→ May 16, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 5/16/15.

My Insider content this week includes my redraft of the 2005 class as well as a recap of the first round picks who didn’t pan out. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Wednesday. My first mock draft will go up on Tuesday.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

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→ May 9, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 5/9/15.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2015 is now up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat afterwards to answer questions about it. I’ll be at UConn’s game today (Saturday) against Cincinnati to see Ian Happ before I head home for Mother’s Day.

And now, the links…

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→ May 2, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 5/2/15.

My annual ranking of the top 25 MLB players under 25 is up for Insiders, as is another draft blog post on Vanderbilt’s Carson Fulmer and Dansby Swanson. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.

I also appeared on actor Nate Corddry’s Reading Aloud podcast, talking mostly about books and pizza with a little baseball chatter thrown in.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • English college student Ione Wells wrote a letter to her assaulter as a statement of strength for herself and other victims of sexual assault. It’s absolutely worth reading (and re-posting, since I tweeted to it on Wednesday).
  • Anything with David Simon is an auto-link for me; with Baltimore in flames earlier this week, he’s a a natural commentator, and you might say he has some thoughts on the matter. The failed War on Drugs comes up, as you would expect.
  • Hugh Acheson and Empire State South barista Dale Donchey will open a new coffee shop called Spiller Park Coffee in Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, with a projected opening date in September. They’ll use a selection from a small number of the best small/third-wave roasters in the country.
  • Nearly all economists agree free trade is good, so why are some members of Congress fighting renewal of the President’s Trade Promotion Authority? Why is Elizabeth Warren, by all accounts a fairly intelligent person, on the wrong side of the table here – along with a good chunk of her fellow Democrats?
  • The New York Times was strong this week, between that op ed and this investigative report on the deep, unspoken support for the drone program within Washington’s inner circles of power.
  • Chipotle, the most responsible of all national food chains when it comes to sourcing ingredients, will no longer serve food made with GMO ingredients. That’s too bad, as it feeds into FraudBabe-style anti-science woo-woo; GMOs are completely safe to eat and can improve crop yields, although they have negative externalities regarding pesticide use. (I still favor GMO labelling, as it’s the consumer’s right to decide what to consume, even if they want to be stupid about it.)
  • Rubella has been eradicated in the Americas. You know why? Because vaccines. It’s the third virus that infects humans to be wiped out in this hemisphere and the fourth virus in total (including rinderpest, which infected mostly cattle and buffalo).
  • NPR’s Fresh Air dedicated a show to an interview with journalist Mark Arax about California’s water wars, especially the current conflict over almond farms’ use of water.
  • A short but potent piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore.
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→ April 25, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/25/15.

My one Insider piece this week was a draft blog post on Donny Everett, Mike Nikorak, and first-round rumors, and I’ll have a similar post up within 24 hours on two Vanderbilt prospects and more gossip. I held my Klawchat on Wednesday, and I have a new boardgame review up for Paste on the X-COM boardgame adaptation, which seems to be true to the spirit of the video game, but which I found excessively complicated.

