keith — Page 89

→ April 27, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/27/19.

No new ESPN+ content this past week, since the NFL draft sort of took center stage, but I’ll have a fresh draft ranking this upcoming week and my first projection for the MLB draft shortly after, either later this week or at the start of the next. Klawchat will also return this week.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Solenia from Pearl Games, a light strategy title that offers more depth of strategy than most gateway games do without sacrificing playability or making turns too long. I also recently reviewed the app version of the game Castles of Burgundy for Ars Technica.

You may also enjoy more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out when the muse speaks to me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sterling Jewelers, which operates most of the major mall jewelry store brands you know (Kay, Belden, Jared, Zales, and others), has allowed a culture of wage discrimination, sexual harassment, and outright assault to flourish even as a lawsuit first filed in 2005 continues to crawl through the courts. This lengthy expose by the New York Times‘ Taffy Brodesser-Akner has many triggering details of rape and sexual assaults, and explains how these problems became endemic to the company across brands and regions.
The New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino explores what it takes to put your phone away and reduce the time we all waste on our devices.
Vox looks at the rise of the online ‘incel’ community and how it has spawned real-world violence. The worship of mass murderers like Elliott Rodger and Marc Lépine should tell you all you need to know about these atavists.
A new paper in the Hofstra Law Review looks at amateur baseball coaches who overuse their pitchers (PDF), exploring why a lawsuit against an offending coach on behalf of an injured pitcher would be extremely unlikely to succeed and thus arguing for a consistent scheme of pitch count regulations. (The piece mentions me in passing and incorrectly identifies my role with the Blue Jays.)
Also in the New Yorker: the story of a Jewish jazz musician who survived the genocide in part by playing in a jazz band for the Nazis.
The Cut interviewed Eula Biss, the author of On Immunity, about how “anti-vaxxers” are too heterogenous a group to be lumped under that single term. That’s one reason I would prefer that we call them ‘deniers,’ because that is something they all have in common – they deny the incontrovertible evidence that vaccines are safe and effective, even though they have diverse rationalizations for doing so.
The United States worked to dilute a UN resolution against the use of rape in war. You read that right: The UN tried to condemn rape as a war crime, and the U.S. fought to water it down.
Several women at Google have accused the company of retaliating against them for organizing a walkout to protest the company’s poor treatment of women.
NPR looks back at the immediate, effusive reaction when Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which became an anthem for disaffected youth of its time despite lyrical content that itself is anti-anthemic.
A 30-year-old man came down with measles … which is how he learned he wasn’t vaccinated. I would never speak to my parents again if I found out they had skipped vaccinating me. (I’ve seen my records, so I know this isn’t the case.)
Meanwhile, measles cases in the U.S. have spiked to nearly 700, even though the disease was eliminated from our hemisphere in 2000. This is entirely the fault of vaccine deniers, and they should be forced to bear the cost of their decisions.
A New York Supreme Court Judge rejected a challenge to a city vaccine mandate, which is good news, if temporary, in the fight against measles. One of the lawyers who brought the challenge? Conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Washington State Representative Matt Shea (guess) was caught discussing violent attacks with far-right figures, according to a Guardian investigation. The Seattle Times‘ editorial board has called for the state GOP to oust him.
A cognitive scientist explains why we are so susceptible to fake news and distorted memories. I definitely thought the Evil Queen’s quote was “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.”
Several Ohio lawmakers (guess) are pushing legislation in response to a mother who let her 9-year-old son dance in drag at a local bar, in a transparent attack on LGBTQ children.
Chely Wright responded to the bigot Franklin Graham’s claims that you can’t be gay and Christian.
President Trump continues to defend white nationalists and the slave-owning general Robert E. Lee in response to attacks from Joe Biden over the very issue of Trump’s support of white nationalism.
McSweeney’s gives us a rough transcript of every interview with Pete Buttigieg.
Bosk, the new game from the co-designer of Sagrada, is available for pre-order on Floodgate’s site.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it along this week – best-selling novelist Dan Mallory is a serial liar who has made false claims of cancer and bipolar disorder to try to further his career. None of the claims has anything to do with his book, The Woman in the Window, however; it’s just that much of what he says about his life to date is untrue.
Mariners pitcher Rob Whalen recently retired due in large part to anxiety disorder, and he says the Mariners handled his case extremely poorly.
WIRED has a long, in-depth look at the chaos inside Facebook in 2018 as the company was called to account for its role in influencing the 2016 election, the way it promulgates hate speech and fake news, and poor data privacy standards.
Audio link: KQED looks at the Coachella concert-goers and those of us at home don’t see, a community far less affluent than the attendees are, and that is dealing with environmental problems from the warming desert.
The Writers’ Guild of America has demanded that its members cut ties with their agents to protest conflicts of interest by agencies that also produce shows via “packaging” deals. This past week, the first writer came out to say he wasn’t going to do so, in a letter that is pompous, self-serving, and in at least one instance untrue.
Fair Harvard, doing me proud: The university’s health services rejected a student proposal to make naxolone, the treatment capable of reversing opioid overdoses, available on campus. The money quote: “They had some skepticism about whether the research actually suggested that naloxone would be effective at Harvard.” If Harvard students have different biology from other humans, I’d love to know about it sooner rather than later.
The FDA may start cracking down on the use of the Non-GMO Project label.
A Bangladeshi student who reported sexual harassment by one of her teachers to the police was burned to death by members of her community, sparking large protests in the Muslim nation in south Asia.
A pair of adults wore Nazi armbands and MAGA shirts in Providence, Rhode Island, and then stood atop the city’s Holocaust memorial where they gave the Nazi salute.
The Washington Post looks at one possible fix to the “nightmare” job market for academics.
Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress started a food truck with someone from his hometown to re-create a favorite childhood experience of fried seafood. I need reports from those of you in Milwaukee when it starts up on May 5th.
Apparently there’s a controversy brewing over a Canadian stamp with an inaccurate depiction of something called a Nanaimo Bar, which I’d never heard of it until this happened.
Board game news: Another Terraforming Mars expansion, Turmoil, is over $600,000 on Kickstarter already.
The unrelated game On Mars has also cleared the half-million mark on Kickstarter. The BGG listing for the game says playing time is 90-150 minutes, so I may end up giving this one a miss.
Not a board game, but after reading this review of Falcon Age at Paste, I’m suddenly interested in it despite my general avoidance of video games (because they suck up so much time).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, bangladesh, board games, gmo, links, rhode island, social media

→ April 17, 2019
→ By keith

The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance Of Loss, a slow-burning tragedy set in the Darjeeling district of northeastern India, near the border with Bangladesh, that covers distinctions of class, gender, and language, but never establishes a single compelling or central character anywhere in the novel’s 350-odd pages. It’s an oddly dispassionate novel given how much the passions of individual characters factor in the story.

The most central character in the novel is Sai, the suddenly orphaned daughter of an Indian engineer who is killed while in Moscow training for the Soviet space program; she arrives, without warning, at the home of the judge, a curmudgeon who has distanced himself from the rest of his family, living on his estate with the man known only as the cook. The cook’s son, Biju, has gone to America to make his fortune, but instead works his way through a series of entry-level jobs in various restaurants in New York City that rely on undocumented labor to run their kitchens.

