→ January 3, 2019
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Klawchat 1/3/19.

Keith Law: I wish the world was flat like the old days. Klawchat.

Seth: Andrew Vaughn likely to be the first 1b only prospect to be drafted in the top 5 in a long time? If so, is it a reflection on his skills or a weaker draft class?
Keith Law: Possible, not likely. A reflection on the draft class either way.

Nick: Doesn’t it kind of feel like the Cubs are spiraling downwards towards mediocrity ?
Keith Law: No.

J: Trying to sift through the numerous Padres’ pitching prospects. Do you see Paddack, Quantrill, or Allen making any dent in 2019? Is Quantrill just an org guy at this point, or room for redemption?
Keith Law: Paddack for sure. The others possibly. Q is more than an org guy, but he’s also regressed a good bit since the first summer.

J: Framber Valdez. Good enough to start the season in Astros’ rotation?
Keith Law: I’d say probably not, since they’re contenders.

Trevor: Are you in favor of expansion and would it help solve the slow free agent market?
Keith Law: Yes, and probably not.

Ted: Klaw,

What’s your opinion on how we should view movies, music, etc. that was made during times when certain words or actions were, for lack of a better term, more “acceptable”? I was thinking about your recent comments about the Ten Years After song this past weekend when “Money for Nothing” came on the radio, which also infamously includes a homophobic slur. Mark Knopfler has always claimed he got the lyrics from a time he was in a New York appliance store and overheard a delivery worker making comments about a video on MTV (which is also why the characters in the video are dressed that way), and thus is taking poetic license. Of course, no one in their right mind would write those lyrics today. But it seems that if you view a lot of art made 30 or 50 or 200 years ago through the prism of current societal norms, much of it will appear racist, homophobic and misogynist. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when people would commonly say “that’s gay” to mean they thought something was stupid.
Keith Law: I think understanding the context of the objectionable language or ideas is important. For example, in that song, Knopfler is mocking the speaker (who is trying to mock musicians like Knopfler), for his overall attitude and for assuming that a singer with one earring is gay. I hate the word, but have no objection to art that repeats the word in a manner that denigrates someone using it. Compare that to the Scarlet Pimpernel, a novel I really enjoyed as a reader, but one that uses a particularly bad anti-Semitic stereotype for a central character. It’s a blast to read, but when it came up as a possible book choice in my daughter’s curriculum this year, I asked the teacher to consider removing it.

Joe: What’s your opinion of the Mariners’ Julio Rodriguez? Is he getting any consideration for your top 100 or is it too soon? Do you think he has superstar potential?
Keith Law: Nowhere close to top 100 yet.

Mo: What happened to Shane Baz last year? Has his stock dropped dramatically?
Keith Law: No. Did something happen? I can’t even think of why you’d ask about his stock dropping.

Lance: Do you think Kyle Wright will throw significant innings for the Braves this season? It’s hard to project anything for them with the glut of high-upside SP prospects they possess.
Keith Law: As you said, it’s hard to project innings totals for their arms. I would guess, based on very little but my own outside sense, that he doesn’t throw much for them unless they suffer multiple injuries or trade at least two guys ahead of him in the queue.

Lonnie: Javier Baez repeating his 2018 season – buying or selling?
Keith Law: Buying. You didn’t say when; I am buying that he can have that season again.

Yong: What is your read on Adalberto Mondesi? Do you think he’s close to the player he was in the second half last year, or was that an abberation?
Keith Law: I think that’s an aberration, boosted by the juiced MLB ball.

waks: sorry, long q. so i’m a labor advocate (and union councilor, to boot), and i’ve long thought about the power that the MLBPA has, while recognizing that it’s done a fair amount short-sighted things. One of the things i can’t stop thinking about however, is how bizarre it is that average fans are likely to side with billionaire owners over “greedy” millionaire players (despite the fact that people come to see those guys play, not take a tour of the facility). How can the MLBPA combat this? Is it even worth combating it?
Keith Law: They’ve never taken it seriously enough, going back to when I was a kid. I do think it’s worth combating it, and that it would help if the PA would align itself with unions in general – something they’ve eschewed in the past, with players crossing picket lines for other unions.

Dana: If you’re the Yankees, are you comfortable going into Spring Training with Luke Voit and Greg Bird as 1B options?
Keith Law: No.

Rodney: Is there any chance Richard Urena becomes an everyday player? Age and scouting the stat line make it seem like a possibility, but there are plenty of red flags.
Keith Law: Very unlikely.

Fred: Is Kyle Lewis regaining top 100 status simply a matter of putting together a healthy, productive season, or has he fallen further than that?
Keith Law: Not being flippant, but let’s see a healthy, productive season, and then discuss it. We have no idea at this point what such a season would even look like for him.

Ron: HI Keith- The Cruz signing a decent deal? Get the bat if there is something left and maybe an influence on Sano etc? Money wasn’t bad and maybe has a year left in the tank? Your thoughts? Thanks!
Keith Law: Yep, very good deal. Twins are quietly building a legitimate threat to Cleveland.

Eric H.: Daniel Norris has been a mix of unhealthy and ineffective since joining the Tigers. Any realistic chance he regains his form?
Keith Law: I think it’s all about health and velocity, and those two are probably connected. With a plus FB, he’s a GUY. With a slightly below-average FB, he’s more like a middle reliever or maybe a long man.

Jim L: Why didn’t Trump ask Mexico for ONLY $5 billion to build the wall?
Keith Law: Now Mexico is going to pay for it via tariffs. Or something. Is the swamp drained yet?

Moe Mentum: Any rational explanation for Harold Baines beating Edgar Martinez to Cooperstown?
Keith Law: Do you consider corruption a rational explanation? As they say in White Christmas, it’s not good, but it’s a reason.

Rhys: HNY Keith. Do you see Daniel Murphy playing more than 100 games this season at 1B and if so, might that mean the Rockies are betting on Brendan Rodgers seizing the 2B job? What are realistic projections for each if so?
Keith Law: I don’t get that signing at all. Murphy at 1b is barely worth the roster spot, and he can’t play 2b any more. To give him that kind of guaranteed money seemed like extremely wishful thinking.

Jack SF: HNY Keith! Is the Brantley acquisition a foreshadowing of Tucker’s exit from Houston? Traded for Realmuto? Is there Yelich potential there with Tucker in Miami?
Keith Law: I like Tucker but don’t think this means Tucker is getting traded.

Sweeney: At what point do strikeouts become so much of a problem that teams begin preaching about making contact and using the whole field over hitting the ball in the air to the pull side? When teams are averaging 12 ks per game? 15? 17?
Keith Law: Some teams are already doing that, but we haven’t reached an inflection point where the contact-oriented approach is more valuable.

Henry: Hi Keith, any thoughts on Jeff Passan joining ESPN. Seems like a nice addition. Keep up the great work!
Keith Law: I’m thrilled. Jeff is great at his job and I’ve been friends with him for a long time now. He also knows his KC barbecue.

Moe Mentum: What non-academic advice would you give college freshmen, in order to maximize their experience while in school?
Keith Law: This might be more like academic advice but if I could do it over again, I’d focus on taking classes on things I loved, or was truly interested in, rather than trying to figure out what classes or major would be the most valuable. The idea that you should enjoy your social life and hate your academic life is just dumb. (Not that my alma mater had a great social life, or that I was anywhere ready to enjoy one if it did.)

Chris: Do you like eating at restaurants or cooking more?
Keith Law: Eating out. Then I don’t have to clean. It gets expensive, though.

