→ November 16, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

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→ November 12, 2019
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Sushi Roll.

Phil Walker-Harding is a mainstay on my year-end board game lists at this point, with Bärenpark (2017) and Gizmos (2018) making my annual top tens the last two years and Silver and Gold obviously set to appear on my list this year. He’s shown himself able to design clever, replayable games across a broad range of mechanics, with Imhotep and Cacao among his other hits and the new Adventure game series (which I have but haven’t tested out yet). He’s also the designer of Sushi Go! and its bigger offshoot Sushi Go Party, one of the best games I know of for 6+ players, and has now added a second brand extension to this title with the … eye roll-inducing title Sushi Roll, a dice-drafting game that captures some of the feel of the original but streamlines it for faster play.

In Sushi Roll, players will roll dice at the start of each round, choosing one die and then passing their ‘conveyor belt’ board with all remaining dice to the left, after which players roll their new dice, choose one, and pass them around. There are five different colors of dice, each of which has a totally different set of images and ways to score: nigiri, worth 1-3 points each; maki, where the player with the most symbols in each round gets six points; tempura, which you collect in sets that can be worth 8-13 points if you get three of a kind; desserts, which score only at game end, six points if you have the most but negative six points if you have the fewest; and green dice that give you extra menu or chopstick tokens, or let you gain wasabi, which can triple the value of a subsequent nigiri die you place on top of the wasabi.

Sushi Roll box and components

Let me see that Sushi Roll…

The menus and chopsticks give you additional abilities to use on your turns, with each player starting the game with three menu tokens for re-rolls and two chopstick tokens for swaps. You can spend a menu token to re-roll any or all of your dice after your initial roll. You can use a swap token to take one die off of another player’s conveyor belt in exchange for one of yours – one of the only ways that player order, which rotates after each player chooses one die, matters in the game, and the only time you’ll directly interact with another player during game play. (The maki and dessert scoring involves other players, but only at the end of rounds or the end of the game.)

Walker-Harding has definitely hit on the right balance of game length and strategy; there are enough dice in each round, ranging from 16 (two players) to 21 (three players), that you can plan ahead a little bit. You see all of the dice around you, and can at least sort of guess what dice might come your way over the next few turns, so that you can make more informed choices with each draft. Of the five types of dice, only one, the white (nigiri) dice, score immediately with no impact beyond that selection; three of the other dice colors score depending on other dice you collect and possibly what other players get, while the last color, the green dice, offers a little of both. That’s distinct from roll-and-write titles, which are all the rage this year, but which mostly comprise independent rolls and choices.

I’d still put Sushi Go Party! above Sushi Roll, since the former has less randomness and offers more choices within each game and from game to game, while also scaling up to 8 players where Sushi Roll plays 2 to 5. I also don’t think Sushi Roll plays that well with two because it becomes too obvious what dice you might get, and because it’s too easy for the players to take entirely different paths and end up with little to no conflict. (The -6 point penalty for having the fewest dessert icons doesn’t apply in a two-player game.) The two-player mode might benefit from the addition of a dummy player that, say, takes dessert tokens first, then maki tokens, which would directly impact the way the two players score those categories. For 3-5 players who either want a new twist on Sushi Go! or who just love dice games, however, it’s a credible re-imagining of the original that is very true to the earlier games’ mechanics.

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→ November 11, 2019
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The Calculating Stars.

Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.

Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.

Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.

There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.

The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.

If I had to speculate on why this book won the big three awards, I’d guess it’s because the novel is, indeed, a climate change story. The climate isn’t changing because of man in The Calculating Stars, but it’s changing, and because the meteorite in the novel hit water and not land, it has probably pushed the climate past the point of no return. Kowal simply accepts that as a given, and then uses it to give us Republicans in Congress denying the accuracy of climate models, or average citizens asking why the government is spending money on long-term projects instead of helping people who need it today. It’s so thinly veiled you can see right through it, and even though I’m obviously on the side of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real, I found Kowal’s approach graceless and infantile, including how easily some of the climate change deniers in the book suddenly drop their opposition. I don’t see the present GOP changing its tune on climate change quite so easily.

That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.

It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.

Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.

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→ November 10, 2019
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Proving Grounds.

Proving Grounds is a solitaire dice-based game with a peculiar mechanic around re-rolling, giving you sixty seconds to settle on your rolls and then matching them up to the six enemy cards your character is currently fighting. It’s a fun little distraction but ultimately I don’t think it puts enough strategy or power in your hands to mitigate the randomness of the dice rolls and the restrictions around rerolls.

There’s a complicated back story to Proving Grounds, which comes with a novelette that gets into it, but it’s immaterial to the play itself. Your character faces six enemies at a time and must try to defeat eight enemies – they get replaced when you kill one – before taking five ‘wounds’ from all of your enemies. Enemy cards have battle tracks up their right sides that spell out how many dice and in what combinations you need to roll to hit them, moving the battle marker up one spot on the track. If a battle marker on an enemy reaches the top spot, you have defeated that enemy and get to remove that card from the game, replacing it with the next card from the enemy deck.

You start the game with eight dice to roll, and in each round you get sixty seconds to roll and re-roll until you get a result you like or the timer runs out. (Renegade has an app that includes a timer and lets you track how many enemies you’ve defeated.) When you roll the dice, you group them into sets by value. You can re-roll any set of dice, but if you have a single die with a particular value, you can’t re-roll that unless you end up matching it by re-rolling some other set. You can keep re-rolling sets and regrouping the dice, but you roll complete sets at once and you can only roll one set at a time.

