baseball — Page 2

→ March 13, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/13/22.

I released my first ranking of draft prospects for 2022 over on The Athletic, and held a live Q&A to take questions about it. I also wrote up the two trades from Saturday night, involving Chris Bassitt and Isiah Kiner-Falefa/Mitch Garver.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Adventures of Robin Hood, a narrative game from the designer of the Legends of Andor, but with simpler mechanics and a clever encounter system with a two-layered board.

I spoke with the Locked On Dodgers podcast in a two-part interview you can watch here and here. I also sent a new issue of my free email newsletter, talking about Monty Python and the development of my sense of humor.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times asks what it means that even Americans are consuming less beef.
Vanity Fair has a fascinating article on Grimes, talking about her persona, her upcoming concept album, and that guy.
Kathryn Schulz, who appeared on my podcast a few weeks ago, wrote about the complicated history of Bambi, the book, as it enters the public domain.
ProPublica reports on barbaric conditions in Louisiana’s largest juvenile detention facility in Louisiana, part of the race in the Deep South to see which state can get to the 19^th century fastest.
Conservative billionaires pushing fake news are becoming a major US export, as now a single South Korean oligarch is pushing conspiracy theories to keep the two Koreas at war.
Vulture has a wonderful interview with Murderville showrunner Krister Johnson on the “treasure chest” of in-jokes, Easter eggs, and other small gags on Homestar Runner.
Melissa Rodriguez, the former executive chef at Del Posto, is now opening three new restaurants in that space, including a high-end pizzeria. Resy interviewed her about the venture, the pandemic, and the end of Del Posto (which was good, but wildly overpriced).
Several research papers still in the pre-print stage have put more nails in the coffin of the lab-leak hypothesis have appeared in the last two weeks. The New Republic looks at how we can learn from this to try to prevent the next zoonotic pandemic.
The best path forward now is for institutions to work to improve mitigation efforts, including encouraging further vaccinations.
Cobb County is taking a big loss on its public funding of Truist Park. This Axios piece has a quick summary of the same.
Stop acting like pediatric deaths from COVID-19 don’t matter because of their numbers. Those children had names.
Mask requirements in schools reduced COVID-19 cases. We’re going to see increases in cases again now that schools everywhere are lifting mask mandates.
I don’t understand how asking people to harass a journal editor to try to short-circuit the peer review process is remotely ethical, but Alina Chan, who wrote a book that pushes the lab-leak hypothesis, is long gone around the bend at this point.
The Philadelphia Inquirer had a long article on where to eat and what to do in Wilmington, hitting our big 3 fine-dining restaurants (Le Cavalier, La Fia, and Bardea), and several other favorite spots of ours (Swigg, Wilma’s, De.co Food Hall, The Queen), although they whiffed badly with some of their inclusions (Mrs. Robino’s, Wilmington Country Store).
ABC News ran a long segment (about 12 minutes) on the lack of any evidence to support the use of ivermectin against COVID-19.
Now bot accounts are using false fact-checks to spread fake news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee appointed an arms dealer who sold ammunition to the Aurora mass shooter to the state’s board of education, not long after appointing a 9/11 hoaxer to the state’s “textbook commission.” What a shitshow.
Brandon Tensley writes at CNN about how and why the GOP is targeting LGBTQ+ rights across the south and far west. I think the answer is simple: They’re pandering to their evangelical base. This is why the raving lunatics running Idaho want life in prison for anyone providing gender-affirming care to trans kids.
And in Texas, a family that once invited Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife to dinner found themselves the target of one of the state’s witch-hunt investigations into families with trans kids. Shame on anyone who votes Republican in Texas this year. This policy is going to lead to more suicides and grievous harm to vulnerable people, all to satisfy a small population of bigots.
Disney has been censoring same-sex affection in Pixar’s films, according to several employees, who wrote a letter also demanding that the company stop donating to Florida legislators who voted for the state’s “don’t say gay” bill.
A Georgia man took an $85,000 SBA loan for his business, and then spent two-thirds of it on a rare Pokémon card.
An American man wanted on rape and sexual assault charges in Utah is accused of faking his own death and pretending to be someone else in a COVID ward in Scotland, where he’s since married a British woman. The man, suspected of being George Rossi, has been identified by his tattoos, and his adoptive father also says that it’s him.
A Trump-appointed judge dismissed a complaint against Rep. Madison Cawthorn, alleging that his support of the January 6^th insurrection made him ineligible to run for office, because people might take up arms otherwise.
Apparently Trump has been holding “contests” where small-donor dollars would win trips to meet him, but then they never award the prizes, according to a report from the Washington Post.
Board game news: Former Z-Man Games employees have founded a new publisher, Moon Crab Games, and announced their first game, Leviathan Wilds, a cooperative, tactical game of movement on various boards representing massive creatures the players try to climb.
Hamlet, a cute town-building game from the designer of the lovely game Petrichor, is fully funded already on Kickstarter.
So is Tiwanaku (formerly known as Pachamama), a Minesweeper-inspired board game from the publishers of Magic Maze.
And so is Envelopes of Cash, a game about corrupt recruiting in college football (so, you know, reality), designed by a reader of mine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, delaware, Economics, frauds, idaho, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, pizza, russia, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, the swamp

→ February 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/19/22.

