My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out in three days! You can buy it wherever you can buy books right now, but allow me to recommend bookshop.org, which sources books from independent bookstores or just gives some of their proceeds from direct sales to indie stores.
For The Athletic subscribers this week, Eno Sarris and I examined the five tools for position players from both scouting and analytical perspectives. There will be another piece for pitchers, which I hope to get done this week (I think Eno’s well ahead of me for his part). On my own podcast, I spoke with former Angels scouting director Eddie Bane about Mike Trout, all-time draft busts Bill Bene and Kiki Jones, and more. You can subscribe here on Apple and Spotify.
On the board game front, I reviewed Oceans, the new standalone sequel to the game Evolution, over at Paste this week. For Vulture, I looked at pandemic-themed games, including the one by that name, with thoughts on why diseases are such a popular theme.
I did a virtual bookstore event with Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar on Thursday, which you can watch here if you missed it. I’ll do another such event on Friday, April 24th, with Sean Doolittle via DC’s Politics & Prose; you can sign up by buying a copy of The Inside Game here.
I spoke to Ryan Phillips of The Big Lead about The Inside Game and my move to the Athletic, among other topics, appeared on the Sports Information Solutions podcast with my former ESPN colleague Mark Simon to talk about the book, and talked about boardgames during quarantine on the Just Not Sports podcast.
And now the links…
- Longreads first: This WIRED piece on the neurological decline of a brilliant young coder is devastating and kind of hopeless, yet so well-written.
- John Horton Conway died this week of complications from COVID-19; this Guardian profile of the master mathematician from 2015 gives you a sense of his works and his persona. Conway invented the zero-player game The Game of Life, which proceeds according to fixed rules from whatever starting position you create. It’s famous in mathematical and computer science circles, at least.
- The economic pain from the pandemic will be unfairly distributed. This piece from the New Yorker makes some strong points, although there’s a bit of a survivorship bias angle to the conversations with an investor who claims he saw the pandemic coming and profited heavily from investments around it.
- Republicans are trying to use the pandemic as cover to remove thousands of voters from the registration rolls, with Wisconsin a prominent example of how they’re targeting voters of color too.
- Anti-vaxxers are already spreading disinformation about COVID-19 and preparing to fight vaccinations if and when a vaccine is developed for it – but there are also signs that some vaccine hesitant people are reconsidering their views.
- Dr. Grace Farris, the chief of medicine at Mount Sinai West in New York and author of some very clever cartoons on her Instagram account @coupdegracefarris, wrote a bittersweet piece in the New York Times about how she hasn’t seen her kids in four weeks to try to keep them away from the coronavirus while she’s working at the hospital.
- No matter what Fox News tells you, there is no evidence that COVID-19 came out of a laboratory in China or anywhere else.
- South Dakota’s Republican governor is one of five who’ve resisted issuing stay-at-home orders, and now the state has one of the nation’s worst hotspots for COVID-19.
- Ohio Republicans are trying to get the state’s governor, Mike DeWine (R), to reopen the state’s economy. This is becoming a trend across the Midwest and south, despite public health experts’ recommendations that the states remain closed.
- And we may not be able to reopen at all until we start testing a lot more people – especially those who aren’t visibly sick.
- An email chain involving experts inside and outside the government shows just how far behind the curve Trump and even the CDC were in preparing for the pandemic here.
- Why did a company with no employees and no history of producing medical equipment get a $55 million contract to make N95 masks for the federal government?
- Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has had to arrange covert shipments of protective masks from China to avoid the federal government seizing them, since the feds haven’t provided enough masks to the state in the first place.
- Molly Roberts, writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems the Tara Reade allegations pose for Democrats looking to support Joe Biden (or who simply want to defeat Trump in November).
- Bill Simmons bought a $16 million home outside L.A., and Variety reported on it but took the story down within hours.
- There’s a GoFundMe open to support Oakland’s Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest black-owned independent bookstore.
- CMON’s Kickstarter for Ankh: Gods of Egypt, the newest game from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun), has already crossed $1.25 million.
- Jupiter Disco, a Brooklyn cocktail bar owned by a friend of my partner, has a Kickstarter out (already funded) for a new cocktail zine called PRESERVATION! to help keep the bar afloat during the shutdown.