And now, the links… saturdayfive

  • Yet another study showing vaccines don’t cause autism. How much research time and money has been wasted because of one disgraced doctor’s fraud? And how many children have suffered because their parents bought into the vaccine deniers’ lie?
  • The BBC has a 25-minute Inquiry program on the true causes of the conflict in Yemen, and why it matters for the rest of the world. It’s an essential story that’s barely covered in the U.S. right now, even though we’ve had a hand in it and are poised to come out big losers once again.
  • Does a US child go missing every 90 seconds? No, of course not, but that won’t stop people from repeating a bad statistic that gets clicks.
  • It’s full of spoilers, but I enjoyed the NY Times‘ recap/review of the Broadchurch season finale. My review of season two is mostly spoiler-free.
  • Are hospitals doing all they can to prevent Clostridium difficile infections? Not yet, according to a terrifying new study.
  • How Dodgers fans are using tech tricks to evade the TV blackout. This isn’t a black-and-white issue; viewers getting screwed by a legally sanctioned monopolist are resorting to illegal methods to access content for which they would and do pay. MLB can solve this quickly by ending local blackouts, or Congress could force cable companies to open their infrastructure to competitive carriers, and please stop laughing now.
  • Earlier this month, a federal court upheld New Jersey’s ban on gay “conversion” therapy, leading to calls for a national law doing the same. The Human Rights Commission has some links on the harm such therapy inflicts, as well statements from major medical associations against the practice. It’s abhorrent and cruel.
  • My friend Wendy Thurm waxes on the Islanders’ departure from Nassau Coliseum. I grew up an Islanders fan and still remember hanging the Newsday cover with the headshots of everyone on the Isles’ roster after they won their fourth straight Stanley Cup, as well as the cover the following spring with the headline “Deprived of Five.” (Damn you, Gretzky.) But the Coliseum is a dump and it was never easy to get to in the first place. That said, if you play in Brooklyn, you’re no longer allowed to be called the “Islanders.” You can be the Hipsters, you can be the Tip-Tops, you can even be the Bums, but once you crossed the county line into Queens you ceased to be Islanders.

Finally, apropos of nothing, I’m just going to leave this here:

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→ April 18, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/18/15.

My Insider post this week covered seven prospect-laden minor league rosters, which went up after Eric Longenhagen identified the Opening Day assignments for all 300 prospects in my thirty team top 10s. This week’s Klawchat transcript, full of “small sample size” questions, is up as well.

And now, the links…

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→ April 11, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/10/15.

My ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class went up on Friday for Insiders; I also had a draft blog post specifically on Nate Kirby and Kyle Funkhouser, and I broke down the Craig Kimbrel/Melvin Upton trade. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the excellent baseball-themed deckbuilder Baseball Highlights: 2045, which is currently $32 over at amazon. My daughter, who doesn’t have much interest in the actual baseball thing, even asked me last night if we could play it again this weekend.

Amazon is having a huge sale on strategy games today in honor of International Tabletop Day, with almost half off Splendor, 7 Wonders, Five Tribes, and King of Tokyo.

And now, the links:

  • A repost from my social media accounts this week: Why the “Food Babe” is full of shit. The shame is that she could marshal her small group of followers to make meaningful changes to our food supply, like pressuring vendors to stop buying meat from animals raised with antibiotics, but instead propagates ignorance and anti-science sentiment.
  • More on the FraudBabe: A post from September on the harm such pseudoscience quacks can cause in their followers. And followers they are, much like those of a cult leader.
  • One baseball link, from my colleague Stephania Bell: What we’ve missed about Tommy John surgery, with a focus on why some pitchers require a second transplant surgery soon after their first one.
  • Longread of the week: Vanity Fair delves into the deterioration of NBC’s news department that culminated in the Brian Williams debacle. Shorter version: This was the end of a long decline.
  • The health of our bodies is related to the health of the trillions of bacteria that live in our GI tracts; one gene in the mother may affect the composition of bacteria in a newborn’s gut.
  • Children with maple syrup urine disease, an organic acidemia similar to the one my daughter and I have (3-MCC), can only be cured via a liver transplant. Now their discarded livers can be transplanted into other patients who might not qualify for a liver from a “healthy” (meaning dead but not diseased) donor.
  • This excerpt from Masha Gessen’s The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy on the death of one of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friends at the hands of the FBI poses some uncomfortable questions about the nature of policing in an endless war against terror.
  • Cops are much more likely to stop black drivers than white drivers for investigatory (that is, non-safety) reasons. And that’s how you get situations like the murder of Walter Scott. (Confession: When I saw #WalterScott trending, I started thinking of Waverley jokes or something I could tweet in Scott’s variety of the Scottish dialect, only to discover what the trend was about and stop myself from being horribly insensitive.)
  • Daniel Vaughn, aka @BBQSnob aka Texas Monthly‘s barbecue writer/editor, went to Phoenix’s Little Miss BBQ and loved it. I feel validated by this. I like the slaw more than he did, and I’ve had better sausage there than he got, but otherwise we’re on the same page.
  • Vice has some ominous news for almost everyone on the Internet: Your porn is watching you, or, more specifically, it would be rather easy for someone to reveal any online porn viewer’s habits if they were to compromise any major site’s server logs. There’s some skepticism, but I think the larger point about our lack of privacy online (porn or not-porn) is valid.
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→ March 28, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/28/15.

