My annual prospect ranking package started to appear on ESPN.com this week for Insiders, with the farm system rankings coming in three separate parts: teams ranked 1 to 10, teams ranked 11 to 20, and teams ranked (sad trombone) 21 to 30. I held a Klawchat here on Friday, after all three parts were posted.
The top 100 itself will roll out over five days this upcoming week, 100 to 81 on Monday and 20 to 1 on Friday. I will probably chat Friday afternoon again so that you have the whole list available to you before I take your questions.
Over at Paste I reviewed the really adorable boardgame Kodama: The Tree Spirits, a great family game with a new mechanic that almost feels a little artistic.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter, where, I kid you not, someone actually told me “you should stick to baseball” in response to the last edition, because apparently I can’t talk about whatever I want to talk about in my own fucking newsletter
Gah. The links:
- Man Boasts Of Sexual Assault, Later Inaugurated 45th President Of United States. Not The Onion.
- Journalists covering President Trump are in for a hellish experience, one where he’ll abuse and attack reporters whose coverage he dislikes, and where he’ll simply lie his way past serious questions. Best of luck. We’re all counting on you, so no pressure.
- The New York Times interviewed numerous women who voted for Donald Trump. The answers are all different, yet all horrifying – the rationalization, the economic ignorance, the invocations of the paradox of tolerance, and so on. Yet the message is fairly clear – the Democratic Party did not do a good job convincing enough voters that Trump’s policies were harmful. Either they didn’t have the right messaging, or they didn’t reach enough people, or both. But we can’t blame voters – even when they say dumb things – for not voting the way we wanted them to.
- I’m writing this as the global Women’s Marches are ongoing, and enjoyed seeing that even a small group of visitors to Antarctica are participating.
- A reader of mine wrote this humorous op ed on why Trump’s vaccine-denialist pandering angers even nice doctors.
- Longread: The Atlantic looks at Iceland has curbed substance abuse among teenagers. Quick summary – it’s complicated, and it involves parents stepping up their efforts.
- A long-running lawsuit against Cargill and Nestle over turning a blind eye to child slave labor on African chocolate plantations may finally get its day in court, and if this does nothing more than scare large chocolate manufacturers into ensuring their suppliers don’t use slaves, that would be a positive outcome.
- Actress and activist Ashley Judd gave a TED talk in October about online misogyny, and within it argued video game developers must wipe misogyny from their games and that all tech companies must fight sexism in the workplace. (The entire TED talk is embedded in both articles.)
- Everyone seemed to mock Betsy DeVos’ answer to the question about guns in schools during her confirmation hearing, but did that cause the reporting to miss just how crazy and/or unprepared she was?
- Speaking of Ms. DeVos, in this 2014 piece Jeb “Mobute” Lund looked at the 15 worst owners in sports, including the DeVos family, who own the Orlando Magic.
- A reader sent along this link on how research into turmeric’s medicinal properties was a waste of time, because the molecules within it (curcumin) that show anti-inflammatory properties on their own don’t do so within the body.
- Shake Shack has pledged to source all its chicken according to higher animal welfare standards … by 2024. I understand these things take time, so overnight promises are worthles, but seven years for a company that doesn’t even sell that much chicken? Within the piece, however, it says all the eggs they use are now from chickens raised cage-free, so at least they have a history of meeting such goals.
- I wrote my thoughts on season 4 of Sherlock earlier in the week, but EW interviewed showrunner Stephen Moffatt about the season and the finale as well, and he offered some truly cringeworthy comments on the Molly sequence in that last episode.
- The national soccer team from Timor-Leste was kicked out of the Asian Cup for using Brazilian players with fake documents.
- I love a good strategy boardgame, but this five-hour, £175 game now on Kickstarter is beyond my tolerance for the genre.
I know it was from a little over two years ago and not the main point, but the 15 worst owners in sports article needs to be updated. A couple of the owners have since won championships (Ricketts, Glass, and Gilbert). And it seems fellow NFL owners might want to add Chargers owner Alex Spanos to the list.
Good long read from your employer about teens, compulsive gambling, and gaming.
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18510975/how-counter-strike-turned-teenager-compulsive-gambler
I’m not even sure that Jerry Jones deserves a spot on that list. Yeah he’s not a great owner, but he’s not as awful as the other listed owners, Spanos, the Monforts, Angelos, and Vivek
Today, yeah Jones could come off. He was on the list originally for the same reason Mike Brown will remain, they were owner and GM. Jones has at least learned to listen to others even if he keeps the GM title. But Ranadive, Monforts, Kroenke (even the fans of his most successful team Arsenal don’t like him), Sarver, York, all could join the list now.
