Anyone’s stash will do.
White-collar criminals come in all sizes and styles, but they share a motive: to steal money. Anyone’s stash will do. According to the FBI, they are experts at “deceit, concealment, [and] violation of trust.” Of the lot, the most complex to prosecute and the likeliest to weasel a light or “deferred” sentence are the fraudsters whose open secret is to appear legitimate: the neighborly crook, the good egg from church. Money launderers, work-site embezzlers, pyramid scammers, phony security traders nice folk like Gina Champion-Cain. The latest basket term for crimes perpetrated on the near and maybe dear is “affinity fraud,” tricking those the swindler knows, often intimately.
January 3, 2021
One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.
He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.
“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”