My Insider posts this week covered:

* Masahiro Tanaka, Rafael Montero, and Mike Foltynewicz
* Potential #1 overall pick Dillon Tate

This week’s Klawchat transcript is up as well.

saturdayfiveI’ve read a few books lately that I just won’t have the time or patience to review in full, but this seems like as good a place as any to mention them. I was very disappointed in Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald’s Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, which takes a very narrow look at its topic and lacks enough prescriptive measures for readers who want to correct their own biases. The authors focus on implicit biases, truly just subconscious prejudices based on race, gender, or age, without expanding in any way to discuss such unknown (to ourselves) biases in all aspects of our lives. While I understand that their research was limited to those interpersonal prejudices, the cognitive processes behind those and behind other biases – entrenched opinions on groups or classes that skew the decisions we make – are probably related, if not identical, and I would have appreciated a broader take on how to identify and correct biases in my own thinking.

I also read two anthologies in the last few weeks, one of which I recommend highly: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, edited by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). The book runs the gamut of writing, from essays to short stories to poetry (most of it terrible) to comics, with many of the works amazing and creative and unlikely to have come across my desk (or lap) in any other form. My favorite piece was Nathaniel Rich’s “The Man Who Saves You From Yourself,” about cult deprogrammer David Sullivan, who died one day after the piece was first published in Harper’s. The anthology also includes a superb interview with Mona Eltahawy, a clever and haunting short story from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, and the delightful comic “Have Tea and Cake with Your Demons” from Yumi Sakaguwa.

I was less entertained by The Best American Travel Writing 2014, which included far too many ponderous pieces that put the author ahead of the subject or the destination. The two standouts were Amanda Lindhout’s Twelve Minutes of Freedom” and Gary Shteyngart’s “Maximum Mumbai,” the first harrowing and emotional, the second witty and charming.

Lots of links this week and this wasn’t even everything, just what I remembered to post:

  • A mother in Australia describes the “Agony of seeing my girl fight for life after contracting whooping cough.”
  • Meanwhile, some real science on the causes of autism: It’s not vaccines or GMOs or circumcision, but your genes.
  • Thanks to some added rainfall, Costa Rica filled all its power needs for 75 days using only renewable energy sources. That’s not a poor country using tiny amounts of energy, either.
  • Fans of The Wire will want to watch this conversation between show creator David Simon and President Obama about the drug war and the vicious cycle of incarcerating drug users.
  • Six tips for using your slow cooker via Tasting Table. The yogurt-making idea definitely appealed to me, given how much of the stuff I eat.
  • Following on my Paleofantasy review, here’s a similar op ed from the Guardian that calls the “paleo” diet a dangerous ideology. This is the money quote:

    The paleo diet is premised on a false image of stasis and harmony projected from an entirely arbitrary point in the long history of human evolution.

    When you also add in that the arbitrary point isn’t even historically accurate, you’ve got a weak foundation for massive dietary changes.

  • Related: Eating whole grains may help you live longer. I hope so, since I consume a lot of oats and oat products.
  • Andrew Zimmern interviewed chef John Mirabella on eating the invasive lionfish.
  • A beautiful post from Smithsonian on Via Margutta in Rome, a tiny street that’s appeared in numerous films.
  • I doubt the University of North Georgia meant for their 2015 catalog to reinforce how women and minorities still come up short in business. White Privilege Studies, anyone?
  • Want to know why the “religious freedom restoration” acts aren’t really just about religious freedom? The site RFRA Perils tells you why, and how those laws go well beyond the First Amendment protections for freedom of worship. These laws were always bad policy, but it’s even more egregious today.
  • The language here is very NSFW, and if you’re a gun owner you might not appreciate it, but I laughed often and loudly at Jim Jefferies’ routine on gun rights in America.
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→ March 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/14/15.

