→ April 24, 2025
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Klawchat 4/24/25.

Starting at 2 pm ET. I’ve got scouting notebooks up this week on Mets & Orioles prospects and on three of the top HS prospects in this draft class for subscribers to the Athletic. And tomorrow I’ve got an update of my top 50 pizzerias in the U.S. coming here on the dish.

Keith Law: Years gone by, I’d say we’ve kicked some ass. Klawchat.

Aaron C.: Is there a food or cuisine that you’ve made a good faith effort to like, ordered different items or prepared different ways and damn it, it’s just not for you.
Keith Law: Lao & northern Thai cuisine. There’s something about the spices those cuisines use, particularly in seasoning meat, that comes across as very bitter to my palate. I’ve just stopped trying to make myself like it – it’s not for me, and that’s probably my loss in the end.

JJ: PCA playing like a future MVP. What’s a fair contract to get him locked up?
Keith Law: How many future MVPs have 37% chase rates? Dude’s had a good week and a half. He was just as bad the week and a half before that.

Richard: Just saw that the 2025 Hugo finalists are out, and you have read the Kingfisher entry. Have you read any others worth recommending?
Keith Law: Haven’t read any of the others yet. I did really enjoy Kelly Link’s The Book of Love (review coming next week), which was nominated for the Nebula.

Richard: The Astros are talking about Cam Smith playing Centerfield now.  Right field felt like a stretch, but Center seems nuts, right?
Keith Law: I think it’s especially nuts to ask him to learn an even tougher position than his natural one (3b) in the majors. It speaks to the lack of a plan for the player. He’s your best prospect; stop treating him like he’s roster fodder.

John O: Ty Floyd is 4 months shy of 24 and pitching in A. Considering that and no proven pitch beyond his fastball, what should expectations be moving forward…2027+ relief role? found money for any role?
Keith Law: That’s awfully quick for a guy who has made all of four starts since he was drafted. He missed 2024 after shoulder surgery; the fastball appears to be back and he has a functional (but no more than average) changeup. The slider sucks right now, and that’s a real concern, but he’s pitched so little that I doubt anyone has even considered tinkering with his pitch mix.

Aaron C.: Should I be more excited for Nick Kurtz’s debut or terrified that my A’s – already the worst defensive team in baseball! – are accommodating Kurtz by playing Tyler Soderstrom in LF and, like last night, are bringing in SETH BROWN as a defensive replacement?
Keith Law: Yeah I’m thrilled to see Kurtz up, even though he wasn’t great in AAA. There had to be a better way to do that than to put Soderstrom in the outfield, no?

PhillyJake: Off topic, but something I’m wondering about: Do you prefer ops+ or wRC+ ? Both are used by writers in the context of a person with a score of 110 is 10 percent better than average. I know of you’re not liking OPS in general as it takes two distinct stats are treats them equally when they shouldn’t be.  I don’t know enough about wRC that I should probably read more about it.
Keith Law: wRC+. I believe the stat on which it is based is much more accurate.

Andy: Do UCLA and USC still have prestige when it comes to college baseball, or did the move to the Big 10 basically kill any stature that they had?
Keith Law: USC lost its stature a while ago; they’ve been bad for more than a decade. Both schools are now getting beat in their own backyard by SEC and ACC schools. That’s really where it all starts – they have to recruit better, and if that means they need more NIL money, well, get to it.

foolsgold71: are we overevaluating prospects from certain teams like the Dodgers? players like Diego Cartaya and Bobby Miller have been a major disappointment
Keith Law: Cartaya has a serious back problem – chronic for sure, possibly degenerative? Throw that one out the window.

Andy: How is NIL affecting college baseball? Besides obviously giving top talent more reason to do college, is it trickling down to help lower level schools or are there just more kids getting paid to not play for SEC schools?
Keith Law: Right now we’re getting a huge concentration of talent in the SEC/ACC. Tennessee, LSU, Arkansas – these schools are building super-rosters. I don’t think we’ve reached equilibrium, though, because of what you hinted at: it’s often going to be better for real prospects to play somewhere else and get more playing time or a more prominent role than it is to be the Tuesday starter for Clemson.

Andy: Matt Shaw was given almost 20 games, and whilst he didn’t look good, it isn’t like the Cubs seem to be hurting from getting nothing at 3b. With signing retreads or utility guys there, what do they have to lose for him to struggle for a bit until he can figure it out?
Keith Law: No idea why they rushed to demote him. If you’re going to be that quick with the hook, you should never have promoted him in the first place.

Aaron C.: Every year, you write up “guys you got wrong” and thoughtfully explain what you got wrong and why. Who are the dudes who were better/worse than you thought where your explanation is essentially the “shrug” emoji?
Keith Law: Austin Wells catching is one. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wear pinstripes who foresaw him becoming a passable catcher. Even area scouts who loved him as a kid and as a hitter said there was no way he’d catch. I don’t think he’s very good, but he’s adequate.
Keith Law: If Brett Baty never hits in the majors, he’ll be a wtf guy for me. I don’t have a real explanation there. Big strong guy with a good swing who hit pretty much everywhere. Also kind of shocked at how quickly Dylan Carlson stalled. Another one everyone liked who just … stopped hitting.

Corey: How should the Red Sox handle their imminent roster crunch, how long do they keep Mayer + Anthony in AAA ?  Will a rehab stint be enough to build Yoshida’s value for a trade with no slot for him in Boston ?
Keith Law: Yoshida’s dead weight … a platoon DH? maybe a platoon LF in another park? Tough to see them moving him – at the least, don’t make a promotion for Anthony contingent on moving a bad contract.

Corey: Assuming Alcantara returns to normal, what should Boston’s offer be ?  A package starting with Arias + Cespedes ?  Including a pitcher – Valera or Perales ?
Keith Law: Not my strong suit but gut reaction is that seems like a lot to give up for a guy just back from TJ.