I’m an orioles fan, and not necessarily a huge Angelos fan, but I think he’s mended his ways enough to get off the worst owners lists. He’s hired aGM and mostly let him alone, albeit with a lowish payroll and an occasional Chris Davis signing, but he’s not openly meddling like he used to. And unlike virtually every other owner or there, he’s a stalwart liberal, including not just his loyalty to the Baltimore Democratic party, but his long-standing advocacy for the poor, his sorry for BLM, and other things I wouldn’t normally expect from a sports owner. He also hasn’t begged for a new stadium yet, which is always a win.
Support, not sorry
It really depends on how you define “liberal”. I would agree most owners are fiscally conservative (strangely, except when it comes to taking pubic money to build a new sports venue). On social issues, they are going to run the gamut from very conservative to very liberal.
Pretty dweeby as usual, Keith.
OK.
Pretty worthless as usual, Damer.
Not really surprised, considering the publisher, but that article about the “worst owners in sports” basically just read as “REPUBLICAN! BAD!” There were a couple legitimate gripes (the Panthers’ owner looking the other way on Greg Hardy being a big one), but it mostly seemed like the author was just complaining about people who disagree with his political beliefs, rather than a serious (or humorous, for that matter) take on the issue.
“The answers are all different, yet all horrifying”.
I’m not sure where to go with this comment other than to say…wow. It’s the NYT, so of course they’re going to put some ridiculous stuff in there because they are so anti-Trump. The woman who said she liked Trump after listening to an 8 year old – I mean, that’s so insanely stupid, how did they even find her?
However, the opinions of the women who feel Obama didn’t support law enforcement enough, feel Trump will bring high-skilled jobs, feel that the current welfare system traps its participants into relying on it forever, and so on…what is horrifying about that? These are reasonable positions that many people agree with.
I extremely, extremely, reluctantly voted for Trump. After I voted, I felt dirty. However, the reaction after he won has made me feel somewhat more comfortable. I’ve read so much stuff in the media that is so over the top, watched demonstrators calling Trump supporters Nazis (which trivializes the Holocaust to such an extent it’s incomprehensible), read folks like yourself calling people’s reasonable opinions horrifying, and so many other things that I can’t identify with or understand that I feel better about my decision because these things are at odds at how I live my life and comport myself in general. (Sorry, I do realize that may come off as sanctimonious, of course I’m not perfect, but I think you get my point!)
What’s horrifying about, say, believing Trump will bring high-skilled jobs back to the US is that there is absolutely no rational basis for this belief whatsoever. He has no history of job creation and has outsourced labor to other countries while not paying contractors who do skilled work for him. And the sad economic truth is that no one really knows how to create lots of high-skilled jobs. You can try to foster a culture of innovation, which means ensuring that starting a business is relatively simple and that burdens on the smallest businesses are reasonable, but those things are already true of the U.S., especially compared to the world’s other most developed economies.
Feeling that the current welfare system traps people … I mean, we tried welfare reform, and it didn’t work. It didn’t alleviate poverty. It didn’t provide enough incentive to kick people back into the workforce, because it didn’t address the real reasons they’re not in the workforce (such as the lack of affordable child care that would make working a net-positive economic choice).
Feeling that Obama didn’t support law enforcement enough – I don’t quite know where to go with that, because it’s so vague that it’s impossible to argue against. But it’s not as if we saw officers who shot unarmed people of color going to jail under his administration.
What I find horrifying about it all is the total lack of critical thinking. It’s as if these women quoted in the piece have no idea what happened as recently as ten or twenty years ago. And they seem to have swallowed Trump’s grandiose claims on job creation – which were always light on specifics – without questioning them. Don’t you hear someone say they can create good jobs and ask “how?” You can bring manufacturing jobs back here with protectionist tax policies, but you’ll do damage to the broader economy, so you’d better have another idea, and I don’t think he did. (FTR, I don’t think either party has the answer to that question.) That’s the part that horrifies me – they voted for a man who lied and bluffed his way through the campaign, and has a history of all sorts of questionable behavior in his businesses and his personal life, without giving any serious thought to the claims he was making.
