My top 100 prospects package began to run this week on The Athletic, with the global top 100 running Monday, the column of guys who just missed on Tuesday, and then the American League org reports running the rest of the week. (Here’s the Rangers’ report, and the Royals’, for example.) You can access everything via this index page. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday.
My brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), debuted this past week as well, with a guest appearance from Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.
I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.
And now, the links…
- This week’s must-read piece is from James Hamblin in the Atlantic, on how we are all likely to get coronavirus. A vaccine won’t arrive in time to stop the outbreak, with U.S. policy failures a big reason why, and the virus’s long incubation period and 2% fatality rate ensure it will continue to spread despite containment efforts. We should try to get all our red city cards to the Scientist.
- Of course, our Dear Leader referred to concerns about coronavirus and the media coverage of it as a hoax, and then offered some false statements on the virus’s spread.
- Longreads: This history of the failure of the startup Homepolish is fascinating if entirely familiar. A fast-talking, highly educated con man convinced a lot of seemingly smart people to fund his company-without-a-business.
- GQ has the story of “the Great Buenos Aires bank heist,” meticulously planned and executed, only to collapse because of one gang member’s infidelity to his wife.
- The Guardian looks at the lasting influence of Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which continues to alter the global food scene with its ethos of local, sustainable cuisine.
- Writing for VICE, the great ex-Deadspin writer Laura Wagner details testimony in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s racist policing practices.
- Pippa Norris, Harvard political scientist and director of the Electoral Integrity Project, discusses the rise of authoritarian populism as a response to social change and why populism lends itself to authoritarian impulses.
- How Gmail filters emails from various candidates may affect how those candidates fare in the primaries.
- The mass murderer who killed nine Turkish immigrants outside Frankfurt was a Trump-loving, QAnon believer.
- Bloomberg profiled Restoration Games and founder Rob Daviau fresh off the company’s blockbuster Kickstarter effort for the Return to Dark Tower, a reboot of a cult classic game from the early 1980s, which raised over $4 million. Daviau is also the inventor of the “legacy game” concept, which turned Pandemic Legacy into one of the most acclaimed and highest-rated board games ever released.
- Celtics rookie Grant Williams loves him some Settlers of Catan.
- Jon Melli goes inside the campers where two Orioles pitching prospects make their homes.
- Learning another language can alter your perception of time.
- You can only be a writer if you can afford it.
- Plaid Hat Games, acquired several years ago by Asmodee, has been sold back to founder Colby Dauch, although much of its catalog of games will stay with Asmodee.