Mark: What chance do you think Donaldson has of posting at least 5 WAR this year?
Keith Law: I’d bet the under, but the odds are not zero.

Ryan: keith, huge braves fan, but wondering why they havn’t done more, price just to high for AA?
Keith Law: It’s January 3rd. Lots of offseason left.

Nick: What do you make of reports like the White Sox won’t go over 7 years for Harper/Machado? Is that just posturing to control the price?
Keith Law: I do not believe those reports.

BeefLoaf: Can you please rank Rick Hahn 1-30 (1 being the best) out of current MLB GM’s
Keith Law: I have never ranked GMs and I’m never going to do so.

Vinny : Are the Padres actually going to make a big trade this year?
Keith Law: Why should they unless it’s a good one? They’re going to be good, maybe as soon as 2020. Do you want them to trade Turner and Ross for Wil Myers and stuff again?

Ron: Fantasy baseball question – who has the best 2019 season out of beiber, toussaint, kikuchi, or Cahill?
Keith Law: No idea – I haven’t played fantasy baseball in almost 20 years now.

Juwan: If you were the GM of the Nats, would you prioritize bringing Harper back, or focus on a Rendon extension?
Keith Law: Love Harper but I think extending Rendon and using any remaining cash this winter to upgrade 2b and the back of the rotation would be the better move to contend in 2019.

Matt: So how does the shutdown end? The Dems can’t cave because if they do, the GOP will always resort to shutting down the government until they get what they want. On the other hand, Trump is a 4 year old child with narcissistic personality disorder. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to “take a loss” even if it’s for the good the country.
Keith Law: I have wondered this myself – if the GOP would eventually rebel against Trump enough to reopen the government, for the good of the people who actually voted for them.

Sheng: Does Harper have the higher upside while Machado the higher floor? Would it make sense for a team to offer a 2 year deal worth 100m? And would either think of accepting such an offer?
Keith Law: Machado has the higher floor; I don’t know that I agree either has a clearly higher upside; and I can’t imagine either player accepting an offer that short when they’re likely to get 8+ years and could end up at 10/$300MM.

Juwan: Are you still as high on Victor Robles as you once were? Still think the McCutchen comp fits?
Keith Law: Yes, maybe yes, could be more defense and a shade less power.

Michael: Why did you make a tweet slamming clickbait rumors/sources, then like a tweet a few hours later claiming that Harper is going to sign with the Cubs, and then block people who called you out for the hypocrisy?
Keith Law: Because that’s not hypocrisy, a word that people like to use on twitter without knowing what it means (or what the Like function is). And the tweet in question, from my pal Brett over at Bleacher Nation, did not claim Harper was going to sign with the Cubs or anything close to it, so the single person I blocked was, to use the technical term, utterly full of shit, as are you.

Steve: Belt for Conforto, who says no?
Keith Law: The Mets should.

Jim: Thanks for the chats. Would Verdugo, Maeda and a bullpen arm be a fair return for Kluber?
Keith Law: No.

James : aside from Vlad Jr., who’s the one prospect you think will come up and have a strong 2019 year?
Keith Law: Robles. Eloy. Whitley. I could see Tatis Jr spending half the year in the majors and producing.

Dan: Curious on your thoughts of JP Crawford as a hitter. Think the move to SEA might help him to concentrate on hitting gap to gap, instead of the “long ball” mentality? Thank you and happy 2019!
Keith Law: I think it’s more about him than the ballpark – he has to accept the type of hitter he is, not try to hit for power, and frankly to be more aggressive in all aspects of the game: ambushing good pitches to hit when he’s ahead, running out key groundballs, getting after balls in the field. He has superstar ability but for reasons I don’t understand his visible effort level was not there last year.

Justin R: When we can expect your 2019 prospects columns to hit?
Keith Law: The week of January 28th. I guess I should start writing those.

Justin R: Just bought the Smart Baseball audiobook…did I make the right call or should I have gone dead tree?
Keith Law: I’m just happy you’re reading it in any format.

Thomas: Can we expect book #2 any time soon?
Keith Law: April 2020.

James: Hey Keith. Great HOF ballot, awesome to see Andruw get your vote. Who else would you have included if allowed unlimited votes?
Keith Law: I listed those in the column on my ballot.

Jeff: Keith – It seems the Dodgers involvement in additional trades is tied, at least in some way, to Harper’s decision. Do you agree? If so, are there any smaller moves you see a positives to help them finally get over the hump?
Keith Law: I do not agree – I don’t know for sure that they’re on him.

Rell: Do you ever gamble on baseball
Keith Law: No.

Kevin: Do you see anything with Soroka’s delivery that would suggest long term shoulder issues?
Keith Law: I don’t love it, the low slot/arm path seems to put a little stress on the shoulder, but 1) I don’t think it’s a huge red flag and 2) some guys have bad deliveries and stay healthy anyway, Chris Sale being the most obvious example.

Steeeeve: Why was Harper’s defense so bad last year?
Keith Law: Mike Petriello at MLB did a great piece where he looked at all of Harper’s key ‘plays not made.’ I got the sense this was a deliberate move by Harper to not sacrifice his body for defense as much as he had in previous years, perhaps (I’m inferring here) to ensure he stayed healthy all year for free agency. I don’t think he was actually a worse defender by skill.

Mo: Re: Baz, I was basing it on his poor results in the second half, being shipped to Tampa as a PTBNL, and him being excluded from the Rays top 10 on BA
Keith Law: Yeah, still not seeing it. He only made 12 starts, all in short-season, and his best outings came in his second half. Being traded isn’t a marker against a player. I don’t write for BA and can’t explain anything about their lists.

Larry: Who has more helium potential- Vientos or Mauricio?
Keith Law: Mauricio has the higher ceiling, Vientos might do the most this year to improve fans’ awareness/perception of him.

Anthony: You ever watch Silence of the Lambs? Thoughts if you have?
Keith Law: Nope, nor do I plan to.

TP: What is the rationale behind having a different ball in MLB and MiLB? How does that impact player evaluations?
Keith Law: There is no rationale – MLB doesn’t even want to admit there is a difference – and IMO it screws up attempts to grade power.

Andrew: Thoughts on Bobby Abreu as a HoF candidate when he appears on the ballot with Jeter?
Keith Law: He’ll be below the line for me.

Concerned Seattle Fan: Is most of Jarred Kelenic value tied into his defensive development? His hit tool seems to be intact but can he become a 25-25 type player?
Keith Law: No, and yes.

Kretin: Is Chris Rodriguez a sleeper prospect this year if healthy?
Keith Law: He was top 100 for me before he got hurt so I don’t think he could be a true ‘sleeper’ this soon.

Fred: Who do you prefer between Anthony Kay and Grant Holmes?
Keith Law: Anthony Kay.

Sean : Favorite movie last year?
Keith Law: Burning. My top ten, as of 12/31, is here.

Kyle: What does Braxton Garrett need to do in your mind to have a “good” year?
Keith Law: Just be healthy.

Matt: Is Kelenic now the Marineers best prospect? Do you think he can hit 25-30 homers in safeco?
Keith Law: It’s probably Sheffield, then Kelenic and Dunn.

JD: Does Charterstone work well as a two-player game?
Keith Law: Yes. You can also use “automa” as neutral players if you want to keep it from becoming too simple for the two of you to rack up goods/points.

don’t wear pearls: HOF induction is the game’s highest honor. If stealing numbers is stealing money, nobody stole more than Bonds and Clemens on their respective sides of the ball.
Keith Law: Well, I don’t know how you steal numbers, nor do I see how this somehow equates to stealing money. If you figure out who stole i, let me know, because for years I’ve been wondering if I just imagined it.

