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September 26, 2026 · 6 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/26/26.

One column at The Athletic this week, my hypothetical award ballots for the five major player awards other than NL Rookie of the Year, for which I actually voted this year. My minor-league player of the year column will run tomorrow (Sunday).

Plans for my free email newsletter this past week were derailed by a few things, not least of which was me losing a day and a half to getting my flu & COVID shots. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’ve noticed an uptick in folks trying to reach me via DMs with baseball questions – I can’t possibly answer all of the individual questions I get, but I do answer the majority of questions I get in public spaces, like the comments under my Athletic stories or on Bluesky.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vulture has an excerpt from an upcoming book about Beck that explains how his album Sea Change came as he withdrew from his friends and his romantic partner and fell into the cult of Scientology.

Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for the open Senate seat from Michigan, claims he worked on an auto-plant assembly line helping build Chrysler LeBarons, using that as a way to position himself as someone who understands Michigan workers. The UAW says he’s lying: He worked at an aftermarket facility that modified cars, never worked at any Chrysler factory, and was never a UAW member.

WIRED profiles the 28-year-old Heritage Foundation analyst who is trying to destroy fertility treatments in the U.S. because Jesus said so. I can not view people like this, who try to force the strictures of their personal superstitions on the entire country through anti-democratic means, as anything less than evil.

The Guardian’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed argues that the Democrats’ centrist, establishment wing is losing elections because they have spent the last three years denying Palestinians and their supporters a voice.

A building damaged by Israel’s assault on Gaza collapsed about ten days ago, killing 21 people, including eight children.

A new UN report says that women in Gaza are facing heightened risks of sexual violence as a result of the war, due to the breakdown in the societal order. The Jerusalem Post story I linked noted that the UN report doesn’t mention Hamas’ role, which seems like a large omission for reasons they explain in the article.

Some Trump advisers are trying to get Trump to declare martial law ahead of the midterms. It’s terrifying because it’s plausible that he’d do it.

Utah Republicans are subverting democracy there, overruling the voters and setting up extralegal courts to avoid giving Democrats a single Congressional seat from the Mormon-run state. Some LDS women are fighting back.

A group of researchers are suing NIH over the blatantly political policy of screening grants for anything that hints of DEI or woke or whatever bogeymen scare the Trump Administration.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter plan his massacre. I do not understand why there’s so little push to hold the developers of such software responsible for this kind of foreseeable use.

A former Cornell student is suing the school and seven current and former students, all members of the Chi Pi fraternity, alleging that she was drugged and raped at a frat party and that the school did next to nothing after she reported it. Cornell refused to name the accused, but the school newspaper, The Cornell Sun, was willing to do so.

Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell may have used AI to write academic articles and editorials – and his emailed reply to The Dartmouth when they asked him about it.

The same AI-detection tool, Pangram, has also ruled that an acclaimed novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien was likely AI-written, causing the Prix Goncourt committee to remove the novel from its shortlist. The case is more complicated, in part because the author writes in French while Pangram was trained on English texts, and because of subsequent discoveries that Orélien plagiarized content in articles he wrote over a decade ago.

DoorDash spent $1.4 million in the NYC mayoral race last year, most of it to a super PAC that ran disgusting anti-Islam ads targeting Zohran Mamdani. Turns out they did it to try to avoid consequences for wage theft, as Mamdani’s office just settled with the company for $131.5 million.

The University of Texas has removed all women’s and gender studies classes from its core curriculum, further debasing one of the country’s best public universities just to bend the knee to the Administration.

Gavin Newsom continues to push himself to the right, vetoing a bill that would have protected health care workers, helpers, and patients there from prosecution by other states for abortions and gender-affirming care. Eighteen other states have such laws in place. Whoever’s advising him on his obvious plans to run for President is doing a shit job.

Maine Congressional candidate Paul LePage (R) may actually live in Florida if you believe his wife’s tax returns, where she claims a Florida home as their primary residence.

My former colleague Zach Buchanan, now writing for Axios, has the scoop that Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) left positive comments about xenophobic and Islamophobic books on Goodreads.

A measles outbreak that began earlier this year in Bangladesh has killed over 1000 children since the spring. This outbreak isn’t due to anti-vax propaganda, but due to poverty, where malnutrition weakens the immune responses even of vaccinated people, and the country’s extreme population density, which helps the highly contagious virus spread.

