Stick to baseball, 10/31/20.

My ranking of the top 40 free agents this offseason went up on Thursday morning for subscribers to the Athletic. I also answered some questions for Kaitlyn McGrath, our Blue Jays beat writer, on the state of the Blue Jays’ farm system.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Taylor Trammell, Mariners outfielder and author of a column on the Players Tribune called “Baseball Is Not Black Enough.” He was an outstanding guest, and I think this is one of the best interviews I’ve had, which is all to Taylor’s credit. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and now Amazon podcasts. I appeared on TSN 1040 in Vancouver on Wednesday to talk about the World Series and the role of analytics in the sport, in which I think I expressed my views on the subject pretty well.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

Here’s my weekly reminder that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life and you should buy lots of copies for everyone you know, like your Secret Santa person, or that annoying guy at work who thinks he knows everything there is to know about sportsball.

And now the links…

• Longreads first: “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman.” The Vanity Fair cover story and profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is well worth reading, despite the non-troversy over what she wore in the photos.
• The Washington Post explores how several companies issued six- and seven-figure bonuses to executives, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stiffing creditors and laying off thousands of employees.
• The New York Times has the story of how the Wall Street Journal‘s news reporters’ debunking of their own editorial page’s claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was some big deal, concluding that Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, thus foiling the Trump campaign’s last-ditch attempt to attach a scandal to their opponent. (The “dossier” in question is fake, and the alleged author doesn’t exist.)
• Also from the Grey Lady, the story of Trump’s sketchy relationship with Deutsche Bank, and his avoidance of taxes on $287 million in forgiven debts.
• Amy Coney Barrett is the least experienced SCOTUS judge in 30 years – which is what the GOP wanted, since she’s likely to give them decades of loyal service.
• Author Mona Eltahawy writes that Barrett is a five-star general in the army of the patriarchy.
• QAnon’s predictions – like JFK Jr. coming back on October 17^th at a Trump rally – haven’t come true, so how will the movement survive this failure of prophecy?
• This Washington Post investigative report found that during Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties, so I suppose he drained the swamp right into his own coffers.
• Many states and countries are moving to eliminate daylight saving(s) time, in line with increasing evidence that the practice does more harm than good.
• Travis Roy, the BU hockey player who broke his neck in one of his first games in college and was paralyzed from the neck down, died this week at age 45.
• Philly police smashed the windows of an SUV, beat the driver, and then pulled a toddler from the backseat … and the National Fraternal Order of Police claimed that an officer had found the child wandering around barefoot.
• A judge in Florida’s Duval County resigned from the county’s voting board after a local paper reported that he’d donated 12 times to Trump’s campaign and had multiple Trump signs in his yard – which the judge’s wife claimed were on “her side” of the property.
• A professor at Northeastern wrote an open letter to the school’s students as the university tries to force all professors there to teach classes in person in the spring semester.
• Facebook employees say the company manipulated the news that users saw to favor right-wing sites in an effort to appease Republicans.
• Easter Island defeated the coronavirus without causing a deep division among its people by invoking their cultural practice of tapu, which gives us the English word taboo.
• Côte d’Ivoire has its own presidential election this year, with a current president running for a third term that might not be constitutional, and a rival whose refusal to leave that same office in 2010 led to a civil war and an ongoing trial at the Hague.
• A British-Australian academic has been held in Iranian prisons for two years after she was arrested while attending a conference in Tehran. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was moved from a notorious women’s prison, Qarchak, to a secretive ward elsewhere in Tehran.
• Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced that they’re taking pre-orders for Atheneum: Mystic Library.

Please, if you are a U.S. citizen and you haven’t already done so, vote. Vote this anti-science, racist, authoritarian Administration out, so we can get back to arguing over whether Yadier Molina is a Hall of Famer instead.