Amy: $400mil to Harper or spread around to Pollack, Kimbrell, Keuchel and more?
Keith Law: Depends on the team, but the latter (excluding Kimbrel, who looks like a time bomb to me) makes more sense.

Luis Rengifo: How do you view my breakout season last year? Has my prospect status risen?
Keith Law: A prospect now, maybe a utility guy, but a big rise from the time of the trade.

Zirinsky: Tulo signing: assuming the Yanks are quick to dump him if he can’t play/isn’t healthy, it’s a decent move right?
Keith Law: Eh. Lot of people seem to be assuming he’ll either be fine, or they’ll just cut him in March. One, I don’t buy that he’ll be fine after almost two years of not playing due to injury, a long history of injury issues before that, and declining defensive skill. Two, I don’t believe they’ll just cut him – more likely he pulls an Alomar and just quits mid-game in March – since he’s a respected veteran and they’ll love his clubhouse presence yata yata. And three, having him precludes bringing in another option for the same role as SS fill-in until Didi returns (or 2B fill-in with Gleyber at SS). It is a gamble, with some risk and some small reward.

Paella Pete: Seems fair to say that you were more excited about the prospect of Chaim Bloom becoming Mets GM than any of the other options… What do you think so far of the job BVW has done?
Keith Law: Bloom was the best choice, but they picked the guy who promised he could contend in 2019. So far BVW has traded the team’s top two prospects for insufficient return, overpaid for a reliever (with a DV history), and signed a catcher to a good deal.

Rhys: If you’re a Phils fan, should you be rooting for Middleton and Co. to spend stupid money on Machado over Harper? I get that Machado plays IF, (likely 3B with the Phils) makes consistent hard contact, but I get the feeling the long term effect is better with Harper on this team. Thoughts?
Keith Law: You should be happy with either guy – the team will be better, likely a contender, if they land either one. The fear should be that they land neither despite having the resources to sign one.

JD: Is Wander Franco the Next Huge Thing, or just the buzziest guy at the moment?
Keith Law: He’s a potential star. I wrote in August that he looks like the next teenaged big leaguer.

Johnny LaRue: Where would you place a new franchise outside of the U.S. mainland, were it up to you?
Keith Law: I don’t think such an option exists. As much as I’d love to see a team in Havana, there really isn’t a market right now in Latin America that has the population, the disposable income, enough security for players, and the proximity to the US to work.
Keith Law: San Juan would be the best bet, IMO, but the island’s economy is not in good shape.

Mark: Do you think Miguel Andujar sticks at third?
Keith Law: I think he can work his way to average in time, but I doubt the Yankees give him that much rope.

Anthony: Does Shed Long profile as a regular? What should the Reds do with Gennett, either now or after the season?
Keith Law: He doesn’t. Minus defender at 2b.

Johnny (Woburn): Hey Keith, Happy New Year! Do you see the Red Sox making any significant moves ahead of the season? Also, what kind of player do you see Dalbec becoming? Thanks!
Keith Law: No idea what moves they might be planning. Dalbec has made himself a plus defender and it’s huge raw power, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen a player strike out this often at his age and then become a regular in the majors.

Z: I got in an argument with a family member, curious to hear your thoughts. Do you view someone that is transgender as someone with a mental illness/disorder (gender dysphoria)?
Keith Law: The American Psychiatric Association’s position on this is ‘no.’ Gender dysphoria refers to the emotional distress resulting from the incongruence of one’s perceived gender and one’s biological sex, not from the difference itself. (And, this should be obvious, I also do not view having a mental illness or disorder as a failing any more than I’d view having a physical illness or disorder as one.)

Greg: Worse HoF vote- Harold Baines or Def Leppard? I feel like Leppard at least had a higher peak.
Keith Law: Yeah, plus the RnR Hall has always had a populist bent.

Matt: Is that guy that made the comments about Sosa gonna be held accountable by the Hall of Fame? (Lose his vote)
Keith Law: I doubt it.

Biff: Any recent Philly dining adventures you’d like to share?
Keith Law: I’ve been planning to do a list of my favorites this month since I’ve been here a while. Cheu in Fishtown was tremendous. Also had a great if pricey meal at Fork last weekend.

Patrick: Is it the responsibility of the Tweeter to keep in mind that some readers will be too lazy/biased/clueless to understand sarcasm, or should we just ignore those folks and carry on?
Keith Law: I have enough followers that no matter how I word something, there will be at least a few people who misinterpret it, inadvertently or deliberately.

John o: Your thoughts on the Orioles and Elias staff so far? Hyde?
Keith Law: So far, very good.

Adam: “Then I could travel just by folding a map.” Happy New Year, Keith! If the Phillies don’t land Harper or Machado, how do they salvage the offseason? Do they hold tight and wait for the trade deadline or next year when someone like Arenado is available, or are there other moves to make?
Keith Law: They could follow Amy’s suggestion above of Pollock & Keuchel.

John: I am a loyal Democrat and I don’t like Elizabeth Warren. I think she unlikable for a number of reasons—all of them unrelated to her sex. I’d also point out that most politicians are unlikable for various and legitimate reasons. You believe that any opinion contrary to yours must be linked to some bias of sex or race. Your ID politics keeps you from fully understanding people or the world around you.
Keith Law: I do not believe any such thing. I do believe that the “unlikable” tag applies to women in positions of power far more often than it does to men, and my belief is based on actual research, as opposed to yours.

Bobby Bradley’s 40-time: Recently got into cooking as I moved into a place with my girlfriend. Got the Anova sous vide you rec, food processor, few books, etc. Any go-to meals that you family loves? Preferably something not remarkably hard.
Keith Law: The sous vide chicken thighs on serious eats are a huge hit here.

Arty23: Do you think the Miller deal was a reasonable gamble for the Cardinals or an overpay?
Keith Law: Good gamble for them.

JR: you have about 6 weeks to get in the best shape of your life before spring training starts. Kidding aside, how much are you praying Bartolo signs this winter so there is still one MLBer older than you?
Keith Law: He’s fun. I definitely want him in MLB as long as he can hack it.

waks: Follow-up to the labor union thing. I think you’re absolutely right re: PA aligning publicly with other unions to show power of organized labor. I think movie actors ought to as well – and some have, like John Goodman stumping against Right to Work laws in Missouri this past summer. If unionized athletes and entertainers would take more of a vocal role, it would go a long way towards winning a PR war.
And hey, the MLBPA should want the piano tuners to argue against the MLB luxury tax.
Keith Law: The MLBPA – I think this is true of the NFL too – has long positioned itself as a union apart from others, and it’s easy to see why since they are arguing over a different magnitude of pay than just about every other union. The principles at stake are the same, however, and they’ve relinquished the most obvious source of public support for their efforts as a result.

JD: Kristian Robinson in Dbacks system – anyone being hyped more right now from someone that was not close to top 100 last year?
Keith Law: Wasn’t he my sleeper for them last year? He’s a guy for sure. I love Chisholm, who’s almost certainly going to be on my top 100, but I know scouts who think Robinson will be better.

Erik: Is Black Panther still in the top 10 of English language films for you in 2018 (said it in your review)
Keith Law: It is 14th right now, but four films ahead of it are not in English, so yes.

RSF: Do you worry about the plastic bags used for sous vide?
Keith Law: No because there is no reason to.

James: Any concerns that Tatis Jr makes it to the majors and is limited by contact problems a la Moncada?
Keith Law: No. Different players, different swings.

