Draft blog post is up on Matt Purke’s demands and Randal Grichuk’s suitor.
More “vignettes” from me on building through the draft and ’09 draftees who could move quick.
I’ll be on our St. Louis affiliate on Monday at 12:20 pm CDT to talk draft.
→ June 7, 2009
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→ June 5, 2009
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More Klaw than you can stand!
Today’s draft tidbits, all bullet-pointy.
Another article on top prospects in this year’s draft who were undrafted out of high school.
I’m quoted extensively in this survey article on the HS crop in this year’s draft.
Another videoclip, this one about Scott Boras’ role in this year’s draft.
Also, Levi Stahl discusses Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me in this and one prior blog post. I’ve never read it, but loved her first novel, The Dud Avocado, when I read it back in January.
Last up – I’ll be on our Pittsburgh affiliate again on Saturday morning at 10:40 am, and I’ll be on ESPN Radio sometime in the 9 am EDT hour on Sunday morning.
→ June 5, 2009
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.
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After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.
Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.
Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind
→ June 3, 2009
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New projection, radio, etc.
New first-round projection is up. As I noted in the comments there and on Twitter, I heard after it was posted that the Rockies are “heavy heavy” on Matt Hobgood for one of their two picks.
Radio hit on Baseball Tonight this evening.
UPDATE they just posted my NYC radio hit with Seth Everett.
Ticket to Ride is a very cool game, by the way. I need to update that boardgames post, once I survive the draft.
→ June 1, 2009
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ESPNEWS today.
Live at 3:20 pm EDT.
Last mental_floss quiz should be posted at 5 pm today.
→ May 30, 2009
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The Phantom Grammy.
Today’s mental_floss quiz: Can you name the fifteen departments run by the Secretaries in the US Cabinet?
Anyway, this is kind of stupid but I’m going to mention it anyway because it annoys me. The University of New Mexico has a reliever named Cole White with a big arm and poor command, and he’ll be drafted somewhere in the top 5-6 rounds. When that happens, you will hear something, somewhere, about how he was nominated for a Grammy, because that’s what it says on his bio page on UNM’s athletics site.
It is also false. Cole White was never nominated for a Grammy, which is easy to prove since Grammy nominations are announced publicly every year. I contacted UNM’s media relations department in late April, asking them to clarify, and was told: “As we dug deeper into it, he ended up in the top 100 for Best Rock Song.”
So I called NARAS and asked them if they issue any sort of top 100 rankings for award categories, and was told no. As it turns out, Cole White wrote a song that his former band recorded, and their record label submitted it to NARAS so that it could be considered for the ballot, but it was not nominated or otherwise recognized for anything other than the fact that it was released commercially and met the general requirements for nomination. His song was one of 15,000 entries on the overall ballot from which the nominees are eventually chosen.
I notified UNM’s media relations department that this was all incorrect on April 29th, and did receive a reply, but they haven’t corrected it on the site, which means the inaccuracy will be repeated once White is drafted and/or signed. I was hoping UNM would just fix it and the story would go away, but a month is probably sufficient grace period for them to fix the error, and it annoys me tremendously that they haven’t. ESPN.com wasn’t interested in the story – and I agree with them, as it really is small potatoes – but I feel like a mistake like that, however innocent, should be corrected.
→ May 29, 2009
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Top 20 21 Prince songs.
So today mental_floss is running the quiz that I suggested to them back in April, which led to the idea of a whole week of Klaw quizzes: Can you name the six #1 hits authored by Prince?
To celebrate this, here’s a countdown of my twenty favorite Prince songs, which I recommend you skip until you’ve tried the quiz. Prince completists out there will probably notice that all but one of these songs were released as singles; in part this is because I am generally a singles guy instead of a deep tracks guy, in part because I think deep tracks guys are usually pretentious boobs, and in part because my first introduction to early Prince came from The Hits
(EDIT: Why 21? Because somehow I deleted “Raspberry Beret” when reordering songs, didn’t notice it, and added a 20th song before posting. Of course, I wrote the whole thing two weeks ago, so I’m just guessing that that’s what I did.)
21. “Partyman.” Prince had a very long peak, but it wasn’t a steady one; the late ’80s were relatively fallow for him and he didn’t bounce back all the way until Diamonds and Pearls in 1991. The video for “Partyman” starred a relatively unknown Dutch sax player named Candy Dulfer, who then had a crossover pop hit called “Lily Was Here” a year later.
20. “Little Red Corvette.” I wonder what Prince song has actually received the most airplay over the years – it seems like “Corvette” is a staple of eighties stations the way that Visage’s “Fade to Grey” is de rigueur for ’80s new wave compilations. It’s a good enough song, with lyrics that walk the line between clever and all-right-we-get-it-everything-is-about-sex, which kind of sums up 64% of the songs Prince recorded, with the other 36% just about sex without any of the metaphors.
19. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” Prince was pretty big on the synth early in his career, before the New Wave crowd took it and played it directly into the ground. This was one of Prince’s catchier synth hooks; “When You Were Mine” has better lyrics (“You didn’t have the decency to change the sheets”), but he sounds like he recorded his vocals with a towel stuffed in his mouth.
18. “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” His first US top 40 pop hit, with 28 more to follow. I wonder how many programmers and listeners realized what exactly Prince was saying in the chorus.
