Stick to baseball, 12/12/20.

I wrote one piece this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Lance Lynn and Carlos Santana signings and the Angels’ trades for two guys named Iglesias.

For Paste, I ranked the top fifteen new board games of 2020, which range from a game suitable for kids as young as 4-5 to a crunchy two-hour dice-drafter.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Tony Paul, who’s covered the Tigers for ages for the Detroit News, talking about the Tigers, what it’s like to cover a bad team, and how baseball can improve its efforts on diversity.

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.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for more essays from me and summaries of everything I’ve written between issues of the newsletter.

And now, the links…

• Before I get to the longreads, two stories relevant to the Georgia runoffs: Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband bought stock in companies likely to benefit from the CARES bill while she was working on it, while Sen. David Purdue took $1.8 million from a board member of FINRA while they lobbied the Senate on a bill relevant to their industry by selling his house to her privately for above its market value. Both have a history of profiteering from their positions, in levels of corruption that should lead to criminal charges, not re-elections.
• Now the longreads: The Hollywood Reporter‘s chronicle of Johnny Depp’s fall from grace is shocking in just how much Depp was the architect of his own demise.
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein needs to resign if this article on her cognitive decline is even remotely accurate.
• A new journal article in Science shows how fast COVID-19 spread in an unmitigated setting in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s not good.
• The science supports that face coverings are saving lives during the pandemic, as this Nature article states, so why are people, like this half-witted Texas congressman, still fighting them?
• A community in South Dakota that ignored the pandemic is now getting destroyed by it … and they couldn’t do more than pass a defanged mask mandate because of the idiotic opposition.
• “What kind of country is this?” asked a woman looking at a lengthy food bank line in Orlando, one devastating line of many from this Washington Post look at theme park employees laid off by Disney, Universal, and other operators. Of note: Disney restored pay cuts to its senior executives just a few weeks before laying off 28,000 low-wage workers.
• The scientist who came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction technique was also a serial harasser of women, making any attempts to grapple with his legacy complicated.
• The Oregon Medical Board finally suspended the license of a Portland anti-vaxxer pediatrician who had thousands of patients (and whose antics I’ve highlighted here before).
• What comes next for evangelicals who sold their souls to make a deal with the devil in the White House?
• We need better advice than telling people not to see family at the holidays, because it’s not working.
• Now we finally know who funds the Federalist. It’s the Uihleins, major conservative donors in Wisconsin who run the shipping and business supply company Uline and who contracted COVID-19 while attending a Trump party in November; and DonorsTrust, a fund that allows donors to give anonymously to conservative candidates and causes – like the $1.5 million they gave the white nationalist, anti-immigrant group VDARE.
• An investigation by an independent government watchdog group found that Rep. Dan Crenshaw smeared a fellow veteran who alleged she was sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The Texas Congressman, who backed the failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to nullify the 2020 Presidential election, also refused to cooperate with the OIG’s investigation.
• Florida whistleblower Rebakah Jones found herself the subject of a warrant and early-morning raid, as the state accused her of unauthorized access to an internal emergency alert system. Several legal experts have said the evidence to support the warrant was flimsy, and the warrant was the judge’s first act since he was sworn in by Gov. De Santis.
• WIRED looks at the strange case of Google firing a researcher for her work on an uncontroversial paper about bias in AI algorithms.
• Speaking of Florida, the Orlando Sentinel apologized for endorsing Rep. Michael Waltz, who also signed on to that abortive effort to subvert our democracy. Apparently his efforts to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive sales tax wasn’t enough reason not to endorse him before the election.
• This New York Times article on Wilmington, Delaware, having a ‘moment’ because of Biden is actually pretty good except for the top photo of the Charcoal Pit, which is like a poor man’s Friendly’s.
• A writer who has autism writes about the harm of Sia casting a neurotypical actor as a character with autism in her new movie.
• Cris Collinsworth put his foot in his mouth by acting surprised that women might actually like and know about football, and later issued a half-assed apology.
• The photos of the new underwater tunnel in the Faroe Islands are quite stunning.