Stick to baseball, 6/8/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects currently in the minor leagues and then wrote about five prospects who’ve fallen off so far this year. One of them, Adael Amador, is actually in the midst of a hilarious run where he’s hit 6 homers in his last 9 games after hitting just one in his first 37 games … and he’s still only hitting .194/.337/.329!

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday for Diamond Dreams at 2 pm ET, one segment on Unpacked at around 2:40 pm ET, and possibly a segment on The Rally in the 5 o’clock hour.

I’m at Disharoon Park again today for game 2 of Kansas State vs. Virginia, so I’m rushing to get this posted. So now, the links…

  • You may have seen the piece in the New York Times op-ed section claiming evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis, written by an author who is not a virologist or epidemiologist and who has been flogging a book (co-authored with a climate-change denier) pushing the lab-leak deal for several years. Scientists have been picking it apart all week: Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen posted this thread on BlueSky debunking Alina Chan’s terrible editorial, virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen did the same on Twitter, and biochemistry professor emeritus Larry Moran also debunked her points in a concise blog post. Chan is wrong, and we have copious evidence showing she’s wrong, but she persists – and she got a giant platform to sell her view.
  • House Republicans moved on from attacking Anthony Fauci to smearing Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent voice in the pro-vaccine and pro-science movements who co-developed a low-cost vaccine against COVID-19.
  • The Columbia Law Review published a massive story from a Palestinian researcher on the Nakba that had been killed by the Harvard Law Review, but the CLR’s board of directors didn’t like it so they took down the journal’s entire website.
  • Hamilton Nolan explains that allowing the rich and powerful to opt out of public systems, like mass transit and public education, allows those systems to atrophy and discourages government from repairing them. I think it’s more complicated than that – if you have the money to afford life-saving medical care, should the government prevent you from receiving it? – but his point about mass transit seemed quite relevant given our country’s dismal record on that front.
  • Jared Kushner’s investment fund is in bed with the Serbian government – which is aligned with Russia and denies its role in the Bosnian genocide – in a construction project that will include a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression.”

Comments

  1. Brian in NoVA

    Thank you for mentioning the story about the Fearless Fund, Keith. People in my field are freaking out about the ruling and the dangerous precedent it potentially creates. Is a grant program for Native Americans at risk? What one for LBGTQ+ individuals? What about ones for people with disabilities? Also there are a lot of scholarships at colleges that could in theory be at risk under argument set forth by Edward Blum and his stooges. It also worries me from a public policy standpoint. We’ve already outsourced the social safety net to private philanthropy in a lot of cases (not great in and of itself if you think about it). Now we’re setting up a case where individuals like Blum can sue other private individuals over who they’re awarding the money to. In this case, the Fearless Fund set up the program because black women receive less than 1% of all venture capital funding and were trying to make sure they got something.

  2. Brian in SoCal

    The father who prevented his daughter from shaking the hand of the school superintendent is wearing a baseball hat to his daughter’s indoor graduation. Even the most virulent racists in the segregated South in the 1950s wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that. I don’t know why I find this sartorial detail so revealing and yet unsurprising.

  3. Ugh. I gotta stop reading these articles every week. I just get more and more depressed, and with other things I have going on right now, I don’t need that kind of depression. Why does nearly everyone suck?

  4. “ Ugh. I gotta stop reading these articles every week. I just get more and more depressed, and with other things I have going on right now, I don’t need that kind of depression. Why does nearly everyone suck?”

    I love Keith’s baseball work. I disagree with him on most of his posts outside of baseball. When it suits me, I look at his links. I read some of them, disagree with most of them.

    He does not suck, I just disagree with his viewpoint. Accept people for who they are and what they believe. Then make adjustments accordingly. You will live a longer and happier life.

    • @ Steve M

      I’m pretty sure Pat D was not referring to Keith, but rather, to the people in the articles Keith posts.

    • Yea, what Frank said. Good job misinterpreting.

  5. That Matt Eddy item sure took a quick turn for someone who thinks of Matt Eddy as the longtime writer from BA. Even the parenthetical about the HS graduation sucked me in. Oh look, Keith is pointing out that this fellow prospect writer must have a kid going through the prospect evaluation process. That’ll be a sweat story for a father to see his business from the other side.

    It was NOT that!