The Inside Game is out! You can buy the physical book on Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or get the Kindle version on amazon. (Some of my biggest fans have already left one-star reviews!) Audible named it one of their top picks in History/Nonfiction for the spring of 2020 too.
To promote the book, I did a live ‘virtual’ bookstore event with help from Nats reliever and voracious reader Sean Doolittle, which you can watch if you registered and bought the book through Politics and Prose. I also appeared on several podcasts:
- Grierson & Leitch: Conversations (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
- Baseball by the Book (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
- Birds All Day (Athletic, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
- Creative Nonfiction (Apple, Stitcher)
- The Good Phight’s Hittin’ Season (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
There are also some very positive reviews for The Inside Game out already on Throneberry Fields, Farther Off the Wall, and Porchlight Books. It also made a Wall Street Journal roundup of three recommended baseball books for the spring and was recommended by Inside Hook.
I did a Q&A at the Athletic on Thursday, and part two of my diptych on scouting, covering pitcher grades, with Eno Sarris is also up for subscribers. The Athletic ran an excerpt from The Inside Game on base-rate neglect and why teams draft too many high school pitchers in the first round.
My own podcast this week featured Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, talking about COVID-19 and baseball fandom. You can listen to it on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.
I did send out a new edition of my newsletter last week, and I’ll be back on it more often now, I think; you can sign up for free here.
And now, the links…
- Those of us in the United States are living in a failed state.
- This editorial on Eater London explains how restaurants have to adapt to survive what could be another year and a half of “corona time,” with two important takeaways for us: Doing what you can to support restaurants still operating during the shutdown is critical to their survival, and we are not going to see fans in ballparks any time soon.
- Scientists are tired of explaining that COVID-19 was not made in a Chinese lab.
- Are you having stranger dreams during the pandemic than you usually would? National Geographic looks at reasons why that is happening to so many of us.
- Governors talking about reopening their states – or actually doing it, in the case of Georgia – are being way too cavalier, as the pandemic is not under control yet, according to this New York Times editorial by Professor Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
- Nationalist groups are using COVID-19 to push their agendas to reduce civil liberties, consolidate power, and spread hate and distrust of marginalized populations.
- Why did Nikola Motor, whose CEO just bought a $32 million ranch, get a $4 million payout from the COVID-19 small business fund?
- Those Facebook groups pushing anti-lockdown protests are largely just astroturfing by the Dorr brothers, a family of conservative pro-gun activists whom Republican lawmakers have called “scam artists.”
- Are COVID-19 mortality rates higher than they need to be because so many developed nations’ citizens are fundamentally unhealthy?
- The New York Times looked athow children’s shows are responding to kids’ needs during the shutdown, such as Sesame Street’s episode with a virtual playdate for Elmo and various real and Muppet friends. (I especially enjoyed Cookie Monster’s appearance.)
- A few German citizens are protesting lockdown measures under the guise of liberty or some nonsense.
- Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) failed to disclose stock sales in 2019 while she was serving in Congress, violating federal law.
- Board game news: Renegade is now taking pre-orders for Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the West Kingdom trilogy, for delivery at Gen Con (if the convention takes place).
- I don’t know much about the upcoming game Sea of Legends other than that it’s narrative-based and looks like it has a great theme.
- Boardgamegeek’s annual Golden Geek Awards balloting has now opened. I do wonder if Wingspan will suffer any backlash to its crossover success in the voting. I’d vote for it for Game of the Year, Innovative Game, Strategy Game, and Family Game of the Year; Watergate for two-player game of the year; and either Res Arcana or Point Salad for Card Game; plus Evolution for best app.
I’m going to guess that the R’s will call for the death penalty for Shalala, since they already electrocuted irony.
I was being sarcastic when I suggested the President would instruct us to use bleach as a cure for COVID-19.
addoeh: This week, the President has directly contradicted public health officials on multiple occasions. I almost expect him to either (1) issue an executive order that a vaccine for the coronavirus needs to be released to the public prior to any testing or clinical trials or (2) promote some crackpot anti-vaxxer concoction of turmeric and bleach.
Keith Law: The latter.
Who is Vaugn Tan and why should we put any stock in his editorial?
