I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).
And now, the links…
- Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.
- Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.
- The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.
- Trump has also deported at least two U.S. citizen children with cancer. This appears to be on top of the illegal deportation of a two-year-old girl, also a citizen, with “no meaningful process” in the words of a federal judge in Louisiana.
- It looks like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may have misappropriated public funds, moving $10 million earmarked for … into his personal campaign fund.
- A former Tesla engineer says that when she pointed out a safety issue with the breaks in the company’s cars, Elon Musk threatened to deport members of her team.
- Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.
- The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.
- A group of scientists have banded together to form the Vaccine Integrity Project with the goal of countering vaccine misinformation coming from our own federal government. It comes as the Administration replaced the official site for information on COVID-19 with a page promoting the debunked lab-leak theory of its origins.
- Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.
- The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.
- Two German backpackers were handcuffed, held in dirty holding cells, and deported from Hawai’i because customs officers thought they were sneaking into the U.S. to work. Travel into the U.S. from overseas is tumbling. I’m not clear how cutting the billions foreign tourists spend here is supposed to help our economy.
- In a largely symbolic move, two Delaware legislators, including my representative Krista Griffith (D), introduced a bill to inhibit local attempts to ban books from school or public libraries.
- Thanks to the reader who pointed me to this Times story about the massive monthly board game night in NYC hosted by Richard Ye, which topped 500 people in March.
- Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.
- Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.
Harrowing links, as expected these days.
It’s a hobby for us in NY to complain about tourists, but deep down we all know how much they contribute to our economy. It will be devastating for us to lose a significant amount of them. And just plain sad, too. It’s really nice that people want to come visit, for all the shit we get from people in our own country.
The deportation/disappearing machine just kills me. I honestly don’t know how these people in power can live with themselves. A cliché, I know, but really. How do you sleep at night.
And lastly: Columbia has thrown its reputation into the toilet, and it ain’t coming back. Just like our country.
i’m always glad to see your boardgame content in whatever form; I try not to buy too many games, but travel-size is nice so it was easy to pull the trigger on Gazebo & Gingham; I’ll spend the time waiting for fulfillment trying to decide if I should keep both or gift one.
Off-topic from the headlines but curious what others here think about overhauling the quality start metric that is now widely tracked and referenced by baseball talking heads.
It really bothers me that a pitcher who goes exactly 6 innings and gives up 3 earned runs is credited with one while a pitcher tossing 5-2/3 innings of shutout ball or one going all 9 while giving up up 4 runs (admittedly rare) is not. Is falling one out short of completing 6 innings really so detrimental to the value of the start that you’d prefer a pitcher finish the inning but give up 3 runs instead? And wouldn’t it be more valuable to the team for a pitcher to go all 9, even if he gave up that extra run, by sparing the bullpen’s arms for one game? Heck, the ERA for a start like the one described is even lower – 4.00 vs. 4.50 – than what you get with the minimum qualifications, and you’re getting 3 more innings of use.
I’m proposing an enhanced QS metric with the following qualification thresholds:
-at least 15 outs (5 innings) and no more than 0 earned runs allowed
-at least 16 outs (5-1/3 innings) and no more than 1 earned run allowed
-at least 18 outs (6 innings) and no more than 2 earned runs allowed
-at least 21 outs (7 innings) and no more than 3 earned runs allowed
-at least 24 outs (8 innings) and no more than 4 earned runs allowed
This is intuitive in that, the deeper you can go in the game, the more grace that’s allowed in terms of runs allowed and it still be considered a valuable start. But it seems reasonable to say that giving up 5+ earned runs, regardless of innings pitched, is not a “quality” start.
For all of the advanced metrics that are out there, why can’t something like this be considered for one of the more simplistic metrics for gauging starter consistency.
For what it’s worth, Roger, “quality starts” are not an official MLB statistic, and I rarely seem them mentioned very much in discussion or analysis of the game. The “quality start” is also becoming even more archaic as the average length of a start has decreased and is now closer to five innings than six. And, unlike the save, which is a similarly arbitrary achievement made up by a sportswriter, the quality start never dictates strategy in a game, i.e., you’d never see a manager letting a starting pitcher finish six innings just so that he can qualify for a quality start in the way that some managers let the save rule govern their use of relief pitchers.
In sum, I just don’t think the quality start carries much weight anywhere other than perhaps in an arbitration hearing where an agent grasps at whatever they can to sell the merits of their client.
While the QS might not be an official MLB statistic, I see it referenced often by analysts.
Along with wins, ERA, saves, and strikeouts, it’s one of the five pitching metrics highlighted by ESPN on their stats page.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/stats
The QS certainly isn’t one of the headier stats out there, compared to something like WAR, but it’s a good, simple metric illustrating the consistency and/or frequency in which a starting pitcher provides you with a good, competitive outing, assuming you approach it in the context of total games started as well.
It’s similar to OBP (or would be, if it were more finely tuned). There are many other stats that help fill in the details about hitter quality, but OBP is a really good, basic measuring stick for whether a batter has a knack for succeeding at the primary task he’s given each time he steps into the box. You know exactly what comes to mind when you look down and see a guy with a .425 OBP, one with a .350 OBP, and one with a .275 OBP. The same is, or should be, true when comparing one pitcher with an 80% QS rate vs. one with a 55% rate.
Look, it’s clear that Harvard has a history and practice of discriminating against worthy students in order to make room for the less deserving. I’m referring specifically to the fact that Jared Kushner was admitted to Harvard, as mentioned in the linked N.Y. Times article.
By the way, John Paulson, mentioned as one of the conservative Harvard donors in that Times article, is a person of no credibility. During the 2024 campaign, he claimed that, during the first Trump term, “there were no wars.” In fact, of course, the United States was at war in Afghanistan for the entire length of Trump’s first term. (This is without even getting into other wars that were happening around the world during this time period, including in Yemen, Congo and Syria.) I saw Paulson interviewed on CNBC last fall, and the very, very smart and highly informed CNBC anchor interviewing him, Sara Eisen, let this “no wars” remark pass without a peep of pushback.