→ August 1, 2017
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Music update, July 2017.

I’m going dark for a week, but I’ll tide you over with a new playlist, which you can access directly in Spotify or via the widget below.

Arcade Fire – Signs of Life. I’ve listened to their new album, Everything Now, and I can certainly understand why some people hate it. The lyrics are beyond pretentious; the too-clever-by-half songwriting we saw on Reflektor appears to be a feature rather than a bug. Social commentary and criticism by anecdote worked beautifully on The Suburbs, one of the best albums of the century so far, but their frontal attempt to ridicule their targets only leaves them looking ridiculous (“Infinite Content” comes to mind). But this song is good, “Creature Comforts” is solid, and the album’s title track is definitely the best thing ABBA has done in forty years.

Sløtface – Pitted. This Norwegian punk-pop act, definitely among my favorite finds of the last year or so, does what Arcade Fire used to do – they tell fun stories that seem frivolous but abound with meaningful details, and every song they’ve released has had a catchy hook.

Atomic Tom – Burn the Witch. Atomic Tom covered my #1 song of 2016, and managed to make it newly sinister via a different arrangement and the introduction of a heavy guitar line in the second chorus.

Allie X – Vintage. Almost too poppy for my tastes, but the chorus and the keyboard riff both stuck in my head after one listen.

Hundred Waters – Blanket Me. Hundred Waters had my top album of 2015, and this single is very much in the same vein of experimental, airy, voice-as-instrument music.

Foster The People – Lotus Eater. Didn’t love their new album, which dispenses with the stuff that worked (for me) on Supermodel, but this track does recall that album’s more rock-oriented moments.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – The Punishment of Luxury. I can’t believe it’s 2017 and I put an OMD track on a best new music playlist.

Dan Croll – Bad Boy. I wasn’t familiar with this English singer-songwriter, who just released his second album, Emerging Adulthood. This seems like it has a good chance to be a big crossover pop hit if US radio gives it a chance.

The War On Drugs – Strangest Thing. I wish their songs were shorter, and maybe that the singer would stop wth the Dylan impersonations, but they’ve reeled off a bunch of compelling songs in a row now.

Wolf Parade – Valley Boy. I didn’t think these guys were ever getting back together.

Little Cub – Too Much Love. I felt like some of the vocals on this London trio’s debut album, Still Life, are just too precious, but the soulful electronica behind the words is simultaneously sophisticated and rapturous.

Nine Inch Nails – Not Anymore. I didn’t think much of NIN’s new EP; this was the best track of the five.

YONAKA – Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya. Strong riot grrrl vibe here with a perfect putdown in the hooky chorus. This is the kind of track Mister Wives keeps trying to make.

The Night Café – Felicity. This Liverpudlian quartet is touring with Sundara Karma and sounds a lot like Sundara Karma.

Prong – Divide And Conquer. I’ve mentioned before how Prong’s Beg to Differ is both one of my favorite metal albums ever and a seminal record in defining my taste in music. New Prong kind of makes me sad, since they’ve long since morphed into any-metal act with only occasional hints of their former glory, like on this track, still angry if overproduced.

Arch Enemy – The World Is Yours. I thought Arch Enemy’s last album, its first with the band’s new lead singer, was formulaic and cliched, a far cry from the band’s heights as one of the most important bands in the Gothenburg school of death metal. This song, from their upcoming album Will to Power, is easily better than anything from that last record.

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→ July 30, 2017
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The Able McLaughlins.

Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now Fiction) in 1926, the sixth time the award was handed out, part of a surprising run where four winners in five years were women authors (along with Edith Wharton’s wonderful The Age of Innocence, Willa Cather’s sentimental One of Ours, and Edna Ferber’s forgettable So Big). Why it won is probably a mystery lost to the sands of time, as it’s a trifle of a work, a slim slice of quaint Americana that pays tribute to homesteaders and the strength of family, without memorable characters or a particularly solid plot.

(I’m going to spoil much of the story here, because you’re probably never going to read this book, and if I don’t get into plot details this post will be just six words long.)

The McLaughlins are a hard-working family of Scottish immigrants in Iowa with some indefinite number of children, one of whom, Wully, takes a fancy to the neighbors’ daughter Christie. He goes off to fight for a second time in the Civil War, but when he returns, Christie won’t so much as give him the time of day … because, he finally discovers, she’s pregnant, having been raped by another neighbor (and maybe cousin of Wully’s) named Peter Keith. Wully runs Peter out of town under threat of death, marries Christie, and claims the child – born too soon to have been conceived legitimately – as his own. Minor scandals and controversies ensue and fade away, until eventually Peter returns, having gone to see Christie, leading into a multi-chapter search around the area for him or his corpse, although only Wully and a few others know the reason for his departure.

That’s not a whole lot to go on, especially when reading with the morals of the modern reader who will see this all for what it is. Rape victims still feel shame today, but the idea that a woman is responsible for her rape is at least less pervasive in society today, so Christie acting as if she’d done something wrong, and then everyone working to hide the truth, is an anachronism that makes the entire story hard to accept today – even if you know this was a widespread attitude in the time of the book’s setting or publication. Instead of even questioning the established order, Wilson wrote a book about forgiveness and Christian morality; how Wully’s mother is so disappointed in him when she believes the baby is his, how relieved she is when she finds out it’s not and that he was doing the Right Thing by marrying Christie anyway, how Wully and Christie end up forgiving her assailant when he comes to a bad end.