Jay: This is probably a more nuanced answer than should be in a chat, but what are some of the things that some org’s are doing to get their batting prospects to hit their upper end projections more consistently? I’m thinking BOS & BAL and why can’t that be replicated for orgs that struggle with that like PIT & COL despite having years of plus draft grades by you and other publications? I’m thinking about the current struggles and or downright misses for guys like Davis, Veen, Gonzalez, Swaggerty, Romo, Montgomery, Beck, and countless others for my two beleaguered teams (PIT fan living in DEN…). Thanks Keith!
Keith Law: I believe we had a story on Boston’s hitter development, and ESPN did as well, and while I don’t think that’s the ONLY way to develop hitters, it’s instructive in the sense that they are doing things other clubs aren’t. The Dodgers are too. It’s fair to point to Pitt and Colorado and ask why they aren’t doing at least some of the same stuff – particularly when we’re talking about modest expenditures on people and technology.

JJ: Top 100 picks for the upcoming draft — how many will you end up seeing in person before the draft?
Keith Law: I’ll be over 50 … some guys won’t sign in the end, but I’ll have 50+ from my own Big Board, at least. Been a good year.

Eric: Does it make sense for Drake Baldwin to play a few times a week in ATL as opposed to every day in Gwinnett?
Keith Law: I don’t hate it for a catcher. I might for any other position.

PJ: The Cubs have played 26 games, and 23 of them were against teams over .500 (the Pirates have played 6 such games). It’s almost shocking they are 16-10.  How aggressive do you think they should be with Cade Horton?  Put up a 1.07 ERA in April
Keith Law: That’s a health question as much as anything else. Not sure how much they want to manage his innings.

Alek: Cj Kayfus hitting the snot outta the ball once again. No clue why he’s repeating AA. But could he have an offensive impact for Cle 2nd half of this summer?
Keith Law: Maybe … I think he’s going to underperform those numbers against better pitching. Solid hitter, not a star.

Ken: Zebby Matthews looks ready. Why do you think Minnesota hasn’t called him up yet?
Keith Law: Honestly that’s a question for Aaron or Dan. I assumed he’d be in their rotation.

OJ: I know it’s early in the minor league season, but some of Atlanta’s position player prospects who are young and raw/toolsy are starting to hit (Isaiah Drake, Ambioris Tavarez, Nick Montgomery, a few more).  Do you think it’s small sample size, or does ATL have something cooking?
Keith Law: Tiny sample.

Ben (MN): Have you ever heard of players trying to manipulate the data other teams have on them? For example, a hitter known as a patient hitter intentionally swinging at the first pitch in blowout games to appear more aggressive. Do players ever try things like that?
Keith Law: Never heard of that. The one thing I’ve heard is teams overpromoting very young players with sort of middling tools to boost them in models that overweight age relative to level.

James: Brandon Pfadt a GUY?
Keith Law: Yes.

James: Had you gotten into bitcoin investing or anything or do you play safe in index funds or s&p 500?
Keith Law: No bitcoin. My money is all in tulips and South Seas shares.

Chris: Roch Cholowsky a 1-1 candidate?
Keith Law: I don’t think so. first rounder, thought he was one in HS, don’t think he’s in that 1-1 tier right now.
Keith Law: Justin Lebron is the college name I hear most as a 1-1 guy for next year. Bear in mind that that player was Jace Laviolette this time last year, and he may not go in the top 15.

Chris: You’ve mentioned often, most recently in a scouting notebook, how changes to the Minor Leagues have made developing raw HS players incredibly difficult. Clearly the decision to ditch short-season ball was because of $, but I have no idea why the Complex season now starts earlier. It’s all clearly hurting teams’ ability to develop players. Do you think most MLB owners favor these changes just to cut costs, or is all of this because of a vocal minority of owners who only care about the money instead of player development? And, do you see any hope of this changing, post-Manfred?
Keith Law: I think that this is all about cost-cutting and that everything MLB is doing is aimed at cutting the minors further and farming out player development to colleges. Which would be taking the goose that lays the golden eggs and torturing it to death in the most sadistic way you can imagine.

Guest: I’m going to see the Nashville Sounds vs Durham Bulls minor league game this weekend – anybody promising to be on the field maybe?
Keith Law: Sorry, I don’t have the rosters memorized. For questions like this the best resource I can offer is my top 20s for each team – Rays and Brewers.

James: Any change in your opinion on Jacob Wilson? Small sample size but seems to be hitting at all levels – Luis Arraez 2.0?
Keith Law: Not only am I not changing my opinion on any  player after 90 PA, Wilson has one walk in those 90 PA, and he’s making almost no hard contact.

Paul: If you were Rizzo, would you go Ethan Holliday at 1-1 or would you go another route? He seems to be worthy of that pick in this class based on your personal ranking, just wondering if you’d go EH, arm or a lower ranked college bat?
Keith Law: Slot there is $11 million. Pick your final set of players and offer them each $9 million to see who takes it. I wouldn’t give anyone in this draft full slot.

Garrett: The July draft seems like a disservice to teams for many reasons: No short-season affiliates; Complex leagues end a week later; Upcoming trade deadline.

Now that we’re entering year 5 of it, do you have a sense of how organizations view it? I assume it hasn’t been well received.
Keith Law: Baseball people almost unanimously hate it. These are decisions made by business people who do not understand that players are the product. If you ruin player development, you ruin the product.

Taker55: What is your take on which org is best equipped to take this Jack Bauer kid? 102 from a HS LHP seems unfathomable and the upside seems otherworldly.
Keith Law: I don’t think the upside is “otherworldly.” There’s a whole lot to pitching beyond velocity. Bauer had trouble throwing strikes last summer at 90-91.
Keith Law: He is not a first rounder for me.

Colter Bean Fan: First to worst, please rank: Hess, Cunningham, ERC, Schlittler & (healthy) Hampton?
Keith Law: My Yankees top 20 is here.

Taker55: Did you see Sharon Osbourne going after Kneecap for their political comments during Coachella? War Pigs was ok but stay off Margaret Thatcher apparently.
Keith Law: Seeing some of those ’70s and ’80s rock icons go conservative is depressing, but I guess not that shocking. Then again, I didn’t exactly need Paul Stanley’s thoughts on trans rights.

Colter Bean Fan: I know you’re skeptical of S.Jones (so am I, and the lazy Judge comps drive me mad) but put any stock in his setup/stance modification making any difference? Swing looked good couple days ago vs. Hartford.
Keith Law: Still striking out at an untenable rate.