Chris B.: Chargers were dropped against Reuben Foster, who was roundly demonized two months ago based on accusations. I’m not sure if you commented on Foster, but I know you typically do not wait for the justice process to play out before castigating those accused of domestic violence. Does Foster’s case (or others where the accuser is lying) give you any pause?
Keith Law: I don’t know who that is, but I know cases where the accuser is lying – and, by the way, charges being dropped don’t mean the accuser lied – are quite rare. You are guilty of base rate neglect here.

Buck: Does David Dahl still have the upside he appeared to have as a prospect? Possible All Star if he can just stay healthy?
Keith Law: Yes.

Bob: Aledyms Diaz a cheaper Marwin for Houston?
Keith Law: Cheaper but not as good.

Archie: Would raising the strike zone and going back to a “normal” ball start to get us back to where balls are being put into play, but not always ending up in the seats when they are?
Keith Law: I have some hope it would.

Cash: Who is the nicest mlb player you have ever met?
Keith Law: Tough call – I’ve liked most of the players I’ve interacted with over the years. Archie Bradley comes to mind though. He certainly was the most enthusiastic I’ve ever met.

AZ: Favorite restaurant in Scottsdale?
Keith Law: FnB.

Rich: Is bo bichette a 2b long term?
Keith Law: That is my guess.

Bob: Are you ready to place some NFL playoff parlays at Stanley’s? I’m happy to buy you a beer and show you the ropes (on how to donate your money to the state of DE).
Keith Law: Are they taking bets there now too? good lord.
Keith Law: I don’t gamble, BTW, and I get the sense you don’t either.

Vinny : How do you feel about David Robertson to the Phillies?
Keith Law: Sure.

Adam: Could Acuna be the 2nd best player in MLB this year?
Keith Law: I’ll say that’s unlikely.

Grant: Do you think Joe Ross can be healthy enough to start?
Keith Law: I think he can be very good if healthy, but I know little more about players’ health than the public does (and if I know anything more I usually can’t share it).

Alex: Why do you think the Yankees are spending only 29% of their overall revenue on their roster, the lowest in baseball? Hal clearly wants to drive in more profit, right?
Keith Law: They’re treating the luxury tax threshold like a hard cap, which does what the league wants it to do but kills the union. I’m not disappointed, because I don’t want to see the Yankees simply field a $300 million team, but the idea of team owners pocketing all that cash doesn’t sit well with me either since the players are the product.

Chris: Can Evan White be the starting 1b for the mariners in 2019?
Keith Law: In 2020, yes.

Ryan: I believe you said you started reading Harry Potter to you hold at age 7. I’d like to do he same, do you feel that was a good age for that?
Keith Law: To my daughter? Yes, and yes, it was.

Amy: Random US city that surprised you as a fun travel destination?
Keith Law: Omaha was great for food and I found a cool board game cafe. Louisville is probably my favorite mid-sized city for food + drink + stuff to do.

Jack: Is it possible that the Mets wanted to move on from Kelenic due to non-baseball issues that you either wouldn’t know about or aren’t willing to share?
Keith Law: No. That’s kind of a bullshit question.

JP: Is legalized gambling good, bad, or neutral for MLB?
Keith Law: Gambling is bad for society in general, but it’s going to happen regardless, so it’s better to have it legal and somewhat regulated (and taxed!) than the alternative.

Amy: Have you ever done Cabo food recs?
Keith Law: I’ve never been to Mexico.

waks: hey john who’s a loyal democrat, lemme guess, you’re a middle-aged white guy
Keith Law: Anyone catch that GOP strategist who tweeted about her 87-year-old dad who wouldn’t vote for Elizabeth Warren in 2020? That’s some real valuable advice for Democrats: definitely tailor your candidate to the portion of the electorate with serious misogyny issues and a 50/50 shot of dying before the election.

Rob: Bought sous vide off your rec and I love it. Now looking into espresso, and I read some of your old posts. Any entry rec that won’t put me over $300?
Keith Law: Gaggia has some low-end models in the $220 range that are okay, not quite real espresso but closer than anything else in the price range.

KC: Do you see Gohara having a rebound year?
Keith Law: If healthy, he has real starter stuff and/or huge bullpen upside.

Jeff: Have you gotten past level 12 playing The Mind?
Keith Law: Nope. BTW, his Kennerspiel-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg is now out in the US, and it’s really fun, nowhere near as complicated as the title or the award would imply. It’s a simple push-your-luck game where you draw chips from your bag, but as the game progresses you get to add better chips to improve your odds.

Alec : Would you vote for Nikki Haley in a general election?
Keith Law: No, because of her policy positions and associations with Trump.

Tobias: Did Jack Flaherty just have his best season? The guy was a blast to watch, but it felt like the numbers were a little ahead of the stuff. Is he more of a #3 than a #1?
Keith Law: I think he can pitch like that for a while due to his plus-plus command.

JP: Is Durbin Feltman a potential high-leverage reliever in 2019?
Keith Law: Yes.

DC Deac: Read your HOF article and agree completely. I am a fan of WAR and appreciate it but as a writer do you ever consider not leaning on WAR as much because of your audience? I certainly don’t think it should be an end all be all (and I know you don’t) but do you ever worry readers will take that away from an article like that?
Keith Law: It’s a good starting point but you seem to understand my position on it perfectly. What I have found is that if I mention WAR there will be readers who focus on nothing else.

Kool Karl: Have you seen Holmes and Watson or intend to see it? I saw it over the holidays and thought it was a great film with some clever political overtones. I would love to get your opinion.
Keith Law: God no.

Bench : Griffin Canning? ace? Or potential Andrew Miller-ish type guy
Keith Law: If healthy, #2 starter. Strange that everyone was ready to flunk him on draft day but he’s been totally healthy in pro ball for 19 months.

mike sixel: Will Rooker cut his strikeouts enough to be a good MLB player someday? What position do you think he might play, if so? thanks.
Keith Law: 1B most likely, and yes. I think average regular.

Ben: Would you have voted for Edmonds if he were still on the ballot?
Keith Law: Yes.

Rick Sanchez: Do you think Hiura will be a consistent 20+ homer guy in the majors? There has been a pattern of blue chip prospects with elite hitting tools hitting for increased power once they reach the majors (likely attributed to the ball); e.g., Gleyber Torres, Lindor, Betts, etc.
Keith Law: With the current ball, sure. With a regular ball, I would say no.

Dan: Does Jeter Downs strike you as the kind of hitter that LA can convert into the next version of Turner/Muncy/C. Taylor? Possible 2B option for 2020? Thanks!
Keith Law: I have heard nothing but praise for the hit tool and the makeup. He’s definitely a 2b in the long run, not sure if he has that weird power upside you’re talking about, even with the LAD launch angle obsession.

Mike : My biggest worry about Elizabeth Warren as a Democrat isn’t even Elizabeth Warren, it’s that she’ll give Trump an easy target with which to play to his low info voting base and take advantage of the way the electoral college is stacked against high info areas in the first place.
Keith Law: That would be my worry as well, but at the same time, I’d rather see all of the interested, qualified candidates enter the race, and maybe then sort them out.

Andrew: Higher % between Rivera or Jeter for the HoF?
Keith Law: I think both get 99%, with a few omissions.

Chris P: Have you seen A Private War? I thought it was excellent and Pike really stood out in her role…but I feel like nobody knows about it.
Keith Law: Yes, loved it, she deserves a nomination. It is in my top 20. Review here.