These stories play out against the background of the rise of a Gurkha self-determination movement in the district that continues today. The Gurkhas, Indian natives who speak Nepali, have been agitating for their own state within India for over a century, and a more militant group, the ominously-named Gurkha National Liberation Front (styled after numerous insurgent groups, nearly always with communist leanings, around the developing world), sprang up in 1986, leading to a lengthy general strike depicted in the novel. Sai falls in love with her tutor, Gyan, who joins the GNLF and who makes a decision that affects their budding if likely forbidden romance as well as the lives of the judge, the cook, and other family members who have lived in privilege in a region where the ethnic majority has been subjugated.

There’s some beautiful imagery in the book and some recurring metaphors that would probably be worthy of a deeper dive – vapors appear in various forms from the first page onward – if I cared one iota about any of these characters. I’ve generally enjoyed fiction from South Asia, whether translated or originally written in English, probably because the setting is so different to me and because that part of the world has an ethnic and cultural diversity that lends itself well to complex stories, with many writers with south Asian backgrounds incorporating myths or magical realism into their works. Desai’s style is dry in just about every way; the prose is uninteresting, the characters unmemorable and unlikable. The judge’s back story, for example, explains his grim, misanthropic exterior, but in a way that will make you loathe him for his cruelty. There’s a parallel between his upbringing and what the cook hopes for Biju, certainly, where Biju chooses family and emotion over the sort of materialistic ambition that defined the judge’s life. Perhaps I would have felt more invested had Biju’s story resolved a little sooner, but Desai has us watch his debasement a little too long before anything of consequence happens in his story, and the novel ends before his story gets any sort of answer.

I still can’t decide what Desai was trying to depict in The Inheritance of Loss or what aspect of life she wanted to explore, which could be my failure as a reader rather than hers as a writer – but whatever it was, I didn’t get it, and that’s a pretty rare experience for me at this point in my life. I may not always like novels I read, but I’m rarely this flummoxed. That puts this towards the bottom of the two dozen Booker winners I’ve read so far, at least.

Next up: I’ve just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: disappointments, man booker prize, post-colonial literature

→ April 16, 2019
→ By keith

The Sea.

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, a slim, introspective novel on death and grief, written from the perspective of a middle-aged thesaurus. It’s a demanding read that brims with ideas and contains many sparkling turns of phrase while simultaneously maddening with the narrator-protagonist’s bloviating style and endless desire to show off his vocabulary.

Max Harden is a retired art historian who has recently lost his wife, Anna, to some sort of aggressive cancer, after which he revisits the seaside cottage where he’d spent time one summer and had first encountered death and loss, although exactly how that occurred is saved until the very end of the novel. (The reveal is similar in tone to that of another Booker winner, the marvelous The Sense of an Ending, but the latter book does it far more effectively.) He splits his meandering narrative across three separate timelines – the end of Anna’s life; the summer he spent with another family, the Graces, at their cottage; and the present day as he’s returned to the sea and found connections to the past.

There’s a profound sense throughout Max’s story that he’s still struggling to process his own grief in the face of several shocking losses, something he seems to cover up through his own dissembling, almost in parody of the British stiff-upper-lip stereotype, the man who can look at and even identify his feelings but refuses to engage with them. The reader never gets to know Max at all; he’s the astute observer, in the style of Nick Jenkins, but lacks any discernable personality traits of his own, other than, perhaps, his ability to keep his own grief off the pages. The only real indication we get that these deaths have affected him comes near the end, when a bout of drinking leaves him with a head injury and eventually brings his adult daughter around to try to coax him to come live with her, especially as she’s afraid he may have tried to take his own life. Even then, he can barely conjure up the emotions any father should feel for his daughter, not least the reversal of roles that comes when your children have grown and begin to wish to take care of you.

I mentioned the novel’s vocabulary above; Banville may have all of these words at his immediate disposal, but just because you know a word doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice for that situation. Here’s a sampler of esoteric words I encountered in the book, most of which I didn’t know previously: rufous, immanence, minatory, eructations, aperçu, anabasis, expatiation, putative, vulgate, refulgent, vavasour, plangent. I looked up all of the words on that list (and more) that I didn’t know, or of which I was unsure, and yet have forgotten most of them in the book’s wake. Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book stilted, claustrophobic, and pretentious, while referring to Max as a gloomy narcissist, and even though I clearly liked the book more than she did (low bar, I know), I can’t argue with her criticisms. The occasional use of a twenty-dollar word in lieu of a ten-cent one can be fun for writer and reader, illuminating the page, signaling a shift in tone or sparking a thought in the reader’s mind, but when you’re regularly reaching for the OED, using minatory when menacing would have sufficed, you’re trying too hard.

Banville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize once prior to this win, for the superior The Book of Evidence, a twisted novel in both senses of the term, one that also has a narrator writing at some remove from his emotions but does so in a way that heightens the tension rather than suffocating it. His win in 2005 was not well-received, as The Sea beat Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous Never Let Me Go and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, both of which would have been better choices, as well as highly-regarded novels by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. It does, however, illustrate one of the criticisms of major literary awards – their tendency to reward their own, to be slow to recognize cultural and stylistic shifts, and to excessively honor works that draw heavily on or even mimic the classics of the western canon. I could live with a little pretension if the book took me on an emotional journey, but The Sea seemed to prefer to send me to the dictionary instead.

Next up: I’m just about finished with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, another Booker winner, after which I’ll turn to this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: irish literature, man booker prize

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

→ April 11, 2019
→ By keith

Klawchat 4/11/19.

My column on the most loaded minor league rosters this spring is up for ESPN+ subscribers.

Keith Law: Freeze this moment a little bit longer. It’s Klawchat.

addoeh: Yes, it’s April 11, but the Cubs bullpen might just be dumpster_fire.gif
Keith Law: And they really didn’t do enough to address it this winter. I’m not necessarily on the ‘sign Kimbrel’ train – I’ve said before I have concerns that he’s on the downswing after 2018 – but he’d be a big upgrade over literally every reliever they have.

addoeh: How much is Chris Davis’s roster status and playing time an ownership directive, rather than a front office or managerial decision?
Keith Law: I don’t know the answer to that. I would guess his playing time will decline if/when they choose to bring other position players up or grab someone off waivers to whom they want to give a trial.

alex: I know it’s easy to make fun of Chris Davis on twitter– but there have been some articles which discusses that he has become depressed– maybe not in a clinical sense (since there is, as far as I know, he has seen a psychologist for depression)– does that make you reconsider some of the things you have tweeted? As an Os fan, I’d like to see him retire/release/buy out, but I don’t want him to decide to end things the way Mike Flanagan did.
Keith Law: I have tweeted very little about him, so no. I don’t want to appear to be exulting in his struggles. I tweeted once about the time I argued that Jim Bowden was bonkers for suggesting the Orioles should give Davis at least a six-year deal, and made one joke specifically about Davis’ stat line yesterday. Anything more would start to feel like I was attacking the person rather the contract or the production.

Kyle KS: Do you roll the dice with Jose Martinez in RFif your the Cardinals at this point? When does the better defense (although not good defense) of Fowler stop outweighing the fact that he hits with a pool noodle?
Keith Law: I’d like to give Fowler more time; it doesn’t seem like he’s hitting with a pool noodle, as you say, as he has some hard-hit balls already this year.

Swagboy: Does Zach Eflin have any realistic chance at becoming a reliable starter for a Phillies team trying to contend? Would his (realistic) best case scenario be a #4, or could he surpass that? I’d be thrilled if he had 3-3.5 win potential this year.
Keith Law: I think he could be better than a #4, yes.

