Stick to baseball, 3/14/20.

I have one new post for The Athletic subscribers this week, looking at what might happen to the draft when there are no games to scout. I will have a ranking of the top 30 prospects for the draft on Monday; I’m not sure what my draft coverage might look like from here on out, as it depends on whether anyone’s playing and if the draft date moves.

Over at Paste, I reviewed PARKS, one of the most popular new games of 2019, featuring artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

• Coronavirus first, unfortunately: The White House has repeatedly sought to minimize the facts about the virus’ spread, and even ordered federal health officials to make their deliberations classified, which just further slowed the response … The Singapore government’s strategy in response to the virus has won praise from the WHO while the United States’ strategy has been insufficient … The former head of the White House pandemic office explains what the department did before Trump closed it for no apparent reason at all. He won’t answer questions about the decision, of course.
• Two longer reads on the virus: How the Chinese scientist known to colleagues as the “bat woman” has identified dozens of virii in that family (similar to the ones that cause COVID-19 and SARS) by searching in bat caves … James Hamblin, whose work for the Atlantic has been some of the best writing on the pandemic, points out that staying home if you start coughing is not a sufficient plan.
• Longreads: The BBC had three great longreads this week. The first is on the twenty-year quest to solve a murder in Idaho Falls, one for which an innocent man spent nearly all that time in prison because he was railroaded by police interrogators.
• The second is by a woman who tried to get investigators to track down a child abused in a pedophilia video.
• And the third is about efforts by victims of sexual assault to get videos of their attacks removed from porn sites.
• ProPublica found that the Republican National Committee has handed out big contracts to companies linked to Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s husband and her political bankers.
• The media needs to stop treating Trump’s inaccurate and often incoherent statements as normal political copy.
• While we’re all distracted by the growing pandemic, Congress is considering a bill that would give law enforcement a back door into encrypted communications, giving the government far greater surveillance powers.
• The National Labor Relations Board is trying to remove non-discrimination language from its contract with professional attorneys, eliminating protections against discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation.
• NPR’s Short Wave has a 12-minute audio clip on anti-matter and attempts to create it.
• Worsening relations between Estonia and Russia have split the Seto ethnic minority with an increasingly impassable border.
• Board game news: Capstone Games announced a new game, New York Zoo, from designer Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Patchwork, Cottage Garden).
• Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the second trilogy from designer Shem Phillips (Architects of the West Kingdom, Raiders of the North Sea), is at nearly $600,000 as it ends its Kickstarter run.
• Dire Wolf Digital’s port of Sagrada is now in Early Access on Steam; I’ve played it a few times and it’s very strong, as all of DWD’s adaptations have been.
• Finally, this is just … special.