Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:

Leading Off

One of my favorite writers, Joe Posnanski, takes a detailed dive into the Major League Baseball rule changes designed to bring more action and a faster pace to the game.

I have often been a baseball traditionalist, slow to accept changes like the Wild Card. There are changes I still do not like, as this shirt that I purchased during the 2020 pandemic shutdown to support Nisei Lounge, my favorite Wrigleyville bar, demonstrates.

A Day Baseball Fan Against the Designated Hitter // Selfie

Ahem.

But I find myself all in on these new baseball rules. My favorite sport needs more action and a faster pace. Desperately. As Posnanski writes:

See, changes are coming to baseball in 2023 . . . and beyond. Big changes. Game-altering changes. Why now? Well, baseball has finally decided to draw a line in the sand. The issues facing the sport have long been in the news. Attendance has gone down over the past ten years. Surveys show that baseball keeps losing ground to basketball and soccer, especially among young fans. Baseball’s shrinking television ratings are a more complicated story than many make them out to be—local television ratings are still strong—but it is simply true that the 2022 World Series was the second lowest rated since they began tracking the numbers five decades ago, ahead of only the Covid World Series in 2020.

Even more to the point: Baseball’s ever-slowing pace and the rapid increase in strikeouts have come to exasperate even hardcore fans. They have been adamant in every survey that MLB has done: “Give us more action!”

And now, yes, MLB reacts. Finally.

So all at once, we will get a pitch clock, larger bases, and restrictions on defensive shifts.

I used to hope that the game would return to balance by itself. That managers and players would find ways to deal with the defensive shifts (will someone please bunt down towards that open area where the third baseman used to be before he shifted to short right field). That batters would figure out how to improve against a seemingly endless parade of 100-MPH-throwing relief pitchers. Eventually, we would see more hits, not just the three true outcomes of strikeouts, walks, and home runs. But, as Posnanski explains, that hasn’t happened.

That’s the thing that MLB did not anticipate: Keeping the rules the same did not prevent baseball from rapidly and substantially changing. It only prevented MLB from having any say in what those changes would look like.

That’s why these changes are necessary. Major League Baseball has to retake control of the game before it loses a generation of fans to other sports that understand this dynamic.

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The Power of Radical Acceptance

Exoneree Amanda Knox recently shared a thread on Twitter about an epiphany she experienced while in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder and being publicly shamed globally.

The thread is a wonderful description of the power of radical acceptance. As Knox writes:

My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.

I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer). I wasn’t. I never had been.

The conviction, the sentence, the prison cell—*this* was my life. There was no life I *should* have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.

Knox describes in the thread how this understanding allowed her to build a meaningful life in prison while she continued to work toward exoneration. She focused on the things within her power—staying healthy, helping other prisoners, and doing anything to make each day worth living. This reality may have been sad, but it was better than wishing for something she did not have.

It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself and my sanity, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality was.

I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss, with no clue where I was going and nothing to hold onto but my strong, instinctual sense of balance.

In many ways, though I’m now free, legally vindicated, a woman with a career in the arts (as I’d always dreamed), an advocate for justice (which I never dreamed), a wife with a loving husband, a mother with a joyous child…I’m still walking that tightrope.

The abyss never leaves. It’s always there. And anyone who’s stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort of carrying it with you.

Indeed.

Knox concludes her thread by demonstrating why, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem The Mower:

We should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

This is a picture of me in the prison yard in the thick of all of this. Everyone is going through something, even when they’re smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps.

— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) 6:09 PM ∙ Feb 24, 2023

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Quick Pitches

California

Here’s where California’s reservoirs levels stand after the recent rain and snow we’ve experienced. The situation is better, but we still need to be careful about our water use. (Danielle Echeverria, San Francisco Chronicle)

This better be only an initial step. “A civilian oversight commission has called on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to ban deputy gangs and the tattoos that mark a deputy’s membership.” (Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times)

Last week a Los Angeles judge declared Maurice Hastings “factually innocent” of a murder for which he had served 38 years in prison. A DNA analysis cleared him of the crime last year. Hastings sought the DNA analysis in 2000, but prosecutors refused the request. (Associated Press)

Assembly Member Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) has authored a proposed Constitutional Amendment that would give the Governor the power to appoint the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. My experience working for one—and the past 30 years of state budget decisions—have convinced me that this is a necessary reform if we ever hope to see the California Department of Education receive the funding it needs to help our teachers and students effectively. (Diana Lambert, EdSource)