When you’ve finished rolling, you assign each die or set of dice to the card in that value’s slot around the board. For example, if you have three dice with the value of 1, those dice go to attack the enemy in slot #1. If you have enough dice to meet the criteria in the next spot up the battle track on that card – usually a minimum number of dice, occasionally an extra criterion to have at least one nonwhite die – you may move the marker up. If, however, you have only a single die with that value, you move the battle marker down one slot. When the battle marker reaches the bottom spot, you sustain a wound, moving the wound marker down on its track, then restoring the battle marker on that card to its start position. This feature informs your re-rolling strategy, as you will want to try to avoid creating singles for any enemies with battle markers one spot above the bottom.

Some enemies have other unique features on them. One card’s battle track works in reverse – singles move the battle marker up, sets move it down. Most of your dice are white, but there are green, purple, and yellow dice as well, and some cards count those as two dice apiece, both for purposes of determining whether to move the marker up or down (one die that counts as two thus also counts as a set) and for determining whether you have enough dice to move the marker up the battle track.

When you sustain a wound, you take one die and place it on the top spot on the exhaustion track, which has three spaces on it (although you can stack dice on any space). At the end of each round, you move dice on that track down one space, so after a die has spent three rounds on that track, it returns to your pool. The health track also has additional dice you gain after you’ve sustained three or four wounds, helping shift the odds a little in your favor.

The best part of Proving Grounds is the timed feature: the added pressure of the timer makes the decisions of whether to continue rolling and which sets to re-roll feel more fun, like a real-time quiz or puzzle, and creates the possibility that you’ll rethink certain decisions after the round ends. But the game is overly dependent on the luck of the dice, and once you have a single, it’s not that easy to get rid of it in the base game or some of the additional modules that come with it.

Those modules tend to increase the game’s complexity while shifting around some of the balance of the game. One gives you a dragon die that has five sides that are beneficial and one that requires you to reroll all of your sets. Another includes chariot cards that will ‘activate’ unless you place the required dice on them, raising the level of difficulty. The Inspiration module gives you a single card with a power you’ll keep for the entire game. They’re all tweaks to the base game that add complexity and change strategy, but I don’t think any does enough to mitigate the randomness at the game’s heart. As solitaire games go, it’s probably just good enough to recommend, but is behind other solo games I like more, such as Coffee Roaster, Friday, Onirim, or even Aerion.

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→ November 9, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 11/9/19.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

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→ November 7, 2019
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Klawchat 11/7/19.

You can pre-order my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Can Tell Us About Ourselves, now through any bookstore.

Keith Law: I am unwilling to uncover my eyes. Klawchat.

Tony: It seems pretty interesting to me that all the coaches the Phillies fired this year (Young, Mallee, Kapler) have either immediately new work or seem to be on the verge of new work. Makes me think that maybe it wasn’t the coaching that was the issue in Philadelphia
Keith Law: I wondered if the Kapler dismissal, at least, was from ownership, not baseball operations. It came far later than a GM would ordinarily like to make such a change, and during the season I never heard anything from their front office that made me think Kapler’s job was in jeopardy.

Royal Pains: You referenced seeing Erick Pena, last week in the chat. Any initial thoughts other than the advanced physique? And being forever away
Keith Law: Not really. I saw one instructs game and wrote him up briefly on ESPN.com, but I don’t want to draw big conclusions from a few at bats in a barely-game from a 16-year-old, either.

Nate: Keith, accepting the QO for Jose Abreu is a no-brainer, right?
Keith Law: I think so.

Jeffrey : Did Tony Clark overreact? Is this sounding like a bad divorce where if somebody sneezes looks at you the wrong way it’s time to close the lawyers? Is this good for baseball? Kind of fans have their say at the table when all is set between labor and management?
Keith Law: I did not read Anthopoulos’ comments as indicative of collusion – it sounds like a GM describing the typical due diligence he would do with the GM meetings coming up. You call other GMs and ask what their plans are to try to see if you might line up on any trades. “Hey, we have extra starters we’d part with in a deal for X, and you have needs in your rotation. Do you plan to fill those via trades or free agency?” That’s not collusion. Asking if another GM intends to bid on Gerrit Cole would be collusion, of course, or even asking how much they might have budgeted to spend on free agent starters would, but I didn’t read the comments like that at all.

Mike: Favorite book and movie of all time?
Keith Law: My favorite book of all time hasn’t changed. As for movies, I don’t have a single, clear favorite. Many I love and recommend, but it’s hard for me to compare watching Double Indemnity and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Amelie. They’re all such different experiences, and Double Indemnity didn’t have the technical advantages of the latter two.

Dan: Favorite razor / shaving cream?
Keith Law: That’s a fun one. I’m boring, though: Gillette Mach whatever razors, Nivea shave gel. And I only shave about every week and a half.

Nate: Keith, will you put out a draft prospect watch list before the season?
Keith Law: Yes.

Sean : Hi Keith, I have a question that I hope isn’t getting too personal.. I know you have mentioned your anxiety before.. I also deal with anxiety quite often – maybe not as much as someone else but still feel like it still takes over a good portion of my life. What are some ways you have found work for you to combat with your anxiety?
Keith Law: I’ve mentioned this acronym before, EMMET: Exercise, Medication, Meditation, Eating, Therapy. That’s not in order but it’s easy to remember. I would say therapy is probably the most important component, and it’s possible that that’s most of what you need. I just would emphasize that you shouldn’t resist medication like I did for years – my life is substantially better across the board since I started taking a low dose of an SSRI.

