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.
Not related – how come you turned off the ability to comment on older posts? I sometimes want to comment in your book reviews.
It’s a wordpress setting – nearly all comments I would get on older posts are spam so I turned that setting on (to disable comments after some period, like six months) a while back.
That GQ piece, what a fantastic read! Clearly the Argentine public’s general distrust of banks plays heavily into the crew being seen as folk heroes. But strangely absent is any reflection on the fact that they stole from private citizens, not actually from the bank itself. It doesn’t seem like this at all impacts the public’s view of the thieves.
The coronavirus is the cure-
Human Beings are the disease-
This is the Earth correcting itself-
The characterization of the Homepolish article feels way off after reading the article. I don’t see where it suggests Santos is a con man. He was certainly not a good CEO, but it was a legitimate business that was making money. When his partner left, he was put in a position he wasn’t suited for, and it brought the company down. Santos seemed like he was well suited for the marketing aspects (and a design company is a lot about the marketing), but not running the technical aspects of the company that it seemed his partner had been mostly responsible for. So when Santos had to take over everything he couldn’t handle it.
It’s a sad story of a promising company going under, but it doesn’t seem like there was any sort of scam happening. Only things I saw that might have suggested there was anything untoward were the raising of the salaries and the expensive home. But their initial CEO salaries were really low for NYC, and the company was making money and doing well when they raised their salaries. And the expensive house seemed more like Santos’ husband’s thing, as his husband seemed to be independently well-off.
Hi Keith,
Unrelated, but I gotta ask, why don’t you like Chick-fil-A french fries? Apologies for the randomness, but have always been interested since stumbling upon your Twitter comment regarding them a ways back (as I love the things). Obviously not a pressing comment but would love to hear from you. All the best, man!
Hard to explain why I don’t like something … I just don’t think they have any real flavor and they have the distinctive texture of fries cooked from the freezer.
KLAW, Appreciate all your work. You are why I still have ESPN Insider (just won’t re-new now that you’re at the Athletic, much easier finding your stories there).
With COVID-19, we should be careful with quoting a mortality rate of a new-ish virus. The numerator vs denominator thing, we probably don’t realize how many people have been exposed, especially with children not really being affected by the virus (symptoms similar to normal seasonal cold). At this stage, 2% would probably represent millions of fatalities.