Bill Chappell

Numbers drive baseball, a game whose managers, analysts and fans obsess over matchups, tendencies and results. Its box scores, those proto-spreadsheets, instantly turn human accomplishments into history. The quest is for clean, comparable data.

But for decades, the human aspect of the game — specifically, the racism that pro baseball both reflected and perpetuated — clouded that data. While the feats of white players were carefully recorded and celebrated, the accomplishments of Black players in the Negro Leagues were set apart or forgotten entirely.

Elite female cyclists will be part of the world's most famous bike race next summer, when the Tour de France will hold a women's stage race for the first time since the 1980s.

Women have been riding the men's route in recent years, urging race officials to include them in cycling's crown jewel. Now they'll get a shot at their own yellow jersey.

Royal Caribbean's new megaship, Odyssey of the Seas, was supposed to hail the company's return to business as near-usual this summer. But the ship's launch is now delayed after eight crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. Its first scheduled trips are now canceled.

The Odyssey of the Seas had been slated to make its debut sail with paying passengers on July 3 — more than a year after the pandemic hobbled the cruise ship industry. Its first voyage is now delayed for four weeks, until July 31. By then, summer will be nearly halfway over.

Shelby Houlihan, the middle-distance runner who currently holds two U.S. records, says she's been banned from the Tokyo Olympics after testing positive for the steroid nandrolone. Houlihan says she's clean and is blaming the test result on a pork burrito she got from a food truck.

Anti-doping officials don't agree with the runner. They've handed Houlihan a four-year ban, just before U.S. Olympic trials for the track and field team will begin in Eugene, Ore., this weekend.

Earthworms are often seen as a welcome presence in gardens, and even on fishing hooks. But in the Northeast, experts say invasive "crazy worms" from Asia are creating havoc in forests — and they say the unusual worms are a danger to animals and plants, and especially to sugar maple trees.

"The street cred that they have is hiding the invasion," Josef Görres, a soil scientist at the University of Vermont, says of the worms.

Three experts have now resigned from a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee after the agency approved an Alzheimer's drug called Aduhelm against the wishes of nearly every member on the panel.

U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, hailed as a hero for his bravery during the attack on the U.S. Capitol, will throw out the first pitch at an upcoming Washington Nationals home game, the team says.

Goodman is slated to throw the ceremonial pitch on June 18, when the Nationals kick off their weekend series against the New York Mets.

The Houston Methodist hospital system in Texas has suspended 178 workers for not meeting a deadline to receive the COVID-19 vaccine — a policy that prompted more than 100 employees to file a lawsuit against the hospital. The employees now have until June 21 to be vaccinated, or face being fired.

The standoff represents one of the most high-profile examples of how employers' desire for their workers to be fully vaccinated is being tested by some employees' deeply held vaccine hesitancy — and in this case, the dispute is playing out within the health care system.

Queen Elizabeth II's portrait will no longer hang in a key gathering place at Oxford University's Magdalen College after students voted to remove the picture due to concerns about it symbolizing colonialism.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson sharply criticized the move, calling it "simply absurd," and saying the queen is "a symbol of what is best about the UK."

The criminals texted each other about drug deals and money laundering, confident in special encrypted devices using a platform dubbed Anom. There was just one problem for the crime rings: The FBI was being copied on every message — millions of them worldwide. In fact, the agency had sent the Anom devices into the black market in the first place.

Photographer Tony Austin knew he had gotten lucky when a murder of crows landed near him on a recent nature walk. But then one of the birds started acting strangely. Austin started shooting — and he was astounded later, when he enlarged his photos: The crow had large black ants all over its body.

"I noticed there were like little bumps all over this bird that was flopping around," Austin says. "And sure enough, it was covered in ants."

Former President Donald Trump transfixed a sizable part of the nation over the weekend — not through his words, as he has often done, but because of his pants. Or more specifically, because of unusual wrinkles in Trump's pants that people struggled to explain.

The focus on Trump's attire overshadowed his speech Saturday night at the North Carolina Republican Party's state convention as people weighed an unlikely question: Could the former leader of the free world be wearing his suit pants backward?

For the first time since baseball became part of the Olympics, Cuba's national team won't compete in the sport at the Summer Games, after suffering a devastating loss in qualifying play to its longtime nemesis from the north: not the U.S., but Canada.

"Clearly we have not learned how to beat Canada," reports Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba's ruling Communist Party.

Are we alone? Have alien spacecraft been buzzing across Earth's skies? Those are the questions being asked in the U.S. government's new report on unexplained aerial phenomena — its preferred term for what many of us call unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

So far, it looks like the answers in the report will leave UFO spotters and conspiracy theorists unsatisfied. U.S. officials and analysts who examined video footage from U.S. Navy planes and other records say the evidence doesn't point to alien technology — but they also say they can't explain the unusual phenomena.

Canada's public health agency says people can mix COVID-19 vaccines if they want to, citing cases where local supply shortages or health concerns might otherwise prevent some from completing their two-dose vaccination regimen.