Fox News’ lies about the 2020 election continue to have real-world consequences. The new radical conservative majority on the Shasta County Board of Supervisors has voted to end its contract with Dominion Voting Systems. This decision will cost Shasta County, which is already facing financial difficulties, hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra expenses. I suspect this will come up in Dominion’s current defamation lawsuit against Fox News. (Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times)

California’s workplace safety rules do not currently cover domestic workers. A new bill by Senator María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) would eliminate that exclusion and codify recommendations by an advisory committee of workers, advocates, domestic worker employers, and occupational safety experts. (Jeanne Kuang, CalMatters)

Politics

A Ukrainian postage stamp released to mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion features a mural drawn by Banksy on a demolished wall in a town northwest of Kyiv. It also includes the phrase “FCK PTN” in Cyrillic. I hope someone mails a message to the Kremlin. (Jason Kottke, Kottke.org)

A court in Belarus has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ales Bialiatski, a leading human rights activist, to ten years in prison. Bialiatski founded the Viasna Human Rights Centre, which has documented the jailing and torture of prisoners by the regime of authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko. The right to protest a government is fragile. (Oliver Slow, BBC News)

The Supreme Court last week handed down a decision with an unprecedented 5-4 split that saw Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson join Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority against a dissent written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Yes, that’s a sentence containing a few surprises. “What does it all mean? On the surface, not a lot: Bittner is a minor case about civil penalties for people who fail to disclose their foreign accounts to the IRS. Dig deeper, though, and the decision suggests a certain libertarianism in Jackson’s jurisprudence that may distinguish her from the two other progressive justices. That trait does not map neatly onto the left–right divide that emerges in so many cases, as Tuesday’s ruling demonstrated. Instead, it points toward a skepticism of government power that should cheer civil libertarians across the political spectrum.” I look forward to seeing how this develops. (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate)

Are Democrats finally ready to take on Fox News after depositions in the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems show that the network knowingly deceived its viewers about the 2020 election because it feared losing viewers? It’s long past time for Democrats to take action—including asking why it is still the default network on televisions on far too many military bases—but I’m skeptical they will follow through. (Greg Sargent, Washington Post)

Speaking of Fox News and Dominion, Aaron Rupar interviews Media Matters Senior Fellow Matt Gertz about the ramifications of Rupert Murdoch’s stunning deposition. “I was heartened by Biden’s refusal to do a Super Bowl interview with Fox News,” Gertz said. “I think that’s the right call and it has been absolutely vindicated by these filings, which show how deceitful Fox News is and that it’s a fundamentally political actor.” (Aaron Rupar, Public Notice)

Senator Elizabeth Warren is right to call out the overreach of Roberts and his conservative colleagues during the oral arguments of the student debt relief lawsuit. “When Justice Roberts asks about fairness rather than focusing on statutory interpretation or constitutional issues, he’s becoming a super legislator. That’s not his job,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told TPM. “It is not the role of the United States Supreme Court to make those judgements.” I’m old enough to remember when Chief Justice John Roberts claimed during his nomination process that “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” What’s the point of having these nomination hearings of the judges are just going to lie through them?

Japan has discovered 7,000 more islands than it previously claimed, thanks to advances in mapping technology and volcanic eruptions. (Nikki Main, Gizmodo)

Science

Professor Ronald Mallett pursued a successful career as a theoretical physicist, drawing inspiration from the early death of his father to a heart attack. “A year after losing his father, Boyd, at the age of 10, Mallett picked up a copy of HG Wells’s The Time Machine and had an epiphany: he was going to build his own time machine, travel back to 1955 and save his father’s life.” (Daniel Lavelle, The Guardian)

Five months after the Double Asteroid Redirection Test successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, a new study shares more details about the results of this potential planetary defense strategy. (Sharmila Kuthunur, Space.com)

Technology

David Friedman wanted to recreate the feel of reading comics in a newspaper, seeing a group of them all at once. But he doesn’t know how to write code himself. Here’s the story about how he asked ChatGPT to do the coding for him with surprisingly good results. (David Friedman, Ironic Sans)

A group of Boeing engineers used their expertise in aerospace engineering and a passion for origami to set a new Guinness World Record by throwing a paper airplane 290 feet. (Mychaela Kekeris, Boeing News Now)

