Stick to baseball, 10/4/20.

I had two pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the top 20 players under age 25 in the postseason (before the first round began), and one this morning with my hypothetical ballots for the six player awards. I also held a video Q&A for the Athletic on Friday.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games with polyomino (Tetris) tiles as part of their mechanics, which is a fairly common thing in recent games, with a huge run of them hitting the market in 2019-20.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Nick Piecoro, who covers the Diamondbacks for the Arizona Republic and a longtime friend of mine, almost since I first got into the writing side of the business. My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’ll have a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, now that I have a few more articles to include.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

  • By now you’ve probably seen the New York Times exposé on Donald Trump’s near-zero payment of income taxes and extensive use of questionable deductions to avoid paying. I paid more in federal income taxes in the last half of September than Trump did in all of 2017.
  • The USL, the country’s Division II professional men’s soccer league, had a serious issue in a game last week between Phoenix and San Diego, where a player on the former used a homophobic slur against a player on the latter. Two of my colleagues at the Athletic have the story on the incident and the fallout, where San Diego coach Landon Donovan pulled his team from the field and forfeited the match.
  • Also at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, exposes the real reasons Fox News fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, including harassment and creation of a hostile work environment. Guilfoyle is now one of Trump’s main surrogates on the campaign trail and a big part of his attempts to reach women voters.
  • Editors and staffers at the NYU student newspaper The Washington Square News resigned en masse to protest a hostile work environment created by their faculty adviser, Keena Griffin. Their claims include racial insensitivity and transphobic comments. Dr. Griffin is the president of the College Media Association, and the CMA has announced its own investigation.
  • There’s a longstanding cultural movement in the two Congolese capitals of Kinshasa (the D.R.C.) and Brazzaville (The Republic of Congo), where people of all ages dress extremely snazzily, regardless of their circumstances or where they live. This BBC photo-essay shows these sapeurs in their stylish clothes, including people who break gender norms and children who found their love of fancy outfits early in life.
  • It took Youtube a few days but they finally removed a video by right-wing nutjob Josh Bernstein where he said that Ilhan Omar “should be executed,” referring to her as a female dog.
  • I watched the Spanish-language film Monos, which was Colombia’s submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, this past week, and will write about it in the next few days. The Guardian had an interesting article from last October on how brutal the shoot was in the high-altitude jungles of southern Colombia.

Stick to baseball, 12/21/19.

I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on the Madison Bumgarner contract and the Corey Kluber trade. I didn’t chat this week as I’m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that required my time.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top ten games of 2019 for Paste and the best board games of 2019 by category for Vulture. I’ll have a piece up this weekend on Ars Technica ranking the best board game apps of the year. Also for Paste, I ran down the best games I saw at PAX Unplugged earlier this month.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st from William Morrow (Harper Collins). You can pre-order it now through that link or wherever delicious books are sold.

