→ August 9, 2020
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Music update, July 2020.

It seems like new music releases might be slowing down now, perhaps a lagged effect of the pandemic, although I still see a half-dozen or more albums coming out in the rest of 2020 that I’m excited to hear. As always, you can listen to the playlist here if you can’t see the Spotify widget below.

The Beths – Dying to Believe. The praise for the Beths’ new album Jump Rope Gazers is a bit ahead of my opinion of the album, which I liked, but wouldn’t say I loved it; they’re so much better when they use their energy and go uptempo.

Doves – Prisoners. That’s two strong tracks of the three singles they’ve released so far off their comeback album, The Universal Want, due out on September 20th.

Space Above featuring Boyboy – Movements. Aaron Short, who records as Space Above, may sound more like early The Naked and Famous, the band Short left, than TNAF does today – and I’m here for it.

The Naked and Famous – Everybody Knows. And here’s the remaining duo, with one of their most melodic songs since their debut album in 2010. Their latest album Recover, features this, last year’s “Sunseeker,” “Death,” and “Bury Us.”

Everything Everything – Violent Sun. This latest single from these British avant-garde rockers definitely grew on me over multiple listens, further reason to be eager for their fifth album, Re-Animator, which drops on September 11th.

Nation of Language – The Wall & I. Nation of Language’s latest album Introduction, Presence came out on May 24th, and closes out with this track, which feels heavily influenced by peak New Order.

Jorja Smith – By Any Means. This was the singer/songwriter’s first single on her own since last year’s hit “Be Honest,” and I hope it signals her sophomore album will come soon.

Black Honey – Beaches. More indie-pop goodness from one of my favorite bands of 2018.

San Cisco – Messages. Scarlett Stevens takes on lead vocals on this very sunny pop track, although I think her lack of vocal depth shows here when she doesn’t have Jordi Davieson to share singing duties.

PAINT – Strange World. This really sounds like a lost Badly Drawn Boy track from 2000. PAINT is Pedrum Siadatian, formerly of the Allah-Las; this is the best track from his first album under the name, Spiritual Vegas.

Inhaler – Fade Into You. It’s tough to cover a song like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but Inhaler, led by Elijah Hewson (son of Bono), does a very credible job here.

Hinds – Spanish Bombs. A bit of a different sound for the Spanish quartet, maybe a little more polished than their previous output, although that’s kind of a low bar.

Glass Animals – It’s All So Incredibly Loud. This song is wonderfully weird, and has Glass Animals’ trademark use of unusual percussion sounds, and the more I listen to it the more I like it. The synth lines here are relentless.

Serpiko – Sleep State. Nobody seems to know who Serpiko is, but his debut EP, also called Sleep State, has garnered some positive press for its unusual blend of electronic, funk, and jazz elements. This title track is by far the best on the record, meandering in a purposeful way thanks to a persistent percussion line.

The Go-Go’s – Club Zero. Showtime has a new documentary out on the pioneering all-girl pop/rock group, and the quintet recorded this new track to go along with it … and it’s great. Other than Belinda Carlisle’s vocals, you might guess this was something from their peak years.

Ihsahn – Spectre at the Feast. Ihsahn is one of the founding members of the Norwegian black metal band Emperor, probably as well remembered for their involvement in church burnings and for their drummer’s conviction of the murder of a man who solicited him for sex than for their four albums, the last of which came out in 2001. That’s a long way of saying that this track is nothing like Emperor’s music – it’s progressive rock, not really even metal, with clean vocals and some intriguing guitar work.

Pallbearer – Forgotten Days. The champions of American doom metal are back with this title track from their new album, due out October 23rd. This track was labeled (Edit) so I presume a longer version will appear on the full-length LP.

Ensiferum – The Defence of the Sampo. I really enjoy Ensiferum when they stick to the thrash elements more common in Viking metal and go light on the death growls; it’s like listening to strange Norse metal drinking songs.

Mastodon – Fallen Torches. This is on the heavier side for Mastodon, a previously unreleased track that will appear on the band’s forthcoming B-sides and miscellany collection Medium Rarities, which will also include the band’s cover of Metallica’s “Orion.”

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→ August 8, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 8/8/20.