JJ: No chance Chaim Bloom can trade David Price this off-season, right? Some media types in Boston are playing up an idea that the Rangers might be interested, but I can’t see a reason why any team would be interested in paying $32 million a year for the next three years for his past glory.
Keith Law: His elbow would be the obstacle. I can’t see how the Red Sox could effectively insulate the acquiring team from the risk of Price’s elbow blowing up.

Jacob: Is there an Ivy League school you would discourage your child from attending?
Keith Law: No. They’re all good schools, and they all confer positive name value on graduates in just about any field that might matter – academic, corporate, nonprofit. The biggest reason to go to an expensive private school is either the value of its name or the network of contacts you develop there. I don’t think the typical private school is providing that much higher quality of an education, and your child will likely have a great social experience at less expensive schools. But elite colleges have brand equity that makes a tangible difference.

Ken: How’s your Josh Ritter fandom coming along? He is my favorite live performer.
Keith Law: I’m not a fan, sorry.

Sven Goindon: Hi Keith: where do you think Dellin Betances ends up next year and what kind of contract do you think he’ll get, given he missed all but 2/3 of an inning this season. Thanks.
Keith Law: I imagine a one-year, incentive-laden deal. $2-4 million base, chance to get to $10MM if he’s healthy all year?

Jackie: Anybody catch your eye on the “Modern Era” ballot for the HOF? I would say that the Harold Baines selection last winter really lowered the bar to an unacceptable level, so it would probably be for the best if the veterans’ committee only selected Marvin Miller, just to restore a level of exceptionalism to the player’s side of things.
Keith Law: Whitaker and Evans belong in the Hall, as does Miller. Don’t let the Baines fiasco hurt players who are truly deserving.

xxx(yyy): any major changes expected to your cooking gift guide this year?
Keith Law: Tools, no, but cookbooks yes. I think the biggest addition to my cooking gear of the last 12 months is an Ooni outdoor pizza oven, which I absolutely love, but which isn’t exactly a necessity.

Bruce: Reynaldo Lopez has a few brilliant starts each year that give you hope and then follows that up with a bunch of awful starts. Can he be a reliable starter or should he be in the pen?
Keith Law: I’ve always maintained he needed to go to the bullpen. His delivery is tough to repeat – it’s similar to Severino’s, so I suppose there’s some injury risk too – and he doesn’t have a viable way to get LHB out.

Heather: Which team should offer the most for Mookie Betts this winter, regardless of the fact that he’s definitely hitting the FA market after next season?
Keith Law: A team trying to contend right now that would probably be on the outside looking in if they don’t acquire someone of Betts’ caliber. San Diego, the White Sox, and the Mets all fit. The Cubs would too, but if the Red Sox want young pitching, as I suspect they do, that’s not a fit.

Gene: Kieth, I wanted to ask for clarification regarding your opinion on Buck Showalter. I am a regular reader, an occasional submitter, and, generally, like minded with your opinions in most cases, but I don’t understand your feelings regarding Showalter. I know from past comments that you feel he is an old school instinct coach rather that committed to data application, and you have also voice concern regarding his use of pitchers like Bundy. The Bundy thing always stuck with me because he seemed to have been damaged in high school and travel ball from over use. After the arm injury in the minors, I thought the O’s were just trying to get what they could out of a perishable commodity. While I never understood some of the things the O’s did with pitching prospects during his tenure, the side of the rubber or the insistence of having pitchers shelving the pitches that got them drafted in favor of the FB, CH, CB, repertoires, I wasn’t sure how much of that was on Buck or was organizational.
Keith Law: That was entirely on Buck, as was some of went wrong with the use of Hunter Harvey and Cody Sedlock, as well as the constant messing with Kevin Gausman’s and Jake Arrieta’s positions on the mound, and some other stuff that I’ve heard on background that involved coaches Buck employed. Maybe he’d be different the next time around, but I can’t look at his tenure in Baltimore without noting how young pitchers failed to develop under him.

xxx(yyy): what happened with Jurickson Profar? Literally had the lowest BABIP of any qualified hitter in 2019, and one of the 4 lowest of the last 10 years. While there is hope for some level of bounce back is he cooked?
Keith Law: I don’t have a good answer for that, other than to say I was floored by the low BABIP. Maybe the shoulder isn’t fully healed, or he’s pulling his punches out of fear of reinjury? Either way, if that doesn’t improve in 2020, he’s probably done.

Alex: More viable market for an MLB franchise: Tampa or Montreal?
Keith Law: Tampa, but not with a stadium in St. Petersburg.

brett: when will you start your offseason articles series’?
Keith Law: Prospect stuff? End of January/early February.

@Tepper: Has your opinion changed at all on Willie Calhoun? Seems like he acquitted himself OK in his first year in the Majors…
Keith Law: .323 OBP for a well below-average defensive LF who probably needs to DH. 93 outfielders had 600+ innings in the field in 2019; Calhoun’s UZR ranked him 85th, and his dRS was worse.

Steve: Will Harris should also take his QO, right?
Keith Law: Yes.

Brett: Do you still believe in Corbin Burnes as a SP? He was electric in his first year as a RP but was lost this year. Brewers need him to pan out as a SP?
Keith Law: I do, if he’s healthy. Also heard of a small mechanical flaw the Brewers are hoping to fix … we’ll see if that comes to anything.

HH: Is Triston McKenzie still progressing? I don’t see him talked about much at all anymore.
Keith Law: He missed all of 2019 due to injury.

