For subscribers to the Athletic, my ranking of all 30 organizations ran this week on Wednesday, followed by my team-by-team reports and top 20s for the AL East and AL Central:
The remaining four divisions will run on Monday through Thursday of this week. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
My podcast guest this week was Bobby Heck, Special Assistant to the GM of the Tampa Bay Rays and one of the architects of the Rays’ 2020 AL champs and the multiple pennant-winning Astros teams of a few years ago. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.
At Paste, I reviewed the press-your-luck game 7 Summits, co-designed by the designer of Sagrada.
My last edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials; I’m overdue for another issue because I’ve been writing the team reports and top 20s. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: New Republic looks at QAnon and the cultification of the American right, which will continue without Trump and without the nonexistent Q. The same publication argued that the Democratic Party does not understand the QAnon phenomenon, which has enraptured more educated, well-off people than the Democrats think.
- Also from the New Republic – this is a coincidence – the alt-right problem in standup comedy, where people like Gavin McInnes have tried to use comedy to legitimize their racist beliefs.
- The Republican Party has willingly allied itself with armed self-styled militias.
- Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, has sued a reporter for filing a FOIA request. The only way you could more directly assault freedom of the press would be to arrest the reporter – which I assume is next.
- Donald Trump’s incompetence and science denial has helped the U.S. have the highest case and death rates from COVID-19 in the developed world. A new panel estimates that 40% of the deaths were attributable to federal government policies – not just our late response, but structural problems like reduced access to health insurance and growing income inequality. Trump inherited a bad public health situation and made it much worse.
- Governors across the U.S. are allowing more and more indoor dining before enough people are vaccinated to control the pandemic, which could lead to greater spread of the more infectious variants already present in the country. Delaware has been among the best states in testing and in vaccinations, but we’re already moving to 50% occupancy in restaurants, which seems contrary to scientist’s recommendations.
- “The only truly clean energy is less energy.” So-called “clean” energy requires a lot of dirty infrastructure.
- Phoenix police may have specifically targeted Black activist Bruce Franks, Jr., when they arrested him and hit him with a variety of serious charges after his arrest during an August 2020 protest. The grand jury that indicted him didn’t see any video from the event, but were only given police testimony, which this ABC15 investigation found included multiple false statements.
- Earwig and the Witch, the first 3-D animated film from Studio Ghibli, is a disaster across the board. It’s directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
- Instagram has banned anti-vaxxer and COVID-19 denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. All platforms should do the same. He’s a menace to public health, and his words will lead to more deaths.
- If you’ve been to a baseball game in Arizona, you likely have heard vendor Derrick Moore and his signature “Lemonade, lemonade, like grandma made!” call. He’s facing some sort of serious medical issue and doesn’t have health insurance – nice country we have here, folks – so there’s a GoFundMe to try to help him.
- My daughter and I have been watching The Mandalorian, which is entertaining but hasn’t quite lived up to the hype for us – nearly every problem the main character faces is solved by shooting everyone in sight. Anyway, Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune, will not be returning for season 3 after months of tweets that ranged from transphobia to COVID-19 denial to false claims about the election, with a recent post comparing the negative consequences she’s facing to the Nazi genocide against Jews. My best guess is that Disney had warned her they wouldn’t renew her contract if she didn’t knock it off, and she did it anyway.
- TikTok might be good for the music industry, but it’s not good for good music, as the recent soporific “Drivers License,” which has spent four weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, demonstrates.
- President Biden promised to fire any of his subordinates who harassed colleagues or otherwise treated them inappropriately, but the first major test of that came this week when a Deputy Press Secretary threatened to “destroy” a Politico reporter for writing about a relationship he had with an Axios writer. As of Friday night, the Deputy Press Secretary had only been suspended for a week. It’s not acceptable.
- France has arrested five people so far for making online death threats against a teenager known as Mila, who posted several Islamophobic statements on social media.
- Board game news: Renegade announced pre-orders for the June release of the second edition of Gravwell.
- Asmodee’s years-long acquisition spree went in a new direction this week with the purchase of BoardGameArena, one of the most popular online board gaming sites. W. Eric Martin has some analysis of what this means over at BoardGameGeek.