Stick to baseball, 3/16/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I wrote up the players I saw in the Reds-Rangers Breakout Game plus a few other notes from Arizona, broke down the Dylan Cease trade, and posted a ranking of the top 20 prospects for likely impact in 2024, and offered a draft scouting notebook from the Wake Forest-Duke series. I’ll have some more Breakout game reports after the weekend, but unfortunately the two games I hoped to hit on Friday were both washed out by rain.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week. 

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Judd Blevins is a white nationalist. The town of Enid, Oklahoma, voted him on to their city council, but there’s a fight brewing now to remove him. Blevins refuses to address his history with Identity Evropa, a major white nationalist organization, instead hiding behind “God” and religion.
  • Oregon moved to recriminalize possession of hard drugs, notably fentanyl and heroin, three years after decriminalizing it. Note that several quotes here are from Republican representatives talking about fentanyl (a popular GOP talking point) and Portland (which they do not represent).
  • This year’s FAFSA roll-out and the new rules that led to the changes in the federal student-aid forms have all been a huge disaster that may force some schools to delay enrollment deadlines.
  • Allowing kids to get the measles, the mumps, or rubella just to satisfy some lunatic’s political goals is needlessly cruel, but the cruelty is the point, isn’t it?
  • Medici is one of Reiner Knizia’s most acclaimed games, part of his so-called Auction Trilogy with Ra and Modern Art, but it’s been out of print for several years now. Steamforged announced they’re taking pre-orders for a new edition coming out this year.

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)
  • Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.
  • NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.
  • The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.
  • Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.
  • The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.
  • Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Stick to baseball, 4/15/23.

I haven’t written in the past week-plus due mostly to getting sick, something that wasn’t COVID-19 but might as well have been for this stupid cough I’ve still got. I did get to a couple of HS games in the Boras Classic in Orange County this week and will write that up after I get to another HS game on Wednesday.

My own podcast returned this week with guest Ozan Varol, author of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist and the new book Awaken Your Genius. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I did appear on two other podcasts this week – Sports Sometimes, with my friend Chris Crawford; and the board game podcast Meeple Town, with Dean Dunning. (Not Dane Dunning. That’s Calcaterra’s bit.)

You can also get more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which went out again on this past Monday.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: This New Yorker profile of Pinky Cole and her fast-growing vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan probably isn’t as complimentary as the subject hoped it would be; if anything, it makes it sound like the quality of the food there is entirely secondary to the owner’s ambitions. It also highlights some of the challenges in bringing a broader audience to vegan food, given the latter’s reputation.
  • Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (guess) introduced a bill to ban kids from attending drag shows and has ranted about LGBTQ+ people “grooming children,” so it was no surprise at all to learn that an intern filed a complaint against him, saying that they had an inappropriate relationship and he served them alcohol even though they were younger than 21. Slaton, who likes to post Bible passages on his Twitter account, also proposed a bill to give property tax cuts to straight, married couples who’d never been divorced. To their credit, two Republican lawmakers in Texas have already called for Slaton to step down.
  • All those conservative commentators rushing to defend Thomas and Crow? Yeah, a lot of them rely on Crow for their paychecks in one way or another, Ilya Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charles Murray among them. Whatever you may think of the first three, if Charles Murray comes to your defense, you may want to ask him to pipe down.
  • Speaking of Goldberg, I did appreciate his longish essay in his Dispatch newsletter on how the rising generation of Republicans are becoming, in his words, jerks, taking their cues from Trumpism and the old-conservative God complex model of government (government should enact God’s will, and only we know what God’s will is). He argues that it’s not just bad for the Republican party, but bad for these kids as humans.

Winston-Salem and Wilmington eats.

Mission Pizzeria Napoletana near downtown Winston-Salem isn’t just a pizzeria, but a full trattoria with house-made pastas and other incredible dishes made from scratch in the tiny cooking space behind their counter. My daughter was along for the ride on this trip, which meant I got to try a few extra items. We ordered the arancini starter, a special for that day that might have been the best version of this dish (balls of risotto rolled in bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried) I’ve ever had; the pizza with smoked mozzarella & tomato sauce; the rigatoni with tomato and cream; and the dessert special, zeppole, the Italian version of beignets. The pizza was outstanding – I’m pretty sure they use Bianco tomatoes, and the dough was perfectly light and airy around the edges with a thick outer crust and thin (but not wet) center. The pasta was truly al dente and the sweetness of the tomatoes shined through; I’ve come around over the course of my life on so-called ‘pink’ sauces, as just a small amount of cream is enough to bring out the sweetness of good tomatoes. The zeppole came in a paper bag filled with powdered sugar, which brought back memories of going to Italian festivals as a kid on Long Island, although the zeppole I ate at those festivals were never this soft or moist in the center. I can’t recommend this place highly enough.

Bobby Boy Bakeshop is a French boulangerie and patisserie that had a line out the door when we stopped there while driving around the Wake Forest campus’ west side. They offer some very impressive old-world breads, including $3 baguettes, and a real coffee and tea program. We just had some sweet treats – my daughter loved the coconut cake, which was very intensely flavored and actually not overly sweet – so I can’t vouch for the savory items, although they do offer a rotating sandwich of the day on their own bread.