Nash: Mr.Law, has Twins pitching prospect Jordan Balazovic propelled himself onto your radar?
Keith Law: He was already on my radar.

Pat D: I remember you had a harsh view of the current committees for HOF voting. I think that their ballot for this year has 4 guys who I could easily vote for (Evans, Simmons, Whitaker, Miller). Is it at least a decent ballot in your view?
Keith Law: Agreed, and I wouldn’t object to Simmons getting in.

Jacob Zaldin: What do you think is the biggest problem around the league right now? Do you think that the Nationals winning the WS and the subsequent articles ran about their use of old-fashioned scouting over analytics will affect how other teams operate?
Keith Law: I think those subsequent articles were about 90% bullshit, so, no, I don’t think so.

Tracy: Yan Gomes not in your Top 50 FA. Was your list compiled before the Nats declined his option or is he not in your top 50 b/c he’s not that good?
Keith Law: He’s not that good. I considered everyone with an option for the list and adjusted if I guessed wrong (I had Quintana on the list, for one).

Eric: Favorite something/other?
Keith Law: Oh definitely other. Big fan of other.

Hubert: Hi Keith, I was wondering how do you assess the Rays front office after the departure of Chaim Bloom?
Keith Law: He’s great, and I think he’ll do great things in Boston, but the Rays’ front office is very strong down into scouting and R&D and I think they can weather the loss.

Brandon J: I’m not suggesting that the dodgers don’t “go for it” every year, but if you were running the team, would you blast past the CBT to make a couple of big signings this offseason?
Keith Law: Yes.

John: Do you think Odorizzi gets signed to a long term deal with the draft pick penalty or is he a player better off taking the QO?
Keith Law: I would be concerned if he doesn’t get a long-term deal. That would feel suspicious to me.

Dave: Do you have a favorite album of 2019 or one you’re particularly looking forward to in 2020?
Keith Law: I will do my annual best albums of the year post in December; I have several candidates, with a bunch of new ones hitting the last few weeks (Alcest, White Reaper, Michael Kiwanuka).

AA: If you are the Braves would you rather sign Donaldson for 3 years or trade something like Fried and Wright for Kris Bryant?
Keith Law: I’m a big Fried booster so if that’s the requirement, I’d probably pay Donaldson. If they could trade Wright and two other pitchers below Fried, sure.

Jon V : What’s your view on Oscar Mercado? Can he take another step forward next year or was this year a peak performance type year? How about another reclamation project in Daniel Johnson? Indians seem to have quantity but maybe not quality in the OF
Keith Law: Mercado’s a starter in the long run, IMO, while I think Johnson is a fourth outfielder or platoon guy.

Jay: Any thoughts on why the Yankees didn’t give Didi a QO? Seemed strange he didn’t get one, and I feel like I’m missing something.
Keith Law: Same. Didn’t understand that at all.
Keith Law: Like, if he takes it, so what – isn’t one year of a healthy Gregorius at that salary a valuable commodity in trade?

BuccoFan: You worked with Tony LaCava in Toronto. Would he be a good fit as the Pirates GM? A lot rumors about him in the media
Keith Law: Yes, he absolutely would.

Dave: Your piece on the minor league realignment proposal indicated that you were (at least) sympathetic to the idea that the overall population size of the minor leagues is currently too large. From a baseball standpoint, do you have a sense of your ideal minor league population size (and, how that compares to now)? Clearly you’d want a population large enough to occasionally hit on ‘diamonds-in-the-rough’ or late bloomers, but not so large that (for instance) I’m pitching to your elite hitting prospects; but I don’t know how to go about figuring that out.
Keith Law: I don’t have a specific league/system size in mind, other than believing the current system is too large … we don’t need the Appy/Pioneer Level at all, although I think the Rockies should be mandated to add an AZL team in that case. I’d be fine with losing that level and having every MLB org have seven teams: DSL, complex, short-season, A, A+, AA, AAA. But I think some minor league contraction would also be a function of changing demographics and market sizes. Not every town with a team is capable of supporting that team at a financially sustainable level.

greg: what was your major in school and did you know what you were doing when you went in?
Keith Law: I started out as a government major (like political philosophy), switched to a joint sociology/economics major in my third semester, and I would say I still don’t actually know what I’m doing.

Noah: You know that Emmet is Hebrew for “truth”, right?
Keith Law: I did not know that, since I speak no Hebrew at all. Thanks.

Chuck: Is Tork going #1 or do the Tigers load up on pitching with Hancock?
Keith Law: You left out option C, which might be Austin Martin, or perhaps another candidate like JT Ginn if the changeup he’s flashed in the fall is still there when he starts.

Dave: As a relatively new subscriber, I’m enjoying the newsletter so far. Have you considered a section on what you’ve been cooking lately (specific dish, ingredient, technique)? I tend to enjoy your culinary content!
Keith Law: Good idea, thank you.

Morris: My parents never hit me, and I turned out fine
Keith Law: Funny how we don’t hear that line – it’s always the people who were spanked or otherwise received corporal punishment who insist they’re okay.

Zach D: So republicans don’t like the AZ election results because a democrat won when AZ is a “conservative State” because metro areas rule the elections. I can’t keep up with their nonsense anymore.
Keith Law: Vote them all out. There is no other solution; if they think this strategy keeps them in office, they will continue to pursue it. That’s only rational.

Scott: Austin Riley had an odd year. What do you ultimately see as his big league role?
Keith Law: Extra guy.

Jacob Z: What do you think is a good path to get into the industry? Is it really Ivy league/big name school or bust?
Keith Law: Data science. That’s where the jobs are.

