Last Thursday was “Elimination Day” in Major League Baseball’s Wild Card playoffs, which means three teams will be advancing into divisional matchups this weekend and three more will be going home for the season.

On Wednesday, the New York Yankees edged out divisional rival Boston to force a decisive game three — in large measure thanks to Fernando Cruz’s masterful relief appearance that kept the game tied in the seventh inning.

Cruz, age 35, spent 15 seasons in the minor leagues — an extraordinarily long tenure that left most people thinking he’d never make it to the “Big Show.”

That is most everyone except his mother, Virginia.

Virginia Mahon died of cancer in 2021, one year before her son pitched for the Cincinnati Reds.

Through his years of disappoint, Fernando, who is from Puerto Rico, thought of hanging it all up many times. If not for the encouragement of his mother, he likely would have done so.

“She told me [back in 2019], ‘Don’t quit please. God has something really, really special for you,’” he reflected.

“It took me 16 years to get to the big leagues. And those 16 years, straight up, I was always thinking about those words. And here I am. Living a dream every day.”

There’s a touching video circulating of Fernando praying over 13-year-old cancer survivor DJ Daniel.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is considering signing a “nightmare” bill that would make the Empire State a sanctuary state for those looking to kill themselves via assisted suicide.

The New York Assembly approved the Medical Aid in Dying Act (AB 136) on April 29 by a 81-67 vote. The state Senate subsequently passed the bill on June 9, 35-27.

The bill permits individuals with “an incurable and irreversible illness, with six months or less to live,” to kill themselves with a doctor’s help via a lethal cocktail of drugs. Importantly, the bill contains no residency requirement, allowing terminally ill individuals from out of state to come to New York to end their lives.

This provision would ensure Americans from all 50 states could access physician assisted suicide.

The New York Families Foundation, a Focus on the Family ally organization, has strongly opposed the legislation.

Additionally, the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide has raised several concerns, warning the bill would:

• Allow terminally ill persons to be prescribed lethal drugs without an in-person visit with a physician.
• Make New York into an assisted suicide tourism state.
• Not require any psychiatric assessment of a person requesting state-sanctioned suicide.

Open the door to future expansions of state-sanctioned deaths, which has occurred in Canada.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a generic abortion pill just days after it confirmed its new investigation into the safety of chemical abortions.

The FDA approved Evita Solutions’ application for a generic mifepristone pill on September 30 after finding it “bioequivalent and therapeutically equivalent” to the name brand pill, Mifeprex.

Mifepristone starves preborn children of essential blood flow and nutrients by blocking the pregnancy hormone progesterone. It is the first chemical women ingest in the two-step chemical abortion regimen.

The FDA’s authorization of another abortion pill seemingly contradicts its commitment to reevaluate mifepristone’s safety.

Just eleven days before its letter to Evita Solutions, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed the FDA is conducting an evidentiary review of the abortion pill.

“HHS — through the FDA — is conducting its own review of the evidence, including real-world outcomes and evidence, relating to the safety and efficacy of the drug,” the wrote in a letter to 22 concerned state attorneys general.

The AGs had requested HHS and FDA reinstate stringent restrictions on mifepristone in July.

When the FDA legalized mifepristone in 2000, it required:

The patient be less than seven weeks pregnant.

When Charles Preston pitched the idea of a daily cartoon to the editors of the Wall Street Journal back in 1950, he framed the proposal as something that would add some pizzazz and levity to an otherwise dry and sober editorial page.

At the time, “gag cartoons,” as they were known, ran in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Look and Collier’s. But in a business newspaper?

Preston explained that we needed to “laugh with others in order to laugh at ourselves.”

Editors liked the idea and decided to put Preston in charge of the new feature. Launching on June 6, 1950, they titled it “Pepper … and Salt.”

The witty, gentle, and sometimes pointed cartoon continues its historic run to this day. Whether jabbing good naturedly at entrepreneurial start-ups, office politics, technology or countless other themes, it regularly leaves readers with a smile.

Satirical humor works best when it contains a grain of truth. This is one reason why the Babylon Bee has skyrocketed in popularity since its debut in 2016. Now owned and run by Seth Dillon and his brother, Dan, the site often pokes fun at stupidity and steps on the toes of many of the people behind the nonsensical news.

“Pepper … and Salt” strives to tell an entire story in a single frame and in no more than a sentence. But in this Wednesday’s edition, despite those limitations, the featured cartoon delivers not only a laugh but also a stinging commentary on the root of America’s declining birth rate, family dysfunction and general domestic unhappiness.