A Massachusetts couple making the rounds on right-wing media, claiming their kid was turned trans by their local school, actually lost custody of them earlier this year for physical abuse and witness intimidation, which led their child to get a lifetime restraining order against their parents.

Amazon made a back-room deal with Ridgeland, Mississippi, to access huge amounts of water from the city’s supply for a new data center, in exchange for what appear to be one-time upgrades to the local water infrastructure – without guardrails on usage or outflow, or protections for neighboring Jackson’s water supply.

What came before the Big Bang? We’ll never know, of course, but Scientific American talks about how physicists come up with theories about it.

A rare win for science over religion in the judiciary: A Connecticut court upheld that state’s ban on religious exemptions for schoolchild vaccinations. No actual religion prohibits vaccinations – it’s all made up.

The mother in that viral clip at a Giants game, where she was carrying her baby and a substantial amount of food while no one appears to be helping her, wrote a response to the online reaction, where she defends her husband and explains that they’ve even received death threats over the video.

New Order/Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris spoke to Vulture about the best songs by those two bands to help promote the release of the 16-CD Eternal (Live) box set of previously unreleased live Joy Division concerts.

The New York Times covers two men in England who are doing a podcast about their efforts to learn and play a board game called The Campaign for North Africa, which is known for being abstruse, extremely detailed (Italian units get a “pasta ration”), and long enough that few, if any, have ever finished it. There is at least one user on BGG who says he has finished the game, and I see no reason to doubt him.

Two pretty big Board Game Kickstarters this week: John D. Clair’s Electrify, co-designed with Ian Hutchinson, has some shared DNA with Clair’s Space Base. They’re both engine-builders, but this game has less luck than Space Base, at least in the base game.

And a new printing/second edition of City of the Great Machine, with a new expansion, a one-versus-many game set in a steampunk world, with hidden movement and resource management mechanics, along with variants for solo and co-op play.

Tagged artificial intelligence, board game news, florida, gaza, links, longreads, maine, michigan, mississippi, Music, physics, prix goncourt, reproductive rights, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights, utah, vaccines, water crisis

July 18, 2026 · No comments yet

Stick to baseball, 7/18/26.

The draft is over, which means my team-by-team recaps are up:

If you’re more interested in just the top names regardless of teams, here’s my day one recap. Plus I held a Q&A on Friday to talk draft & prospects. I also recapped the Futures Game on Sunday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today. You can find me primarily on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok.

I appeared on KJR with Chris Crawford to talk about the Mariners’ draft and prospects, on HB with Soren Petro to talk Royals draft, on 101 ESPN in St. Louis to talk Cardinals draft & deadline, and on 92.3 the Fan in Cleveland to talk about the Guardians’ draft, prospects, and young hitters.

And now, the links…

This Reuters special report looks at RFK Jr.’s ongoing effort to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy that helped make this country free of many highly contagious and often deadly diseases. Now measles is back and other diseases are sure to follow, all because a fringe movement clinging to the fiction that vaccines cause autism (they do not because they can not) gained access to power.
The Texas Observer investigates the rise in arrests at Texas schools, with children as young as 10 taken into custody for incidents of misbehavior that shouldn’t rise to the level of criminal.
Madison Square Garden is suing WIRED for this report on MSG’s surveillance apparatus, which Knicks owner James Dolan allegedly used to harass fans and compile a list of LGBTQ+ attendees. Dolan is a close Trump ally and was buddies with Harvey Weinstein, according to the story.
Senate candidate Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) has extremely close ties to a Hitler-loving white nationalist influencer: his son-in-law.
California transplant Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, purchased three condos in Utah in February for $1.6 million, adding to a real estate portfolio worth over $9 million that seems unusual given his salary of $153,000 to be the state’s attorney general.
Radley Balko writes in The New York Times that there is a simple solution to stopping ICE’s violence against American citizens: Allow us to sue ICE’s leaders and the policymakers enabling the rogue agency.
The Democratic consultant who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate without doing proper due diligence on the guy was dismissed from Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA)’s campaign for sexually harassment and verbal abuse.
In The Nation, Jeet Heer writes about the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) choosing evil over truth or country, becoming “the president’s most obsequious lackey.”
Amnesty International caved to pressure from billionaire transphobe J.K. Rowling, removing the page that designated her sexual abuse crisis center “anti-rights.”
Also in the Times, a report on the massive pushback to the Administration’s attempt to make all science grants and programs subject to review by politicians who can cancel funding for entirely subjective, political reasons.
Board Game Wire profiled a new publisher, Valor Mountain, that’s hoping to bring some overlooked European games to the U.S., as founder Christopher High thinks major publishers have become too conservative. I agree that bigger publishers are leaning hard on things like sequel games or IP games, but the market seems saturated with smaller publishers fighting for floor space, many of which do import cool games at all complexity levels from around the world.