The next stage in AI surveillance technology will not just identify you—but also who your friends are. It would be great if state or federal lawmakers would try to protect our privacy rights before it is too late. (Noah Bierman, Los Angeles Times)

Society

The border between the United States and Canada—the longest in the world—spans 5,525 miles. There is one remaining land border dispute between the two nations, as both claim Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine (or Grand Manan, New Brunswick). Here is the story about how one U.S. family has kept the border dispute alive since one of their Quaker ancestors, Tall Barney, traveled there in an attempt to avoid service in the Civil War. (Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura)

A new study by WordFinderX concludes that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has the most words per minute of any television show (176.2). (Sharon Knolle, The Wrap)

Dictionary.com has added 313 new entries, including self-coup, latine, rage farming, petfluencer, nearlywed, hellscape, talmbout, cakeage—and a favorite of many soccer fans—tifo. (Nick Norlen, Dictionary.com)

TURKEY EARTHQUAKE TIFO 🇹🇷❤️Fans of Turkish club Trabzonspor unveiled this remarkable TIFO ahead of today’s game with Basel in honor of emergency workers who are still sifting through the rubble of an earthquake that killed 42,000 some 10 days ago.

— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) 7:44 PM ∙ Feb 16, 2023

A Tennessee court has blocked the expansion of Jack Daniel’s whiskey warehouses because the “angel’s share” ethanol vapor emanating from whiskey barrels is leading to the spread of a black whiskey fungus coating the neighborhoods near the distillery. (Ed Pilkington, The Guardian)

Back to the Future: The Musical will open on Broadway this summer and has cast Casey Likes as Marty McFly. (Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly)

Here are five legendary lost cities that have never been found. (Ancient Origins Unleashed)

Sports

A recent NAIA-level softball playoff game featured a wonderful moment of fair play. Grand View University catcher Kaitlyn Moses hit a go-ahead grand slam but collapsed while approaching second base because of an injury. Under the game’s rules, Moses would have been called out if any of her teammates helped her finish her home run. But there is no such restriction for the other team. Two Southeastern University players carried Moses around to touch second, third, and home plate to give Grand View the lead in a game they would win 7-4.

GVU wins game 1, 7 to 4. This game was not about the win but about the amazing sportsmanship shown by SEU softball players. After a grand slam by Moses and injury, SEU players carried her to touch each base to allow her run to count. @NAIA_SB @AthleticsViking

— Grand View University Softball (@GVU_Softball) 8:33 PM ∙ Feb 25, 2023

The NWSL’s Orlando Pride are switching to black shorts for their away kit in recognition of player comfort concerns while menstruating. Momentum seems to be building toward women’s sports teams ending the practice of featuring white shorts in their uniforms. This is a long-overdue change. (Jason Anderson, Pro Soccer Wire)

During spring training, New York Mets pitcher Max Scherzer has aggressively tested the limits of the new pitch clock rules. In his last start, he thought he had an inning-ending double play. But it was a strikeout instead because of a pitch clock violation Scherzer helped to force. Then things got weird, as Molly Knight recaps: “Well, uh. Here’s what happened next. With one out, CJ Abrams grounded out to first. Had Adams’ double play stood, the inning would have been over with no runs scored. But that’s not what happened. The next eight hitters went: single, homer, error, double, single, double, double, HBP.” This is precisely the kind of chaos we should see in spring training so the players can figure out what they can do when the games start to count. (Molly Knight, The Long Game)

Sonoma County’s 98-year-old Art Schallock is the oldest surviving Major League Baseball player. He won three World Series as a pitcher for the New York Yankees. Fun fact: to make room for Schallock on the roster when they signed him, the Yankees had to send a struggling rookie back to the minors—future Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle. (Austin Murphy, Sonoma Press Democrat)

The Closer

XKCD’s Randall Munroe is warning you.

As Now I Know’s Dan Lewis explains: “A warning before you read today’s email any further: I’m going to show you something annoying that you may have never noticed before. But once I show you, you’ll start noticing it here and there — not everywhere, thankfully! — and it’ll bother you every time. It’s not gross. It’s totally safe for work. It’s G-rated. It’s just annoying.

It’s called “kerning.” That’s a typographical term — it means, basically, “the spacing between letters.” And this is your final warning before it becomes a minor point of frustration in your life.”

Oh, it’s not a minor frustration, as more than a few of my friends have experienced while hanging out with me. And seriously, the Seattle Mariners need to do something about their navy uniforms.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com.