Stick to baseball, 10/26/24.

I spent last week in the Arizona Fall League and filed three scouting notebooks, one with some initial observations, a second was all about pitching, and a last one that wrapped up a bunch of additional position players.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter this week; with Twitter increasingly overrun with misinformation and white nationalists, I’m there less and less, and the newsletter or one of the Twitter alternatives (Threads, Bluesky) are better ways to keep up with my work.

I appeared on All Things Considered’s Weekend Edition on NPR to preview the World Series (before the LCS actually ended!) and then did the same on NBC Morning News yesterday. One of my tweets made this SI roundup of people mocking former Reds infielder Zack Cozart’s incredible ignorance.

And now, the links…

  • Two stories from ProPublica: Arizona’s school voucher program is supposed to help low-income families, but they’re not the ones using the vouchers – it’s wealthy parents doing so. A claimed lack of prosecutors in Anchorage is leading to dozens of cases, some involving serious crimes like domestic violence or child abuse, being dismissed without trial. Other dismissed cases include 270 people arrested for suspected DUI.
  • Thanks to Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban, a pregnant woman who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus had a very high likelihood of spina bifida had to travel to Las Vegas for an abortion and ended up recovering in a casino hotel room. Abortion is health care.
  • This week in Bad Decisions: a doctor leading a large study on transgender youth said she didn’t publish her research findings because the results might be weaponized by anti-trans forces – which, of course, got out, and was promptly weaponized by anti-trans forces, even though the key quote here is this: “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, (the doctor) said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.” It’s also news that the children on puberty blockers didn’t get worse. Regardless of the results, her decision to withhold the results hasn’t helped anyone at all.
  • Israel threatened a Palestinian teen reporter, telling him to stop filming in Gaza, and when he didn’t, they killed him.
  • The hypothesis that Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star to our own, might have a planet orbiting it dates back at least to when I was a little kid. Now there might actually be some proof.

Stick to baseball, 8/10/24.

I’ve been tied up the last few Saturdays with other things, so here’s a quick rundown of what you might have missed.

I wrote 14 different trade-deadline reaction pieces at the Athletic but there isn’t a single link to all of them beyond my author page, so if you missed anything that’s the place to start.

You can see my annual Gen Con recap post, which covers every game I saw at the convention plus my top ten games from the show and which this year ran over 10,000 words, over at Paste. I also reviewed the light family game Biomos, which I kind of liked when I first played it but eventually decided had too much randomness for me.

Stadium has changed its programming schedule and I’ll no longer be going to Chicago, but instead will be doing remote video work for them that will appear before their broadcasts of minor-league games (it’s all AAA games this month) or will show up on Amazon Echo devices and MSN. Unfortunately, I know several people lost their jobs in the changeover there, with some resources moving to the new Chicago Sports Network.

And now, the links – just some of the ones I saved over the last three weeks:

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

  • Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”
  • Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.
  • Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.
  • Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.
  • A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.
  • I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.
  • Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

Stick to baseball, 9/19/20.

I had one post of my own this week for subscribers to The Athletic, on my disdain for MLB’s proposal to keep expanded playoffs beyond 2020. I also did a Q&A with our Royals writer Alec Lewis and answered some questions for our Nats writer Britt Ghiroli on each of those teams’ farm systems.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my friend and former colleague Adnan Virk, talking about the season to date and some upcoming movies of interest to him (he hosts his own movie podcast called Cinephile). My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the five best board game reboots I’ve played, as a companion to last week’s review of Nova Luna, itself a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 8/27/16.

This week, for Insiders, I ranked the MLB players with the best hitting tools, fielding and throwing tools, and pitching tools. I held my weekly Klawchat on Friday.

For Paste, I reviewed the upcoming boardgame Tak, which was designed based on the fictional depiction of the game in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles novels.

