Stick to baseball, 11/2/24.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents available this offseason is now up for subscribers to the Athletic; we’ve updated it now to reflect two players on the list coming off the board as their clubs picked up their options, adding two new players to keep it at 50. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic site on Friday to talk about the list.

For Paste, I reviewed Stamp Swap, a light new game from Stonemaier Games, whose products always have excellent components and art. The game play was meh for me – it was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, and in one case I think a mechanic just makes the game worse/slower.

I need to get another issue of my free email newsletter out soon, but got held up by the FA rankings and the relative lack of sleep I had thanks to the World Series.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: ProPublica has two stories about pregnant women who died because of Texas’s draconian abortion ban, which led hospitals to refuse to treat the women for life-threatening issues. Josseli Barnica died of a bacterial infection, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter. Neveah Crain died of sepsis; she was 18.
• A baseball coach in Nyack, New York, abused multiple boys playing on his teams, and the school district that employed him never reported any of the allegations to authorities. Peter Recla has never been arrested or charged with any crime, thanks in large part to the complicity of his bosses. One victim did sue the district and reached a settlement that included a non-disclosure agreement. Some of the survivors have established a scholarship fund to honor one baseball player and one softball player from Nyack High School each year.
• The Guardian profiled Gazan journalist Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two children, and grandson were killed by an Israeli strike in October of 2023.
• More from ProPublica – Project 2025 co-architect Russell Vought, who ran the OMB under Trump, plans to put civil servants “in trauma” and use the military to quash dissent.
• Vogue has a short but powerful story on Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband is now on trial for orchestrating serial sexual assaults against her, and how she has become a symbol of hope and strength for victims across France.
• A Republican party leader and former Congressional candidate in Indiana has been arrested and charged with stealing ballots during a public test of voting machines. Larry Savage Jr. was caught on camera taking two ballots and slipping them in his pocket. Maybe he saw Election.
• The Washington Post’s decision – made by owner Jeff Bezos, CEO & Publisher Will Lewis, or a magic 8-ball – to endorse no candidate for President led over 200,000 people to cancel their subscriptions to the paper. I’m torn on this; yes, it hurts the many people there trying to produce good journalism, whether it’s reporting or opinion, but on the other hand, voting with your wallet is the clearest way to tell any company you don’t agree with something they’re doing. I cancelled my subscription a few years ago because they ran too many anti-science editorials.
• The family-owned Seattle Times, however, enthusiastically endorsed VP Kamala Harris for President. I subscribed.
• A “tradwife” influencer who has a rare type of ectopic pregnancy intends to carry it to term despite the very high risk that it will kill her, because she opposes abortion. She has seven other kids and has been told that the pregnancy is not viable because the embryo has implanted in scar tissue.
• The Israeli Knesset passed a bill that bans the UNRWA from operating in Gaza starting in 90 days. This will cripple aid efforts, as nearly all 2.2 million Gazans have been displaced and many face starvation as a result of Israel’s year-plus war on the territory, with the UNRWA the main conduit for aid.
• More on terrible Texas: The city of Odessa passed an ordinance that not only bans trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity, but provides a $10,000 bounty for anyone who reports a trans person using the correct bathroom.
• Meanwhile, a youth leader at a church in Abilene, Texas, was charged with possessing child pornography, after he solicited nude pictures from girls through social media. There is no bounty in Texas for turning in a pedophile.
• South Carolina executed Richard Moore over the objections of the sentencing judge, three trial jurors, and the former director of the state’s corrections department. Moore is Black and was convicted by an all-white jury, because it’s apparently still 1923 there.
• The New York Times profiled Robert Smith of The Cure, as the band released its 14^th album, Songs of a Lost World, on Friday.
• Board game news: Druid City Games has a Kickstarter up for Madcala, a new game in the same ‘universe’ as their very highly-rated (and hard to find) game Wonderland’s War.
• I met Amber Cook at Gen Con a few years before the pandemic hit, while she was freelancing for Asmodee; she was a marketer and publicist and very passionate about games and gaming. She introduced me to Silver & Gold, still one of my favorite games and one of the first games that my wife really loved. Amber died last week, leaving behind her partner and a young son. Game designer and publisher Mike Selinker wrote a short piece in her memory.