In the short term, protectionist tax policies will probably bring some jobs back or at least prevent more jobs from leaving. But after that, other countries are going to impose taxes on goods made here and these major corporations are only going to bring more automation to manufacturing. So little is gained. In other industries, there is only going to be more innovation and likely more jobs lost. Driverless cars is probably going to take 10, 20, maybe 30 years for people to adopt, but driverless trucks may be just around the corner because that is something trucking companies can save money on. And that doesn’t even consider delivery from drones. What is going to happen to all those truck drivers, delivery van drivers, taxi drivers, etc? Most will be out of work. And what is the next industry to see big efficiencies gained? If you work in IT or have some good training in STEM, jobs will be continue to be plentiful. No one has a solution to these problems and there probably isn’t going to be one that doesn’t involve a lot more investment in education.
I read an article a few months back that broke Americans down into two groups; savers and strugglers. If you can save money for retirement, rainy day fund, your kids college, you’ll continue to do alright If you can’t, things are going to get more difficult. The gap between these two groups is only going to grow.
Short response to your response, so we don’t write a novel together (and thanks for your answer), is simply that politicians all state goals, but virtually never have specifics. Obama promised to close Guantanamo, and he didn’t. He promised universal healthcare, and came through, mostly. However, there weren’t specifics during the campaign about either.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that many or most politicians lie and bluff their way through campaigns. (Which is why people like baseball – a pitcher can’t lie and bluff his way to a strikeout. It’s like the opposite of politics!)
that politicians all state goals, but virtually never have specifics
Well, HRC had some detailed plans on her site, and more specifics than Trump ever did – which isn’t to say they would have worked, but she did bring them.
Trump, however, promised bullshit. These claims were all transparent nonsense – like the job creation one. Granted, I have an econ degree etc., but I don’t think that was required to realize his claims on that front were impossible, and of course everyone knew that he outsourced work in his own businesses (because it made good business sense to do so).
I agree with Drew–he said it better than I would have. You come off sounding a little sanctimonious saying that all the responses were “horrifying.” I didn’t vote for Trump, but I would have if the choice were binary. There are very legitimate reasons to support him–federal courts, returning power to the states, religious liberty, immigration, abortion, healthcare costs, not trusting her–over HRC, some of which were touched upon by the women interviewed.
“You can try to foster a culture of innovation, which means ensuring that starting a business is relatively simple and that burdens on the smallest businesses are reasonable…”
Can we agree that Republican policies generally do more to help small businesses? Is it horrifying for a female business owner to say she voted for Trump because he will likely ease regulations, bring down tax rates, and repeal Obamacare?
“Can we agree that Republican policies generally do more to help small businesses?”
I don’t know that we can agree on that. First, small businesses are exempt from many of the regulations Republicans decry. Second, the weakening of antitrust laws advance the interests of very large businesses at the expense of small ones. Third, the onerous private health care system burdens the lower wage worker that small businesses often rely on, as they’re unable to cover costs. Now, these aren’t issues that Democrats are particularly adept at addressing, but to most Republicans these systemic issues are not even considered bugs.
“There are very legitimate reasons to support him–federal courts, returning power to the states, religious liberty, immigration, abortion, healthcare costs….”
I question the legitimacy of many of these “reasons.” First of all, some of these things are just euphemisms for bad behavior. “Religious liberty,” for example, is just a pleasant way of saying, “we would like to be able to discriminate against people, and use the Bible as an excuse.” People in this country ALREADY have religious liberty, but it ends at the point that it does harm to others.
Similarly, while many of the issues you list are contentious and difficult ones, about which reasonable people can disagree, Trump never actually addressed them in a meaningful way. Does anyone actually know what his position on abortion is, or what he plans to do about that issue? Or immigration, for that matter, since every time he opens his mouth he’s got a different version of his “policy”? And while the details on those subjects kept changing, there were other issues where he never revealed any details at all, e.g. his “secret” healthcare plan, which is apparently going to remain a secret forever.
While “horrifying” is certainly a strong word, one cannot help but notice that these women largely showed no critical thinking skills at all, and allowed themselves to buy into a bill of goods that Trump cannot deliver.
I’m going to change to Michael H for the sake of differentiating myself from the other Michaels.
I think it’s pretty smug to accuse those women of not thinking critically. I agree that “religious liberty” is largely code for discrimination and is mostly BS, but it’s still a legitimate reason to vote for someone if, for example, you don’t believe taxpayer funds should go toward birth control or abortions, or that small businesses shouldn’t be required to provide contraception in their healthcare plans. I disagree, but I don’t think those issues are illegitimate or that their proponents aren’t thinking critically.