There’s a link to his bio at the bottom of the editorial. Seems like he has relevant expertise to write such an editorial, whether one agrees with his points or not.
Nikola should be shut down.
Uh…
“… strategy consultant, author, and professor at University College London. His first book is The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food.”
We could post editorials until we’re blue in the face and all presume our position is the only legit one. Not only is it impossible to be certain with a situation as unprecedented and uncertain as Corona, but we need to separate fact from opinion.
The editorial is on how restaurants should adapt to corona uncertainty, and his research area is on how businesses (including restaurants) respond to uncertainty. What type of expertise do you think would be more relevant to this type of editorial? It’s not exactly like Bret Stephens writing about the science of climate change.
Exactly. I’m not clear why he would be unqualified to write this piece, or what the “fact vs. opinion” complaint is when the piece is clearly opinion.
Okay… so one guy thinks we won’t have fans at baseball games for a while. So what?
The internet is littered with editorials right now with everyone proclaiming the OBVIOUS and ONLY possible outcome of corona.
if it is just opinion, there are not “takeaways”.
Do you have a cite for either of those? And even there, you are conceding my point: it is their “view”. An opinion. A highly educated, fact-informed opinion. But an opinion nonetheless. We are literally in unprecedented times. Which means a pretty high level of uncertainty. Which, ironically, is this guy’s area of expertise. So, no, there is no “reality” we can point to regarding the future.
What would the response be if I linked an editorial that stated, “The reality is we have no idea if quarantine is saving lives or taking more lives due to the detrimental effects on the economy.” Because, well, that actually is a “reality” too right now. I imagine that’d be quickly dismissed as anti-science and politicized and what not.
This guy’s recommendations are helpful. But the idea that there are definitive “take aways” about what the future may hold which come from an editorial by a guy who’s expertise is essentially in conjecture (and conjecture isn’t a bad thing… it is what everyone is doing right now) seems to pretty obviously be stealing a base. Again, if someone were doing this in pursuit of a different course of action, I imagine they’d be attacked or dismissed by most folks here. It isn’t what he’s recommending that I’m taking issue with, it is the process being employed here. Again, if we want to share editorials claiming to have unique understanding of what the reality is right now and going forward, we can all do so until we’re blue in the face.
It may seem pedantic to include terms like “likely” or “I think” but it seems pretty important during a time of immense uncertainty, especially as people are desperately looking for certainty in the face of all that.
“This is the reality: Corona time is the cycle that has only just begun. It will probably alternate between intense lockdowns to prevent infection rates spinning out of control and less-intense lockdowns during which the economy partially reopens. This cycle will have to continue until there is a vaccine — which could be up to two years away. Any existing restaurant business model is incompatible with this new social and economic reality.”
Is this “opinion”? Because it sure isn’t presented as opinion. It’s — to quote him — “reality”. If this is the reality, what are her qualifications to identify it as such?
If he had started that first sentence with the words “I think”, would you believe he was stating it as an opinion? He is pretty clearly trying to argue a position with some level of authority and not just couching everything in disclaimers or hemming and hawing.
This seems a very pedantic argument.
I’m sorry, but when you start something with: “This is the reality” you don’t get to claim it is merely an opinion.
He offers very little in the way of facts and even those he does sort of offer (e.g., “Corona is so contagious”) are easily refuted.
I’m not some Corona-truther. My ex-wife had it and was fortunate enough to have a mild case. As a result, I quarantined solo with my two young kids for 16 days. My friend’s father passed away from it. I’ve spent what little free time I’ve had delivering meals to the local hospital and FD/EMS workers, who are very much on the frontlines; we are just outside NYC in NJ and are part of the hardest hit area in the country. This shit is real and I get it. Mr. Tan is free to offer his opinion and I appreciate that he and Keith appropriately classified it as an opinion piece. I’m just increasingly surprised to see someone who is so ardently pro-science as Keith (a perspective I agree with) veering more and more into opinion-land as regards Covid.
The passage you pointed to where you feel the author is presenting their opinion as fact does accurately reflect the view of public health officials (including Fauci and the CDC). Specifically, that we are likely to experienced waves of tightening and loosening social distancing restrictions until a vaccine has been made widely available.