Stick to baseball, 10/22/22.

My second and much longer notebook on guys I saw in the Arizona Fall League went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Craig Calcaterra, writer of the excellent Cup of Coffee newsletter and author of the book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter and maybe I’ll send another edition out this week. 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.

My friend and former colleague at ESPN Sarah Langs announced a few weeks ago on Twitter that she has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mandy Bell of MLB.com set up a GoFundMe for Sarah, if you’d like to join me in contributing.

And now, the links…

• Climate change could cause the collapse of Antarctica’s ice shelves even sooner than forecasted, in case you were feeling too good about anything this week.
• Two stories of women who nearly died because anti-abortion laws denied them access to medical care, one in Texas who suffered a miscarriage and had to wait so long she developed sepsis before doctors would intervene, and one in Missouri whose own state Senator referred her to an anti-abortion clinic. The latter woman had to go to Illinois to get medical care to save her life.
• Parker Molloy wrote about how the English press, buoyed by transphobic parents, bullied a schoolteacher who came out as trans into suicide. One of the main writers who attacked Lucy Meadows was Richard Littlejohn, who is still alive and writing twice a week for the Daily Mail, which ignored calls to fire him for his role.
• WIRED has an excerpt from Rebecca Gilbin and Cory Doctorow’s new book Chokepoint Capitalism on how streaming services control what we hear and what music gets made, abrogating the promise that the technology would democratize music.
• A Supreme Court case around copyright law, fair use, and an Andy Warhol piece may permanently alter the landscape of American art.
• Florida’s state Surgeon General issued new guidance around COVID vaccines based on research that produced howls of derisive laughter from actual experts. Here’s one takedown of its many, many flaws. Charles Pierce put it well when he wrote that Florida will just keep “asking questions” until it gets the answer it wants ($).
• Dr. Mehmet Oz, currently running for Senate, met a gun-violence victim at a campaign stop, but failed to disclose that she works for him and has received over $2100 from the campaign. The Associated Press reported on the encounter without noting the conflict. Do your fucking jobs, AP.
• While on TV, Dr. Oz also promoted Joseph Mercola, long one of the biggest purveyors of anti-vaccine and other forms of medical misinformation online. Mercola has been selling supplements by denigrating evidence-based treatments since at least the 1990s, when I first came across his site’s claims that aspartame caused multiple sclerosis and all sorts of other health problems that it doesn’t cause at all.
• Oz’s opponent, John Fetterman, accused the super PAC Democratic Coalition, run by Scott Dworkin, of misleading donors into thinking their money is going to support candidates like him.
• Will Leitch wrote about the abysmal media response to Tua Tagovalioa’s second head injury in five days.
• Slate’s Evan Urquhart defended Jon Stewart’s interview with and humiliation of Arkansas’s bigoted Attorney General, where he makes it clear she’s either ignorant of the facts on the issue of gender affirming care or just denying them.
• How did social media content moderation become such an issue in the culture war?
• This is sort of old news by now, but if you haven’t heard the racist comments by members of the Los Angeles City Council, you should check it out. Only one of the three people making those comments, Nury Martinez, has resigned, as calls mount for the other two to do the same.
• Wildfire smoke doesn’t just pollute the air, but it can carry bacteria and fungal spores across long distances, thus potentially expanding the area where Valley fever and other diseases of rural/desert areas into more population regions.
• Research published in Polymers showed microplastics in human breast milk.
• Many artists are pushing for more student debt relief, as the $10,000 offered is a “drop in the bucket” compared to their debt loads.
• An Oklahoma teacher encouraged students to call a special-needs student in the class the f-slur. The school district dragged its feet, so the state is investigating while many parents are calling for the teacher’s removal. This is the lowest bar, really.
• Is hip-hop’s dominance in American popular music finally slipping? Billboard spoke to industry executives who believe it is, and I would point to the lack of innovation in the space as a reason – and streaming may be the cause, as seen above.
• A terrorist group calling itself a branch of ISIS is attacking villages in northern Mozambique, killing men and raping women, while threatening one of the most important natural gas supply lines in Africa.