Tagged board game news, georgia, immigration, links, longreads, maine, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, white nationalism

December 6, 2025 · 4 comments

Stick to baseball, 12/6/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my analyses of the Sonny Gray trade; the Dylan Cease signing (featuring a massive temper tantrum by Jays fans in the comments); the Cody Ponce & Devin Williams signings; and the Jhostynxon Garcia-Johan Oviedo trade.

At AV Club, I reviewed the game White Castle Duel and wrote up my weekend at the PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, right after the holiday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of another woman killed by Texas Republicans and their anti-abortion crusade. Just worth noting that the unholy marriage between Christians and the anti-abortion movement is an entirely modern creation, not supported by the Bible or the previous 1700 or so years of Christian thought.

Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and lifelong Methodist, writes in the Guardian of how Trump and his allies are doing to America what they did to Christianity – subverting their meanings and destroying them from the inside.

Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that the ending of USAID funding has already killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Princeton Prof. Robert P. George, a highly influential conservative philosopher and legal scholar who was in the news recently for his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation, spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academic thought and the growing ‘illiberalism’ on the far right.

Also in ProPublica, a Minnesota pediatrician who challenged the methods of the director of the child abuse team at the state’s primary children’s hospital says he was sacked for speaking out. The director in question, Dr. Nancy Harper, appears to still use debunked ideas like “shaken-baby syndrome” and thus overdiagnoses child abuse, separating children from families without sufficient cause.

Twitter turned on location identification for its accounts, and shocker of shockers, a huge number of self-proclaimed MAGA accounts are based in Pakistan or Morocco or elsewhere outside the U.S.

Prof. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School who authored the memos authorizing the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps in 2004, writes that the U.S. strikes on boats in the Atlantic are murder even if you assume all of the government’s claims are true.

I won’t link to too much about the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, given how much attention it’s received and the fact that Vanity Fair finally undid its mistake in hiring her (although whoever approved that hiring needs to be held accountable for the decision), other than this New Republic piece on the public-health cost of Nuzzi’s utter lack of ethics.

Speaking of which, Kentucky has reported its third infant death in the last year from pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease; all three infants were unvaccinated, as were their mothers.

Michael Scherer writes about the delusions of RFK Jr., who is dismantling public health in the face of all available evidence and massive pushback from the scientific community.

Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in the Times about her experiences attending an anti-vaccine conference and why these grifters and liars are so easily able to capture people’s minds.

Scientific American has a somewhat related story about how AI chatbots could sway voters’ opinions even when the bots were fabricating ‘facts.’

Drew Magary writes that it is time to declare war on AI, and I couldn’t agree more.

Government bans on the use of puberty blockers for trans teens set a dangerous precedent for further intrusion into individual health-care decisions.

Concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is backing a referendum to overturn Maine’s protections for trans students. National media members need to stop calling her a “centrist.” She is as extremist as the rest of the party.

Drain the swamp! Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who had served just two weeks to date for his role in defrauding investors of $1.6 billion through his private equity funds. The corruption is coming from inside the White House.

Tennessee libraries have begun shutting down to purge books that Republican theocrats wish to ban because they contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

I’m absolutely stunned that a Turning Point staffer and Arizona city councilwoman has been accused of sexually harassing another TP employee – and kidnapping his daughter when he rebuffed her. People that obsessed with others’ sex and sexuality are telling you something about themselves.

The government of the Caucasus nation of Georgia sprayed anti-government protestors with bromobenzyl cyanide, a toxic form of tear gas introduced by the Allied Powers during World War I, according to a report from the BBC.

Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an order that would ban any city agency heads or staff from doing pretty much anything in line with the BDS movement against the government of Israel, just a month before the door hits him on his way out of Gracie Manson in four weeks. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani could undo this with a similar order, but of course there will be an outcry calling this antisemitism if he does.

