Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Texas Monthly looks at the meltdown – or self-immolation – at Texas A&M. The Republicans who run the state are going to ruin their public universities to the point where they don’t get the same kind of out-of-state interest that helps add revenue to the system.
• Grub Street looks at the decline of the veganism movement in the restaurant world (and our tables). I’m not vegan, or vegetarian, but eating more plants is clearly better for our health and that of the planet.
• Deadline doesn’t mince words in its headline about Disney’s new CEO choice: “Dana Walden Expands Oversight To Film in New Role As Media Glass Ceiling Remains Intact.”
• That was not Liam Conejo Ramos in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show; he is in hiding with his family and still traumatized from being kidnapped by ICE.
• Writing in Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the white nationalist movement that led to the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
• ProPublica named the two ICE employees who killed Pretti.
• Meanwhile, a comedy club in St. Paul cancelled an upcoming series of shows by a comedian who made vile, hateful comments about Renée Nicole Good, and CAA is threatening to sue the bar over it. Maybe CAA should drop Ben Bankas instead.
• Why do ICE agents wear masks? So it’s easier for them to violate our Constitutional rights. Duh.
• Jonathan Haidt is making bank by running around telling anyone who’ll listen that social media is wrecking the current generation of kids. Two new studies undermine his claims, as the evidence of harm just isn’t strong enough.
• The Israel Defense Force accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of 71,000 Gazans killed in Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory.
• Saudi Arabia is pulling back plans for its new city project Neom, which included the especially bizarre project known as The Line (apparently now dead).
• The mass-market paperback is going extinct. What a gigantic shame; I understand the economics of it, in general, but the lower price point can get more people into books or new authors or new-to-them genres, and the smaller form factor is a godsend to people who travel and or just love to stuff a book in a pocket.
• Members of our military have reported that their commanding officers are mandating that they go see the fawning ‘documentary’ Melania.
• Harvard is, again, all over the Epstein files, including the campus Jewish center Harvard Hillel soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for child sex trafficking.
• Yale isn’t faring much better; computer science professor David Gelertner recommended a graduate student to Epstein by praising her looks, and he defended those messages to the dean of the school’s engineering department. Meanwhile, Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis also seems to have been rather cozy with the convicted sex offender.
• I prefer the original headline for this op ed by Molly Jong-Fast, which called Jeffrey Epstein “the devil’s concierge.”
• Physicists sort of turned lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing lead atoms into each other at such high speeds that a few spit out exactly three protons, which made them gold atoms. Others spit out one proton, making thallium, or two, making mercury, but that’s hardly as fun.
• Agrovoltaic canopies – solar panels installed above crops to protect them from excessive sunlight and heat – increased crop yields and reduced water loss in trials in France.
• The Burn It All Down podcast has a Kickstarter up to try to fund a return of the show, which features two people I’ve met (Jessica Luther and Lindsay Gibbs) and another I know from the site formerly known as Twitter (Shireen Ahmed). The show is about feminism in sports, and feminism and sports, and women’s sports, and men’s sports through a feminist lens. I don’t understand the podcasting space; it seems like it’s just getting overrun by celebrities with podcasts and nothing interesting to say.
• There have been a slew of new boardgame crowdfunding efforts in the last three weeks. Here’s a list:
  • Stellar Ventures, a heavy, 150-minute game for 3-5 players about space exploration for fun and profit. I know one of the publishers and have a prototype (yes, I need to play it) and have gotten a demo, and I think it looks pretty fantastic, even though it’s about as heavy a game as I typically play.
  • A second edition of Logic & Lore, one of the best games I saw at Gen Con last year, along with a brand new expansion.
  • Red Leaf University, a midweight worker-placement game co-designed by Adrian Adamescu, who co-designed Sagrada.
  • LODGE, a small spatial-puzzle game from the designer of Tiny Towns and Wormholes. I’ve played this on BGA; the game is very good but I hate the art.
  • Gold Country, yet another game from Reiner Knizia, based loosely on his 2012 game Spectaculum.
  • Tinctura, a worker-placement game about apothecaries in the 18^th/19^th centuries where players gather ingredients and fulfill contracts.       
  • Spirited, a hand-management and set collection game co-designed by Shem Phillips (Raiders of the North Sea, Architects of the West Kingdom).
• The BBC podcast Witness History has an 11-minute episode on the creation of the game Catan.
• And finally, for the August 2024 issue of newsletter-magazine Wyrd Science, Dan Thurot spoke to the designers of three politically-themed board games about incorporating real politics and history into tabletop play, including Tory Brown, designer of the fantastic Votes for Women.