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.