JJ: It amazes me how many baseball players progress from year 1 to 2 (although so far Chourio is not). What do you think of a sophomore of the year award? Recognizes how hard the game can be. Curious how many ROY’s in the last 10 would win it.
Keith Law: Just not a fan of making more awards. There’s a push for a Reliever of the Year award now. Meh.

Chip: If you could go back in time to say the 70s or 80s with the in game strategies of today but the same rosters, would you have such an advantage that you’d be hard to beat? Or would you just be Earl Weaver 2.0?
Keith Law: Doubt I could do better than Earl did.

Casey: Are you psyched for the new black maps album to drop soonish? Dunno exactly when, but hopefully in May.
Keith Law: I forgot they existed. Will keep an eye out for it.

Colter Bean Fan: Lombard Jr. love his swing. Do you see a Correa comp — just in terms of swing mechs? *NOT re: overall prospect status as CC was obv. an absolute stud coming out of HS where Lombard is not near his level)
Keith Law: I can’t say I’ve seen a similarity there.

James: Ethan Salas’ glove is so advanced for his age but do you think that SD is hurting his long term hitting development by being so aggressive with his assignments/promotions or do you think it’s not a big deal in the end?
Keith Law: He shouldn’t be in AA. He’s not ready.

Dan: Has Spencer Torkelson shown enough change this year, to show that he is a ML starting caliber First Baseman? Or is this just a hot start to a season?
Keith Law: Anything is just a hot/cold start at this point. I know people love to claim that certain stats “stabilize” by X at bats … because they don’t understand how stats work. Really. It’s like hearing Trump voters talk about tariff policy.

BK: Does Garrett Mitchell have too much swing and miss to ever be a consistent hitter?
Keith Law: I worry he does.

BK: Thoughts on Augustin Ramirez hit tool. Will he stay at catcher?
Keith Law: Can hit. Not a catcher. Worse than Wells ever was.

BK: Thanks for your monthly music lists – you have helped me discover a lot of new music. What are your thoughts on the band Almost Monday?
Keith Law: Don’t know them. Are they better than ‘Til Tuesday?

Sam: What’s the most random/unexpected great meal you’ve ever had?
Keith Law: What a great question. I remember one in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where it was basically a little family restaurant and I had the best fried rice dish I’ve ever had in my life – and it was several meals’ worth for a few dollars. I had a stuffed Egyptian flatbread (very much like naan) at a counter-service spot in Monaco, of all places, that was out of this world. Maybe a decade ago I went to this tiny restaurant in Stanton, VA, that some newspaper (the Washington Post, maybe?) said was the best restaurant in the country – and it was amazing, even though the place was nothing to look at. I’ve had great szechuan duck in Charlottesville that melted my face off. Even just recently, I had outstanding Neapolitan pizza in Sarasota at Atmosphere.

Mike: Sean Linan has posted some wild numbers so far, with massive swing and miss in a small sample. What can you tell us about him and what he might turn into?
Keith Law: He had a pretty high whiff rate last year too – it’s a plus changeup, a weird one with high spin (that pitch usually has very low spin), and his slider is probably average. It might be a 45 fastball and he’s pretty maxed out physically. I’d like to see him at a higher level since he’s repeating low A.

Jay: What is your long term projection for MacKenzie Gore? Seems like the control has been better this year. Can he be an ace still or is he more likely a #2 or #3?
Keith Law: As much as I would love to see him become an ace, I worry that the four-seamer is too straight … it got crushed last year, hasn’t so much this year in a small sample but as far as I can tell it’s the same pitch.

Zack: Antwone Kelly has reportedly been touching 100 MPH this year. Is someone with the potential to be a big riser this year, and can he stick as a starter being sub 6-foot (if listed data is right)?
Keith Law: I’m assuming you mean the Pirates prospect … is he really 5’10”? I just pulled up video and he looks bigger than that. Might be out of date. Anyway he hit 99 last year. Good arm all around, might have the mix to start.

James: With NIL has your stance changed on staying in school vs draft?
Keith Law: Not really – still has to do with how advanced and mature you are out of HS, and whether you’re better served in a pro development system or at college.

Matt: Your offseason write-up of Nestor German seemed more exciting than what you wrote a few days ago. Has he lost any luster based off one look that you had?
Keith Law: The arm slot is higher than what I thought I saw on video – a good argument for seeing guys live vs just video scouting. It’s tough to stick as a starter from up there because you can’t work laterally. He does have the pitch mix to start, and he throws strikes, but yes I like him a little less after seeing his Iron Mike act.

JG: Astros fans (at least in the fan groups I’m part of) seem to have it out for Dana Brown.  I think he’s doing the best he can trying to clean up the mess created by the owner and his minions after they fired Click and hired Brown.  What do you think?
Keith Law: I think he’s been put in an impossible spot.

Chris: I know you like to have something tangible to change your opinion on a guy, does Ben Rice adding strength count?
Keith Law: Adding strength counts, but in his case it doesn’t address the actual concerns about his game (swing & decisions).

CVD: Mitchell Parker is leading the NL in WAR, and sporting a 1.39 ERA.   Time to believe??
Keith Law: No.
Keith Law: It’s April 24th. Everything is a small sample right now.

Ben: James Wood- appears to be on his way to stardom.   What changed from him falling into the 2nd round in the 2021 draft?
Keith Law: He had a terrible spring at IMG – striking out at a very high rate, scouts thought he wanted to go to school – and since he got into pro ball he’s worked really hard at controlling his large strike zone. It’s a lot to ask any player but he’s so athletic he might be able to pull it off even at 6’7″.

Craig: Are Xavier Neyens and Mason Pike (WA high school prospects) first rounders this year?
Keith Law: Maybe and no.

Jimmy: going to be in Chattanooga over the weekend should we pick the game that Chase Burns is going to start?
Keith Law: Absolutely.

Jay: Could Espino still make it  for CLE or has he lost too much development time to injury the past 2+ years?
Keith Law: I’ll be surprised if he ever pitches again. It’s been three years since his last game.

Matt: After the Cam Smith-to-CF announcement, I happened to check his Statcast page and was shocked by the 95th percentile Sprint Speed (which I imagine is part of this CF decision?)! I don’t remember seeing plus speed as a tool for him in anyone’s scouting reports, so I guess I’m wondering where this came from? Of all the tools, that seems like the one that would’ve been easiest to notice!
Keith Law: Sprint speed <> run tool. It’s a snapshot over a very small distance, and that’s not really what speed is – you can have a very high sprint speed but be closer to average over 90 feet.