Bob: You tweeted about Daniel Lynch’s velocity in his most recent start. I saw his first start and it seemed like there was a lot of contact on his secondaries and he would resort to the big fastball to get out of trouble. Do you think he can develop a 2nd (and 3rd!) pitch that can be a swing and miss weapon as he moves up?
Keith Law: That’s not at all what happened in his second start, though. His changeup was above/plus and his slider was sometimes above.

Bob: Hans Crouse is off to a great start. Any idea if there’s been improvement on broadening his repertoire or just blowing hitters away with a limited more reliever-ish arsenal. If the latter, what’s a better approach – forcing him to throw secondary pitchers at that level or pushing him up until better hitters force him to adjust?
Keith Law: I’ve heard it’s more of the same. Not that that’s bad, but I agree eventually he’ll have to adjust.

gavin: are the Padres for real?
Keith Law: They are absolutely a real major league team, which I imagine comes as a surprise to a large portion of MLB’s fan base. They’re also probably good enough to push past .500 this year if they stay healthy.

Josh C: Fangraphs wrote up Astros prospect Abraham Toro as being “divisive” within the industry. What are your thoughts on him? Regular, bench player, not even a guy?
Keith Law: Bench player. I’d have to know what Eric/Kiley meant by divisive to say more, although I trust them if they said that.

Keith: How many PAs typically indicate a stabilized view on K%s and BB%s? Any indication that Moncada has changed his approach in a meaningful way to reduce his K% and increase contact?
Keith Law: There isn’t a clear number for that. I know everyone wants a fixed answer, but that’s not how any statistical distribution works – your confidence that the number is ‘real’ will increase with sample size. I’d be surprised if this Moncada start was sustainable.

Mac: If Rutschman and Vaughn go 1-1 and 1-2 have any college hitters moved into the 1-3 discussion or would the White Sox be choosing between Witt Jr. and Abrams?
Keith Law: Witt Jr, Abrams, Greene, and possibly Bleday (there’s your college hitter) would be the top 6. Lodolo is the only pitcher I can think of who might go top ten, although that’s a reach for me.

Matt: Is this the Maikel Franco we’ve been waiting for?!
Keith Law: No, more a function of hitting 8th.

Rangers: What do you think of our new HR celebration? Inappropriate, wtf, or don’t care?
Keith Law: Don’t care. Celebrate all you want. Have fun.

KillMonger: Fried & Swanson — too early to predict whether either can sustain their success this year?
Keith Law: Too early, yes, but optimistic on both.

Santos: If Kuechel’s demands have actually come down, should the Phillies be seriously considering him? Rotation looks thin and/or volatile.
Keith Law: If I were a GM looking for pitching – Klentak qualifies – I’d be more comfortable “overpaying” for short-term production from Keuchel than Kimbrel. One, I think Keuchel is just better period. Two, I feel better about paying a starter than a reliever.

Tony Stromboli: Logan Gilbert is maintaining the velocity he showed end of last year that raised some eyebrows — at least, through 2 starts. Do you have any general thoughts about him you’d like to share?
Keith Law: I heard 93-95 from a scout who just saw him. He pitched through some minor injuries last spring that probably explained the drop from 92-95 on the Cape in 2017 to 88-92 last summer. I still ranked him as a mid-first rounder even with that velocity because I thought the command and breaking ball made him a potential league-average starter anyway.

Hank: During the off-season you praised the Jays for their hire if Charlie Montoyo. How do you feel about the hiring now that he’s come out saying he likes bunting?
Keith Law: I can still like a manager overall even if he is really stupid about one thing (and, come on, Chuck, stop fucking bunting so much).

Salzer: Do you continue to try Alex Reyes as a starter? He just seems too good to put in the bullpen.
Keith Law: Zero track record staying healthy as a starter. Not saying you don’t try it, but at some point the body is telling you something.

Aaron (Houston): KLAW, thanks for the chat. I have several relatives (parents and kids) who swear their kid (or themselves) can make it to the next level in baseball. With the chances being so small (to make it to the next level), is it not better to skip out on that dream, than try, only to fail, and possibly have no back up plan?
Keith Law: Why not make a backup plan? Not much of a life if you never try anything for fear of failure.

Grover: In the position the Giants are in should they consider trading Buster Posey?
Keith Law: Yes, but I doubt they do, given his status with the franchise.

Tom: Trent thorton – whats his ceiling?
Keith Law: It’s top-of-the-line stuff with below-average command, and I’m not sure he can ever have the command to get to starter quality.

Juwan: SSS of course, but the ball seems to be jumping off of Robles’ bat this season. He attributes the low exit velo to the elbow injury he had at the beginning of last year, it the extra base hit power is real and continues going forward, is he a future perennial all star at center, and does that make him one of the best players in baseball in a few seasons?
Keith Law: Yes to your first question and I’m not so sure about the second. I’d define “one of the best players in baseball” as, say, top 5-10 overall. I’d feel better about saying he’ll be a top 20 player in baseball. Not playing semantics games here, just trying to be clear.

James: SSS but are we sleeping on Franmil Reyes? Only hitting .143/.235/.286 but taking the batted ball data in account his expected BA is .324, expected SLG is .703, and expected WOBA is .440, all while posting great BB% & K% with a high average exit velocity.
Keith Law: Breakout candidate for me this year. Haven’t changed my view.

Jerry: I don’t know enough about it to have an informed opinion so here goes. Is there a legitimate reason to terminate the agreement between MLB and the Cuban Baseball Federation?
Keith Law: In my opinion, no. This reeks of 1) let’s undo the thing Obama did and 2) let’s pander to Cuban-American voters in Florida. The agreement solved a serious problem, and was between a private enterprise and a federation run by the Cuban government. The idea that allowing MLB to give money to an undemocratic regime is untenable while our government hands billions in foreign aid to undemocratic regimes that commit far more serious human rights violations is, to be kind, a bit inconsistent. Why does Cuba get special attention here? See 1 and 2.

Carter: Budget not an issue, where is the best place to sit for an MLB game? Right behind home plate?
Keith Law: Just get behind the net.

Samuel: We’re a little past the discussion at this point, but please tell me I’m not crazy. What Tom Izzo did during the NCAA Tournament wasn’t coaching, right? It wasn’t instructive, helpful, and encouraging. It was a person who was belittling, devaluing, and embarrassing someone he’s in charge of guiding, correct? I feel so discouraged that it seems I’m in the minority here, that we not only accept this behavior, but celebrate it.
Keith Law: I was this many days old when I learned that Tom Izzo is a college basketball coach. I think I only know who won on Monday because I follow Sean Doolittle on Twitter (which everyone should).

Brendan: What happens first? Chris Davis hit or Yu Darvish quality start?
Keith Law: I thought Darvish looked OK last night.

Mark: How long before Ryan Weathers is in Lake Elsinore? Is there anything he can realistically do to become a #1 or #2 starter type?
Keith Law: I’d bet on him spending most/all of the year in low-A and I don’t see a #2 in there unless he has a totally unexpected jump in velocity.

Kris: You pumped for GOT to return?
Keith Law: I have never watched a minute of that show. Rape and violence do not entertain me.

John Smoltz: What are your thoughts on Jesse Biddle? Do you think he can be converted into a starter?
Keith Law: I’d leave him right where he is.

Ben: Any new takeaways on M.J. Melendez or Seuly Matias from your recent look at Wilmington?
Keith Law: Blog post coming tomorrow or tonight. Started it right before this chat. I’ll cover Robert, Lynch, those guys. No Madrigal because he missed the two games I saw, supposedly with a cold.

