Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)
  • Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.
  • Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).
  • The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.
  • And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.
  • A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).
  • Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.
  • GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.
  • The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.
  • The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.
  • Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.
  • My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.
  • RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.
  • A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.

Stick to baseball, 4/5/25.

One piece from me this week at the Athletic, but it’s a long ’un, as I rounded up all of the draft prospects I’d seen in the previous three weeks, covering Arkansas/Vandy, Arizona State, and high school prospects from Arizona, Florida, Alabama (Steele Hall), Nevada (Tate Southisene), and New York. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Sarah Harman writes about how she spent years hiding the fact that she was a mother from her colleagues and bosses at the TV network where she used to work because she understood the discrimination, overt and covert, that targets mothers and pregnant people in the workplace. It’s especially sobering to read this when anti-discrimination laws are being rolled back willy-nilly.
  • Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a crank and anti-vaxxer, has a faculty post at the public University of Florida. He’s barely done anything since he got the job, according to an investigative report in The Alligator. I thought we were supposed to be rooting out corruption and waste.
  • The Guardian’s Timothy Snyder writes how JD Vance’s ridiculous posturing in Greenland was more than just embarrassing – it was a huge strategic blunder.
  • A Michigan woman was assaulted at work and reported it to the police. The police then alerted ICE that she was in the U.S. illegally, and she’s almost certainly going to be deported. If the police can do this, then people in the U.S. without authorization won’t go to the police when they’re victims of crime, and that makes them perfect targets.
  • That left-leaning tabloid … uh, The Economist described Trump’s tariffs as “mindless” and said they’ll cause “economic havoc.” I mean, yeah. Any first-year econ student could tell you they’re going to hurt the U.S. more than anyone else. This is the same publication that said France should allow the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to run for President again, just to give you some sense of their perspective.
  • These economically destructive tariffs are going to cause carnage in the board game industry, where most of the manufacturing takes place in China and small businesses don’t have the margins to absorb the tariffs – nor does anyone expect consumers to spend more money to end up with fewer games.
  • Stonemaier Games is releasing a new edition of Tokaido, an all-time top 100 game for me and a classic from the designer of 7 Wonders.

Stick to baseball, 3/30/25.

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…

  • 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.
  • 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.

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.
  • M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.
  • I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.
  • Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.

And now, the links…

  • A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.
  • Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.
  • Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.
  • A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.
  • Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.
  • Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.

Stick to baseball, 2/22/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first draft scouting notebook of 2025, covering the players I saw at the Shriners College Classic, which probably includes anywhere from three to six first-rounders and maybe ten guys who’ll go on day one. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Coming up, I’ll have my ranking of the top prospects for impact in 2025 on Monday, plus a draft scouting notebook from this weekend probably Tuesday, and then I believe my first ranking of draft prospects will go up around March 5th.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter, which didn’t go out this week because I was recovering from some sort of respiratory infection that wasn’t flu or COVID but still sucked.

And now, the links…

  • Many Americans are leaving the country for good, or at least for the foreseeable future, as the new Administration is slashing and burning through science and other federal budgets while threatening a level of authoritarianism never seen in this country. I don’t blame them one bit.
  • The mayor and city council in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued a local newspaper for publishing an accurate story on a secret vote that the council was required to announce to the public before holding. The paper took the editorial down, but other sites are publishing it to get the word out.
  • Rock Manor Games has one up for StarDriven: Gateway, the second go-round after they pulled a campaign in the fall to tweak the game somewhat. I’ve demoed this game, as the publisher is a friend (our kids go to school together), and I recommend it.

Stick to baseball, 2/16/25.

My entire offseason prospect rankings package is now up for subscribers to the Athletic, and you can find links to all 33 lists/articles on this index page. If you just want the highlights, here’s the top 100, the farm system rankings, and the two Q&As I did around the package on February 12th and January 28th.

I reviewed the family board game Fairy Ring over at Paste about two weeks ago; it’s really great, easy to learn for kids 8 and up, but with enough mental calculations on each turn that it has enough to keep adults engaged. My review of Harvest will go up this week.

I got back to my free email newsletter in the last few weeks, and hope to get back to posting more regularly on the dish as well now that the mad rush of the prospect rankings is over.

There were way too many articles to link to since my last roundup to include them all, so here’s a quick list of high (or low) lights…

  • The Society for the Study of Evolution issued an open letter to the President and Congress on the current scientific understanding of sex and gender, a small but important gesture against the Republican Party’s relentless war on trans people – which included a threat to pull all federal funding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children if the group didn’t remove all mention of trans kids from their site. And the cowards complied.
  • The title of this New York Times op ed keeps changing – I have it saved on my phone as “Why Would We Undermine the Marvel of American Science,” now it’s showing up on my laptop as “I Used to Run the N.I.H. Here’s What Worries Me,” and Chrome shows it as “American Science is Under Attack” in my history. Whatever the title, it’s worth a minute. The wholescale assault on American science research will destroy American health and wreck our economy, which depends on innovation since we have long lost our competitive advantages in manufacturing.