It was really a tiresome read, bearing none of the good qualities of classic American literature, not prose, not memorable characters, and certainly not story. I’m not surprised the book is hard to find – Delaware’s statewide library system didn’t have a copy, so I had to request it from the University of Delaware via an inter-library loan. The copy I got appeared to be a first or very early edition, and it was falling apart as I read it, perhaps an apt metaphor for the irrelevance of this kind of story ninety years after it was written.

Next up: I finished Anna Smaill’s dystopian novel The Chimes and am almost done with John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

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→ July 29, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 7/28/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top five farm systems in baseball, broke down the Jaime Garcia trade to Minnesota, and broke down Tampa Bay’s trades for Lucas Duda and Dan Jennings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

UPDATE: I’ve got one more Insider post covering a few small trades from this week.

I appeared on the Freezing Cold Takes podcast this week, discussing my worst takes, my scouting process (and how failed evaluations have changed it), and Smart Baseball.

I’ve exhausted most of my signings schedule, but will be at GenCon in Indianapolis, signing books on Friday, August 18th, and I believe I will also be signing books at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia in November. Also, Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago has signed copies for sale; call (773) 697-8066 to purchase one.

And now, the links…

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→ July 28, 2017
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After the Divorce.

Italian author Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the second woman to win that honor, the second Italian to do so, and the first Italian prose writer to win it. (There have been 113 winners, six of them from Italy, but four of the winners won for poetry or drama.) Her work focused largely on portraits of regional, peasant life in her native Sardinia, a Mediterranean island that is an autonomous region within Italy, with its own indigenous language and unique history, and a relatively strong economy today that, prior to World War II, was poorer and more driven by agriculture and mining. Deledda’s works, including her 1902 novel After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle), tend to put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances so Deledda can display or criticize social mores, such as the economic disadvantage of being a woman in Italy at the center of this book.

Giovanna and Constantino are a young, happily married couple with an infant son whose unremarkable lives are shattered when Constantino is arrested for and convicted of the murder of his cruel, abusive uncle. A new law passed in Italy shortly after the trial allows a woman to divorce a husband who has been convicted of a crime and jailed, so Giovanna does so, under duress, and marries the neighboring landowner who has been lusting for her for years but whom she rejected prior to marrying Constantino. The marriage is a disaster, of course, and eventually the truth of the murder comes to light and Constantino is released to return to his village, where he and Giovanna begin an affair that leads, almost inevitably, to tragedy.

Although the end of After the Divorce doesn’t quite match the common ending of early novels on the same theme – Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and Anna Karenina all mine somewhat similar material – the novel is still at heart about how women of that era lacked economic power. When Constantino was jailed with no real hope of parole or acquittal, Giovanna has no way to feed herself or her child, and becomes a burden on her own money-obsessed mother.

Deledda never blames her protagonist, instead creating the framework of Shakespearean tragedies to put her core characters on a collision course with each other that you know will end badly for at least one of them. There’s no real way out of the mess short of someone dying; under the law, Giovanna is married to the vile neighbor, Brontu, who, along with his mother, treats her as a servant, and can’t divorce him to return to her first husband now that he’s free. Yet the culture of the time presented no avenue for her to earn any living, and the trial wiped out her family’s only source of income. It’s a feminist novel that predates most feminist literature; even The Awakening, which I think is one of the earliest examples of that genre, has a protagonist driven to infidelity by boredom (inflicted on her by a society that won’t let her do anything with her mind) rather than economic need. Deledda here seems to be describing an injustice of the time, one that might feel a little quaint today but was a real issue in much of Christendom before the post-World War II liberalization of laws around marriage and civil rights.

I’ve seen a few references to this book or Deledda in general as antecedents of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, but I didn’t see the similarity; Ferrante, who writes under a pseudonym and has avoided nearly all media, hasn’t mentioned that this was an influence, and other than the setting there doesn’t seem to be a common thread here. If you liked Ferrante’s novels, you could certainly give Deledda a spin, but I wouldn’t say liking one indicates that you’ll like the other.

Next up: I’ve finished Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, a Puliter winner, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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→ July 27, 2017
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Klawchat, 7/27/17.

I’ll be in Chicago this weekend, speaking over lunch at the Standard Club (a ticketed event) and then signing books that evening at Volumes Book Cafe.

Keith Law: I’m on track, like a Long Island train. Klawchat.

Sean: With the Sonny Gray situation do you think the A’s should take the best offer now or wait until the offseason hoping a better market develops?
Keith Law: I don’t think they HAVE to take the best offer now; if they feel like they’re not getting sufficient return, they can and should wait. But I think they will get an offer they like.

Dodgers catchers: Do you like Keibert Ruiz or Will Smith more? Do you think both make it as catchers?
Keith Law: Ruiz has a lot more offensive upside than Smith, but lower probability. Smith is more advanced on defense right now; I think Ruiz is more bat-first.

Jack: JP Crawford has gotta be a september callup this year right?
Keith Law: Depends. A month ago, he hadn’t done anything to justify a callup. If he keeps hitting AND playing hard AND shows better defense, then yes.

Noah: Is Turang your early favorite to go 1-1 next year?
Keith Law: He’s a possible candidate for 1-1, not an early favorite. Don’t think there is a favorite in this class.

