Stick to baseball, 3/16/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I wrote up the players I saw in the Reds-Rangers Breakout Game plus a few other notes from Arizona, broke down the Dylan Cease trade, and posted a ranking of the top 20 prospects for likely impact in 2024, and offered a draft scouting notebook from the Wake Forest-Duke series. I’ll have some more Breakout game reports after the weekend, but unfortunately the two games I hoped to hit on Friday were both washed out by rain.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week. 

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Judd Blevins is a white nationalist. The town of Enid, Oklahoma, voted him on to their city council, but there’s a fight brewing now to remove him. Blevins refuses to address his history with Identity Evropa, a major white nationalist organization, instead hiding behind “God” and religion.

• One of the leaders at Charis Bible College ran a cult at Messiah College in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, an unreported story until some of the survivors saw that the cult leader, Andrew Wertz, is now a Senior VP at that school and Andrew Wommack Ministries.

• Awful Announcing broke down all of the utterly insane things Aaron Rodgers espoused in that recent podcast appearance where he claimed that the Sandy Hook mass shooting didn’t happen (which, to be absolutely clear, is false). He’s just gone at this point.

• Michelle Morrow, the Republican candidate for Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina, has called for the execution of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and publicly tweeted QAnon slogans. This is on top of the North Carolina GOP nominating a gay-bashing Holocaust denier as candidate for Governor.

• A new study found that participants exposed to many false or misleading headlines were then more likely to believe ambiguous or less implausible ones.
  
• The federal case against former Deadspin writer Tim Burke, who stands accused of exercising his First Amendment rights by accessing unprotected video streams online, appeared in court again last week. The charges claim he “hacked” into those video streams, which Burke says were not protected by passwords or other encryption. It’s an extremely important case for everyone in the press, as this appears to be a direct assault on our freedom to do our jobs under 1A. You can donate to support his legal fund here.

• Tim Grierson wrote how the Oscars were just mid despite a great movie year, although I enjoyed the show more than he did. 

• TIME‘s Stephanie Zacharek looks at the post-Oscars storm brewing in Hollywood, where risk-taking remains rare and studios seem to be as conservative as ever.

• Oregon moved to recriminalize possession of hard drugs, notably fentanyl and heroin, three years after decriminalizing it. Note that several quotes here are from Republican representatives talking about fentanyl (a popular GOP talking point) and Portland (which they do not represent).

• A school board member in Butler, Pennsylvania, who is also the founder of the faith-based Grace Youth & Family Foundation is facing new charges for an “inappropriate sexual relationship” with a teenager in his outreach program and for continuing to contact the victim while he’s been on probation. No drag queens were involved in this story.

• This year’s FAFSA roll-out and the new rules that led to the changes in the federal student-aid forms have all been a huge disaster that may force some schools to delay enrollment deadlines.

• Allowing kids to get the measles, the mumps, or rubella just to satisfy some lunatic’s political goals is needlessly cruel, but the cruelty is the point, isn’t it?

• Ashwin Ramaswami is running for state senator in Georgia against an election denier, Shawn Still, who served as a fraudulent elector for disgraced ex-President Trump in 2021. Ramaswami is a 24-year-old Stanford alum who, if elected, would become the first Indian-American to serve in Georgia’s senate.

• Medici is one of Reiner Knizia’s most acclaimed games, part of his so-called Auction Trilogy with Ra and Modern Art, but it’s been out of print for several years now. Steamforged announced they’re taking pre-orders for a new edition coming out this year.