Stick to baseball, 2/22/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first draft scouting notebook of 2025, covering the players I saw at the Shriners College Classic, which probably includes anywhere from three to six first-rounders and maybe ten guys who’ll go on day one. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Coming up, I’ll have my ranking of the top prospects for impact in 2025 on Monday, plus a draft scouting notebook from this weekend probably Tuesday, and then I believe my first ranking of draft prospects will go up around March 5^th.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter, which didn’t go out this week because I was recovering from some sort of respiratory infection that wasn’t flu or COVID but still sucked.

And now, the links…

• The so-called SAVE Act is a backdoor way to make it impossible for millions of women to vote, because they took their husbands’ surnames or have otherwise changed their names so that they no longer match those on their birth certificates. Democrats should be lying in front of the steamrollers to stop this one.

• Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote an editorial in The New York Times about how RFK Jr.’s bullshit “just asking questions” line led to over 300,000 preventable deaths in South Africa, when that country’s leader was a rabid HIV denialist.

• The President of the American Association of University Professors wrote an open letter stating that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has declared war on civil rights in our education system.

• A prosecutor for ICE has been running a Twitter account that’s made highly racist, xenophobic, and white nationalist comments for a decade. He’s still employed by ICE as an attorney as of this writing; I’m surprised he hasn’t been promoted or transferred to DOGE.

• SFGate reports on the chaos at Yosemite National Park after DOGE did its thing.

• Many Americans are leaving the country for good, or at least for the foreseeable future, as the new Administration is slashing and burning through science and other federal budgets while threatening a level of authoritarianism never seen in this country. I don’t blame them one bit.

• Meanwhile, the Administration is flouting federal rulings ordering them to release promised funding for NIH grants by refusing to submit notes to the Federal Register, which is required to release the funds.
  
• Such federal grants help fund studies like this one at the University of Southern Mississippi into the causes of the tick-borne ‘red meat allergy’ that has been spreading across the United States, mostly in the south.

• The great Elie Mystal asks how New Yorkers should solve the problem of Eric Adams; the only acceptable answer has him removed from office, obviously.

• Quite a coincidence – just as I was reading W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (spoiler: I hated it), this damning review in the Guardian of a posthumous collection of Sebald’s literary criticism appeared.

• A dam in Czechia was held up by red tape, so beavers went and finished it themselves. I for one welcome our new beaver overlords.

• The daughters of the late cofounder of Target spoke out against the company’s decision to end DEI initiatives, which have also led to a big drop in the company’s share price.

• The mayor and city council in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued a local newspaper for publishing an accurate story on a secret vote that the council was required to announce to the public before holding. The paper took the editorial down, but other sites are publishing it to get the word out.

• Some board game Kickstarters of interest: Flatout Games has one for Point Galaxy, the third game in the Point Salad/City series, along with a new small-box citybuilder called Propolis.

• Rock Manor Games has one up for StarDriven: Gateway, the second go-round after they pulled a campaign in the fall to tweak the game somewhat. I’ve demoed this game, as the publisher is a friend (our kids go to school together), and I recommend it.