International: One thing that’s always intrigued be is that despite the fact that the Dominican Republic and Haiti are the same island we see so few players come from Haiti, do you have any insight into why that is? Are they truly that different from a socioeconomic standpoint?
Keith Law: Same island, different countries, cultures, and languages. They play baseball as kids in the DR everywhere on the island, but don’t in Haiti. Players with Haitian ancestry have all grown up in the DR (I think).

brian snitker: is Dansby’s demotion too early or too late?
Keith Law: It is short-sighted and unnecessary. When you’re building, you don’t demote your long-term shortstop in favor of short-term assets (Phillips, Adams) or flashes in the pan (Camargo). It’s really out of character for Atlanta, who’ve done almost everything for the long term.

Nick: What’re your thoughts on the Neshek trade?
Keith Law: Phillies got three useful pieces, none elite prospects, nobody in the Rockies’ top 15 or so. Requena is the most intriguing because it sounds like he can stay a starter and he’s pitched well in a horrible home environment (Asheville). Hammer is a one-pitch reliever with a high spin rate on the FB. Gomez is probably a good utility infielder; if he got on base more, I’d like him as a potential regular at 2b.

Nick: As a Phillies fan, I’m really frustrated by managements commitment to Tommy Joseph. Why won’t they just bench him and play Hoskins???
Keith Law: I think they were hoping they’d get something for Joseph in trade. That seems unlikely now.

Ed: What do you do to keep your knives sharp? Steel, steel + something else, send them out every once in a while.
Keith Law: I have a small knife sharpener recommended by Michael Ruhlman (et al) that I use maybe twice a year.

Johnny Lee: In your opinion, what Blue jays should do before this 7/31?
Keith Law: Sell anyone unlikely to be part of the 2019 Jays. Wouldn’t sell Stroman, which I’ve seen suggested on the interwebs, in what appears to be a buyer’s market.

Jon: Giolito with another strong outing, of course on the heels of a few lesser ones. How much longer until we see him in the CHW rotation in a lost year?
Keith Law: I expect he’ll be up in September. Reports I’ve gotten have generally been positive on the stuff but varied start to start on his delivery. I would love to see him in the majors working with Don Cooper regularly, once they feel like they can trust his delivery enough that he’ll come up and be around the zone.

Sour beer: Yadier Alvarez or Mitch White?
Keith Law: Alvarez by a small and decreasing margin.

David: Duane Underwood Jr has the lively arm and athleticism, but has never put it together. Do you try him as a reliever or let him continue to eat up a 40 man spot and try and make it happen as a starter?
Keith Law: I’d try him as a reliever, with the possibility of returning him to the rotation one day if he ever fulfills his physical projection. But you’re right – it’s not happening yet.

Justen: Pirates had a triple SS promotion last week with Kevin Newman, Cole Tucker and Stephen Alemais all moving up a level. Know you’ve been bullish on Newman and he seems to be hitting better of late. Do they have anything with the other two guys?
Keith Law: I like Tucker – missed a year with shoulder surgery, bit slow coming back, great kid, very good athlete, still young for AA and probably spends most of 2018 there.

Terrence (Atlanta): KLaw, what’s the report on this kid Flexen starting for the Mets tonight?
Keith Law: I had a note on him here: http://www.espn.com/espn/now?nowId=21-0681316008736069655-4

Toby: Josh Naylor seems to be acclimateing well to AA, has he put his maturity issues behind him?
Keith Law: I haven’t heard anything about that, but his body is getting somewhat worse. I think he’s going to have to work to avoid becoming a DH.

Bob: How excited should we be in Padre-land about Michel Baez and Adrian Morejon? Which are you higher on?
Keith Law: Morejon is a 3-pitch guy right now, and LH, but Baez has size and hasn’t had Morejon’s injury scare this year. I prefer Morejon.

James : In April you wrote that Amed Rosario has “so much bat speed and strength … that he should eventually hit 15-20 homers.” Assuming he ever gets called up, is that still your expectation for him? Which young SS is he most comparable to (Lindor, Correa, Bogaerts, Seager)?
Keith Law: Yes, I think he’ll peak in that power range. I don’t like player comps; he’s his own guy.

Kyle KS: Is Bader a CF long term or destined for a corner? I thought it was odd that he was starting there over Pham who has performed well in CF in a small sample.
Keith Law: Bader looks much better than expected in CF, but I think the standard for CF defense is so high right now that he’ll eventually end up bumped by someone better (like Sierra).

Greg: Hey Keith, I was wondering what your general outlook was on the Pirates’ current state. On one hand, they have a good, young, controllable core in place (Polanco, Marte, Bell, Taillon, Rivero, etc). On the other hand, they still seem to be a few pieces away from being legitimate contenders. If you were Neal Huntington, would you aggressively pursue trades for Cole/McCutchen/Harrison now or in the winter, or would you stay the course, hope for better luck and try to win within next 2 years? Thanks!
Keith Law: I would aggressively pursue trades for those guys, targeting players in or near to the majors rather than more total talent that’s further away. I don’t think they need to consider a total rebuild.

Jesse: Who is the greatest prospect you have ever seen in person that did not make it in the majors?
Keith Law: I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone like a Brien Taylor, who is pretty clearly the biggest prospect ‘bust’ of all time – he was as good a pitching prospect as scouts of that generation had seen, and of course was derailed by an injury suffered in a bar fight (and I think is now in jail?). I saw Wade Townsend once as an amateur and his shit was ridiculous, but we know what happened there. Delmon Young was a pretty big disappointment too, but, in hindsight, I think his advantage was that he was so physically mature at 18.
Keith Law: Sorry, that answer required a little research.

addoeh: Baseball seems to be slowly turning into a situation where most at bats end with either a HR, K, or BB. It was frustrating trying to watch Tuesday’s Cubs-White Sox game because of it (even with Hawk Harrelson getting angry). Is there a solution?
Keith Law: I think it’s a problem, and I would say raise the bottom of the strike zone.

Randy: Walker Buehler rebounded nicely last night, first game just a fluke? Should the Dodgers bring him up for help out of the pen in the playoffs?
Keith Law: I believe that is their plan. I wasn’t at either game; I assume the first outing (where he couldn’t retire a batter) was a fluke.

Twflan: To what do you attribute to Kris Bryant’s relative inability to hit well with RISP this year? I know RBI’s are a silly stat these days and very situational based on your teammates getting on base, but KB has not done as well as expected in those situations…
Keith Law: Typical random fluctuation. Player performance is not uniform.

Collin Jones: The returns for the early trades have been quite underwhelming? Is that a sense of what the market is this year, or am I undervaluing the prospects involved?
Keith Law: Multiple execs have told me it’s a buyer’s market, so the returns are all coming back light.

Rachel Failla: Do you think, in our lifetimes, we’ll see a trans professional baseball player? It seems we’ve just started making progress into openly gay athletes in pro. sports, but Trump’s comments yesterday frighten me into believing trans tolerance/understanding isn’t being improved, rather taking a step backwards.
Keith Law: I think we’ll see an openly gay player in the next five years. I don’t know about a trans player, primarily because I think societal acceptance of transgender rights (or transgenderism as an inborn condition, rather than a mental illness) is so far behind acceptance even of gay & lesbian rights.

Adam: Kumar Rocker or Ethan Hankins?
Keith Law: No idea. It’s way too early for that.

Adam: I’m not sure if I missed it, but did you do a writeup on the Royals, Padres trade? Or were there not enough prospects involved for your coverage?
Keith Law: Not significant enough of a trade. Couple of spare parts for the Royals, future starter for the Padres (Strahm) and a nice lottery-ticket bat with a good swing (Ruiz).

Nate: Keith, is there a non-zero chance Casey Gillaspie turns into an average major leaguer?
Keith Law: Non-zero, but low, under 20%. I thought he was a 2nd/3rd round talent in the draft – below average athlete, first base only, strong kid but didn’t use his legs at all in his swing, making the power suspect.

Jay: Over the past few weeks Cornelius Randolph has brought his line up to .255/.350, with a little more power. (10 HR Now) I know he’s stuck in a corner OF spot, do you believe he might be throwing off the title of “failed prospect”?
Keith Law: I dislike using the past tense on a player who hasn’t clearly ‘failed,’ either through release or many years of non-performance. You could call Randolph a failing prospect, or a disappointing prospect. I don’t think anything he’s done the last few weeks changes the outlook for him; the last two scouts I asked about him came back with similarly negative views, a position-less guy without the elite hit and/or power tools he’d need. (I do or at least did like his swing last year. Really surprised he hasn’t at least hit for some average.)

@RationalMLBfan: Just read Smart Baseball very thoroughly–good book! Questions about Stolen Bases chapter. (1) Is there a database that separates out normal caught stealing with hit-and-run? (2) From a sabermetrics perspective, is the hit-and-run play a good play or does it put artificial pressure on the hitter to make contact (and possibly reduce the quality of batted ball contact), which negates any benefit of distorting the defense moving to cover the SB attempt?
Keith Law: I don’t think so on 1, because someone would have to identify those manually (subjectively) and code them as such. That means any answer to 2 won’t be derived from data, but I know Earl Weaver, among others, disdained the hit-and-run for the reason you cited – you’re forcing a swing on the hitter rather than leaving swing/no-swing decision to him to make based on the pitch.

ECinDC: Erick Fedde is getting called up to start for an injured Stras. What can we expect?
Keith Law: I think he’s more likely a reliever in the long run. Everything he throws is hard, so there’s a fringy changeup and he’s had trouble separating the breaking balls. It’s reliever feel.

Lee D, LA: Keith, two weeks ago you answered my question about “upgrading Chris Taylor” by suggesting they replace him with Verdugo. Taylor is now at .320/.388/.541 in almost 300 ABs, and only 26 years old. Still think this is a SSS phenomenon?
Keith Law: Yes, I do. His BABIP is .427. That would be the third-best BABIP for a hitter who qualified for the batting title in MLB history, behind Ty Cobb in 1911 and Joe Jackson in … oh, 1911, there you go. (In fact, no one has topped .410 since 1924, but Taylor and Ben Gamel are both over that mark right now.

Brian: What is Ronald Guzman’s ceiling in your opinion? Everyday regular?
Keith Law: Ceiling is above-average regular. Feel pretty good about him being an everyday guy.

Mac: Hi Keith. How do you justify eating meat to aggressive vegans? I never feel like my responses counter their concerns about animals. I’m not changing, but I’d just love to have a good argument. Thanks!
Keith Law: I don’t. I don’t think I need to justify my food choices to anyone but myself – and arguing meat-eating with “aggressive vegans” would be like talking religion to an atheist or atheism to a devout person. It’s just not worth the time.

Frankur: When you went to the SFG game with google, were the google employees fighting each other to see who would get to sit next to you?
Keith Law: They rotated seats. It was all quite civil. Now, if they’d been Bing people, that might have been a different story.

Mark: What is wrong with Steven Matz? Traditional numbers and peripherals are both terrible.
Keith Law: Don’t think he’s fully healthy. That’s been his story his entire pro career, unfortunately.

TJ: Is there something to this idea that Chance Adams can’t make it through the batting order three times? He’s had success at every level.
Keith Law: I haven’t heard that about him. He’s pretty good, better than I had him coming out of last year. What I get back on him that’s negative is generally about his height and lack of FB plane – but he’s a Yankee, so he’ll come up and throw a ton of offspeed stuff, mitigating any concerns (if they’re real) about the FB.

Dorn: You’re obviously down on Austin Meadows, but lets assume he comes back and finishes the year strong and healthy. Does that put him back to where you had him preseason?
Keith Law: I’m not down on him; he’s been hurt on and off this year and hasn’t performed at all. Everyone (team sources) who saw my top 50 before I published it indicated he didn’t belong.

Brett: Atlanta promoted Luiz Gohara to AAA today. Are you a fan of the move? What do you think his ceiling could be?
Keith Law: #2 starter. I guess you could argue it’s ace stuff and size but he’s never indicated that he’ll have that kind of command/control.

Nate: Thoughts on Jordan Luplow?
Keith Law: Good kid with some power and a bit of length to his swing.

James: Matt Strahm – starter or reliever for the Friars?
Keith Law: Starter once he’s healthy again. He’ll be in the ideal ballpark for developing as a starter.

Joe: Keith, it is unrealistic for the Orioles to land a Chapman/Miller package for Britton?
Keith Law: If they put him out there they should demand a package like that.

Manu: Is it possible to see Acuña in ATL this year?
Keith Law: I bet he and Gohara come up in September.

JR: Conforto on pace to hit 30 HRs (and that is with a stint on the DL and the Mets dinking around with his playing time early season). Would you be surprised if he had some 40 HR seasons (assuming he gets his name in the lineup almost every day)?
Keith Law: I would definitely be surprised – and I’ve always been a Conforto guy. Thought he’d hit .300/.400 AVG/OBP but didn’t foresee 30+ HR power.

David: Who is the worst prospect you have seen that became a star in the majors?
Keith Law: I don’t think anyone who’s been a ‘terrible’ prospect has been a star; I can think of guys I didn’t rate highly who became stars, and guys like Kinsler (whom I never saw as a prospect) who were late picks and always old for the levels but turned into stars.

Peet: So how does next year’s draft class compare to others, overall? Thanks!
Keith Law: It looks stronger, especially on the HS side.

David: Did you expect Hunter Renfroe to look this bad in the majors? Is he really just Jeff Francouer without the speed and defense?
Keith Law: He has always had two issues – bat speed is just fair, and he does not see breaking stuff well. So I’m not shocked at the struggles. I’m more shocked by Margot’s numbers.
Keith Law: Sorry, just found out a cousin of mine passed away yesterday, in her 70s I think – very sweet person who helped me reconnect with a branch of the family we’d lost contact with years ago. What a bummer.

Mike: Are the Orioles *trying to injure DylanBundy?
Keith Law: I have not liked or understood their handling of him going back to last spring. They knew he had calcification in his shoulder, they knew his injury history, and the moment he started hitting 95 in relief, they put him back in the rotation and had him going 100 pitches an outing – and did it again this year. It’s a shame. He would be on my very short list of the best HS pitchers I’ve ever seen live.

Otto: Who do you like better for the next 10 years. Manuel Margot or Andrew Benitendi? Thanks
Keith Law: Benintendi.

Mark: Blake Rutherford – second division regular or 4th OF?
Keith Law: I’m not willing to downgrade him that much just yet. It’s not the year we expected from him, but the swing is still really good and he has a solid approach.

Jay: Given Bo Bichette’s numbers, have we ever seen a prospect ever come in and hold batting averages as high as he has since being drafted?
Keith Law: I’m sure we have. Look at what his brother did that first summer. Kinsler hit like .420 or so in low-A.

Tim F: Can you critique Paul DeJong of the Cards – is his current play an outlier or can he be a solid professional shortstop? Thanks.
Keith Law: Of course his current play is an outlier (2% walk rate, 31% K rate, .300+ ISO) – but he’s definitely a big leaguer of some sort, maybe not an everyday shortstop but either a regular at 2b/3b or a multi-position regular.

John: If you had to hitch your horse to a tall Yankee pitching prospect — is Domingo Acevedo or Frecier Perez the guy to bet on?
Keith Law: Perez. Acevedo’s delivery is really rough. He can’t repeat it.

Zirinsky: Keith: What’s going on with Mateo? SSS or did the (undeserved) promotion cause something to click?
Keith Law: He looked pretty good the other day – bat speed was good, hit that HR I tweeted about, made one really great play at short, then didn’t run out a grounder and half-assed a throw on a routine play that the 1b had to scoop. I do not know this firsthand, but I have a feeling he was moping in high-A and started to play harder after the promotion. The player I saw on Wednesday should not have hit .240/.280/.whatever in high-A.

Carlin: Been reading rumors about the A’s coveting a CF prospect for Gray and scouting Florial heavily. Even speaking as a Yankees fan, isn’t Florial a really underwhelming centerpiece for the a top-of-the-roto guy?
Keith Law: He should be the second piece, not the first. 30% K rate and just generally raw. He’s like a Cameron Maybin sort of prospect – enormous upside due to his physical gifts, but a long way to go as a player.

HugoZ: Why should we be so exercised about Swanson’s demotion if he’s likely to be brought back on Sept. 1?
Keith Law: Because of the philosophy behind it – it seems to be entirely driven by recency bias and an emphasis on winning, what, one or two extra games this year?

Gene Mullett: Have you ever been really excited to try a restaurant or something by a celebrity chef & been disappointed? Care to share?
Keith Law: Spotted Pig in NYC. I have her cookbook and liked a few recipes from it. Meal was disappointing start to finish.

Keith Law: I’m throwing a post-chat bonus answer here, because I saw a few tweets asking about this but didn’t see a question in the chat queue (I never even get to see them all because you guys ask so many, and thanks for that). People are asking if I think Luis Severino is a starter now, because he’s having an amazing season as a starter. My concern on him was always delivery-related; pitchers who don’t rely on their lower halves tend to break down and/or have trouble with command. Severino’s delivery was all arm – like Reynaldo Lopez’s, like JB Bukauskas’s, two other guys with starter stuff and track records but reliever-ish mechanics. Severino is bigger now, and throwing a ton of sliders, a pitch that is much better than it was when I saw him as a prospect (and better than I projected it to become). So yes, he’s a damn good starter right now, even though I don’t know if he’s changed the way he uses his legs at all. I hope he is using his lower half more so that he can pitch like this for a long time.

Keith Law: Gotta wrap this up for a phone call – sorry to cut it a bit short this week. I will be in Bristol on Monday for our BBTN trade deadline show that afternoon, and will probably not chat now for two weeks. Thank you as always for all of your questions. I hope to meet many of you this weekend in Chicago!

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→ July 25, 2017
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Pig Tales.

Barry Estabrook’s Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat didn’t make me a vegetarian or cause me to stop eating pork, but it has certainly reinforced a lot of things I was already doing to try to avoid contributing to our food-industrial complex. Estabrook exposes some of the worst practices in the pork industry, including inhumane treatment of pigs, widespread doping of animals with antibiotics, and terrible pollution that ruins surrounding neighborhoods. Estabrook’s point is that animal husbandry doesn’t have to be that way, but he doesn’t quite get around to saying that this would involve Americans accepting that meat shouldn’t be cheap.

Pig Tales is structured in a predictable way: here’s the setup, here are all the bad practices (some awful, some merely objectionable), here’s the cost of the modern meat-production complex, here are a few folks doing it the right way. It’s certainly effective, and Estabrook is a skilled storyteller. You can’t read about the horrible conditions in which factory-farmed pigs are raised – in cages where they can barely move, sitting in their own excretions, covered in sores – without at least wondering if there’s a better way (unless you’re a sociopath, I guess). I thought his descriptions of local efforts to combat pork-factory pollution were even more compelling because they illuminated a side of the industry that’s much less well-known; raising pigs indoors is a dirty job, and produces a lot of waste that pollutes local air, water, and soil, with much of it dumped into artificial “lagoons” that overflow when there’s a substantial rain. Estabrook talks to local activists and groups fighting the pernicious aspects of pork production – labor abuses and environmental degradation – and uncovers how certain states, notably North Carolina and Iowa, have bent over backwards to favor corporate agriculture over the rights of residents to things like clean air and water or safe housing. (North Carolina especially seems to have debased itself for Big Pig, hardly a surprise given how badly gerrymandered their state is.)

Estabrook also describes the breakdown in our food inspection system, largely because it has fallen too far under the sway of the industrial food producers themselves. He highlights the story of one USDA inspector who was reassigned to a job farther from his house, ostensibly to get him to quit, because the factory owners didn’t like that he was doing his job. Pig Tales was published in 2015, six-plus years into a Democratic administration that, in theory and practice, was more open to regulations than the previous one, and I can only imagine that this is going to get worse given the Trump admin’s war on science within the executive branch. The USDA is a long-running disaster anyway, pushing “nutrition standards” that rely as much on industry input as on actual science (to say nothing of the uncertainty around the science of nutrition), but the fact that it’s understaffed for the mission of ensuring the safety of our food supply only exacerbates the problem. That’s one agency I’d like to see scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, with a focus on food safety. Estabrook only gets at one of the agency’s problems, but he refers heavily to this 2013 report on swine slaughter plants that found widespread, egregious violations of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act … with no real consequences for the manufacturers.

Pig Tales isn’t all bad news for pork eaters, however, as Estabrook visits multiple farmers who are doing something right – many who’ve eschewed antibiotic use, others who don’t use cages or only use them right around birthing, and still more who raise smaller herds as part of an integrated agricultural setup. His stories all give some threads of hope, but I think Estabrook should have emphasized the “cheap meat” problem more: Americans expect meat to be inexpensive, because it has been so for so many years now, but the retail price of factory-farmed meat does not accurately reflect the negative externalities that arise from its production. He hints at the subject, but I could have used a concluding chapter here that pointed out what I think is obvious: If pork producers were regulated correctly, meaning that they adhere to food-safety standards and pay for damage they cause to their environments, pork would become more expensive because no one would be able to produce it cheaply enough to turn a profit at current commodity prices. And I’m not sure anyone is ready for a world where some consumers are priced out of some or all types of red meat. That’s a legal and ethical concern that Estabrook doesn’t broach.

