistant bacterium that hit the UCLA hospital due to a specific type of duodenoscope; well, it’s back, this time at a Pasadena hospital.
- Climate change has made the current California drought 8% to 27% worse than it otherwise would have been. There’s no silver lining anywhere in this story: It’s conserve or die.
- The New Yorker has a brief overview of the ongoing lawsuit challenging minor-league player compensation as illegal because they earn less than minimum wage. The real solution here is to end MLB’s antitrust exemption, but that would require an act of Congress.
- Yet more evidence that we are hopelessly suggestible: Hong Kong restaurant patrons preferred dishes “explained” by the chef, even when those dishes had inferior ingredients. Maybe none of them wanted to seem to be a philistine.
- If you’ve followed the Shaun King story at all, this piece from the Black Lives Matter activist is worth reading.
- Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, conceived a “hyperloop” sort of bullet train that would whisk passengers across a great distance via pneumatic tube; now it looks like construction of a hyperloop may start next year.