I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.

For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.

I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.

My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
  • Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
  • The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
  • Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
  • Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
  • You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
  • A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
  • My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
  • Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
  • Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
  • NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
  • The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
  • Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
  • An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.
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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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→ August 2, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

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→ August 1, 2020
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Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

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→ July 31, 2020
→ By

Klawchat 7/31/20.

I’ve got two scouting blogs up for subscribers to the Athletic, one today and one from Tuesday, covering rookies and young players of note.

Keith Law: You’ve got that pure feel, such good responses. Klawchat.

John: Man, Bieber’s command looks really strong.  How did you see him as a prospect?
Keith Law: I saw him as a back-end starter because he was more 88-91. His velocity kept creeping up, which I absolutely did not see coming, so now he’ll sit 94 and his secondary stuff has improved as well. He’s at least a legit #2 starter. I think over time he’ll give up a few too many home runs to be an ace, but I could be wrong again.

Brett J: Jp Crawford has been noticeably better in his small sample size this year. Are you seeing anything that shows his improvements might stick?
Keith Law: I’d say this is more a continuation of what we saw from him last year.

Mike: Just wanted to say the Scouting Notebook pieces you’ve been running on The Athletic have been stellar. Really looking forward to that series for the next week that baseball will be around.
Keith Law: Thank you. The response to the first one was so good that it made doing a second one an easy call. Now I am a bit stuck as we wait for some more debuts, but if we get another week of games, I’ll have enough guys to discuss. Could always look at which players seem noticeably different from last year too.

Andrew: What is the point of the Mariners carrying 2 actual outfielders while Kelenic sits idle in Tacoma? Shouldn’t they just see what he can do against Major League talent?
Keith Law: At this point, no. They’ve pushed off his free agency by a year already.

Jibraun: In his newsletter today, Joe Sheehan mentioned that MLB’s K rate is rising again this year. What rule changes do you think should be instituted to lower K rates?
Keith Law: Raise the bottom of the strike zone. I also think the automated strike zone would help too.

Jebediah: Since you’re a grump with no emotion for baseball, can you just calculate the teams with the highest WAR so we can award the World Series trophy to them?
Keith Law: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Arnold: Did Giants make right choice to not put Joey Bart on roster? On one hand, Posey opting out created space for him and he looks to be major league ready as a hitter. On the other hand, who knows if MLB will make it through the shortened season and Giants aren’t contenders so why waste a year of salary control.
Keith Law: This is the one variable that might stop teams from recalling prospects now – what if the season ends in a few days, and you called up a guy to play three games only to have him get most of a year of service, and maybe put him on the 40-man too soon? I hate that that’s a consideration, but it’s real.
Keith Law: It’s like when the White Sox recalled Michael Kopech a few years ago, and he made two starts before blowing out his elbow. He got a year-plus of service out of that.

Robert: What would it take for the MLB to admit failure and call the season? Half the league not being able to play?
Keith Law: I bet a player in the hospital in serious condition would do it.
Keith Law: Or another Marlins-level outbreak.

AJ: Who were better prospects as amateurs, Cole and Bauer at UCLA or Rocket and Leiter at Vandy?
Keith Law: I haven’t seen the Vandy boys in college, but I think Cole and Bauer.

Deke: Even if we get anything approximating the rest of the 2020 season, it’s still basically going to be a wash. So my question is: Should we be at all optimistic for NEXT YEAR’s MLB season? It seems like there’s every chance this is comparably bad then.
Keith Law: We shouldn’t be optimistic about anything as long as the hoaxers are in power. We should have had a national shutdown for 6 weeks in the spring. Instead we have the worst situation of any developed country, even worse than many developing countries, out of every place that’s been hit with the pandemic. How anyone can see this and not immediately blame the Administration is beyond me.

Kevin W: What would you do with ohtani?  Keep status quo?  Hitter only?  Pitcher only?
Keith Law: I’d pick one. Still prefer him on the mound but if he hasn’t really come back from TJ yet then maybe you let him hit only and have him throw on the side?

Cubs: Is it way to early to call up someone you just drafted?
Keith Law: In theory, now. In this environment, probably.