The author makes it very clear that he believes there is such a thing as sustainable, ethically-raised, environmentally responsible pork production, and he’s probably right – but it won’t be available to everybody. Raising meat that doesn’t damage the environment, put us at risk of foodborne illnesses, accelerate antibiotic resistance, or mistreat the animals is expensive. It takes a lot of land, as with responsible beef production (although the economics of sustainable beef are worse), and more labor per animal. I don’t think I learned anything from Pig Tales that I didn’t already know about pork, but I did learn about how state and local governments have abdicated their responsibilities to protect their citizens, and that has only further driven me to consume less meat and, when I do consume it, to try to ensure it comes from responsible farmers. Perhaps if more consumers make those choices, the market will shift even in the absence of government regulation – but if meat is suddenly a luxury good, is it really sustainable at all?

Next up: My reviews are a few books behind, but I’ve finished Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night and Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce (just $2 on Kindle) and moved on to Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins.

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→ July 24, 2017
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Oakland & San Francisco eats.

I’ll have my annual re-ranking of the top five farm systems up this week, most likely Tuesday, for Insiders.

I only had two meals on my own during my trip to the Bay Area last week to speak at Google and sign books at Books Inc. in Berkeley (which should still have signed copies available), but both were memorable additions to my ongoing U.S. pizzeria tour. Oakland’s Pizzaiolo is on that list from Food and Wine from a few years ago that continues to inform some of my travels – it’s not a perfect list but I’ve done well by it overall – but the pizza wasn’t even the best thing I ate there.

Pizzaiolo is more than a pizzeria, although those are obviously the star attraction on the menu. It’s really a locavore restaurant that also does pastas, mains, salads, and vegetable-focused sides (contorni), with outstanding, largely local ingredients the common thread among all of them. I met a friend for dinner there and we split two pizzas, a margherita with housemade Italian sausage and a pizza of sweet & hot peppers, black olives, and ricotta salata. The sausage was probably the best element of all of this; the dough itself was good, maybe a grade 55 when comparing it to other Neapolitan pizzerias I’ve tried around the country (a list that has to number around fifty now). The pepper and olive pizza was surprisingly good, less spicy than I feared it would be, more briny and salty from the combination of the olives and the ricotta salata, a pressed, salted, lightly aged cheese made from the whey of sheep’s milk left over from other cheesemaking. But the best thing I ate was actually a salad of mixed chicory leaves (especially radicchio) with figs and hazelnuts; I love radicchio in spite of its bitterness (or perhaps because of it), but this had some of the least bitter chicory leaves I’ve ever tasted, and the sweetness of the black mission figs gave the perfect contrast to just that hint of a bitter note. The menu changes daily, however, and I can see it’s not on the Pizzaiolo menu today.

Una Pizza Napoletana isn’t on that F&W list of the country’s best pizzerias, which is kind of a joke because it’s probably a top five spot for me because of the dough. I’ve never had a pizza with a crust like this – it has the texture of naan, which is an enriched dough from India (usually containing yogurt or other dairy), whereas pizza dough is typically enriched with nothing but maybe a little olive oil. The menu is very short: five different pizza options, no alterations or substitutions allowed, with a few drinks, and one extra pizza (with fresh eggs) on Saturdays. Most of the pizzas use buffalo-milk mozzarella, and only the margherita has tomato sauce. I went with the filetti, which has no sauce but uses fresh cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, garlic, and fresh basil. It’s really the dough that makes this pizza – it’s a traditional, naturally-leavened dough that takes three days to make, resulting in that incomparable texture. The pizzas are on the expensive side at $25 apiece, although I think given the quality of inputs and the time required to make doughs like this, it’s a reasonable price point. You’re buying someone’s skill and time for something you’re never going to make at home.

Una Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco. To die for.

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My new friends at Google also sent me home with a few gifts, including a bag of coffee from Philz, which a few of you have been telling me to try for years now. I haven’t opened the bag yet (I am a bit obsessive about finishing one bag before opening the next) but will report back when I try it.

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→ July 23, 2017
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Everything is Obvious.

Duncan Watts’ book Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us fits in well in the recent string of books explaining or demonstrating how the way we think often leads us astray. As with Thinking Fast and Slow, by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, Watts’ book highlights some specific cognitive biases, notably our overreliance on what we consider “common sense,” lead us to false conclusions, especially in the spheres of the social sciences, with clear ramifications in the business and political worlds as well as some strong messages for journalists who always seek to graft narratives on to facts as if the latter were inevitable outcomes.

The argument from common sense is one of the most frequently seen logical fallacies out there – X must be true because common sense says it’s true. But common sense itself is, of course, inherently limited; our common sense is the result of our individual and collective experiences, not something innate given to us by God or contained in our genes. Given the human cognitive tendency to assign explanations to every event, even those that are the result of random chance, this is a recipe for bad results, whether it’s the fawning over a CEO who had little or nothing to do with his company’s strong results or top-down policy prescriptions that lead to billions in wasted foreign aid.

Watts runs through various cognitive biases and illusions that you may have encountered in other works, although a few of them were new to me, like the Matthew Effect, by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. According to the theory behind it, the Matthew Effect argues that success breeds success, because it means those people get greater opportunities going forward. A band that has a hit album will get greater airplay for its next record, even if that isn’t as good as the first one, or markedly inferior to an album released on the same day by an unknown artist. A good student born into privilege will have a better chance to attend a fancy-pants college, like, say, Harfurd, and thus benefits further from having the prestigious brand name on his resume. A writer who has nearly half a million Twitter followers might find it easier to land a deal for a major publisher to produce his book, Smart Baseball, available in stores now, and that major publisher then has the contacts and resources to ensure the book is reviewed in critical publications. It could be that the book sells well because it’s a good book, but I doubt it.

