Couple of Insider posts this week – one with reactions to the initial rosters for the Futures Game and one on top prospects for tomorrow’s international free agent signing period. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon en route to Lakewood from Bristol.
My latest boardgame review for Paste is the two-player game Santorini, which has some light chess/Othello elements to it but is played on a smaller board (5×5) that keeps the games a bit shorter.
Thanks to everyone who’s already bought Smart Baseball; sales spiked this month between Father’s Day and the positive review in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve got book signings coming up:
* Miami, Books and Books, July 8th
* Harrisburg, Midtown Scholar, July 15th
* Berkeley, Books Inc., July 19th
* Chicago, Volumes, July 28th, 7:30 pm
* GenCon (Indianapolis), August 17th-20th
If you’re with an independent bookstore and would like to host a signing, please contact Danielle Bartlett at HarperCollins; we’re trying to accommodate everyone we can within my work schedule.
I also spoke with Sportsnet about the book, anxiety, and the 2017 Blue Jays.
And now, the links…
- Russell Carleton looks at the utility of pickoff throws over at Baseball Prospectus.
- This isn’t surprising if you follow Zack Greinke at all, but the pitcher told MLB.com’s Steve Gilbert how he used Statcast data to help turn his 2016 season around.
- “The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians.” Long, and you may have seen it, but it seems like more evidence of wrongdoing from the Trump campaign last summer.
- VICE details a planned (or, really, hypothetical) pay-for-play college basketball league that would focus on the Historically Black Colleges & Universities that have largely missed out on the financial windfall of modern college basketball.
- The mother of an immune-compromised daughter who was hospitalized recently because she was exposed to chicken pox lashed out at vaccine deniers for putting her daughter’s life at risk. Your decision not to vaccinate your kids isn’t just about your own neglect, but potentially harms other vulnerable people in your community.
- If you heard that a European Union court ruled against vaccine safety, well, not really.
- A research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine looks at benefits of increased health insurance coverage under the ACA, including lower costs of reduction in mortality rates compared to other policies. (One of the authors is Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto.)
- Eater has a great profile of gelato maker Meredith Kurtzman, who recently retired after two decades in the NYC food scene, working at restaurants (notably at Mario Batali’s Otto) and earning plaudits from chefs and restaurateurs for her work. It’s a wonderful piece because it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Kurtzman isn’t a very engaging or even likable subject.
- The NY Times is now charging for access to its cooking site, which … is fine, actually. I know there’s always a backlash when sites charge for content, but if you want good content, you’re going to have to start paying for it somewhere. I subscribe to their main site, the Washington Post, and Fine Cooking magazine, among others. However, charging for recipes is tricky because they can’t be copyrighted – you can copyright text, but not the specifics of a recipe – which makes this a little different than most subscriber walls.
- The great BBC series Broadchurch just returned on Wednesday for its third and final season, and IndieWire ran a Q&A with star David Tennant that’s more insightful than the standard “actor talks about series he didn’t write but explains everything anyway” sort of piece.
- The Koch Brothers plan to spend $400 million to help elect conservative Republican candidates in 2018. Repealing Obamacare and reducing taxes on the highest earners are two of their main policy priorities.
- Daniel Vaughn’s latest list of the top 50 BBQ joints in Texas came out a few weeks ago for Texas Monthly, and if you’re visiting that state, it’s a great resource. (If you live there, well, I’m sorry.)
- The new Presidential commission on so-called “voter fraud” – which does not actually exist on any significant scale – is really just an attack on voting rights. Even some GOP-led states are declining the requests for state voter information. Delaware hasn’t made any statement yet, but I have reached to the Secretary of State, asking them to refuse to comply.
- Sen. Al Franken very calmly de-pantsed Energy Secretary Rick Perry on climate change, helped by Perry’s apparent lack of any knowledge on the subject whatsoever.
- Whole Foods had long contributed to local farmers both in access to markets and in providing low-interest loans to help farmers ramp up operations to serve the chain. Now the farmers worry these programs will end after amazon’s purchase of the retailer.
Broadchurch has so many elements that I love in a TV show — appealing actors, picturesque setting, topnotch production values…but it is just so goddamned miserable that I had to give up on it. Everyone. Is. Making. Sad. Faces. All. The. Time. This season feels like a too-late entry into the misery porn genre.
I love Broadchurch. It’s just a shame that I need to turn on close captioning when I watch it, especially because of David Tennant. Every other show I’ve seen him in, I don’t have trouble understanding him, but I can’t make out what he’s saying with this accent.
We’ve done that too. But I love hearing a Scottish accent anyway, even if ah dinnae ken what they’re saying.
I generally look down on the, “THEY NEVER PLAYED THE GAME!” line of argumentation, but I may have to trot it out a bit with regards to the BP piece. I reached my limit as a ball player in high school but was the kind of player who pushed the limit on the base paths. And our coaches preached an approach not too dissimilar from what is discussed there: if you got back safely, your lead might be too small. Of course, we were high schoolers still learning what a “good lead” was and were dealing with high school pitchers who were much earlier on the curve of learning what a “good pickoff move” was.
But I remember one sequence where a pitcher threw over multiple times. I dove back safely each time and, for the first few throws, I inched out just a bit more. But by the 4th or 5th, I had to inch in closer. Why? Diving back in took a physical toll. It is a pretty physically involved task to go from standing more or less still to throwing your entire weight in one direction and landing hard with the ground. I actually had a scar on my arm for a few years from ripping open my elbow after that particular series of dives.
Now, this probably doesn’t come into play if we’re looking at a single throw. But if we are looking at throw after throw, even elite athletes are going to reach a point where they can’t dive back safely from the same or slightly farther point or simply don’t want to subject themselves to that.
But… as a non-pitcher, I can’t speak to whether or not multiple throws over take a toll there. Having performed the move a few times, it is a bit challenging for a right-handed thrower trying to maintain any level of actual surprise.
As someone who lives in Austin, I can only say:
1) Daniel Vaughn is a national treasure.
2) Greg Abbott hates Austin as much as he hates women and immigrants. These are dark times.
3) The mental image of a pants-free Rick Perry will haunt me. Thanks.
1. I agree.
2. And yet it doesn’t seem to hurt Abbott at the ballot box.
3. You’re quite welcome.
Is there a reason my comments aren’t posting?
One was caught in the spam filter; it’s up now. Was that the only comment that didn’t post?
Yea. Thanks! Wasn’t sure if I broke it.
Keith the Vox article seems to suggest that Franken didn’t do such a hot job and as such gave Perry an opportunity to attack the 100% human caused claim. I know that Perry is an idiot but why would Franken make such an easily argued mistake?
Probably just talking too fast. I’ve made mistakes like that on live TV – gotten numbers or facts wrong where I knew the right answer, but in the time pressure of that moment just said it wrong.
I’m almost a week late to this, but I just wanted to mention that, like the woman in the article you linked here, my daughter had an organ transplant (liver at 6 months old) and is immunosuppressed. She can’t have any live vaccines and so things like the chicken pox are extremely dangerous to her. She also has autism, so she’s one person anecdotal piece of evidence against the “vaccines cause autism” belief. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for your public efforts to fight the ignorance on vaccines. One of my biggest worries with my daughter is that one of her classmates will infect her with something that is easily preventable through a vaccine.