My entire top 100 prospects package is now up for The Athletic subscribers. That includes:
- The top 100
- The players who just missed
- The ranking of all 30 farm systems
- The team reports, including a top 20 for each club:
I also wrote my first draft post of 2020, covering a pair of potential #1 overall picks in Emerson Hancock and Asa Lacy. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Episode #2 brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), went up this past week, with guest Carlos Rodriguez, VP of Player Development and International Scouting for the Tampa Bay Rays. 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 only have a few links this week, between travel and the way that the news has been so focused on coronavirus. The best thing I read this week on that topic was Julia Belluz’s piece for Vox on why China’s COVID-19 case rate started declining. An infectious disease doctor answered some common questions about COVID-19 for WBUR.org.
Other links I found worth sharing:
- Barnes & Noble’s new hedge fund owners are trying to turn the chain into something more like indie stores.
- David J. Roth’s piece on The Infinite Scroll is a brilliant distillation of the frustration of looking for or reading content online.
- Nike, Apple, and Adidas are among the brands using forced Uighur labor in Chinese factories to produce their Goods, according to an investigation by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
- The Nation spoke to former Bloomberg campaign staffers about its rapid implosion.
- The great legacy board game Charterstone is back in print after a long wait.
One of my biggest reasons to shop at Barnes & Noble is their twice annual 50% off Criterion Collection sale. If they’re going to reduce the amount of space for DVD’s as this article indicates, I’d be worried that this sale will be ended. That would be very disappointing.
Thank you for the Vox article. Most informative piece I’ve read on Covid-19. Much better than the breathless reporting of NEW INFECTIONS!!! that we get from mainstream media with no background of how/why the virus spreads.
The problem I see with coronovirus reporting is that there is no perspective provided. At all. 2018-19 flu was associated with 35.5 million illnesses and 34,200 deaths – in America alone! Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
Based on this, the reaction to the coronavirus is competely irrational. We don’t lose our collective minds and freak out about the flu each year, and we shouldn’t be losing our collective minds and freaking out about this.
Well, there is the issue of mortality rates.
Yes but we simply don’t know what the mortality rate is currently.
I agree that there needs to be perspective, but people need to be rationally cautious and not careless. While there are definitely error bars on the mortality rate for the coronavirus, all evidence points to it being significantly deadlier than the flu. If there are 35 million coronavirus illnesses in the US, that would likely lead to between 175,00 – 350,000 deaths. So, this needs to be treated seriously, and we need to slow the infection rate so that our health care system is not overloaded.
I thought the description of Infinite Scroll captured the experience well, but that the author missed the mark on the reason for it: we want stuff for free/cheap. He briefly glosses over the better looking sites usually being the ones you pay for. Well, that’s just it. We all want content without paying money for it but then complain about the other ways we have to pay for it, namely through an inundation of ads in one form or another.
I use Spotify when I run. I hate when I’m flying along and suddenly the music that has been helping power me cuts out for an ad-break. And there is an easy and available solution: I could pay for Premium. But I don’t. As much as I hate those ad breaks, I hate the idea of paying $10/month to avoid them even more.
If you want a better online reading experience, pay for one. If not, deal with what you’re getting, which remains an immense amount of content, much of it good (why else would you be seeking it out?), for zero dollars out of your pocket.