→ August 2, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E2.

Today’s Klawchat transcript was pretty prospect-heavy. Today’s podcast has me and Dave Schoenfield talking about the Angels/Rangers game, Mike Olt, and sophomore slumps, among other topics.

* No Quickfire this week, as the entire show is built around an elimination challenge that involves catering the wedding of a couple who’ve had both tragedy – the death of the groom’s sister/maid of honor in a car accident – and horrible luck – their planned venue “disappearing” with some of their deposit. The chefs look genuinely nervous about the challenge of putting together an entire wedding menu in one day, which raises the question: With real-life consequences involved for the bride and groom, why not give the chefs more time than normal to ensure a better result?

* The bride wants a “many-tiered cake,” which made me wonder if the producers encouraged the couple to be demanding, or at least max out their demands, to the chefs. I don’t think that’s unfair at all, but if I were in that groom’s shoes, I’d probably be so thrilled that these phenomenal chefs were catering my wedding (presumably at no cost to me) I’d be saying “whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

* Some of the chefs’ stories of their own weddings were pretty funny – Chris Cosentino cooking the food for his own wedding, which probably should have had led to him being committed, or Thierry saying he had to have a croquembouche at his wedding because that’s the dish that made his wife first fall in love with him.

* You couldn’t do this challenge on regular Top Chef because it requires so much cooperation between erstwhile competitors. To their credit, there’s barely a whiff of competition either at the grocery store or in the kitchen: chefs are moving all over the place to help each other get their dishes done and plated. It was kind of amazing to see chefs at this level receiving orders barked by their peers and executing them without complaint or hesitation.

Half full cart, with most of the crab , left at seafood counter. How does that happen? Kerry doesn’t blame anyone but himself, though

* Ah, Art. After more sniping with Chris, Art is really coming off as a prima donna; Chris voices patience in the confessional shots, but in the kitchen he’s more confrontational with Art, who probably had it coming but seems to get more sour the more that Chris pushes him. Meanwhile, Curtis says Art was “gutsy” to volunteer to do the cake, while Art has to tell us fifty times that he did the cake for Lady Gaga’s birthday party.

* Speaking of Curtis, his one-off shots talking to the camera are useless. He’s not informative; he’s recapping what we just saw, but with an accent.

* After yesterday’s absurd “eat fried chicken if you don’t believe in the 14th Amendment” event, the timing of Mark’s comments about marriage equality – he and Clark have been together for 25 years, but can’t get married in Maine because heterosexual marriages would spontaneously combust from Portland to Presque Isle – couldn’t have been more perfect. Mark’s charity is Equality Maine, which campaigns for equal rights for Maine’s LGBT community.

* As for Clark, don’t move his cheese.

* Really, James? That’s the best jacket you could find for a wedding? Goodwill wouldn’t accept that blazer if you tried to donate it to them.

* The chefs provide five small dishes for the cocktail hour. Thierry makes a Filipino blood soup (I believe that’s dinuguan). Clark does barbecued duck with sirloin Szechuan sauce in lettuce with Asian herbs. Kerry, who had panicked earlier when they left one of the grocery carts at the fish counter and left him with maybe half of the crab he expected to have, does a successful corn panna cotta with crab salad and grilled okra. Patricia does a one-bite canape of pickled mackerel, young coconut, herbs, and chilies, served on a spoon; Oseland later refers to it as a “ceviche,” so the pickling may have been rapid. Takashi’s dish looked the best, with braised pork belly that was a deep amber color, served with pickled daikon and a steamed bun, like a deconstructed baozi.

* For the mains, Debbie’s green papaya salad concept degenerated into a grilled lettuce dish that James said was one of the “weirder things” he’d ever eaten. Even as Kerry was grilling the greens, you could see on his face that he thought it was bizarre, and I know of no scientific validity to her argument that grilling them “adds acidity.” I’ve grilled radicchio, which makes it taste smoky but doesn’t add acid, and, more importantly, doesn’t make the thing any less bitter.

* Mark made a sesame-coated salmon that did not cook evenly, with the judges receiving raw fish but the bride getting a perfectly cooked one. Chris does a stunning banana leaf-braised pork with bitter greens and aioli and adobo sauces. In a related story, I need to get to San Francisco.

* Dessert: Art realized early on that his icing was too soft, foreshadowing eventual disaster that required him to dismantle and reconstruct the cake, only to have it leaning when he brought it out for service. But what I didn’t get about his “inside-out pineapple upside-down cake” was why he didn’t do anything to caramelize the pineapples first – that’s the best part of a pineapple upside-down cake, isn’t it? Grill them, fry them in a little butter, whatever, just get them to a nice golden brown. Lorena’s vanilla leche flan with toasted coconut gets kind of ignored in all the brouhaha over the slouching cake.

* Judges’ table: Takashi, Patricia, and Chris (again) are on top. Patricia wins with the one bite dish, another $10K for Heifer, up to $16K total. I didn’t see any surprises here.