Europe’s water reserves, especially those in southern Europe, are drying up due to climate change, while Tehran is approaching day-zero for water.

There’s a new Kickstarter from Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games, publishers of the solo game Resist!, for Queen of Spies, another solitaire game, set this time set during World War I.

Mike Drucker’s parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus is note-perfect.

Tagged abortion, academia, arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, climate change, journalism, kentucky, links, longreads, maine, minnesota, new york city, religion, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

May 10, 2025 · 5 comments

Stick to baseball, 5/10/25.

I posted my first mock draft of 2025 this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and took questions from readers about that and other prospect matters on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Finspan, the new fish-themed spinoff to Wingspan that features simpler rules and a faster teach.

I’m about to send out the first new issue of my free email newsletter since February, before my travel schedule went nuts; I’ve been to fourteen states to see players, just via air, plus two more around here.

A short list this week, for no particular reason, but here are the links…

Longreads first: Automakers are going back to physical buttons and moving away from touchscreens, like the massive billboard-sized screens in Teslas, as consumers prefer the physical buttons and touchscreens are associated with much-reduced reaction times. I rented a car with physical buttons and no touch screen recently, and it took me all of about 30 seconds to figure it out.

Current Affairs has a detailed takedown of the Douglas Murray, who wrote a book on the Israel-Palestine conflict and self-described expert, but whose writing appears to omit or misrepresent facts that don’t support his (pro-Israel) conclusions. I haven’t read Murray’s book, though, and would be curious to hear from any of you who have.

At Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré spoke with an AI “sloperator” who floods Pinterest with fake recipe links and home décor posts, and who says he’s specifically targeting women over 50 with his content.

The Pulitzer Prize board chose to give the Fiction award to Percival Everett’s James, overriding the selection committee, which recommended three other titles. I just started one of the three, Mice 1961, because I want to see if I agree with the choice. I thought James was incredible.

Trump threatened to withhold $3 million in USDA funding from Maine schools because their Governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with his extra-legal demand that they ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The USDA caved. If you don’t comply in advance, they back down. There’s still an ongoing court case over trans athletes in Maine, but the funding is restored.

Trump’s entire process for finding people to fill out executive branch jobs seems to be picking the worst purveyors of misinformation on Twitter: He made Vinay Prasad, a massive COVID and vaccine denier, in charge of the FDA’s vaccine regulation arm; and now he’s nominated a grifting “wellness influencer” without a medical license to be his Surgeon General.

The Trump family cryptocurrency offering – I’d call it a scam, but I think all crypto is a scam – has enriched them by nearly $3 billion.

ICE agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka at their “immigration detention center” in his city, a facility that he says is not properly permitted and should not have been allowed to open.
New Yorkers are about to make a huge mistake if they elect Andrew Cuomo, he of the numerous sexual harassment cases and $60 million use of taxpayer funds, to be their next mayor, writes Alex Shephard in the New Republic. The man is walking ethical disaster.

Côte d’Ivoire had been one of the democratic success stories of Africa in the last decade-plus, but the recent court ruling that the leading candidate to oppose three-term incumbent President Alassane Ouattara is ineligible because of a technicality. The “little-used post-independence law” says that Tidjane Thiam, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, should have lost his Ivorian citizenship automatically when he accepted French nationality, something he already had had through his father.

Mainstream media outlets seem loath to credit independent journalists for scoops and stories, as happened last week when multiple big-name sites failed to even name Marisa Kabas when she was the first to report on Trump’s deal with Rwanda to deport an Iraqi refugee to the central African nation.

A new preprint argues that it is nearly impossible that we live in a simulation because the energy required to ‘run’ the universe as a simulation is beyond the energy we see anywhere in the universe.
The Guardian has a wonderful interview with my favorite Doctor, David Tennant.

Rock Manor Games, whose owner, Mike Gnade, is a friend and frequent gaming opponent, has a new Kickstarter up for a reprint of Seas of Havoc, their top-rated game on BGG.

Tagged africa, board game news, links, longreads, maine, new jersey, new york, physics, pulitzer prize, stick to baseball, the swamp

November 11, 2023 · 9 comments

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Tagged board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

August 26, 2023 · 28 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Tagged baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

March 27, 2021 · 8 comments

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
Cymru am byth.