Patty O’Furniture: Max Fried looked the best he’s ever looked last night!  Not ready to call him an ace or anything, but damn.  He pitched like a grown man
Keith Law: Feeling good about all the years I kept him as a top 50ish prospect. Great athlete, smart kid, just needed time.

Kevin W: Has any player you have scouted ever had all 5 tools rated above 50?
Keith Law: I can’t think of one. Many guys have the power-run-glove-arm tools. Few also have the hit tool.

addoeh: If a player getting seriously ill from COVID nor having half a team testing positive have stopped the season, nothing short of a player dying is going to.
Keith Law: This is also possible.

Kevin W: How are you going to handle school this year with your daughter?
Keith Law: We’re going to do what her school offers, which I believe will be hybrid (a few days in school, a few remote).

Robbie: Were you impressed at all/ have an opinion on the way William Contreras handled his surprise early debut?
Keith Law: No opinion. Minuscule sample. I saw him get overwhelmed in his last game, unfortunately.

Greg: Should Dylan Carlson be playing every day instead of Billy Hamilton 2.0 (Bader)? If so, what kind of numbers would you expect from him in a full season?
Keith Law: I think so. .350+ OBP this year which would be a big help.

Bob: Tatis seems to be worth the $27m it took to pay off Shields.
Keith Law: Yes, yes he does.

Greg: What way do you prefer to cook zucchini  or yellow squash
Keith Law: Fritters! I just made zucchini/corn fritters the other day. Recipe was on Serious Eats.

John: Seems like its impossible to find a reasonable argument with non-maskers, how did our country fall so far, is it really too much to ask to look out for others for 2-3 months?
Keith Law: Masks, evolution, vaccines … so much of this is misguided “liberty” talk, and often is really about people clinging to a vision of yesteryear.
Keith Law: That includes white power, religion, and patriarchy.

Luis: just wanted to congratulate you on the amazing book. I’m at chapter 4 at the moment and waiting for the day to end to dig into ch5! Enjoy your weekend!
Keith Law: Thank you! Glad you’re enjoying it.

addoeh: 2020 is drunk.  The President is promoting a doctor who believes in demon semen.
Keith Law: She’s a massive, massive quack. This is like the President promoting Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Wakefield or Uri Geller as authorities on science and medicine.

Mike: Can Tony Gonsolin be a #2 starter? Do you see him seizing a rotation spot this year from Stripling or Wood, if he’s ever healthy?
Keith Law: I like him more than those two guys, but thought he was more of a fourth starter or an ace in a swingman role. Wouldn’t rule him out from a higher ceiling given how far he came just in his first year in pro ball when he was pitching full time.

Benji: I really don’t like Espn anymore
Keith Law: You should hear what ESPN says about you.

Buck: With his changeup looking so good can B Woodruff become a legit ace?
Keith Law: Above league-average starter.

Matt: Keep seeing the White Sox are playing around with Vaughn at 3rd base – assume the chances of him actually being able to play there are ~0%, right?
Keith Law: I think so. Same for Torkelson. Third basemen are usually a lot more agile than those guys.

Mike: Could Dustin May end up starting a playoff game this season?
Keith Law: Why not?

Josh: Might the league be better off pausing the season, and setting up a “bubble” in Southern California, where they can easily play into November while (probably) leaving time to rest for next season?
Keith Law: I suppose we could see if the NBA bubble works, although MLB has more than twice the player count.

Jack: Nick Madrigal making his MLB debut tonight. Do you think he immediately becomes the non-pitcher with the least present power in the big leagues?
Keith Law: It’d be a close competition between him, Leury Garcia, and David Fletcher, I think. Billy Hamilton would win this but he’s not in the majors.

Tom: do you believe padres catcher mejia can be an above average contributor offensively?
Keith Law: He was on my breakouts list last week, so clearly I do.

TC: How much of Edwin Diaz’s struggles are mental vs mechanical? He looked fine in his first two outings up until giving up the home run to Ozuna & last night he had zero command & no feel for a slider.
Keith Law: I think the altered baseball last year really hurt him. His slider went poof when the baseball changed.

