Stick to baseball, 6/14/20.

The MLB draft has come and gone, and subscribers to the Athletic can read all of my analysis. I broke down the draft classes for every team, with National League teams’ drafts and American League teams’ drafts in two separate files. I also wrote up my analysis of day one on Wednesday night, and held a Q&A for subscribers on Thursday afternoon, before round two began. You can also see my last mock draft, where I got 9 of the 29 first-round picks right, as well as pick #34, and at least alerted you to the possibility the Marlins would take Max Meyer over Asa Lacy at 3. My Big Board, showing the top 100 prospects in the draft class, went up last Saturday. It looks like 82 of those 100 players were taken; the other 18 all appear to have priced themselves off of teams’ boards.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Jonathan Mayo, one of the draft experts at MLB Pipeline, to preview the draft. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify.

The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’ll send out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday afternoon, once my latest game review (for The Crew) comes out over at Paste. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

• ProPublica explains why tear gas is far more dangerous than police departments admit. It’s even more so during a pandemic centered on a respiratory illness.
• Camden, New Jersey, drove down many of its violent crime rates by disbanding its police department and reestablishing it around a new model of community policing. It’s still beset by higher violent crime rates than most U.S. cities, but compared to its own history it is far safer than it’s been in decades.
• There’s another virus on the rise – eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), transmitted via mosquito bites, and it’s on the rise as summer looms. EEE kills an estimated 40% of people who contract it. Wear an insecticide with DEET if you’re going outside at dusk or at night.
• New York magazine describes what happened to a Maryland man who was falsely identified as the racist bicyclist who attacked several kids posting pro-BLM fliers along a bike trail. (The actual culprit was later identified and arrested.)
• The real outrage here is a federal law, but not the guy at the heart of this piece, but “A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control Over a Large Swath of Utah” is a magical headline.
• A black former FBI agent writes that white cops didn’t see him as an equal, often treating him more like a suspect than like a federal agent.
• A Delaware native who went to my alma mater writes about his own terrifying experience of being arrested without cause and threatened with violence by multiple white cops.
• The Louisville Police Department report on the killing of Breonna Taylor is almost entirely blank. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of accountability.
• Why exactly were Minnesota state troopers and Anoka county police officers slashing the tires on protesters’ cars? Oh, it was on the orders of the state’s Multiagency Command Center.
• The family of Maurice Gordon, a black man killed by a New Jersey police officer while unarmed and standing on the side of the Garden State Parkway, is looking for answers to why he was shot to death.
• Why are black Americans dying of COVID-19 at more than twice the rate of white Americans? It’s because of systemic racism, not genetics.
• New cases and hospitalizations are surging in states that are rushing to reopen, including Arizona, Texas, and Florida, the three states MLB was supposedly considering in an earlier plan to relocate regular-season games to neutral sites.
• This is only good until late on Monday, but if you donate at least $5 through this link to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Community Bail Fund you get access to over 1000 indie video games contributed by their developers to this charity bundle.
• Fox News “investigative reporter” Lara Logan keeps falling for online hoaxes about antifa and repeating them as if they’re fact. It’s a sad, puzzling decline for a once-promising reporter.
• Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (guess) said last week that he didn’t see ‘articulate’ people among the protesters, and dogs across the Midwest started howling.
• Paste looks back at the TV show Pushing Daisies, the ‘perfect romance story for a pandemic.’ Pushing Daisies was one of the more notable casualties of the 2007 writers’ strike.
• Steve Priest, the charismatic bass player for the seminal UK glam-rock band Sweet (“Ballroom Blitz,” “Fox on the Run”), passed away earlier this month. Flood looks back at ten of their best songs.
• This Instagram photo-thread, called The Passive Voice is for Cowards, is great advice for writers and for readers. The passive voice is used when you don’t want to call out the actors in question – as I did there, when I should have said “cowardly writers use the passive voice when…” Mistakes were not made. Identify the people who made them, even if those people include you.
• Travis singer/guitarist Fran Healy drew the band’s newest video on his iPad using a sort of homemade rotoscoping method.
• Literary Hub offers us a musing on why Studio Ghibli’s films, especially Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, bear important messages for our current time. Their entire library is now available to stream for HBO Max subscribers.
• Board game news: Thames & Kosmos just announced that My City, the new legacy game from Reiner Knizia that was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award this year, is available for pre-order and will hit stores next month.