My one Insider piece from this week included my own scouting notes on prospects Jeff Hoffman, Spencer Adams, Gleyber Torres, and Brad Markey.
Klawchats have returned! They’ll be here on the dish from now on, as ESPN has ended all Sportsnation chats. The first one was on Thursday.
And now, the links…
- Marlins beat writer Juan Rodriguez is fighting brain cancer, and some of his friends have set up a fund to help support his family.
- Every Day Should Be Saturday says pay the players, dammit, through a personal essay about what it’s like to be broke.
- Hand-pulled oyster with activated artichoke, anyone? The man behind the Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator talked to the Village Voice about his creation.
- The passing of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has led to some touching tributes, including Atul Gawande’s in memoriam piece, which also mentions their shared love of the excellent dystopian short story “The Machine Stops
,” available for a buck for your Kindle through that link. It’s never mentioned in discussions of E.M. Forster’s works, but I’d take that over A Passage to India any day.
- BBC’s Assignment radio program looks at Paraguay’s preteen pregnancy problem, exploring why schoolgirls there are so vulnerable to abuse.
- Digg interviewed the Food Lab’s Kenji Lopez-Alt ahead of the release of his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
, later this month.
- I haven’t tried this recipe but I was intrigued enough to share it: Sichuan-spiced dry-brined turkey. Dry brining doesn’t require a giant bucket as a wet brine does, and the recipe calls for spatchcocking (stop laughing) the bird for more even cooking of the white and dark meats.
- New York has a rare positive story on climate change, arguing that we’ve finally gotten serious about slowing it. One major reason, in the author’s opinion, is the threat of a Republican candidate winning in 2016, as that party steadfastly denies the science on climate change in embarrassing fashion.
- How did lobster become so commoditized that it’s now on the McDonald’s menu? The New Yorker provides an “unnatural” history of the McLobster, looking at advances in lobster fishery that resemble other types of animal husbandry.
- If you want to know why baseball is becoming whiter, there’s a simple explanation: youth sports are too damn expensive.
- Celebrity chef Kerry Simon died this week at age 60 of multiple system atrophy. I first saw Simon on TV maybe fifteen years ago, on a Food Network show where he went to some off-Strip places in Vegas where he said the real chefs would go to eat. One of those places: Firefly, now one of my favorite restaurants in Las Vegas.
Keith (and anyone else coming to Vegas),
I’ve always loved Firefly, but you might wish to be aware that all the locations other than the new one on Paradies (down the street from the original) have closed. Much easier to get into. The crowds of locals are gone. Just before they moved locations, they had a major Food Poisioning episode at the old location. There was a bunch of negative press, the neighborhood locations, which had been jammed, suddenly were empty and then closed. Went to the Paradise store a coup,e of months ago and what a chance. 7 PM and the place was full of empty tables which never used to happen.
Keith,
As you see it, is there a viable solution to the youth sports question? I only see travel teams becoming more and more important. It seems like even high school teams are taking a back seat to the travel circuit.
Would eliminating the draft have a positive impact by incentivizing teams to develop academies in the US like they do in Latin America? Absent that, I struggle to see how significant change is going to be made.
Before eliminating the draft, someone needs to alert parents of how unlikely it is that their kid will turn pro. Parents who are spending absurd amounts of money on their kids in expectation of a college scholarship or pro career should learn that their expected ROI is dismal. On the other hand, parents who are spending absurd amounts of money so that their kid can learn the positive lessons and be part of the positive experiences that youth sports offer will get a much better return (albeit not a financial one) on their dollars.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/09/04/432795481/how-likely-is-it-really-that-your-athletic-kid-will-turn-pro
Keith,
ESPN has apparently granted a stay on the chats (Schoenfeld chatted Tuesday); does this mean you’ll be chatting there, here, or both?