Chris P: Hey KLaw, are you going to be able to get any information on the secondary sites for each team? I’m wondering if we’re able to get any information on prospects that aren’t in the show this season.
Keith Law: I expect to get some information, filtered through team sources though, after a few weeks.

Pat D: I’ve been desperate to get this question answered by multiple people.  Shouldn’t the MLBPA fire Tony Clark at the very least get him a MUCH better negotiating partner for the next CBA?  It seems like his track record is pretty terrible so far with these negotiations.
Keith Law: I think it’s more about who’s advising him, and whether he even has final say over negotiations. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that he’s been overruled by people around him, which – if true, and I want to be extremely clear that this is unverified – would be the worst position for a leader.

TC: Is it fair to say the only true way we can have a safe season is if we have a vaccine widely available? Should MLB be concentrating on being able to safely open 2021 spring training?
Keith Law: Other countries have limited the virus’ spread without a vaccine. They locked down nationally, enforced it, and got compliance from the populations. We had a piecemeal approach, hoaxers and deniers in the White House, and mouthbreathers in the streets claiming masks were tyranny (but abducting protesters in unmarked vans and calling for delaying an election isn’t?).

Nate: Will you be able to do a prospect list this offseason? With no minor league games and only the opinions of team officials as to what is happening at their satellite camps, it seems like there just wouldn’t be enough unbiased info to make the process legitimate this year.
Keith Law: Sure, it just won’t change as much year over year as it usually does.

Guest: Does it seem odd to you that Markakis saw how things are going and now has decided to play?
Keith Law: Yes, although maybe he thinks he’ll play for a few weeks, the season will be cancelled, and he’ll at least go back into free agency with some playing time?

Lee: Has Trump officially killed the Republican party?   How the hell did any sane person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: If he loses in November, which I am not willing to assume just yet, the party will quickly move to disavow him, and individual politicians will rewrite history to say they never really supported him. It is on us to stop them from doing so.

Dave: You prefer the Vetri Neopolitan dough to Reinhart? I’ve gotten decent results with Reinhart, but it’s so sticky it’s hard to handle unless I keep it cold, which is suboptimal.
Keith Law: Different doughs for different temperatures. I use Vetri’s Neapolitan for my outdoor oven, which gets to 800+. Reinhart’s is my go-to for indoors, where I set the oven at 500.

Another Matt: What are you missing most about having no minor league season this year?
Keith Law: All of it. Going to games to scout, and to see scout friends, and watching stuff online, and following players through box scores, and talking to scouts and player development people about players.

Leprekhan: Long term Soroka or Fried?
Keith Law: I feel better about Fried staying healthy over the long term than Soroka. Both are probably #2 starters.

Ethan: Any suggestions for Carcassonne expansion packs? Already have hills and sheep and traders and builders. Thanks!
Keith Law: I like Inns & Cathedrals. Haven’t tried Hills & Sheep.

Todd Boss: I know he’s not a major prospect, but Nats farmhand Tres Barrera (who was recently hit with an 80game PED suspension) filed a counter suit.  In the complaint he says he tested positive for “10 picograms” of DHCMT.  In mass units, a picogram is equal to 0.000000000001 of a gram.

If this is true, is this just a patently ridiculous suspension?  Is a MLB player actually being suspended without pay for 80 games for ingesting less than a millionth of a gram of a performance enhancing substance?
Keith Law: I’m probably out of my league answering this, but I think the issue is that you wouldn’t have that in your system at all unless you’d ingested it, because it’s synthetic.

Adam Trask: Nick Madrigal gets the call. You see real value there or replacement level?
Keith Law: More than replacement level. Maybe an average regular if he can keep his average up. My concern remains his inability to make hard contact, with zero power.

Todd Boss: So are you in a Sinclair market that’s being forced to show Plandemic?  Are you setting your DVR?
Keith Law: I am not. I think we’re an hour-plus from their nearest affiliate.

Danny: Simple question and not at all wishcasting- what are the odds that Trump is indicted at some point post-presidency (i.e. election fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, improper profiteering from office?)
Keith Law: I hope that whoever succeeds him, whenever it happens, holds him and his cronies (and his children) accountable for any crimes they’ve committed, rather than pardoning them and saying we need to move forward or turn the page. The latter would simply encourage the next set of grifters who come along.