My prospects ranking package is now all posted for subscribers to the Athletic. Here’s the complete rundown of everything that ran:

The top 100 prospects
The prospects who just missed the top 100
The ranking of all 30 farm systems
The org top 20s:

Baltimore	Houston	Chicago Cubs
Boston	LA Angels	Cincinnati
NY Yankees	Oakland	Milwaukee
Tampa Bay	Seattle	Pittsburgh
Toronto	Texas	St. Louis
Chicago White Sox	Atlanta	Arizona
Cleveland	Miami	Colorado
Detroit	NY Mets	LA Dodgers
Kansas City	Philadelphia	San Diego
Minnesota	Washington	San Francisco

I also did two Q&As over at the Athletic, one the day the farm rankings went up and one the day the top 100 went up.

Since my last stick to baseball post, I’ve reviewed several board games over at Paste as well, including Nidavellir, one of my favorite games from 2021; Equinox, a new version of Reiner Knizia’s game Colossal Arena; The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game based on the 1991 cult classic; and Wilson & Shep, a cute bluffing game for players as young as five.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and radio things related to the top 100, including the Seattle Sports Union; the Update with Adam Copeland (talking Giants prospects); Press Box Online (Orioles); Sox Machine (White Sox); and Karraker & Smallmon (Cardinals).

My own podcast returned in late January, with three episodes since my last roundup: Michael Schur, author of How to Be Perfect and creator of the show The Good Place; the post-punk band Geese, an episode where I answered a bunch of reader questions on the top 100 too; and union labor lawyer Eugene Freedman, who gave his thoughts on the MLB lockout. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There is no evidence that wearing masks in school harms children’s mental health or educational development. None. I’ll repeat: There is no fucking evidence, people. Every one of those anti-mask grifters you see on Twitter hawking their $80 a year substack is full of shit.
In 2003, a woman in Australia was convicted of smothering all four of her babies to death. Several researchers believe she is innocent, and that a mutant gene was the real cause of the tragedy.
MIT Technology Review has a very long piece on the scientist at the center of the lab-leak conspiracy theory.
The scourge of private equity is now causing rapid inflation in housing prices, with PE firms buying up apartment buildings, hiking rents, and skimping on or even forgoing basic services to tenants.
WIRED looks at how personal finance apps are making phone scams even easier.
The Harvard Gazette ran an excerpt from Kevin Birmingham’s 2014 book on Ulysses’ long and tortuous road to publication. I reviewed The Most Dangerous Book back in 2016.
MEL gives us the subterfuge behind the surprise pop hit “Tubthumping,” and how the anarcho-communist band Chumbawamba used its success for their own ends.
Are you getting cardboard shipping boxes from U-Line? Not only does the family that owns U-Line fund the far-right site The Federalist, they’ve given millions to other right-wing extremists, including some of January 6^th terrorists. If you use U-Line in your business, find another vendor. If you get a package in a U-Line box, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else for their boxes.
Space elevators are a staple of hard science fiction novels and stories, but if one breaks, it’s a massive and potentially fatal disaster. The plot of Green Mars includes the sabotage of a space elevator, and while I don’t care for the novel, Kim Stanley Robinson does a reasonable job of getting the science right on what happens when the broken cable hits the ground.
REI sent this union-busting email to all of its employees, then published a podcast full of dubious rationalizations for its anti-union efforts.
The Washington Post profiled the woman who led the first successful effort to unionize a Starbucks store.
COVID-19 becoming “endemic” doesn’t mean it’s becoming harmless.
In fact, there’s evidence that the claims that the omicron variant is less severe than prior ones are due to greater population immunity, not to any reduced ability of the virus to cause serious illness. Also, there’s a subvariant of concern, too, although once again, vaccination confers substantial benefits.
COVID denialists on the right seem to think the virus is actually a person – at least in the language they use to minimize it.
Right-wing pundits, including Jordan Peterson, were up in arms because a Boston hospital denied a heart transplant to a man who refused the COVID-19 vaccines – but such rules are routine to increase the likelihood of the patient’s survival.
Anti-vaccine loon Christiane Northrup has become a major donor to Maine Republican candidates, including former Governor Paul LePage.
Two Long Island nurses have been charged with selling fake vaccine cards and entering the false information into vaccination databases, taking home $1.5 million in the process. But what happens to the people who bought them?
An inevitable consequence of all of this anti-vaccine misinformation is that now measles vaccination rates are falling in the UK.
Meanwhile, Republicans in 14 states are pushing bills that would block medical boards from censuring doctors who spread misinformation; in Tennessee, the Know-Nothings in the state legislature even pressured the medical board into removing language from its website discouraging such doctors.
Speaking of foundations of misinformation, Fox News was happy to talk to an anti-vax state trooper … until he died of COVID-19.
A New Jersey police officer was driving drunk when he struck a pedestrian … and then put the body in his car and drove home with it. He didn’t call 911. He now faces a dozen felony charges.
The story about the Los Angeles train robbery a few weeks ago, which made news across the country and even in Europe, is really about how Union Pacific laid off 4/5 of its security force – and how the mainstream media increasingly just buys whatever corporations are selling.