Brian: Does The Athletic have a stick to sports policy? I remember you being more outspoken in the past.
Keith Law: I would suggest you check out my weekly link roundups on Saturdays.

Matt: Obviously the sample is tiny, but Alfredo Duno has thus far drastically cut down his K% and swstr%. If that guy can really keep his K% under 20%, how high is the ceiling there?
Keith Law: I think the bat might be elite. Just do not see that large body sticking at catcher.

Jay: Will the ability to frame/receive diminish with an ABS challenge system? Wouldn’t that help guys like Ramirez stick behind the plate or is the ability to control a run game with success rates near 90% still too much a factor?
Keith Law: Framing will diminish and thank god, what a stupid skill that is. Receiving isn’t about stealing strikes, though. That’s different.

Guest: If you were the president and say, hypothetically speaking, you were in the pocket of a foreign adversary, would you be doing anything differently than the current administration is doing?
Keith Law: Hypothetically, no, this hypothetically looks a lot like the hypothetical situation you described.

Brandon Hyde: What went wrong for the Orioles, and can they fix it this season?
Keith Law: Pitching. They needed to replace or re-sign Burnes, and they didn’t. Now they have a logjam of hitters, some of whom are losing trade value, and not enough starters. Joe Sheehan wrote in his newsletter today that it’s the worst rotation in baseball by performance so far. SSS, yes, but also, they didn’t do anything to address it this winter.

JJ: Is Shane Smith a mirage or is it sustainable?
Keith Law: I believe he’s a big-league starter. Might have a mediocre year this year given the jump, but I think he’ll end up a good #5 or even a #4 in time.

Taker55: Do you keep playing Cagliaone at 1st base or do you see what he looks in the outfield?
Keith Law: Outfield.

Andy: It’s NFL draft week and as an aside in one of the draft previews, there a mention that teams monitor the mock drafts. Not necessarily for who they are taking, but for the general level where people are being valued. Does that line up with how baseball people think of mock drafts?
Keith Law: Yes.

JJ: I get we can’t trust SSS in the majors/minors, but does that explain in part why drafting is such a crap shoot since we are mostly judging off of recent performances?
Keith Law: We’re not judging that much off recent performances, though. It’s recent looks, but there’s a lot of consideration to whether a spring performance might be skewed by randomness or bad luck – that’s where Trackman data can really help teams.

Chaim Bloom: Should I buy on Victor Scott II?
Chaim Bloom: Matthew Liberatore looks much better this year. Think he’s finally reach some of the potential or SSS?
Keith Law: I’m all in on Scott. If Liberatore is going to keep a walk rate of 2% all year, yes, great, but you can guess whether I believe that.

Andy: How does it feel that you went to a “Anti-Semitic, Far Left institution,” like *checks notes* Harvard?
Keith Law: I’m so glad Harvard finally decided to fight back. I do not often say I’m proud of my alma mater for anything, but I am right now. “Far left” is fucking hilarious, btw. Wasn’t true when I was there and I don’t believe for a second it’s true now.

Staunton Va: You went to The Shack in Staunton! It did get big media coverage.
Keith Law: that’s it!

LW: How did Mize get his groove back?
Keith Law: More splitters (best pitch in college), improved slider and more of it, cut back on the 4-seam, so he’s giving up a lot less hard contact. This I think is sustainable because it all makes sense together – he’s reduced his use of the pitch that got hit the hardest, he’s amped up the use of his best swing-and-miss pitch, and he improved a third pitch that I actually liked in college but that didn’t play that way in the majors.
Keith Law: The story all fits together.

Joe Nathan: James Tibbs and Cam Smith went 13 & 14th in the draft last year, both played together at Florida State as well. Not even a year later Smith is in the majors, and Tibbs is in high A. On the surface, Tibbs had better numbers than Smith in college last year, so how did we arrive here today? Is there something that the Cubs and/or Astros saw that made Smith the type of player that could be pushed, or is there some other explanation that you are aware of? To me it’s super fun and interesting, and Smith also moved from 3B to RF and looks like he belongs (and maybe will see time in CF now?!?).
Keith Law: It’s a great question – Tibbs could probably be in AA, for what that’s worth, but your point still holds. I don’t think Tibbs is ready for the majors. I didn’t think Smith was either, though!

Thatssotaguchi: Moved family to Italy two years ago under the assumption (gestures vaguely) all of this would be happening. MAGA in-laws are visiting for two weeks in May. How do I not kill them?
Keith Law: Wine?

Colter Bean Fan: Is there a dish you’ve made that sticks out in your mind b/c it seemed a bit of a pain in the arse to make but incredibly good/satisfying upon tasting? Mine would be red beans and rice (soaking the beans 24 hours and then cooking for hours while smashing the means to promote creaminess.. all well worth it)
Keith Law: Tiramisu. Made it once from scratch. Biggest mess I’ve ever made in the kitchen. But it was delicious.

Joe Nathan: No question, just wanted to say thanks for the Shades of Gray recommendation, loved it & Red Side Story. Hopefully it won’t take nearly as long for another sequel!
Keith Law: Pretty sure Fforde said he’s working on the third book already.
Keith Law: His stuff is almost all great, btw. The Constant Rabbit is a one-off that’s funny and a pretty obvious satire; Early Riser is more dramatic than most of his works, still really good; and the first quartet of Thursday Next novels are all awesome.

Frank: What do the Pirates do with Henry Davis?  Seems like he needs extended time in the big leagues to show if he can do it because the bouncing back and forth between AAA where he has had success and the Majors where he has not is not working.
Keith Law: He needs to be in the majors, in the lineup every day. Catch some, DH some, fine, but never the outfield.

Paul: Any concerts coming up?
Keith Law: TBD – just need to get through draft travel.

Patrick: What round do you see Eli Pitts getting picked?
Keith Law: Day two, if signable (I have no idea what anyone wants for $ at this point).

Kelly: What became of former Rays 2-way draft pick, Brandon McKay?   Could he still have a career as a position player?
Keith Law: Blew out, shoulder and elbow. Re-injured the UCL last year. He might be done, unfortunately; he hasn’t had an at bat since 2021.