Kretin: How is it in this day and age that people believe any of this anti-vax nonsense?
Keith Law: Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

Mark: Is Nick Margevicious a legit MLB starter going forward or is he just getting by on smoke and mirrors?
Keith Law: Back end starter. Also, I need someone with art or Photoshop skills to make a gif of Marge Simpson sneering like Sid Vicious with that punk hairdo.

John: Is Dylan Carlson a bench guy regular?
Keith Law: More.

Todd: Rep Tom Massie is confusing. He drives an electric Tesla, has solar powered house, talks all the time about conservation & sustainability. He does more to combat climate change on an individual level than most people…..yet denies climate change.
Keith Law: And he went to MIT. He can’t be as dumb as he sounded yesterday, can he? Is he just pandering to his constituents in rural Kentucky?

Justi: What does Nolan Gorman need to do to get into your top 100 at midseason? Is the lack of inclusion on your list due to swing and miss issues?
Keith Law: I had him in my top 50.
Keith Law: I mean, maybe just check my rankings before posting? It’ll make this a better experience for everyone.

Bobby Bradley’s 40-time: Does a smaller sample size for someone like Julio Rodriguez, someone who the organization thought was advanced enough to tackle full season ball at 18, matter ever so slightly more? (enough to get excited, anyway)
Keith Law: No. Sample size doo doo do do do do, sample size doo doo do do do do…

Nick Grit: I’ve seen some pretty differing opinions on Casey Mize, with some referencing a ‘violent’ delivery and/or athleticism concerns. He has always struck me as a pretty complete pitcher coming out of college and pretty safe. It doesn’t seem like you are as worried as others about his health, is that accurate?
Keith Law: Yeah, those opinions to which you refer – and I honestly have never seen that anywhere – are wrong.

Bob: Better longterm outlook: Xavier Edwards, Tirso Ornelas, Josh Naylor.
Keith Law: Ornelas. All big leaguers though.

Blaine: Thanks for your review of the strategy game Wingspan. It’s beautifully made and a joy to play.
Keith Law: So good. I can’t wait till the next print run hits so I can tell you all to buy it.

Robert: Zack Brown has flown through the brewers system much like Corbin Burnes. What’s your report on him?
Keith Law: Also on my top 100.

Justin: Bryan Reynolds’ (obviously SSS, high babip, etc) hot start has me wondering. In general, how much can hamate surgery temporarily sap someone’s power? Would we be talking a full scouting grade?
Keith Law: I have heard estimates of up to 18 months – I remember an NHL player, Jason Allison (?), saying it took him that long to regain full strength after a broken wrist. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, but I like to try to give guys a calendar year to get it back.

Ben: Any potential GUYS at LSU this year?
Keith Law: No.

Bobby Bradley’s 40-time: Do you have any concerns about Vaughn, being a R/R 1B and all, going #2? Or is the bat that freaking good?
Keith Law: The bat is that fucking good, man.

Michael: Hi Keith- Thanks for the chat! I know you have said that baseball content outside of work feels like… well…work. But wondering if you have ever read the classic “Glory Of their Times” by Lawrence Ritter about the old days of baseball and what you thought of it.
Keith Law: I don’t think I ever read that one, although I read some books in that genre maybe 15-20 years ago. The whitewashing of the sordid parts of the game’s history grate on me.

ck: Keith, you had an exchange on Twitter last week about John Anderson of Minnesota allowing a pitch count to get dangerously high. Does he have a history of pitcher abuse? My sense is that in general he is very well regarded, and I had a personal experience with him (albeit over 30 years ago) that gave me a very favorable impression of him.
Keith Law: First time his name had come up in that context with me, but his inaction in that game was a major blunder.

Nelson: Do you think Acuna, Pache, and Waters will be the Braves’ 2021 Outfield?
Keith Law: I’ll buy that. And I’ll watch the hell out of it.

Grover: Why does the hypocrisy go over the heads of guys like Archer who beat their chest and flex after a strike out but take offense to a guy admiring the donger he just hit?
Keith Law: I understand your point, but as I said on Twitter about this, hypocrisy is beside the point. Throwing at a hitter is wrong, no matter who you are, and MLB should drop the hammer on those guys. It should go in the next CBA – you throw at a hitter, you get a mandatory suspension of, say, ten games. Enough to hurt the team, not just your paycheck, so your bosses and teammates might say, hey, cut that shit out, we need you to pitch.

Nils: You mentioned Mason Thompson in your ESPN article earlier this week. Is he long for the rotation or do you see him becoming a RP long term?
Keith Law: Starter.

Justi: Do the Reds bring up Senzel as soon as he’s healthy or are they gonna continue to be cute with him? He’s 23, what’s the holdup?
Keith Law: He’s hurt.

Ira: Do you have concerns about Chris Sale’s decreased average velocity on FB and general lack of usual dominance going back to middle of last season, especially given the extension he just received?
Keith Law: I’m concerned about the combination of reduced velocity and shoulder trouble from last year.

Ben: Any early rumblings at what the Tigers would do at 5? Do you think they would go for Witt if he falls or stick to college bats?
Keith Law: The list of six position players I mentioned above would apply to them too. Greene or Abrams, likely. Feel like they wouldn’t take Vaughn if he’s there.

Nick: Are you planning on seeing the West Virginia Power with Gilbert, Kelenic and Rodriguez?
Keith Law: If they come closer to me, and I’m free to go, sure. I don’t plan that far out.

TP: Can Freddy Peralta succeed as starter without better secondary pitches? Against the Reds last week, he threw 84 fastballs out of 100 pitches, but struck out 11 and gave up 2 hits over 8 IP. His other starts…not so great…
Keith Law: It’s all deception – his fastball isn’t very fast, but hitters don’t see it if he throws it up in the zone. I think he can start but have a lot of disaster starts along the way, to the point where he’s still valuable enough to start but that people in/out of the org wonder if he should be in a different role.

Josh: Was surprised not to see Dodgers’ Tulsa team on your loaded MiLB list. Not enough depth of talent there?
Keith Law: Right.

Michael: Any chance you saw that Gabe Kapler said that the Phillies can’t baby Roman Quinn? After all, Kapler said, he’s “not made of glass”. Wondering if you know if they actually had this confirmed by a medical doctor, as I have my doubts.
Keith Law: I actually thought he was made of glass, so this is big, if true.

Aaron G: Do the Yankees have the depth to lose Severino and not have to pick up Keuchel (and lose the draft pick)?
Keith Law: I don’t think so. At this point how much production would you project to get from Severino, with rotator cuff inflammation and now a lat injury that will probably keep him from pitching in the majors until at least June 1st?

Hoz: Hello Keith! Do you think Domingo German can stick and develop further into a 2 or 3 sp? Much thanks
Keith Law: No, I think he’s a reliever.

Jim: Is Josh Naylor’s bat good enough to supplant Franmil / Renfroe in SD as soon as opening day next season?
Keith Law: Reyes and Renfroe are outfielders, so no.

Everyone: ESPN’s updates on the website are whack. No pitching starts pace indicator and the FantasyCast is garbage compared to years past. So I guess my question is, what the hell?
Keith Law: Well, if I had anything to do with that, that would be useful, but this isn’t even an ESPN chat.

Mark: Do you post Klawchat schedules anywhere?I get the newsletter, is there somewhere else I need to look ? Thanks
Keith Law: I shoot for Thursdays at 1 pm when I’m not traveling. I can tell you now next week I’ll be on the road.

Bloop: So. How’d the mythical Robert look?
Keith Law: He went 0 for 5 with two punches. The universe is mocking me.