Brian: Gavin Lux and Nolan Jones, likely top 100 guys?
Keith Law: Yes, definitely.
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. Thank you all for the questions and for reading. I’ll try to keep these going all month, although it’s possible I’ll have to skip one while working on the prospect rankings. More details on the new book coming soon. Take care.

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→ January 3, 2019
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Sorry to Bother You.

Sorry to Bother You (now streaming on Hulu), Boots Riley’s debut as director and writer, is a total mess of a film. It’s not a mess in the sense of, say, The Room, which is legendary for its badness, but in the sense that Riley tried to do way too much in a single 110-minute picture, packing in enough thematic material for three movies, attempting to shock the audience at least one time too often, and, when the film starts to go off the rails in the final third, steering hard into the skid when he needed to correct his course. The result is a film with high-concept ambitions that can’t achieve any of them.

Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) stars as Cassius “Cash” Green, an unemployed Oakland resident who lives in his uncle’s garage and lands a very low-end job with a telemarketing firm, RegalView, at the very beginning of the film. After a bunch of prologue that doesn’t entirely matter, he learns from an older colleague (Danny Glover) that he’ll sell more stuff if he uses his “white voice,” which Cash eventually finds almost by accident (voiced by David Cross). He becomes a star, is promoted to a “power caller,” and goes upstairs to the VIP level at the telemarketing firm, where he finds himself selling some ethically dubious products services. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson, whose earrings are the film’s best running gag) is a progressive artist and part-time agitator who works with a leftist-anarchist group The Left Eye to protest a new company, WorryFree, that promises workers employment, housing, and food for life if they agree to work for the company for life without any salary. And Cash’s colleague Squeeze (Steven Yeun, who had a pretty good 2018 for himself) is actually a union organizer who leads work actions at RegalView. There’s more, but you’re probably getting the idea by now.

Riley is trying to take out a bunch of rabbits with a machine gun here, with entirely predictable results. Unfettered capitalism might be his main target, but he’s also hitting materialism, conscious and subconscious racism, cultural appropriation, worker exploitation, police brutality, police militarization, the dumbing down of American culture, genetic engineering, and a lot more. No film could adequately address that many disparate issues in two hours without turning into a scattershot mess; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil tried to hit fewer than half as many concepts, and was still incomprehensible to large portions of the audience.

One of the keys to effective satire is focus – the satirist picks one target, maybe two at most, and then drills deeply enough to take something essential to that target and use that facet against it. Riley goes the other way here, skimming off the top, and thus relying on superficial depictions of his targets to lampoon them by simply making them more ridiculous. The “white voice” gimmick is the best deployment of this technique, and to Riley’s credit, he doesn’t overuse it – only four characters get white voices at all, and only two get them for more than one scene, while it becomes unremarkable for Cash and his boss upstairs, Mr. _____, after a few conversations. That sort of restraint is lacking elsewhere in the film; the most popular show in the alternate universe of Sorry to Bother You, a game show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!,” appears repeatedly without ever saying anything that wasn’t apparent the first time Cash and Squeeze watch it on TV at a bar after work.

The film also has one of the worst endings of any movie I’ve seen from 2018; The Wife‘s was worse, since it was the most predictable, and First Reformed‘s was more of a copout, whereas Riley just decides to go full batshit with his conclusion here, introducing a new plot element in the final third of the movie and making it essential to the resolution. (He also loses five points for casting Armie Hammer, who might know his claret from his Beaujolais but is not and will probably never be a good actor, as the CEO of WorryFree.) Riley doesn’t just go over the top in his conclusion – he pole-vaults over the top and clears it by a country mile. The problem with that approach is eventually you have to hit the ground.

I’d rather have a film with too many ideas than a film with none, and Riley has a lot to say here with enough cleverness that I’m still interested in whatever he’s doing next, even though Sorry to Bother You just doesn’t work. The bravura that Riley brings here does not serve him or the film well, and the best of the ideas – runaway capitalism and the economic inequalities it creates – suffers as a result. If Riley gets an editor, or even a voice over his shoulder encouraging him to pull back on the throttle, his vision could still lead to something brilliant down the road. This just wasn’t it.

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→ January 2, 2019
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Custody.

Custody (Jusqu’à la garde, on amazon and iTunes) is a full-length sequel to the Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything, both written and directed by Xavier Legrand and starring the same actors in three of the four main roles. This film, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and the Louis Delluc Prize last year, follows the same family from the custody hearing that opens the film through the father’s attempts to control his estranged wife through their twelve-year-old son, building in intensity through its refusal to acquiesce to the commercial impulse toward big, dramatic moments.

The opening scene has Miriam (Léa Drucker) and Antoine (Denis Ménochet), with their lawyers, in a session where each side argues for their desired custody arrangements, which form the only real disagreement between them. Miriam accuses Antoine of abusing her, and has repeatedly changed phone numbers and often hidden her location to protect herself from him. Their daughter, Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux), is about to turn 18, and wants nothing to do with her father. Julien (Thomas Gioria), their son, also wants no contact with his father, but the judge who hears their arguments grants Antoine the visitation rights he wants – apparently dismissing Miriam’s claims of abuse for lack of ‘proof’ – which gives the father the wedge he needs to insinuate himself into Miriam’s life.

The film is spare, just 93 minutes, and even at that length there is little action and a very simple plot, reminiscent in several ways of 2017’s Loveless. Antoine is manipulative and controlling, and his interest in Julien seems limited to using the boy as a way to maintain contact with Miriam and to remain aware of her whereabouts and actions. Gioria is especially strong as a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t want contact with his father, but also fears him and has the innate respect children have for authority figures, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re also the victims of those same adults. Some of Custody‘s strongest scenes involve Julien and Antoine doing very little, often barely speaking to each other, or Antoine demanding something only to have Julien try his hardest to avoid answering, and they’re excruciating because Legrand lets these interactions play out in something very close to real time. When Antoine demands that Julien show him their new apartment, Legrand puts us in the car the whole time as Julien tries to direct his father, left, right, straight ahead, for twice as long as you’d expect, giving more time for the anticipation of an eventual explosion to build up.

You don’t need to see the prior film to follow Custody, although it will color your view of the characters in the first few scenes; without that prologue, you can more easily see the judge’s point of view that she must figure out “which of (the parents) is the bigger liar.” It doesn’t take much time to see Antoine’s character come through – first the need to control his wife and children, then his temper and his manipulative nature, and eventually the violence – and at that point anyone watching will realize how badly the judge screwed up, and, in what I assume is Legrand’s point, how poorly the French custody process serves abuse victims if there isn’t an actual crime on record already.

Ménochet also delivers a tremendous performance here even before Antoine’s violent side starts to surface – I’d argue that the performance is better until then, because once it becomes physical, there’s less for the actor to do with the role. Legrand didn’t write this character as a sympathetic one, but also avoided completely dehumanizing the man, so that the scenes with Antoine and Julien can still work as drama – you can understand the son still seeing this man as his father, someone who says he loves him, and an authority figure, rather than just a monster. An adult would see through Antoine, but his own child will always have that inner conflict, and giving the father enough depth gives the audience Julien’s lenses to see him.

Custody has one of the best conclusions of any film I’ve seen from 2018, although it could trigger anyone sensitive to scenes of domestic violence. Given what has come before, it might be the only authentic climax to the story, and then Legrand had his choice of resolutions from that inflection point. By choosing to tell this story slowly, showing detail where most films would speed up to the next moment of action, Legrand has made a film that feels distinctly non-commercial, but that also should evoke more genuine emotions in the audience until that final scene – and by that point, the direction and the acting have earned a big payoff. It’s one of the best films of the year, probably borderline top ten for me right now, and deserves a wider audience here than it’s gotten.

