Stick to baseball, 10/8/22.

My hypothetical ballots for five of the six major postseason player awards went up for subscribers to the The Athletic this week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Wormholes, a space-themed pickup-and-delivery game that’s very easy to learn. I think it’s great for family play, on the weight and fun level of Ticket to Ride.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein about the postseason awards, playoff predictions, rules changes, and more. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: A Colorado state custody evaluator, who happens to be the brother of actor Val Kilmer, has a history of disbelieving abuse allegations and recommended a teenaged victim stay under the control of her abuser, according to an extensive report from ProPublica. Mark Kilmer has also been convicted of harassing his ex-wife, who accused him of assaulting her.

• From last June, this WIRED story on the conflict between a potential lithium mine that could help power tens of thousands of electric cars and a single species of wild buckwheat that only lives on that one site in Nevada is balanced and beautifully written.

• The Washington Post let investigative reporter Radley Balko go, a very disappointing decision as the paper seems to be leaning away from the serious journalism that made them worth paying for in the last six years. He has a new post up on his Substack about how Arkansas has kept a severely intellectually disabled man in prison for 30 years, even with questions about his guilt.

• Thousands of Americans have died thanks to the propaganda efforts of anti-vaccine quacks and cranks, writes Kurt Anderson for the Atlantic.

• Also from ProPublica: Mississippi police departments have taken to hiding search warrants from the public, flouting state laws on making them available at courthouses, which has the result of protecting officers who may have violated residents’ Fourth Amendment rights in no-knock searches. I donated to ProPublica today, as their journalism is incredible and this type of depth becoming more rare in our media landscape.

• The Guardian has an extract from the upcoming book The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime, which you can pre-order here.
• The BBC has a story on the ignominious and ongoing history of book-banning, even in liberal, democratic societies.

• Scientific American spoke to Dutch mathematician Ionica Smeets about her work fighting the misuse of statistics by anti-science folks.

• It’s not perfect, but it’s a start: a new California law bans doctors from giving patients medical misinformation during direct care.

• Chess player Hans Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online games, but there’s no evidence he’s done so in a live game, according to an investigation by Chess.com.

• A Kansas City cop tasered a handcuffed child in the back of his police car and still has his license.

• The attorney for the family of an LAPD cop who died during a training exercise has alleged he was killed by fellow officers for being a whistleblower.

• Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) ran a TV ad so racist the Des Moines Register ran an editorial saying it has no place in their community. The ad seeks to distinguish white Iowan society from anything other.

• TIME has a story on Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) and her message that Democrats can’t ignore the importance of state races as they try to hold both houses of Congress.

• Could Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) be in actual legal trouble now that the identity of the woman who lured migrants on to his Publicity Stunt Airways flight to Massachusetts has been revealed?

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weighed in on another DeSantis controversy, where the Governor went on Fox News and falsely claimed that no Americans questioned slavery prior to the Revolutionary War. Even I knew the Quakers were abolitionists well before American independence. He also called out Kyrie Irving’s idiocy for spreading nonsense conspiracy theories on his Instagram account.

• Facebook banned the Proud Boys four years ago, but the site’s software still auto-generates pages for the group and its affiliates.

• The hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse? A Swiss court ruled that Lidl’s chocolate bunnies were too easily confused with Lindt’s and ordered the retailer to destroy its stock.

• Board game news: A tiny publisher at Central Michigan University has a Kickstarter up for Rising Waters, a new historical-themed board game about the 1927 Mississippi flood that also focuses on the huge racial disparities exposed by the disaster.

• The roll-and-write game Draft & Write Records is already funded on Kickstarter with 11 days to go.

• This New York Times story on Russian men fleeing to neighboring countries to avoid being forced to serve in the war against Ukraine has a photo of some of those men playing the board game Splendor.