This is horrifying: San Francisco police used DNA from a woman’s rape kit to identify her as a suspect in another crime. And we wonder why women don’t come forward to report their assaults. I’ve already reached out to two state Senators in Delaware, and to the Attorney General, to see what can be done to make sure this does not occur here.
Over 650 Philly cops who claim they’re too sick or injured to work are fine holding down other jobs.
A tax cheat and father of a child murderer has bankrolled a right-wing streaming network that has given Steve Bannon a platform again. It’s available through most major streaming platforms, too.
A tremendous piece of local journalism led to the resignation of the police chief of Brookside, Alabama, who had set up a racket that scammed drivers out of over $500,000 a year in fines and forfeitures – often when they were no closer to the town than the local interstate.
A Republican state senator in Texas has sworn in a declaration that the state’s Republicans violated federal voting rights laws in a recent redistricting.
Minneapolis police insisted on a no-knock warrant in a predawn raid – raid, a word that should be reserved for war, or perhaps when there’s a lost ark involved – on an apartment in the city. They ended up murdering an innocent civilian sleeping in that apartment.
Spokane district attorney Larry Haskell is under fire, again, for his wife’s long history of racist and white nationalist comments online. It’s more disturbing that voters keep electing him.
Families in West Virginia are suing a school that held a Christian revival on campus during school hours, with some teachers forcing students to attend. This isn’t the first such incident in this school district.
I liked Encanto, and assume it’s going to win the Oscar for best animated film, but I noticed the script glossed over the weird power dynamic between the Madrigals and the townsfolk. Jim Vorel wrote about that very topic for Paste.
Hannah Keyser has a great piece at Yahoo! Sports asking why people get so mad over Hall of Fame voting. The abuse was worse than ever this year.
Ohio’s extreme gerrymandering leads to more extreme laws from legislators who don’t have to worry about re-election, even though the laws are often opposed by a majority of Ohio voters.
The mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, a suburb of Jackson, decided to order the city’s libraries to remove all LGBTQ+ materials before he’d release their funding. The city’s leaders are denying this is what’s happening, but a local nonprofit group has raised all of the missing funds from donations.
This feels like old news now, but McMinn County, Tennessee, banned Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its school curricula because there are naked mice in it.
Who’s behind all the book-banning movements? Major conservative dark-money donors, of course.
And they’re also pushing educational gag orders across the country, with over 120 such bills introduced in the last 13 months.
Like the one in Florida, supported by the death-loving governor there, that wants to force LGBTQ+ kids back in the closet. (DeSantis can’t even bring himself to condemn a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando.)
Or the laws targeting the chimera of critical race theory in schools, which threatens teachers’ livelihoods and even their freedom.
LZ Granderson writes about the extreme illogic of Michelle Tafoya leaving the media to campaign against racism education, when she herself lives in a town that has become majority white thanks to racial covenants in housing contracts.
The British government recently moved to make something called “virginity repair” surgery illegal. I didn’t know this was a thing, but it is clearly founded in some seriously deranged religious beliefs.
Matt Walsh, espouser of misogynistic and homophobic views under the guise of Christianity, tried to trick a bunch of trans people into participating in a documentary attacking trans rights.
This is from before the Oscar nominations were announced, but the LA Times‘ Justin Chang implored the Academy to nominate Drive My Car for Best Picture – which they did.
Craig Calcaterra continues to expose New Albany, Ohio, school board member Philip Derrow as a science-denying history-ignorant turnip.
Is a building at Florida State University causing cancer in the people who work there? Cancer clusters are often matters of chance, but in this case, there’s evidence of actual carcinogens in the air ducts, and the school has closed the building to investigate.
Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt courted snitches among parents opposed to mask mandates, setting off a series of pointless, expensive battles that probably did way more to harm kids than wearing a mask ever could.
Instagram is doing nothing to suspend or block accounts promoting hate speech.
I don’t often agree with Jennifer Rubin’s editorials in the Washington Post, but I think her take here is correct: The only way Democrats can hope to fight Republican voter-suppression efforts is to change the venue to local elections and referenda, taking the message directly to voters – and even that may not be enough.
I can’t love this tweet enough.
Board game news: I saw a prototype of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game from Inside Up Games, at PAX Unplugged, and from what I saw it looks right up my alley. It’s on Kickstarter now.
So is Trekking Through History, the third Trekking game (following Trekking the National Parks and Trekking the World) from Underdog Games.
And so is Rolling Heights, the new roll-and-write game from the designer of Mystic Vale.
Tiwanaku, the game previously known as Pachamama, will relaunch on Kickstarter on March 9^th.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, dark money, florida, free speech, links, mississippi, missouri, movies, Music, philadelphia, police, san francisco, science, stick to baseball, texas, unions, vaccines, voter suppression, washington state, west virginia