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→ January 1, 2019
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If Beale Street Could Talk.

If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a film that is very of the moment, for its theme and its source material. James Baldwin is himself having a renaissance after the acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro appeared in 2016 and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly alluded to Baldwin’s works, such as Fire. Even though the novel on which Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was written over 40 years ago, it revolves around a very current theme of racial injustice and police misconduct towards African-American men. It succeeds without sermonizing by wrapping those huge themes in a very sweet, straightforward love story between two young black people played by rising stars.

Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James of Homecoming) and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne, making her film debut) are childhood friends who’ve fallen in love in 1970s New York City, but whose relationship faces many obstacles, including the most obvious one – a society that views them as second-class citizens because they’re black. As the film opens, we learn that Tish, just 19, is pregnant, and that Fonny is behind bars, accused of a rape that he didn’t commit, put there by a vengeful white cop. Jenkins alternates scenes of the present day, where Tish and her family work to try to clear Fonny’s name, with long, languid scenes of their nascent romance, mostly from Tish’s point of view as she also learns more about who Fonny has become as an adult and the challenges a young black man faces, even in a multicultural place like New York.

The story hits a wall when Tish’s mom, played by Regina King, travels to Puerto Rico to try to convince the victim to revoke her identification of Fonnie as the rapist. The scenes that follow are important to the plot, but the lyrical mood Jenkins has set hits an abrupt stop the moment she steps on the island, and it takes the rest of the movie, until the concluding scene, to get that atmosphere back. There’s also an utterly corny scene where Dave Franco, dressed as an observant Jew named Levy, delivers a monologue to Fonnie and Tish to explain why he might be the one landlord in the whole city willing to rent an apartment to a young black couple. The soliloquy is hackneyed, right down to the whole “I don’t care what color you are, black, white, purple” line that could be borrowed from any of a thousand films where a white character tries to explain how he doesn’t see color.

King has been listed as a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Beale Street, but I don’t think she’s in this film enough to have that sort of impact. She’d slip in under the Judi Dench Exemption, I suppose, but King isn’t the Queen, and her character is actually not that well-developed. There’s nothing missing from King’s performance, but the script just doesn’t demand enough of her. James and Layne are both outstanding, and Bryan Tyree Henry, who is having a year himself, is strong again, this time as a friend of Fonny’s who was just paroled after serving two years for a crime he didn’t commit, but to which he pled guilty rather than face a more serious charge for marijuana possession. (This remains a major reason African-American men are incarcerated today, but first appeared as a weapon of the state, often with the support of leaders of black communities, in the 1960s and 1970s. Locking Up Our Own, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, documents this trend and its effects on the African-American population.)

Jenkins made several smart decisions that power Beale Street past its flaws and made it one of my top ten movies of 2018, including the choice to retain some of Baldwin’s original prose, often having Tish use it as narration; and the way he maintains much of that glowing atmosphere even into some of the scenes around Fonny’s incarceration and the efforts to clear him. Keeping that mood into early conversations that Tish and Fonny have through glass while he’s in prison makes the scene where he loses control of himself more visceral, and the early scene that you’ve likely seen in the trailer, where the two families come into conflict because Fonny’s mother blames Tish for leading her son into sin, starts out with the same atmosphere only to dissolve as the rancor in the room overtakes it. Between this and Moonlight, Jenkins has made his style very clear – he’s in no rush, often letting scenes breathe longer than any other contemporary director I can name, and when he does take the wheel, such as for close-up shots of specific characters’ faces, you’ll be aware of the transition.

If Beale Street Could Talk seems destined to earn a slew of nominations at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and lose just about all of them; its best chance, aside from King as Best Supporting Actress, might be in Best Adapted Screenplay, where it will be up against A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman, although I’d vote for this over both of those. If any film has a chance to upset A Star is Born for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, this would be it. It is a wonderful film, so kind to its two main characters but with a story that will make you seethe by its end, worth seeking out if Annapurna gives it a wider release beyond just the 65 screens it was on this past weekend.

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→ December 31, 2018
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Top ten movies of 2018.

I’ve seen everything I think would likely make this top ten list other than several foreign titles, including Cold War and Capernaum, although I’ll still continue watching 2018 releases for a few more months as they hit theaters or streaming. I’ve seen 40 movies that count as 2018 theatrical releases, not counting the HBO movie The Tale, which would have made my top ten but isn’t eligible for awards because it went straight to television after the network purchased it at Sundance.

With those caveats in place, here’s my top ten as of this morning, and it still could change as I continue to see more 2018 films this winter. Links on the films’ titles go to my reviews.

10. The Endless. A thriller, or perhaps a psychological horror movie, that garnered positive reviews with a modest release, The Endless follows two brothers who, having escaped a cult where they grew up, revisit the compound to try to find some closure, only to discover that a mysterious presence has kept their old cultmates from aging and seems to prevent anyone from leaving.

9. First Man. Considered something of a box-office flop, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land goes in a completely different direction, telling the quiet, almost painfully restrained story of Neil Armstrong, from the death of his young daughter to cancer to his landing on the moon. Ryan Gosling and Clare Foy are excellent as the two leads, although the emphasis on accuracy in depicting space flight made some scenes very hard for me to watch.

8. Isle of Dogs. This should win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, although I fear the silly Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will win (I admit Spider-ham is pretty funny, though) instead. Wes Anderson’s second animated film, his first from an original story, is brilliant, emotional in the right ways, often funny, and extremely well-voiced by a cast of Wes usuals along with the welcome addition of Bryan Cranston.

7. The Favourite. Yorgis Lanthimos’ follow-up to the The Lobster is a bawdy, lowbrow comedy in nice clothes, and it’s hilarious, thanks to the combined efforts of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, all three of whom deserve awards consideration. The story itself isn’t new – it’s a power struggle combined with a bizarre love triangle – but the dialogue sparkles and the three stars, aided by a strong supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult, all slay in their respective roles.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk. A lovely, languid adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Beale Street stars Stephan James (of Homecoming) and Kiki Layne as young lovers who find they’re expecting just as he’s headed to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

5. You Were Never Really Here. A taut modern noir thriller, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a damaged private eye who rescues kidnapped girls and ends up caught in a case that threatens his safety and his sanity. Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, her first feature since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, clocks in at a spare 90 minutes, leaving no slack in the tension.

4. Beast. Driven by a star turn by relative newcomer Jessie Buckley, Beast follows a young woman in her late 20s who falls for the local outcast, who is himself a potential suspect in the murders of three other teenaged girls in their small town. The contrast between the idyllic setting and the darkness throughout the plot further drives the viewer’s sense of unease at every turn.

3. Shoplifters. My top three films are all foreign films, which is purely coincidental, and all made the Academy Award’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars. Japan’s entry is a simple, intimate portrait of a makeshift family of grifters who take in a neglected four-year-old girl they find playing outside in the cold in their tenement. Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda took hold the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which has a huge heart and explores the essentially human need for the connections and security of family through a group of well-rounded characters.

2. Roma. Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project for Netflix lived up to the lofty expectations set for it. Based on his own childhood in Mexico City, including the life of his nanny/housekeeper Cleo, Roma is told from her perspective, as she gets pregnant by a man who abandons her and sees the marriage of her employers crumble, all amidst the tumult of protest-torn Mexico in the early 1970s. The story can be a shade slow, and Cleo is the only real character of depth, but the cinematography is the best of the year – maybe in several years – and the film seems set to win awards for its sound as well.