Paul: Piggybacking on my concert question, I was disappointed with the limited touring of Sam Fender here in the states. It feels like he is someone that should be a lot bigger than he is. But then again I’m middle aged.
Keith Law: I worry we’re going to see fewer dates from any artists not born in the US because of the sudden turn in how we treat anyone coming into the country. I didn’t know until just recently that our Fourth Amendment protection from unlawful searches doesn’t apply within 100 miles of our borders (per a SCOTUS ruling) … not that that’s the biggest priority right now, but a rational Congress should fix that.

Jakob: You vote on awards – can you explain why writers vote on just one award, versus all of them?
Keith Law: It’s two votes per team, so 30 per league for each award.

Brent: I have 4 and 6 year old girls who want to play board games with mom and dad. Do you have any game recs? Candyland hurts my soul, memory match games are blah, and one can only play Yahtzee so many times. Thanks.
Keith Law: Dragomino, Outfoxed, Ticket to Ride First Journey.

Ryan: Miguel Vargas homered today – what ever happened there? Is he still a salvageable big leaguer?
Keith Law: I would like to think so but he stopped hitting the ball hard in the majors.

Jesse B: Luis Peña, Braylon Payne, and Jesus Made similar to the RedSox Big 3 in a few years, what do you think?
Keith Law: I think that Carolina team has an OBP of .420 as an entire roster. You can’t get a better example of the problem of small samples than that.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for reading, as always. I’ll have at least one more scouting notebook up next week, possibly two, depending on some weather & personal commitments. In May I’ll have a top 100 Big Board for the draft and my first mock, probably both around the middle of the month. Take care & be safe out there.

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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat marries the dark history of the United States’ assassination of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba, done with the full consent of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskold and several other western leaders, with music from some of the great American jazz musicians of the time – as the U.S. was sending them on friendly missions to emerging post-colonial Africa. The contrast between this blue-note diplomacy and the vile, racist machinations of the CIA, President Eisenhower, and their co-conspirators makes it a tense, compelling watch, even though you probably already know how this ends. It was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (I watched it free on Kanopy, which I can access through my local library, and it’s also on iTunes, Amazon, etc. for rental.)

The film has no narration but does use some on-screen quotes to keep things moving along, which allows the music to continue throughout almost the entire film. It’s a who’s who of mid-century American jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Melba Liston, and others, most of whom visited Africa on state-sponsored goodwill tours and/or became pan-African activists at home, tying the movement to U.S. civil rights efforts. (Gillespie’s quixotic campaign for President in 1964 gets prominent mention, even though it came three years after the Lumumba assassination.) The story begins several years before Congo’s independence, with scenes from independence movements across colonial Africa, speeches from African and American activists – including several from Malcolm X – and significant footage of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who became a champion for African independence movements because those groups often espoused socialist or communist ideology. Much of what plays out before Lumumba is elected happens at the UN, where we see speeches from Khrushchev and from ambassadors from Belgium, the U.S., and many non-aligned nations that had already obtained independence. The on-screen text also explains the importance of the Congo’s vast mineral resources, which at the time were led by huge uranium deposits that could be used in nuclear weapons, although today the emphasis has shifted towards coltan, a mixture of niobium (columbium) and tantalum that is extremely important to the manufacture of capacitors for electronic circuits – like you’d find in whatever device you’re using to read this.

This all sets the scene for the intrigue that ultimately led to the torture and murder of Lumumba by a rival leader, Moïse Tshombe, who led the breakaway State of Katanga. Tshombe was interested in power, and Katanga is the most resource-rich region of the country, so he had plenty of backers in the west. Days before Congo became independent, Belgium privatized the mining company Union Minière, taking the dominant force in the Congolese economy away from the native population and depriving the new government of a major revenue source – the final insult in Belgium’s seventy-year misrule of the territory and abuse of its citizens. Union Minière was based in Katanga, so Tshombe was the perfect stooge for the west, and was happy to oblige first through his political activities, smearing Lumumba as a communist, and then later through violence.

Throughout the film, director Johan Grimonprez (who is Belgian) intersperses the history of the conflict and subterfuge with the music, a jarring but effective choice that turns the whole endeavor into a visual fugue, with the music the counterpoint to the infuriating history on the other side. The struggle for independence across Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, went on just as Black Americans were fighting Jim Crow laws, and the response of the United States government in both cases was built on suppression and violence. At the same time, President Dwight Eisenhower, who apparently was an early proponent of assassinating Lumumba, tried to use American jazz stars to spread American culture to these new and emerging nations, calling them “jazz ambassadors” and sending them around the world to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, and to Africa. Louis Armstrong’s tour of the Congo, which appears to be the only time the State Department sponsored such a tour in the continent, turned out to be a cover for the CIA’s coup. Over 100,000 people showed up to watch him perform in the capital, then still called Léopoldville, while Lumumba was under house arrest; less than two months later, he would be dead at the CIA’s hands.

No country bears more responsibility for the now 65-year tragedy of the Congo, a fake nation with borders set up by Belgium’s King Leopold that has been beset by civil war for nearly all of its history, than Belgium does. Grimonprez gives more attention to the United States and the UN, but gets a few stabs in at Belgium, particularly in how Belgian leaders and officials tried to claim that colonizing the Congo was almost an altruistic affair, bringing civilization to a “less developed” people. Their colonial rule was one of the most brutal and damaging of any, a story hinted at here and told at great and gruesome length in Adam Hochschild’s tremendous book King Leopold’s Ghost.

The film ends with Lumumba’s death and the turning of sentiment on the part of the jazz ambassadors against the U.S. government, although there will still a few more such tours into the early 1960s. There isn’t so much a conclusion here, as the stories of the Congo and the CIA’s involvement in coups and assassinations would continue for decades, and the U.S. does still occasionally send musicians out on goodwill tours, if not quite to the same level as they did in the late 1950s. It’s an important slice of history, not just for Africa but for the United States as well, a reminder of the great power we can wield through the impact of our culture and the value of our diversity, and the great evil we can do when we do not hold the powers that be accountable for their actions.

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→ April 23, 2025
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Surely You Can’t Be Serious.