→ December 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/6/21.

We had a busy weekend of decorating the house, including acquiring the largest tree I’ve ever owned (since we have one room with exceptionally high ceilings, it seemed irresponsible to fail to take advantage of it), which means this post is late. I had a whole slew of posts for subscribers to The Athletic last week, however, including

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, the sequel to the 2019 Kennerspiel winner, and I think a small but significant improvement over the original. At Ars Technica, I contributed twenty new entries to their Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, with a story about being too judgmental and learning to get past it. And finally, with Christmas just three weeks away, here’s another reminder that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Columbia Journalism Review report on the hazards of social media for journalists is spot-on, and I wish the people running major social-media outlets would read and internalize its lessons. I can also say that ESPN’s ill-conceived, ambiguous, and inconsistently enforced social media policy ranks as the #1 reason I left the company. The straw that broke the camel’s back isn’t even public, but it related to this.
Utah, a state run by conservatives at all levels, makes it so hard to get public aid that some people join the Mormon Church to qualify, even if they don’t believe in the tenets of that sect.
This August piece in Science on how variants emerge and change the way the pandemic goes seems just as important now.
The longrunning debate over whether you can plagiarize a recipe has reared its head again, after a published recently pulled a book from circulation after discovering that the author had copied recipes and stories from another book. (The short answer here is that you can’t plagiarize – or copyright – a recipe, but you can plagiarize or copyright the text around it.)
The BBC Three spoke to multiple victims of sexual assalt about rape culture in British schools and authorities failing to do enough about it.
We are witnessing the end of “Roe v. Wade,” writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Elections have consequences.
The New York Times ran two powerful editorials about abortion this week: one from a woman who was raped by her father and had an abortion, and another from a woman who didn’t have an abortion but “erased” the future she’d planned for herself, speaking very plainly about a life-altering decision from when she was 19.
Once again, for the people in the pack: Pregnancy is not a riskless, health-neutral event.
Anti-mask lunatics outed the trans child of the local school board chair, so now the family is moving out of the district.
Men who get COVID-19 have a sixfold risk of experiencing erectile dysfunction after the infection.
Many self-styled “experts” who minimize or deny the effects of COVID-19, or who soft-deny the vaccines’ efficacy, or push fake treatments, are now trying to brand themselves as “medical conservatives.”
With the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor coming up tomorrow, it’s good to remember that army leaders rejected evidence that the naval base was vulnerable to just such an attack, demonstrated during a simulation (that sure sounds like a board game) by one of its own officers. It’s a cool blend of cognitive dissonance and old-fashioned racism.
A county judge told the Alabama coal miners union currently on strike against Warrior Met Coal they can’t protest outside the company’s offices. I am not a lawyer, but this seems questionable on First Amendment grounds, no?
Scientific American explains how the brain switches between languages.
Is there simply too much culture – film, TV, music, video games, podcasts, and more – for us to consume?
Former Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) now faces charges of misusing her office for political and personal gain from the state ethics commission.
A defense industry worker says we need to cut the defense budget.
Cleveland is asking taxpayers to pony up for improvements to the Guardians’ statement. Don’t fall for their nonsense about “economic impact.”
There’s a fight brewing in St. Louis over who gets how much of the $500 million payday from their lawsuit against the Rams and the NFL.
The same government ding-dongs in Missouri who accused the Post-Dispatch of hacking for discovering a huge security flaw in a state website were originally going to thank the paper for it.
The media treats President Biden worse than it treated Trump, and that’s a huge problem.
Longtime Montréal chef and co-founder of Joe Beef David McMillan has retired from cooking at age 50.
I enjoyed this comic video explanation of how the west allowed omicron to happen (even if he does misspell it in his caption).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, coronavirus, Economics, longreads, missouri, rape culture, social media, Sports, stick to baseball, utah, world war ii

→ October 30, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/30/21.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week as I finished writing up the top 50 free agents ranking, which will run shortly after the World Series ends.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Happy City, a light city-building card game that’s ideal for younger players, ages 8 and up, who aren’t quite ready for Splendor. If you’ve played Machi Koro, this has a similar vibe, but without the dice or the unbalanced cards.

My guest on my podcast this week was Christina Kahrl, who helped me preview the World Series and some of this winter’s free agent market. You can listen and subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.

The latest issue of my email newsletter was about a hat – one that’s very important to me, though. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of how Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell and run for years by his ethically challenged son, discourages and dismisses students’ reports of rape and sexual assaults.
Why is the idea of gender provoking such a backlash around the world? It’s an unholy alliance of religion, misogyny, and homophobia/transphobia, and feminists should not ally themselves with those trying to roll back progress on human rights.
Steph Apstein spoke to multiple Native American leaders in asking why MLB still allows the “synchronized, team-sanctioned racism” of the tomahawk chop? Meanwhile, Rob Manfred totally whiffed when asked about the chop, lying about Native Americans’ views on it and landing on the wrong side of the issue.
The Columbia Journalism Review published the second part of its series on paid advocacy groups writing content for local news outlets.
The Posies broke up this week as multiple women accused lead singer Ken Stringfellow of sexual misconduct.
That SEPTA (Philadelphia transit) rape incident where people watched and filmed the assault without calling the police? Yeah, the cops made that part up. The lesson here is to not take authorities at their word.
Bobcat Goldthwait has some thoughts on the hoax that is “cancel culture.”
A white man in Texas killed a Moroccan man who was sitting in a car in his own driveway. It took 11 days for authorities to arrest him.
My colleague Levi Weaver called out the Rangers for their refusal to acknowledge LGBTQ+ fans. It’s outdated, it’s exclusionary, and it’s pandering to the wrong element.
Meanwhile, the NAACP urged pro athletes to avoid signing with teams in Texas over the state’s rollbacks of reproductive, voting, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Oh, and a Texas state rep who’s running for attorney general is trying to start a book-banning investigation of public schools in the state, demanding that schools disclose if they have any of eight hundred and fifty books – not in their curricula, but just in the buildings.
Ohio isn’t that much better, as the Republican Governor forced out the Board of Education President who authored an anti-racism resolution that has since been repealed, because in Ohio, racism is good!
Chevron’s ten-year vendetta against an environmental activist who exposed the company’s extensive pollution in Ecuador has led to the activist’s jailing on contempt charges. Steven Donziger has been under house arrest for over two years, all part of the company’s revenge against him for his exposé and the $9.5 billion judgment against them in Ecuador.
Vaccinated people are 63% less likely to spread the delta variant of COVID-19 than unvaccinated people are.
The bizarre backlash against critical race theory in elementary schools – where it’s never taught – was in reality an astroturfing campaign by conservative dark-money titan Charles Koch.
Jim Squires, a Democrat running for the U.S. House in Texas’ 22^nd district, held up a “The ‘Chop’ is Racist” sign at Game 2 of the World Series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, coronavirus, links, metoo, ohio, philadelphia, religion, science, stick to baseball, texas

→ October 2, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/2/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my hypothetical ballots for the six major postseason awards. Fans are taking it extremely well, as you might imagine.