Chuck: Does Josiah Gray make double digit starts for LA next year?
Keith Law: How about 2021 for that?

Sok: How egregious is it that Larry Walker is on his 10th HOF ballot? Guy was an absolute stud
Keith Law: I will vote for him; I think he’s deserving. Decent shot since it’s his last year and we did clear a few names last offseason. I have pondered my ballot and there’s a nonzero chance I’ll leave at least one spot blank. There are about eight definites, and then it falls off into borderline guys.

Sam: If you were the Yankees, would you rather give Cole a deal in the 7yr/$245M (35M/yr) range or give Wheeler and Odorizzi each a 4 year deal with a combined annual value of 35M/yr?
Keith Law: Cole. I mean, option 2 isn’t bad, but I think they need the frontline guy for the regular season AND postseason.

Vandal Cunningham: The Braves are allegedly prioritizing a front-line starter, but they’ll surely be out on Cole / Stras, and Bumgarner doesn’t fall into that category. Who can they realistically target? Is Syndergaard an option?
Keith Law: They’re well-positioned to acquire someone in trade rather than free agency (can’t imagine Liberty letting them go get one of those top SP).

Sam: As a Mets fan, am I crazy for wanting them to sign Gregorius and move McNeil to 3B and Rosario to 2B?
Keith Law: No. The one downside I would see is that you might stop Rosario’s development at SS – he was much better in the second half, and I think he can do it long-term.

Ira: Should the MLB have a spending floor to force teams to at least pretend to be competitive while also not letting them take advantage by collecting revenue sharing w/o spending money?
Keith Law: I don’t like the straight salary floor idea, which would provide incentive for teams to pay for veterans who aren’t necessarily any better than the younger players they’d be replacing. I would prefer a system that says, “OK, you can field whatever team you want, but if your total payroll for this year falls below $FLOOR, you pay the rest into a union fund that the PA would distribute to unsigned free agents.” That would solve the problem of teams just pocketing shared revenue without asking anyone to field a worse team just to spend more money.

Roger: Can’t too much go wrong with young pitching for the Red Sox to be like, “Ian Anderson is the main piece for Betts.” Wouldn’t they be better off getting Waters, if not Pache?
Keith Law: If your question is just position player vs pitcher, then yes, better to get the position player, all else being equal. In this case, the Red Sox have a more acute need for starting pitching than anything else, though.

Josh G.: current book you are reading? side note: how many books do you read at a time?
Keith Law: Usually one book/ebook and one audiobook at a time. I’m reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and listening to Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression.
Keith Law: I think my next read will be The Cloven, the last book of the Vorrh trilogy.

Connor: You wrote “inconsistent arm swing” in George Kirby’s writeup in the top 100 draft prospects. Is that something that, if unaddressed/unchanged, you think will negatively affect his command?
Keith Law: Yes, that is the #1 concern with an inconsistent delivery.

Zach D: How is releasing a whistler blowers name not illegal? And now republicans plan to subpoena the individual in a public hearing. What a s-show
Keith Law: This is the world we chose in 2016.

Jeff: Just a Reds fan, reading an old Klaw article from 2012 with my “Insider” account. “Votto’s 10-year contract might look good for the next four or five seasons, but the deal threatens to be an albatross around the neck of a low-payroll team in a market that might generously be called middle of the pack“
Keith Law: I don’t even remember saying that, so thank you.

Millennium Sports: Hearing LHP Dan Tillo is up to 98 with a wipeout slider for Team USA. He a DUDE for you?
Keith Law: Wrote about him after seeing him in the AFL, where he was throwing harder than I’d ever seen (not 98, IIRC).

Eric: How sad that Bill Gates is so worried he may have to live on $8 billion dollars vs. $108 billion if Elizabeth Warren is elected, right?!
Keith Law: The struggle is real, my friends.

Matthew : Does caffeine help with memory and studying?
Keith Law: I sure hope so!

Josh G.: when is the next periscope happening?
Keith Law: I do not schedule those … it’s a matter of having the time, and the quiet around here.

Max: The Astros should be all over Jon Gray, right?
Keith Law: Did I suggest that last week? I feel like I did.

Geraldo: I have the flu and feel like crap. Tell me something good about the Giants to temporarily relieve my pain.
Keith Law: I have a lot of trust in Farhan to modernize this org and get them moving forward again.

Dan W.: Any thoughts on what happened at Deadspin and/or on the next best way forward for those of us who relied on it?
Keith Law: Follow those writers to their new spots, and read what they write. Also, pay for some content, somewhere. You probably pay for mine if you’re here, and I appreciate that. I pay for the Athletic, Baseball America, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker, plus a cooking magazine or two (Bon Appetit, at the moment). I want to support writers i like, and to support good journalism, period. The best way to do that is with my wallet.

Ryan: How is Wingspan as a 2 player game? My wife and I love Azul, which has been our first real venture into boards, so I’m wondering if Wingspan is worth the purchase or if I should go for 7W Duel instead, thanks for all your work!
Keith Law: Wingspan works well with 2, but 7WD is ‘optimized’ for two-player.

Portmantotebag: Can you give a Tigers fan any hope?
Keith Law: There’s some pitching coming.

OC Joe: Did you have any reaction to MLB’s proposal of a free agent multi-year deadline this winter, which would have come…I believe sometime in mid-December?
Keith Law: The dumbest fucking idea of the year … in a year of some DFIs. Teams would just refrain from offering multi-year deals till after the deadline.

Dave: Scale of 1-10, what’s your excitement for Rise of Skywalker?
Keith Law: 3 or 4.