And now, the links…

  • The Mormon Church has built up a $100 billion fund they claimed was for “charitable” purposes, but has hoarded much of the money and only made distributions to two for-profit businesses owned by the church, which if true is a massive case of tax fraud.
  • Professor Julie Sedivy writes about rediscovering her parents’ native tongue, Czech, after her father died, and how the process reconnected her with her roots.
  • I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and have been struck by just how much of a creep Richard Feynman appears to be in his own telling. It turns out I’m far from the only one who noticed, and, worse, his second wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse. To make it worse, the audio version has its own problems, such as the narrator trying to imitate non-American accents, with an especially cringey version of a Japanese accent that might make Krusty the Clown blush.
  • Over at the Atlantic, Amanda Mull says enough with the year-end rankings, and while I agree there are a lot of those posts, I think she misses a large part of the point: They become both conversation starters, which is one of the main reasons I post rankings here, and ways to find new music or books or movies you might not have heard about previously.
  • Clint Eastwood is clearly a chauvinist asshole, with his new film, Richard Jewell, fabricating a story about a real journalist offering sex in exchange for information – a story that never happened, about a journalist who has since passed away and can’t defend herself. Ankita Rao writes in the Guardian how harmful this pervasive stereotype is.
  • I guess one good thing about the ongoing measles epidemic in the U.S. is that it is waking up more media outlets to the existential threat anti-vaxxers pose. Men’s Health has a column from Jacqueline Detwiler on how scientific BS has brought measles back, and how we can fight for science against denialists.
  • A bill in the New Jersey legislature to end non-medical exemptions to mandatory schoolchild vaccinations – which is only rational, since there are no religious prohibitions on vaccinations, and if you have a “philosophical” objection to vaccination then you can just home-school your kid – stalled in the Senate after vocal protests from anti-vaxxers. The Newark Star-Ledger’s editorial board commented by saying that the anti-vaxxer movement has gone off the rails, comparing vaccinations to “hate crimes.” Do you live in New Jersey? Find your legislators and call them Monday to let them know you support this bill.
  • The Washington Post‘s Dave Sheinen profiles fringe relief prospect Gabe Klobosits to talk about how the proposed cuts to minor league baseball might impact players at the margins of organized baseball. It’s a good piece, but I think it’s an anecdotal argument that doesn’t consider how many other players like Klobosits never pan out (and he hasn’t yet) and what the overall cost is to employ and develop those players, and additional coaches and staffers, in the hopes you’ll find one or two hidden big leaguers.
  • A disabled artist designed a hotel room that is deliberately difficult to stay in, trying to mimic the experience disabled people have in rooms designed solely for the non-disabled, for the Art B&B in Blackpool, England.
  • I do like my elite status when I get it, so this New Yorker piece on the madness of airline elite status hit rather close to home.
  • The Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a trade partner, trading ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows with the U.S., even though Wakanda is a fictional country. We have handed the keys to our government to the dumbest possible people.
  • China responded too slowly to a pig virus called African swine fever, leading to an epidemic and fears it will spread beyond China’s borders.
  • I’d never heard of Bolze, a French-German hybrid language spoken in a small town in the canton of Fribourg, before finding this BBC Travel post about the language and its associated culture.
  • The Anti-Defamation League now lists the ‘ok’ hand gesture as a symbol of hate, depending on context, of course.

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

Stick to baseball, 9/22/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, my annual list of players I was wrong about went up on Thursday, including Matt Chapman and Harrison Bader. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Ars Technica, I reviewed the new digital adaptation of the complex board game Scythe, available now on Steam. I don’t love the underlying game of Scythe but the implementation here is spectacular.

Here on the dish, I’ve set up a new index page for all my board game reviews in alphabetical order; there are 160 there now and I’ll continue to update it as I post new reviews here or on other sites. I reviewed two more games here this week: Mesozooic and Founders of Gloomhaven.

I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter earlier this week; it’s irregular in timing and content, but hey, it’s free.

And now, the links. I do want to warn anyone who might be triggered by such stories that there are quite a few links here relating to sexual assault.

Big Chicken.

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t get a ton of headlines, but it is one of the most critical threats to global health, enough so that the United Nations resolved to address the problem at a summit late in 2016. At the time, they estimated there would be 10 million deaths annually from resistant ‘superbugs’ by the year 2050, which doesn’t include people who would die indirectly from the scourge, such as people who can’t have surgery because the antibiotics that you receive before any operation are no longer effective. In a country where a third of the population rejects the truth of evolution, getting people to understand this issue – itself the product of evolutionary processes among bacteria – has been difficult, and never seems to rise very high on the priority lists for policymakers.

Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, the journalist and Schuster Institute fellow explains how we got here by way of the humble chicken, which took over our plates and menus thanks to the prodigious and reckless use of antibiotics, in turn leading to widespread antibiotic resistance in our food supply and outside of it as well. Chicken became an industrial product because someone realized that pumping birds full of antibiotics as part of their feed would make them grow faster, regardless of whether they had any need for these medications. While the chicken world consolidated and counted its profits, bacteria did what they do – evolved, through mutations and gene transfer, to become resist to one drug after another, spreading through and beyond our food supply, abetted by antibiotic residues that washed into the water supply from overuse.

McKenna builds the book around the narrative of one man who nearly died from salmonellosis, an infection caused by bacteria in the Salmonella genus (there are two species, and either can cause this illness), part of a widespread 2013 outbreak caused by unsanitary conditions at the Foster Farms chicken processing plant. The specific Salmonella strain in this outbreak, known as Heidelberg, was resistant to multiple antibiotics, sickened over 600 people, and resulted in at least 200 hospitalizations, although there were no reported deaths. Within the framework of this patient’s ordeal – he survived, but will have lifelong complications, which is common for people who develop these infections – McKenna walks through the history of the chicken as foodstuff, from its advent as an industrial product through changes to the bird to the very recent movement by major chicken producers and consumers to stop antibiotic use.