On my podcast, I spoke with Conor Murphy of the band Foxing, talking about their new album Draw Down the Moon and our mutual interest in games – he’s particularly into D&D and Magic: the Gathering, but we talk a lot about tabletop games we both enjoy. They’re hitting the road next week with Manchester Orchestra and I’m bummed I’ll be in Arizona for Fall League when they come through my area. You can hear their newest album on Spotify, and you can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes. I was also on the Athletic Baseball Show again on Friday, where you can hear me say Dylan Carlson might be a breakout candidate for 2022, which I recorded a few hours before he hit 2 homers against the Brewers.

Over at Paste, I recapped my experience at Gen Con, running through every game I saw or played at the convention, and ranked the ten best games I tried.

I’ve been better about sending out my email newsletter this past month, with this week’s edition talking about how challenging I’ve found my role as an adjunct at a local university. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian profiles Prof. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and bestselling author who has emerged as a major celebrity in the culture wars while allying himself with some disreputable figures, including the white supremacist blogger Steve Sailer. Pinkerite, a blog dedicated to exposing Pinker’s links to bogus “race science” proponents, asks if this column is “the end of the gentlemen’s agreement” to avoid asking Pinker about his history of defending and working with white supremacists.
Zach Helfand writes in The New Yorker about the imminent arrival of the automated strike zone and the loss of the human element. I disagree with the basic premise here – as you might have guessed – but there’s one point worth bearing in mind: The actual strike zone is probably a lot smaller than the de facto one umpires call, and that might mean more walks and longer games.
From October of 2020, WIRED looks at the cultural problems that have bedeviled Amazon’s attempts to buy its way into the gaming market.
My colleague Meg Linehan wrote a powerful investigative report on NWSL coach Paul Riley’s history of abusive behavior towards his players, including rape, after which his employers, the North Carolina Courage, terminated him within hours.
A 2019 book called The Psychology of Pandemics presaged much of our country’s reaction to this current one.
Pitcher Kieran Lovegrove came out as bisexual, making him just the second player ever in affiliated baseball to do so and the closest player to the majors as well.
A 10-year-old girl in Virginia died of COVID-19 after she was told to walk sick kids in her class to the nurse.
As more evidence emerges against the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, why does the mainstream media continue to push it?
Youtube appears to be finally moving to ban all anti-vaccine content.
The New York Times did what it too often does, highlighting the views of the deranged few, here talking to New York state health care workers who said they’d choose job loss over vaccination, but I think there’s a subtle message here: These people will use any loophole they can find to avoid the consequences of their choices, like claiming a religious exemption they don’t merit.
Yale historian Dr. Beverly Gage resigned as head of the school’s Program in Grand Strategy, citing the school’s unwillingness to fend off influence from conservative donors, including San Francisco Giants owner Charles Johnson, whom you might remember from his donations to Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn.
UNC officials met with an Israeli diplomat who pressured them to remove a teacher who criticized Israeli policy while teaching a class on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) used her office to pressure a subordinate to issue Noem’s daughter a real estate appraiser’s license, according to the Argus-Leader.
Toxic microbial blooms on freshwater lakes and rivers may be a harbinger of a coming mass extinction event.
The New York Times’ Pete Wells offered an unflattering review of Eleven Madison Park’s new $335 vegan tasting menu.
Board game news: Days of Wonder is selling pink train sets for Ticket to Ride, with $2 from each $4.95 going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The massive 4X game Voidfall, from European publisher Mindclash, is nearing $1MM raised already on Kickstarter.
Queen Games is publishing four Stefan Feld “city collection” games, three of which are reimplementations of older games of his (Bruges, Macao, and Rialto) and one of which is new, with a deluxe edition bundle that costs $695. (Not a typo.) I’m not linking to that nonsense, but I am linking to this video critique of Feld’s cultural appropriation in the game Marrakesh, including an embarrassing photo of him in a fez holding some sort of chain to an invisible camel. That this is still happening in 2021 – seven years after Bruno Cathala put actual slave cards in Five Tribes, which is the first major outcry to result in a change to a game that I can remember – boggles my mind. Whether you agree that this is cultural appropriation, or merely harmless appreciation, it was completely unnecessary, and says to me that no one around Feld or Queen thought to say, “hey, maybe this is a bad idea.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, environment, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, vegan

→ August 28, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/28/21.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’m still dealing with an illness in the family, but I hope to have my next piece up on Thursday of this upcoming week.

I reviewed the board game adaptation of Red Rising for Paste this week, and also reviewed the book from which the game is derived.

I created a T-shirt celebrating the #umpshow to raise money to help Afghan refugees who are settling in the Wilmington area. Proceeds will go to Jewish Family Services of Delaware – they’re aware a donation is coming – and possibly a second group depending on how best we can help. We’re over $650 raised through T-shirt sales, not counting the handful of you who’ve donated directly to JFSD, so thanks to all of you who’ve bought the shirt or donated.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry about their new album, Screen Violence, which came out yesterday; as well as the toxic environment of social media, working with Robert Smith, and more. You can (and should!) subscribe on iTunes and Spotify. I also appeared as usual on the Friday edition of the Athletic Baseball Daily show.