* Elimination: Mark, Debbie, and Art. No surprises here either. Krista just starts rubbing it in to Art, talking about how important the cake is to a bride. What compassion – Art already looked like he wanted to die before that. Otherwise, the judges aren’t really responding to the chefs’ comments, which I understand given who’s standing there, but a little back-and-forth would be fine.

* I’ve been killing James so far, but his criticism of Debbie’s dish was great. He explained very specifically what a green papaya or mango salad should have, what elements and flavors make it great, and how her reconception fell short. We need more of that from him, and less of him looking like he’d rather be home playing with 37 of his 83 cats.

* Debbie is eliminated, which fits; of the bottom three, she was the only one with a bad concept and bad execution, where the other two primarily failed to execute.

Next week’s recap will probably be a day late, as I’m headed to the Area Code Games in Long Beach and may not see the show until early Friday.

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→ August 1, 2012
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Tucson eats (and trade analysis links).

I blogged about every major trade from the past few days, combining some smaller ones into longer posts, which you can find here:

Today’s podcast is all prospect talk with Kevin Goldstein chatting with me about prospects from those trades and top 100 prospects who’ve disappointed so far this year.
—

I’ve been to Tuscon a handful of times this year and had some mixed success with food. My favorite spot to hit is actually a postgame stop right by the U of A campus – Allegro, a gelateria founded by two natives of Morbegna, Italy, offering a great mix of traditional flavors and more modern ones, the latter category including the best sea salt caramel gelato I’ve had (with a strong butter flavor), as well as saffron, fig, anise, and pineapple basil. It’s comparable in quality to the best gelato I’ve had in the Phoenix area, where Frost (actually based in Tucson) edges out Angel Sweet.

As for food in Tucson, the best I’ve found is probably Feast, run by local-celebrity chef Doug Levy, who actually seated me and chatted for a little while when he noticed I was reading a Michael Ruhlman book. The “date plate” starter – grilled crostini with hummus on one half and a Manchego-stuffed, pancetta-wrapped date on the other – was delicious if a little weird; I didn’t get the interplay between the two toppings, although, really, dates wrapped in bacon, people. Unfortunately, the execution of my entree, a special including achiote shrimp over jasmine rice, was poor; the shrimp weren’t hot and the dish included four hidden whole black peppercorns, which I discovered when I ended up biting into three of them at once. I need to try them again because I can tell the emphasis on fresh ingredients and inventive combinations is there, but that wasn’t the first impression I was hoping to get.

Feast’s culinary vibe and philosophy put them ahead of Kingfisher for me, even though the latter, focusing on fresh seafood, had better execution. I had a salad from their seasonal specials menu, grilled black mission figs with mixed greens and ricotta salata, with a perfect balance of sweet, sour, bitter (from the greens and radicchio), and salty. The pumpkin seed-crusted scallops in my entree were slightly overcooked and, because they were covered with the breading all the way around, didn’t have that slight sweetness that scallops develop when they are seared and allowed to brown on the exterior. The poblano aioli (with the consistency of a crema and a bright green color) and corn salsa on the plate were also somewhat overpowering, but would be great with a stronger-flavored fish like salmon. With black beans and soft jasmine rice, it was an enormous amount of food, but the delicacy of the scallops ended up overwhelmed by other elements.

I went to the tapas restaurant Casa Vicente back in March but apparently never wrote about it. Casa Vicente offers authentic Spanish tapas, heavy on seafood options. I don’t remember the meal clearly enough to give a quality review here; I remember finding it solid, with the “plaza mayor”-style fried calamari and the patatas bravas (fried potato chunks, served with a spicy red vinegar sauce and a garlic aioli) both successful.

Finally, I haven’t been to Beyond Bread this summer, but should mention it as one of my favorite sandwich places anywhere, primarily because their bread is so good. They have three locations in Tucson and are open late enough (8 pm) for you to grab something before heading to a night game at Hi Corbett Field or Kino Veterans Park.

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→ July 30, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E1.

New post for Insiders today with a scouting report on Danny Hultzen. I also broke down the Zack Greinke trade on Friday.

—

I’ll say up front that I greatly prefer the regular version of Top Chef to what I saw of Top Chef Masters in season three, which included some fairly absurd challenges (cooking with live bugs?) and often felt, to me, disrespectful to chefs who by and large have already achieved substantial success in the field. The higher level of professionalism on Masters also means there’s less opportunity for snark, mostly because we don’t get the same silly drama behind the scenes. That said, I just made Mary Sue Milliken’s quinoa fritters again last night, so I’m going to watch this season of Masters if only because I’m hoping to learn something new.

As for the chefs … I don’t think I’ve eaten at any of their restaurants, although I’m familiar with Chris Cosentino and am dying to get to one of his places – I just haven’t been in San Francisco proper in five years. Cosentino does have a stand in LA’s new Umamicatessan, called PIGG, and I’m sure you can figure out what they serve.

To the episode:

* Quickfire: The blackjack setup, where two-chef teams were each dealt two ingredient cards and had to incorporate both into a single dish, was cheesy and took up way too much time. They should have let chefs double down, taking a third ingredient for double the prize money.