Most of the women stated that they didn’t love Trump, but simply preferred him over Hillary, especially when they took into account the issues. How is that “horrifying” or lacking critical thinking?
While I agree that Trump never clearly articulated his positions on a bunch of issues, I would put my money on him to be more conservative than HRC on most things. And I assume most people would. For abortion, he said multiple times that he was pro-life and that he disliked Roe v. Wade.
“…a bill of goods that Trump cannot deliver.”
How much will he not be able to deliver? Bringing back significant numbers of manufacturing jobs and building a wall are both pipe dreams, but I think he can accomplish a lot of what he ran on and what people expect. Filling the courts with Scalia-types, a promise he made continually, will address a lot of social issues. I expect him, with a Republican Congress, to lower taxes, repeal Obamacare, increase military funding, get tougher on the border (an admittedly amorphous concept), and return a lot of power back to the states. Am I wrong?
With 20-20 hindsight, it’s apparent the Democrats failed miserably at “messaging.” I believe, however, that many on the left (and I plead guilty to this as well) likened this election to inviting somebody to make a sandwich with their choice of either a fresh loaf of white bread or a package of moldy hamburger buns. Yes, I can hear the off-putting arrogance in that analogy, but #NeverTrump just seemed self-evident.
One reason I think many people voted for Trump is that he was seen as capable of rising above the Washington D.C. BS. For example, it was easy (at least for me) to picture him walking into a room as POTUS and saying, “WTF! Medicare is almost broke [which it is] and we need to fix it, politics aside, ideologies aside. Let’s figure out how to do it.” Same thing on tax reform, immigration, etc. And I think people would have responded at least neutrally to that type of approach because he wasn’t seen as an ideologue. Most people are dying for a solution-oriented approach that eschews both sides’ pet issues. That is why many voted for him because they saw him (rightly or wrongly) as taking that approach, when, for the last 8 years, we’ve had the opposite, ideology-driven approach. (And to be fair, we’ve seen that approach probably for last 16 years.)
Problem is the last few months have shown that will never happen. The left will oppose him at every turn because they don’t see him as legitimate. They won’t allow him to rise above the BS. So he won’t and nothing will change.
The left will oppose him at every turn because they don’t see him as legitimate.
I don’t think that’s an accurate statement of the problem here.
Yes, keeping in mind that the Republicans have complete control of both the legislative and executive branches, let us not buy into the argument that “it was the fault of the left” if and when Trump fails.
Well, first, I didn’t say that. And, second, it seems like that’s all we heard when Obama’s first two years went the way they went (badly). “OH, it’s the right! Those racists! They just oppose him at every turn!”
I think what I said is a big part of the problem. Trump’s inaugural? Sanders could’ve given 90% of it. Yet, it elicited howls from the left because they can’t see past the person giving the speech. Which, frankly, I get! He’s certainly not a sympathetic character.
First of all, I think you’re being very disingenuous. Your remarks certainly suggest you’re a Trump voter, even though you keep referring to that group as if you’re an outsider.
Second, your argument is that if Trump just had a (D) next to his name, the Democrats would be on board with his ideas. That may be true for the TPP, but it’s not true for the wall, the oil pipelines, the tax cuts, the Obamacare repeal, or 95% of the rest of it. And if you think that Bernie Sanders could have given 90% of Trump’s speech, either you didn’t read the speech, or you don’t know Sanders all that well.
Third, in Obama’s first two years, he helped turn the economy around, wound down the war in Iraq, got unemployment headed on a downward trajectory, and–oh, yeah–managed to get Obamacare passed (where so many other Democratic presidents had failed). Sounds like those two years went “badly” to me.
If you can’t see that Donald Trump is dangerous in ways that no Democrat or Republican has ever been, that’s on you. I don’t say that because he’s an R vs. a D, or because of his personality, or his hair, or some other triviality. How many reckless things does he have to do, how many careless or inappropriate tweets does he need to send, how many lies does he have to tell, before you move off your facile “The Democrats are just being obstructionist” argument?
“Sanders could’ve given 90% of it. ”
That is delusion. I honestly do not know what else to call it. That was perhaps the darkest inaugural address ever given. The idea that Bernie Sanders would put together a speech even approximating that is comical at best.