Adam Trask: We’ve learned JK Rowling is a bigot. I was looking forward to reading the Potter books to my baby girl. Should I still?
Keith Law: Yes.
Keith Law: There is a lot of good in those books, even though their author has revealed herself to be a TERF.

Don: How did we get brainwashed as a country to prefer chicken breasts over chicken thighs?
Keith Law: Our national fat phobia, along with bad advice from some quarters of the federal health establishment.

David: Keith, do you think Jeff Lunhow will work in an MLB front office again?
Keith Law: My guess is no.

Eric: Sadly, my father unexpectedly passed. Do you have any tips for grief or any good books to rec? It’s…hard.
Keith Law: I’m so sorry for your loss. I don’t have a book to recommend, but would certainly suggest talking to a therapist or psychologist, even if it’s just for a few sessions.

Robbie: He’s already 29, so clearly he’s not a prospect, but what’s your opinion of Yaz. He seems to have a great approach and has continued to hit the ball hard to start the season
Keith Law: Extra outfielder at best.

Pat D: Is there any movie that’s SUPPOSED to come out this year that would get you into a theater?  I’m still very determined to see Tenet in IMAX.
Keith Law: No, I’ll wait to see them all at home.

Drew: If you saw an anti-mask tirade in real life like we’re seeing all over the news, would you step in? I keep picturing myself wanting to get involved but also not wanting to be in the cloud of a covidiots screaming and spittle.But my 2020 rage could use a good screaming.
Keith Law: I think I would. I haven’t told anyone to put a mask on, even though I’ve seen people without them, or “wearing” them off their noses and mouths.
Keith Law: If they’re giving an employee a hard time, though, that employee would probably benefit from other customers voicing support. I think.

Greg: Why does there seem to be a very local contingent of fans who are seemingly convinced that sports media are driving some kind of agenda to get sports cancelled? Just general distrust of media of any kind? If the fans are for something, that means the media must be against it? Or just a more widespread dumbing of America?
Keith Law: Distrust of media, and wishful thinking. The funny part is that they think we have some power to affect the outcome.

Arnold: Today’s reports that national pandemic plan was tossed in trash by Jared because COVID-19 was hurting blue cities/states more is both least surprising and most frightening thing yet from this administration.
Keith Law: And should make more people mad … but it won’t.

Brett: Thank you for your taking time to do this today. Kris Bubic makes his big league debut tonight. Have you seen him live, and if so, what did you like/dislike? What’s your ceiling on him long term?
Keith Law: Low ceiling but command/changeup guy who should succeed for a while as a back-end starter.

Don: Leury Garcia is secretly a yoked muscle hamster. Jacked two dongs from both sides of the plate in the opener
Keith Law: ISO under .100 last year. He’s strong for his size, but that size is awfully close to me.

Whodini: What was your favorite song from that Eurovision Song Contest movie?
Keith Law: No interest, sorry.

addoeh: How would you describe yourself when you’ve had a couple adult beverages?  Happy, huggy, sleepy, loud, sings a lot, dances a lot, belligerent, wordy?
Keith Law: I’m more voluble, and I’m told I’m a funny drunk.

Chris: Given his crazy stuff, why has Dustin May struck out less than a batter an inning in his minor-league career? Do you think he ever wins a Cy Young?
Keith Law: He does, or should, get a lot of bad contact.

Guest: Ha the Socialist agenda officially killed the Democratic party? How the hell could any same person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: Please go read any actual history or economics book about what “socialist” means.

Ridley: So, I hear more than a few politicians saying that they’re not going to extend/increase unemployment because they don’t want people to make more money than if they were at work.

Isn’t that the point? Don’t we want to incentivize people to stay at home, avoid spreading the disease, and be safe?
Keith Law: Painting the poor as lazy has been a popular pastime for both parties, especially the GOP, for at least 75 years.

Craig: MLBPA has a say in how the draft is run because draft pick compensation is tied to free agency. Why don’t the owners get rid of free agency compensation so they can do whatever they want with the draft?
Keith Law: The union doesn’t want to give up that say, and they’d have to give that.