Keith, out of curiosity did you ever work closely with Bill Simmons at ESPN, and if yes, was he good to work with?
Closely, no. Met him once, talked to him several times, always enjoyed our conversations & never had any issues whatsoever working with him.
I can see these “liberation protests” backfiring and the fact that Trump is pushing for them isn’t going to help his election chances. A large majority of people understand why we’re staying at home. If the economy opens before we have large scale testing available and on the other side of the curve, who is going to participate? And that is from both a labor and consumer standpoint. There are a lot of people in the high risk group and many more live with people in this group. Add to that there are many young, healthy people succumbing to this disease.
The Tara Reade situation is super-problematic, and I’m honestly unsure how to feel about it other than two certainties:
1) I so wish the Democratic primary resulted in (almost) any other of its leading candidates.
2) The all-around disaster of Donald Trump (as a President, a leader, and a human being) still makes this an easy choice for me, even if you believe the worst of Biden. Which is convenient as it relates to voting, but is a super-sad state of affairs.
Also, completely unrelated, but thank you Keith for that tandem piece you wrote with Eno. It was incredibly-insightful and balanced, one of the most enjoyable pieces I’ve read on the Athletic. Can’t wait for the pitching edition!
If the Governor of South Dakota had issued the stay at home order, all of the workers at the Smithfield plant would have still been considered essential and gone into work everyday. Is the article trying to make the argument that a stay at home order would have prevented the outbreak at the plant? Is the author criticizing working conditions at the company? Seems the strongest arguments are made for the latter, completely contrary to the headline. Sure, the headline is technically accurate, but is this correlation or causation? I don’t think that’s proven.
Treating an entire state like it is the biggest city also seems questionable. Chicago has a population of about 2.7 million. Cobden, IL has a population of 1,100. New York’s 8.4 million. Milan, New York has a population of about 2,400. The splits are even greater in very rural states. I am all for issuing orders for big cities, but tiny towns? I think that’s up for debate.
The Mother Jones article about voter suppression is misleading when it comes to Wisconsin (where I live). I agree with anyone who talks about our stupid election on April 7. It should have been rescheduled, done only by mail, you name it, anything except continued on as if there wasn’t a stay-at-home order.
However, claims that votes were suppressed in enormous numbers by the law requiring ID makes no sense. You need an ID to do anything – get on a plane, buy alcohol at Pick n Save where they will card you even if you are 70, you name it. The downtown Milwaukee DMV does nothing but ID’s – very little wait time, very accessible location to public transportation. A state ID card can be gotten for free.
For voting, the way it works is you bring in your ID, they look you up in a very large book, make sure you are the person under your name at the address listed (important for me, I have a somewhat common name), you sign the book, and you vote. It makes sense to get rid of the names of people who have moved – it’s a large book, and sometimes it takes a while to find your name. That names were removed in error is obviously bad, but it makes sense to keep the voter rolls up to date in order to keep the process moving swiftly.
If you are not registered, you just need your ID and a bill at your current address, and you can register. It’s so easy, the last time I voted in person, there was a line of about 10 people for people who were already registered to vote. A guy walked in at the same time as me and registered. He voted before I did!
The woman in the Mother Jones article brought her electric bill just in case there was a problem. Smart! I do the same thing, just in case, as I’m sure do many others. I have absolutely no idea why she was so mad. You just get in a different line. If my name wasn’t listed, I’d say, “huh, that’s weird, kind of annoying, but whatever, that’s why I brought a utility bill” and go register.
Previous to the voter ID rule, it would be very easy to vote multiple times if you moved recently. I actually considered it once. I had moved shortly before a presidential election. I could have gone to my previous voting location, given my name, and voted. Then, gone to my new voting location, showed a utility bill, registered, and voted again. I decided not to, simply because I’m honest. But it would have been super easy to do, and because I didn’t have to show ID tying me to a certain address, there would be no way for anyone to know that I had voted twice. And, if someone was motivated, using scanned and altered utility bills, it’d be super easy to vote in different locations all day long.
Like I said, what we did in Wisconsin a few weeks ago was stupid and indefensible. But to claim that the voter ID law and removing names from the voter rolls for people who it appears have moved is some horrible nefarious plot is simply wrong. If other states don’t make it super easy to register on the spot, then sure, for them, it’s a valid argument, but not in Wisconsin.
