Category Archives: baseball

MLB’s “Ultimate Father-Son Sweepstakes” made my baseball-loving, Star Wars-obsessed daughter cry

My six year old daughter loves baseball (when she was three she invited Manny Ramirez to visit her school). She also loves Star Wars (which she consideres the ultimate princess movies). And she loves video games especially those that involve smashing things). So you can imagine how thrilled she was when, as we checked the […]

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Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it

Peer review is ostensibly one of the central pillars of modern science. A paper is not taken seriously by other scientists unless it is published in a “peer reviewed” journal. Jobs, grants and tenure are parceled out, in no small part, on the basis of lists of “peer reviewed” papers. The public has been trained […]

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DNA testing in baseball – more silly alarmism from reporters and bioethicists

The New York Times is fronting a story that combines two of my favorite subjects – DNA and baseball. Unfortunately, the story is ridiculously alarmist, and either willfully or ignorantly conflates DNA paternity/maternity tests with tests designed to extract other information from a person’s genome. The plug for the piece is that Major League Baseball […]

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R.I.P. Mark Fidrych

One of my all-time favorite baseball players – Mark “The Bird” Fidrych – died yesterday. He was one of the first baseball players I remember loving because of how he played, and not because he was on the Red Sox. The weird antics on the mound – he patted the dirt, and talked to the […]

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What do you think Fox fears most?

President Obama or a Tampa-Philadelphia World Series

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