Uncategorized — Page 105

→ June 14, 2018
→ By keith

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Catherynne Valente first published her young adult novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making online, in installments; the book was a huge success online, winning the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction/fantasy, given by the Science Fiction Writers’ Association, and is still the only self-published novel to do so. It’s now the first novel in the five-book Fairyland series, which covers the adventures of a young girl named September who lives in Omaha and is visited one day by the Green Wind, who whisks her off to the parallel world known as Fairyland. Hilarity and peril ensue, as they would. I bought it for my daughter to read, but last month decided to give it a whirl myself, and it is witty, sweet, and written at a very high level for YA literature.

September is your typical YA fantasy heroine, a precocious child whose life is boring (to her) and whose family isn’t perfect (her father is away at war, her mother works long hours at an airplane manufacturing plant), so she is the ideal target for a being from Fairyland to come and rescue for a series of adventures – although Valente has a knack for making these adventures go sideways often enough that they’re not totally predictable. September then meets a series of eccentric characters from Fairyland after the Green Wind, including a wyvern who’s convinced his father was a library, a young ifrit named Saturday, a conjured servant made of soap, a sentient paper lantern, and plenty of others, leading up to the Marquess, a young girl who has become the evil queen of Fairyland after the death of the benevolent queen who preceded her. September ends up on a series of quests that generally don’t end well for her but instead lead her on a crooked path toward an eventual confrontation with the Marquess and a revelation about the true connection between Fairyland and our human plane.

Valente’s imagination is impressive, with crazy characters and amusing plot twists, but she writes in a high style that recalls 19th and 20th century British literature, from Lewis Carroll to P.G. Wodehouse, similar to the writing of Susanna Clarke but just a half-grade lower in difficulty. Reading it as an adult (by age, at least), I never felt that the prose was written for children or in any way condescending to the reader through simpler vocabulary or syntax. I’m unfamiliar with Valente’s other work – she’s a prolific author – but if this isn’t a near approximation of her natural voice, I’d be shocked. It’s perfectly calibrated to appropriately challenge a young reader without turning her off, and to appeal to an adult reader without seeming trivial or dumb.

There’s also quite a bit of wordplay within Fairyland, perhaps not quite as much as you’ll find in The Phantom Tollbooth or in the Harry Potter series, but a similar mix of straight-up puns and double meanings along with twisted loanwords from folklore and mythology. September meets a wairwulf, who is a wolf 27 days a month and a man the other three, and is married to two witches, one of whom gets the wolf days and the other the human days; the witches are named Hello and Goodbye, and the wairwulf Manythanks. There’s a quest for a spoon (alas, not the runcible variety), a dictum to avoid eating any food in Fairyland that quickly goes awry, an argument over the shape of the earth (“roughly trapezoidal, vaguely rhomboid, a bit of a tesseract”), and plenty of sly jokes about bureaucracy, pseudoscience, and air travel.

My daughter read this when she was 11 and both enjoyed it and said she had no real trouble with the prose; she read it on her Kindle, which, despite my affinity for dead-tree editions, does have the benefit of allowing you to click on a word and get an immediate definition. (And then you read a paper book and come across a word you don’t know and put your finger on the page and press and then look around and hope nobody saw you do that. Or so I hear.) Valente has hit that perfect sweet spot between writing for a young audience and keeping it smart enough to hold an adult’s attention. I ripped through the entire book in just a few hours while on a flight back from Europe last month, because I wanted something light for the long trip, but this was fun and sharp enough that I decided it was worth reviewing and recommending too.

Next up: I’m way behind on book reviews, but I’m currently reading Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which is just $3.55 for Kindle right now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, andre norton award, comic novels, fantasy, young adult literature

→ June 13, 2018
→ By keith

Compounded.

The board game Compounded takes its theme from the world of chemistry, asking players to gather five elements to assemble any of the sixteen compounds available at any given time on the table, while boosting players’ abilities to form and fill compounds as the game progresses. The core game play is pretty simple, although the rules are more detailed than they probably need to be, and there’s one rule I could probably have done completely without.

The elements that players will use to form their compounds are drawn at random from a bag, and no two elements appear with the same frequency – hydrogen is the most common, sulfur is the rarest. Compounds can be as simple as three elements, and can require up to eight. You can ‘claim’ one compound at a time, before you finish it, and can then place two elements anywhere on the tableau on a turn. Once you do finish a compound, you take the card, return the elements to the bag, earn three to seven points, and get to move up one of your four tracking tokens that affect how many elements you draw at the start of each turn (default is two), how many compounds you can claim at any given time, how many elements you can place on a turn, and how many elements you can store on your board (default is four). Some compounds also give you a bonus token or ongoing ability; for example, if you have three elements of any color, you can return them to the bag to take one element of your choice, but with the Pipette that ratio becomes 2:1 instead.

The game progresses until one player has scored at least 50 points – the scoring track is a separate board showing the periodic table, so you have to at least get to tin – or one player has reached the top of three of his four tracks, or the deck of compounds is exhausted. That can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in our experience, playing with three to five players. (It plays two with some rules variations.)

The one rule that I would gladly ditch is the lab fire, which doesn’t do much but add some randomness and a little ability to screw your opponents to the game. Some compounds have one or two tiny fire icons at the bottom of their cards, indicating that the compounds are flammable. The deck of compound cards has five Lab Fire cards in it, and when one appears, players must add one very tiny fire token to every compound on the table that has the icon on it. Once all flame icons on a compound have been filled, the compound explodes and is removed from the board, and all elements on it are scattered to adjacent compounds (at the discretion of the player who had claimed but not finished it). There are also a few volatile compounds in the deck that explode when they’re completed and have a similar effect on the tableau. Players can complete their fire extinguishers – two oxygen, one carbon and use them to remove one flame token from any compound, although I think it’s better to save it until the end of the game for 4 extra points. And you may earn a one-time use Bunsen burner token that you can use to light someone else’s compound on fire, which is just mean.

There’s more strategy required in Compounded that just figuring out which compounds you can easily finish; gaining the abilities to draw or place more elements each round is huge, and whichever player moves up the fastest on those tracks is going to have an advantage that will be hard for other players to catch. Getting those abilities does require some luck, however, as you have to draw the right elements to be able to complete the right compounds; we had one five-player game where one player never managed to finish a compound that would have allowed her to draw more than two elements at a time. There is a slight workaround – if you finish a compound with a graduated cylinder on it, you can then bump one track down a peg and another track up a peg, once per turn for the rest of the game – but it can lead to a serious imbalance if one player just gets the wrong draws from the bag.

I’m all for more science-themed games, and chemistry games seem to be especially scarce, so Compounded is a welcome entry to the field. I did find some of the rules a little fiddly, and the Lab Fire mechanic didn’t really work for me other than to add more maintenance and move through the compound deck a little faster. The core game play itself, trying to figure out how best to deploy the elements you’ve drawn, is the best part of Compounded, and you can certainly tweak the other rules to work with just that basic mechanic for a cleaner experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, boardgames, chemistry

→ June 11, 2018
→ By keith

The Tale.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, highly recommended, metoo, movies, tv

→ June 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.

You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.

My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.

And now, the links…

Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, florida, guns, kansas, links, mental health, muppets, south dakota, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

→ June 5, 2018
→ By keith

Klawchat 6/5/18.

Day one of the draft is in the books and day two has just begun. My thoughts on day one are now up for Insiders. You can also see my last mock for posterity’s sake; I had nine picks on the dot, and flipped Arizona’s two picks from 25 & 39.

Over at Paste my wrapup from PDXCon, where Paradox Interactive announced four new board games based on their popular video game titles, went up yesterday too.

Keith Law: It’s almost over now. Klawchat.

Adam: Thoughts on Greyson Jenista?
Keith Law: A reach at that spot for a player with serious position questions and poor offspeed recognition. He’s on my Big Board.

Chris: As a Giants fan, is my overall attitude of “meh” justified? While they got two players who will contribute (and Bart will likely contribute a lot), it just doesn’t feel like much upside considering they had the number two overall pick and a high second round pick.
Keith Law: It feels very safe, and they have taken four players so far who should contribute sooner rather than later, but you are right that they forewent upside in favor of probability and proximity.

K. Williams: What do you think of Konnor Pilkington? He looks like he has good size and he repeats his delivery well.
Keith Law: Velocity was down much of the spring, especially at this past weekend’s regional. Command guy at the back of a rotation in a best case scenario.

Gabe: In your write-up of Casas, you questioned his power. In other write ups I’ve seen him given as high as a 70 grade on his power. Are you questioning his potential for in-game power or did you get some really bad looks at him?
Keith Law: I don’t care what “other write ups” might say; I’ve seen Casas a few times and talked to plenty of scouts about him. To get him to 70 future power, someone is going to have to work with him on rotating more and getting more loft in his finish.

addoeh: I figure the undrafted high schoolers remaining in your top 100 probably won’t be drafted because of money. But what about the college players that still remain? Is the reason for them down to money? Is it injury concerns?
Keith Law: Could be medicals, yes, or some off-field/makeup thing I don’t know about.

Timothy: After day one which team(s) are most at the mercy of their pool money? Which ones have the most room to splurge?
Keith Law: I don’t track that, sorry.
Keith Law: BTW, college players who don’t get taken high may also be draft-eligible sophomores (Mulholland) or have otherwise told teams they want to finish their degrees.

El Perezoso: Texas has made another one of their high risk / high upside arms, Speas, a reliever / closer and he seems to have found “a little” command (if 20BB in 24IP can be considered “progress”). Thoughts on his potential as a high leverage bullpen arm?
Keith Law: You still have to throw strikes even to pitch in the sixth inning. He’s not close.

John: You commented yesterday that “cold weather bats” are hard to project, or something like that. How far south do you get where that is still a problem? Obviously the Sun Belt guys have an advantage. But is it still an issue in, say, Virginia? Jersey? Is there a clear line, or is it a sliding scale?
Keith Law: It’s a function of how many games those kids play each spring. The further north you go, the shorter the schedule, and the more games lost to weather.

Dan: Thanks for all your work on the draft Keith – I’m sure most people don’t realize how much time and effort you put into this. What are your thoughts concerning Madrigal staying at SS? If he can, would you have concerns over moving Anderson to CF/LF eventually?
Keith Law: Madrigal isn’t a SS now; he’s a 2b.

Tristan: Jays nab two high school teammates in their first three picks. Think an under-slot deal with the first one makes the second one signable? Do you see Kloffenstein as a worthwhile investment if the money is big?
Keith Law: I preferred other prep arms in that spot but I understand what they were trying to do.

Scott of Lincolnshire: KLAW! I know ~100% of 1st rounders will sign, but how many of these round 2/comp picks will sign? Wondering specifically if the Cubs can overpay for their 2nd round pick Davis.
Keith Law: Yes, you should assume they have all already agreed to terms. Now it’s just about passing their physicals.

Arnold: Pretty good job with your mock Keith. Who are you most surprised did not get selected on Day 1 of the MLB draft?
Keith Law: I had heard actual chatter about Wilcox going in the late first round and thought he’d be a pick somewhere before 40; maybe his price went up late. Floored Isbel didn’t go – that’s my favorite pick relative to its spot of all those Royals guys.

Ryan: Feltman 15 innings in the minors then to Boston?
Keith Law: Awfully optimistic there. How many college relievers have actually done that and not sucked?

Ben: Does Siani sign with Cincy?
Keith Law: Teams do not take players this high without deals in place. If you take a kid in the 4th round and he doesn’t sign, your draft pool is *fucked*.

Matt: More surprising – Murray at 9 or Stowers in the 50s?
Keith Law: Stowers was a real reach for me there. Maybe a money-saver.

Alan: The Cards grabbing Gorman at 19 seemed to be a surprise. Any idea why he fell that far?
Keith Law: Could be concerns about swing and miss.

JC: Tristan Beck, just taken, did not make your top 100 – all medical related (including the Stanford pitching problem) or stuff related as well?
Keith Law: Missed all of last spring with a back issue, stuff and results up and down this spring. Really didn’t miss many bats.

WarBiscuit: Any Auburn players/commits that could get drafted in Day 2 like Garrett Wade and Brendan Venter ?
Keith Law: Pretty sure Wade is going to school at this point.

Allan: How much do the Dodgers like pitchers coming off injuries ie Michael Grove?
Keith Law: Grove was up to 96 pre-surgery, but that may also be a below-slot deal to sign Ginn and maybe someone else later.

Dan: Did Blaine Knight slide to the O’s at 87 because of sign-ability concerns?
Keith Law: No, he doesn’t have a ton of leverage.

AGirlHasNoName: What is your opinion on the Cubs draft so far? Seem to be taking guys ahead of where you ranked them down the line.
Keith Law: Yeah, definitely surprised by several of these. Davis I liked, but a round after that, not a 7-figure guy.

Ben: Luis Robert assigned to Kannapolis, rather than W-S. Surprised at all?
Keith Law: I’m 90% certain that’s where I predicted he’d be assigned back in March.

Newt: How much harder was it to complete the final mock with the knowledge that you housed a three-legged predator with murder in its heart?
Keith Law: I live with this fear all the time.

Mike: Thoughts on Yanks taking two catchers with top 2 picks despite a young established catcher in Sanchez
Keith Law: Well catching is hardly Sanchez’s strong suit, and the two they took may both be better catchers in the end. Plus there is so much value in having good catching prospects.

HH: Cleveland has gone HS have the past two drafts, including multiple high picks of 17-year olds. Does that tell you anything about where they see their system, or am I overthinking this?
Keith Law: Tells me more that their draft model weighs age more heavily than other teams’ do.

Mat Ji: What I have read on Triston Casas indicates that he has an OK approach and a fair amount of raw power but has some holes in his swing. Assuming this is true, is this typically a fairly correctable issue?
Keith Law: That’s not what I’ve seen at all. I think he can really hit, but the power projects to maybe 60, not 70-80.

Brian: You had Carter Stewart #2 on your big board – given the high risk associated with prep pitchers is it safe to say that he is the most talented player in the class but was discounted to #2 because of the risk?
Keith Law: No, he was #2 because he was not as good as Mize.

Cooper: What do you think of the Royals grabbing 5 straight college pitchers with their 5 of top 58 picks… and Singer falling to them at 18?
Keith Law: Singer “falling” is relative; I don’t think Singer was worth a top 15 pick. I thought they got a lot of probability with those arms, and given their trouble with prep arms taken with high picks recently, it may be a worthy correction to their strategy.

AJ: Jose Suarez has been promoted twice already with absolutely huge SO numbers (also big BB numbers). Is he a legit frontline SP prospect?
Keith Law: I like him a lot – wrote him up in March – but he’s not a frontline (1 or 2) guy.

Nick: What happened to Nander de Sedas? He was projected to be a top 15 pick preseason, but then I stopped hearing anything about him.
Keith Law: He had a terrible spring at the plate, and I had more than one scout say he looked disinterested. I guess he’ll end up at FSU now.

Steve: Having been picked by the Rays, McClanahan seems like he’s going to end up as Jake McGee 2.0. Fair projection or can he make it as a starter?
Keith Law: I’d consider that an excellent outcome.

Brandon: Has there been anyone drafted that you just don’t know yet? What round does that normally start?
Keith Law: Grove (Dodgers’ last pick yesterday) was the first one.

Noah: It feels like in both the draft and in trades, the Phillies target safe but low upside players that project as back of the rotation players or utilitymen. It seems to be that you’d be better off devoting high draft picks and trade returns on lottery tickets with higher ceilings and find depth players elsewhere. Would love to hear your thoughts on this approach.
Keith Law: I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. Randolph was a high-ceiling bat who hasn’t panned out yet. JoJo Romero was a big gamble that’s paying off already.

Nick: Thoughts on Colton Eastman?
Keith Law: I like him, even though it’s a tough profile. Hitters don’t see the ball out of his hand at all.

Dr. Bob: Sometimes football and basketball players are better off not being drafted in a late round. Much less money and at the mercy of the team with no mobility. Is that true in baseball? Or is being drafted late still better than not being drafted at all?
Keith Law: In baseball, what matters most is what you’re paid, not where you’re taken.

ar: how much do you think about/are you concerned about recency bias and small sample size when looking at draft prospects? it makes sense that evaluations for growing kids be heavily weighted to recent events, but at the same time, the draft board has changed a ton since before the season.
Keith Law: Well, guys do get hurt, they change physically, they have to respond to the extra stresses of the draft season, and more than anything else we scout them more heavily. I saw a few 2019 guys over the course of this spring – Logan Davidson with Clemson comes to mind – but I didn’t focus on him because I was watching other players and chatting with scouts & advisers too. The next time I see Davidson, I’ll be bearing down on him.

Saman: Thoughts on the last two Dodgers’ picks? (Michael Grove and John Rooney)
Keith Law: I’m not really clear where their money is going now, unless they’re going way over on Ginn.

Zach: How much do you think Trackman stuff and makeup contribute to whether or not someone gets drafted? Ie how much stuff does the public not know about that influences where/when a player is drafted.
Keith Law: There are teams that weigh Trackman extremely heavily – Astros and Yankees for sure.

Sergio Q: Padres scouts mentioned that Weathers was hitting 94-95 in his final inning of his last start? Hype or real info?
Keith Law: He did that in a few starts – first outing back in March, at least his final two starts of the spring.

Not Chris: What player has the highest ceiling?
Keith Law: If Mize stays healthy he’s a #1 starter.

Pete: Have you seen Simeon Woods Richardson, the Mets 2nd rounder? Thoughts on him?
Keith Law: Video only. Up to 93, can show great depth on the breaking ball, lands both for strikes, has shown a CH, good athlete and competitor, physically maxed out, long arm swing.

Brian: Does your daughter ever walk by while you are doing a Periscope and wonder what in the world her dad is talking about? I would think that the lack of context around what you are saying would seem really strange for a child.
Keith Law: She’s used to my baseball-speak.

Rally Goose: How much of a reach was Clemens at 3.1?
Keith Law: Was not even a consideration for my top 100, so at least a full round.

Greg: Percentage chance the Reds sign Siani?
Keith Law: 100%. The answer isn’t going to change.

Joe: Do you think anyone takes Kumar Rocker at this point?
Keith Law: Round 11 or later, yes.

Josh: I’ve seen several Orioles fans who are skeptical of the Rodriguez pick make comparisons to Matt Hobgood; be it because of his size, jump in velo, or the fact that he went higher than expected. Is that a fair comparison?
Keith Law: Bad comparison. Really not similar other than both HS RHP.

Allan: Does Jonathan Ornelas have the potential pop to stick at third if/when he’s moved off ss?
Keith Law: Yes.

Jason: What did you think of the brewers’ first two picks? Can Gray make more contact? Was the first rounder SS a reach or a nice pick?
Keith Law: I think Turang gets to the majors on his defense for sure. If I told you today he’s going to have Adam Everett’s career, are you happy with that? You actually should be, based on the pick #, but I would guess most fans would say “no” because Everett doesn’t feel like a first-rounder in hindsight (he was one, 12th overall, and did have a career to justify going in the top 30).

Lilith: Many Reds fans were bummed last night that they weren’t able to get a “Taylor Trammell” or a “Jeter Downs” type player at the top of the 2nd round. Did they just get one with Siani in the 4th? Is my genuine excitement justified?
Keith Law: Yes, based on my rankings that’s exactly what they did.

Bret: Obviously one can’t ignore the past season when evaluating him, but what was Griffin Conine’s scouting report a year ago at this time? What are the odds the Jays can get him back to that?
Keith Law: Clear top 10 pick coming out of the Cape. Then he punched out 70 times this spring.
Keith Law: Someone asked about Stiever at IU in chat yesterday – he just went in the fifth round.

THE Average Sports Fan: India an under slot selection? How many 3b do the Reds actually need\
Keith Law: Fans get fairly stuck on a player’s listed position on draft day; India could end up at 3b, 2b, and I would send him out as a shortstop and see how he fares.

Greyson: Are there any examples of players requiring teams with a poor player-development track record to pay a premium? So, a player requiring an extra 500k to sign with Baltimore, for example?
Keith Law: No.

Brandon: I assume you know your top 100 better than me going back and forth name for name so … who was the first non-ranked player drafted?
Keith Law: Mets took Simeon Woods-Richardson at 48, and the Pirates took Braxton Ashcraft at 51. Both were players I knew but didn’t put on the top 100. Grove was the first player taken I didn’t know, because he missed the whole spring after TJ.

Logan: Opinion on Nick Decker?
Keith Law: I drove up to see him and saw all of one swing in the game. Has power, good arm for a corner, strong kid, seems to know a ball from a strike, but we’ll see when he faces real pitching this summer.

Kev: Hi keith, you’re really effeminate. Love your work.
Keith Law: I suppose this is some sort of insult? You’ll have to try harder than that, bud. You’re talking to a guy who’s worn makeup for TV and done Periscope chats while wearing an apron.

Clint: Would the risk of Kyler Murray playing another full season of football have kept you from picking him in the top 20 of this draft?
Keith Law: I would have insisted on him giving up CTE-ball if I was paying him first round money.

Craig: With Turang, how much of his fall was him being a known quantity for so long that familiarity bred contempt and how much was that his ceiling just isn’t as high as ppl thought it was last yr?
Keith Law: He didn’t perform well at the plate over the last 12 months. When scouts started bearing down, the conclusion was that he’s not the hitter he’d been hyped to be.

Gregory: How would you change the draft to make it more appealing to casual fans?
Keith Law: Trade picks and get more players to the draft.

Jeff Ala: Did the Braves just get a steal in the 4th round with Beck?
Keith Law: No.

Clay, Rutherford : Should I be concerned that the Cubs took Hoerner in the first round, since Stanford has a reputation for messing with hitters’ swings? The recent track record of Cardinal hitters is lackluster.
Keith Law: I had him ranked just a shade below that, more because I don’t see the secondary skills at the plate (patience or power). High contact guy with high baseball IQ too and chance to stay at short.

Trevor : All the 1st round guys got talked up big time. The Dodgers kid not so much. Was that a huge reach in your mind?
Keith Law: Yeah, this is the other issue I have with the coverage – every first round pick was a future all-star, plus tools left and right, ready for the majors in a month, etc. It’s not possible that every pick was a good one. Ginn might have two pitches that grade out as 7s, but there’s disagreement about the delivery – I see violence that might make him a reliever, I know good scouts (not with LAD) who think it’s not a problem and he was maybe the best prep arm in the draft.

Mike: I know this is mostly draft, but you’ve always been a Derek Hill fan. He’s been great offensively since coming back from his latest injury. Have you heard/seen anything about him possibly figuring something out finally? Or should I give up that dream?
Keith Law: Had great reports from last August too, when he was healthy and started raking.
Keith Law: My last look at him this March wasn’t great, for whatever that’s worth.

Brian: Thanks Keith! Only reason I have insider. This may seem like a softball question but how does the draft pool work? Do teams get a certain amount of $ to spend? I’m a tiger fan and there were discussion about maybe signing someone other then Mize so they could do more with their pool? Could be way off but genuinely wanted to know how it works.
Keith Law: Right. You add up your slot values for all of your picks in the top ten rounds. If you don’t exceed that by more than 4.9%, you face no penalty. If you exceed it by more than that, penalties kick in, including potential loss of draft picks.

Jeff Ala: Mize or Kyle Wright higher upside and who would you take right now?
Keith Law: Mize.

Boston: Why do you think Weathers won’t be underslot?
Keith Law: Why would he be when he wasn’t falling very far if the Padres passed on him?

Chris: Will the London MLB games mean a possible visit to London for you?
Keith Law: Hoping so, yes.

Mark: What’s going on with Kumar? Any reason as to why he’s dropped
Keith Law: Vandy commit with big price tag and finished the season poorly, with some loss of velocity and a bad showing in his team’s final doubleheader.

Jason: What do you think of the brewers strategy to draft guys up the middle of the field? CFs, SS all day
Keith Law: That’s where the biggest positional value is.

Dave: On MLB network, they said Seth Beer has had trouble with wood bats. What are some reasons behind this?
Keith Law: Specifically, he hasn’t performed well in wood bat leagues/environments the last two years. (It’s not like, say, the wood bats and he don’t get along.) It’s a great approach with real power, but he doesn’t have exceptional bat speed.

Pat D: Think the Yankees stick to college players between now and Round 10 in order to offer overslot to Green?
Keith Law: I’d expect a college senior or three mixed in from here forward. I wonder if they still try to grab one more over-slot guy, maybe in round 11.

Todd: How rare is it for a player not even on the radar in high school to develop into a viable draft pick in college?
Keith Law: Not that rare. Strasburg went from undrafted out of HS to 1-1 out of college. Mize did the same. Rendon was undrafted out of HS too.

michael: hi keith, how much of a reach is Joey Bart to you? Is there a huge gap between your #2 prospect and Bart who I believe was ~#10?
Keith Law: A modest one. The big gap in my rankings was between Mize and everyone else.

Josh: How close was Kaiser to your top 100? (Don’t kill me if he was on it, I am chatting/reading while in a meeting!)
Keith Law: Wasn’t on it or that close.

Adam D.: How far down that bottle of rum did you get last night?
Keith Law: I stopped after the Periscope. I did have to be alert enough to write up that reaction piece.

Joe: Is it time for Tigers fans to be concerned about Matt Manning? I know he’s young and only in low-A ball, but his command seems to be going in the wrong direction year to year.
Keith Law: You can be concerned, but not to the point of giving up or calling him a bust. Still 20, lots of time to turn it around.

Mike: Is there a Forrest Whitley in this draft? A pitcher taken in the teens who could end up a stud?
Keith Law: Liberatore and Winn would be my guesses.

Allan: How much money did leaving Colorado make Cole Winn?
Keith Law: Maybe a million bucks? Getting away from the altitude, and also moving to somewhere scouts would see him more often.
Keith Law: I’ve still yet to go to Colorado to see an amateur player in 12 years of doing this. Saw Gausman at showcases, and then he went to school. Saw Bird at showcases too (he was Gausman’s catcher in HS). Winn would have been the first, but he moved.

Po: Was reading through your big board of the top of 100 and once again I am concerned about the A’s decision making. It seems they avoid Boras guys and expensive upside guys and take risky and cheap? Am I misreading that?
Keith Law: That isn’t accurate. And I certainly haven’t identified Boras guys anywhere so I’m not sure how anyone would know who they all are.

xxx(yyy): Is there a reason a player should withdraw from the draft? I assume that 99.99999% of the time it is a terrible move but is that wrong?
Keith Law: If a player withdrew for something like religious reasons, or a personal/family matter, then money shouldn’t be a factor anyway and the process could be an unwelcome distraction.

Robbie: As a UGA fan, I watched Keegan Mcgovern hit the ball hard all year, why is he not considered a draft prospect whatsoever anywhere i have read?
Keith Law: He didn’t have that great a year overall, and he’s a corner bat. Might be someone’s senior sign later today.

Slick Rick Hahn: Better OF Prospect, Luis Gonzalez (CWS) or Steele Walker?
Keith Law: Gonzalez, I think. Better tools. Walker had the performance but I knew some scouts who thought he was beating up on lesser competition.

Sean : No surprise that the Nats have focused on pitching in this draft. Any thoughts on the arms the Nats have drafted so far?
Keith Law: Really like their draft through round 4. Schaller is super intriguing – has the frame, body, fastball you want, just hadn’t pitched in two-plus years after TJ.

Kevin: What is your take on the Cape League? Time well spent for prospects and scouts ?
Keith Law: Absolutely.

Chris : I know some Oakland fans are freaking out about the Murray pick, but isn’t the point that he’s one of the very few players in the draft to have actual superstar potential, even if those odds are low and there is some bust potential attached?
Keith Law: I would say that is precisely the point.

Nathaniel: Whats the best/worst outcome for the Mets 1st round pick?
Keith Law: Best outcome is all-star CF. Worst, of course, is that he doesn’t reach the majors.
Keith Law: Cole Sands left his last start of the year with an injury, but the Twins just took him in the 5th round. That’s a mild surprise to me – maybe the injury turned out to be nothing.

Andy: In your last chat, you mentioned some first round guys who weren’t on your thought list for first rounders, and none of them turned out. Has there been a guy that you can recall, that you thought a team way overdrafted someone, that’s worked out well? I don’t mean having Mike Trout not ranked #1, but like a guy who you had 60, went 15, and has been an All Star/top prospect.
Keith Law: Oh all the time. Chris Sale is probably the most stark example; I killed the delivery, he went 13th, probably should have gone top 3. A lesser example is Joe Panik; I had him in the third round by my ranking, he went 29th, has 7 career WAR.

Rob: Not a draft related question, but long term who do you like more, Newcomb or Folty? And do you see the paces they’re both at dropping off pretty hard or are they both close to this good.
Keith Law: Folty. If you asked me to ‘buy’ one right now it’d be him.

Pete: Does Justin Dunn see AA by the end of the year?
Keith Law: I’m guessing so, but I don’t think he *has* to get there for the year to be a success.

Scott: Quick analysis on Beer was that he couldn’t hit w/ wooden bats and projects only as a 1B. Do you agree w/ that assessment?
Keith Law: DH for me. Not a 1b.

Adam: Is Carter Stewarts Curveball of the Adam Wainwright variety?
Keith Law: Literally the highest spin rate ever recorded on a CB.

Turner Watts: Has a relatively high draft pick ever been drafted in June and dealt at the trade deadline of that same year?
Keith Law: Can’t do that. First time these guys can be traded is November.

Doug: Are the Padres saving their money for late picks? Or is Xavier Edwards good enough to justify Weathers over Liberatore?
Keith Law: The gap between Weathers and Liberatore in my mind is just not that big, and I’m sure there are guys who had Weathers higher due to present command.

Andy: Scouting the stat line only, McKay looks ready for AA as a P, but not as a hitter. Now the Rays sound like they’re doing the two way thing with another guy. How does it work that they will inevitably progress differently with the different skills?
Keith Law: I think these situations will resolve themselves because the player will buy in to dropping one or the other.

Rick C: The Braves drafted Rendon out of HS. He didn’t sign.
Keith Law: You’re right – 27th round. I must be thinking of someone else.

David: What are the odds that someone outside of day 1 would be the #1 pick in your with hindsight draft on 2028?
Keith Law: Maybe 1 in 3? It’s happened a few times.
Keith Law: Oh, god, am I still doing this in 2028?

Kyle: Would Royce Lewis have been your top position player in this draft?
Keith Law: No.

BK: Who is Christopher Bec???
Keith Law: Senior sign. I’m guessing way under slot. I prefer his brother Mal.

Tim: I think I know the answer – but is there any reason to be concerned that players in A-ball are hitting Greene too hard? He’s getting Ks but that BABIP makes me worried his fastball is playing down this year. (yes I’m scouting stat line a bit).
Keith Law: I posted his season stats split into first five starts and last five. His BABIP has come way down.

Mark: Hi Keith, non-draft Q here. With the “can’t scout stat lines” caveat understood, anything about apparent improvement from Ryan McKenna at High-A to excite an O’s fan?
Keith Law: I’m hearing very good things about the bat. I’m pissed I couldn’t get out to see him last week in Wilmington because I was working on the mock etc. I’ll try to get him next time.

Craig: I have a good friend whose son is a HS freshman pitcher who is already getting noticed (85-87 MPH, still growing into his body). What’s the #1 piece of advice you would give him to ensure he has a great day 3 years from now?
Keith Law: Take at least 100 days off from throwing every year – not just pitching, but no throwing. And follow the MLB PitchSmart guidelines. even if it means saying ‘no’ to a coach.

Jon: Keith, did you ever play any wargames as a youth, like Avalon Hill produced?
Keith Law: No, board games are my thing but not the longer wargames.

Danny: Have you heard the Yankees have a deal with Hackenberg and do you think they could save enough from their top 3 picks to offer him around $1M?
Keith Law: If they had a deal with him they would probably have taken him already.

Kevin: Let’s say you have seen a player 3 or 4 times….wouldn’t that be considered SSS?
Keith Law: No.

Marsh: Rangers drafted a kid who weighs less than me (but not my much ;)) Is he that good? Easley?
Keith Law: Damion’s kid. He’s actually a good little player. Maybe not a ton of upside but tremendous instincts in the field. Made some money just by playing next to Gorman all spring.

Ted: Experience with a dutch oven? thinking of getting one but not sure how often will use
Keith Law: Love mine, use it all the time for braises and it is the best vessel for deep frying.

Dan: With guys like Singer and Liberatore still available the Orioles reached for Rodriguez at 11. Defensible, or completely mystifying?
Keith Law: I would have taken Liberatore, but not Singer. Don’t understand fans’ abject hate of this pick. Rodriguez may not have been the best guy available but he’s up to 97-98 with a hammer.

Will: What is your comp for Bren Spillane? First guy to OPS over 900 in D1 since Pat Burrell.
Keith Law: That can’t be right about his OPS. And Spillane is 1b only who did his damage in a bad conference. I had him more in the 4th-5th round.

TK: I know he was high on your big board, but should Swaggerty’s lack of production in a bad conference this year scare me as a Pirates fan?
Keith Law: It’s a concern, but if he performs as expected he never gets to pick 10.

Notice me Law-senpai: Is it just me or, apart from the Stewart pick, are all the Atlanta picks after really, really underwhelming?
Keith Law: It’s 3 picks after that. Beck was fine for that spot. I thought Jenista was a reach by half a round, and just don’t love him for an NL squad because of DH risk.

Dave: Parenting question: better for taking a kid to his/her first pro ball game, major league park or minor league park?
Keith Law: Minors, easily, but please get yourself behind the netting.

Jamie: Could you have handled the money, bus rides, culture shock and living on your own at 18?
Keith Law: I was on my own at college at 17 (17.25, to be baseball precise). I survived. But college would have been a way better experience had I been older. I would have made better choices about classes, applied myself more, and gotten way more out of it academically and socially had I been 21 or so.
Keith Law: OK, still got some stuff to do and then I have to start writing up every team’s draft results. Thanks so much for all your questions and for reading all my draft drivel the last few months. All 30 draft recaps will be up by the end of the week!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ June 4, 2018
→ By keith

Klawchat 6/4/18.

My fourth mock draft for the first round went up this morning for Insiders.

Keith Law: I’m tired of the excuses everybody uses. It’s Klawchat.

TC: Are there any teams that you feel fairly certain will select a player if he is there? Seems to be a ton of uncertainty a few hours out. Normally there are a few picks that seem cemented the day of the draft.
Keith Law: Nothing is cemented because 1) someone could fall to a team they didn’t expect to get a chance to pick or 2) a likely predraft deal doesn’t pan out, but I think Stewart to Atlanta, Adams to Texas, and Denaburg to Washington all are “very likely if the players get there” sort of picks.

Tom: What percentage would you place on the Tigers NOT selecting Mize 1st overall. Also, if not where is his floor (Phillies at #3?)
Keith Law: I go back and forth on this. Was all the smoke yesterday about them being off Mize mere posturing to get him to take less than slot? (Really, they should offer the slot for pick #2 plus $1, and he should take it, because he’s not getting more than that anywhere else.) I think they probably know who they want, and they probably knew that yesterday, so the correct answer is either 100% or 0%. The answer from outside, without actual information, makes it look like 50/50. So I suppose this is Al Avila’s Cat.

Rico Brogna : If the Phillies land either Madrigal or Bohm (seems they are most interested in a college bat) or even Bart if he falls, how quickly do you think each of these bats gets to the majors?
Keith Law: None is more than two years away. I’d guess any or all could debut late in 2019.

Tom: Hey Keith, where would you rate Casey Mize longterm compared to of Justus Sheffield, Brendan McKay, Bret Honeywell, Sixto Sanchez and Mitch Keller? (My first klawchat question – so proud!)
Keith Law: Ahead of Honeywell (hurt), behind the others.

Richard: On the topic of over-working pitchers at the youth, high school and collegiate levels… Am I off-based at thinking announcers and television personalities deserve a major portion of the blame? Guys like Harold Reynolds praising guys for being “gritty” or “team players” for pitching twice in a collegiate Regional or throwing 120+ pitches in a high school championship game. This instills in our youth that it’s noble to be over-worked, and there’s something “wrong” if you refuse this type of treatment.
Keith Law: Yes, it’s absolutely part of it, and a problem with having only ex-players in booths and no one with a sound front office or scouting perspective to offer.

Alex Failla: Has Pirates OF Calvin Mitchell regained the hype he had prior to his rough senior year of hs? He looks to be driving the ball to all fields again and has been impressive this year 200 PA’s in full-season ball as a 19 year old.
Keith Law: He’s hit very well and impressed scouts I’ve talked to. Position is still a question.

Kyle Huber: What are you hearing for the Pirates tonight? Any chance of one of the top five-ish guys falling to them? Still thinking HS pitching?
Keith Law: Click on the mock at the top of this page and you’ll see my latest thoughts (as of about 10 pm last night, although nothing has really changed yet) for all 30 picks.

Paul Park: Thoughts on OF Z. Watson at LSU? Chances he goes tonight?
Keith Law: Unlikely. Fourth OF type, I think after the third round but someone could pop him there.

Andres: Tranquility Base review. When? Wheeen? WHEN?
Keith Law: I don’t review albums any more and I said a month ago I didn’t like this one.

Andy: Mize doesn’t drop below the White Sox right?
Keith Law: If he gets to the White Sox, then there’s something seriously wrong with his medicals that absolutely nobody has mentioned to me or, as far as I can tell, anyone else who does this stuff.

Matt: Hi Keith. Any chance Indiana’s Jonathan Stiever gets taken before the third round? Thanks
Keith Law: I haven’t heard his name once all spring.

Mr. Patton : My son plays U6 travel ball, and I recently attended one of his practice (typically just drop him off). I stayed off to the side to watch but not interfere. I noticed his coach using language I wouldn’t approve of in-front-of and towards the players. My wife thinks I’m over-reacting, but I’m considering confronting the coach. Thoughts?
Keith Law: Is this a question of profanity, or of language that was derisive or harmful to the players? I understand objections to the former, but the latter is where I’d confront a coach – if he was insulting or demeaning players, or even bullying some.

Patty O’Furniture: You had Carter Stewart mocked to the Braves at 8, after sticking with the Gorman pick for quite a while – is there anybody ahead of ATL that could jump in on Stewart?
Keith Law: The Giants and Reds would be extreme long shots but have shown interest in him this spring.

Mike: Keith, what are your thoughts on Duke’s Jimmy Herron? Seems like people are down on him compared to earlier this year.
Keith Law: Extra OF type. Like Conine, he just didn’t do enough at the plate this year.

ScooterMcGavin: White Sox at #4. I’m worried that Mize and Singer will be taken already. Madrigal scares me a little, reminds me too much of Gordon Beckham. Is India or Bohm a better fit for CWS?
Keith Law: I think Singer gets there, although I wouldn’t take him over any of those three bats you mentioned. I think he’s more Carson Fulmer than Chris Sale.

Tyler: Is Colin Simpson any sort of frat prospect this year? If so, where do you see him going?
Keith Law: I hear the Alpha Betas have strong interest.

Joe: Any chance that the Yankees take Lavigne with their first pick? Seems like that would be a big overdraft based on yours (and others) rankings.
Keith Law: Sure, it’s possible – they may think we’re all too light on him. Cold weather bats are hard to evaluate, and Lavigne’s value is entirely in his bat, not his glove or legs.

JB: With neither Hankins nor Rocker listed in your mock, is the consensus that they’ll go on over-slot deals in the comp round?
Keith Law: Yes. Likely both, Hankins more likely.

Jo-Nathan: How much money, if any, would it take for Kyler Murray to sign and give up football?
Keith Law: You’d have to ask him. Even if I had that dollar figure – I don’t – disclosing it here could pose problems for the kid’s eligibility.

HH: How many draft-eligible pitchers are good enough to pitch in the majors later this year (even in pen)? How does that compare to the average draft?
Keith Law: I think Mize could, in relief. A few college relievers probably could too, guys like Mulholland way down my 100. Singer maybe as a right-handed specialist.

Frigga: i know teams typically draft BPA. However do they break the BPA down by position? Or is BPA just the player that will provide the most value either on the field or via trade?
Keith Law: Up top it’s BPA. Maybe in the fifth or sixth round that starts to break down and teams would split their pref lists by position.

Tim Ackins: Re: Heimlich. He fulfilled his legal obligations based on the sentence he accepted. Is it ethical to insist on placing further punishment on him that the state did not seek in their plea? Or am I too concerned about the difficulties faced by ex-convicts once they serve their punishments?
Keith Law: No one is insisting on further punishment, at least not around here. You can’t jail him now after the justice system has finished with him. I object to him gaining the privilege of playing professional baseball, on the basis of what he has admitted to doing, and how he put many scouts’ and baseball execs’ livelihoods at risk by failing to disclose the guilty plea last spring until he was outed.

Andrew: I keep reading reports that the Tigers are undecided on who they’re taking. Is that likely a bluff? I remember your review of Trouble with the Curve (shout out for convincing me to not watch it), where you eluded that teams usually know reasonably before the draft who they want.
Keith Law: Right, I think they already know.

someguynamedkenny: What are the odds Alec Bohm ends up being able to stick at a position other than first base long term?
Keith Law: Maybe 35%. I think he’s a better athlete than people realize from his body, but he’s a big boy for 3b.

JP: Not draft related, but what do you think about the Yankees potentially boycotting ESPN interviews because of a scheduling dispute?
Keith Law: I’ve never heard about this but I also don’t really do those interviews.

Chris: Call me crazy but I think Tigers would be dumb to take Mize. This is based on unpredictability and higher likelihood of arm injuries for any and all starting pitchers.
Keith Law: OK. You’re crazy. Any selection depends entirely on who else is available; if Mize, discounted appropriately for the risk of any pitcher, is still the best value available, as i believe he is, then you take him.

Jay: If Bohm and India are sitting at 6, which way do the Mets go?
Keith Law: I think India. But I also have them taking someone else over those guys.

Matt: Have you ever considered actually going to Secaucus or been there, if so, could we get a rundown on the fine dining establishments there?
Keith Law: I went to the draft two years ago. MLB & MLBN people were all wonderful to deal with, but there wasn’t any real advantage to me in being on site.

Robbie: At what point can I start to to be encouraged by the angels’ drafting capability? Do I have to wait until there is Major league success or should I at least look at the prospects they drafted last year and be excited they have added or kept their value?
Keith Law: oh, you can now, for sure. Much improved the last two draft classes.

Tortoise Joe: You mention Adams to the Rangers — there is a line of thought among some Ranger fans that drafting toolsy high ceiling athletes hasn’t worked for Texas, and so they need to start going a different direction. Is that a reasonable critique?
Keith Law: Adams is toolsy and high ceiling, but he has also shown some feel to hit already. He’s way better than Eric Jenkins.

Brian: How similar is Matt Liberatore to Mackenzie Gore? Are they similar type of lefties regarding stuff and potential or only similar in that they are left handed?
Keith Law: No, just that they’re lefthanded.

Chris: Saw you retweeted Wursthall this morning. you planning on making it out to the Bay Area to scout anytime soon?
Keith Law: I’d love to eat there, but I didn’t retweet anything from them. I was in SF in March but probably won’t be back this year.

Aaron C.: Appreciate your candidness on the challenge of putting out mock drafts. Since you’ve been doing this, has a team ever made a first round pick of someone who wasn’t anywhere on your radar?
Keith Law: Yes. Cubs with Hayden Simpson – not on my top 100, and someone had to remind me who that was when it happened, because the little I had on him was so bad that I had dismissed him from my mind. Same year, Yanks took Cito Culver, whom I knew but expected wouldn’t go till the 4th round. Rangers took Kevin Matthews in 2011 at the end of the first or early comp and he was another guy who wouldn’t have been on my top 200 if i’d gone that far. I had virtually nothing on him either; he was released after 2015 and walked almost a man an inning in the minors.

Neal Huntington: Who should I take if Liberatore, Winn Gorman and Kelenic are there?
Keith Law: They won’t all be there. My Big Board (top 100) is updated; I would tell any GM who called to take the best guy.

Joe: Hearing any possible locations for Nick Decker?
Keith Law: No, but he might go later today in the second round.

Brian: How many players in this draft do you see as being top 100 prospects by years end?
Keith Law: I think the historical average (for my lists) is about 13-14 each January drawn from the most recent draft. It varies more by MLB graduations than by the draft classes themselves, I believe.

Chris: Drew Parrish coming back after a 2 hour delay and ALREADY throwing 108 pitches is scary. How do college managers live in such a bubble?
Keith Law: There are few if any consequences. Now, if a Florida State recruit withdrew his commitment today because he saw how Parrish was abused, that would get some coaches’ attention.

Dave: Keith, lot of talk about the TCU coaching situation…Schlossnagle staying, pitching coach Saarloos may be leaving. How does that impact Kloffenstein and what are the chances he goes pro?
Keith Law: I’ve heard he’s a very tough sign. Shame if Saarloos is gone so soon – I thought he might be a good moderating influence on Schlossnagel, who has seen a lot of arms break down in his tenure there, and I think bears responsibility for at least two of them (Purke and Winkler).

EL: Can Bart play anywhere else but catcher (in case the Giants draft him)?
Keith Law: You don’t take him if you’re not going to catch him. Posey is 31 with over 800 games caught in the majors. His future at that position is limited now.

Chris: Is it just me, or is this draft weak compared to recent years, especially at the very top?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s weak up top, and I think it’s very deep in prep arms and outfielders, but it doesn’t have the slam-dunk names we’ve had in some recent years. I think it’ll end up a productive draft though.

Jimmy: What do you usually do during the draft ? Watch at home ? Do you eat a nice dinner while watching ?
Keith Law: It’s varied by year, depending on where I am. I’ll be home this year so I’ll write, tweet, maybe do a live video something, have a lovely beverage. I’ll eat dinner before the first pick though – roasted a whole pork shoulder yesterday so there would be plenty of leftovers.

Dan: How likely would it be for the Phillies to offer an overslot for Mize at #3 that’s over the slot for the first two picks? Does not having a second or third round pick make that any more or less likely?
Keith Law: Doing so would essentially require punting much of the draft, then. They don’t pick again till the 4th round, so they’d have to go under slot a few times and would almost be pulling a Ricky Williams draft.

Ralph: Why do college (baseball) coaches bunt so much? I’m genuinely interested in the thought process. Are they typically oblivious to modern baseball tactics? Bunting runners from 1st to 2nd in the first inning seems to be a ‘go to’ play for most teams
Keith Law: College and high school coaches who call for hitters to bunt in the first inning are secretly telling you that they can’t teach hitters how to hit, so they teach them how to bunt instead.

Jim: Is there any substance behind the rumor of Mize falling to three? Or was that just a hypothetical in your mock?
Keith Law: Not a hypothetical.
Keith Law: Sorry quick delay for a draft-related phone call
Keith Law: I’m back. That was interesting, mostly for yet another person saying he didn’t know what the Tigers’ decision will be at 1.

Freddy: What are the knocks on Carter Stewart? Seems like everyone agrees he’s mid 90s with a plus curve, athleticism and likely to stick as a starter. What are the negatives?
Keith Law: Prep RHP have one knock against them to begin with. He also lost a little velo at the end of his spring due to a wrist injury, not a serious one. I still have him at #2 overall on my board.

Dave: Keith, how hard is it to decipher what MLB draft rumors are legit versus what are smokescreens? Specifically with something like the Giants taking Winn at #2?
Keith Law: Bobby Evans went to see Winn. That’s not a smokescreen.

Chris: Any chance Lenny Torres hears his name called today? If so, when and by who?
Keith Law: Yes, after the first round. It could be the Royals at 33/34, but that’s probably the top of his market.

Jimmy: Where is Torkelson projected ?
Keith Law: To go back to school, since he’s a freshman and not eligible to be drafted.

Sean: How do you get new info today? Do you have insiders at specific teams who let you know, or do you just hear “through the grapevine” of scouts, reporters, and FO people who let info out?
Keith Law: Phone has been buzzing on and off all day.

Tim Ackins: I love Cal Raleigh’s bat. Any chance he can stick at catcher or is he bound for 1B?
Keith Law: Enough chance that I think he’ll be drafted as high as the mid-2nd by a team that intends to leave him there.

Carl: In a hypothetical situation, let’s say the Heimlich being an admitted child molester story wasn’t reported by the media, but a team doing its due diligence on him discovered it. Is that the kind of information that a team would share with other teams considering the severe nature of the crime and his own admission of guilt, or would whichever team discovered his guilty plea keep it to themselves and quietly remove Heimlich from their draft board?
Keith Law: I think that news would leak very quickly. In your draft room, you have at least ten people, maybe twenty-plus if you bring in all your area scouts, who’ll know that and see the magnet come off the board. There’s no way ten people in this industry keep anything a secret.

Mike: Do you believe teams are getting better at drafting? Are there fewer 1st round busts and fewer late round surprises than there would have been 10-20 years ago?
Keith Law: I think so. Some is smarter drafting, including using stats and analytics as a tool in the process. Some is not throwing 19-year-old Bill Pulsipher 200 fucking innings in one minor league season.

Dave: Keith, is deal-cutting by the Padres and Braves really going to drop both Liberatore and Gorman to the A’s at #9?
Keith Law: I don’t have either of those teams cutting deals with the players I projected to them.

GIO: Two part question – How does Bart compare to Zunino at the same point of their careers? Do you think Bart can be better than Zunino has been up to this point of his MLB career?
Keith Law: Zunino had more hit tool at the same point, Bart has more raw power and might be a better catcher (receiving, game-calling).

Jon: Any Andrew Benintendi in Travis Swaggerty?
Keith Law: No.

Nick: For weeks it seemed like the Mets were locked into taking India and now you don’t even have him mentioned as a posibility for them. Any reasoning behind this?
Keith Law: They were never locked into taking him.

Parts unknown : Which top prospect is most likely to end up being described as a “gamer” or being “gritty”?
Keith Law: Madrigal. 5’7″ 155 pound white middle infielder who isn’t a plus runner.

Bren Spillane: Could I be drafted tonight?
Keith Law: Unlikely, not a zero chance. College 1b in bad conference.

Nick: What type of power do you see Jarred Kelenic having as a pro? 15+? 20+? 25+?
Keith Law: Homers? If he hits enough to get to the power it’s 25+ homers.

Jimmy: Where did you have Mickey Moniak ranked on your big board when he went #1 ?
Keith Law: I think fifth? I said at the time I wouldn’t have taken him first – I had Corey Ray 1.

Brian: Thoughts on Madrigal’s size for a top 3 pick?
Keith Law: Short doesn’t bother me. I don’t know if he has the hand strength to make enough quality contact against major-league pitching. He’s short, but also somewhat slight, at least compared to guys like Bregman, who is short but strong.

Coach B.: I know you don’t get around to scouting this level, but are there any NAIA names to watch for today/tomorrow?
Keith Law: Not on my radar, but I’m certain there are such players for rounds 5-10 (tomorrow), which for NAIA is still a pretty good outcome. I kind of wish the NAIA would position itself a bit more as an alternative to the NCAA – hey, come play for us, use an agent, transfer without penalties, etc.

Dave: Keith, heard a lot of people mention Durbin Feltman as potentially the first to the Majors pick this year, kinda like fellow TCU pitcher Brandon Finnegan did. How likely do you think that kind of scenario is, and any idea who might be targeting Feltman?
Keith Law: If he goes, maybe as high as the second round, it’ll be like that – take him now and advance him quickly through the minors. Of course, both Burdi brothers were supposed to be like that, and neither has seen the majors yet around TJ … and TCU’s track record of pitchers in pro ball isn’t great.

Alex: Is Kyler Murray something to pay attention to today, or is he just a name people recognize?
Keith Law: He’s on my top 50.

Lilith: Kyler Murray: He struck out a ton this year, despite his improvement. Why is he so sought after?
Keith Law: He barely played in the last two years, and “a ton” is an overstatement.

Matt: I totally understand why you don’t think Heimlich should be drafted- and I agree. But if Aroldis Chapman can sign for $86 million, what’s stopping a team like the Yankees or Cubs (Chapman, Addison Russell, etc) from drafting him?
Keith Law: Nothing. If you have talent, you get picked. And I would guess at least one team would try to use his guilty plea and the scarlet letter on his magnet to sign him under slot – take it or leave it, nobody else even wants to draft you – and use that to sign someone else they like.

Dave: Keith, what’s the likely percentage that a top 5 college bat (like Madrigal or Bohm) fall to the A’s at 9?
Keith Law: Mize goes ahead and at least two high school players go ahead, I think, so there’s one scenario where all five go ahead and a bunch of scenarios where at least one gets to them.

Mark: Any chance the Padres take Murray at 7? Seems like 2 years ago everyone thought Quantrill was going with their second pick, but they took him at 8
Keith Law: I considered that possibility and you’re right – it could happen, as it did with Q. But I also think they feared Q wouldn’t get to 23, while Murray could very well get to 38.

Andy: One of a baseball players secondary responsibilities is dealing with fans, especially younger fans. I can overlook a player being an a-hole in general, if he gives my kid a ball. I can honestly say I don’t know how comfortable I would be with my 5 year old interacting with Heimlich.
Keith Law: Imagine you’re a GM or team President and you decide, after doing your due diligence, to take Heimlich anyway. Do you send him to children’s hospitals with other players? To in-store events where kids might appear? And if he does re-offend, are you ready for the PR backlash and perhaps a lawsuit? There’s so much to consider here for any front office that can even get past the moral questions around the selection.

John: The Phillies last 3 first round picks all look highly questionable. What do you make of their scouting department as a whole and their top guy? Have they just been unlucky? Also, please convince me they won’t take a middle infielder with no power at #3 if Mize and Bohm are still on the board. Thanks
Keith Law: I’ve said before I think their first round picks have been disappointing and their picks from the second round on have been much better, above average compared to other teams, I think.

Tom: If you could quantify it on a 1-10 scale, how big is the separation between Mize and singer.
Keith Law: The only way I’d take Singer over Mize is if you told me Mize had a current medical (arm injury, back issue) problem that Singer didn’t, and to the best of my knowledge, that’s not the case.

John: What’s stopping MLB from allowing full pick trading?
Keith Law: It has to be collectively bargained.

Travis: How high do you think Austin Becker goes? Does the Vandy commit scare some teams?
Keith Law: He’s going to school. I’d be floored if anyone took him in the top ten rounds.

Bill: How does Parker Meadows compare to his brother Austin?
Keith Law: I addressed that specifically in Parker’s writeup. He’s not as good as Austin was at the same age.

Jimmy: Do teams try and strike pre daft deals with leverage of bad market teams drafting right after them that a player would not want to go to ?
Keith Law: No, that doesn’t work.

Mark: Where would Hunter Greene have been ranked in this year’s draft? #1?
Keith Law: I would probably have him 1, although Mize, as a guy who’s further along and less risky than a 17-year-old pitcher, would give me pause.

Steven: Can Naylor remain a catcher or is he destined for the infield?
Keith Law: He’s not a catcher any more. Third base is most likely.

JP: whats your favorite place to watch a game in the Cape Cod League?
Keith Law: To watch, probably chatham, although it’s not great for scouting.

Greg: Regarding Simpson, can you think of another first rounder who was out of pro ball (non-injury/jail-related) after only two years?
Keith Law: Aaron Akin was the 12th overall pick in 1997 from a Kansas JC, and was out of baseball before the end of 2000. That’s kind of my gold standard for a fast washout.

Brian: Worst place (food/location/weather/etc.) you visited in your scouting destinations this year?
Keith Law: I did pretty well this year with that part of the gig. I mean, Florida’s no great shakes, but I’m never going to have a year where I don’t go there.

JR: you have a post-draft vacation planned? If so, where too?
Keith Law: Europe. Going to take my daughter for the first time and also go visit my cousins.

Thomas: If you had to pick one position player and pitcher you’re really high on and think the rest of the industry is sleeping on, who would they be?
Keith Law: I said in the top 100 I’m higher on Naylor than the industry (I think). Not sure I have a pitcher with a comparable gap – am I higher on Wilcox than most?

Nick: As a rare Yankees/Jets fan, should I be concerned about another Hackenberg potentially coming to New York?
Keith Law: If that’s a football reference, I don’t get it. But that kid’s name always puts Prince’s “Pope” into my head.

Ryan: Oh please do a live video, I will mute the TV and also maybe join you in the beverage having.
Keith Law: Maybe I should go to the liquor store first.

Matt: Is there a chance Tristan Pompey sneaks into the supplemental round or is he a 2nd rounder?
Keith Law: Yes, supplemental is reasonable.

Adam : In your most recent mock you have the Giants passing on Mize to save money to go over slot for someone later. The only way they do that is if they have an agreement in place with someone they have specifically targeted, correct?
Keith Law: Probably, although you can’t guarantee player number two gets to pick number two.

Tom: Re: Stewart very likely to Atlanta if he gets there rather than the previous connection to Gorman. Is that a function of your information getting clearer, an evaluation change in the scouting department, or something else?
Keith Law: Better information – which often means the team did something that put the information into the marketplace. There are no evaluation changes this late in the game.
Keith Law: (If there are, whoa boy, time to find a new scouting staff.)

Tyler: Any way mariners go prep at 14?
Keith Law: Any way, yes. Likely, no.

Ben: Who are the Boras guys in this year’s draft?
Keith Law: I can’t and won’t jeopardize any player’s eligibility by disclosing adviser information or revealing confidential medical information.

Dan: In a general sense, how do players become ‘below-slot’ guys? Do their agents just say, “let’s be honest, you’re not a top three talent BUT you can go at #3 if you take this underslot deal?” How do teams and agents/players determine whether a player is worth a slot bonus?
Keith Law: Advisers call around to teams to gauge interest in their players. Then if the highest-drafting team with interest calls and asks for a deal, you know what your best alternative is (BATNA for you fellow MBA dorks), and you can take a dollar figure that’s more than the next-highest team will offer but still a discount for the team that called.

Po: read you mock and loved it. My question is who SHOULD the A’s take if available
Keith Law: If Liberatore is there, I’d take him.

Carl: Recipe for the pork roast?
Keith Law: 6 hours at 275, another 30 minutes at 300. Used my standard rub for a smoked pork shoulder but the weather sucked so I did it indoors.

Jesse B: Can David Fletcher be an everyday regular at 2B for the Halos? Also, how legit of a prospect is Kevin Smith? Thanks
Keith Law: No on Fletcher. Not really on Smith.

Patrick: The Baltimore local reporters all seem to expect the birds to take a position play at 11, probably an infielder. Are you still hearing them on pitchers?
Keith Law: I’ve heard pitchers more than hitters with them all spring.

Jo-Nathan: Is Tim Cate better off returning to school for a senior year or do players lose too much leverage as seniors for it to make sense (I can’t think of a time where this worked outside of Mark Appel)?
Keith Law: No, he should go high enough to make signing worthwhile. Plus, Coach Penders at UConn can’t seem to stop mishandling pitchers.

Tim: Wouldn’t a correct change be Schrodinger’s Al Avila instead of Al Avila’s cat?
Keith Law: Well, for Al’s sake, I hope nobody opens the box.
Keith Law: That’s all for today, but we’ll do this again tomorrow when we have something real to discuss, instead of all of this speculation. I’ll try to do some sort of video chat tonight after the draft starts, and I’ll file a day one reaction for Insiders later tonight. Thanks again – enjoy the draft!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ June 1, 2018
→ By keith

Music update, May 2018.

I went a little overboard this month and decided not to edit it down as much as I usually do, because of the time crunch with the draft coming up. So I give you 28 songs from the pop, alternative, hip hop, and metal worlds. You can also access the Spotify playlist here.

Lemaitre featuring Betty Who – Rocket Girl. An early candidate for song of the year, certainly my song of the year so far, powered by a soaring, anthemic vocal from Ms. Who.

Jungle – Happy Man. A welcome return from the British R&B collective behind 2014’s “Busy Earnin,” a top 20 song for me that year.

Childish Gambino – This Is America. I’ve never been much for Donald Glover’s music, which I thought showed his inexperience in that realm, but this song is truly catchy, makes a serious point in its sparse lyrics, and of course has come with a provocative video addressing gun violence in America.

Young Fathers – Toy. I linked to this song’s video a few weeks but had never put it on a playlist. This Mercury Prize-winning hip-hop trio has a unique sound that combines musical influences from two members’ African roots, American trap music, and more frenetic European EDM sounds.

Kid Astray – Can’t Stop. More pop goodness from this Norwegian quintet, although I was disappointed to learn that keyboardist and sometime vocalist Elizabeth Wu left the group at some point in the last two years.

Artificial Pleasure – I Need Something More. I could do without the 30-second intro, but after that there’s a droning, throwback new-wave sort of guitar riff that powers the rest of this song from their debut album The Bitter End.

Hinds – Tester. Maybe my favorite track yet from this Barcelona quartet, who always sound like they recorded their vocals in a tin can and as if they have never done anything so fun in their lives as recording music.

Black Honey – Bad Friends. I’m hoping this darker single presages a full-length release from Black Honey, who’ve dotted my top 100 lists the last two years.

Wye Oak – Join. A little Lord Huron, a little Cocteau Twins, maybe even a little Beach House (but with a stronger melody). This is from the duo’s new album The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs.

Hatchie – Bad Guy. I think I’ve now put four of the five song’s from Hatchie’s EP Sugar and Spice on monthly or annual playlists, ebecause she’s fantastic.

bülow – Not A Love Song. Megan Bülow is a teenager from the Netherlands with a heck of a pop sensibility; this track comes from an EP she first released in Europe in late November. She doesn’t seem old enough to pack this many musical influences into one track.

Courtney Barnett – Charity. Barnett’s second solo album Tell Me How You Really Feel dropped two weeks ago and is very similar to her first album (and, fortunately, not at all similar to the record she made with Kurt Vile).

CLOVES – Wasted Time. I think it’s clear at this point that CLOVES could sing an instruction manual for a toaster oven and I’d put it on a playlist.

Cœur de Pirate – Malade. From the Quebecois singer-songwriter’s new album en cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé, which dropped today. The entire record is in French, unlike her previous full-length, and has a broad mix of more upbeat dance tracks like “Prémonition,” some ethereal piano ballads like “Somnambule,” and in-betweeners like this.

Okkervil River – Love Somebody. I didn’t care for most of OR’s new album, In the Rainbow Rain, in large part because Will Sheff just isn’t a very good singer, but goes beyond his range in the intros to so many tracks here. This is the best song on the record and builds very nicely to a second movement (starting around 1:40) that showcases the best of Sheff’s songwriting both in music and lyrics.

Mourn – Fun at the Geysers. The ‘other’ great young band from Barcelona also put out a new song this month, with better production value and a bit more punk rock to their vibe, as with

The Charlatans – Totally Eclipsing. The track is just fair, but the Charlatans (sometimes called Charlatans UK here) are one of my favorite bands from the 1990s, so anything they produce gets consideration for a playlist here.

Sea Girls – Too Much Fun. Radio 1 tabbed Sea Girls a band to watch for 2018, and this song, from their forthcoming EP Adored, has that potentially anthemic chorus offset by an understated vocal in the verses.

Drenge – This Dance. I loved their first album (my #4 album of 2013), didn’t like the sonic shift on their second record, and am glad to hear this song sounds much more like their debut record.

Great News – Sleep It Off. A Norwegian trio who call their music “daze-pop,” Great News were among the big hits at last month’s Great Escape music festival in London.

Vast – She Is Murder. I lost track of Vast (or V.A.S.T.) aeons ago; their song “Touched” was one of the songs I played repeatedly while I was in grad school, but I had no idea Jon Crosby was still recording under this name. Their eighth album is due this summer.

The Get Up Kids – Better This Way. Emo/indie artists the Get Up Kids, not to be confused with the geddup noise, are set to release their first album in seven years and just their second since their breakup in 2005.

Wooden Shjips – Eclipse. Wooden Shjips’ latest album, just titled V., dropped on May 25th, and it’s only seven songs long because six of the tracks clock in between five and eight minutes. There’s a lot of spacey guitar noodling here, but that’s kind of my cup of tea, innit?

Bilk – Spiked. These guys are very British, very post-punk in sound, and very, very young.

Winger – Dance Macabre. I’m shocked to hear these glam-metal stalwarts, who sort of became the poster child for the hairspray excesses of the era, come back with a … wait, this is Ghost? And the song isn’t 30 years old? Never mind.

Lucifer – California Son. Lucifer is the new project from Johanna Sadonis, who was the lead singer for the one-album project The Oath, who broke up before their record was even released. It’s a deep throwback to the kind of 1970s British metal that I absolutely adore.

Pallbearer – Dropout. The dominant doom metal band recording today, Pallbearer just released this one-off single as they headed out on tour to support last year’s Heartless.

Amorphis – The Bee. This Finnish progressive/melodic death metal band has been recording for 25 years now, and just released their 13th album, Queen of Time, two weeks ago.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 in music, alternative, metal, Music, rap

→ May 31, 2018
→ By keith

Klawchat 5/31/18.

My latest mock draft went up this morning for Insiders.

Keith Law: I can tell just by the climate, and I can tell just by the style. It’s Klawchat.

John : As a White Sox fan, I’m been more focused on the minor league prospects than the big league results. I’ve heard some info on “Super 2” status for Kopech and Eloy that says that Kopech’s Super 2 date is in June and Eloy’s is in July. Is this information accurate and why would the dates be different?
Keith Law: That’s some incredibly bad information. There is no specific “super two” date – it varies each year, and we don’t know the date for year N until after year N+2 – but it would be the same for all players who currently have 0 days of service. I also think it’s really dumb for fans to worry about this beyond wondering when a player would be called up; it’s not your money, and in the grand scheme, unless the player becomes a star, it’s not much money to the teams, either.

GS : Thoughts on Twins prospect Kirloff? He’s raking. Mid-season promotion or do you wait because it’s his first season back?
Keith Law: The argument for promoting him is that he’s 20, and not young for low-A (not old, either). You might want to challenge him with high-A competition before the summer is out.

John : Thanks for “Smart Baseball”, I think I learned more from that book than my previous 30 years of listening to announcers! Luis Gonzalez (White’s Sox’s 3rd round pick in 2017 out of New Mexico) has been having himself a nice season down in Kannopolis. But he’s a college guy repeating Low-A. Should I temper my enthusiasm or is he someone to keep an eye on?
Keith Law: He’s 22 and shouldn’t be in low-A. He’s a prospect, but his stats this year are kind of worthless for evaluating him.

Greg Bird is The Word: Considering Hicks is a FA after 2019, & Florial is a ???, if the Yanks signed Harper, could he handle CF mostly full-time? If he still has a Mantle fascination, they could give him # 77 & sell him on playing that position. And throw $400 million at him, of course…
Keith Law: I think he can handle CF, but my question would be whether that would increase the chances of him getting hurt (covering more ground, plus he still plays like his hair’s on fire).

Chris: Any opinion on what Ross Stripling is doing? It only ~50 innings, but it seems it would be hard to fake a 30% K against a 5.6% BB.
Keith Law: Stuff is unchanged, but he’s throwing a lot more strikes. I don’t think he’s close to this good, because the stuff isn’t any better and not going to miss that many more bats, but if he’s throwing strikes at this rate (and thus not walking guys) with the stuff he does have, he’s probably a 3rd-4th starter.

Candice Bergen: I’m guessing CBS is praying that no old videos of me in blackface praising Hitler surface.
Keith Law: And audiences everywhere are praying they do.

TJ: Would you even comment on what round Heimlich would be on talent alone or is it immeasurable given the other very serious issues?
Keith Law: I think he’s undraftable, and will voice my criticism of any team that chooses to draft and sign him. I do not give a single, solitary fuck how good a pitcher he might be.

addoeh: Is there anything funnier in baseball, or maybe sports, than watching members of the bullpen sprinting in like an eight year old chasing an ice cream truck because of an argument between the two teams? Bonus points for the bullpen catcher in full gear running in. It’s sillier than a goalie fight in hockey.
Keith Law: It just prolongs the agony of watching the ‘brawl’ (that often is less a brawl than a show of something or other). If you leave the bullpen during a fight, automatic five game suspension.

TJ: How come there aren’t public metrics on minor league WAR?
Keith Law: I don’t think those stats are terribly useful for minor leaguers; we want prospects to show certain skills, and care about their ages relative to their levels, but a minor leaguer who posts a high WAR or wOBA or wRC+ isn’t necessarily a good prospect. Chase Vallot posted wRC+ of 140 and 136 the last two years in low- and high-A, respectively, but wasn’t much of a prospect at all because his hit tool is so far below average. He’s now got a 76 wRC+ in high-A with a Tebowesque strikeout rate.

Adam: Who wins a foot race between Buxton and Acuna???
Keith Law: Buxton is the fastest player in the majors.

Krontz: What’s the better Shane Beiber comp . . . Josh Tomlin or Kyle Hendricks?
Keith Law: Bieber has much better stuff than Tomlin.

BE: As a Tigers fan, how concerned should I be about Avila passing on Mize?
Keith Law: The industry is still betting they take him.

Mark: Do you have any intel on guys the Padres are targeting for later rounds (yes I read your mock)? Did they acquire the extra pick with that CF in mind already in mind?
Keith Law: I think they acquired the extra pick with a lot of guys potentially in mind. You can’t guarantee someone will get to your second pick, but waving extra money around might help, and it means you can then take a better guy when your pick does arrive. It wouldn’t shock me if they took someone like Hankins who slips on signability + injury concerns.

Nick: Is there a stat that factors in level of competition faced? Example: Clevinger facing Houston in back-to-back starts vs. Ohtani’s start vs. the Yankees being skipped so he sees the Tigers?
Keith Law: I know BP has listed aggregate stats of batters faced (so you can see the triple-slash line of a pitcher’s opponents).

James: Hi Keith, thanks for these chats. I can only scout the statline here, but would you say that Jonathan Hernandez is arguably the best pitching prospect the Rangers have (with Cole ragans out right now anyways)?
Keith Law: Who’s his competition at the moment? Ragans is out, Matuella has a 9+ ERA, Speas can’t throw strikes, Cody is out, even Crouse is out.

scott: Hi, Keith. how do we explain what is going with guys like Charlie Morton? 34 yrs old and seems to be getting better. is it a new pitch? something the Astro’s coaches do better than other pitching coaches? thanks
Keith Law: Changed approach in that month he was in Philly, and the Astros kept it going. Stopped trying to sink the ball, went with more four-seamers up.

Mark: How does the process of trying to get a player to “slide” in the draft work? Does a team tell the player they will pay them x amount of $, and the player then tells other teams that’s the floor of what they’d take?
Keith Law: Exactly. Don’t take my guy because he won’t sign for less than $2 million. Sometimes it works, sometimes Anthopoulos says screw you, I’ll take who I want.

Andrew: Thanks for all the work Keith, including the latest mock. I know you have Winn at 2 to the SFG, but what would you do if you were Sabean / Evans? Take Stewart because he’s your best player available?
Keith Law: I’d make an offer somewhat below slot to Stewart and Liberatore (my #3) and see who takes it. You do want to be able to go over at pick 45 and grab someone else of first-round caliber.

Krontz: If MLB expands to 32 teams, what’s your favorite setup then? Eight divisions w/ four teams each where division champs make playoffs and no more Wild Cards?
Keith Law: Worse. That will give us another sub-500 division winner.