Krankie’s is a popular breakfast spot that also roasts its own coffee beans, offering a Tanzanian peaberry the day I was there (you can’t buy it on their site) that had the slightly sweet berry notes typical of that country. My daughter and I each got breakfast sandwiches on biscuits and once again she defeated me, getting the special with chicken, pesto, and tomato, while I got the Yeti with eggs, house-made sausage, and tater tots right on the sandwich, drizzled with maple syrup. The sausage was the disappointing part, actually, as it was way overcooked, and the biscuit itself wasn’t as good as what I can make at home, but the coffee was very good if brewed a little too hot. It looks like those two places are the best options for craft coffee in Winston-Salem.

Chill Nitro is right downtown and offers ice cream made to order with the help of liquid nitrogen, offering an incredibly smooth product because the nitrogen freezes the ice cream base so quickly that the ice crystals remain very small. They also offer the option to add a shot of alcohol to your ice cream for $6, although I passed on that; alcohol also inhibits freezing but I didn’t think it would be necessary and I wasn’t interested in drinking right before the drive back to Charlotte. I had the peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cups and a peanut butter drizzle, and it was indeed intensely peanutty with an outstanding texture.

I also went to (other) Wilmington to see Walker Jenkins last week and had one meal there, eating dinner at Savorez, a Latin American/Southern fusion place in a cute space with funky décor. (I wanted to try Seabird, but they’re closed on Tuesdays.) I went with the shrimp and grits, served with a chorizo gravy, goat cheese polenta, black beans, oven-dried tomatoes, and pea shoots. The idea of the dish was better than the execution, as the polenta itself wasn’t very hot and the chorizo gravy – which would have been great on biscuits – overpowered the flavors of just about everything else on the plate. The shrimp were actually quite good on their own, which meant deconstructing the dish was the best option.

I rolled into town earlier than I expected, so I stopped in Bespoke Coffee to sit for an hour or so, which is a very cool café/bar with a wide range of tea options (I don’t drink coffee that late in the day unless I have a migraine). I can’t say much about the booze or coffee offerings but I absolutely loved the space and would definitely end up working there often if I lived in downtown Wilmington. Well, that Wilmington, not mine.

Stick to baseball, 11/20/21.

I had two new posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on the Noah Syndergaard signing and one on the Eduardo Rodriguez signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Genotype, the latest boardgame from Genius Games, a company that creates games that incorporate real math/science concepts into its titles so they’re educational as well as fun. I think this is their best effort yet.

No podcasts this week, but my show will return next week. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week. 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: New York has the inside story of reporter Felicia Sonmez’s lawsuit against her employer, the Washington Post, with some damning details about the now-retired executive editor Marty Baron, one of the heroes of Spotlight.
  • North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (D) pardoned Dontae Sharpe, who was wrongfully convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and served 26 years for it, even though a key witness recanted her testimony just months after his trial.
  • Coffee, and specialty coffee in particular, is a Yemeni product, but the Yemeni people have not benefited from its explosion into a high-end product consumed around the world. Some Yemeni entrepreneurs in Brooklyn are trying to change that, with coffee shops that use Yemen-grown coffee – no mean feat given the chaos and devastation of seven years of civil war there.
  • A Latino police officer in Joliet, Illinois, leaked official video that showed a colleague choking and slapping a suspect who was dying of a drug overdose. The police union’s response was to kick him out, and the DA has filed criminal charges against him.
  • Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans in the state House have passed a ban on vaccine mandates. I thought Republicans opposed excessive government interference? I must be thinking of some other brand of Republicans.

Stick to baseball, 8/8/21.

My one new post this week for subscribers to The Athletic is a long scouting notebook with my observations on players from the Nats, Rays, Orioles, and Tigers’ systems, including five former first-round picks. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to Dr. Katy Milkman, author of the new book How to Change, about we can use psychology and knowledge of how our brains work to enact real, lasting behavior change in ourselves. You can subscribe via iTunes or Spotify. And on the Athletic Baseball Show, I got back together with my old Baseball Today partner in crime Eric Karabell (also on Spotify).

My email newsletter will return this week, and I’m going to give away a copy of a new board game (the publisher sent me two copies, so I offered to do a giveaway and they were on board, get it?) to one random subscriber.

And now, the links…

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.

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. 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 Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 2/23/19.

Just one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the Padres’ deal with Manny Machado. I held a Klawchat on Friday since my afternoon game in Texas was rained out.

I sent out the latest issue of my free email newsletter this week, complete with Obscure Music Reference as the subject. I nearly always tailor those song quotes to the subject of the email, although I think this week’s might have been a bit too obscure.

For the next five Mondays, High Street on Market, my #1 restaurant in Philadelphia, will host “sandwich battles” in the evenings, featuring area chefs and personalities in a competition to build the best sandwich using High Street’s phenomenal artisan breads and a mystery ingredient each week. Tickets are $25 apiece and you might see me in the crowd one night.

And now, the links…