My last run at the helm of the BBTN podcast for this year came on Monday’s show, with guests Jerry Crasnick and Joe Sheehan.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 8/13/16.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, on the decline and fall of Yasiel Puig as a hitter, not as a clubhouse problem or social media superstar. I also held a long Klawchat on Thursday.

I attended GenCon for the first time last week and wrote three pieces about it for Paste, including the top ten new games I saw, the summary of every other interesting title, and an essay on the experience of attending for the first time.

And now, the links:

  • This piece on Twitter’s ongoing failure to deal with harassment sheds much light on how and why the site has allowed abuse to flourish. Lack of diversity in company leadership has been one major problem.
  • Vox advances the thesis that NBC’s coverage of the Olympics is terrible because they view the games as entertainment, not sports. I find their broadcasts unwatchable; we record them and fast-forward through maybe 90% of the content, including every recorded feature they’ve prepared on the athletes, because all I’m interested in is certain events.
  • Deadly bacteria, like the one that causes cholera, are spreading as ocean temperatures rise. Climate-change deniers tend to focus on air temperatures, but I’ve yet to find one who can rationalize away our warming and increasingly acidic oceans.
  • A woman who was sexually assaulted while a student at Harvard Law School explains why the school needs to apologize, part of the “just say sorry” campaign for schools to at least accept that modicum of responsibility. I’m ashamed to read the details of how HLS mishandled her case, including the subsequent readmission of her rapist and the actions of 19 professors who have defended him and participated in shaming her.
  • Anita Hill spoke to NPR about progress in workplace since her sexual harassment claim, which became a story in 1991 but never really threatened the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. If a nominee today were accused of doing what Hill said Thomas did – and I see no reason to disbelieve her – would he sail through to the bench as Thomas did?
  • Amazon is quietly eliminating list prices in response to a number of complaints, including lawsuits over misleading discounts off prices that never really existed.
  • Three student-scientists at Stanford believe they’ve developed proteins that will kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They’re seeking investors and aren’t disclosing the details – which I hope isn’t too similar to Elizabeth Holmes’ history – but this could be very good news in what is about to become a huge public-health crisis.
  • Clay Shirky explains why there’s no such thing as a protest vote. I happen to agree, and I have in fact cast such a vote in the past – but won’t this year.
  • On the other hand, Reason has an op ed on why Republicans voting for Trump would be wasting their votes, although the author is really just arguing that Trump is not a conservative and that he’d be a disastrous president … but I believe he’s arguing conservatives should vote for Gary Johnson instead.
  • Texas, which has executed more prisoners since 1976 than 45 other states combined, is about to execute a convict who didn’t kill anybody. He was in the getaway car when his partner in the planned robbery killed the store employee.
  • So far, the Rio Olympics have not led to any of the disasters predicted for them. That doesn’t mean giving Brazil the Olympics was a good idea; the economic harm done to the country could be long-lasting, such as wasting $62 million on Olympic posters to hide a favela from public view.
  • The pseudonymous surgeon and scientist Orac weighs in on the latest Medscape survey on vaccine-refusing or hesitant patients, with some prescriptions for the best strategies in dealing with them. He also notes that the media (hi!) have become less tolerant of anti-vax bullshit over the last few years.
  • The DoJ report excoriating the Baltimore police department included a note where a prosecutor called a woman who reported a rape a “conniving little whore.” Much of the coverage has focused on the department’s problems with racial bias, but the BPD has an abysmal record at investigating rapes, too.
  • Vanity Fair has a longread on the Bill Cosby rape case(s), explaining how this one particular incident reached a courtroom and opened the gates for fifty-nine other victims to come forward.
  • A judge in Louisville, Kentucky, has gotten some positive attention on social media for two cases where she showed some human decency. The first case, of a female defendant who appeared to have been seriously mistreated by jailers, is about much more than just a judge showing compassion.
  • Australia has a large detention center for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – a functionally insolvent island state that depends on the center and foreign aid for its economic survival – and a Guardian investigative report found widespread abuse of children in the camp.