The very rise of this form of industrialized animal husbandry was an accident, which is one of the book’s most interesting sections (granted, I love history of science stories); there wasn’t any reason to think pumping healthy birds full of antibiotics would make them grow faster, but it did, to a shocking extent. What is infuriating, if not entirely surprising, is how government agencies responsible for ensuring public health rolled over and played dead for Big Chicken and the antibiotic manufacturers themselves even as scientists began to sound alarms about resistant bacteria in the 1950s. The manufacturers played the Big Tobacco game of demanding more proof, aided and abetted by Congressman Jamie Whitten, a Democrat from Mississippi, who abused his power to protect the two industries from proposed restrictions on antibiotic usage until his retirement in 1994. (Whitten wrote a pro-pesticide screed as a rejoinder to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in case you were unclear on his stance on the matter.) Mckenna parallels this narrative with a walk through the tactics of the bacterial world to outflank our best drugs, most recently with the emergence of bacteria with the mcr-1 gene, conferring resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of ‘last resort’ that has been used for bacteria resistant to all other antibiotics.

Blaming the two industries of chicken and pharma, along with the complicity of useless government agencies (the FDA and the USDA), is easy, but the American consumer is also a major part of the problem here. We eat far more meat than we need to meet our dietary requirements, but we insist on meat being cheap, which encourages us to both eat and waste more of it. We’ve also decided we want lean meat, based on nutritional advice from the Useless Department of Agriculture that turned out to be mostly to entirely wrong, leading to greater demand for breast meat, and in turn for farmers to grow chickens with giant breasts and smaller legs, to the point that the broiler-fryer chickens you might get in an average grocery or warehouse store can’t walk or stand up normally. (I rarely see them in stores, but once did buy a pasture-raised whole chicken; it had less than half the breast meat of even a well-raised conventional bird.) McKenna goes into this in more detail – how the rise of ‘chicken fingers’ and the McNugget exacerbated this trend, how consumers prefer buying chicken parts rather than whole birds – while also pointing out how producers bred birds with these un-natural characteristics to suit the marketplace.

There is hope, at least in this book, on both the antibiotic resistance and the chicken-producing fronts. The UN has, at least, paid lip service to the cause of fighting antibiotic resistance. Several major chicken producers, led by Purdue, have stopped or pledged to stop using antibiotics in full, or to only use them to treat sick birds rather than as growth promoters or for prophylactic purposes. Many large chicken buyers, including Panera, Chipotle, and even McDonald’s, have also pledged to go antibiotic-free, or have done so already. Whole Foods has long been antibiotic-free as well. (One reason I buy organic milk and eggs, even though ‘organic’ itself isn’t that meaningful: It guarantees the cows/birds in question weren’t given antibiotics.) And slowing the use of antibiotics on animals should help in particular if and when researchers discover the next big class of antibiotic compounds. We may have gotten much farther with the drugs we had if we hadn’t given them in such huge quantities to the animals we raised and ate.

McKenna also visits chicken farmers who are operating outside of the main supply chain of industrial birds, raising heirloom varieties in the American heartland or raising certified Label Rouge birds in France, chickens that neither look nor taste like the bland if predictable American hybrids. Educating consumers with the disposable income to buy these birds is a challenge, but one that has plenty of precedent in the market for high-end foods. The bigger conundrum is how to provide enough meat, chicken or otherwise, to feed a world that increasingly demands it and doesn’t want to pay more for it, without the overuse of antibiotics that has led us to the edge of a bottomless pit of resistance.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/11/17.

I have a new boardgame review at Paste, covering the card-drafting game Skyward. I also had two Insider posts go up earlier this week, one previewing some potential offseason trade targets, the other ranking the top 50 free agents this winter. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

Also, don’t forget to buy copies of Smart Baseball for everyone on your Christmas list! Except for infants. They might eat the pages. Get them the audiobook instead.

And now, the links…

Pig Tales.

Barry Estabrook’s Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat didn’t make me a vegetarian or cause me to stop eating pork, but it has certainly reinforced a lot of things I was already doing to try to avoid contributing to our food-industrial complex. Estabrook exposes some of the worst practices in the pork industry, including inhumane treatment of pigs, widespread doping of animals with antibiotics, and terrible pollution that ruins surrounding neighborhoods. Estabrook’s point is that animal husbandry doesn’t have to be that way, but he doesn’t quite get around to saying that this would involve Americans accepting that meat shouldn’t be cheap.