* Speaking of those ingredients … bologna? That’s back to disrespecting the chefs. There were eleven ingredients that would all have fit well on a haute cuisine menu, and then there was O-s-c-a-r. Also, I haven’t eaten bologna in thirty years. It’s what I imagine human flesh might taste like.

* Dry aged beef and whole catfish seems like the most challenging combination – the chefs have to work with two proteins, each of which should be the star of the dish, and as it turns out they have to break the fish down in the allotted time of 15 minutes.

* Clark Frasier complains that quinoa doesn’t go with langoustine. Quinoa goes with just about everything – it has little taste of its own but takes dressings, sauces, and aromatics really well. His team’s dish ends up a mess, looking like someone spat the candied/popped quinoa on the langoustine.

* Duck breast and peaches seemed like the best combo of ingredients – fruit sauces, chutneys, and gastriques all work so well with duck – but lost to the beef and catfish. We shouldn’t be shocked that Cosentino would be good with proteins, I suppose.

* Random thought: Do chefs like these worry that the editing will make them look like doofuses? We get complaints from chefs in just about every season that the editing required to squeeze the two challenges into 44 minutes often makes them look bad (or dumb, or mean), so does that also apply to these chefs? We already have Art Smith carping about Cosentino’s youth and inexperience, which I found incredibly catty – who cares how old a chef is if he can really cook? Does your food somehow taste better if you’re on the far side of 40? And does Art not remember the cocky-as-all-hell Michael Voltaggio?

* Elimination challenge: As twists go, these individual lottery tickets, with small awards or penalties (like losing 30 minutes of cooking time) are pretty harmless, nowhere near as bad as the team-wide tickets.

* Missy Robbins cut a deep cash into one of her little fingers on a mandolin and ends up leaving the show; she needed a skin graft and couldn’t wield a knife for one or two months.

* I love Thierry Rautureau discussing the BOOfay. Speaking of Thierry, he’s back for a second go-round; he appeared on season 2 of Masters under the previous format, where he failed to advance beyond the preliminary round.

* Art: “I cook for billionaires.” Does he have “Chef to the 1%” T-shirts for sale?

* The twists from those gold team-wide tickets: Each of the two teams’ assigned cuisines – one Mexican, one Indian – is revealed after their initial shopping trip. Team Mexican sends Art, who looked about as lost in the supermarket as I’d be in an auto-parts store, on the initial trip, while Team Indian chooses to make do with what they’ve got.

* The dishes … Patricia’s cornmeal pancake with chicken and beef adobo and peach and corn salsa sounded phenomenal; I wasn’t clear whether this was her concept, or her execution of Missy’s concept.

* Lorena’s ceviche ‘tigre de leche’ got mushy because she made it too soon. It amazes me that chefs at this level can make fundamental errors like that – is it the time pressure? I can’t imagine it’s the food knowledge. Anyway, Lorena’s probably the one chef you all know, because you see her face every time you drive by a Taco Bell.

* Clark’s dish – green beans with fried shallots and goat cheese – looked about as Indian as pasta alla carbonara, which, for a challenge in which his team was required to cook an Indian-themed buffet. Excuse me, BOO-fay. Team India scuffled almost across the board; Mark’s curried corn soup with curried flatbread was bland, and the judges made the filling in Takashi shrimp and salmon dumpling sound like spam mousse. The one dish that sounded most appealing here was Thierry’s masala salmon and beef shoulder with spiced mango couscous and lemon-peanut chutney, but that’s also not terribly Indian. (Unfortunately, the recipe omits the couscous, which was much more interesting to me than the proteins.)

* Judges’ table: Unfortunately, the insufferable James Oseland is back at judges’ table; he’s incredibly nitpicky, and even when he says he likes something he looks like someone just slipped a moldy onion under his nose. When your comments on dishes from chefs at this level are so skewed toward the negative, I have to seriously question your palate or your intent. And overall, I think the judges are much less insightful and entertaining than Tom, Hugh, Padma, and Gail. I understand the reluctance to lay into any of the chefs, given their resumes, but I also think the judges are so reserved that they fail to inform us enough about the dishes.

* Chris wins again for his “pork and beans” with pork belly, chorizo, and chickpeas, earning tepid applause from teammates Art and Kerry. That’s now $16K raised for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

* Team Indian gets scolded for missing the target by a subcontinent or two. Seems like they lost because they didn’t shop again or change their dishes enough, so apparently it’s better to send the village idiot back to the store than to send no one at all. Chef Sue Torres of Sueños in Manhattan is sent home for essentially having to cook a cuisine she wasn’t prepared to cook, having shopped for a Mexican dish and failed to adjust it enough after the challenge changed. That’s not a good way to send a lower-case top chef home, is it? I’m hoping future challenges push these chefs to be more innovative, not to leap over more obstacles.

* Final three prediction: I agree with Missy that Chris looks like the favorite. Thierry and Patricia (who did a dish and a half in the elimination challenge, and earned plaudits for both) also seemed strong, although to be fair I don’t think anyone stood out the way that Chris did.

