→ October 23, 2021
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Stick to baseball, 10/23/21.

My second (and final) Arizona Fall League notebook went up for subscribers to the Athletic on Monday; the prior one, with notes on MacKenzie Gore, Zach Thompson, and more, went up last Thursday. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Hunger, the newest game from designer Richard Garfield (King of Tokyo, Magic: the Gathering).

On my podcast this week, I spoke to Trevor Strunk (@hegelbon) about his new book Story Mode: Blah Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, which you can pre-order here. And you can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.

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.

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→ October 26, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 10/25/19.

My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).

You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.

And now, the links…

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→ August 3, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

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→ November 4, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

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→ October 5, 2018
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.

If it seems like there’s a surfeit of information out there on dinosaurs for readers or viewers of all ages (“Dinosaur Traiiiiiiin…”), then you might share my surprise to see the publication this year of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, that covers similar ground. Providing an overarching history of the reign of the members of the Dinosauria clade from their rise prior to the end-Triassic extinction event, through the Jurassic era, until the Chicxulub meteor caused the K-Pg extinction event and wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs from the planet around 66 million years ago, the book works down from a high-level overview and then dives to the surface to provide more specific example. Author and paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who appears on the BBC program Walking with Dinosaurs, has managed to create a book for the mass market that doesn’t skimp on the science or on the sort of specific details that give texture and relevance to the broader story, while also drawing very specific parallels between the two extinction events that bookend the dinosaurs’ reign and the mass extinction event going on right now due to the actions of mankind.

(Full disclosure: This book was published by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins, which also published my book, Smart Baseball, and I received a copy of the book through my relationship with them after Mr. Brusatte reached out to me via Twitter.)

Brusatte provides two main recurring features in the book while telling a fairly linear history of dinosaurs, including why they ended up the dominant species after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (one caused by runaway global warming that was exacerbated by the release of methane trapped in glaciers and polar ice caps, which is exactly what anthropogenic climate change is threatening to do right now) and how they died off in rather quick fashion. One is that he profiles several of the best-known dinosaur species or genii, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, in disciplined, fact-based fashion to try to counteract many of the myths that have grown up around various sauropods through the magic of fiction. (The demon spawn of Michael Crichton come in for special criticism throughout the book.)

The other feature is a series of concrete examples from the field, as Brusatte goes to dig sites and/or talks to other paleontologists who have done so and gives detailed descriptions of how new species are found, identified, and categorized. China is the hottest spot for new dinosaur finds, and he explains why that is in geological terms, as well as why T. rex was only king of some parts of the world. Understanding what we know directly from Jurassic era fossils and what we can infer from those bones but also where and how they were found helps the reader follow the scientists’ path towards a more accurate taxonomy of sauropods and of their timeline on the planet.

Near the end of the book are two chapters that stood out as fascinating enough to live on their own as excerpts or as something a reader who might not have the interest or the reading level to get through an entire book would enjoy. One, “Dinosaurs Take Flight,” explains that birds are indeed the descendants of dinosaurs – actually, they are dinosaurs, in Brusatte’s telling – and explains how and why they evolved. The idea of something as complex as an avian wing or an eyeball emerging from the process of evolution is often a stumbling block for those who choose to deny the facts of the matter, but Brusatte lays out the story in plain language, with examples, without detracting from the sheer interest level of what he’s describing. The other is the final chapter, “Dinosaurs Die Out,” which has one of the best pop histories I’ve seen of the discovery of the Chicxulub meteor impact and the Alvarez hypothesis, by the father and son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez. The pair did a bit of forensic geology to discover that the iridium layer in the world’s crust at the K-Pg boundary was too dense and too uniform to have originated on the planet, and thus must have come from an external source. They looked for an impact site from a large meteor or comet and eventually found it in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, a buried crater now known as Chicxulub, a nearby town. Brusatte leads the chapter with a fictional but probable rendition of what the day of impact looked like; the meteor hit at around 67,000 miles per hour, hitting with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, causing earthquakes near 10 on the Richter scale and winds over 600 mph, killing everything within about 600 miles of the blast site.

Brusatte in turn credits Walter Alvarez’s book T. rex and the Crater of Doom as a source, calling it “one of the best pop-science books on paleontology ever written,” high praise as I think Brusatte himself may have written one too. I knew fairly little about dinosaurs coming into the book, other than what I might have learned 35 years ago (probably inaccurate) or learned more recently sitting alongside my daughter, so this book was right in my wheelhouse – a pop-science book that never talks down to the reader but also remembers to provide some fundamental knowledge before deep dives into the specifics. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and Brusatte also manages to make many of the scientists in the book seem like stars (google Jingmai O’Connor, whom he calls the world’s preeminent authority on avian dinosaurs, to see what a cool scientist is like). I’m glad Steve contacted me as the book would likely have slipped right past my radar otherwise.

Next up: I read Nick Drnaso’s Booker Prize-longlisted graphic novel Sabrina today, and just started Patrick Modiano’s novella Missing Person.

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→ May 5, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

My first mock draft for 2018 is now up for Insiders, as is a short post on the Ronald Acuña show. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I did some podcasts with friends this week. I appeared on the Productive Outs podcast to talk some baseball and music. Then I talked with Seth Heasley on his Hugos There podcast to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, one of my all-time favorite comic novels (and a Hugo Award winner). And of course on Thursday I was on the BBTN podcast with Buster Olney.