17. “Black Sweat.” I think this is the only post-name-change song on the list; it sounds a lot like early Prince with better production values and a very catchy drum machine riff behind it. It’s less-is-more music.
16. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” Ten thirty-five on a lonely Friday night.
15. “Sign O’ the Times.” Hated this song when it came out, because it was so strange. Now I like it, because it’s so strange. Prince was never big on social commentary, at least not in songs he released as singles, but “Sign” is entirely about it, and one of the first mainstream songs to talk about AIDS.
14. “Thieves in the Temple.” Honestly, if it wasn’t for this song, I’m sure Prince could propose that we all forget that Graffiti Bridge ever happened and get a unanimous “amen” from the congregation.
13. “1999.” Might not have made my list at all on January 1, 2000, because I was so damn sick of it.
12. “Let’s Go Crazy.” Dearly beloved … Purple Rain was Prince’s breakthrough, and I’d like to think the main reason is that he veered so much farther into rock territory than he ever had before. He was already working his own wide-ranging style of fusion, and by assimilating a big chunk of not just rock but distorted guitar-driven rock, he created something pretty amazing that no one has been able to match since then. Oh, and this wasn’t even the best song on the album.
11. “Delirious.” Great song that sounds kind of dated now. It’s begging for a remake that replaces the little Casiotone synthesizer he used on the original track with some guitar.
10. “U Got the Look.” Prince invents text messaging, with the help of the hey-she-got-kinda-hot Sheena Easton.
9. “Alphabet St.” Perhaps better in the version released as a single, without the embarrassing rap from “Kat,” although for embarrassing it’s tough to top “Dead on It” from The Black Album. Also, getting “Alphabet St.” as a single meant that you didn’t have to buy Lovesexy and end up with one of the more ill-advised album covers in music history. (This was the most ill-advised cover in music history. I warned you, but you’re going to click anyway.)
8. “Pope.” I think this is the only B-side on the list – it was unreleased before The Hits came out. Very catchy, with humorous lyrics and that same less-is-more feel that a lot of Prince’s best songs have. It’s poppy by Prince standards.
7. “Raspberry Beret.” My wife was floored when I told her this wasn’t one of Prince’s #1 songs. I’ve often wondered if this song gave Ian Broudie the idea to call his side project the Lightning Seeds (a mondegreen from the line “thunder drowns out what the lightning sees”). And no, I don’t think the urban legend about “in through the out door” is true.
6. “Sexy MF.” Not one you’re going to hear on the radio any time soon. Sort of a funky NPG jam session with plenty of sexual innuendo and a syncopated beat that feels like an odd time signature or a record that keeps jumping ahead. I could argue for any song from here on for #1.
5. “When Doves Cry.” Hell of a guitar intro, brilliant lyrics, and no bass line whatsoever.
4. “Soft & Wet.” This was actually Prince’s first single, according to Wikipedia, but I’ve never heard it on the radio. The title gives you a fairly clear indication of what the song is about, and what almost every song Prince recorded in the first four or five years of his career was about. It’s dated with the heavy synth use – almost funk meets new wave – but the hook is sharp. Great first line, too, although that might be the reason I’ve never heard it on the radio.
3. “7.” No one seems to know to what seven people the song refers, but the mystical lyrics and catchy chorus made it kind of a surprise hit. Of course, in the U.S., it peaked at #7.
2. “Gett Off.” One of the best opening stanzas to any song, ever: “How can I put this in a way so as not to offend or unnerve/But there’s a rumor going around that you ain’t been gettin’ served/They say that you ain’t you know what in baby who knows how long/It’s hard for me to say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong.” The song was sort of a return to Prince’s glory days of sex-driven funk, but despite serving as the first single off the Diamonds and Pearls album, it didn’t make a dent in the singles charts until the album’s second single, “Cream,” went to #1.
1. “Kiss.” Iconic? Anthemic? Timeless. There may be no better exemplar of less is more in music.
→ May 28, 2009
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Miscellaneous links.
Tuesday night’s hit on AllNight.
Today’s hit on The Herd. That was a really fun bit, at least for me.
Today’s chat transcript.
I’m waiting to hear from mental_floss about today’s quiz – might have been pushed back to tomorrow.
→ May 28, 2009
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New quiz, chat, etc.
Sorry for the lack of action over here – I’m tied up writing reports and making phone calls. I’ve even ground to a halt in Gone With the Wind.
Klawchat tomorrow will be at 1:30 pm EDT and I’ll probably have to stop at 2:30.
Today’s quiz on mental_floss is on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Interesting piece on why more roads may not reduce traffic.
→ May 26, 2009
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Keith Law on the Interwebs…
My updated top 100 ranking for this year’s draft is up. My first-round projection will be up later tonight is up now as well.
And I’m on mental_floss as a guest quizmaster for the week. After I sent them a suggestion for a “Name X in Y” quiz, they actually asked me to write four more and make a big thing of it. I’m not sure if this represents slumming for me or for them, but the first quiz, on geography is up now: Can you name the ten countries in ASEAN? There will also be quizzes on baseball, books, and music, but I couldn’t come up with a viable one for food (at least not in the “Name X in Y” format), so the fifth one is on politics.
I’ll also be on AllNight tonight with Jason Smith, although we tape it before the show so I don’t know exactly when it’ll air.