I’ll be back with an email newsletter and I hope a chat this upcoming week. And don’t forget that my second book The Inside Game is now out in paperback.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: R.J. Anderson reports on the pushback and near-strike that took place after MLB pushed changes on the Atlantic League, particularly the choice to move the pitcher’s mound back a foot.

The New Yorker profiled my colleague Katie Strang, who has become the industry’s leading writer on athletes and coaches accused of domestic violence or sexual assault.

Dr. J. Stacey Klutts, a clinical associate professor of pathology and clinical microbiology at the University of Iowa, wrote a great primer on what we know now about the Delta variant. The Des Moines Register should have asked him to write an editorial, not the unqualified grad student and COVID-19 minimizer they invited instead.

STAT reports on the complete lack of evidence that Ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. It’s all junk studies and anecdotal reports.

Dr. Doreen Dodgen-Magee explains why it’s so hard to get people to back down from their misinformed beliefs: commitment bias.

This April piece from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society exposes RFK Jr. for the dangerous anti-vaccine charlatan he truly is.

Many professors are leaving their jobs rather than teach in-person, especially at schools that won’t require masks or vaccines. Some schools are, of course, prevented from issuing such mandates because of the death cult running their states.

More U.S. police officers died of COVID-19 in 2020 than from all other causes combined. Yet I keep seeing reports of officers and even union chapters fighting vaccine mandates.

A new lawsuit accusing Horatio Sanz of grooming and abusing a teenage girl that names him, Saturday Night Live, and NBC may blow the lid off a bigger story about the culture on that show and impugn other cast members from that time, notably Jimmy Fallon.

Louise Godbold, who identifies herself as a “Harvey Weinstein survivor,” wishes media outlets would stop asking her the same questions about what should happen to the serial rapist and sexual abuser.

The BBC has the story of a former Angolan child soldier who survived a near-fatal shooting to his head and is now a popular restaurant manager in London.

Facebook refused two Representatives’ request for more information on the company’s (minimal) efforts to fight COVID-19 misinformation on its platform. I found multiple groups dedicated to the deworming drug Ivermectin, including at least two that purport to help people get prescriptions for it, active on Facebook just this week. Reporting them has had no apparent effect.

The school board in Waukesha, Wisconsin, hometown of Jarred Kelenic, turned down state funding for free lunches because people might get “spoiled” by it.

Board game news: The Price of Coal, a board game about coal mining and labor rights, is just about to hit its funding goal over at Kickstarter.

Eagle-Gryphon Games has brought us a new(ish) title from the late designer Sid Sackson, combining elements of his games The Great Race and Can’t Stop into Route 66 The Mother Road, now on Kickstarter and already well past its funding goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, good journalism, longreads, metoo, vaccines, wisconsin

→ July 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/17/21.

All of my draft coverage is now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including my team-by-team draft recaps, posted by division:
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I also recapped the Futures Game with notes on prospects who stood out or who I saw for the first time. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new preprint on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 states that “there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2” and “there is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.” This failed hypothesis isn’t just the province of the right-wing; the anti-GMO movement has also latched on to it.
A conservative activist invented the nontroversy over critical race theory. If someone tells you CRT is bad, just ask them to name an author who’s written about it, or a book on the subject. Like this Alabama columnist did to a state lawmaker.
This ran a few weeks ago, during my hiatus from these posts, but former sportswriter Kat O’Brien detailed how she was raped by a major league ballplayer while she was on the Rangers beat.
Influencers who peddle anti-vaccine misinformation are raking in cash from their efforts. It’s almost entirely a grift, with a societal cost measured in bodies.
The Delta variant’s threat explained in three simple points by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong.
The “mystery Chinese seeds” that made the rounds of the news last summer? Probably just a brushing scam.
Why don’t we have a vaccine against Lyme disease? It’s complicated. Anti-vaxxers, a dubious claim about side effects, and the regional nature of the disease all contributed.
A nurse in Louisiana who posted anti-vaccine views and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has, in fact, died of COVID-19.
Poynter spoke to Walter Hussman, the conservative megadonor to UNC who led the school to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure and ultimately cost them her services. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, but also disputes some of the story that’s been publicly reported.
MEL magazine is coming back.
A power plant in upstate New York is primarily powering a bitcoin mining operation, warming Seneca Lake and polluting the air (as well as contributing to climate change). I’m not sure what the solution is – taxing bitcoin is the most rational economic move, but tricky because of its nature – but cryptocurrencies are an environmental threat that demands some sort of government action.
Why did three people in different states contract the often-fatal tropical bacterial disease melioidosis?
The state of Alabama took a man’s gun after he shot his wife. Nine months later, they gave it back to him, despite a protection order, and he used it to kill her. I’m sure the fact that he was a cop had nothing to do with this.
Men read far fewer books by women than women do. This has real-world implications for the way readers’ minds work.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bitcoin, links, longreads, north carolina, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 1, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/1/21.

