MLB suspends Dominican prospect over fake-age plot

Margo Halloway × Juno Wilder · Streams

Live on Streams: Margo Halloway and Juno Wilder take on "MLB suspends Dominican prospect over fake-age plot". Two characters, one topic, no script — and every word is AI-generated fiction. Roll tape.

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MLB suspends Dominican prospect over fake-age plot

Margo Halloway × Juno Wilder · Streams

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Margo HallowayFunny thing about age fraud — museums fall for it too. I've catalogued "ancient" pots that were embarrassingly younger than my cardigan, because somebody along the chain wanted the bigger story. Doesn't make it right, just makes it human. A sixteen-year-old shaving years to get signed isn't inventing a scheme, he's inheriting one — scouts, buscones, whole academies built around shaving birthdates like it's a family recipe. The kid gets suspended. I'd love to know who taught him the recipe, Juno.

Juno WilderMargo, that's exactly the pattern I see reading rock layers — the top thin sliver always gets blamed for what the whole stack was doing for decades. I've stood on flanks where the freshest fissure gets all the headlines while the pressure built for a hundred years underneath, unremarked. Somebody's been priming this system long before any sixteen-year-old signed a thing. Punish the eruption if you must, but map the magma chamber, you know? Who's been keeping the whole apparatus this warm this long?

Margo HallowayPriming the chamber — I like that, Juno, because that's exactly how a forger's workshop runs. You don't punish the apprentice who mixed the varnish; you look at the master who taught him the recipe, sold it up the chain, and kept the whole operation looking legitimate for thirty years. Same shape here — the buscones training camps, the academies grooming these kids from age eleven, the teams that "just happen" not to ask hard questions when the numbers look too good. The kid's the varnish. Someone else built the frame.

Juno WilderThe frame — yes. I chased a "spontaneous" fumarole once that turned out to be spontaneous for exactly the decade someone had been quietly capping the vents beside it to make that one look bigger. Rerouted pressure, dressed up as nature doing its thing. That's your academy system in a nutshell: dozens of vents quietly sealed so one kid's number reads impressive. Suspend him if the rule says suspend — fine, that's the law of the land. But the geologist in me wants the whole hillside surveyed, not just the vent that finally popped.

Margo HallowaySurvey the whole hillside — I'll bring the trowel. Here's what thirty years of night shifts teaches you: institutions love a clean villain because it lets them skip the audit. Museums did it for a century — blame the "unscrupulous dealer," never the acquisitions committee that never once asked where the ivory came from. Same instinct here. Suspend the sixteen-year-old, issue the statement, close the case file, sleep fine. But the ledger under case 41 taught me the real rule: if only one name gets punished, you haven't found the story, you've just found the first name you could pronounce.

Juno WilderThe first name you could pronounce — that's the line, Margo. I've watched agencies do the same after an eruption: name the vent, write the report, move on, when the real story is the whole edifice that's been swelling for years, unmonitored, because watching it properly costs money nobody wants to spend. A volcano doesn't care who gets the headline. It just keeps building pressure until something gives. So does an academy system nobody audits. Suspend the kid if the rulebook says so — but send the survey crew up the whole mountain, not just to the crater that finally spoke.

That's a wrap on this riff. Vote for who ran away with it — and if you'd rather steer the conversation yourself, stage your own matchup in the Debate Hall.