Happy π day! May all your infinite series converge.

My Insider content this week included a post on Danny Salazar, Kendall Graveman, and others from a Cleveland/Oakland spring tilt, and a draft blog post on Kolby Allard, Lucas Herbert, and Kyle Molnar. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.

My latest boardgame review over at Paste covered the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated strategy game Rococo, where players run haberdasher/dressmaking firms in a game that combines deckbuilding, resource management, and worker placement mechanics.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • If you’re interested in eating parakeet, muskrat, or pigeon, head to Amsterdam, where the The Kitchen Of The Unwanted Animal food truck serves up all kinds of non-traditional meats, including a horse burger called the My Little Pony.
  • A study published in Molecular and Cellular Oncology found that oleocanthol, a phenol compound found in extra virgin olive oil, killed cancer cells by breaking down their membranes, yet left neighboring non-cancer cells alone.
  • The New Jersey Senate is moving to tighten the “religious exemptions” to vaccination requirements. These exemptions are bogus, unenforceable, and unnecessary even under the First Amendment (you retain the option to home-school your children if you’re still too ignorant to vaccinate). My only issue with this piece is that the writer, Susan Livio, didn’t qualify or question the claim of one mother who said her child was injured by a vaccine – and Livio got huffy with me on Twitter when I pointed this lack of verification (kind of a big deal in journalism) out.
  • More vaccine stuff: A strong overview of the scientific evidence that vaccines do not (and can not) cause autism, passed along by former big leaguer Chuckie Fick.
  • The evolutionary case for how man ate his way to “world dominance.”
  • This Man Legislates, a new Tumblr dedicated to elected officials who saw or do horrible things – racist/sexist remarks, spousal abuse, giving away an adopted child to a man who later molested her. You know, the kind of behavior we’ve come to expect from the people who write our laws.
  • A famous Hillary Clinton quote was never actually uttered by the former First Lady; it’s from Erin Gloria Ryan, writing about Hillary for Jezebel in 2012. (And her main point, that a woman’s looks should not be part of any discussion of her policies or her suitability for office, remains true no matter who said it.)
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→ March 7, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 3/7/15.

I’ve had two draft blog posts in the last week, one on Kyler Murray and one on UF shortstop Richie Martin, with some other players included in each piece. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, my last before heading off to spring training, which will make chat times irregular for the rest of the month.

The University of Chicago Press has published a new edition of the essential baseball book The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics, with a foreword by … oh, hey, that’s me. The original came out in 1984, which I know is before many of you were born, but it remains one of the great gateways into understanding the sport on a rational level. I own a copy of the original, but I’m thrilled to get and to be part of this update.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • Dr. Paul Offit, who invented the rotavirus vaccine and is one of the most ardent and erudite advocates for universal vaccination, on how the modern vaccine-denial movement is putting our children at risk.
  • Meanwhile, Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who chairs a House science subcommittee, didn’t get his kids vaccinated. There’s no justification for having him anywhere near a science policy-making body, and he just feeds right into the whole children-as-property fallacy with his comments.
  • From the New York Times: Is most of our DNA just junk? It turns out the question of whether noncoding DNA serves any useful purposes is tied up in debates over genetics research and has even drawn in the cranks who push creation “science.”
  • Speaking of creationism, the irreducible complexity fallacy gets a good slap upside the head at the National Center for Science Education’s blog in a post tearing up that misconception. Evolution doesn’t favor increasing complexity, and, as the post asks, what exactly do you mean by “complexity” in the first place?
  • Radley Balko, who keeps churning out great investigative pieces, on as bad a case of police and DA corruption as you’ll see. A process server who served papers to a police officer ended up arrested and charged with assaulting the officer, with seven corroborating witnesses, most or all cops, backing it up … but the alleged assault never happened. And as far as I can tell, none of those cops has been charged or suspended in the case.
  • The man credited with bringing farm-to-table to Dallas long before that was even a term passed away last week at 58. Tom Spicer supplied produce to many of the Metroplex’s finest restaurants.
  • What purpose is served by a law that prevents a woman whose baby is almost certainly nonviable from terminating the pregnancy? That’s the very real case of a North Carolina woman, Whitney, who had to head two states away to have an abortion because North Carolina has banned all abortions past twenty weeks. This seems to me to be a medical issue, not a right-to-life vs. reproductive rights question, and therefore one best determined by the patient and her doctor.
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→ February 28, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/28/15.