Chris P: Vladdy Jr seems to still be hitting mostly groundballs and has only 1 homer going back to last August. Are you noticing anything different from him or his approach that would give you pause? I know he was on your breakout list this year and I still think he’s going to be a star…but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a little concerned.
Keith Law: It’s been a week. Even with the high GB rate last year he had a 105 wRC+, because he hits the ball hard. Everyone I’ve asked who’s spent time around him thinks he’s such a smart hitter he’ll get to driving the ball more. Also, he’s just 21, way too soon to be concerned. He’d be a junior in college right now.

Sal: Earlier you said to raise the bottom of the strike zone to deal with the rise in Ks. Is that suggestion for a hard rule change or for umps being less generous with the low strike?
Keith Law: A hard rule change.

Jonny: “individuals with a cervix” by CNN today.   At some point this becomes Orwellian speech, no?
Keith Law: Please go read 1984 if you’re going to allude to it.

xxx(yyy): do you listen to any podcasts? have any recs for non-baseball related ones?
Keith Law: Grierson & Leitch, The Hidden Brain, BBC’s The Inquiry. I don’t have time to get through any more right now with no car time.

Sal: One last one….can you give Mets fans *any* reason not to start twitching when they hear or read the name “Kelenic”?
Keith Law: No, sorry. You should be permanently angry over BVW just giving him away.

Frank: The Giants traded for Zach Cozart and released him before the season was shorted so they owe him the money for this contract under the 2020 season.  Since he was released before the new agreement and 60 game schedule, do they owe him the full amount of his contract or the agreed upon prorata amount?  If its the later, makes this trade even better for the Giants.
Keith Law: Great question. I assume pro rata but I do not know for sure.

Andrew: If MLB created a “Utility Man of the Year Award” (think: NBA 6th Man of the Year), who would you name it after?
Keith Law: Tony Phillips.

addoeh: For Eric, I lost my dad two weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.  Talk to a therapist, talk to friends.  For me, it was time that also helped.
Keith Law: Thank you.

Samsonite: I wouldn’t normally recommend this kind of thing but this year is different – you should watch that Eurovision Song Context movie. Is it dumb? Very much so. Is it good? Well, I guess it’s not. But it made me happy for a couple of hours and I’ve had some really terrible songs in my head for a week.
Keith Law: It’s not even a style of movie I like. There are still so many movies out there I want to watch and don’t have time to see – plus a billion TV shows, although I’ve finally started watching Stranger Things – that I can’t see spending time on something I’m so unlikely to enjoy.
Keith Law: ok, apparently Cozart gets the full salary because he was released before the season.

That Guy in Detroit: The U.S. might benefit from the presence of an actual “socialist” party — and ranked choice voting to give it, and others, an actual shot
Keith Law: The presence of one, yes. I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere with a true socialist party in power.

Ken: Let me rephrase the question. Has the policies of the Democratic Party made it impossible for them to win a Presidential election?
Keith Law: Their candidate got 3 million more votes than her opponent last time, so I am pretty sure your questions reflect more about your desires than they do any political reality.

xxx(yyy): who would you rather have for the next 5 years as a team cornerstone – Vladito or Joey Gallo?
Keith Law: Vlad.

Mickey: hey Keith – loved the book, of course. Are you less active on twitter these days or am I just missing your tweets (or mis-remembering you as being more active in previous years)?
Keith Law: Less active. It just doesn’t pay to have discussions on there, let alone to argue with anyone. Credit to Twitter for finally booting David Duke, but the site is still overrun by bots, racists, science deniers, and just general assholes.
Keith Law: People will say *anything* if they don’t have to put their names on it.

Henry: Isn’t the entire 2020 season just a small sample size? I’m not sure if we can count anyone’s performance this season seriously.
Keith Law: I tried to make a similar point at the top of my predictions column. Sixty games is less than half a season. It would get us to about June 10th in a regular year.

JJ: The Democrats’ candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections.  It’s not their policies that are keeping them from the White House …
Keith Law: It’s the electoral college, and maybe some gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Patty O’Furniture: Thoughts on Mike Foltynewicz?
Keith Law: Not sure where his velocity went, but he might be a candidate to take eight months off to try to regain strength, or let whatever’s gone awry heal up, and try again in February or March.