Stick to baseball, 1/25/25.

I had two posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, on the signings of Anthony Santander and Jurickson Profar. My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball will go live on Monday morning; the content is all written but I am still tweaking the final order.

At Paste, I reviewed the game Gnome Hollow, a medium-weight family game of tile placement, set collection, and some market selling, along with gnomes. I liked it but I would say I didn’t love it.

I did send a short newsletter out to subscribers earlier last week; you can subscribe here for free and get the next one, which I hope will go out Monday/Tuesday to go along with the unveiling of the top 100.

As the social media landscape has lurched to the right, I’m posting links on several sites but only posting other content or answering people on Bluesky, so if you want to interact with me that’s the spot.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Molly White writes in her newsletter, [citation needed], about Elon Musk’s and the right’s war on Wikipedia, a source of information they can’t easily control.
  • An independent journalist is going to trial over her coverage of the police response to a pro-Palestine protest at Portland State University. Alissa Azar has already been convicted once for her work, as the police claim she’s not a journalist, but “antifa.” How convenient for them.
  • Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, said that defending democracy would amount to “abandoning its central role as a source of impartial information.” His comments, made to a former colleague of his now at Semafor, didn’t go over well.
  • Just days after a (so-called?) cease-fire in Gaza, Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin. La plus ça change.
  • I hate to link to the dumpster fire that is Politico, but they have a good piece on how RFK Jr. might try to remove vaccines from the market entirely if he’s confirmed as HHS Secretary. And his buddy Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote for him. If you live in Rhode Island, you need to call Sen. Whitehouse’s office on Monday morning.
  • Florida has benefited from net positive migration for years because of its weather, cheap real estate, and general economic growth. That may be changing, as more people left Florida in 2023 than any other state but California. Climate change and the state’s hard-right shift are likely causes.
  • My former colleague at the Athletic Lindsey Adler has a newsletter of her own now after she left the Wall Street Journal, and her latest issue, “Ten Years in a Crumbling Industry,” is an excellent look at her decade in (mostly) digital media and what it’s been like to work in a field that’s imploding around you like the Hamptons sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
  • Character.AI has been in the media more for problems with its software, including one user’s suicide after he became obsessed with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, than for anything good about the product. So why would any media brand want to partner with them?
  • Jeb Lund writes at Truthdig that AOC ’28 needs to start now – not necessarily because she’ll win, but because she is the right person to stand front and center as the leader of the opposition to the President. And I agree. I don’t think concerns about “electability” are even relevant any more; Trump should have been the most unelectable candidate ever, and he just won his biggest victory yet.
  • At Slate, Dan Kois writes about The Straight Story, David Lynch’s most conventional film, and an absolute fucking masterpiece.
  • Outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentence Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The federal government withheld a ballistics report that showed the fatal shots did not come from Peltier’s gun, and no witnesses identified him as the shooter.
  • Support our troops! But don’t give them houses! Oklahoma scrapped a plan by the Veterans Community Project to build tiny homes for homeless veterans in Oklahoma City after neighbors objected. I bet they stand for the anthem, though!
  • Elon Musk made a Nazi salute at the inauguration, twice. We know that’s what it was because neo-Nazis online said so – and they loved it.
  • Greg Sargent of the New Republic says that Trump allies are conceding they don’t have a huge “mandate” after all. I’m not sure this means much if no one is willing to stand up to him.
  • The New England Patriots set up a Bluesky account and the NFL told them to shut it down. Then the league announced a new partnership with Twitter.
  • The Columbia Journalism Review has a story on how the White House press corps is looking forward to a second Trump term. It’s the most effective way I can think of to make someone hate the media. The people they spoke to do not care who’s hurt or what the long-term effects on the country might be, as long as their individual jobs are easier.
  • One of Trump’s barrage of executive orders tried to erase the existence of trans people. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. No one benefits from this – certainly not the very women who such orders are supposed to protect, not as their rights to basic medical care are also under assault.
  • Another order froze pretty much all business at the NIH, which is going to seriously impact critical scientific research on things like cancer treatments and disease prevention. NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies fund all kinds of research into medicine, mental health, and other areas of science that have helped keep the American economy among the world’s strongest and driven continued improvements in global health. That’s all at risk now.
  • The American Association of University Professors put out a statement called “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” Do not comply in advance. It’s not hard to remember.
  • We have a new Fabio Lopiano (Merv, 3 Ring Circus) game up on Kickstarter, called Baghdad: The City of Peace. I love Lopiano’s games – they’re medium-heavy but manageable – and this one looks like it’ll have great art similar to that of Merv, which I own and have played just once but kept because it’s so gorgeous.