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→ July 26, 2012
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The Making of a Chef.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. I am planning to go to tonight’s Mets/D-backs game and hope to file something off it tomorrow.

The Culinary Institute of America has become the most prestigious cooking school in the country, expanding from a small, all-male class when it opened 66 years ago in New Haven, to a large campus in Hyde Park, New York, featuring four restaurants and a rolling calendar where a new set of students matriculates every three weeks. For the CIA’s 50th anniversary in 1996, writer Michael Ruhlman went through the curriculum as a student, albeit at an accelerated rate and without the required restaurant externship, and wrote a book about this first-hand experience. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America became a best-seller and established Ruhlman as one of the top food writers in the business, succeeding both because of its lively, energetic prose and because Ruhlman absorbed so much food knowledge while working his way through his classes.

Ruhlman refers to himself as an “undercover” student, although the faculty are aware of his presence and role, and he cooks right alongside the students, finding himself judged and graded as they are – and often defending himself when he’s not happy with the results. These classes range from basic knife skills to butchering to sauces to pastry, concluding with a 15-week run through the four on-campus restaurants run by the CIA, which range from family dining to formal and assign each student to a different station each day, forcing them to draw on all of their prior education.

Ruhlman’s great trick in this book is finding and conveying drama in what otherwise might seem the most mundane of tasks: The preparation of food. From early classes where the object is to beat the clock and achieve a good enough result for a demanding professor to later work in the restaurants, where students’ work is served to paying customers (and, occasionally, the school’s president or a visiting celebrity chef), Ruhlman manages to evoke a sense of urgency in the reader, turning dry material into compelling prose. He achieves this primarily through dialogue, letting his fellow students (and, often, himself) communicate their rising stress levels, rather than trying to explain it directly in a way that would likely sound trite to anyone who’s never spent time in a restaurant kitchen. There’s a recurring theme in the book about the need for chefs to push themselves harder and faster than they thought possible, something hard to imagine if you’re in a job that doesn’t have the same kind of time pressures.

He also uses the open question of what type of roux (a cooked combination of flour and fat, used as the base for many major sauces, as well as for gumbo) one should use to make the poorly-named “brown sauce,” which also relies on veal stock, aromatics, and tomatoes (usually as a paste) for flavor and then itself becomes a foundation for countless other sauces. There are two answers to the question, blond or brown, but the way in which each instructor answers the question reveals much about his/her philosophy of food and, perhaps more importantly to this book, philosophy of teaching about food. The lengthy discussion of the making of consomme follows a similar path – it is not sufficient to know what consomme is or how to make it; one must understand why making it so clear that the instructor can read the writing on a dime at the bottom of a gallon of this clarified meat stock matters.

Although Making of a Chef is a book about cooking, it’s not a cookbook – there are no recipes, nothing more specific than a general description of some fundamentals like brown sauce. The story is full of unusual characters, instructors and students, but none becomes a central figure and some of the students blink in and out of the story as they leave campus for their externships at high-end restaurants – a requirement for graduation at the CIA. It’s a book about an idea, that cooking, only recently seen as a highly respectable profession in the United States, can be codified and taught to the inexpert so that they can enter the world of haute cuisine and develop their own culinary concepts. It also details Ruhlman’s own intellectual evolution from someone who enjoys food to someone who understands it, appreciates it, and, fortunately for us, can write about it in an informative and eloquent way. For a book that would seem, on its face, to lack a compelling hook, it was very hard for me to put down.

I own four other books by Ruhlman, none better or more heavily used than Ruhlman’s Twenty, an absolutely essential cookbook that I reviewed in November. It goes through twenty ingredients or techniques that are key for any home cook, with numerous foolproof recipes that often include step-by-step instructions and photographs to help the less experienced reader.

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→ July 24, 2012
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Phoenix eats roundup, July 2012.

Today’s column at ESPN ranks the top ten prospects in contenders’ organizations by their current trade value. I’ll be back on the podcast on Wednesday.

Chou’s Kitchen in northwest Chandler, at Warner and Alma School, serves regional Chinese cuisine from northeastern China, known as dongbei cai, from the area generally known in English as Manchuria. Because the climate in the area is less favorable for growing rice than that of central and southern China, northeastern Chinese cooking includes more wheat, which means lots of dumplings, including the thick, doughy filled dumplings known as baozi. Chou’s version is less doughy than the baozi I’ve had elsewhere and was more like an oversized “potsticker,” meaning a better ratio of filling (pork and vegetables) to dough. I preferred those to the “meat pies,” large discs with a thinner dough and the same filling (they also offer beef, shrimp, or vegetable fillings), fried on both sides, with more meat and less dough – still good, but not as balanced as the baozi. Their version of tiger salad (lao hu cai) incorporates sliced fresh green cabbage and peanuts with the traditional combination of cilantro, scallions, and chili pepper, with enough to serve two people and a great balance of acidity, heat, and sweetness. All of that food – more than I was able to finish – cost about $17 before tip, and the service was very attentive; the owner even came out to ask me how I’d found them. They’re in Phoenix magazine’s current issue, listing over great “cheap eats” from around the Valley.

