Stick to baseball, 12/1/18.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week, one on MLB’s recent showcase for Venezuelan amateur players and one on the Josh Donaldson and Jesse Chavez contracts. Furthermore, I’ve been busy making calls for my annual prospect rankings, which will run the final week of January into February. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I have a new review up covering the roll-and-write game Welcome To, which uses cards rather than dice, and can play any number of players at once. It’s really fun, probably my favorite light game of 2018.

I suppose I’ll write another edition of my free email newsletter soon, just as soon as my girl finds me an acre of land.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was Laura Trujillo’s piece in USA Today about grieving and accepting her mother’s suicide. Trujillo’s mother jumped to her death at the Grand Canyon in 2012, shortly after Trujillo told her mother that her stepfather had raped her for several years while Trujillo was a teenager.
• Sociologist and author William Davies writes in the Guardian about how the elites eroded public trust, paving way for the new populism, led by “common-knowledge” liars like Trump and Farage.
• Former anti-vaxxer activist David Ayoub is now testifying as an “expert witness” on behalf of accused child abusers. He’s a radiologist who has a history of saying that vaccines cause autism and that mandatory vaccinations are part of a plan of genocide to control population growth, and has no formal training in the areas in which he testifies.
• Also from ProPublica, North Carolina was supposed to force pig farmers to come up with an alternative to storing hog waste in open lagoons, but they’re still doing it, and climate change is making it even more dangerous. It’s not mentioned in the article, but this seems tailor-made for a cholera epidemic. For more on this subject you might want to read Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales.
• Hangin’ Hyde-Smith won the special election this past Tuesday to represent Mississippi in the Senate, but she has to run again for the same seat in two years, so it’s worth sharing that she attended an all-white high school and sent her child to the same to avoid having to go to school with African-American students.
• There is no leftist case for nationalism, writes Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in The Nation in response to a documentarian’s apparent defense of the anti-immigrant beliefs of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
• That Thrillist writer who claimed his ranking of a Portland bar’s hamburger as the best in the country ended up shuttering the restaurant missed all of the owner’s significant legal troubles, including a no-contest plea to charges of choking his then-wife, who at the time had stage 4 breast cancer, and multiple charges related to alcohol abuse.
• A New York Times editorial eviscerates the ‘I turned out fine’ argument against restrictions on child abuse.
• Anti-vaccine sentiment is spreading in France due to the viral nature of fake news about vaccine safety, possibly further spread by Russian trollbots.
• Emory Professor of global health, epidemiology, and pediatrics Saad B. Omer explains how small groups of vaccine refusers can make large groups of people sick. Every state should ban all non-medical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws for children.
• The Forward looks at the battle over vaccines in Orthodox Jewish communities. Philadelphia’s Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky and his wife Temi are vocal anti-vaxxers, openly lying to their community about vaccines’ efficacy.
• Concerned about climate change, as you should be? Vote against Republicans.
• The Trump Administration’s own (mandated) report on climate change was dire, so they tried to bury it by releasing it on Black Friday. Remember that the EPA is currently rolling back regulations that would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, because the Administration’s policy on climate change is that it’s not real. (Narrator: It is.)
• Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange before the 2016 election and before Assange’s decision to dump material hacked from the DNC. Maybe now we can stop pretending Assange is some sort of champion of freedom.
• Right-wing violence is on the rise in the United States. In response, Sinclair made all its stations run a segment about the dangers of Antifa.
• The British Parliament questioned a Facebook representative this week after seizing a trove of documents related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and it came out that Facebook knew about and ignored Russian hacking back in 2014, two years before Brexit and our last Presidential election.
• Four St. Louis cops have been indicted for beating … an undercover officer during the September 2017 protests over another officer’s acquittal for killing an unarmed black man.
• France will return 26 statues and other items it stole from Benin, which was part of the former French West Africa colony. Note that they’re not “loaning” the works of art, but returning them to the land from which they were seized during a war on what was then known as Dahomey.
• Vox’s Earworm program breaks down John Coltrane’s landmark song “Giant Steps,” explaining why the song is so revered … and ‘feared.’ (Is it the Jim Rice of jazz?)
• Ars Technica spoke to a physicist to explain why spin speed and axis make different pitches move the way they do.
• British baseball blog Bat Flips & Nerds has some thoughts on the exorbitant ticket prices for MLB games in London next July. The only somewhat inexpensive seats are so far from the field that they would be outside of any MLB stadium, and seeing game action from them might require binoculars. Not great, Rob.
• Dr. Mario Elia, a family physician in Canada and a reader of mine, made a video answering all of the common myths and misconceptions about the flu shot.