Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

• The top 100 prospects
• The ten players who just missed the 100
• My ranking of all 30 farm systems
• My top 20s and org reports for all 30 clubs

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
• I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
• The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
• Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
• A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
• A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
• In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
• The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
• There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
• KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
• Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
• West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
• Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
• Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
• A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
• Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
• We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
• This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
• Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
• Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
• The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
• Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
• New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
• Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
• An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
• A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
• There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).