Stick to baseball, 10/31/20.

My ranking of the top 40 free agents this offseason went up on Thursday morning for subscribers to the Athletic. I also answered some questions for Kaitlyn McGrath, our Blue Jays beat writer, on the state of the Blue Jays’ farm system.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Taylor Trammell, Mariners outfielder and author of a column on the Players Tribune called “Baseball Is Not Black Enough.” He was an outstanding guest, and I think this is one of the best interviews I’ve had, which is all to Taylor’s credit. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and now Amazon podcasts. I appeared on TSN 1040 in Vancouver on Wednesday to talk about the World Series and the role of analytics in the sport, in which I think I expressed my views on the subject pretty well.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

Here’s my weekly reminder that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life and you should buy lots of copies for everyone you know, like your Secret Santa person, or that annoying guy at work who thinks he knows everything there is to know about sportsball.

And now the links…

Please, if you are a U.S. citizen and you haven’t already done so, vote. Vote this anti-science, racist, authoritarian Administration out, so we can get back to arguing over whether Yadier Molina is a Hall of Famer instead.

Comments

  1. Voted!

    And he’s obviously not.

  2. Voted as well. Even got my wife to vote for the first time.

    I vividly remember Travis Roy’s injury. Even with the baseball playoffs going on, college and NFL halfway through their seasons, NHL and NBA just starting theirs, it still was one of the lead stories on SportsCenter that night. 11 seconds into his first shift in college, he crashed head first into the boards when his opponent avoided a check. It was a major story for days after that.

  3. Amen, Keith.

  4. Brian in ahwatukee

    I think the Hunter emails simply show washington sleaze as he traded on his name. And by and Large Joe knew of this. This isn’t good but hardly damning and in many ways standard Washington practice. Barf. I mean this is basically why democrats didn’t impeach him on emoluments. They also practice sleaze.

    More interesting is the concerted effort by many to simply not cover it because may reflect poorly on Bidens chances. That’s journalism malpractice and a huge issue. Greenwalds departure from The Intercept is bananas. The Intercept looks awful doing exactly the muting of coverage that we should despise.

    • Both the WSJ and Fox News looked at all the evidence that Giuliani and Bobulinski provided and couldn’t corroborate it. Some authors of the New York Post piece refused to put their name to it because they were uncomfortable with it. Now Rudy and Bobulinski are unwilling to share their evidence with anyone else unless you will only report what they want. Most of the newsrooms haven’t been able to look at the evidence, so how can they report on it if they can’t see all of it? It was already known that Hunter used his family’s name to get onto the board of directors at Burisma. Hunter probably continued to use his family’s name to get deals in China, even after Joe left the White House. Bobulinski has tried to connect Joe to it, but no one has proved it. All the “smoking guns” are extremely vague or from people who aren’t exactly neutral.

      The one questionable aspect of this is Twitter not allowing people to share the New York Post article. Should social media companies be in the business of figuring out what is worth sharing/true? I think they should change their algorithms so people don’t go down the conspiracy theory wormhole, but that’s different than this. I don’t know if I have enough information to form a strong opinion on this.

    • Brian: Earlier this year, you claimed that Biden was “sundowning.” Now that we have pretty clear evidence that that’s not true – not that there was ever real evidence that it was – you’re moving on to this?

      No reputable outlet is covering the Hunter Biden story because the sourcing is inadequate. Greenwald was wrong; the Intercept insisted he find a second source, as any good journalism outlet would (including the Athletic and ESPN, in my own experience), and he couldn’t. He chose to leave rather than accept that his story did not have sufficient sourcing. That’s the bananas part.

  5. Are you capitulating to the adding of an unnecessary ‘s’ in “Daylight Saving TIme”? For shame! That’s like allowing “Groundhog’s Day.”

    Full disclosure, the link didn’t work, so I couldn’t see if Scientific American backed your play.