My second mock draft of 2026 went up this week, with a new name at #1. I also held a Q&A on Wednesday to discuss it. Last Sunday, I posted a scouting notebook on Theo Gillen, Miguel Sime Jr., and other Rays & Nationals prospects.
I sent out a new epistle of my free email newsletter this week. You can find me on Bluesky for text-based commentary and links, and TikTok and Instagram for short videos, mostly on baseball.
I appeared on The Fan LA on Wednesday to talk about the Dodgers’ farm system.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Longtime vaccine denier and supplement peddler Joseph Mercola – who has taken up other anti-science positions like claiming aspartame is behind all sorts of health problems – quickly changed his tune on vitamin K shots after ProPublica asked him for comment on why he’d made false claims about these lifesaving injections for infants.
- WIRED (reprinted on KFF Health News) explored the devastation caused by vaccine denialism in Utah, where a measles epidemic has sickened many infants too young to be vaccinated and strained hospitals unprepared for a highly contagious disease that had been eradicated from the Western hemisphere. We all pay the cost for these grifters and the idiots who follow them.
- The Times spoke to Scott Pelley on his ouster from 60 Minutes and the self-immolation of CBS News under Bari “Free Speech” Weiss.
- In a related story, noted Trump-lie debunker Daniel Dale hasn’t appeared on CNN in three months. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the Justice Department’s review of the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger.
- The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of West Ham United owner David Sullivan, asking how someone who made his fortune in pornography reached the pinnacle of English football.
- Republican Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia owns an empire of coal-mining companies. The Trump Administration closed investigations into potential criminal violations by Justice’s firms.
- Auburn University’s board of trustees dissolved the faculty senate and took control of curricula to comply with a law that doesn’t apply to the school.
- Conservative Americans have higher mortality rates and worse health outcomes than liberals because of ‘ideological divides,’ which is a polite way to refer to science denial.
- In the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik writes that the right’s war on science has reached a new low, and could go lower.
- Avelo sucks to begin with, but now the CEO is demanding that regional airports give him equity in exchange for the airline flying there.
- China is producing more solar energy than it can use. The Financial Times notes that it is “madness” to waste this surplus. Meanwhile, U.S. solar energy output has passed coal for the first time, despite a federal government openly hostile to green energy. Imagine what might happen if we had people in charge who accept scientific facts.
- San Carlos Lake in Arizona is now closed to visitors after drought and a water release from a dam upriver killed all of its fish.
- A 21-year-old Seattle man who was recently playing basketball for his junior college team was arrested for running an abusive pornography content mill, kidnapping, threatening, and beating girls to get them to produce pornography for OnlyFans and similar sites.
- A good use of artificial intelligence: Mathematicians used an internal model from OpenAI to find a better solution to Paul Erdös’ planar unit distance problem.
- I enjoyed this Vulture interview with KISS’ Paul Stanley, who never directly answers the interviewer’s questions but gives insightful comments on just about every one.
- AVClub’s Sam Barsanti writes that it might be for the best that Doctor Who is on hiatus after the BBC sacked Russel T. Davies.
- Dire Wolf has a Kickstarter going for a board game based on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series.