Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

I had two pieces this week for subscribers to The Athletic, one on six non-tendered players who would make my rankings of the top free agents, and another on what this week’s news of realignment and contraction in the minors might mean. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the unique new game Pendulum, which is turnless – players move simultaneously, but when and where you can move, and what you can do, is dictated by three sand timers, each of which has a different duration.

I have two books out for the readers on your holiday shopping lists. The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, available in hardcover; and Smart Baseball, available in paperback.

My podcast will return on Monday, with two episodes scheduled before we break for the holidays. You can also get more of me by subscribing to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: It’s the 19^th century in Kansas, where debtor’s prison is still a thing. In Coffeyville, a judge without a law degree issues bench warrants for a debt-collecting attorney who gets a cut of bail payments. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
• Outside looks at plant-based imitation fish, and why it could be a game-changer for our depleted oceans.
• I reviewed the new documentary The Donut King here earlier this week, and the BBC has a longread on the same man, Cambodian refugee turned donut-shop entrepreneur Ted Ngoy.
• In 2018, Gatwick Airport had to close for two days after multiple people reported seeing a drone flying in its airspace. Yet a long police investigation has found no evidence any drone was ever there.
• This 2018 piece from the Washington Post is a strange sort of apologia for Chevy Chase, a white man who’s said and done some lousy things, and made some bad choices, and doesn’t seem to understand why nobody wants to work with him.
• Stereogum explains why an obscure Pavement song became their most-streamed track on Spotify, and how the service is trying to convince artists to take an even lower royalty rate than they already do.
• One of Joe Biden’s top advisers lobbied for the 2017 GOP tax cut, which also gave a boon to MLB owners by allowing them to continue to pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage. Cynthia Hogan also lobbied for the NFL while the league was dealing with bad publicity after several domestic violence incidents, and played a pivotal role in Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991.
• Anti-vax communities have proliferated on social media for years, despite the evidence harm they cause, but now they’ve become recruiting grounds for people pushing the bullshit conspiracy theory known as QAnon.
• A new article published in Microbes and Infection looks at how anti-vaccine activists are courting people thirsty for information on COVID-19, identifying six specific tactics one such show has been using to convince people that the virus is a hoax and the vaccines won’t be safe.
• The media needs to stop reporting on people’s intent to get (or not get) a COVID-19 vaccine, because it’s helping erode already shaky public trust.
• The English rapper Digga D has to notify police any time he uploads or releases new material, potentially giving them the chance to censor him, as part of the terms of his probation for a conviction for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
• The editors at the National Review called Trump’s ongoing attempts to claim widespread election fraud cost him the Presidency a “disgraceful endgame.”
• Trump’s ‘vaccine czar’ Moncef Slaoui owns $10 million in stock in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the companies that has worked with the Administration’s Warp Speed effort to develop a vaccine, and refuses to sell it. The Administration’s position is that Slaoui is technically a contractor and thus isn’t bound by the same ethics rules as employees.
• Jess Grose, the New York Times‘ parenting editor, writes about why most kids hate to lose and what parents can do about it.
• A school superintendent in Weatherford, in North Texas, refuses to enforce a state mask mandate … and nobody is stopping him.
• Mental Floss gives us the controversial history of fry bread, sometimes called Indian fry bread, a traditional food borne out of the oppression of Native Americans by white authorities.
• NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about how an obsession with “smart politics” left the press unprepared to do its job when Donald Trump began his run for President.
• Tweet of the week: