“Of course, the size and length of the deal look absurd, and I doubt anyone expects Soto to still be a $50-million-a-year player in 2039, when he’ll be 40 if we haven’t burned up the planet by then.”

—Baseball writer Keith Law, writing in The Athletic regarding the impact of the Mets signing outfielder Juan Soto to a 15 year, $765 million dollar contract as discussed on Ethics Alarms here.

I’ll start with a full disclosure: I’ve had some unpleasant personal interaction with Keith Law, who is a talented baseball analyst of long-standing but out of his depth in the field of business and sports ethics, where his nasty exchanges with me occurred more than a decade ago. This quote would be flagged by me as unethical if had been made by my sister in a national publication.

Experts have an obligation to not abuse their authority, influence, presumed wisdom and ability to persuade the public. Keith Law is a very qualified commentator on all aspects of baseball, from the business of the game to talent evaluation and statistics. Unlike a lot of sportswriters, he has an impressive educational background including an undergraduate degree with honors in sociology and economics from the same disgraced but unfortunately still prestigious college that I graduated from, as well as a Masters in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He is not, however, a climate scientist, and as it appears that his every waking hour has been and is devoted to the wide, wonderful world of baseball, it is safe to presume that he has not acquired any special expertise in the area of climate change other than what he reads in the New York Times (which owns the Athletic) and other progressive propaganda media.

But Keith has the arrogance often associated with those anointed as elites in Cambridge, Mass. Ten years ago, Law engaged in a long Twitter debate with former MLB pitching star Curt Schilling, defending evolution against Schilling’s faith-based creationism. I regard even having such an argument a bad sign: one cannot argue against faith, which is what creationist theories rely on, and it should be obvious that evolution, even as described by Darwin and his successors, could be the mechanism through which a divine Creator did his work: this was the point on which Clarence Darrow topped William Jennings Bryan in their epic debate during the Scopes trial.

ESPN suspended Law’s Twitter account after the tiff with Schilling, apparently holding that a sportswriter using a sports network’s social media account should stick to sports topics. His response to critics who said that he should by stick to baseball was that “Science is infinitely more important” and that he would continue to oppose “anti-science.”

I have no doubt that he considers skepticism over the certitude of the climate change cult “anti-science,” but it isn’t. Scientists chasing grants and dumbing down complex objects of research to achieve political ends is anti-science. If Law hasn’t figured out by now that the Left’s simplistic “follow the science” mantra has been thoroughly discredited in recent years, then he’s not as smart as I thought he was, and definitely not as smart as he thinks he is.

I don’t read Keith Law’s work or any baseball writer’s output to be lectured on politics, and that’s what the gratuitous “if we haven’t burned up the planet by then” crack is. Law proves, or tries to, the conclusions in his baseball analysis; this is just political propaganda, joining the thousands of ways the mainstream media deceives and confuses public opinion.