Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

• The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.

• Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.

• Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.

• The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.

• Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.

• Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.

• More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.

• Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.

• I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.

• The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.

• Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.

• People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

• A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.

• A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.

• Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10^th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.