My ranking of the top 20 prospects for 2015 impact went up on Tuesday for Insiders. I also wrote some words about Boston signing Yoan Moncada.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I learned about recent and upcoming boardgame releases from my visit to Toyfair.

saturdayfiveAnd now this week’s links, heavy on the anti-science as it was a good week to be stupid…

  • Jimmy Kimmel and a bunch of actual medical doctors have something to say to vaccine deniers. Meanwhile, look at these idiots in Arizona who exposed a whole town to measles after all three of their unvaccinated kids caught it at Disneyland … and the mom still can’t take full responsibility for her actions. How is denying your children essential medical care like vaccinations anything but child neglect?
  • Meanwhile, there’s a vaccine out there that can largely prevent several forms of cancer, and lots of parents aren’t getting it for their children. It’s Gardasil, which provides immunity to most strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is transmitted through sexual contact and can cause cervical, anal, vulvar, oral, and oropharyngeal cancers. Gardasil also protects against strains of HPV that cause genital warts. Yet we have vaccine deniers claiming it’s unsafe (it’s quite safe, thank you science), and I think we have a lot of parents refusing to acknowledge that their daughters are sexually active.
  • Senator Sheldon Whitehouse puts the smack down on the Senate’s most anti-science member, Jim Inhofe, over the latter’s climate change denial (and ignorance, really). This is on the heels of the Idaho lawmaker who thought the vagina was connected to the digestive system and the Nevada lawmaker who said cancer is caused by a fungus and can be cured with baking soda. Science literacy matters, folks, especially among people who might be making laws and such.
  • A rather harrowing blog post from writer Desi Jedeikin about a childhood memory of seeing her father nearly kill her mother. It’s a repost from xojane in 2012, but she put it on her tumblr this past week, which is where I first saw it. She’s also one of the only comedians/comedy writers I’ve ever encountered who can do very crude humor well.
  • Also from the Harrowing Links Dept., a long read from the Wichita Eagle on the struggles of the daughter of Dennis Rader. You might remember Rader as BTK, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita over the course of about two decades and ten confirmed murders. The piece does contain some disturbing details of the murders.
  • A new study says that babies who eat peanut-containing foods are 80% less likely to develop peanut allergies. Another study, this one in Sweden, found that children in households where people hand-washed dishes are about 40% less likely to develop allergies, a little more evidence in favor of the “hygiene hypothesis,” the idea that we have more allergies today because everything is too clean and our immune systems aren’t challenged by enough germs when we’re little.
  • I’m not going to link to her page, since she’s an anti-science fraud, but the self-styled “food babe” is now targeting the food additive cellulose (and various derivatives of it), which is generally made from wood pulp. Although that sounds weird – and that’s just the fallacy TFB is exploiting here, the argument from personal incredulity – there are two significant problems with her “argument.” One is that cellulose is among the most common chemical compounds in the plant world. If you eat celery, you eat cellulose. The fact that the food additive version comes from wood shouldn’t matter any more than you should care that cochineal and carmine come from bugs. The FraudBabe’s second problem is that we all eat wood already: Cinnamon and its knockoff cassia come from the barks of two trees found mostly in south and southeast Asia, and that wood isn’t processed to be un-wood to anywhere near the extent that industrial cellulose is.
  • Finally, also in the science-fraud department, the guy behind the junk-science juggernaut NaturalNews posted this gem late last week:

    That’s right: A seven-year-old leukemia survivor is just a shill for Big Pharma. Welcome to the fantasyland of science deniers.

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