For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.
I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).
Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.
- Ninety-four women allege a Utah doctor sexually assaulted them, but a judge said Utah law makes this medical malpractice and threw their cases out. Utah legislators could just change the law, but they’re too busy trying to kill trans kids.
- The Appeal has stories of pregnant people who’ve been shackled and abused while in custody in Harris County, Texas, jails, the same jail system that saw 28 prisoners die last year and four already in 2023.
- De la Soul’s catalog is supposed to come to streaming platforms in March. OkayPlayer spoke to the attorney who helped clear most of the samples on their earliest work and made this possible.
- Funds from two programs created by then-President Trump’s Department of Agriculture to provide disaster relief to farmers flowed to wealthy landowners instead, such as a $983 payment to the owner of a $23 million mansion right near Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago resort. Over $5.5 million in total funds from those programs went to residents of the 75 wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S.
- The New Republic is one of the few outlets doing real reporting on the effects of the train derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio, such as this article on dying animals and residents’ respiratory distress, and this editorial on the fake conspiracy theories around it and the real corruption that allowed it all to happen.
- There’s a network of neo-Nazi home-schoolers operating in Ohio, and the state says they can’t do anything about it. Maybe if they were teaching critical race theory and trans rights?
- Biden’s EPA has streamlined a program to approve alternatives to fossil fuels that originally covered biofuels but also includes fuels made from recycled plastics – even though one such process is likely to release a highly carcinogenic byproduct into the atmosphere. And the EPA won’t release details of the process, right down to the names of the chemicals involved.
- The majority-Black city of Jackson, Mississippi, is likely to end up with a separate, state-run court district with judges appointed entirely by white politicians, thanks to a Republican-authored bill that already passed the state’s lower chamber.
- A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”
- A publisher planned to revise several of Roald Dahl’s books to remove potentially offensive language, but after criticism it appears they relented. I have a lot of thoughts on this, most of them opposing the effort. You can’t undo history, and art is a comment and reflection of its time. With a children’s book, you always have the choice not to read the book to your kids, or to read it in full and explain why some language or imagery is inappropriate or offensive. I’m also not sure what good this does for books with millions of copies in print.
- New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has a history of activism through his work and his social media commentary. He also criticized journalists who argued that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been slanted when he co-signed a letter calling them “activists.”
- From the Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.
- The chaos and breakdowns within Twitter hampered rescue efforts after this month’s earthquake that killed thousands in Turkey and Syria.
- Russia used state media to support Canada’s so-called “Freedom Convoy” that protested the country’s attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19.
- I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.
- Board game news: The small publisher Holy Grail Games announced they’re shutting down.
- 25th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.
- The Search for Lost Species is over 11x funded already on Kickstarter; it’s the sequel to The Search for Planet X, my #1 game of 2020.
- The Kickstarter for the last standalone expansion for Set a Watch is also fully funded, with just five days to go.