And so is My Arepa, which shares a space with a Rosati’s Pizza, a strange arrangement that didn’t give me great confidence when I entered. The food was very good, and apparently they’ve got a small following among Venezuelan Cubs players, with signed photos from several on the walls (including Carlos Zambrano and Angel Guzman). The menu is enormous but we ordered one item from the three main categories – one arepa, one empanada, and one cachapa. Arepas are thin pancakes made from ground corn meal, sliced the long way and filled like a sandwich. My Arepa’s masa is made from white corn, so it’s pretty bland (I’ve had yellow-corn arepas a few times and prefer them, but I guess that’s not authentic), with the fillings – braised shredded beef, sweet plantains, and black beans – more than making up for the dough’s lack of flavor. The cachapa, a yellow-corn pancake with kernels in the batter, folded in half like an omelette and filled, was the best item we tried, sweet from both the corn kernels and from caramelization on the griddle, with the same options for the fillings as the arepas. The place itself is pretty bare-bones, from the furniture to the décor, and could probably use a little facelift. Both Chou’s and My Arepa are inside of 15 minutes from HoHoKam.

Also in that Phoenix magazine feature was Baratin Cafe, located in Old Town Scottsdale just off 5th street, in a walkway across Craftsman from Citizen Public House. Baratin’s menu is as small as they come, changing daily, with one starter, one salad, one sandwich, one vegetarian option, one “potted” entree, and one dessert. The day I went, the starter was roasted tomatoes and garlic with basil, olive oil, and grilled slices of rosemary-olive bread, and the sandwich was a pulled pork with spicy whole-grain mustard, sliced apples, and cole slaw on a crispy flatbread from Mediterra Bakehouse in Coolidge. Business is slow everywhere here in the summer, but it can’t be a good sign that I was the only customer at 6 pm on a Saturday evening – this place is far too good for that, and quite reasonably priced for some of the highest-quality ingredients I’ve come across out here, about $18 for those two items plus a drink.

Tortas Paquime in Avondale is one of the few independent restaurants I’ve found on the west side worth hitting, close to the Glendale stadium and on the way from my house to Goodyear, serving, of course, tortas, Mexican sandwiches on soft white bread (they also offer whole wheat) with the usual array of meat fillings. Torta ahogada (“drowned” in sauce) is the most traditional, but I went for the cochinita pibil with “everything” – avocado, tomato, lettuce, jalapeno (and a lot of it), and mayo, served with a handful of homemade potato chips for $5.49. This pork was still tender and had a good balance of acidity and smokiness from the achiote, nicely cut by the fats from the avocado and mayonnaise. They also offer tacos, various pastries, and six flavors of agua fresca.

Il Bosco is a new, tiny, wood-fired pizza shop in north Scottsdale, tucked into a strip mall on a side street on the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Shea. Their site says they cook their pizzas at 900 degrees, but I chatted with the pizzaiolo a little bit and he said he’s found the ideal temperature is between 700 and 800, which produces a pizza somewhere between Italian style (ultra thin crust, more charring on the outside) and New York style (moderately thin crust, toppings cooked a little further). The menu is small and simple, with a handful of standard pizzas plus a daily special; that option on the night we went was superb: homemade meatballs, sliced thinly like sausages, with three cheeses and rapini, a vegetable I don’t usually like unless it’s cooked at a hot enough temperature to bring out some of its sugars. The salads are extremely fresh and the restaurant grows its own herbs in pots out back. The service was off the charts, and the owner even let my daughter come behind the counter and see how some of the equipment worked while she poured her own drink.

I’ve mentioned Frost Gelato on Twitter as our new favorite gelateria in the Valley, just barely edging out Angel Sweet (which we do still love). Frost, located in the Santan Mall, has two locations in Tucson as well as one in Chicago now, and was started by two U of A alumni who hired – and somehow secured a “special skills” O-1 visa for – an Italian gelato chef to help them devise the recipe. The gelato’s texture is perfect and their flavors are strong, including dark chocolate, salted caramel, and coconut, with only the bitter, extract-y mint chocolate chip disappointing so far.

La Condesa Gourmet Tacos made Phoenix magazine’s list of the best new restaurants of 2011 and was recommended by several friends of mine who rave about its salsa bar, which is quite extensive. But the food itself was very disappointing. The cochinita pibil tasted of nothing but vinegar, while the carne asada was tough and surprisingly bland. Worse, however, was the corn tortillas themselves: If you aren’t making the tortillas fresh in-house, you’re not a “gourmet” taco shop. These were the same tortillas I could buy at Target in a package of 30 for $2. Stop spending so much time on strawberry salsa and start making tortillas from scratch (and grilling them, while we’re at it), and then we can talk.

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→ July 23, 2012
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The Golden Ratio.

Some recent ESPN links: Analyses of the Jays/Astros ten-player trade and the Brett Myers trade, as well as a big post on players I’ve scouted in the AZL over the last week, including Jorge Soler. The Conversation under the Myers piece has been rather bizarre, as a few (presumably male) readers are saying I shouldn’t have brought up Myers’ 2006 arrest on domestic violence charges. Needless to say, I think these complaints are spurious.

—

I’m a big fan of mainstream books about mathematics, most of which would probably be best classified as “history of math” even if they’re discussing a currently unsolved problem, such as John Derbyshire’s excellent book on the Riemann Hypothesis, Prime Obsession. (And yes, I’m aware of Derbyshire’s political writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Riemann book is very well done.) Mario Livio’s book The Golden Ratio: The Story of φ, the World’s Most Astonishing Number was on my wish list for a long time because it seemed like a perfect blend of the academic and applied branches of mathematics, as the irrational number φ appears in numerous places in nature and (I thought) art. Unfortunately, Livio’s book spends more time talking about where φ is not than about where it is, making this more of a book of mythbusting than of math.

Livio does provide a solid introduction to φ, an irrational number equal to (1 + √5)/2 = 1.6180339887… that has several interesting properties, including:

* φ2 is equal to φ + 1, or 2.6180339887…
* 1/φ is equal to φ – 1, or 0.6180339887…
* If you take any line segment AB and place a point C on it such that the ratio of the longer half to the shorter half is equal to the ratio of the entire segment to the longer half, the ratio in question will be equal to φ
* The ratio between consecutive terms in the Fibonacci sequence – the series 0, 1, 1, 2, where each successive term is equal to the sum of the two terms before it, thus continuing with 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ad infinitum – approaches φ. The ratio between the 17th and 16th terms is already 1.61800328…
* φ is also the result of the peculiar expression

The golden ratio also appears in many polygons and polyhedrons of interest not just to mathematicians but to artists, architects, and even botanists, as it appears in the spacing of leaves around the stems of many plants. But interest in the ratio has spurred no end of specious or outright fictitious claims about its appearance, including an oft-repeated one about its inclusion in the dimensions of the Parthenon (obtained by gaming the measurements to achieve the desired result) and another claiming Leonardo da Vinci used it in the Mona Lisa (similarly bogus). Livio devotes so much of the book to debunking these and other claims that by the time he gets around to discussing the golden ratio’s actual appearances in art, architecture, and nature, he’s devalued his subject by spending too little time explaining where φ is and too much time explaining where it ain’t.

Next up: I’m a bit behind here, having already finished Michael Ruhlman’s superb The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, the book that first established him as one of the best writers on food and cooking today.

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→ July 21, 2012
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Pelotero.

The stellar new documentary Pelotero shines a light on the way Major League Baseball has used the Dominican Republic as a pipeline for talent over the past forty years by following a pair of up-and-coming prospects leading up to Signing Day in 2009. The 75-minute film is screening in select cities, and is also available as a rental for $6.99 via both amazon and iTunesicon.

Pelotero started out as a simple documentary about the way MLB mines talent in the Dominican Republic, focusing on two young players, Miguel Angel Sano and Jean Carlos Batista, as they approached their 16th birthdays and the July 2nd date after which they’d be allowed to sign pro contracts. The directors appear to have gained almost unfettered access to both players, their families, and their trainers, as well as a surprising number of on-camera quotes from scouts with major league teams operating in the Dominican. That alone would have made the film worth seeing, but it probably wouldn’t have had much narrative greed to keep the attention of a larger audience.

As some of you probably remember, Sano ended up at the center of a controversy over his actual age and identity, one the directors were able to follow in real time and to expose in a way that has to have MLB and the Pittsburgh Pirates deeply unhappy. The film makes it quite clear that the family blames Pittsburgh’s top scout in the Dominican Republic, Rene Gayo, for starting the rumors about Sano’s age and then colluding with the MLB investigator (who, off camera, tells Sano to sign with the Pirates for $2 million to make the investigation go away) so he can acquire the player at a discount. The most damning evidence, obtained via a hidden camera, has Gayo strongly implying to the family that he is the reason Sano was partially cleared – and that they should sign with Pittsburgh as a result. The unfolding of this drama, as well as a similar if smaller-scale issue affecting Batista, and the associated effects on the players’ families, turns an ordinary documentary focusing on the exploitation of young Dominican players into a scathing indictment of corruption in MLB’s operations on the island. (The film concludes with a note that MLB declined an opportunity to respond on camera, and that MLB now claims that the depictions in the film are “inaccurate” and no longer reflect the league’s operations and conduct on the island. Gayo is still employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and says, in another statement displayed before the credits, that he simply did his job. You can read some of MLB’s comments here and here, and it is fair for them to argue that their regulation in the Dominican Republic is stronger today than it was in 2009.)