Pig Tales is structured in a predictable way: here’s the setup, here are all the bad practices (some awful, some merely objectionable), here’s the cost of the modern meat-production complex, here are a few folks doing it the right way. It’s certainly effective, and Estabrook is a skilled storyteller. You can’t read about the horrible conditions in which factory-farmed pigs are raised – in cages where they can barely move, sitting in their own excretions, covered in sores – without at least wondering if there’s a better way (unless you’re a sociopath, I guess). I thought his descriptions of local efforts to combat pork-factory pollution were even more compelling because they illuminated a side of the industry that’s much less well-known; raising pigs indoors is a dirty job, and produces a lot of waste that pollutes local air, water, and soil, with much of it dumped into artificial “lagoons” that overflow when there’s a substantial rain. Estabrook talks to local activists and groups fighting the pernicious aspects of pork production – labor abuses and environmental degradation – and uncovers how certain states, notably North Carolina and Iowa, have bent over backwards to favor corporate agriculture over the rights of residents to things like clean air and water or safe housing. (North Carolina especially seems to have debased itself for Big Pig, hardly a surprise given how badly gerrymandered their state is.)

Estabrook also describes the breakdown in our food inspection system, largely because it has fallen too far under the sway of the industrial food producers themselves. He highlights the story of one USDA inspector who was reassigned to a job farther from his house, ostensibly to get him to quit, because the factory owners didn’t like that he was doing his job. Pig Tales was published in 2015, six-plus years into a Democratic administration that, in theory and practice, was more open to regulations than the previous one, and I can only imagine that this is going to get worse given the Trump admin’s war on science within the executive branch. The USDA is a long-running disaster anyway, pushing “nutrition standards” that rely as much on industry input as on actual science (to say nothing of the uncertainty around the science of nutrition), but the fact that it’s understaffed for the mission of ensuring the safety of our food supply only exacerbates the problem. That’s one agency I’d like to see scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, with a focus on food safety. Estabrook only gets at one of the agency’s problems, but he refers heavily to this 2013 report on swine slaughter plants that found widespread, egregious violations of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act … with no real consequences for the manufacturers.

Pig Tales isn’t all bad news for pork eaters, however, as Estabrook visits multiple farmers who are doing something right – many who’ve eschewed antibiotic use, others who don’t use cages or only use them right around birthing, and still more who raise smaller herds as part of an integrated agricultural setup. His stories all give some threads of hope, but I think Estabrook should have emphasized the “cheap meat” problem more: Americans expect meat to be inexpensive, because it has been so for so many years now, but the retail price of factory-farmed meat does not accurately reflect the negative externalities that arise from its production. He hints at the subject, but I could have used a concluding chapter here that pointed out what I think is obvious: If pork producers were regulated correctly, meaning that they adhere to food-safety standards and pay for damage they cause to their environments, pork would become more expensive because no one would be able to produce it cheaply enough to turn a profit at current commodity prices. And I’m not sure anyone is ready for a world where some consumers are priced out of some or all types of red meat. That’s a legal and ethical concern that Estabrook doesn’t broach.

The author makes it very clear that he believes there is such a thing as sustainable, ethically-raised, environmentally responsible pork production, and he’s probably right – but it won’t be available to everybody. Raising meat that doesn’t damage the environment, put us at risk of foodborne illnesses, accelerate antibiotic resistance, or mistreat the animals is expensive. It takes a lot of land, as with responsible beef production (although the economics of sustainable beef are worse), and more labor per animal. I don’t think I learned anything from Pig Tales that I didn’t already know about pork, but I did learn about how state and local governments have abdicated their responsibilities to protect their citizens, and that has only further driven me to consume less meat and, when I do consume it, to try to ensure it comes from responsible farmers. Perhaps if more consumers make those choices, the market will shift even in the absence of government regulation – but if meat is suddenly a luxury good, is it really sustainable at all?

Next up: My reviews are a few books behind, but I’ve finished Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night and Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce (just $2 on Kindle) and moved on to Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins.

Stick to baseball, 5/27/17.

My one Insider piece this week was on Luis Robert, his deal with the White Sox, and the poor history of Cuban position player free agents. I did not hold a Klawchat, and will have another mock draft up on Tuesday.

Smart Baseball continues to sell well and I am very grateful to all of you who purchased it. I have about 100 signed bookplates that I can send out to readers who’ve bought the book, and I’ll get that info to everyone soon – probably in my next email newsletter.

And now, the links…