My favorite movie when I was a kid was Top Secret!, the third feature and second studio film from the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, who were, of course, responsible for Airplane! and the greatest television series of all time, Police Squad! I actually didn’t see the full Airplane! until much later, probably because my parents thought it was stupid … and it is stupid, gloriously so, and so much of it still holds up today.

Jim Abrahams died in 2024 at age 80, but not long before his death, the trio collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a hilarious recounting of the making of that movie and their lives and careers up to that point. A friend suggested I track down the audiobook, which you can get on Apple Books or Amazon, because it’s read by the authors with a huge cast of people reading their own reminiscences from working on the film – including stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty – and comedians who remember how influential the film was in their lives and careers. Even Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, both studio execs who were there as the film was greenlit and produced, chime in. It’s a blast, not just funny, but fascinating because of how the trio recall coming into the movie business as rank amateurs, having to figure it out as they went along while also convincing established actors to go along with a script many of them didn’t understand until they saw the finished product.

The three men were childhood friends from Wisconsin who naturally always gravitated towards comedy, and while in college in Madison they created a playhouse where they put on sketch-comedy shows, eventually settling on the name Kentucky Fried Theater. They took that show to Los Angeles and turned it into a movie called, of course, Kentucky Fried Movie, written by ZAZ and directed by a then-unknown John Landis, who went on to direct Animal House because of his work on this film. They’d already started work on the film that would become Airplane!, which was built around a spoof of a mediocre air-disaster film called Zero Hour, from which the trio cribbed not just the framework of the story but entire bits of dialogue. The resulting movie was like nothing else, packed with jokes, non sequiturs, sight gags, puns, wordplay, and an inexplicable shot of a topless woman, and it was both a huge box-office success and a turning point in the history of comedy.

I rewatched Airplane while about halfway through the book, and most of it is still pretty funny, probably because so many of the jokes are just silly, like the one that provides the title of the book, the “The hospital? What is it?” running gag, and several of the visual jokes that it would be pointless to describe. It’s hard to watch that film, then or now, and think that some of the main actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack, were seen as dramatic actors incapable of comedy. They all nail the deadpan style that ZAZ wanted, and it’s essential to the film that they do so. Only Bridges really does anything overtly funny, when he sniffs glue; the others are just reciting ridiculous dialogue like it’s Shakespeare. There are a few jokes that sound dated now because they refer to something contemporary to the film, and a few that you probably just couldn’t tell today due to changing norms, although I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in the film might truly be offensive by today’s standards. I’m sure someone could find offense with a lot of what’s in Airplane!, but it’s all pretty tame compared to modern comedy; maybe Captain Oveur’s lines to Joey wouldn’t make the cut, but they’re just so stupid I found it hard to see them in that light. (The movie was on Hoopla, available through my local library.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the movie business, so much of what the book describes is new to me, even though I’m sure much of it doesn’t apply now, forty-five years later. I also couldn’t get enough of hearing the actors describe what it was like reading the script and working on the set; the book still has quotes from some of the older actors who died well before the book came out from previous interviews, just read by a narrator, and they’re almost all interesting. Most of them didn’t get what the script was; several had to be convinced by a loved one just to take the offered parts.

I wish the main part of the book hadn’t ended with Airplane!, although we do get one Top Secret! Fact, around the origins of that film’s “skeet surfing” scene. (I didn’t know that film was a box-office bomb; I was eleven when I saw it, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever watched.) There’s also a three-part epilogue where each of the writers talks about his career and life after Airplane!, which goes off the rails at several points, including one of them veering into some weird anti-science territory. You could probably skip that part, as none of it has much of anything to do with why you’re here. The rest of the book is either funny, interesting, or both throughout. The only catch is that if you haven’t seen Airplane! … well, what’s wrong with you?

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→ April 22, 2025
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Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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→ April 21, 2025
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I’m Still Here + top films of 2024.

I’m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture – becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things – and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after the disappearance of her husband in the police state of Brazil, 1971. Based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the secret police, it shows their beautiful, happy family, and the ways in which Eunice has to swallow her fear and grief to move forward and raise their four children without him. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

As the film opens, we see just faint signs of the terror to come, including a scene where the Paivas’ eldest daughter, Vera, is in a car with friends when they come up against a police roadblock. They’re forced out of the car and roughed up a little as the cops search for “terrorists,” mostly people suspected of engaging in any sort of activities opposing the dictatorship. Rubens is a former congressman who participates in clandestine, peaceful activities like passing letters to families of disappeared people – dissidents or innocent people – and coordinating with other like-minded people. They don’t seem to see any risk in their actions, but, of course, one day the secret police come knocking, taking Rubens away and barricading the Paivas in their house for what appears to be a day or two, after which they then take Eunice and another daughter in for interrogation as well. (Vera has gone to study in London and live with another Brazilian family that fled the country out of fear for what was coming.) The daughter is released in a day, but Eunice is kept for nearly two weeks, during which she’s tortured and asked to inform on her husband.

Eventually, she’s released, and begins to try to fight through the judicial system first to find out where Rubens is, and then later to get the state to admit they kidnapped and killed him. At the same time, she has four children, three girls and a boy, to raise, while the house’s breadwinner is gone and she finds herself unable to even cash a check because he can’t sign it or call to confirm. The hour or so spent in this time period is by far the strongest, as it focuses entirely on her, and all of the burdens placed on her as a mother, a de facto widow, a dissident, and more. It could be a metaphor for modern motherhood and all of the things we ask mothers in western societies to be, including how we ask them to hide or subjugate their own feelings to take care of their families (which reminded me of Jess Grose’s excellent book Screaming on the Inside), although I don’t know if that was intended, since the source material is the Paivas’ son’s memoir, a best-seller in Brazil about ten years ago.

After about 100 minutes, the film jumps forward 25 years to 1996, when Eunice gets word that the death certificate for Rubens has been found. By that point, she has returned to school and become a lawyer, while also making a name for herself as an activist for the families of the disappeared, making this a public event as well as a deeply personal one. Then we get a second flash-forward to shortly before Eunice’s death, a scene that is sentimental and doesn’t need to be in the film at all, although it allowed director Walter Salles to reunite with actress Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in his acclaimed 1998 film Central Station … and who happens to be Torres’s mother.