Tagged anti-science, arkansas, coronavirus, links, longreads, maine, north carolina, racism, science, social media, vaccines, west virginia

June 1, 2019 · 7 comments

Stick to baseball, 6/1/19.

My second mock first round for Monday’s MLB draft went up this past Tuesday for ESPN+ subscribers; my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, went up the previous week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will hold another Monday afternoon, plus a Periscope live chat Monday night after the draft starts.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Aerion, a fun little solo game from the designer of Onirim, but that might be a bit too easy to beat. I won every single time I played; it was often close, but I still could find a way to win even with various included expansions.

I finally got back to my email newsletter yesterday, talking about why this was such a weird draft class to cover.

And now, the links…

One of those viral videos that purported to depict racism against African-Americans, this one involving a Chipotle employee (herself a person of color), turned out to get the story backwards; CNN has a long piece breaking down how the ‘internet mob’ got the story wrong and how it affected the woman targeted by the online outrage.
The BBC relates the history of British colonial authorities trying to erase hijras, India’s “third gender.” India recognized transgender people as an official third gender in 2014.
Jonathan Mayo polled 22 MLB scouts and executives asking who they’d take #1 in this draft class.
Waldorf Schools in California form major clusters of unvaccinated children; parents of these kids interviewed in this Guardian article voice the appeal to nature fallacy or the false conflict of interest claims. As much as anti-science is associated today with fundamentalist religion, you can also find wide swaths of anti-vaccine sentiment on the left in communities like these.
A German father wrote about losing his son to SSPE, a rare but invariably fatal side effect of measles infections. Max caught measles at six months, too young to be vaccinated, and SSPE put him into a vegetative state at the age of 12, after he’d suffered seizures and lost most of his memories. He died at 20.
Maine became the fourth state to eliminate non-medical exemptions to mandatory childhood vaccination rules, with the law passing the state’s Senate by a single vote. State Sen. James Dill (D), who voted for the bill, still raised bogus arguments about genetic conditions that might exempt children from the schedule, despite a total lack of evidence to support the existence of any such conditions. He’s listed as a scientist in that article, but his specialty is pest management, not immunology.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended white supremacist Paul Nehlen as a “prominent voice” who was “censored” (not what that word means) by social media.
Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of why she won’t do a town hall on Fox News is perfect (although I have no idea what Whoopi Goldberg is talking about at the end).
Why is the Administration referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom?”
A science professor at Williams College writes about how students are rejecting science that challenges their worldviews, such as discussions of genetic differences between males and females, or across different geographic groups.
This New York Post article asserting that some students are avoiding colleges in states that are trying to outlaw abortion seems incredibly anecdotal, even if it’s sort of plausible. I’d like to see actual data on whether this affects applications or enrollment at any such schools before we claim this is a thing.
The Good Men Project tracks Sean Doolittle’s tour of MLB cities’ independent bookstores.
I loved Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I enjoyed this mental floss piece with some facts and trivia about the novel.
A University of Alabama-Birmingham study of spectator injuries at sporting events pointed to the need for more netting to protect fans from “ballistic” injuries – something flying from the field of play into the seats.
There’s a new, micro-game on Kickstarter from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave called Tussie Mussie.
Tweet of the week:
The people who belittle @AOC for being a former waitress are the same faulting @ewarren for billing out at $675/hr. So how much exactly should world-changing women make?

— Katherine M. Gordon (@katgordon) May 28, 2019

Tagged anti-science, baseball, india, lgbt rights, links, maine, vaccines, white nationalism

January 5, 2019 · 2 comments

Stick to baseball, 1/5/19.