GF: is there a way to view all the articles you have written over at espn? i just subscribed to espn+ and would like to do some reading of yours but i can’t find a way to view prior posts
Keith Law: There is not an easy way to do that. I’m sorry.
Keith Law: I have asked for an index page that just lists all my pieces chronologically, but was told no.

Andy: Keith–I’m in the same boat at Chris P from last week’s chat. I would much rather read your top 50 FA list than, eg, someone’s who was repeatedly fired for unethical behaviour and doesn’t believe in using evidence. If you don’t jump elsewhere, eg The Athletic, and re-up with ESPN can you please negotiate to be able to send subscription-fee newsletter your Insider content to foreigners?
Keith Law: I am sorry about this as well.

Brian: Keith, we know the idea of “momentum” is bunk in baseball. I know you’re not a huge fan of other sports, but do you think it’s possible that it has an effect on the outcomes of games in other sports, or does the data suggest it’s total nonsense?
Keith Law: I would insist on seeing evidence before believing it is anything other than woo.

TomBruno23: It’s me again saying thanks once more for the book recs…blew through The Queen this week. What a crazy, crazy story interwoven with US Social Welfare Policy.
Keith Law: So, so good. Also, congrats to Tom Baxter, who won our giveaway of a signed copy of The Queen, provided by Josh Levin & his publisher.

Sam: Can you please explain why you ranked wheeler over bumgarner? Virtually the same age, wheelers injuries have been more prevalent and baseball related than madbums and the actual performance year over year favors madbum? Madbum seems like a much safer investment than wheeler.
Keith Law: Wheeler is way better right now. He had ~5 mph more on his FB, was worth about 1.5 more WAR last year, started more games and threw a lot more innings the last two years. I don’t think this is even a little controversial.

Dave: Just for general knowledge, the Ryan Thibs tracker is live https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=F2E5D8FC5199DFAF!17003&ithin…
Keith Law: Excellent, great resource. I always make sure Ryan has my ballot.

Jose: Where do you have Nick Neidert’s ceiling at?
Keith Law: Fourth starter.

RAWagman: If the launch angle revolution is not largely a function of the juiced ball, what impact does that have on the importance of fielders? Thanks, and good luck with the new book
Keith Law: Doesn’t it make them more important? Balls are being hit harder, and more frequently as line drives.

Linus: During the writing of your new book- how much did you interview researchers, or were you primarily reliant on their publications?
Keith Law: My interviews were with baseball people. I exchanged emails with a few researchers – I can think of two immediately – but largely relied on their published papers so that interested readers could follow up and read them if so inclined.

TomBruno23: Your “this tweet just won the 1985 NL MVP” tweet made me smile. Talked with Dave Parker at a card show in STL several years ago and made a point to bring that voting up. “I’ve read where you think you’d be the HOF if Willie McGee hadn’t stolen your 1985 NL MVP.” “Yeah, that’s right. Where you at, McGee?” as he’s mock looking around the room.
Keith Law: I’m not sure if that gets him in the Hall, but it wouldn’t have hurt his case, at least.

TestaDuda: It’s not my money, but doing the math based on known revenue streams and free agent variables and it seems like the Red Sox should be going for it all this year and then trying to get under the tax AFTER 2020. If free agency of Betts, JDM (opt out) and JBJ aren’t enough, Price and Sale have chances to prove health (reducing underwriting on a trade) plus a new CBA all seem to make sliding under more conducive after 2020. Agree?
Keith Law: Here’s my counter to that: Who pitches? Price isn’t 100%, Sale isn’t 100%. Eovaldi wasn’t good. They have one decent, healthy starter right now, and nobody coming out of the system to help them. If they keep Betts, can they build a contending rotation through trades and free agency?

xxx(yyy): bottom of the 9th, 1 run lead in Game 7 of the World Series…do you prefer the best starting pitcher in baseball to come in for 1 inning (say G Cole? Scherzer?) or the best “relief” pitcher to come in for 1 inning (say J Hader) to close it out? Why?
Keith Law: Would depend on matchups (if you have LHB coming up, you want Hader) and how much rest everyone has had.

Ben: Do you think Carter Kieboom could be an every day starter next year?
Keith Law: At 2b, I’d say a strong possibility. I don’t see where else he could reasonably play.

Eric: At early look of the HOF ballot, I think a good ballot would be: Bonds, Clemens, Jeter, Rolen, Sheffield, Walker, Andruw, Helton, Manny
Keith Law: That’s not a bad ballot at all. You do have some of the borderline guys I struggle with, though.

Austin L.: also, favorite baseball book ever?
Keith Law: Lords of the Realm is pretty great, if dated now.
Keith Law: If you want something recent, Alex Speier’s Homegrown was a great picture of how the Red Sox built the 2018 team, with a lot of inside information from their scouts & player development folks.

scott: when does your espn contract expire?
Keith Law: In (checks calendar) 54 days.

Connor: Keith, any tips for pizza dough? Mine frequently comes out a little to dense for my liking
Keith Law: Dense sounds like you’re overworking it a bit. Also would check your hydration levels.

Rob: Thoughts on the new Opeth album? And are you listening in Swedish or English?
Keith Law: English, and I was very disappointed after the first track. Too proggy without the metal.

thatssotaguchi : A loud segment of the St. Louis Cardinals fan base is appalled that Mozeliak was just extended. Good move for the team or nah?
Keith Law: Yes, good move. Mozeliak has done a very good job, as has Girsch. I didn’t get the Shildt extension after we all just saw him playing Candyland and making Snitker & Martinez look like they were playing Gloomhaven.

