Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This academic paper, co-written by reader Dr. Mike Sonne, finds in a review of existing literature that pitchers’ mechanics and performance break down with fatigue, with the effects apparently interdependent (fatigue leads to mechanical breakdown, which can lead to declining performance and increased stress on joints, leading to more fatigue and performance declines, etc.).
• An ESPN Outside the Lines investigation uncovered track coach Conrad Mainwaring’s forty-year history of molesting athletes, often children, under his command.
• A podcast helped get parole for a black man in Texas whom prosecutors railroaded into a murder conviction.
• The Guardian looks at modern slavery in the United Kingdom and the government’s mistreatment of these victims of human trafficking, focusing on a Vietnamese boy who was abducted and forced to work on a cannabis farm.
• Novelist and writing teacher CJ Hauser wrote a harrowing essay on how she called off her wedding ten days before the date after realizing her fiancé had been extensively gaslighting her and denying her the most basic level of emotional attention.
• Cultural appropriation is endemic in board game design, but the industry got some needed pushback this spring over a game called Scramble for Africa, which treated the colonization and pillaging of the continent as fodder for game play, gamifying the enslavement and massacres of entire peoples. Maybe it’s not okay to take massive tragedies and turn them into fun?
• The fraudulent “documentary” Vaxxed has been disappearing from streaming platforms, with Vimeo the latest to pull it, because it’s full of falsehoods that may scare parents into denying their children vaccines. Skeptical Raptor  explains why the film is so bad and lauds Vimeo’s decision.
• Films like that exist because spreading anti-vaccine propaganda is very profitable. It’s late-stage capitalism at its worst, and the solution is to attack it on both ends: constricting supply by closing channels, reducing demand through education.
• Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax answers a reader who overheard a man she hoped to date grossly objectifying her body.
• Because Florida: The state Board of Education’s new chair is a dimwitted creationist who thinks evolution is “only a theory” (you keep using that word…) and shouldn’t be taught in schools.
• Right near me in Delaware, vandals removed a new memorial to the lone confirmed victim of lynching in Delaware history. George Lynch was accused of murdering a white person, and a local pastor encouraged residents to break him out of jail and kill him, which they did by burning him alive, taking pieces of his charred body as souvenirs.
• Diabetes sufferers are going without insulin because of rising prices; one 22-year-old woman died because she aged out of a state assistance program and couldn’t afford insulin on her own.
• The Colorado Rapids cancelled a postgame fireworks display because there’s a plague outbreak on a nearby nature reserve.
• The New York Times ran an essay from Timothy Winegard’s upcoming book on how mosquitoes are our apex predator.
• A tiny town in Texas, near the Louisiana border, has stirred controversy by declaring itself a “sanctuary town” for fetuses.
• There’s new hope for a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Sudan.
• Phoenix restaurateur Sam Fox, whose portfolio includes Culinary Dropout and the original Zinburger, sold his company to the Cheesecake Factory, although for now he’ll stay on as head of the group.
• I am shocked, shocked I tell you to read that affluent parents are gaming the system of accommodations for students with ADHD or learning disabilities.
• The Onion had a good baseball post on Instagram.
• If you love the Deep Water Games flip-and-write title Welcome To, which I did, check out their expansion pads showing different themed neighborhoods, like this Halloween edition.