Just one ESPN+ piece this week, due to holidays & my work on prospect rankings, this one looking at the Mariners’ signing of NPB star Yusei Kikuchi. I also held a Klawchat this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There’s yet another grift on the amazon marketplace, for consultants claiming they can teach you how to get rich selling Chinese products without ever handling the goods yourself.
The Guardian retweeted a piece from last January, on why the dominant narrative about depression might be incomplete, in highlighting some their best longreads from the last year. It’s an excerpt from a longer book, and argues that simply giving medication to people with depression may miss the underlying causes.
The Washington Post looks at the rise of ‘deepfakes’ and their potential for extortion or revenge. Deepfakes are porn videos where the target’s face has been swapped for that of one of the performers in the clip.
Packers beat writer Ryan Wood shared the story of his wife’s mental illness, including multiple suicide attempts and, more recently, some hope due to treatment and medications that seem to be helping.
Antibiotic resistance is rising, but the Trump Administration is allowing growers to spray them on citrus plants to fight a disease called “citrus greening.”
The EPA is also trying to make it easier for coal plants to spit more mercury and more particulate matter into the atmosphere by changing how the agency measures costs and benefits. You can still weigh in on this proposal by emailing a-and-r-docket@epa.gov with Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794 in the subject line.
My friend Tim Grierson explains why we shouldn’t listen to Netflix’s claims of a huge audience for Bird Box. Tim’s year-end post on his personal blog, which includes his top ten movies of 2018, is also well worth your time, even though he’s clearly wrong about Shoplifters.
Outgoing Maine Governor Paul LePage, an outright racist who claimed 90% of drug dealers in Maine were people of color, pardoned a Republican buddy of his of a felony drug trafficking charge, which may in turn complicate an investigation into a firearms possession charge against the latter.
A healthy 39-year-old man got the flu last winter and ended up in a coma, so this year he’s getting his flu shot and encouraging others to do the same. It isn’t too late to get yours.
For subscribers to The Athletic, Cliff Corcoran asks what it takes for a new advanced metric to catch on. One factor that I would have mentioned had Cliff asked me was the reputation of the source – the genetic fallacy in practice, of course, but I believe it matters even though it shouldn’t.
The “likeable” bullshit line has resurfaced this week with Elizabeth Warren’s announcement that she intends to run for President in 2020; the Atlantic points out that the biggest reason for her perceived unpopularity is that she’s a woman. People, both men and women, view women who are in power or who seek power more harshly than we do men, and journalists need to point this out when discussing whether a politician is “electable.”
House Democrats wasted no time after their swearing-in ceremonies in introducing a bill to make it easier to register to vote and harder for states to gerrymander their Congressional districts. It also includes a “requirement that sitting presidents and vice presidents, along with candidates for those offices, release their tax returns from the past 10 years.” I wonder what that’s about.
George Will writes that Republicans should be concerned by ‘signs of intelligent life’ in the Democratic Party after Rep. Cheri Bustos won election as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Bloomberg looks at what opponents of Seattle’s $15 minumum wage law got wrong, as evidence mounts that the hike hasn’t hurt job growth or reduced hours for workers. The article says the early analyses of the law’s impact weren’t just wrong, but extremely wrong, because the people looking at the data did so through the bias of existing theory that the law would indeed have these deleterious effects.
Nicaragua has slipped back into autocracy since the Sandinista leader who ran the country in the 1980s, Daniel Ortega, returned to power in 2007, and this year he’s led a violent crackdown on dissidents. The family of one protestor, a 24-year-old Belgian-Nicaraguan named Amaya Coppens, has been pleading with the international community to pressure Ortega’s government to no avail. It’s as if despots see the void left by the United States’ departure from the international arena and now can act with impunity against their own people.
The same is certainly true of the Saudis, with Jamal Khashoggi of course, but also with other dissidents, including Loujain al-Hathloul, a leader of the Saudi women’s right-to-drive movement. The Saudis kidnapped her and her husband in Dubai, trafficked them back to Saudi Arabia, and jailed them both – even though women were granted the right to drive in June.
CartoonBrew surveyed some animation critics before the Oscar shortlists came out, and they argue that the Academy whiffed on the best shorts of 2018. I’ve seen five of the ten on the shortlist; four were good, including Bao, Weekends (available there for just a few more days), and Lost & Found.
WIRED argues that more people should be using Tor, software that protects your anonymity online by routing traffic through an overlay network of thousands of relays so that your location and history online aren’t visible to sniffers or other forms of surveillance.

Tagged environment, links, maine, mental health, mental illness, seattle, stick to baseball

July 14, 2018 · 3 comments

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

No new Insider pieces this week; I’ll have a Futures Game wrapup Sunday night and an updated top 50 prospects ranking out on Thursday. I did hold a Klawchat this past week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the popular and very highly-rated new board game Rising Sun, from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Ancestree), a $100 game with meticulously-crafted miniature figures but a fairly straightforward set of mechanics around area control and negotiation.