Jo-Nathan: How high would Jasson Dominguez go in the draft this year if eligible?
Keith Law: Not that high. The two pools aren’t very comparable to begin with, given the players’ ages, but what I’ve heard on Dominguez doesn’t make him a top ten talent or anything.

Adam Trask: FYI, Cuban Baseball Federation is not run by the Cuban government. It is run by the Cuban Olympic Committee, which answers to the International Olympic Committee.
Keith Law: “Answers to” is not the same thing. Who funds the Federation? Not the IOC, right?

Anya: Michigan State basketball rape story in the NY Times today. OMFG, what is wrong with colleges when it comes to sports…
Keith Law: College sport fandom is like a cult. Last June, Oregon State abused one of its pitchers, Kevin Abel, to win the CWS, throwing him 129 pitches the day after he’d thrown a 23-pitch relief outing. He was 19, so even the 129 was over the PitchSmart limit for his age, and that limit assumes regular rest before the start. I called them out at the time, and Pat Casey, the OSU coach, said people criticizing him were just haters (that we “didn’t want them to win,” I believe, as if I give two shits who wins the CWS). Abel has been hurt much of the spring and now has to have Tommy John surgery. I pointed this out yesterday … and was immediately set upon by OSU fans who are suddenly experts in pitching injuries in mechanics. They believe exactly what they want, and only what they want, rather than consider that the team or its players or its coaches might be less than perfect.
Keith Law: Also, Casey did the same to Drew Rasmussen, running him out for full outings just a year off TJ, enough that Rasmussen flunked his physical with the Rays and required a second TJ less than two years after his first one.

Chuck: Cedric Mullins a AAA guy, AAAA guy or MLB guy?
Keith Law: Bench/up-and-down guy.

Ben: When does Milb present to us a remotely friendly site and app? This is ridiculous!
Keith Law: MILB turning its app from a useful one to a completely useless one is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen on that platform. Apps are supposed to improve, and add features, right?

E: You have mentioned a weaker draft class numerous times this year. Is there a chance no draftees crack the top 20 prospects next year?
Keith Law: Rutschman maybe, otherwise no.

Jake L.: Are you a believer in the Forbes Team values? The Rays, to no surprise, scoff that the team is now worth 1.01 Billion dollars
Keith Law: They’re educated estimates, but hardly precise. It’s very difficult to properly value an asset that not only isn’t publicly traded but the sale of which is effectively regulated by a third party.

Brian Godish: Once the season starts, how do you divide up your time between MLB, the minors, and draft prep? I picture your office with 6 screens this time of year.
Keith Law: Watching draft guys on TV is mostly useless to me. The angles are all wrong.

Guest: Can you confirm Luis Robert is real now?
Keith Law: I can confirm this.

scott: Jake Mangum looks like he will finish as the all time hits leader in the SEC. Does he have any professional future?
Keith Law: Professional yes, major-league no.

Jeff: It seems Oregon State lies about the nature of Abel’s injury. Shouldn’t there be some repercussions from the NCAA?
Keith Law: Ahahahahahahahahah oh my god that’s hilarious. No, they’ll probably suspend a different player for accepting a free sip of water.

Jerry: Last night’s performance out of the bullpen for James notwithstanding, if the back end of the Astros rotation isn’t doing the job by summer would James and/or Whitley bring enough to the table to keep the good times rolling or would it be time to start shopping Tucker and others for a big time SP?
Keith Law: Why not both? Try Whitley and James while exploring the market for Tucker.

Big Fan: Is ‘Insert Player’ from ‘Insert Favorite Team’ going to be awesome this year based on ‘Insert Small Sample Stat’?
Keith Law: I’m trying to skip most of those questions this week, but yeah, that’s about the size of it. Nobody knows which great/terrible start is real.

Jeff: Does it make any sense that Abel would feel a twinge in his elbow while rehabbing after being shut down for an alleged bad back?
Keith Law: When I was with the Jays, Jeff Niemann was a potential first-rounder at Rice (heh) and missed some starts his junior year with what was reported as a groin injury. One of my colleagues asked in a group discussion about potential picks if that was the groin that’s attached to the elbow ligament.

Esteban: Have you heard old town road by lil nas x? Thots?
Keith Law: I hate that fucking song already.

Bobby D: It the recent past it seems that you have been reading more. Were/are your motivations tied to your writing or more along the line of personal enjoyment?
Keith Law: I’m still reading at my usual pace. Just started The Inheritance of Loss yesterday.

Eric: Some people on Blue Jays twitter are starting to get excited about Patrick Murphy…justified? Any insights you can share?
Keith Law: It’s two starts.

Brian Godish: Maybe Madrigal played and you just couldn’t see him…
Keith Law: On the contrary, I could look him right in the eyes.

nelson: Talk about the black hole
Keith Law: I’m just trying to figure out how we can fire all the anti-vaxxers right past its event horizon.

Mike: If the over/under was set at “1” on Big League Regulars among McKinney, Jansen, Teoscar, Gurriel, Tellez and Drury, would you take the over?
Keith Law: Yes.

Jay: At what point do the draft picks become unattached to free agents? That’s the day I think we see deals for Kimbrel & Keuchel
Keith Law: After the draft.

Guest: Keith, any idea if ESPN+ will get folder into Disney+ whenever it comes out?
Keith Law: I was just discussing this with someone last night – I don’t know, and my gut is that they’ll be separate services, but how great would it be if they were combined or even bundled like Spotify/Hulu? (UPDATE: Disney announced this afternoon that there will indeed be some sort of bundle.)

Chris: Not even looking at the statline, Amed Rosario looks like a different player this year. Turning on balls inside while displaying better patience. Exciting.
Keith Law: Cautiously optimistic on that one. Hitting balls harder, not getting them quite enough into the air. At some point after Brooklyn his swing got a little flatter.

Mark: I was watching a show on T.V the other day called ,”The best Thing I ever Ate.” Curious what as to what your answer would be.
Keith Law: A longtime reader & correspondent (who seems to have vanished from the internet completely, so I’m a bit worried about her) asked me that years ago, and my answer was the meatballs with tomato sauce and lardo at Boston’s Coppa. I no longer eat beef, so that dish will have to remain a memory, but I could also offer the duck carnitas at Cosme in NYC, the piedras y oro dessert at Xochi in Houston, the Wiseguy pizza at Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco, the grilled carrots with jalapeño chimichurri and apricot puree at Juniper and Ivy … okay, this might get long…

Keith: What insights (if any) did seeing Luis Robert in person give you?
Keith Law: Swing is better than I expected. At bats were not. My goodness he is a large man.

Chris: I got to watch a lot of Kyle Isbel and Nathan Eaton play last year in the Pioneer league and came away really impressed by both. Any thoughts on either of those guys? Any reason for optimism?
Keith Law: First two games with Isbel weren’t promising. I’ll see him a ton more this spring, though.

Nick: For the Phils, would signing Keuchel and moving Pivetta to the pen make more sense than just signing Kimbrel? (Not that either scenario is likely.)
Keith Law: Yes but I think they still view Pivetta as a long-term starter. I think he’s too vulnerable to LHB.

Steve (nyc): You have mentioned how it is like work when being in large social settings. I have similar experience and can’t get spouse to understand why I don’t always want to entertain. How do you handle this?
Keith Law: To what extent does your spouse understand why you feel this way? Explaining your anxiety or discomfort may help. Even asking them to read something that gets into what anxiety is and why we feel it could help them understand.