Jackie: Giving a 12 year contract to any player is just insane, right?  Mookie might be a great player now, but the vast majority of major leaguers don’t last nearly that long.  If the Dodgers employ an actuary, he probably pulled out all his hair.
Keith Law: It’s a luxury tax thing. You spread out the payments over more years to reduce the AAV and thus reduce the hit to your payroll for LT purposes.
Keith Law: Nobody thinks he and Harper and Trout will still be $30MM+ players at age 40. It’s just accounting.

Colin: Don’t you think Yaz as an “extra OF at best” is a bit harsh? He hit last year at a solid OF level already. After reading MVP machine, I feel more open to late bloomers, myself. Especially when I didn’t know what was not happening for the player in their early-mid 20s
Keith Law: No, it’s right. I’d go further: without the Happy Fun Ball, he wouldn’t even be that. I’m sorry that the .556 BABIP he has so far this year hasn’t changed my view.

Greg: I don’t like that there is a world series attached to this. Can we just call this a beefed up spring training. I’d be happy with that.
Keith Law: At this point, I’m happy with every day of games we get, and not looking any further.
Keith Law: I need to wrap this up a bit early and will be offline most of the weekend, so I won’t have a links post up Saturday either. Thank you all for reading and for all of your questions. Please stay safe and wear your masks.

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→ July 30, 2020
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The Famished Road.

Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his sprawling novel The Famished Road, which now sits as the start of a trilogy of novels about the spirit child Azaro, who moves back and forth between the spirit and material worlds until he decides to stay with one family in a nameless African country until he can make his mother happy. Okri’s prose is stunning and the book is replete with the magical realism common in postcolonial literature, but even a week after finishing it I still can’t quite decide what, if anything, this book was about.

Azaro, short for Lazaro (since he has seemingly returned from the dead multiple times), is the only child of a couple in a small African village where citizens are getting by, but where the mere appearance of a car or a radio is notable. Representatives of two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, visit the village, where the hub of activity is the bar owned by the mysterious Madame Koto, who lets Azaro hang around during the day while his mother hawks goods at a local market and his father does … well, a lot of nothing. Azaro’s father chases various chimeras throughout the book, at one point deciding he’s going to be a boxer and at another that he’ll be a politician, never doing much to earn money to feed his family (and, while he’s a boxer, eating more than his share, so Azaro and his mother go hungry). There’s also a blind man in a wheelchair who seems to just wish evil on Azaro and the other kids in the village, a photographer who runs afoul of the political thugs and begins to document the strife they cause in the village, and various incarnations from the spirit world who want to pull Azaro back to the other side.

Okri is a beautiful writer, and even descriptions of ordinary events and moments sparkle. Azaro is probably around eight or nine years old, but uses phrasings and imagery of a wizened adult – or, perhaps, an ageless being from the spirit world: “The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.” Even scenes of violence take on a mystical quality that lessens their graphic nature, which makes some of the rioting – a not infrequent event in The Famished Road – a bit easier to navigate as a reader.

I love both magical realism and postcolonial literature, but something about this book didn’t hit the mark with me, primarily because I couldn’t connect with whatever its underlying themes might be. It seems like Okri writes at a figurative level, but perhaps without the metaphorical meaning beneath it. If Madame Koto represents someone or something, or Azaro’s father does, I missed it completely, perhaps just because I lack the historical context (what I know of Nigerian history is fairly limited to their civil war), but even his depiction of the two political parties felt a little facile; if the message here is just “all politicians are corrupt,” well, sure, but I think we already knew that.

Because of Okri’s prose and the incredible imagery throughout the book, The Famished Road flies by, even at 500 pages, and even with a plot that meanders substantially. Okri sets a scene, creating a vivid environment with a clear atmosphere, but what happens in these scenes is murky and I was left with a constant sense that I didn’t really get what he was trying to express. It reminded me of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, which seems thematically similar, but is more grounded in the concrete and, as a result, has a more powerful and evident metaphorical meaning as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Tara Westover’s Educated and begun David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

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→ July 29, 2020
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The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

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→ July 25, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

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→ July 24, 2020
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The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

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