In just a few hours, I’ll be DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose with Jay Jaffe to talk about our books and sign copies. The event starts at 6 pm.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA at 1 pm to speak and sign copies of my book as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian goes deep on how the Caribbean island of Nevis, half of the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, has become one of the world’s most secretive offshore havens for money laundering and tax evasion.
Was rum invented in India, not the Caribbean as generally believed? It sounds like it – but to what extent was rum invented rather than discovered? It’s the distilled byproduct of the fermentation of molasses, which itself was the waste left over from sugar production; millers left the molasses out in the sun, using it to feed slaves, and the stuff would ferment into the precursor of rum.
There are anti-vaxxers even in the world of horses, and the result is a fight against a vaccine for an equine virus called Hendra, a very deadly paramyxovirus that can also infect humans, and is among the candidates for the next global pandemic.
No sooner do I praise Italy for the quality of life over there than the new right-wing government says parents no longer have to provide proof of vaccinations for schoolchildren. Some useful phrases for Italian learners: il morbillo, la parotite, la rosolia = measles, mumps, rubella.
Increased use of nonmedical (i.e., bogus) exemptions has driven down vaccination rates in Arizona, spurring fears of loss of herd immunity for highly contagious, deadly diseases already present in the state like measles and pertussis.
The “white nose fungus” killing bats is spreading to more states and more bat species. Bats serve a crucial role in human agriculture, feeding on many pests that would otherwise destroy crops or encourage further use of pesticides.
There’s a lot more talk about plastic pollution lately, even in our destroy-the-EPA life as it is right now. Recycling alone won’t solve this problem; we need to make less, use less, and think more holistically about the life cycle of plastics. And as of this year, China won’t recycle the world’s plastic waste any more.
Deadspin ran this crushing letter from a parent whose preschool-aged daughter was molested by a relative. One key line, from the therapist the parent consulted: “Kids that age don’t make this kind of statement up, you have to take it seriously.” Bear that in mind when you read excuses made for a certain Oregon State left-hander who pled guilty to molesting a child around this age, and now has tried to deny it.
The U.S. economy is approaching the mythical threshold known as “full employment,” although such figures generally ignore unemployed workers who have chosen not to continue seeking work, or who are unable to for whatever reason. But full employment isn’t NAIRU, the non-accelerating rate of unemployment, so high inflation is eating most workers’ wage gains.
People often ask how I ended up choosing Delaware when I relocated from Arizona back to the east coast. One reason was its low taxes, and it turns out that Delaware’s tax burden is the lowest of all 50 states after you adjust for cost of living. I actually think our property taxes could be higher, especially if the funds could help improve the dismal schools in the city of Wilmington and boost its police force.
The San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve posted a note saying the 2017 GOP Tax Bill will boost the economy far less than promised, in part because the economy was already growing over the previous few years.
Mainers keep voting for Medicaid expansion and their racist governor Paul LePage, a Republican, refuses to implement it. He’s offered to go to jail rather than expand the program, to which I say, why not both?
I reviewed the new documentary about Fred Rogers the other day; the Observer has a piece on the ‘haunting doubts’ of Rogers and Paddington Bear, building off a line Rogers uttered to his wife shortly before he died, wondering if he’d been a good enough Christian in his life.
Stop ‘snitch tagging’ on social media. I block anyone who does this. If someone asks me about a player, don’t tag the player on my response. People doing that have largely driven me away from tweeting opinions on players, and leaving those opinions in chats or on ESPN.
A Republican state senator in Kansas who is running in a primary for a Congressional seat said “outside of western civilization is only barbarism”, and later clarified that he meant Judeo-Christian civilization … you know, the same civilization that enslaved over 10 million Africans not very long ago.
Neutrinos are one of the great mysteries of particle physics – long believed to be massless, now known to have unfathomably minuscule mass, interacting via the weak force and gravity, able to pass through entire planets without hitting anything – and for the first time, scientists detected neutrinos and identified their source galaxy.
The Daily Beast has a fun slideshow of the strange mix of stunning architectural styles in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Tweet of the week:

It’s so fucking weird that we scrape the seed pod of an orchid into ice cream and that flavor is considered plain.

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

Tagged astronomy, caribbean, Economics, environment, italy, kansas, links, maine, physics, pollution, rum, stick to baseball, vaccines

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