Big Time Timmy Jim: You’ve maintained that you never questioned Luis Severino’s stuff, only whether or not he can hold up longterm given the delivery and body. In two consecutive years, his stuff worn down in the 2nd half, and how with real shoulder/arm issues to start 2019. While I know you don’t advocate for any pitchers to be injured (and actively root for them to succeed, even if it means you’re ‘wrong’), is there just a small part of you that wants to say “This is what I was talking about, guys.”?
Keith Law: Yes, it occurs to me – I took this question, which some readers might interpret as prima facie evidence that I’m gloating – but i find it nauseates me to think about taking pride or pleasure in a player’s injury, if that makes sense. I’ve said this before – that baseball player who fails is a grown-up kid who always dreamed of being a major leaguer. I get physically uncomfortable when fans mock, heckle, or just boo opposing players who fail. I get that most fans do this stuff or think it’s fine or even funny, but that’s still a human on the receiving end of the invective.

Jerry: Carlos Correa has been pretty adamant that he won’t sign an extension. Good for him. I think every player should make as much as they can. Assuming he walks do the Astros have any SS-3B types in the minors who project as better than average MLBers by the time he’s a FA?
Keith Law: I hear Betts is the same way. Right now, no, I don’t think they do.

Mike : Why do you keep saying Kelenic was the Mets top prospect when your list is the only one that has him ahead of Gimenez
Keith Law: Because … it’s … my … list.

Newt: I don’t know if he’ll ever hit consistently, but man, watching Byron Buxton break the sound barrier rounding second en route to his triple last night was jaw-dropping.
Keith Law: And at the plate, he looks like he did for most of 2017, too. I’m optimistic.

Lawl: Too early for top of the draft rumblings? White Sox have a chance at Vaughn?
Keith Law: They pick third so yes. If I had to guess – this is a guess, people, not based on much info at all – I’d say picks 1-2-3 were Rutschman, Witt Jr, Vaughn. Maybe then Abrams/Greene in some order, although neither did himself any favors at NHSI with 20+ directors and several GMs in attendance.

Tim Apple: Do the early struggles of the CWS make it more likely that they will call up Cease, Madrigal, et al this summer or less likely? Stadium is empty but does control outweigh draw or vice versa?
Keith Law: Cease is a no-doubt callup, isn’t he? They’re going to need more starters no matter what, just with typical attrition, and what if Reynaldo Lopez’s bad start is more than just SSS? Madrigal I doubt we see but I would be shocked if Cease isn’t up by July 1st.

Pete: How do you usually watch MLB each night? Lots of flipping between games or mostly settle in for one on each time slot?
Keith Law: Depends on the night. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of the Padres because they nearly always have someone I want to see. Some nights I just bounce around close games.

MikeM: Yankees blog River Ave Blues is closing shop. They were one of the sites that really got me into baseball analytics and led me to learn a lot as a fan. I will miss their contributions to the baseball discussion (not withstanding Mike’s job with CBS sports). More baseball blogs should be like that and less reactionary.
Keith Law: Yes, they were one of the best team-specific blogs, and, in my opinion, a good bit less prone to the sort of jingoistic fandom into which even many decent blogs fall. I’ll always have fond memories of the one commenter there who called me a racist for omitting Donavan Tate from my top 100 the winter after Tate was the #3 pick in the draft.

Ben: How can we tell when a hot start is the 1% of times when it is real and not the 99% when it is a SSS? We hear so much about “swing tweaks” and trying out new pitches now that it seems like there is a report of something “different” on every player with a hot start.
Keith Law: I do not believe we can. We can guess, but that’s all we’re doing.

Chris P: This is the time guys generally pick up helium before the draft, so are there any guys you’ve been hearing about so far that are making the jump?
Keith Law: I wrote about Hunter Bishop a few weeks ago. Josh Wolf is a prep RHP in Texas who has surged. Josh Mears in Seattle is another one. Blake Walston in NC.

BigDaddeh: What are your thoughts on how much rest from baseball preteen kids should have. Not talking showcase circuit or max effort radar gun efforts, but fall ball after spring and summer and things like that
Keith Law: Pitchers should take at least 100 days off from throwing. I know that’s a bit of an arbitrary number but it seems in line with most of the recommendations I’ve heard from people I know with teams and from sources like PitchSmart.

Fan boy : Favorite minor league atmosphere within driving distance of your home?
Keith Law: Reading.

romorr: Adley is it at 1.1, right? No getting cute with underslot than overslot?
Keith Law: Why not? If you could sign Vaughn, save $1MM, and go grab JJ Goss for $3 million at your second pick, wouldn’t you do that?

Daniel: Hi Keith. Thank you for offering your fans this forum. What do you think is the reason that Forrest Whitley is not with the major league club? Is this more to give him innings due to the lack of them last season or a manipulation of the service time rule? I would think he is a better option than Peacock at this point.
Keith Law: Barely pitched last year at all.

Tony Montana: Is Jordyn Adams one of the highest ceiling players in the minors that is currently outside the top 100?
Keith Law: That’s reasonable.

Draft pick compensation: HEY! Don’t blame me for Keuchel/Kimbrel not signing. These guys think they’re getting $18M+ for 4+ years.
Keith Law: I would believe it hurts Kimbrel more than it hurts Keuchel.

JR: How would you handle Smith/Alonso if you were the Mets GM? Seems like two really good candidates at same position, but given Alonso is getting bulk of playing time a trade of Smith would be selling low on him?
Keith Law: I think Smith is trade bait. Even if Alonso slumps, he’s going to hold that job for a while – they’re not going to switch the guys if Alonso has a bad week. Helps that Smith looks good physically and has been solid in his minimal playing time.

Jake L.: When you are on a scouting trip, do you prefer to eat food at local restaurants or do actually eat at fast food chains once in awhile?
Keith Law: Local whenever I can. I do eat at Panera from time to time because I can eat something healthful while working too.

Esteban: Do you get more groupies (fans) from espn, food or writing/ reading books good? I like picturing fans waiting outside your hotel for autographs
Keith Law: I do not have groupies. I’m not sure I’d want groupies, but regardless, I do not have them. As for fans, I’ve been honored by how many of you have come to my various book signings.

Erik: thoughts on Minor League Baseball restricting usage of video from the games? Just saw that Baseball America took down all the in-game videos from their site.
Keith Law: Terrible. Waiting to hear if this is permanent and, if so, what they’re thinking.

MATT DAMON: Have you been able to see Cal Stevenson yet?
Keith Law: A tenth-round senior sign? Did I miss something?

Ben: Re Buxton, watching Billy Hamilton score from second on a fly out (is it scored as a sac fly??) was incredible.
Keith Law: Yep, that’s a sac fly.

Rod: When is the next mock draft coming?
Keith Law: You have never seen a mock from me before May 1st.

MATT DAMON: What happened to Logan Warmoth? He was ranked pretty high in your 2017 draft lift
Keith Law: Contact quality has been totally absent with wood. I’m floored – I thought his swing was good and was told his exit velocities in college were no worse than solid.

Brodie Van Jump on the Bandwagon: I am pleasantly surprised at Pete Alonso’s overall hitting– approach, hitting to all fields, etc. I recall you weren’t super high on him… I know it’s a small sample size, but he’s been pretty impressive on the hitting side, right? I think a 25 HR/90 RBI season and hiting .280+ may not be out of the question, especially if the Mets offense keeps on hitting. Thoughts?
Keith Law: I could see .280/25, and I could see .250-.260/30-35. I think I could see the latter more easily.