Bruce: Will the Reds move Nick Senzel to second base?
Keith Law: I’d like to see that; I don’t think CF is a great fit for him, although I worry 2b isn’t going to do anything to keep him off the IL.
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. Thank you all as always for reading, and for all of your questions. I’ll be back next week for another Klawchat and hope to start my annual offseason dish posts (top 100 games, cooking posts, etc.) next week. Enjoy the long weekend!

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→ November 6, 2019
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Standard Deviations.

While working on my own forthcoming book The Inside Game (due out April 21st from HarperCollins; pre-order now!), I stumbled across a chapter from Prof. Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, a really wonderful book on how people, well-meaning or malicious, use and misuse stats to make their arguments. It’s a very clear and straightforward book that assumes no prior statistical background on the part of the reader, and keeps things moving with entertaining examples and good summaries of Smith’s points on the many ways you can twist numbers to say what you want them to say.

Much of Smith’s ire within the book is aimed at outright charlatans of all stripes who know full well that they’re misleading people. The very first example in Standard Deviations describes the media frenzy over Paul the Octopus, a mollusk that supposedly kept picking the winners of World Cup games in 2010. It was, to use the technical term for it, the dumbest fucking thing imaginable. Of course this eight-legged cephalopod wasn’t actually predicting anything; octopi are great escape artists, but Paul was just picking symbols he recognized, and the media who covered those ‘predictions’ were more worthy of the “fake news” tag now applied to any media the President doesn’t like. Smith uses Paul to make larger points about selection bias and survivorship bias, about how some stories become news and some don’t, how the publish-or-perish mentality at American universities virtually guarantees that some junk studies (found via p-hacking or other dubious methods) will slip through the research cracks, and so on. This is more than just an academic problem, however: One bad study that can’t survive other researchers’ attempts to replicate the results can still lead to significant media attention and even steer changes in policy.

Smith gives copious examples of this sequence of events – bad or corrupt study that leads to breathless news coverage and real-life consequences. He cites Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor whose single fraudulent paper claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; the media ran with it, many parents declined to give their kids the MMR vaccine, and even now, twenty years and numerous debunking studies later, we have measles outbreaks and a reversal of the eradication the hemisphere had achieved in 2000. Smith chalks some of this up to the publish-or-perish mentality of American universities, also mentioning Diederik Stapel, a Dutch ex-professor who has now had 58 papers retracted due to his own scientific misconduct. But these egregious examples are just the tip of a bigger iceberg of statistical malfeasance that’s less nefarious but just as harmful: finding meaning in statistical significance, journals’ preferences for publishing affirmative studies over negative ones (the file drawer problem), “using data to discover a theory” rather than beginning with a theory and using data to test it, discarding outliers (or, worse, non-outliers), and more.

Standard Deviations bounces around a lot of areas of statistical shenanigans, covering some familiar ground (the Monty Hall problem and the Boy or Girl problem*) and less familiar as well. He goes after the misuse of graphs in popular publications, particularly the issue of Y-axis manipulation (where the Y axis starts well above 0, making small changes across the X-axis look larger), and the “Texas sharpshooter” problem where people see patterns in random clusters and argue backwards into meaning. He goes after the hot hand fallacy, which I touched on in Smart Baseball and will discuss again from a different angle in The Inside Game. He explains why the claims that people nearing death will themselves to live through birthdays or holidays don’t hold up under scrutiny. (One of my favorite anecdotes is the study of deaths before/after Passover that identified subjects because their names sounded “probably Jewish.”) Smith’s reach extends beyond academia; one chapter looks at how Long-Term Capital Management failed, including how the people leading the firm deluded themselves into thinking they had figured out a way to beat the market, and then conned supposedly smart investors into playing along.

* Smith also explains why Leonard Mlodinow’s explanation in Drunkard’s Walk, which I read right after this book, of a related question where you know one Girl’s name is Florida is incorrect, and thank goodness because for the life of me I couldn’t believe what Mlodinow wrote.

I exchanged emails with Smith in September to ask about the hot hand fallacy and a claim in 2018 by two mathematicians that they’d debunked the original Amos Tversky paper from 1986; he answered with more detail that I ended up using in a sidebar in The Inside Game. That did not directly color my writeup of Standard Deviationshere, but my decision to reach out to him in the first place stems from my regard for Smith’s book. It’s on my list now of books I recommend to folks who want to read more about innumeracy and statistical abuse, in the same vein as Dave Levitan’s Not a Scientist.

Next up: About halfway through Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.

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→ November 4, 2019
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Riding the Rails with Paul Theroux.

Paul Theroux first came to my attention a few years ago when I picked up one of his later travelogues, Last Train to Zona Verde, which chronicled his trip (mostly) by train from Cape Town up the western coast of southern Africa through Namibia, detouring into Botswana, and eventually into Angola. It was weirdly fascinating, no less so that this older white American would enter territory where he would stand out in the worst ways, potentially attracting unfavorable attention, and that he had to abandon his original plan of traveling all the way up the coast and inland into Mali once he reached the Angola-DRC border. It’s a grim trip, where the curmudgeonly Theroux documents the bleak poverty he encounters at each stop, noting environmental degradation and tourism aimed at westerners who have too money and think that poor is cool, while, in my view, missing what his own privilege and perspective bring to his observations.

