→ August 13, 2020
→ By

Klawchat 8/13/20.

My latest post for The Athletic subscribers looks at the difficult demotion calculus teams face with young players now, as well as notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe.

Keith Law: Klawchat. Breathing life into your nightmare.

Heather: Do you think there will be HS/College baseball in the spring?  It would be just like the Red Sox to finally get a top three pick, and then not have anyone for their scouts to watch.
Keith Law: At this point, no, I do not. That could change with the results of the election, and/or a fresh surge in cases in the northern hemisphere as the weather turns cold. (Wasn’t the heat supposed to shut the virus down? How’d that work out?) But we’re not prepared for what we really need right now, another 4-6 week lockdown.

Mark: Just finished with Empire Falls from your recommendation and loved it. If I recall ,you proceeded to read all of his books after that one.I;’m going away on vacation, what might be a strong second choice by Russo?
Keith Law: Nobody’s Fool is his second-best book; Straight Man is his funniest.

Joe: Nats promoted Seth Romero.  Think he is ready for the bigs?
Keith Law: On the mound? Changeup was always big-league quality, probably a 70. Control is iffy. Off the field is another matter.

Ben (MN): Does your love of coffee spread to espresso? If so, any espresso recommendations? I am just starting to get into espresso in the mornings instead of coffee because the acid in an entire cup coffee is doing a number on my stomach as I get older. So far the only “good” brand I know is Intelligentsia. I’m starting to explore local coffee shops in the Twin Cities but many don’t have their own espressos.
Keith Law: Dogwood’s Neon blend is a great, workhorse espresso bean. They’re local to you. And yes, I love espresso, and it is definitely easier on my stomach.

Jones: I’m surprised nobody’s picked up Folty since his DFA.  Any insight?
Keith Law: He was down 2+ mph.

Bob: Important pizza question. I’m on the east coast and will probably never be in AZ to eat Pizzeria Bianco right out of the oven. I just noticed one of those food delivery services offers to ship 4 pies for a pretty hefty price of $135. I’m willing to bite the bullet on the price, but will the pies be anywhere close to restaurant quality so that I can say I’ve actually tried Pizzeria Bianco? Never settle for less than fresh or accept this is the best I can do?
Keith Law: If you can afford it, try it. It won’t be as good as fresh, but you’ll still get the fresh ingredients and the high quality of workmanship that goes into it. But I’d also encourage you to look in your city for a Neapolitan-style pizzeria you could support.

Joe: As a fan, it seems like Deivi Garcia has been passed over as a rotation piece this year in favor of Clarke Schmidt even though he has actually pitched at AAA and is already on the 40 man.  Can you see Garcia helping the Yankees at all this year?
Keith Law: Yes, maybe in a long relief role. I don’t think they trust his command or his fastball’s ability to keep missing bats.
Keith Law: I like him a bit more than they do internally.

Nate: Watched Vlade Guerrero Jr. over the weekend against the Red Sox.  I guess he gets his metabolism from his mom’s side of the family.   He’s gotta be three hundred pounds.  He won’t be in the league in five years at this rate, right?
Keith Law: He’s big, for sure, and that’s why I’ve been saying for almost two years he will end up at DH. You can be heavy and still be a very good hitter, and it’s also not unlikely that at some point he’ll realize he has to get himself in better shape.

Kyle KS: In your opinion what is better for almost ready or MLB ready prospects, to be at an alternate site getting some sort of consistent reps or being at the MLB level but not playing frequently?  I’m thinking of Knizner and Carlson on the Cardinals when they were actually playing.
Keith Law: I wouldn’t call up Carlson unless he was going to play regularly. Knizner I could see using part-time, because there’s always work for other catchers to do – he could help in the bullpen, for example, and learn to catch better stuff & work with pitchers there.

Guest: OK, at what point (if any) does MLB look at the Cardinals situation and say that there is no way they can qualify for the post season due to the lack of games they can play.  

Do you think they privately have a hard number minimum?
Keith Law: I don’t know and I haven’t heard anything at all about this.

JJ: Was Andrew Benintendi always overrated?  I’ve been hearing for three years that he’s on the verge of stardom, but all I see is a league average player, who hasn’t improved at all since he first came up.
Keith Law: He hasn’t improved since he came up, but I don’t think he was overrated. Everyone, myself included, assumed he’d continue to adjust, and he hasn’t.

James: Can Trent Grisham be a dude? His underlying stats look really encouraging.
Keith Law: Yes.