Setting aside the specific questions of culpability in the Sano case, which may have cost him $1-2 million off his ultimate signing bonus, the film’s greatest contribution is its exposure of how Dominican prospects are treated like chattel in a factory system where independent trainers will develop players on contingency, taking up to 35% of their eventual signing bonuses, while MLB teams pay lower bonuses there than they do to comparable American- or Canadian-born prospects. The new CBA, which caps each team’s total international expenditures on all players in this signing season at a figure less than what the seventh overall pick in this June’s draft received by himself, only makes the varying treatment of players by their places of birth even more stark. Pelotero shows how much Dominican players’ families come to count on a large signing bonus as their lottery ticket out of poverty, with some players (including Sano) living in heartbreaking conditions before they sign – and relative opulence afterwards. The promise of a life-changing bonus leads to a clear sense of entitlement on the sides of some players, to Batista’s mother apparently viewing her son as a cash cow, and to incentives for players to try to cheat the system by lying about their ages or identities. MLB and Gayo come off as the villians of Sano’s story, but that doesn’t mean the players or their camps are heroes.

The directors of Pelotero deserve much credit for staying out of the story, with minimal narration from John Leguizamo that offers some slightly pro-player commentary early in the film but that largely drops off as the Sano controversy takes over. The flip side of their hands-off style is that once that storyline becomes the film’s center, the balance begins to shift, unavoidably, to Sano’s side – we are watching it from his house, and hearing most of the commentary from him, his family, and his agent, but other than Gayo, who comes off horribly, we don’t get MLB’s side because they declined to comment on film. There was little the directors could have done to restore the balance without participation from the Commissioner’s Office, but the film does suffer slightly in the end from their absence. It is an outstanding film even with that caveat, a must-watch for any baseball fan. After you hear a trainer casually toss out “planting seeds” and “harvesting” as a metaphor for how he develops teenaged prospects before they turn 16, you will find it hard to look at any Dominican prospect the same way.

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→ July 18, 2012
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I rarely recommend any product I haven’t used or read, but I’m making an exception in the case of the new e-book The Hall of Nearly Great because it includes so many great writers, telling the stories of good big leaguers who were never good enough to earn legitimate Hall of Fame consideration. (I do have a copy of the book, but haven’t started it yet.) It’s available now for just $12 through that link.

I wrote yesterday about improved and declining farm systems for Insiders.

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Anita Loos’ 1925 comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is best remembered now for Howard Hawks’ movie adaptation, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, but at the time of its release it was an enormous best-seller, second only to John Erskine’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy among novels published in the U.S. that year. Loos’ book, a scant 120 pages, is now typically sold with its sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, a weaker sibling that doesn’t have the same high or low comedy of the first book.

The blonde in question is the shameless gold-digger Lorelei, who narrates the novel in diary form, detailing her exploits in convincing various witless suitors into buying her expensive meals, clothes, and jewelry, while also taking her from California to New York to London and across Europe. What Lorelei lacks in brains she makes up for in cunning, manipulating multiple men simultaneously without any remorse for the way she leads them on and leaves them once she finds a better offer. She’s accompanied by her sarcastic friend Dorothy, whose lack of decorum and interest in men without money confuse and aggravate Lorelei, whose only end seems to be having a good time through someone else’s wallet. For the time, Lorelei’s casual attitudes towards love, sex, and money, as well as a disinterest in then-traditional female roles of doting wife and mother – even when she settles on one man at the end of the novel, it’s more about what he can do for her budding career than about love or family.

The book is extremely funny between Lorelei’s own observations and the occasional cutting line from Dorothy; Lorelei is always talking about “educating” herself by reading, yet confesses that she and Dorothy “do not seem to be mathematical enough to tell how much francs is in money.” She says her friends told her she had talent for music, but “I mean I simply could not sit for hours and hours at a time practising just for the sake of a career.” (Spelling errors are rampant throughout her diaries, accelerating once she and Dorothy reach Paris.) And because she’s beautiful and, presumably, because she’s blond, men fall all over themselves to buy her affections – in a rare turn of events, it’s a book where the thinly-drawn characters are males, a sort of anti-Sorkinism that had to be even more unusual in the ’20s.

But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes doesn’t live up to its predecessor’s humor, as Lorelei only appears as the narrator of Dorothy’s life story, from a very rough upbringing to her eventual pursuit of a wealthy New York scion whose mother rather thoroughly disapproves of the match, setting various schemes in motion to save her son from a disastrous marrage. The narrative is more traditional, but aside from the slapstick nature of Dorothy and her beau chasing each other while her would-be mother-in-law interferes, it lacks the farcical nature of the first book, in part because Dorothy is no longer the wise-cracking observer but is enmeshed in the plot. It’s as short as the Blondes, though, and with the original illustrations by Ralph Barton taking up a number of pages, you could probably knock off the pair of novels in three hours or so.

Next up: I’ve finished Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio (about the irrational number φ) and moved on to Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America.

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→ July 16, 2012
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Scotland Yard app.

In case any of you missed it, my top 50 prospects ranking update went up on Thursday. I’ll be back on the Baseball Today podcast on Tuesday.

