Stick to baseball, 12/9/23.

Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.

At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.

My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/10/22.

I’ve written a lot for the Athletic over the last two weeks, reacting to:

Over at Paste, I wrapped up everything I played or saw at PAX Unplugged last weekend. That board game convention is why I didn’t run this post last week, of course. I’ll have my best new games of 2022 post up this upcoming week.

On my podcast, I spoke to Prof. Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, about his book and some of the big themes in it. You can buy the book here, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Esquire has the story of Robert Telles, former Clark County Public Administrator, now charged with murdering the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter who exposed his misdeeds in public office.
  • Mississippi, a backwater region in the American South that ranks 50th among all states for health care, 43rd in education, and 49th for its economy, took funds from a federal program aimed at helping poor families with children and used them to pay for volleyball practice facility at Southern Miss that Brett Favre had promised to pay for. They also paid $1.1 million from the same program to pay Favre for services never performed. In a functioning democracy, there’d be at least an investigation in the legislature into current Gov. Tate Reeves (R), but Mississippi is gerrymandered into oblivion and has disenfranchised 15% of Black residents, giving Republicans a supermajority in both houses, so nothing will happen.
  • ProPublica normally does great work, but they ran a garbage story about the debunked lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins, and it was rife with obvious mistakes.
  • There’s a ridiculous anti-vax film circulating online, called Died Suddenly, which is so shoddy that it claims that people who are indisputably alive actually died from the COVID-19 vaccine. Other anti-vaxxers are attacking it, saying it’s hurting their (bogus) cause. If you want more information on the various lies of Died Suddenly, much of which focuses on false claims of blood clots, you can find a lengthy takedown here on Science-Based Medicine.
  • Grant Wahl, an acclaimed and respected soccer writer who has been an outspoken critic of the World Cup and the human rights abuses taking place in Qatar, died last night at a World Cup game. He was 48.
  • A lobbyist for a Saudi alfalfa company that has been has been elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he would have influence over a dispute about water usage in the state. Thomas Galvin’s employer grows alfalfa with scarce water in Arizona and ships it to Saudi Arabia to feed livestock there.
  • Michael Harriot dismantled the defenses of Jerry Jones after a photo emerged of the Cowboys’ owner, who has never hired a Black coach, at the door of a school in 1957 where white students blocked Black kids from integrating.
  • Why does the media continue to take billionaires at their word? Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried … they promise things that the media just accepts without question, and then don’t deliver, or it turns out they were lying.
  • Speaking of which, the forces trying to get public funding for a new stadium for the Titans have made a lot of big promises of economic returns. Turns out they’re probably exaggerating.  
  • Back in high school, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State (R), “willed” a classmate “a rope and a tree” as part of a series of racist jokes he and friends made in the class yearbook.
  • Shake that City!, a sort of roll-and-place puzzle game from Alderac, is also fully funded with four days to go. You shake a device with nine cubes in it and they come out in a random pattern that tells you how to place the related tiles on your board.

Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Reno eats.

I was only in Reno long enough for two meals, leaving first thing the morning after the game at the University of Nevada (which I wrote about here), and was a little disappointed that a city where gambling and tourism are the two main industries didn’t have more to offer food-wise. I’m still in Atlanta till tomorrow and will have another food post up on that shortly. In the meantime, check out this week’s episode of my Behind the Dish podcast.

The better of the two meals I had was a reader suggestion, Campo, an Italian restaurant on Sierra that offers pastas, thin-crust pizzas, and house-made charcuterie, using lots of locally-sourced ingredients, so very much my kind of restaurant. They boast of accreditation from the authority in Naples that awards the “VPN” (Vera Pizza Napoletana) badge, but I’d say this is more evidence of how dubious that term is. Campo’s pizza is fine, but not terribly authentic – the crust is by far the best part, thin with the right amount of charring around the edges (but not underneath), probably a little less airy on the rim than it should have been but otherwise boasting good texture. I went with the basic margherita pizza, which had far too much sauce and somewhat too little cheese; the sauce tasted very sweet, like it was made with overripe tomatoes, and the cheese was moisture-reduced rather than truly fresh mozzarella. The server must have thought I was an oddball for scraping so much of the sauce off the pizza, and one of the slices actually had no cheese on it at all – just sauce on dough. The charcuterie was more interesting and even the “small” plate ($12) was generous, featuring mortadella, prosciutto crudo, prosciutto cotto, pork rillette, a hard salami with a name I didn’t catch, a few cubes of pecorino romano, mustard (which he referred to as “our” mustard, so I assume it didn’t come from a jar), and a few pickles, including green beans and garlic. Everything was good, with the prosciuttos and the rillette particular standouts; the worst thing I could say was that the salami was tough because of how thickly it was sliced. I found it the absence of any prosciutto on the pizza options on the menu to be odd, and, since I just ate them together instead, the saltiness helped balance out the sweetness of the sauce. If I end up in Reno another time, I’d try Campo again but would give the pastas a shot rather than another pizza. I do recommend it.

Burger Me is apparently owned by the group behind Campo, and earned mention from Esquire for serving, in their opinion, the best burger in America, as well as showing up on “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.” I ordered the specific burger that Esquire cited, a bison burger with BBQ sauce and jalapenos, but it just wasn’t anything special: a high-quality burger that was too lean and didn’t have big flavor except from the peppers. The fries were also ordinary – please, people, if you’re going to open a gourmet burger place, the fries are not a damn afterthought. It’s so easy to just hand-cut the fries in back – In-n-Out seems to have no problem doing this – and when I get cheap fries that went from freezer to fryer at a burger place that is trying to sell me on their quality, I want to hire Lionel Hutz and sue them for fraud. I’d skip this stop