Gary: Hey Keith- have you gotten to watch any Andres Gimenez? Man is he fun to watch. Glove looks like a 7
Keith Law: Yes. Not a 70 defender.

Guest: Who is hurt more with lack of a minor league season: low level prospects or triple a guys?
Keith Law: Low level prospects. They don’t get the year of repetitions that could lead to significant improvements and accelerate their ascents to the majors. It’s quite possible some of these guys will start 2021 no better off than they were at the start of 2020.

Brian: Is Detroit really gonna manipulate Mize’s service time in a year when they could legitimately make the playoffs and the back end of the rotation has been positively dreadful?
Keith Law: Seems like it.
Keith Law: They should have Mize, Skubal, and Manning up now, replacing Boyd, Nova, and Alexander. They’d probably be better off; they’d certainly be more interesting.

Jason: What is Luis Urias’s ceiling?
Keith Law: Above average regular at 2b.

Kevin: What position does Austin Martin play for the Blue Jays?
Keith Law: They’re going to try him at SS, I think, but I would bet on 3B in the long term.

Andrew: Does Realmuto break Posey’s record catcher deal?
Keith Law: He should.

TC: Gimenez off to a nice start for the Mets, and his defense definitely plays. His bat’s always been the question mark. Is there something you’ve seen in his at-bats so far that accounts for the small sample size success but could be a good sign for the future?
Keith Law: No, he’s been Madrigal-like, it’s all batting average, below-average power, doesn’t walk or even seem to work the count that much.

James: I think your scouting series is so popular because we can actually watch what you’re seeing.
Keith Law: I’m just glad you guys are enjoying it. I was certainly concerned about providing enough value to subscribers in a year without the minors.

Zach: The Daniel Bard story out of CO is pretty darn cool. Did you ever scout or watch him as a young player? (Also, amazing how much money the Rockies spent on bullpen help and this guy may wind up being their stopper.)
Keith Law: Yes, saw him both summers he was an amateur, with Team USA and on the Cape. Saw him hold mid-90s up to 98 with life as a starter, secondaries were always inconsistent, arm slot was kind of a problem. I believe I wrote him up as a potential starter, though, because the velocity was so easy and he was supposed to be a smart kid. Who knows what really went awry – was it just Lancaster? Was it the arm action? Something we don’t know about? – but I will say, in hindsight, he had a long way to go to get to three legit pitches and enough stuff to get LHB out to become a starter.

Jack: Any thoughts on the Laureano/Cintron incident? Were the suspensions right?
Keith Law: Yes, and yes. They’re both idiots for what they did. There’s a fucking pandemic going on, you dingbats.

Kevin: Is there an early indication on the baseball being used? Happy fun ball or scaled back?
Keith Law: Rob Arthur has written that it’s less happy-fun than last year’s.

JT: Trump is intentionally murdering the post office to ruin mail in voting and circumvent democracy. Whither the NRA and the defense from tyranny?
Keith Law: He and his cronies are explicitly talking about reducing voting rights, but that’s fine, because it’s the voting rights of brown people.

Michael: The top of the 2016 draft was terrible, but after round 1 you had Dustin May, Pete Alonso, Bo Bichette, Shane Bieber, Zach Plesac and more. How are MLB teams so bad at this crucial part of building a team?
Keith Law: That’s not really fair. Alonso looked quite different physically and didn’t bring all that huge power to games. Bichette was a first-round talent, and some teams saw him that way, but he tried to deter some teams from drafting him so he could sign with an organization he liked (Toronto being one). Bieber had a 45 fastball. May had athleticism and a great arm but some head-whack and no real delivery consistency. You cherrypicked, with hindsight, five guys from rounds 2 and beyond. That’s five successes out of, what, 500+ guys just taken in rounds 2 through 10?

Danny: I’m a Yankees fan and just saw Touki pitch this week for the first time- he’s fun as hell to watch. Have I missed out? his pitches have great movement and he’s really athletic on the mound
Keith Law: I still really like his future as a starter. Three potentially plus pitches, great athlete, still struggling a bit with consistency in the delivery, and I feel like he defaults a bit to power rather than location/setting up hitters.

Zach: Do you think Ryan McMahon will make enough contact to be an above-average regular?
Keith Law: I do.

jimmyb: At what point do the Angels get concerned about Adell? His defense (even on the wall catch yesterday) has been bad. And he looks sort of lost at the plate. Is it just about adjustments at this point?
Keith Law: Small sample but my impression is that he’s overmatched at the plate and not ready yet.

