Stick to baseball, 5/23/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I spoke with teenaged umpire Jameson Morris about his confrontation with a standoffish rec league coach, the video of which has gone viral; published a minor league scouting notebook on Seth Hernandez, Edward Florentino, and some other Pirates & Phillies prospects; and wrote up scouting report on hard-throwing high school lefty Brody Bumila.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the Jays, Trey Yesavage, and what the next year or so will be like for Jose Berrios; and on 95.7 The Game in San Francisco to talk about the Giants’ lost season and how maybe Buster Posey isn’t the savior.

I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter on Friday.

Apropos of nothing, this Lyrics Born performance of his 2003 song “Callin’ Out” for KEXP is an absolute banger. KEXP is on quite a roll this year with their in-studio performances.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This New Yorker story on a mysterious Chinese couple in LA who have used surrogate mothers to amass over 20 children doesn’t have a big, punchy finish, but the whole thing is wildly disturbing, from the neglect and abuse of the kids to the broader issues of what the fuck is even going on.

• 404 Media exposes how Radnor (PA) Township School District completely fumbled a case where a 14-year-old boy made pornographic deepfakes of his classmates, including letting him return to school at one point before he was eventually charged with a crime. (The post was free when I first read it, but it appears now to be only for paid subscribers.)

• The NAACP issued a call to Black athletes and fans to stop supporting athletic programs in states that are suppressing minority voters’ rights, which includes pretty much the entire SEC.

• ICE deported a mother to Honduras but refused to send her 3-year-old son with her, leaving him in the care of an abusive uncle. That uncle beat Orlin to death, and now ICE is blaming the mother for abandoning her child.

• Nicholas Kristof wrote in the Times’ opinion section about the world’s silence to the substantial reports of rapes of Palestinian men, women, and children by Israelis, including soldiers, prison guards, and even colonizers. The UN has long recognized the use of rape as a tactic in war.

• In March, the Israeli military dropped criminal charges against soldiers caught on video raping a Palestinian detainee. This past week, they were allowed to return to military service, and the Israeli Defense Minister apologized to them.

• Texans are probably going to elect Republican Ken Paxton as their Senator, despite his history of scandals that have led to an impeachment and an indictment.

• Also in Texas, Democratic Congressional candidate Maureen Galindo wrote that she wants to turn an ICE facility into a concentration camp for American Zionists, the latest in a stream of antisemitic falsehoods coming from her and her campaign. She’s in a runoff to become the Democratic candidate in TX-35, with early voting open now and the election proper on Tuesday, May 26^th. She’s also been backed by the Republican SuperPAC that bills itself as Lean Left.

• I usually put the board game news at the bottom of these links, but whoa boy, this one is special. BoardGameGeek fired their longtime advertising manager for rejecting an ad because he claimed demonic possession is real and an unfit subject for a game. It’s worse than it sounds; I hope this guy gets professional help, as he seems to be suffering from delusions, notably that demons are real (they are not, nor is demonic possession). Here’s the Gamefound page for Possess Me, Satan, which is already fully funded, perhaps thanks to a little extra publicity.

• A Trump-loving Tennessee sheriff jailed a resident of his county for 37 days for posting a meme after the death of Charlie Kirk. That resident just won an $835,000 settlement in his lawsuit against the county. Maybe Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems should have to pay some of that.

• I linked a few weeks ago to a story about Iowa Republicans forcing an oxymoronic “Center for Intellectual Freedom” on the University of Iowa. Students aren’t taking its bullshit classes, so now those same Republicans are going to mandate the classes for all students.

• Sports Illustrated is at it again with the AI slop; Sportico caught SI plagiarizing some of its content, Futurism delved further, and now everything that author supposedly wrote is gone from SI’s site, along with the author’s social media presence.

• I’ve seen several stories this week about the murders of trans women; one was Juniper Blessing, a student at the University of Washington whom the Seattle Times honored with a piece about her life and legacy.

• A now adult daughter of anti-vaxxer parents recalls how she ended up hospitalized for almost a month with meningitis when she was eleven – and how her classmates thought she was drunk.

• Oklahoma Republicans are pushing through two bills to ban “obscene” material – by their definition – from schools. This is, of course, not about protecting children at all, but about enacting Christian censorship within public education.

• A New York doctor is facing 21 felony counts for faking vaccination records for her own kid and anti-vax parents. Lock her up.

• Three former CDC executives say “enough is enough” to RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines.

• The Broadview Six, including onetime Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, had all charges against them related to their protests outside an ICE facility dismissed with prejudice this week, with the judge issuing some excoriating commentary on the unethical behavior of federal prosecutors in the game.

• Mathematicians appear to have proven the convexity conjecture first posed by Michel Talagrand in 1995, and did so with an assist from AI.

• Florida man Alan Chambers once ran a Christian ministry that promised to “cure” LGBTQ+ people. He was arrested last week for soliciting sex from a teenaged boy.

• Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video of himself taunting and slapping activists abducted by Israeli forces from a peace flotilla heading for Gaza; France has now banned him from entering any French territory. The now-freed activists have also alleged they were sexually assaulted while in Israeli custody.

• The Times Guild, representing workers at the New York Times, filed an unfair labor practice charge this week against the paper. The Athletic’s unionizing effort has been fighting for over a year for the Times to recognize us as part of the Guild as well, rather than a separate bargaining unit.

• Let’s Go! To France is up on Kickstarter now; my final piece for AV Club before they shuttered their games section was an interview with designer Josh Wood about the game.