For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual just-for-fun predictions column and a roundup of a few prospects I saw on the back fields in Florida this week. I also put together a post (with my editor’s help) with the preseason scouting reports and a sentence or two on the 2025 outlook for all top 100 & just missed guys who made Opening Day rosters.

At Paste, I reviewed the Ticket to Ride legacy game, Legends of the Old West, which is one of the best legacy games I’ve tried. It’s true to the original game and doesn’t load it up with too many new rules or twists (there are some, of course).

I appeared on NBC News This Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday to discuss Opening Day and the upcoming MLB season; I was also on CNN that evening but I don’t think it’s online. I also discussed the Guardians on WHBC 1480.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: ProPublica reports on how a gay man in Idaho built a following on Telegram that encouraged followers to kill LGBTQ+ people and commit acts of terror in the name of white nationalism.

• Florida is going to make it easier for companies to employ and exploit children now that the rush to deport immigrants is hitting the state’s work force.

• Three senior partners at the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters exhort other law firms to join them in fighting the Trump Administration in an op ed in the New York Times, coming in the wake of two major firms completely capitulating to the President and his vindictive executive orders.

• My alma mater, with over $50 billion in its endowment and quite a few alumni in powerful positions around the world, also bent the knee by dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

• Hamilton Nolan writes in his Substack that the federal government is going to destroy labor unions if we don’t stop them, after Trump signed an executive order (which, to be clear, is just that, not a law) saying the federal government won’t recognize the unions that represent most of its employees.

• Republicans in North Carolina continue their legal fight to steal a state Supreme Court seat, arguing that the right to vote is not absolute as they try to invalidate over 65,000 votes.

• Arizonans voted in November to protect reproductive rights, but Republicans in their legislature don’t care and are trying a backdoor method to defund clinics by preventing them from even discussing abortion as an option with patients.

• Another pregnant woman died in Texas because the state’s abortion ban meant doctors couldn’t perform a procedure to save her life.

• Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) appears to have spent campaign money on businesses that don’t exist, just the latest in a series of financial improprieties uncovered by Phil Williams at Nashville’s NewsChannel 5. Williams previously reported on how Ogles fabricated details of his resume and background.

• An immigrant to the United States appears to have broken Wisconsin law by offering $1 million via a lottery to anyone who voted in the state’s Supreme Court race. Unfortunately a judge in that state denied the Attorney General’s request for an emergency injunction to stop the lottery.

• A barber in Texas who came to the United States from Liberia when he was two years old is now facing deportation to that country because he committed a crime for which he was pardoned. ICE also arrested and detained an indigenous Mexican farmworker and activist in Washington, allegedly because of his activism, although in his case ICE claims he was ordered to leave the country by a judge in 2018.

• At Objective Journalism, James Salanga argues that authorities in the U.S. have always treated speech in favor of Palestinians’ rights differently than other forms of speech, whether it’s the federal government, universities, or journalistic outlets.

• Mathematicians solved another century-old puzzle, this one on whether you can divide a triangle into fewer than four pieces and assemble those into a square. The answer is that you can’t – four is the lowest number.