Torres just is this film; the whole endeavor hinges on her performance and she is superb. Any time she is on screen, she owns it – and the glory is in how subtle Torres’s performance is. There are no big, showy scenes, no giant outbursts, no soliloquies. Had she won the Oscar over Mikey Madison, I wouldn’t object; they’re the two best performances I saw in any 2024 movie, regardless of gender. No other character has half as much to do or matters a tenth as much to the credibility of the story. Once Rubens disappears, you’ll probably suspect we’re not going to see him again even if you don’t know the true story, at which point the script hands everything to Torres and asks her to carry it … which is pretty much what life did to Eunice Paiva, come to think of it.

I would have given the Best International Feature award to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film about life under an authoritarian regime, but this was the second-best of the nominees and of all eligible films I saw from 2024. And, if you’re curious, here’s my mostly-final ranking of the best movies I saw from 2024. I haven’t seen No Other Land, but I think that’s the only film out there from the 2024 cycle that might crack this list. I’ve seen 43 movies in total that were Oscar-eligible or were released to streaming in 2024, to give you some perspective; #43 was The Apprentice.

1. Anora
2. Nickel Boys
3. Nosferatu
4. A Real Pain
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
6. The Brutalist
7. September 5
8. Hard Truths
9. Sing Sing
10. Daughters
11. Kinds of Kindness
12. Memoir of a Snail
13. I’m Still Here
14. The Room Next Door
15. Sugarcane
16. Challengers
17. I Saw the TV Glow
18. All That We Imagine As Light
19. Kneecap
20. Rebel Ridge

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→ April 19, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.
  • GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.
  • The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.
  • The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.
  • Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.
  • My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.
  • RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.
  • A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.
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→ April 17, 2025
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The Girl with the Needle.

The Girl with the Needle was Denmark’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the final cut to be among the five nominees even though it presents real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who took payments from desperate women to adopt out their babies, only to murder the infants instead, in a somewhat sympathetic light. It’s dark, strange, and extremely creepy, playing out like a horror film where the main character is never truly in danger herself. (It’s streaming free for Mubi subscribers, or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a garment-factory worker in Denmark during World War I, married to a soldier who she presumes is dead, as there’s been no word from him in a year. She’s evicted from her rooms when the film opens, but when goes to her boss to try to get help obtaining widow’s benefits, he takes advantage of her and she becomes pregnant. Her husband returns from the war, disfigured from battle, and she sends him away because she believes she’s going to marry her boss. He reneges, of course, and she loses her job, after which she tries to perform an abortion on herself with a giant needle while in a public bath, only to have Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) stop her and potentially save her life. Karoline has the baby with Dagmar’s help, at another job the older woman helped her find, and she pays Dagmar to give the baby to another family; when she can’t pay all of what she owes, she goes to work in Dagmar’s candy shop and helps convince other women to give their babies up as well, until she becomes suspicious that Dagmar isn’t what she seems.

The story itself is sort of beside the point; Dagmar is a real person, apparently quite infamous in Denmark as the serial killer with the most known victims in the country’s history, so clearly the film will end somehow with her arrest. Instead, director and co-writer Magnus van Horn focuses on the relationship between the two women, telling the New York Times that he chose to find “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” which is a bold strategy, given what Dagmar was doing. (There’s no direct violence in the film; the only murder that takes place on the screen is hidden from our and Karoline’s view.) That choice means that the film can only succeed or fail on the quality of the script and of the two lead performances.

The two women, both decorated actors in Denmark, deliver strong, compelling performances, particularly Dyrholm, who can be completely terrifying but also capable of surprising, often sudden bouts of empathy. The script depicts her murders as the result of a nihilistic view of the world, where in her mind these babies would go on to lives of suffering, poverty, and abuse, and a belief that she is actually helping the women she’s conning. (I couldn’t find any evidence that the real Dagmar Overbye was like this; her defense at trial was that she was abused as a child as well.) She’s initially cold to Karoline, helping her in some tangible, discrete ways, before eventually taking her in and bonding with the younger woman, as does Dagmar’s young daughter, Erena.

Van Horn lays the atmosphere on a bit thickly, however, and it ends up diminishing the film by going too far. The entire film is shot in black and white, and the streets are filthy – sooty, muddy, diseased, anything you can think of to increase the sense of bleakness and despair. The beginning resembles a misery-porn remix of Fantine’s story in Les Misérables, to a predictable level, until Karoline attempts the abortion, after which the story becomes something new and much more interesting; the first third or so of the movie is nothing you haven’t seen before. It needs Dagmar’s character to at least give us something new, even if it’s shocking; because Dyrholm plays her as someone who appears to exist on both sides of the edge of madness, the moment she arrives in the film the pace picks up, while it also allows us to get away from a story that keeps kicking Karoline in the teeth. Two hours of that would have been unbearable. Once the real plot begins, it’s still dark and unsparing, but a far more intriguing story, and a better watch due to the two strong leads.

(I still haven’t seen the winner of the Best International Film category, the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, but it’s loaded up for my next flight; of the other four, I’d put this second, behind the German submission The Seed of the Sacred Fig.)

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→ April 15, 2025
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Raleigh-Durham eats, 2025 edition.

I had one of the best meals of my life in Raleigh last week, so much so that I opened up my Notes app and started writing down every restaurant that made me say the same thing, ending up with about 15 of them (which will eventually become a post here) of which I could remember the names and the meals. This dinner came at Figulina, an Italian restaurant that focuses on fresh pastas and a lot of traditional ingredients, while the recipes run the gamut from the very traditional (a straight pasta alla carbonara with guanciale, the ideal cured pork for that dish) to the modern. Chef-owner David Ellis was previously chef de cuisine at Ashley Christensen’s Poole’s Diner, located just a few blocks away. Every single thing I ate was superb, the cocktails were also outstanding, and the service was just exemplary across the board. I even thought about going back a second time on this trip to try more things before I realized that was a little silly and also I didn’t have time.

I ordered a little out of my usual comfort zone because I figured this was a rare chance to try some things I don’t eat often or even see much on menus. For a starter, I had the salt cod tartine, and if you gave me two of those it would be the most divine and complete lunch. I like baccalà, the dried salt cod pioneered by Basque sailors and still popular across southern Europe, although I had to acquire the taste. This dish mixes the salt cod, which is rinsed and prepared to remove the preserving salt and reduce the fishiness of the flavor, with artichoke leaves, parsley, onion, some extremely good olive oil, and a light touch of vinegar and serves the combination on a thick slice of crusty bread from nearby Boulted Bread. It was bright and balanced, with the cod present in the flavor but not overwhelming with its saltiness. I’ve had salt cod a few ways, but never like this, and actually never in a cold preparation that I liked.