1. Burning. Adapted from a scant Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning,” this Korean-language film creates an air of uncertainty from the start, and its three main characters remain unknowable to the dramatic conclusion. Lee Jong-su meets a girl, Shin Hae-mi, who says she knew him in grade school, and after a few days he’s clearly in love with her, only to have her go to Africa on a trip and ask him to watch her cat for her. When she comes back, she’s with a suave, wealthy guy, Ben, who might be her new boyfriend, and Jong-su can’t figure out what to do – or what exactly Ben does for his strange hobby. It’s a hypnotic slow burner anchored by one of the year’s best performances from Steven Yeun as Ben.

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→ December 30, 2018
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Minding the Gap.

As much as the awards-season conversation has been dominated by Netflix (for Roma) and amazon (for several TV series, including the very good Homecoming), Hulu has quietly had a banner year as well by moving into documentaries, with two of its properties making the shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. One of them, Minding the Gap, seems like a lock for a nomination given its universal acclaim and the timeliness of its subject, exploring the lives of three young men in Rockford, Illinois, all skateboarders and all products of traumatic childhoods.

Bing Liu is the filmmaker and one of the three subjects, having begun filming his friends as they skateboarded around Rockford as preteens and continued it in his early 20s (Liu is 24 now) with both interview footage and scenes from their daily lives. The two other main subjects are Zack Milligan, a handsome, volatile kid of 21 or 22 who now has a son with his 18-year-old girlfriend Nina (also a product of a violent home); and Keire Johnson, an African-American kid who can pile systemic and tacit racism on top of the challenges he already faced from a traumatic upbringing. The three men all respond to the challenges of their lives in different ways, notably Zack, who has become a physically and emotionally abusive partner to Nina and even tries to manipulate their depictions on camera by playing an audio recording of Nina screaming at him without explaining that it was preceded by him physically assaulting her.

As the story progresses, the details of the family lives of all four of these young adults become clear – three grew up in physically abusive environments; Keire lost his father at a young age, while Bing only saw his father three times since age 5. Zack’s childhood is the most opaque, even though he really never shuts up while he’s on camera, and is blessed or cursed with good looks (he reminds me of the ’90s actor Jeremy London) and a self-confidence that convinces him he’s smarter than he really is, which becomes very apparent in a soliloquy later in the film where he justifies his own bad choices by calling people who choose a predictable family life as ‘weak.’ He’s damaged, as all four of the principals (including Nina) are, but he’s also doing the least to cope with it, self-medicating, lashing out physically and emotionally, and stringing Nina along until she finally takes him to court for child support.

The appeal of Minding the Gap is how raw it is, including the footage Liu shot ten years earlier, as well his decision to insert his own story into a narrative that also includes other people. Documentaries seem to follow the either/or path: it’s about your own story (Strong Island) or it’s about someone else’s, but not both. Liu’s history of abuse comes out later in the film, but the arc of his life, including his use of skateboarding as an escape from a bad home situation, dovetails perfectly with those of his friends. And while Liu is occasionally heard interviewing subjects, he’s as unobtrusive in that role as he could be.

Where the film falters is around the three men themselves. Keire and Bing are compelling and sympathetic, but also both reserved by nature, and there’s often a feeling that they’re not revealing as much to the camera as the audience might need to hear from them – especially Keire, who has a mischievous smile he puts on every time he’s lost in thought, even if the thought is unpleasant. Zack, meanwhile, comes off as a real asshole – granted, one with trauma in his own past, someone who probably needs real treatment for PTSD and other mental health issues, but his treatment of Nina and general disregard for others around him is hard to accept even with Bing essentially vouching for his buddy by including his story. He also seems to have a knack for finding women he can manipulate, which comes off particularly poorly as Bing gets Nina’s back story of a horrendous childhood and lack of any kind of family structure until her aunt and uncle take her into their house when she’s 21 and has a 3-year-old in tow.

I personally found the domestic scenes between Zack and Nina excruciating to watch because he is just awful – awful to her, and awful in the way a child trying to act like an adult can be awful. There’s a sense here that Liu is still finding his voice as a documentarian, that he had great material and stumbled on a tremendous subject, but has to learn more about assembling what he collects into a coherent narrative or series of them. Minding the Gap has garnered incredible acclaim to date, with 62 positive reviews for a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes, and the Best Documentary Feature award may come down to this versus Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but I didn’t see it in quite that light. It’s a strong debut that might be the harbinger of a great career for Liu, but it’s also flawed and didn’t do enough to grab and hold my attention throughout its tapestry of three stories.

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→ December 29, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 12/29/18.

I’ve had several ESPN+ pieces in the last two weeks, including my Hall of Fame ballot and explanation, my analyses of the Jurickson Profar trade and that huge Reds-Dodgers trade, and a post that covered the Michael Brantley and Wilson Ramos signings. I held a Klawchat here on the 20th.

On the board game front, my year-end articles went up two weeks ago – my top ten games of 2018 for Paste and my best games by category for Vulture.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2018 and top 18 albums of 2018 that same week.

My free email newsletter will resume next week. Join the five thousand other satisfied customers who’ve already signed up for occasional goodness.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first, as always: Marc Randazza, a lawyer who represents or has represented several major neo-Nazi and white nationalist figures in lawsuits, has a very long history of legal misconduct, much of it dating from his time working for gay porn producers, but has only received a slap on the wrist from the Nevada Bar for his misdeeds, detailed in this lengthy Huffington Post piece.
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→ December 28, 2018
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A Brief History of Seven Killings.

I’ve been getting reader recommendations for Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, for several years now, including a recommendation from our Twitter friend Old Hoss Radbourn. I’ve even owned the Kindle version of the book for more than a year, picking it up at some point when it was on sale for $2 or $3, but then procrastinating because the book was so long and seemed dense. Well, it is long, it is dense, and there were certainly parts of the reading experience where I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but it’s also very good, a transgressive work of postcolonial fiction that takes a strong political stance and weaves a compelling, violent narrative around the real-life assassination attempt against Bob Marley in 1976.

Marley isn’t named in James’ book, referred to throughout merely as the Singer, and his 1976 performance at the Smile Jamaica concert, an event held to try to stop violence between supporters of the two main political parties in Jamaica at the time, is central to the book. Two days before the concert, seven gunmen broke into Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road and shot him, his manager, his wife, and one other member of the Wailers, although somehow there were no fatalities. James works from historical accounts of the assault, including manager Don Taylor’s claims that he attended a street-justice ‘court’ and execution of several of the gunmen, and then populates the narrative with a cast of extraordinary characters – including some of the shooters, Jamaican drug dealers and underworld figures, a white Rolling Stone writer covering the Singer, a woman trying to escape the violence for the United States, and more – to build this sprawling novel where even the good guys are probably bad guys too.

Although the Singer – the shooting, the concert, just his mere existence at the heart of Jamaican culture in that moment – is central to the story, he’s not a character in the book. James shifts his narrative among multiple people, mostly men, and gives many of them individual stories that give their characters depth. (The BBC story on the Man Booker announcement says the book has “more than 75 characters,” but I think about a dozen come through as core characters with three-dimensional depictions, which is still a remarkable number.) James also writes each chapter in the language of the character speaking it, so much of the book is written in a Jamaican patois that slowed me down while reading, and I’d say it took me a hundred or more pages before I got used to the vastly different vocabulary and speech patterns, but that’s also part of the power of the book to evoke a setting and, for me at least, to emphasize that this is a culture and place that is very different from anything I’ve ever experienced and that I shouldn’t judge its characters or events through my lens.