Matthew: I have recently entered the world of publicly published articles — I have to ask, how do you block out the unkind portion of a legitimate criticism, especially if the critique is a fair one?
Keith Law: Ignore. It invalidates the entire commentary for me.

Chris: Where does Hayden Simpson rank on your “WTF First Round Picks” list? The Cubs had some whiffs around that time period, but that was an all-timer, wasn’t it?
Keith Law: I believe that was one of only two times since I started this job that someone took a player in the actual first round I hadn’t heard of (although someone reminded me I did know who Simpson was, I had just totally dismissed him from my mind). The other was Kevin Matthews, 33rd overall in 2011 by Texas; he never got out of low-A with the Rangers, and had just one pro outing above A-ball at all, pitching in indy ball in 2018.

romorr: I’ve heard this here and there, but any truth to Trout falling in the draft because of Billy Rowell?
Keith Law: That was one variable among many, yes.

Charlie Indio Montoyo: Keith. I really respect your opinion alot. I just want to know why you think Thornton has below average command and control. He’s had a a 1.7 BB/9 in his entire minor league career (spanning nearly 450 IP), and he’s been able to locate his pitches really well in his first 2 starts (granted small sample size obviously).
Keith Law: Walk rate is not command.

Jake L.: How are you doing today after dunking on “the stick to baseball guy ” in regards to the Schilling thing? I don’t know if I ever laughed so much
Keith Law: I mean, my internal reaction to anyone who says “stick to baseball” is “go fuck yourself,” but rare is anyone so stupid as to non-ironically say “stick to baseball” when I’m actually commenting on baseball.
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. Thank you all so much for reading. I do not think I’ll get to chat next week, and depending on travel/weather, the next chat will probably be April 24th. Enjoy your weekends, and if you’re at any of the Texas Tech/WVU games this weekend, I should be there for the one Alek Manoah pitches.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ April 8, 2019
→ By keith

Longreads, 4/7/19.

My latest draft post for ESPN+ subscribers looks at the top prospects from last week’s NHSI tournament, including C.J. Abrams, Riley Greene, and Jack Leiter; as well as Saturday’s outing by Elon RHP George Kirby.

Here are some of the leftover longreads I hadn’t gotten through in time for yesterday’s post:

The Guardian looks at the evolution of the influencer market, which continues to grow even through scandals and fragmentation. The article also focuses, a bit oddly, on influencers’ drive for “authenticity,” which strikes me as a contradiction in terms.
A reader sent this lengthy Current Affairs overview of Pete Buttigeig as seen through his book Shortest Way Home, arguing that he’s not a progressive candidate and that progressive voters shouldn’t want any part of him as a Presidential candidate. I think the article makes many good points, notably when discussing his policies as South Bend mayor and how he seemed to deprioritize issues like poverty reduction or racial inequality, but also makes some dubious inferences and leans too much on the book itself, which is a campaign document. Buttigeig also wrote about his ten favorite books for Vulture and I find it hard to believe that these ten, which read like the list of books you want other people to believe are your favorite books, are actually his favorites.
The Indy Star profiles John Franzese, whose testimony sent his father, a Colombo crime family boss, to jail, and his life after leaving witness protection, trying to work with recovering addicts like himself.
I’ve read two great books on the Chicxulub impact event, the asteroid collision with the earth that wiped out the dinosaurs and caused the KT mass extinction event, in the last year: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and T. rex and the Crater of Doom. The New Yorker has a piece right in line with those, looking at the recent discovery of a site that may have a fossil record of the first few hours after the impact.
Matthew Komatsu documents his experiences as a Japanese-American in the wake of the 2011 tsunami, and what he found in his 2018 return to the country.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of science, links, social media

→ April 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

The best thing I read this week, one with particular relevance to me and many people close to me, is the New Yorker‘s piece on Laura Delano and the poorly-understood challenges of going off psychiatric drugs. I take one of those drugs, escitalopram (Lexapro), at the lowest ‘therapeutic dose’ of 10 mg/day, to help manage my anxiety.
Irin Carmon, now of New York magazine’s Intelligencer, writes of how the Washington Post, including famed editor-in-chief Marty Baron, spiked her work (with Amy Brittain) revealing that 60 Minutes boss Jeff Fager had a history of sexual harassment. CBS and Fager barraged the Post with threats of lawsuits and implied that they’d leak information to sink the story and some individuals’ careers, so the Post excised Fager’s story from their exposé of Charlie Rose; Ronan Farrow eventually published these allegations last July, leading to Fager’s belated firing.
The BBC looks at the murder of Iraqi Instagram star Tara Fares, part of what appears to be an increasing campaign to silence “liberal” women with significant social media profiles in the country.
Two of the links this week are very difficult reads about the deaths of children. The Washington Post goes deeper on the story of the grieving mother Susan Stevens, whose daughter’s death by overdose been used by Trump as ‘evidence’ we need a border wall, but whose story is far more complicated, with abuse and sexual assault possibly contributing to her daughter’s drug use.
The second is a photo essay on NPR covering the life and death of 12-year-old Lola Muñoz from a brain tumor, documented by photojournalist Moriah Ratner, who spent over a year with Lola and became very close to her subject before Lola’s death one year ago.
Vox asked fifteen experts about what modern practices or beliefs will be “unthinkable” in fifty years; I thought Lux Alptraum’s answer on sex work and its possible decriminalization was particularly insightful. When we turn sex workers into criminals, we are often revictimizing the people we charge with crimes.
The Anti-Defamation League called out anti-vaxxers for misappropriating the Holocaust-era Star of David badge to try to make themselves into some sort of victims.
The HPV vaccine has led to a dramatic drop in cervical disease, referring to the precancerous cells found in cervixes as a result of HPV infections.
I may have included this once before, but Undark’s profile of 18-year-old Ethan Lindberger, who was unvaccinated until he gained his majority and whose mother is still off in cloudcuckooland when it comes to vaccines, is worth your time.
From McSweeney’s: “I’m Vaccinating my Child the Natural Way – With Measles.“
The Administration is draining that swamp by letting pork producers have more control over inspections. Getting food-borne illnesses to own the libs?
Texas billionaire and Trump ally Andrew Beal is trying to get courts and regulators to stop California’s clean energy goals so he can profit, with zero apparent concern for the effects on our environment. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be born without a soul.
The Fifth Circuit Court’s recent ruling in Gibson v. Collier abandons the rule of law so the majority could weigh in against trans rights, according to plaintiff’s attorney Max Kennerly.
Probiotics do little to nothing for your overall health; they may even be bad for your immune system. Want a healthier gut? Eat more fiber.
The Atlantic has a fun interview with songwriters Norm Stiles and Chris Cerf, who wrote many of Sesame Street‘s most famous songs and later co-created Between the Lions. I do dispute the writer’s assertion that Sesame Street‘s best-known tune is “Put Down the Duckie.” That’s not even the show’s best-known song about a rubber duck; “Rubber Ducky” was so popular it hit the top 20 on Billboard‘s pop singles cart in 1970.
In a video essay for the New York Times Venezuelan-American writer Joanna Hausmann says the American Left is wrong to glorify Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, and that protests against U.S. action in the collapsed South American state seem to ignore the wishes of actual Venezuelans. She also points out that Venezuela’s economy collapsed due to decades of corruption, with Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez looting the state for personal gain.
BuzzFeed writers have unionized, but the company is refusing to even recognize the union. You can see the union’s open letter to management on its Twitter feed.
Political science professor Leah Stokes looks at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that corporate money, not public opinion, is the real opposition to the Green New Deal, and finds evidence to support it.
Wine Enthusiast has a guide to amari, potable bitters, mostly from Italy that I’m seeing more on dessert menus at fine restaurants. The piece mentions my two favorites for drinking straight – Meletti and Montenegro.
Nationals pitching prospect Sterling Sharp is running a pledge drive to benefit youth baseball in Detroit where you can donate a flat amount or do as I did, pinning your donation to the number of groundball outs Sharp records this year.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for two upcoming titles, Artsee and the trick-taking game Time Chase.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, depression, food safety, links, liquor, longreads, mental health, the swamp, vaccines