I had two posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on how the Rockies’ next GM might start to turn the franchise around, and a draft scouting notebook looking at several day-one candidates, led by Fordham lefty Matt Mikulski.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, talking about this year’s MLB draft class. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the many victims of disgraced writer/teacher Blake Bailey came forward to tell how Bailey manipulated and raped her.
Alameda police killed Mario Gonzalez, who was unarmed, by pinning him to the ground for five minutes during an arrest on April 19^th. This is a systemic issue.
CloseCallSports has the best explanation of the obstruction call in Milwaukee that I tried to explain on Twitter, only to have my replies explode with people who didn’t like the call. An umpire can make a call that is technically correct – and Marty Foster’s was, indeed, justified by the rules – but so rarely made that we assume it’s wrong.
Tony LaRussa’s animal welfare nonprofit is plagued by claims of racism and a toxic workplace environment. Between this and his multiple DUIs, LaRussa’s hiring by the White Sox this offseason looks even more suspect. Over at Sox Machine, Jim Margalus talks about some of what LaRussa is doing wrong on the field, too.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced that residents aged 16-35 who get the COVID-19 vaccine will get a $100 savings bond, an ingenious use of the stimulus funding the state has received.
After years of misguided opposition, Florida officials will finally release genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the kind responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and more, to stop the insects’ offspring from surviving into adulthood.
Anti-vaxxers are adopting yellow stars and other symbols of the Holocaust, in case you were wondering how low they would sink in their war against science and rationality.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Museum is pushing revisionist history that absolves Poles of their role in the Holocaust (Haaretz, $ required).
PBS has a new series coming up on May 11^th called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, about the extraordinary success of vaccines and other major medical advances that helped double our life expectancy in a century.
Facebook claimed they removed the “Disinformation Dozen,” twelve people responsible for the vast majority of anti-vaccine lies on the internet, but ten of them are still active on the site.
Joe Rogan told his millions of young listeners not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. That is dangerously irresponsible, and he shouldn’t be issuing medical advice.
Julie DiCaro reminds us not to listen to people with obvious conflicts of interest – agents, lawyers, fans – when they try to downplay charges of sexual assault against popular athletes.
Fox News is struggling to “pick a side” when their culture-war takes conflict with the facts, as with two recent manufactured outrage stories that turned out to be false – that Biden would ban or limit meat consumption, and that migrant children were being given Kamala Harris’ book.
The BBC asks why the west neglects a potential superfood source that’s efficient, sustainable, and climate-friendly: insects.
Epicurious revealed that they won’t publish any new beef recipes, part of an effort to encourage more sustainable eating. They stopped publishing those a year ago and they say nobody has noticed.
Conservative writer Gary Abernathy argues that all conservatives should support reparations to Black Americans.
From the National Review, the “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer to Tucker Carlson’s misinformation.
University researchers appear to have moved and possibly lost the remains of two children killed in Philadelphia’s bombing of its own citizens in 1985, part of a government assault on the MOVE cult.
Deforestation in the amazon has soared under the reactionary Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, devastating native homelands and reducing one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks.
A teacher in Washington State’s Issaquah School District is on administrative leave after parents objected to a poem she used in her anti-racism curriculum
Ashley Feinberg may have found JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts. Dimon has been accused of misleading investors in the “London Whale” investment disaster and of overseeing a culture of discrimination at his banks.
Board game news: Capstone Games is reissuing the Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement classic Glass Road, and pre-orders are open now at $10 off.
Renegade has a Kickstarter going for the ‘epic mad scientist’ game My Father’s Work, which they say will only be sold through their website once it’s released.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, police, racism, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ February 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/27/21.

Nothing new for subscribers to the Athletic this week now that my entire offseason prospects package has run. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Canvas, a new card-drafting and card-crafting game with some of the best artwork I’ve ever seen on a board game. It’s so visually appealing that you’ll want to play it more.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Blue Jays VP of International Scouting Andrew Tinnish about their loaded farm system and what it’s like to scout players in Latin America, including ones as young as 13. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: BuzzFeed has the inside story of how Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs enable and encourage right-wing demagogues who push misinformation and hate on their site. Facebook is really trash.
Texas regulators served electricity providers rather than Texas, leaving the state’s grid vulnerable to the type of disaster that left most of the state in darkness and freezing temperatures last week.
An LA Times investigation reveals corruption and self-dealing inside the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that runs and votes for the Golden Globes (coming up tomorrow night). Of note is that more than half of the electorate was flown to visit the set of Emily in Paris at the studio’s expense, and the frivolous show ended up with two nominations. Speaking of which, my friend Tim Grierson, whose new book This is How You Make a Movie comes out on March 9^th, listed the worst Golden Globe nomination in each of the last twenty years.
Sports Illustrated‘s Steph Apstein examines whether the baseball was juiced in 2020.
Also from BuzzFeed, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has a long history of sexually and verbally harassing women. Here’s my prediction: It won’t matter. His party will close ranks around him.
This 2009 piece from author Simon Winchester, “Take Nothing, Leave Nothing,” the story of how and why he has been banned for life from returning to the island of Tristan da Cunha, is weird and lovely and speaks to a certain type of wanderlust that I feel like I truly understand.
I discussed optimism bias in The Inside Game, and ProPublica has a piece on why it impeded pandemic response plans.
If you live in Delaware, please consider signing this petition asking our state government to enact paid medical and family leave.
The Washington Post profiles the doctors and nurses who spend their limited non-work time fighting coronavirus and anti-vaccine disinformation online.
The Republican Party has started a fresh round of voter suppression efforts across the country.
The opposition leader in Georgia was arrested in a “violent raid” on his party’s headquarters. I’m referring to the small nation in the Caucasus, but would you be surprised if Gov. Brian Kemp authorized this?
Judas and the Black Messiah is getting some well-deserved Oscar buzz. The film adheres to the true story of how the FBI and the Chicago Police assassinated Fred Hampton, including how Hampton rallied a group of white southerners who carried the Confederate flag to work with the Black Panthers.
A Pennsylvania bird-watcher snapped a now-viral photo of a cardinal that is intersex, meaning that it has physical characteristics of both male and female birds. The condition, called bilateral gynandromorphism, means that the cardinal is male on one side of its body, from red feathers to one testis, and female on the other. I wonder which bathroom Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it should use.
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, ranked the five best episodes of the Muppet Show. I’d agree with three (Moreno, Martin, and Burnett), and don’t remember the other two that well, but would include John Cleese and Zero Mostel.
I linked to this in chat this week but it’s worth reposting: The reopening of a detention center for migrant children is not a return to Trump’s xenophobic, inhuman immigration policies. We still shouldn’t be bombing in the Middle East, though.
The IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica picked up a neutrino from a star that was destroyed 700 million years ago.
Illinois became the first state to eliminate cash bail.
CPAC, with a slate full of voter-fraud charlatans and seditionists, cancelled a scheduled appearance by the anti-Semitic QAnon adherent Young Pharaoh. The convention’s actual theme this year is “America Uncancelled.”
Smith College found itself embroiled in a conservative-fueled nontroversy last week, but they issued a scathing, evidence-based response that their critics, like Bari Weiss, have ignored.
George Will wrote of the tough choices facing Pres. Biden as he tries to hold a hard line with China, including continuing the policy that began under Trump of labeling the Chinese genocide of Uighur Muslims as such.
Board game news: Cryptozoic has a Kickstarter up for a board game based on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
Another Kickstarter is up for a second edition of Orconomics, itself a reimplementation of an earlier, self-published game called Economicus.
I don’t know much about the game itself but Brew, coming in June from Pandasaurus, looks amazing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, science, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ February 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/20/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, all of my prospect ranking content is now on the site, from the top 100 to the org rankings to every team’s top 20 & org report:

Arizona	Houston	Oakland
Atlanta	Kansas City	Pittsburgh
Baltimore	LA Angels	St. Louis
Boston	LA Dodgers	San Diego
Chicago Cubs	Miami	San Francisco
Chicago White Sox	Milwaukee	Seattle
Cincinnati	Minnesota	Tampa Bay
Cleveland	NY Mets	Texas
Colorado	NY Yankees	Toronto
Detroit	Philadelphia	Washington

Podcasts: I was remiss in omitting these from my newsletter this week, but I appeared on several podcasts to talk prospects and rankings, including the Sox Machine podcast, the East Village Times podcast, and the Eutaw Street Report (Apple/Spotify). I’ve also recorded a spot on The Update with Adam Copeland, our Bay Area sports podcast at the Athletic, that should be available next week.

On my own podcast this week, I did a mailbag episode and ripped through as many of your questions as I could in about 35 minutes. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I finally sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, talking a little bit about the anxiety and joy of releasing all of this content into the world. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: At the Ringer, David Hill writes about a “beach bum” day trader who made millions with a long position on GameStop he’d started buying long before this year’s run-up.
The expanding ocean habitats of mackerel have led to a new debate over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
A new Malayalam-language film called The Great Indian Kitchen explores gender inequality in the Indian home.
The Huffington Post’s obituary of Rush Limbaugh just tells it like it is.
Critical thinking skills, already in short supply, may not be the most effective counter to disinformation. The SIFT method – Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to original context – may be a better approach.
Denmark has invested in tracking the different variants of COVID-19 spreading in its population, and the data so far on B.1.1.7, the UK variant, are not promising. This Science piece looks at some of the policy options ahead of them, and, potentially us.
An immunocompromised patient who died after a 154-day infection with COVID-19 may hold a clue to how the variants have emerged and spread.
Why are cases dropping so fast in the United States? Four reasons: distancing, seasonality, seroprevalence (partial immunity), and vaccines.
New data have shown that the pandemic has hit academic mothers especially hard.
Rational people in Connecticut are trying to eliminate the religious exemption to schoolchild vaccination requirements and the Republican Party is lining up with the loonies.
An Ohio State wrestler testified that Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked him to help cover up allegations of sexual abuse by the team doctor while Jordan was assistant coach.
There was a big social media kerfuffle this week when various gynecologists took aim at Vagisil for deceptive ads targeting teen girls. Led by Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible and sometime New York Times columnist, they argued that the company was preaching products that could be harmful while also shaming girls for things that are natural.
ERCOT officials said that Texas was mere minutes away from a catastrophic system failure that could have left Texans without power for months. The Huffington Post looks at why the storm knocked out so much of the power and how right-wing grifters and charlatans blamed it all falsely on green energy.
A tiny town in Iowa – Armstrong, population 840 – saw its mayor, police chief, city clerk, and former city clerk all arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and “the deployment of a Taser against a civilian in exchange for cash.”
I can’t seem to muster any sympathy for the investor who gave $2.5 million for a “voter fraud” investigation and now wants his money back.
The Reply All podcast was starting a new series on the toxic workplace environment at Bon Appetit that led to the ouster of longtime EIC Adam Rapoport in 2020 when a similar scandal took down Reply All’s co-host and the senior reporter leading this story.
Nicole Hazen, the wife of Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen, has been fighting a brain tumor for the last year, and the two of them chose to discuss it publicly.
Many prominent British actors are urging the UK government to renegotiate visa rules so they can continue to work in the EU.
Literary Hub’s list of 50 classic novels under 200 pages is pretty good, at least based on the half I’ve read and the others I know about.
I greatly enjoyed McSweeney’s Valentine’s Day gifts from famous fictional men.
But nothing made me laugher harder this week than this twitter thread about a Texas survivalist nut who isn’t very good at the survival part.
Board game news: I don’t know much about this game but folks are very excited for the Kickstarter for Stroganov.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, Humor, iowa, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

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