A Brief History of Seven Killings does imply in the title that the book will be violent, but even that did not adequately prepare me for how violent it is – graphic, yes, but also seeming to revel in its own violence. There’s a scene of a massacre in a New York crack house which is pivotal to the plot of the final section of the book but also horrifying in how casual the murders are and how James chooses to describe them in such bloody fashion. There’s a similarly casual attitude on the part of most of the characters towards rape, and a weird mix of outright homophobia and acceptance of some gay or bisexual men among the gang members involved in the assassination attempt. The novel makes heavy use of many gay slurs, one of which is part of Jamaican patois, which I assume is a fair representation of how these characters might have talked but no less jarring to read.

The core themes of James’ novel, opening a window on a pivotal time in modern Jamaican history while exposing the CIA’s suspected role in fomenting this violence and even accelerating the cocaine trade, recalled those of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which did the same for the brutal rule of Dominican dictator Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo, who may have been assassinated by the CIA as well. While Diaz’s work made the oppressive Trujillo regime’s crimes against its people more personal, James’s novel puts the government’s misdeeds at a further remove – the authorities’ incompetence and selectively applied attention helped create these enclaves of wealth and poverty, and a lawless environment where local gangs would inevitably pour in to fill the void left by the absence of real government or the corruption of the local police. The infighting between the two main parties and the proxy war in the streets also created the opportunity for the most famous Jamaican in the world at the time, the Singer, to be simultaneously beloved by his people and marked for death by one faction vying for power. I’m at a disadvantage reading such novels, since I came into it with no knowledge of Jamaican postcolonial history and very little knowledge of the country’s culture, but reading James’ novel and then going online to read about events described in the book became a sort of superficial education on the subject.

Because James weaves multiple smaller plots around the central event of the assassination and its aftermath, there’s no single resolution to the novel, and many of the storylines fade out rather than reaching a clear conclusion. One particular death provides closure to other characters, while other events seem to end one phase of Jamaican political culture only to usher in a new one. It all adds to the feeling that James’ novel is the equivalent of a good Tarantino film – it’s hyper-realistic, over the top with violence, with a wide cast of characters, darkly funny at times but also tackling serious themes amidst the shock and gore. It’s not for everyone – one of the Booker committee members said it wasn’t a book you’d give to your mother to read – but it’s a great exemplar of why the Booker’s decision to open the prize up to writers from other countries was a good one.

Next up: Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield.

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→ December 27, 2018
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Zama.

Zama, available on amazon Prime, is the weirdest movie I’ve seen this year. Originally released in Argentina in 2017 and submitted by that country for this past year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s based on a 1956 novel and plays out like a Kafkaesque fever dream in colonial South America, where lives are cheap and promises worthless. It’s violent and full of confusion, to the point that it’s unclear whether any of what we’re seeing is real, or whether the main character himself is losing his mind. I haven’t read the novel, which wasn’t translated into English until 2016, but any sort of guidebook would have helped me navigate this weirdness, which had me befuddled from the opening scene and never did much to set me on track.

Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a local functionary in Spanish South America, in the town that is now Ascúncion, Paraguay, who has been waiting some time for a transfer order to reunite him with his wife and child. His title, corregidor, was unique to the Spanish colonial system and referred to the top official in a subdivision of the country’s massive holdings in the Americas, dating back to Castile in the Middle Ages, and they were typically quite powerful because they worked at such great distances from their superiors. Zama, however, always answers to a governor in this film, first one and then his replacement, and the transfer is forever delayed or even forgotten by the men with the power to put them into action. He continues to rule over petty matters of the locals but becomes increasingly erratic, at one point promising two Spanish landowners thirty Native Americans as slaves, and eventually gives up hope of a transfer and joins a vigilante party searching for the bandit Vicuña Porto, who was supposedly killed (twice, I think) earlier in the film but remains a threat to trade and travel between cities.

Zama starts the film as a sort of would-be lothario, obsessed with the lady Luciana (Lola Dueñas, who is made up and dressed to look utterly ridiculous), and acting as the protector of some young women in his household of unknown purpose. He becomes more disheveled as the film progresses, and the dialogue starts to break down and become increasingly disjointed, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I had missed bits of it or if the characters were simply speaking past each other. Zama brings up the letter multiple times in conversation at one point, only to have the governor seem to completely forget what he was talking about. There’s also a llama in the governor’s office at one point, never explained and never remarked upon by any characters, who seem to regard it as just another llama in the office (reminiscent of Elizabeth Moss’ roommate in The Square). I assume it was partly a play on Vicuña Porto’s name – a vicuña is a South American camel related to llamas – and thus an acknowledgement that he always exists under their noses and they’re unable or unwilling to defeat him.

Zama felt like an experimental novel brought to the screen but losing too much in translation. The gruesome finale feels absurd and metaphorical, but a scene like that requires a greater foundation to provide it with sufficient impact beyond mere revulsion. The extra descriptive text in that sort of book can make it comprehensible, but here I couldn’t get much further than understanding that Diego de Zama was a man trapped in a remote place in circumstances he couldn’t control, to the point that it may have caused him to lose his sanity. And that is a story I’ve seen before.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Amsterdam.

I’ve never met the novelist Ian McEwan, but after reading two of his books and seeing a film adaptation of a third, I think his worldview is depressingly misanthropic. Amsterdam, a slim novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 1998, plays out like a dark comedy without the comic elements, taking a mutual euthanasia pact between two friends and using it as a core plot device with the most obvious possible ending.

Clive and Vernon connect at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman with whom they’d both previously had affairs and who has just died of some sort of progressive neurological disease, where they form this pact, saying if either sees the other heading for the same sort of miserable, undignified death, they’ll speed the process by going to Amsterdam where such things had just become legal. While at the funeral they also run into another of Molly’s former lovers, the ambitious politician Julian Garmony, then British Foreign Secretary with eyes on the top prize.

Vernon, an editor of a newspaper coping with falling readership, ends up privy to compromising photographs of Julian that could ruin the latter’s career, and after much debate within the office decides to publish them – over moral objections from Clive. Meanwhile, Clive, a renowned composer working on a piece for the government celebration of the upcoming millennium, is experiencing a bit of writer’s block and goes on a long walk in northwest England’s hilly Lake District, where he comes upon a man fighting with a woman, but chooses not to intervene because doing so might cost him the melody he’s crafting in his head. When he later explains this to Vernon, the latter is incensed at Clive’s selfishness and points out just how serious the consequences might have been. These two subplots turn the friends into mortal enemies, and, between that and the book’s title, you can probably see where we’re headed.

The Guardian‘s review at the time says the book has “a distinct whiff of Evelyn Waugh” in both style and subject, but I’d say that’s half right. Waugh’s social satires were often bitingly funny, both in character and in plot. If this reminds one of any of Waugh’s novels, it’s the questionably unfunny A Handful of Dust, where one major character ends up with one of the most unfortunate endings (short of death) in literary history. Amsterdam is devoid of humor; McEwan scorns his characters, and appears to loathe the Netherlands’ lax policy on euthanasia, but the combination of the two means two people we are supposed to hate drive each other to a shared ignominious end. Aside from my reaction that the conclusion probably wasn’t realistic, I was barely moved to shrug my shoulders. Even Tony Last got more of a rise out of me than that.

I didn’t care for Atonement, where McEwan builds a narrative around what I felt was a totally unrealistic event and then pulls the entire rug out from under readers; I did like this year’s film adaptation of On Chesil Beach, but the worldview within is still decidedly pessimistic, with both works arguing, in essence, that we can’t atone for or even recover from past mistakes. Maybe that’s true but it makes for miserable reading.

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