→ April 4, 2019
→ By keith

Between You and Me.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at the New Yorker for several decades, and, based on her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is what I had always imagined copy editors to be before I became a professional writer. If you’ve seen the last season of The Wire, you know the archetype I’m describing: The human dictionary, someone not just familiar with the finer points of grammar and syntax but who revels in those distinctions, and thus becomes both indispensable to harried writers who might not find the right word or who err in their usage as well as the sworn enemy of the same writers who, like me, would prefer to believe that their copy was perfect when it was filed.

Norris does a lot of that, it seems, and some of those language quirks serve as the starting points here for individual chapters that meander through questions of usage or linguistic evolution but also through fun or interesting stories from her forty years at one of the most revered English-language publications. The New Yorker has published works, fiction and non-fiction, from some of this country’s most esteemed writers, and Norris was able to edit and work with many of them, with her working relationship with Philip Roth earning significant mention in the book (a weird coincidence, since I just read a fictionalized version of a romantic relationship with him in Asymmetry). The publication is also well-known for maintaining standards on language, grammar, and orthography that, depending on your perspective, are either a noble attempt to fight the erosion of linguistic excellence or pretentious prescriptivism that leads people to say grammar is just something white people like. (I admit to sympathizing with the former sentiment more than the latter, but even the New Yorker loses me by putting a diaeresis in coöperation.) George Saunders has praised her editing, as has longtime editor in chief David Remnick.

The best parts of Confessions of a Comma Queen, for me at least, are the anecdotes about battles, internal and internecine, over editing decisions. I often answer people on social media or in chats by saying that “words have meanings,” a bromide that I think gets at a deeper truth: any modern language has a panoply of ways to describe just about anything, and in most cases these different words or phrases will differ slightly in denotation or connotation, so that in most cases there will be one or two optimal choices. Yet the subjectivity of language and its limitations in expressing the variety of human thought also mean that rational, intelligent people may even disagree over which words are the right ones. Norris details some of those battles and even more trivial ones, devoting much of one chapter to the hyphen, another to the semicolon (perhaps my favorite punctuation mark, but one she derides), and of course quite a bit to the comma, although I think she ultimately comes down on the wrong side of the debate over the serial, Oxford, or Harvard comma.

There’s a wonderful chapter on profanity that is appropriately filled with f-bombs, as well as a strangely fascinating chapter that is mostly dedicated to Norris’ quest for more #1 pencils, which I only knew existed by imputation, since I was always required to use #2 pencils for standardized tests and had seen #3 pencils (useless) but to this day have never laid eyes on a #1 pencil. The story of the pencils has no inherent drama but Norris manages to turn it into a comic escapade, complete with a delightful back-and-forth with the CEO of the pencil company whose pencils she ultimately obtains. There’s a discussion of the singular they, and other (failed) gender-neutral pronouns, that has become even more salient today than it was when Norris wrote about it, and of course the title’s phrase looms large in another discussion of how people misuse pronouns by saying things like “between you and I” or “me and Joey Bagodonuts both went 0-for today.”

I only had one real quibble with Between You and Me and it might not matter if you read the printed version. I listened to the audiobook, and Norris’ attempts to read Noah Webster’s writings, which used ?, a character known as the medial s that looks like an f but actually isn’t one, comes off like she’s mocking someone with a speech impediment; treating that character as an f is funny once, as a joke, but Norris carries it too far while ignoring the fact that it’s not an f at all. That gag slightly sours another wonderful chapter that explains how much of even contemporary English usage derives from decisions Webster made unilaterally on what was “proper” English, as well as other changes he advocated that never caught on. It’s a great read for the stickler in your life, or any writer/editor who might enjoy reading about the editing life and culture of one of America’s great and most distinctive magazines.

Next up: John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Grammar, highly recommended, history of language, non-fiction, writing

→ April 3, 2019
→ By keith

Childhood’s End.

My daughter has five ‘cycles’ in her English & Language Arts class this year, with a choice of four books in each cycle, usually tied together by a common theme in their subjects. We got the list last August, and I was pleased to see Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a book many of you had recommended but which I’d never read, on the list for her final cycle, coming up next month. I’d previously read three of his novels – 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, and The Fountains of Paradise, the latter two of them Hugo winners – but never this one, which I think many readers consider his strongest work.

It is … fine, I guess. It’s got an interesting conceit, certainly asks you to open your mind to some giant philosophical questions, and is heavy on the science. Like his two Hugo-winning novels, however, it’s written in such a detached way that there are no interesting characters and thus no compelling individual storylines. You read because you want to see how Clarke wraps up the big picture, but in my case, I never felt any emotional connection to anything or anyone in the book itself, not even when the entire human race is threatened with extinction.

Earth is visited in Childhood’s End by a highly advanced extraterrestrial race known only as the Overlords, who appear over Earth’s major cities, make contact via voice, and proceed to tidy things up for humanity, putting an end to war, famine, and disease around the world, acting as benevolent dictators with just a brief show of force to make their power clear. Their intent, however, is far less so, and under this Pax Overlordia human progress slows, both in the sciences, where the Overlords put a stop to all research into space exploration, and in the arts, where prosperity and lack of want quell the urge to create. One human manages to sneak aboard an Overlord ship bound back for their home planet, after a ‘séance’ that reveals the star system in question, but while he’s gone the true purpose of the Overlords’ visit and de facto occupation of Earth becomes apparent.

Clarke was something of a futurist, and major themes associated with that school appear in each of the book’s three connected yet clearly discrete sections, which function as novellas bound by setting rather than a single narrative whole. He was a staunch atheist who opposed both organized religion and the tenets of religious faith, incorporating the death of religiosity into this novel as he did in Fountains of Paradise. With the question of gods thus dispensed, he asks readers to consider what other meaning humanity might find in a universe without intrinsic purpose, using that as a loose segue to a middle section where he dances around the question of art – why we create it, and whether our urge to do so is a byproduct of the lives we live, ones with agony and ecstasy, with doubt and uncertainty. It’s a wonderful question, but Clarke abandons it before getting far enough to even create an interesting discussion within the novel itself, focusing instead on the closest thing the novel has to an overarching theme, which ties into the resolution of the main story.

I think after reading four novels I have a good sense of my own opinion of Clarke. He was absolutely brilliant, and able to bring complex ideas into his writing without making it inaccessible to most readers, but he had little to no interest in character development, and his prose was parched. This is the sort of novel I loved when I was a kid, because I could get caught up in the setting and the science. I enjoyed genre fiction at the time for its genre, and cared less about the quality of the fiction. I can’t read that way any more, and Childhood’s End struck me as childish, not in the quality of Clarke’s content, but in its aims. I ask more of a novel of ideas than Clarke is able to deliver.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Nights, the true story of his grandparents’ courtship and work as journalists in the Far East in the years before and during World War II.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: british literature, hard science fiction, science fiction

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