Derek: Adam Eaton is heading on a rehab assignment and scheduled to come back next week. What should the Nats do upon his return? It seems clear that Harper, Eaton, and Soto are the three best bats and should play most of the time. CF defense would be a problem, but the extra offense more than makes up for it, in my opinion. Who of those three would you stick in CF? I can make a case for and against each one.
Keith Law: Soto can handle CF.

barbeach: Keith: Love the chat and the other posts–and bought and loved your book. Thanks so much for all that! Dom Thompson Williams on NYY High A team is a dinger machine early on. (I know, SSS) But is he someone we should keep an eye on?
Keith Law: He’s 23 with a .263 OBP since his promotion and ~40% K rate, so that’s a no.

Dave: How would you handle a situation like Felix Hernandez in Seattle. Guy is a Mariners legend, and locked into another year at $27 million, but is clearly hurting the team when he pitches. With all that mileage on his arm, he’s not going to become elite again.
Keith Law: Do they have a better option for his rotation spot? I may be forgetting someone, but if they do, then they need to just replace him.

Brandon: Would Mize rank in your top 50 MILB after signing?
Keith Law: Yes, my #1 prospect in every draft class has been a top 50 prospect when I’ve done the list in July.

Pete: Austin Meadows, Gleyber Torres, even Ronald Guzman … all showing a lot more more HR pop in the bigs than they did in the minors. Has to be the baseball, right? Also, is Meadows a star if he stays healthy?
Keith Law: Definitely the baseball – now we know something’s different. But Meadows was just not very good in AAA, and it’s foolish to disregard that and assume his 50 AB in the majors are the truth.

Derek: If you were a fan of a team that decided they were going to draft Luke Heimlich, what would your reaction be? Even knowing that there’s a chance that he flames out in the minors and never gets called up, my gut reaction would be disappointment and I’d be praying that he never gets called up.
Keith Law: I’d call the office and cancel my season tickets or say I’m done spending money on the team.

Michael: Hi Keith- I am confused about why more hitters don’t try to beat the shift by bunting or going the other way. Especially in a high leverage, late inning situation when you need baserunners. What’s the deal here? “Hit ’em where the ain’t”, right?
Keith Law: I’m confused too and have no answer.

Kevin: What’s the ceiling/floor of Cole Winn?
Keith Law: Ceiling is #2 starter because of control/command of above-average but not elite stuff. Floor … well, he’s a HS pitcher, the floor is that he never sniffs the majors, unfortunately, but I’d bet he does more than that.

Kevin: Who do you expect to be some of the overslot draft picks in the second round?
Keith Law: If you compare my top 100 to my mocks, any HS kids I have in the top 40 or so who don’t go in the first round are obvious targets for over-slot deals. Siani comes to mind. Seigler, Thomas, Scott, Hankins, Rocker could all go over slot in the comp round or second. All good prospects with strong commitments to good schools.

Justin : Did you watch the Americans? If no, any plans to?
Keith Law: I’ve never seen it.

Andy: I think it’s finally time for you to admit to your burner accounts. You’re actually tweeting under the name CJ Nitkowski right?
Keith Law: I’ve been trolling Lebron and the rest of you for years as Skip Bayless.

Joe Don: No question, just thanks for doing these. Best chatter in baseball. I’ll hang up and listen.
Keith Law: Thanks!

Archie: You mentioned that Madrigal is likely a sure fire big leaguer. How long do you think he will take to get there?
Keith Law: Late 2019.
Keith Law: Remember he’s probably still regaining strength after the hand injury. Same for McCarthy at UVA.

Steve: Hi Keith, do you think Jason Martin is a starter in Pittsburgh? He’s never not hit.
Keith Law: Extra guy. Limited to LF, don’t see the power to profile there.

MuellerTime: Winker to the bench – dumb move, or dumbest move?
Keith Law: Dumb developmental move. Would have helped his own cause with better performance, but still, this kid is part of the future.

BE: Reports are that Christin Stewart is making strides on defense. Can he play LF in the majors?
Keith Law: I have always thought he could play a passable if below average LF.

Santos: I don’t understand the argument in favor of Rizzo’s slide, or breaking up a play on purpose in general. If a player ran into a first baseman on purpose on their way through the base, everyone would agree that’s a dirty play, so why do some people think it’s OK to do that same thing, but use your legs instead? How is it different? The competition in baseball is not about physically overpowering your opponent.
Keith Law: I said on Twitter even if it was legal it was not acceptable. I’m glad MLB ruled it illegal, but now they have to warn him and then suspend him if he does it again.

Andy: Do any teams voluntarily pay minor leaguers more? I’m just thinking that if there’s a late round high school kid, not a huge bonus, but you’ll get 10k per month in salary may convince him.
Keith Law: Only minor league free agents.

Ryan: Are there any similarities between Nola and Singer coming into the draft? Believe you had Nola rated higher with his command and movement on pitches. Phils haven’t had much success with high draft pick position players. Read Gilbert could be a possibility.
Keith Law: There’s some delivery similarities, but Nola is better across the board – more flexible, better command, better changeup. I like Gilbert a lot but he’s probably a reach at 3.

JR: Anything you think MLB could do to better promote the draft and make it a bigger media event (assuming they want too)? I realize there is only so much they can do given a lot of the players being drafted are high schoolers (and even the college guys aren’t on TV all the time like their NCAA basketball/football counterparts) that the casual fan knows nothing about.
Keith Law: Trades. Allow trades. It’s so simple and no one will push for it.

Russ: Tirso Ornelas is acquitting himself nicely at for age 18 in High-A. Is he a potential top 50 type prospect down the line?
Keith Law: I think so although as a RF he has a high offensive bar to clear. I believe in the swing.

Erwin: What do you think of Dennis Santana? SP long term?
Keith Law: I haven’t seen him since March 2017, and the only scouts I know who’ve seen him didn’t see him in Tulsa, but we all had him as a reliever coming out of last season. Two pitch guy with lower slot. He is, however, a converted SS and relatively new to pitching, so maybe he’s something very different this year. I’m hoping his debut comes soon and not on Monday night so I can see it.

JR: Who do you predict makes it the MLB first from this years draft?
Keith Law: I have to do a column on ‘superlatives’ and that will be one of them. Mize isn’t a bad bet, though.

TJ: Do you think there is ANYthing suspicious about the resurgence of all of these Astros pitchers at the same time?
Keith Law: No, Trevor, I don’t.

Russ: Cavan Biggio’s breakout reminds me of Kingery adding HR pop out of nowhere last year. Do you buy Biggio as a regular in the bigs?
Keith Law: Where does he play? Kingery is a 7 runner and 7 defender at second. Biggio is none of those things.

Aaron C.: I’m sure there are much better examples, but can you help me understand why teams draft/acquire players (ex. Casey Meisner when Oakland got him) and then immediately tweak/change what’s ostensibly been working?
Keith Law: Nope, I don’t get it. I understand changing what hasn’t been working, and that’s a great way to find hidden value.

JT: The rumour or speculation was spread on Twitter that Meadows is seeing the ball better in the better light MLB parks. That sounds, well, like BS. How do you think the Pirates accommodate their OF?
Keith Law: That is … baseball pseudoscience? I am fine giving Meadows an opportunity but still don’t think they should give up on Polanco.

addoeh: How long before the draft would potential draftees and teams start exchanging dollar figures?
Keith Law: That’s already sort of started with asks from players/advisers but the serious stuff starts Monday.

Gavin: I know you don’t follow other sports, but how many current NBA players could you name? More than 10?
Keith Law: Lebron. Curry. Durant. Kevin Love. Westbrook. Isaiah Thomas (that’s almost unfair, isn’t it?). Irving. um … that Kristaps guy on the Knicks, because wasn’t SAS horribly wrong about him and I keep seeing it on Twitter?
Keith Law: oh, Carmelo Anthony.
Keith Law: I think I’m tapped out there.

Max: Weird situation with Vasil and thanks for your article on him. Makes no sense for him to opt out. Wouldn’t the concern of future injury lead him to believe that if he can get life changing money with an overslot end of 1st round deal, it might be worth more than going to college now? Also, what is preventing a team from trying to do this? Should every team be calling him to see what he says on draft day, in case he changes his mind and will accept such a deal?
Keith Law: UVA had another player, Brandon Neeck, withdraw from the draft too. Maybe the coaching staff has something to do with this? And maybe MLB needs to step into this process.

Stan: If you drafted Tanner Dodson, would you send him out as a pitcher, a hitter, or let him do both and see what works best?
Keith Law: Sounds like pitcher is the belief. No reason not to let him hit a little this summer, since all college pitchers are on restricted schedules their first pro seasons anyway, and see what happens.

Tony: When will Forest Whitely be ready for the MLB?
Keith Law: Later this year. Just came off suspension and still hasn’t pitched in a game.

Dave: Hi Keith thanks for the chats, I look forward to them every week. Thanks too for Smart Baseball, really enjoying it. He’s getting 13.4k’s per 9, giving up 2.6 walks per nine and has an ERA of 2.76 in AAA, all improvements from 2017. He’s also scrapped his slider and introduced a cutter. At the risk of scouting the stat line and relying on a relatively SSS, is Jalen Beeks more than just a guy?
Keith Law: He had the cutter last year too. His results are great, but all scouts I’ve asked have him as a reliever.

Juan Soto: Am I exceeding your expectations?
Keith Law: It’s been ten games. There are no expectations for a sample that small.

Jim: Keith, thanks as always for the chats. According to the Transactions page on ESPN, Minnesota “Traded RHP Phil Hughes, cash and the 74th overall draft pick in 2018 to San Diego for C Janigson Villalobos”. How is that draft piece in there?
Keith Law: That draft pick is the only reason the trade happened. The Padres just got an extra $800K in pool money.

Pat: Hoe much does spin rate RPM matter? Ie a 95 mph fastball, but one has greater spin rate. Does it matter more on breaking pitches?
Keith Law: Very high or very low spin rate on a FB makes it more effective. Dead-average spin rate and average velocity is a hitter’s favorite kind of fastball.

Ray: Is your position on Heimlich and other offenders that you don’t want them to be in a job that has influence over others or just that they should never have a meaningful job? I’m speaking more from the standpoint of what to do with rehabbed offenders that aren’t high profile.
Keith Law: I cover baseball. My position is that no baseball team should employ someone who did what he admitted he did.
Keith Law: (It’s also worth mentioning that the idea that every offender can be “rehabbed” isn’t well supported by science. I think it comes more from theology – there’s certainly a strong strain in Christianity arguing for forgiveness and second chances, but there are some paraphilias that just can’t be fixed, and that should play into our views on how the justice system and society should handle people who’ve committed such crimes. But for me to go from there to say that such a person should never be employed anywhere would be beyond the scope of what I know on the topic.)

addoeh: I’ll guess your NHL player list. “Crosby, Ovechkin, and, umm…, is Jagr is playing?”
Keith Law: Bossy, Potvin, Goring, Tonelli, Bill Smith, Trottier, Gillies, Sutter, Chico Resch!

Thomas: Your prospect work is second to none, but I’m curious if there are any MLB guys you’ve enjoyed watching develop this year? Anyone who has been a pleasant surprise for you? You must at least be happy to see Jurickson Profar getting some ABs.
Keith Law: Yep. Soler, Mazara, Snell too.

Santos: Jim’s question was how can MN trade a pick if trading picks isn’t allowed?
Keith Law: Ah, I didn’t follow. Competitive balance picks are tradeable. No other picks can be traded.

Cletus: Ryan Mountcastle an MLB regular?
Keith Law: Yes. Not sure at what position.

Orville Overall: Hans Crouse was out? I thought he was slated to join Spokane when the Northwest League starts up.
Keith Law: Biceps something-or-other, I believe. Spokane doesn’t start for 3 weeks, so he may be back by then.