• Amidst news of ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, the Economist called for sanctions against Eritrean dictator Issaias Afwerki ($), calling him “equally malign” as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
• Randy Kaufman, running for the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board and who said he wanted to “protect our children from the progressive left,” suspended his campaign after he was arrested for masturbating in his car near a preschool. Always be wary of those who doth protest too much.
• Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) refused to say whether she would accept the election results if she loses.
• Republicans in Congress have introduced a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit schools, libraries, and other institutions that receive federal money from teaching children about, well, anything related to sex, gender, gender identity, and so on, and would allow parents to sue if they did. The Human Rights Campaign has denounced it. The end result of bills and laws like this is more youth suicides, and if that’s your goal, we’re not going to agree.
• George M. Johnson wrote about his experiences seeing his book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir of growing up Black and queer in America, become the second-most banned book in the country.
• Michigan Republicans introduced an anti-trans bill that would jail parents for life if they sought gender-affirming care for their kids. This is the totalitarian playbook: demonize a small, vulnerable minority to rally your adherents and get them to the polls.
• Florida Times-Union columnist called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ closed-door selection of Sen. Ben Sasse, both Republicans, as the new President of the University of Florida, the “crowning achievement of the DeSantis-led effort to defile” the college, questioning Sasse’s qualifications and his intentions.
• A Texas sheriff certified that the nearly 50 migrants DeSantis trafficked to Massachusetts are “crime victims,” creating the possibility they could receive special visas to stay in the U.S. Unintended consequences FTW!
• In the wake of Hurricane Ian, DeSantis relaxed voting restrictions in three heavily Republican counties, but not in heavily Democratic Orange County.
• Police body camera footage shows officers arresting people for so-called voter fraud, as DeSantis proudly announced a sweep and emphasized the criminal records of the arrestees, who were overwhelmingly Black.
• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist James Causey called Sen. Ron Johnson’s comment that his opponent this year, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D), has “turned on America” and “finds America awful” a “cheap shot,” saying that you can love America and still criticize it. Johnson’s campaign has also run ads that darkened Barnes’s skin tone and claimed he’ll be soft on crime.
• South Carolina’s medical licensing board has yet to discipline any physicians for spreading misinformation on COVID-19 or the vaccines that help prevent it, apparently for fear of backlash from the conservatives who run the state government.
• Marin County in northern California was once a haven for highly educated anti-vaxxer parents. COVID-19 vaccines changed that, and the county now has one of the highest uptake rates in the country at 91%.
• Jazz Chisholm was impressive in his brief stint on MLB Network’s studio coverage of the first round of the playoffs.
• A new property, the Hotel Lyra, is trying to revive a nearly-abandoned town in Croatia called Licko Petrovo Selo. The town, which is near the country’s scenic Plitvice Lakes National Park, was destroyed during World War II, rebuilt by the Yugoslav government, and then heavily damaged during the Balkan wars, with most of the population, especially its Serbs, driven out.
• The white nationalist teenager who opened fire outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia had posted anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ+, and white replacement views on Twitter and 4chan. The Anti-Defamation League says in response that Twitter and similar sites don’t do enough to moderate hate speech.
• Board game news: Rock Manor Games, run by my friend Mike Gnade, has a Kickstarter up for its new role-playing game The Few and the Cursed.
• BoardGameTables, who make tables for board games (!) and have also published titles like On Tour and Sequoia, have a Kickstarter up for three small-box games, including Pollen, a re-theming of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: The Card Game.
• Rising Waters, the historical co-op game about the 1927 Mississippi Flood and the racial disparities it exposed, just funded in the last few days, with about a week and a half to go in its Kickstarter.
• Race to the Raft, a cooperative game from Isle of Cats designer Frank West, is already about 8x funded on Kickstarter.