Watts similarly dispenses with the ‘great man theory of history’ – and with history in general, if we’re being honest. He points out that historical accounts will always include judgments or information that was not available to actors at the time of these events, citing the example of a soldier wandering around the battlefield in War and Peace, noticing that the realities of war look nothing like the genteel paintings of battle scenes hanging in Russian drawing rooms. He asks if the Mona Lisa, which wasn’t regarded as the world’s greatest painting or even its most famous until it was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian nationalist before World War II, ascended to that status because of innate qualities of the painting – or if circumstances pushed it to the top, and only after the fact do art experts argue for its supremacy based on the fact that it’s already become the Mona Lisa of legend. In other words, the Mona Lisa may be great simply because it’s the Mona Lisa, and perhaps had the disgruntled employee stolen another painting, da Vinci’s masterpiece would be seen as just another painting. (His description of seeing the painting for the first time mirrored my own: It’s kind of small, and because it’s behind shatterproof glass, you can’t really get close it.)

Without directly referring to it, Watts also perfectly describes the inexcusable habit of sportswriters to assign huge portions of the credit for team successes to head coaches or managers rather than distributing the credit across the entire team or even the organization. I’ve long used the example of the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks as a team that won the World Series in spite of the best efforts of its manager, Bob Brenly, to give the series away – repeatedly playing small ball (like bunting) in front of Luis Gonzalez, who’d hit 57 homers that year, and using Byung-Hyun Kim in save situations when it was clear he wasn’t the optimal choice. Only the superhuman efforts by Randy Johnson and That Guy managed to save the day for Arizona, and even then, it took a rare misplay by Mariano Rivera and a weakly hit single to an open spot on the field for the Yanks to lose. Yet Brenly will forever be a “World Series-winning manager,” even though there’s no evidence he did anything to make the win possible. Being present when a big success happens can change a person’s reputation for a long time, and then future successes may be ascribed to that person even if he had nothing to do with them.

Another cognitive bias Watts discusses, the Halo Effect, seems particularly relevant to my work evaluating and ranking prospects. First named by psychologist Edward Thorndike, the Halo Effect refers to our tendency to apply positive impressions of a person, group, or company to their other properties or characteristics, so we might subconsciously consider a good-looking person to be better at his/her job. For example, do first-round draft picks get greater considerations from their organizations when it comes to promotions or even major-league opportunities? Will an org give such a player more time to work out of a period of non-performance than they’d give an eighth-rounder? Do some scouts rate players differently, even if it’s entirely subconscious, based on where they were drafted or how big their signing bonuses were? I don’t think I do this directly, but my rankings are based on feedback from scouts and team execs, so if their own information – including how teams internally rank their prospects – is affected by the Halo Effect, then my rankings will be too, unless I’m actively looking for it and trying to sieve it out.

Where I wish Watts had spent even more time was in describing the implications of these ideas and research for government policies, especially foreign aid, most of which would be just as productive if we flushed it all down those overpriced Pentagon toilets. Foreign aid tends to go to where the donors, whether private or government, think it should go, because the recipients are poor but the donors know how to fix it. In reality, this money rarely spurs any sort of real change or economic growth, because the common-sense explanation – the way to fix poverty is to send money and goods to poor people – never bothers to examine the root causes of the problem the donors want to solve, asking the targets what they really need, examining and removing obstacles (e.g., lack of infrastructure) that might require more time and effort to fix but prevent the aid from doing any good. Sending a boat full of food to a country in the grip of a famine only makes sense if you have a way to get the food to the starving people, but if the roads are bad, dangerous, or simply don’t exist, then that food will sit in the harbor until it rots or some bureaucrat sells it.

Everything Is Obvious is aimed at a more general audience than Thinking Fast and Slow, as its text is a little less dense and it contains fewer and shorter descriptions of research experiments. Watts refers to Kahneman and his late reseach partner Amos Tversky a few times, as well as other researchers in the field, so it seems to me like this book is meant as another building block on the foundation of Kahneman’s work. I think it applies to all kinds of areas of our lives, even just as a way to think about your own thinking and to try to help yourself avoid pitfalls in your financial planning or other decisions, but it’s especially apt for folks like me who write for a living and should watch for our human tendency to try to ascribe causes post hoc to events that may have come about as much due to chance as any deliberate factors.

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→ July 22, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 7/22/17.

With the trade deadline approaching, I’ve had a bit more Insider content than usual this week, including breakdowns of the Ryan Madson/Sean Doolittle trade, the David Robertson/Tommy Kahnle/Todd Frazier trade, and the Tyler O’Neill-Marco Gonzales trade. I also had a long post covering lots of prospects I’ve scouted in the last few weeks, including players from the Phillies, Nationals, Orioles, Red Sox, Atlanta, and Cleveland systems. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the asymmetrical game Not Alone, which pits one player against anywhere from one to six opponents who work together, although we found the game really doesn’t work with just two players and is only slightly better with three.

Thanks to everyone who’s already bought Smart Baseball. I’ve got just a couple of additional book signings coming up:

* Chicago, Standard Club, July 28th, 11:30 am – this is a ticketed luncheon event
* Chicago, Volumes, July 28th, 7:30 pm
* GenCon (Indianapolis), August 17th-20th

And now, the links…

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