Ryan: What if Heimlich got a full pardon from Trump, like Dinesh D’Souza did? Then can he play ball? Seriously, D’Souza – WTF?!
Keith Law: D’Souza, who helped out closeted LGBT students at Dartmouth and loves to repeat the conspiracy theory bullshit that Soros was a Nazi collaborator (he wasn’t; he was 14 when WWII ended). Twitter needs to just kick him and his ilk off entirely.

Justin : How do you feel about the way baseball is discussed on general sports show on your network? On PTI for example there is a particularly disdainful attitude toward analytics/wins and RBI are still the measures of a player…
Keith Law: I don’t watch any of those shows, sorry. I don’t think I’m in their target audience.

Jonathan wants to know: Please provide a comp for Jonathan India, please? Thanks!
Keith Law: I don’t do player comps, sorry. I find them generally misleading. It’s part of why I don’t do player tool grades either – they became shortcuts that people tend to focus on to the detriment of the scouting reports as a whole.

Jason : I know you were high on him prior to the season, but has Adell answered the questions about his ability to make consistent contact? Where do you see his ceiling?
Keith Law: So far, yes. Could be a superstar with those tools and this (surprising) contact rate.

Tom: Can Spencer Torkelson be a GUY, or is he just a guy?
Keith Law: Just a guy.

Matt : How often do you go to games in the Cape Cod league? I’ll be out there in June and I am deciding if it’s worth a one of my few nights out there.
Keith Law: I love the Cape, but haven’t been the last two years for various reasons.

TJ: Triston Casas – playable at 1b for a bit or is he a near term DH?
Keith Law: Fine at 1b, not good there, but not Vogelbach.

curt: Thought on Drew Waters from the Braves? Top 100 come winter?
Keith Law: Top 100? The bar is really high for that. I don’t see him anywhere close.

Gene: Keith, love the chats. I’m a depressed O’s fan and an English Comp teacher. I’ve always enjoyed your book reviews and wondered if you had any good banned novel title recs that I might incorporate into one of my classes. My students already read Faulkner, Atwood, Chabon, Morrison, Toole, Vonnegut, Hemingway, etc.
Keith Law: Color Purple gets listed often as a banned/challenged title. A quick google search tells me Grapes of Wrath is often challenged – maybe for the final scene? (GTFOH, people.) One Hundred Years of Solitude is an amazing book often challenged. Are your students too young for Lolita? While very often banned, it’s not actually explicit – it’s disturbing AF, but that’s part of its power.

The Great Alonso “Bohm”?: Are you a believer in what Peter Alonso is doing in AA at age 23 and if Bohm were to slip to the Mets, would they take him knowing they already have Alonso (plus Smith who is trying to play OF)?
Keith Law: I am a believer in Alonso, and Bohm would be in their mix but perhaps not their top choice. I think I can come up with six names I believe they’d take over him (which includes guys like Mize or Bart, who go before them in any scenario).

Chris: Do scouts look hard at level of opposition in minors? Like if a top prospect is belting all of his home runs off non-prospects, does that lessen his value? Or too hard to quantify?
Keith Law: Yes, absolutely.

Scott B: As a Red Sox fan, now living in Delaware, I was able to catch Salem this weekend in Wilmington. I came away unimpressed with what I saw. Any prospects of note that maybe had a bad weekend?
Keith Law: That’s a bad team.

Tom C: I spent too much time thinking about Molly Knight’s question the other week about who is the most famous current MLB player. My immediate thought was Jeter, which, umm.. Anyway, I went with Aaron Judge based on 1) plays for NYY, 2) hits home runs, 3) has really cool name. Who would you say?
Keith Law: I think Harper or Altuve. Altuve’s surprisingly well known … I run into people who profess they’re not fans of baseball but know him or ask about “that short guy in Houston” or something like it.

RW: Can an NL team draft Seth Beer with hopes that maybe he fits in at 1B or, wishcast on him in LF?
Keith Law: They can do that. There is no rule against them doing so. There’s also nothing stopping me from laughing at them.

Chris: Have you heard anything from scouts about Richie Martin? Is this just some random SSS, or has he rediscovered his swing from The Cape?
Keith Law: Guy repeating the level, plays 34 games this year, with 82 last year of awful performance. I’m not saying this year isn’t different, but the evidence before us should discourage you.

Bobby Bradley’s 40-time: Are you a fan of Vonnegut?
Keith Law: Yes. I read every novel of his but the last one, I believe.

Jim: Hate to whale on the moribund equine, and can take this to the comments later, but the transaction notice doesn’t say “compensation pick” (as they usually do), and the 74th pick comes out to late second/early third round. That sounds like a regular draft pick, unless I’m missing something.
Keith Law: It is the last pick in the Competitive Balance Round B.

UGW: Let’s assume Harper and Machado both get 10 yr, 300 million dollar deals. Given that both will be entering age 26 seasons, will these deals be a net positive for the team in your opinion?
Keith Law: Yes. They may not fare well in the last few years of the deal (but they still might given how great those players are), but they’ll work out just fine.

mike sixel: Keith, do you drink Rye? If so, recommendations for mixing rye?
Keith Law: It makes a fine Rye Old-Fashioned. That’s about all I know about it.

JJ: Never been a huge fan of Vonnegut’s books, but his cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” was spectacular.
Keith Law: Salvaged the entire movie for me.

Corey: speaking of the Boston farm system, other than Pawtucket as a solid true taxi squad but with few rising prospects , the system overall looks bad. obviously you want a strong farm but given how young + stacked with longer term players the MLB club is and will be for a few years, i shouldn’t feel that concerned right ?
Keith Law: Right. The system is down (yo), but two big reasons are all the promotions to the majors, and the trades that brought in Sale, Kimbrel, and, well, the ghost of Tyler Thornburg.

GIO: I know Swaggerty gets comped to Gardner by some, but Gardner was just a slap hitter when he first came up. I more see Kiermeier in the swing and the set up. What ‘ya think?
Keith Law: Right, Gardner came into power after he got to the majors (I think the ballpark helped, because he realized he could drop the bat head and almost golf balls out to right). Swaggerty is trying to hit like that now, and it’s meant more homers but a worse average and a higher strikeout rate.

Paul: Free case of Oreos if you answer my fantasy question. I bought low on Goldschmidt. Any optimism that he gets it back on track this year? Where do I send the Oreos?
Keith Law: Any optimism would be based on past performance; he’s not just been bad this year, but seems to be trending worse, as if something’s physically wrong with him (there is no public evidence of this, I’m just saying that’s how bad he’s been). I’m also wondering where you’re getting all these Oreos.

Chris: Isn’t the downside to teams trading draft picks, that we would see a lot of picks dealt to large market teams for salary relief (thinking about the Dbacks trade of Arroyo a few years ago..and that was before the Brain-trust arrived in Miami)?
Keith Law: Arroyo was traded with Toussaint to clear the salary, so that’s already happening even without trading trade picks. However, the argument that you broached is the one originally made in the 1980s to support banning trades of picks. The environment has flipped today where most low-payroll teams would much rather acquire picks than deal them, because draft picks remain the highest ROI way to add players to your system. It’s a screaming bargain when you hit on one, so I doubt any semi-competent GM is going to just deal away these picks on a regular basis.

Chris: What is stopping a team from telling Mize “listen we pick 20th, but we’ll blow our entire draft budget on you, and draft all senior signs besides you?
Keith Law: He wouldn’t fall that far. There’s only so much you can do, especially with a college junior, whose leverage is limited; he’s certainly not returning to school next year.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week’s chat. I will post yet another mock on Monday morning and then chat that afternoon to discuss the draft, which begins Monday evening. I’ll also be hosting the BBTN Podcast on Monday while Buster is traveling, so we’ll be talking mostly draft there as well. Thanks so much for reading and for all of your questions!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ May 31, 2018
→ By keith

Might and Magic: Elemental Guardians.

Might and Magic was one of the most important and influential of the earliest wave of computer RPGs, debuting in 1986 and continuing through the tenth installment in the series in 2014. Along with Bard’s Tale (my personal favorite), Ultima, Wizardry, and the Gold Box D&D games, M&M became both a major driver of the popularity of RPGs in the 1980s and early 1990s and helped lay the foundation for later waves of RPGs on the computer, including the Baldur’s Gate and Elder Scrolls series.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to see the M&M name on an entirely different game with today’s release of Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians (iTunes • Google Play), a free to play game that dispenses with most aspects of traditional RPGs and strips the game down to character upgrades and battles – lots and lots of battles. If your favorite aspects of dungeon crawls were the waves of enemies you had to defeat, then this is perfect for you. I always preferred the storylines and puzzles of the RPGs I did play, so I tired of Elemental Guardians sooner than other players might, but I will say it was mildly addictive for the way the game constantly dangles new achievements or goals in front of you while raising the bar slightly for each battle in sequence.

The main idea of Elemental Guardians is that you’re some sort of mage who will collect and train various creatures to do all the fighting for you, leveling them up and arming them with “glyphs” that increase their powers. Each creature has a main attack skill and two special attack or defense skills unique to that creature type and that can only be used once every few rounds in battle. Some allow the creature to heal itself or another creature in the party; some focus an attack on one enemy and may paralyze or stun it; some spread the attack against all enemies; and so on, with the game giving you enough creatures that you can pick and choose to form your ideal parties.

The battles involve waves of enemies – three waves in the main track that starts with the tutorial, five waves in some of the separate areas with greater potential rewards – that you must defeat without resting to heal your creatures. Part of the trick of Elemental Guardians is figuring out which enemies to attack first in each wave; because of the weird way the game handles initiative, you’re always better off killing one enemy at a time than spreading the attack too thinly across all enemies. When it’s one of your creatures’ turn to attack, an arrow appears over each of the enemies in green, yellow, or red, indicating if that creature has an advantage or disadvantage when attacking that specific enemy. You can also turn on ‘auto’ mode and let the AI do the actual fighting for you, which isn’t as bad an idea as it might sound because later battles against higher-level enemies can get a little long and monotonous.

Aside from battles, upgrading your creatures is the main task in the game, and one I found a little convoluted. Creatures level up automatically from gaining experience points, although you can also spend potions (which aren’t super plentiful) to level them up more quickly. Each creature can wear six of those glyphs I mentioned, and you can spend more energy points to upgrade the glyphs from level one to at least level 12 (that’s as far as I got), although each time you try to upgrade them you run some unknown risk of failure. You also get a bonus if you put three glyphs of the same type on a creature. When a creature maxes out its levels, you can bump it up a rank, from rank one all the way to five, but to do so, you have to destroy other creatures in your troupe, so I found I was adding and leveling up creatures for the sole purpose of destroying them later to level up my main fighters … which is kind of distasteful if you think about it too much. If you collect enough rare artifacts, you can even ‘evolve’ your creatures, but I think doing so would require playing the game for dozens of hours and I never got close to that point.

You can earn points for completing Missions or reaching Achievements, most of which are things you’ll do routinely just by playing the game and fighting battles, and you earn certain points and rewards every 24 hours anyway, so unless you’re playing this eight hours or more a day you’re not likely to run out of the resources you need to keep playing. There’s also an Arena if you want to battle other actual players from around the world, although I popped in there once and found that the potential opponents were levelled up way beyond any of my creatures, which meant it was sort of a waste of time to try to fight them.

The base game is free to play and Ubisoft pledges to keep it that way, but they do allow you to pay to speed up some of your upgrades or to buy what you’d need to play it for even longer stretches. This isn’t quite the Farmville model, where you’re spending money without a point; it’s more like the game is free for a few hours a day, and if you want to play it even more, or to skip the most basic levels, you can drop a few bucks to get to the harder material.

So that’s a long way of saying that Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians isn’t really my cup of tea, but it’s a good game for its style. Some people just love hack and slash dungeon crawlers, and this game distills the RPG experience to those elements: you fight, you get stuff, you level up and trick out your fighters, and then you go do it all over again. The battles are largely about brute force, and using your special powers every time they become available again, so it’s more about bulking up than any kind of strategy in battle, and the story laid on top of the main path of battles is just window dressing. There are also some areas of the battle map that are greyed out for future expansions, so I imagine they’ll continue to increase the difficulty as players max out their creatures’ strengths. I think I’ve played this one out for myself, though.

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