For my main, I had the cappelletti with gorgonzola dolce, served with walnut pesto, fig mostarda, and fresh rosemary. I don’t care for blue cheese in general, not on principle but because I have never become accustomed to the signature flavor of those cheeses, which my palate (and my nose) will forever interpret as “spoiled.” My bartender assured me that the filling of their pasta was a mixture of house-made ricotta and gorgonzola dolce, and that the blue cheese flavor is subtle because there is so much else going on in the dish. (I also knew that if I was ever going to like or tolerate a blue cheese, it was probably gorgonzola dolce; dolce means sweet, and this cheese is aged far less than most blue cheeses, so it’s nowhere near as pungent.) I took the leap of faith and followed his advice to try to get every element in each bite – one of the little hats of pasta, a good bit of the walnut sauce, and some of the dollops of fig mostarda. He was right about everything; I’m struggling to describe the overall flavor because it contained such a broad array of different flavors and notes that worked together so that, no, you don’t get a big hit of blue cheese or of the vinegar in the mostarda. The best comparison I can offer is the perfect cheese board, where you pair a creamy young cheese with a fruit paste and some toasted nuts, but with the glory of fresh pasta involved too. And rosemary. Their menu changes often but I hope this one sticks around for the season.

I have largely been skipping dessert while traveling because I just don’t need it or even crave it like I used to, but given how good the first two items were, I had to give it a look. They had three desserts, one of which held no interest for me and the other contained an ingredient that I’ve had an allergic reaction to twice (although I’m not sure it was the culprit), so I settled on the Bakewell tart, a very not-Italian dessert that I only know because my wife has made it a few times. Figulina’s version was traditional, and rich, so much so that I had just half and … uh … had the rest with lunch the next day. I think it was less sweet than others I’ve had, but I’ve found that’s typical in a lot of fine-dining desserts.

Then there were the cocktails … I told the bartender that I enjoy a Negroni, but that I saw they had an extensive collection of amari (potable bitters, like Montenegro and Cynar), so would he be interested in concocting a negroni-like drink for me? I’ve done this now and then at bars and always get a good response, plus I get to try new things. He did, and it was good … but the better drink was their Escape from Manhattan, containing barrel-aged Conniption gin, Mancino rosso sweet vermouth, and Cardamaro. Cardamaro is a cardoon-based amaro, similar to Cynar but less artichokey; the Conniption gin is 94 proof and is aged ten months in bourbon barrels, although to be honest I’m not sure that last bit is a good thing in gin. Anyway, it was sort of a cross between a Negroni and a Manhattan, but better, less sweet than either drink, with some nice bitter notes and a strong base of herbal flavors. (I’m pretty sure he used Cardamaro in the Negroni riff he made for me as well.)

Anything beyond that will probably seem a bit anticlimactic, I suppose. The second-best meal I had was actually tacos from a gas station in Cary – Taqueria La Esquina, which runs a decent-sized kitchen in a Shell station. I tried their pork al pastor and chicken, which both come with cilantro and grilled onions, with the pork the better of the two; both were good but the chicken was a little dry, while the pork retained its moisture and generally had more flavor to it, although neither was spicy at all. Their menu runs a little heavy on red meat, so it’s not ideal for me (I don’t eat beef at all).

I found them because they were just up the street from Milos, a little coffee shop that has just ordinary espresso drinks with Illy beans but offers single-origin pour-overs from different roasters. I’m still a big fan of Jubala over in Raleigh, but Milos is closer to the USA Baseball Complex, which is often where I’m headed anyway.

Located right in downtown Durham, Bar Virgile does classic cocktails and a simple gastropub menu. They do a classic daiquiri, just rum, lime, and simple syrup, which isn’t hard to make but which I think has lost its luster because of fruity, blended nonsense that has appropriated the name. Hemingway liked them, and I don’t think he was sitting poolside with a giant glass of slushy mango juice and rum. Anyway, I don’t know why I ordered fish and chips when I was kind of feeling like getting something light, but it was the right choice – Bar Virgile’s version has just a light breading, and the cod could not have been more perfectly cooked, enough so that I ended up eating most of it with a fork because I couldn’t pick it up. I was having dinner with my friend from middle school, and after we went across the foyer to their cocktail bar, Annexe, where I had a drink called the Lazy Monk that was clearly their twist on a Last Word, using gin, génépy, Luxardo maraschino, lime, and a rosemary-thyme simple syrup. With green Chartreuse becoming hard to find, everyone’s looking for alternatives – Luxardo has one called Del Santo that gets good reviews from folks who use it in a Last Word – and this was a great twist, with the syrup bringing herbal notes to the front but not enough to throw off the drink and make it too sweet. It’s not a Last Word, which is one of my favorite cocktails ever, but it’s damn good. I got to Durham a little early after an aborted attempt to go to Blacksburg (the game was rained out about 90 minutes into my drive), and parked at Yonder Coffee, located inside The Daily, to have some tea and sit for a little bit. They have a credible selection of teas available, including hojicha, my favorite green tea – the leaves are roasted, so it’s less grassy than most green teas.

I tried Big Dom’s Bagel Shop, which is only open Wednesday through Sunday, and then only until they sell out. The everything bagel was covered with seeds and salt, and it had the right consistency in the center and enough chew to the crust. I ordered an egg sandwich, and the eggs came in one of those pre-cooked blocks of scrambled eggs, which, fine, I’m here for the bagels, but I feel like a good bagel deserves better than that.

One Blacksburg restaurant to mention – Café Mekong, a pan-Asian spot in a strip mall a little south of downtown. They clearly do a thriving take-out business, although their handful of tables were full the whole time I was there. The papaya salad was standard-issue, just average, but their Singapore noodles were a 55.

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→ April 11, 2025
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Nosferatu.

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

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→ April 10, 2025
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Transcendent Kingdom.

I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.

Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.

This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.

As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)

Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.

It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.

Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

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