Several readers suggested I go back and read Theroux’s better-known, earlier travelogues, especially The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, both of which appear in an e-book trilogy called Riding the Rails With Paul Theroux, which I got on sale for the Kindle for $4 and which includes the later book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he recreates the trip of the first book thirty years later. They are long, meandering, fascinating, and unstinting; they don’t cast Theroux in a particularly good light; yet they also open a window on places the vast majority of us will never see, from Tashkent to Baku to Santa Ana to the Khyber Pass, exposing cultures, foods, and traditions that remain ‘foreign’ to the west even in this era of globalization.

The Great Railway Bazaar made Theroux’s name as an author, especially of this very specific style of book: a non-fiction narrative work that follows the author on a trip where he documents the mundane, not merely the extraordinary. Much of the content of all three books revolves around the modest inconveniences and occasional joys of traveling in proximity to other people, including the varying customs of folks traveling by train in different countries and the ways in which train travel becomes a signal of economic status in those cultures. This first book chronicle’s Theroux’s trip by train from Paris through Istanbul, Teheran, India, Burma, and Thailand, eventually putting him in South Vietnam (after the U.S. withdrawal, before the fall of Saigon), after which he flies to Japan and returns home via the Trans-Siberian Railway. The journey, we later learn in the third volume, cost him his marriage – he returned home to find his wife, who opposed the trip, has taken up with another man – but made him a literary star.

The second book follows Theroux from Chicago through Texas, Mexico, most of Central America – twice he has to take to the skies, skipping Nicaragua as too dangerous and jumping past gaps in the rail lines – into South America, eventually ending up in Esquel, a small inland city in Patagonia, on the Argentine side of the Andean border with Chile. The third book sees him revisit the first trip 33 years later, but due to massive political changes, he heads north to avoid Iran and Afghanistan, passing through the Caucasus, Turkmenistan (shortly before the death of its deranged dictator Saparmurat Niyazov), and Uzbekistan. He remarks at length on the changes he’s seen in India’s big cities, while places like Sri Lanka and especially Burma (now Myanmar) have barely changed, before visiting Cambodia for the first time since the Khmer Rouge fell and Singapore for the first time since his novel Saint Jack was banned there, finishing his trip again via Japan, Vladivostok, and Moscow. (He flew from Tashkent to Amritsar, lacking a ground route through Tajikistan.) His description of these changes blends the factual and his own disdain for pretty much all of it: he denigrates Indian megacities for their unfettered growth and evidence income inequality, then derides the next two countries he visits for their failures to thrive.

By far, the most entertaining parts of Theroux’s books are his encounters with countries furthest from my own experiences as a traveler; I have been to over 20 countries, but only one is outside of North America or Europe (Taiwan), and all of my visits to developing countries except one were for tourism. I’m probably never going to Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, and the odds of me visiting El Salvador or Honduras are extremely low given their current levels of political turmoil and violence. He comments on how “Considering their history – not only the riots, civil wars, and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism – it is a wonder that (Central American countries) exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea,” an amusing sentiment made more so by the flips in fate in the intervening four decades. Nicaragua was too dangerous to visit, so he went to El Salvador. Colombia and Costa Rica have developed into fairly well-off economics, at least by the standards of their neighbors. Turkey raced forward between his two visits, only to regress rapidly since Ghost Train was published. He visited South Vietnam a year before the north invaded and unified the country; now he compares his visits to Saigon and Hue, while visiting Hanoi for the first time. He visits the famous temples at Angkor Wat for the first time since the Khmer Rouge came and went; and the secret red light district of Singapore for the first time since its autocratic government banned his novel Saint Jack. He passes through the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which has almost no Jews living in it, of Russia, a place I didn’t even know existed before reading this book. So much of the pleasure of these books is Theroux visiting places I’ll never go, sometimes making me envious, other times letting me know I don’t need to feel that bad about missing them.

Theroux’s status as an author stood him in good stead even on his first trips, as the last two books include encounters with some very famous authors he meets on his sojourns. He spends days with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, meets up with Orhan Pamuk – about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – in Istanbul, goes to the home of Arthur C. Clarke – who’d be dead within two years – in Sri Lanka, and travels a bit with Haruki Murakami in Japan. Each of these conversations feels like one of those essays I’d find in the New Yorker and would share with you all in a Saturday post; Borges and Clarke really come to life on these pages, while Murakami comes off as reticent and pensive, although I suppose that’s unsurprising.

Theroux, though, doesn’t come off very well in his books. He doesn’t seem to like other people very much, especially not people working jobs he views as menial. He might be a little bit racist. The first two books in particular stand out for Theroux’s stereotyping of various peoples and overemphasis on physical characteristics, including skin color, while the third is more muted but still has his voice and, with it, his obvious tendency to create a clear distinction between himself and anyone he deems as ‘other.’ He’s also more than a little bit sexist, and some of his commentary on sex and the skin trade comes off as creepy even before you consider that he made the trip in the third book when he was about 65 years old. Some of the commentary in the first two books may have been acceptable in its time; much of this material in the third book was already cringeworthy in 2008, when it was published, and it’s all worse now.

There’s also something quaint about these books in the era of cheap air travel and, outside of Europe, very limited and/or expensive rail options. I could forgive Theroux’s act a bit, given the window on the world he opened and the existence of at least some self-deprecation. He’s also acutely aware of the poverty he sees, and understands his economic privilege even while othering so many of the people he encounters on the trains. There’s something quite admirable in his willingness to leap into these journeys, to travel to places most of us wouldn’t dare visit on our own for fear of disease or violence or simply the unknown. Even where the text hasn’t aged well, the voyages themselves justified the time.

Next up: Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, winner of this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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→ November 2, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

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