Stick to baseball, 2/20/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, all of my prospect ranking content is now on the site, from the top 100 to the org rankings to every team’s top 20 & org report:

Podcasts: I was remiss in omitting these from my newsletter this week, but I appeared on several podcasts to talk prospects and rankings, including the Sox Machine podcast, the East Village Times podcast, and the Eutaw Street Report (Apple/Spotify). I’ve also recorded a spot on The Update with Adam Copeland, our Bay Area sports podcast at the Athletic, that should be available next week.

On my own podcast this week, I did a mailbag episode and ripped through as many of your questions as I could in about 35 minutes. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I finally sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, talking a little bit about the anxiety and joy of releasing all of this content into the world. Also, 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: At the Ringer, David Hill writes about a “beach bum” day trader who made millions with a long position on GameStop he’d started buying long before this year’s run-up.
• The expanding ocean habitats of mackerel have led to a new debate over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
• A new Malayalam-language film called The Great Indian Kitchen explores gender inequality in the Indian home.
• The Huffington Post’s obituary of Rush Limbaugh just tells it like it is.
• Critical thinking skills, already in short supply, may not be the most effective counter to disinformation. The SIFT method – Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to original context – may be a better approach.
• Denmark has invested in tracking the different variants of COVID-19 spreading in its population, and the data so far on B.1.1.7, the UK variant, are not promising. This Science piece looks at some of the policy options ahead of them, and, potentially us.
• An immunocompromised patient who died after a 154-day infection with COVID-19 may hold a clue to how the variants have emerged and spread.
• Why are cases dropping so fast in the United States? Four reasons: distancing, seasonality, seroprevalence (partial immunity), and vaccines.
• New data have shown that the pandemic has hit academic mothers especially hard.
• Rational people in Connecticut are trying to eliminate the religious exemption to schoolchild vaccination requirements and the Republican Party is lining up with the loonies.
• An Ohio State wrestler testified that Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked him to help cover up allegations of sexual abuse by the team doctor while Jordan was assistant coach.
• There was a big social media kerfuffle this week when various gynecologists took aim at Vagisil for deceptive ads targeting teen girls. Led by Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible and sometime New York Times columnist, they argued that the company was preaching products that could be harmful while also shaming girls for things that are natural.
• ERCOT officials said that Texas was mere minutes away from a catastrophic system failure that could have left Texans without power for months. The Huffington Post looks at why the storm knocked out so much of the power and how right-wing grifters and charlatans blamed it all falsely on green energy.
• A tiny town in Iowa – Armstrong, population 840 – saw its mayor, police chief, city clerk, and former city clerk all arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and “the deployment of a Taser against a civilian in exchange for cash.”
• I can’t seem to muster any sympathy for the investor who gave $2.5 million for a “voter fraud” investigation and now wants his money back.
• The Reply All podcast was starting a new series on the toxic workplace environment at Bon Appetit that led to the ouster of longtime EIC Adam Rapoport in 2020 when a similar scandal took down Reply All’s co-host and the senior reporter leading this story.
• Nicole Hazen, the wife of Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen, has been fighting a brain tumor for the last year, and the two of them chose to discuss it publicly.
• Many prominent British actors are urging the UK government to renegotiate visa rules so they can continue to work in the EU.
• Literary Hub’s list of 50 classic novels under 200 pages is pretty good, at least based on the half I’ve read and the others I know about.
• I greatly enjoyed McSweeney’s Valentine’s Day gifts from famous fictional men.
• But nothing made me laugher harder this week than this twitter thread about a Texas survivalist nut who isn’t very good at the survival part.
• Board game news: I don’t know much about this game but folks are very excited for the Kickstarter for Stroganov.