By the way, if any of you happen to live in/near Stockholm, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be there for a conference in the near future. Let me know in the comments what I should try to do or see in the few hours I’ll have free while there.

And now, the links…

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→ March 26, 2018
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The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

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→ March 17, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 3/17/18.

My biggest news this week is that Smart Baseball is now out in paperback. This edition has a new afterword covering a few new developments from the 2017 season.

For Insiders this week, I had three posts from the Cactus League, covering:
• Hunter Greene & prospects from four orgs (CIN, LAD, CWS, LAA)
• Chris Paddack, Adrian Morejon, and other Padres & Rockies prospects
• Mackenzie Gore and even more Padres prospects.

I also wrote about the Jake Arrieta contract. Due to spring travel, the next chat may not be until April, unless I get a rainout on the road somewhere.

Here on the dish, I wrote up a slew of new restaurants I tried in Arizona this month.

And now, the links…

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→ September 8, 2017
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Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

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→ April 7, 2017
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I Contain Multitudes.

You are currently covered in bugs.

That’s the fact that drives Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, his highly acclaimed 2016 book about the microbiome, a relative neologism that refers to the interconnected world of microorganisms that exist in, on, and around all other life on earth. Without these bugs, we almost certainly wouldn’t exist, and the best estimates Yong has have bacteria and other microbes in and on our bodies outnumbering the cells of our actual bodies by a margin slighter over 1:1. You do not just contain multitudes, Yong quips (borrowing a line from Walt Whitman), but you are multitudes.

Yong spends as much time dispelling myths as he does explaining the new science of the microbiome because everyone who reads this has probably grown up believing one of two things about bacteria and other microbes: They’re dirty and bad and cause illness and death; or, some bacteria are good and we want lots of them but not the bad ones. Yong says neither is accurate; there aren’t “good” or “bad” microbes per se, but that the effect a microbe can have depends entirely on where it lives and thus what it’s able to do.

Microbes make the complexity of life on earth possible, sometimes serving as the difference between life and not-life, as in creatures that live in inhospitable, lightless environments at the bottom of the ocean near steam vents that bring geothermal heat out into the water. Scientists discovered creatures there that seemed to have no business existing in the first place, such as a worm that had no mouth or digestive tract. It turned out that the worm in question plays host to bacteria that provide it with all of the energy the worm needs by converting sulfur compounds found in that dark environment into chemicals the worms can use.

He also explains how evolution works differently – and apparently faster – in bacteria than it does in multicellular organisms, thanks to something called HGT, Horizontal Gene Transfer. (As opposed to, say, the Mariners moving Segura to second base if Cano is hurt; that would be a Horizontal Jean Transfer.) Bacteria have the ability to swap genes with other bacteria in their environment, meaning they can alter their genome on the fly while still alive, as opposed to humans, who are stuck with the genes that brought us to the dance.

Perhaps most relevant to the lay reader are the two chapters near the end of the book where Yong talks about how probiotics don’t work and how we might use bacteria, including their HGT superpowers, to fight diseases like dengue and Zika. Probiotic products are all the rage now, but there’s no evidence that swallowing these bacteria – which appear in tiny amounts even in products like yogurt – alters your microbiome in any way. Your gut flora are largely a function of what you were born with, meaning in turn what you got from your mother in birth (vaginal delivery exposes the infant to the bacteria in the mucosal lining) or via breast feeding (which contains more bugs plus compounds that encourage the growth of helpful bacteria in the cut), and what you eat now (more fiber, please). So skip the kombucha and eat more plants.

Mosquitoes that spread disease often do so with the help of bacteria they host, but there’s an effort underway in Australia – a country far less hostile to science than the United States is – to release mosquitoes of the same species that carries viruses like dengue or chikungunya, A. Aegyptes, that have been infected with a Wolbachia bacterium that renders the critters immune to the viruses. These mosquitoes would then move into the environment, mate with other mosquitoes, and thus spread the bacterial ‘infection’ through the population, thus dramatically reducing the number of bugs flying around with the disease in the first place. A separate but related endeavor aims to do the same with the mosquitoes that carry the parasite that causes malaria in people, a disease that has proven particularly obstinate to the development of a vaccine (in part because it’s neither viral nor bacterial).

Yong’s book seems comprehensive, although I came into it knowing extremely little about the subject. He gets into fecal transplants, including why they’ve helped people with deadly C. dif infections where traditional treatments failed. He discusses antibiotic resistance, of course. He provides copious examples of symbiosis and dysbiosis in the wild, and how many species, including animals, deprived of their normal microbiomes fail to thrive. And he gets into how climate change is altering microbiomes worldwide, leading to mass deaths on coral reefs and the spread of a fungus (also highlighted in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction) that has already wiped out numerous species of tropical frogs.

Most important, however, is that Yong keeps this all so accessible. I find the subject interesting anyway, but his prose is readable and his stories quick and quirky enough that the audiobook held my attention throughout, including during some rather dreadful trips between spring training sites in Florida. Granted, it might make you think very differently about shaking hands or touching various surfaces, but I Contain Multitudes might also encourage you to eat better, get a dog, and throw out all your triclosan, while giving you a new appreciation for germs.

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