Scotland Yard is one of the few mass-market boardgames from before Settlers of Catan ushered in the modern era of “Eurogames” to fare well in the comparison to the more sophisticated, less luck-based games that players like me tend to favor. It has a very simple mechanic, has cooperative elements, and involves a tiny bit of luck. The Scotland Yard iOS app, released early last month, is a very strong implementation that only falls short in that it’s a hard game to play with AI opponents or partners.

The game is semi-cooperative, with two to five players as detectives chasing one player, the thief Mr. X, around London, attempting to catch him by landing on the space he occupies in the span of 24 turns. On each turn, a player can move to an adjacent location or station using a taxi, a bus, or the subway. The detectives start the game with a limited number of passes/fares for each method of transportation, and when a detective uses a ticket, he gives it to Mr. X to use on a subsequent turn. The location of Mr. X is obscured for most of the game, but is revealed four times, after moves 3, 8, 13, and 18; on all other turns, the detectives see what method of transportation he used, but not his location. Mr. X also gets two “double move” tickets, allowing him to make two moves within one turn, and has several “black” tickets, where he can obscure his method of transportation as well as his location. Finally, he can take boats along the Thames by using black tickets, a method entirely unavailable to the detectives.

I’ve never played the physical boardgame, but the need for secrecy makes this tailor-made for an adaptation to a mobile platform, whether you’re using pass-and-play or online multiplayer. The graphics in this app are bright and pretty clear, no mean feat for a complex board with lots of fine lines representing paths for each method of transportation; the app also brightly highlights all acceptable moves for each player on his turn, and includes a countdown clock of variable move times for live games.

Playing solely against AI opponents, I found it more fun to play as Mr. X because you can’t coordinate with AI detective players when playing the other side. Yet escaping the detectives quickly became simple, even on the hardest setting, because they’re not deductive enough – for example, they never seem to grasp that when Mr. X reaches one of the stations on the Thames and uses a black ticket, he probably took a boat to a different part of the board. So while gameplay is clean and simple, it’s much better suited to play against live opponents, even if you want to supplement with an AI detective, or want to gang up on an AI-played Mr. X.

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→ July 15, 2012
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Brave.

Brave is by far the most beautiful animated film I have ever seen, with details so clear and so lifelike that the movie exceeded any expectations I had for how realistic computer-generated images could be. It features a strong female protagonist, something I appreciate as the father of a six-year-old princess-obsessed daughter, and a stirring score primarily written by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle, with two songs performed by Scottish singer Julie Fowlis. Unfortunately, the story is a lot less nuanced than previous entries in the Pixar canon, with a more predictable plot and none of the secondary storylines we’ve come to expect from a studio that has produced so many masterpieces.

The warrior princess at the heart of Brave, Merida (voiced by, who else, Kelly Macdonald), is being groomed for eventual betrothal to one of three princes from allied clans in the Scottish highlands, yet has no interest in an arranged marriage or any fate written for her by her domineering mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson). Her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), is happy to encourage her tomboyish habits, giving her a bow and arrow for a birthday present and making fun of her would-be suitors with her, yet defers to his wife on all matters of import. Merida runs away after a blowout quarrel with her mother over her refusal to accept any of the princes, ending up in a witch’s cottage in the forest, which, naturally, leads to a spell that goes awry, the effects of which Merida must spend the remainder of the film trying to undo.

The animation of Merida’s unruly, curly, red hair is an absolute marvel, both an obvious symbol of her fiery independent spirit and a chance for Pixar’s animators to show off their tricks, which are even more impressive now than they were in Ratatouille, perhaps my least favorite Pixar film but which featured remarkable animation of Colette’s hair. Pixar re-wrote its animation system for the first time in 25 years to allow for more realistic depictions of human characters, and it shows all over this film, even in the depiction of the fur on the two ursine characters and in breathtaking panomaric shots of the highland forests, cliffs, and waterfalls. It is a new high-water mark for computer animation in the movies.

While my daughter enjoyed the movie tremendously, adults will likely find it a little too predictable, and the resolution relied on what was, for Pixar at least, an abnormal amount of just straight-on physical combat between man and bear and eventually between the two bears themselves. The mother-daughter bonding that occurs after the spell takes hold is poignant without becoming too sentimental, with the usual Pixar message of the need for characters who disagree to open their minds and work together. Merida’s three younger brothers, mischievous triplets who are too young to speak but are old enough to understand and use simple machines, steal most of the scenes in which they appear and seem tailor-made for future appearances in Pixar shorts, if not in a film of their own. Yet they don’t have any sort of story, appearing as comic relief and to help Merida and her mother try to break the spell. I also thought the film had less of Pixar’s trademark humor, relying on more obvious sight gags and even some mild bathroom humor to fill that gap.

However, I know I’m holding Pixar to an impossibly high standard – one they set through their first eleven films. (I still haven’t seen Cars 2.) No studio has been so good for so long and it may be unfair to expect every one of their films to be as good as The Incredibles or Up. Brave is an excellent movie by industry standards and my daughter loved it, not least because it has such a strong female lead. It just didn’t quite meet my very high expectations.

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