Peer-reviewed, scholarly studies find racial and ethnic minorities have less access to photo IDs, so yes this is voter suppression. There is no peer-reviewed evidence to suggest there is even a infinitesimal amount of the multiple voting you describe. Try again.
Bill-
Haha, ok, I will try again. As I said, in other states, similar laws may make it difficult to vote. It’s Just. Not. True. of Wisconsin.
Do you think so little of racial and ethnic minorities that you don’t think they have the capacity to go to a DMV and get a free ID? I don’t.
As I said, the downtown Milwaukee DMV does nothing but ID’s. It’s so fast to get an ID there it’s hard to believe. It’s an easy location to reach. The barrier to anyone getting an ID in Wisconsin’s biggest city is very low.
If someone wants to participate in the democratic process in Wisconsin, there are almost no real reasons that they cannot. It takes extraordinarily little effort and preparation to vote here. If you want to believe otherwise that’s fine. There are people who believe vaccines are bad too. Feel free to ignore reality and join them!
It doesn’t matter how many times you try to use anecdotal evidence, it still doesn’t work. But since this seems to be your jam, I’ll put this in language you can understand:
Even if one accepts your premise, what about the person that lives 2 bus transfers away and works first shift and can’t access your oasis ID vending machine? What if also this person literally lives paycheck to paycheck and would have to choose between the ID fee and dinner for their child – which if you’ve watched the news anytime in the last month is 40% of America? Is this scenario more or less likely than Danny Ocean plotting his move across town to time with an election so he can vote twice while air-twirling a fictitious mustache?
Also, nice added straw man at the end to complete your frivolous argument bingo card.
How did this person in your example get a job in the first place? You need an ID to get almost any job. There is not some sort of army of would-be voters who don’t have ID’s and don’t have the time to get one. You need an ID to be a functional member of society.
And the anecdote about me moving was purely to show how easy it was to vote twice for me, had I wanted to. I then provided a very easy example about how one could vote all day long and no one would ever know.
Ask yourself honestly, if someone was involved in a local campaign that may not be decided by many votes, wouldn’t they at least consider altering electric bills and voting all day long? Anyone who has worked on any campaign has to have at least thought about it. Heck, I thought of it and I’m just some random guy! I’m not saying it happened. But dead people voted in Chicago for years. (Maybe they still do.) Politics is a dirty game. If it meant being unemployed or being some elected official’s staffer for the next four years, what do you think a lot of people would do? It’s a good loophole to close.
“Ask yourself honestly, if someone was involved in a local campaign that may not be decided by many votes, wouldn’t they at least consider altering electric bills and voting all day long?”
And yet this has been investigated numerous times, including a whole federal commission that tried like hell to find widespread voter fraud, and it found nothing. The most recent case of a large amount of voter fraud was someone going house to house and changing the votes of absentee ballots. When I vote, I don’t provide any identification. All I do is sign a paper and the poll workers compare the signature I made to the one on file. There are several states right now that have vote by mail and there isn’t widespread fraud. They do the same as me; they sign their ballot and that signature is compared to the one on file.
Agreed, it may not have happened, as I stated. But it would have been very easy to pull off, which is why I think it was a good loophole to close. It’s a good proactive solution.
Interestingly, I think a good comparison is to MLB and their reactive solution regarding netting. If netting would have been extended 30 years ago, imagine the hue and cry that would have occurred. Change only happened after there were many injuries, even though reasonable people could see they were a likely scenario. This is the same kind of thing – why wait for injuries (voter fraud) to happen, make sure it doesn’t in the first place.
I enjoyed the book excerpt reprinted in The Athletic and am partial to this particular parcel of prose:
“Partisans of prep pitching prospects point to these players as proof of their proposition”
Now, I am required to purchase the book in the hope there’s some hidden iambic pentameter.
Keith, I’ve preordered your new book (from Powell’s, and it will arrive in a day or so. I’d also like to have the convenience of an electronic version. What is your position on the ethics of procuring a copy of the ebook from a torrent site?
By the way, I just bought a copy of the new book by Mike Davis & Jon Weiner on LA in the sixties directly from Verso. When they emailed my receipt, there was a link to download the ebook. That was appreciated, and made me want to buy direct from the more often…