CG: It really seems like people get a kick out position players pitching (like Gyorko for the Brewers last night).  It seems more prudent this season than any other season, with the compressed schedule.  Do you enjoy it as well?
Keith Law: I enjoy it but it becomes less fun the more common it is.

Ben: There a lot of talk in Tigerland these days about wishing Boyd was dealt (before his current downturn started in the 2nd half) at last years deadline. My question to you is, do you know what level of prospects (if there actually was interest) were actually being offered then? If it was similar to the Greinke package, with all the financial negatives, I’d say Avila was right to sit. Do you think the Tigers could have gotten a better deal then the Greinke deal last summer for Boyd?
Keith Law: I don’t know, but I don’t blame Avila for not foreseeing Boyd turning into a pumpkin.

Guest: Why not push the end of the season a week or so to allow teams to complete their seasons?  They could then get a playoff bubble in one or two cities and make sure that completes to get all their money.
Keith Law: Television contracts.

Joe: Since Tatis missed most of the last two months I forgot how much fun he makes baseball, doesn’t he? I think Paddack’s curve looks different this year and it seems to be fooling people. Is it moving into that average pitch territory more consistently?
Keith Law: No, not an average CB, a 45 for me. Probably good enough for what he is.

Andrew: Any chance MLB will have fans in the stands come April 2020?
Keith Law: Realistic answer? Maybe. Scientific answer? They shouldn’t.

Fitch: Keith, as an outsider looking in (from UK, we have our own problems). When did Republican start to = idiot? Any post i see online or news clips you seemingly have to be thick, all lives matter, anti science, anti mask etc to be a Republican. Has Trump hardened these lines or did this start before him?
Keith Law: At some point in the Bush presidency, 2000-2008. This isn’t the Republican party of the 1980s or even 1990s. Now, some of it – the fealty to the religious right, general opposition to anti-discrimination laws, smaller government and less social safety net – has been part of their platform since at least the 1960s, but this anti-science, conspiracy theory-toting lunacy is a new feature.

Justin: Bought and loved the book.  Just in the last couple of days I’ve heard on the Mets broadcast that their biggest issue is that they can hit, but they can’t hit with runners in scoring position.  Also heard the Rockies say of course a close pitch would go Story’s way, he has 600 games in the big leagues and the other guy has 6.  My volume down button has never gotten more use.
Keith Law: You’ve made several good decisions there.

Braves Pitchers: Lucas Sims was pretty critical on Twitter of how he was handled by the Braves and they really only have Fried and Soroka to show for their pitching-focused rebuild.  Are there issues with the Braves’ front office re: developing pitching or is it just sour grapes from Sims?
Keith Law: That sounds a bit like sour grapes to me. And they still have some pitching coming, in the majors (Touki, Wilson) and minors (Anderson, Davidson).

Michael: Re: The draft, I’m talking about compared to the top of the draft with Moniak, Pint, Ray, etc.  But you can do the same exercise for any year and find tons of great talent that reached the majors shortly after being picked.
Keith Law: That year had a very weak top 10 and we knew it at the time.

Charlie: Vlad Jr is 21, but 2 very sloppy errors at 1B make me concerned about how hard he works at his craft…
Keith Law: I’ve heard for years that he really works at hitting. That’s great – make him a DH.

Tom: evan white looks very overmatched right now as well
Keith Law: Yes he does, and worse, it’s overmatched by velocity.

Jake: There were some stories from spring training that Gabrial Arias achieved some PD goals in terms of pitch recognition. That’s a big thing holding him back. If everything clicks, what kind of player could he be?
Keith Law: It’s just stories until he does it in games.

Andrew: Trading Max Fried will end up being Preller’s worst trade, wont it?
Keith Law: That would be saying something for the GM who traded Trea Turner for Wil Myers.

Michael: Have you watched Crip Camp on Netflix?  I had no idea the opposition to ADA laws and how it all came about. Amazing what we don’t learn in schools
Keith Law: I have not – heard it’s good, though.

Jay: How do you see the trade deadline playing out?  Very few teams will be out of the playoff picture this year, but you know the billionaire owners won’t let their GMs spend any money.
Keith Law: Probably just encourages more deals where GMs trade players and pay most of their salaries to get prospects back.

Guest: After reading your latest article regarding young MLB prospects and no AAA, would you call up Pache and let him get “real experience.”
Keith Law: I would. It’d help their defense, which in turn would helpt heir pitching too.

Andrew: Is Naylor done for with the Padres? Mateo. Almonte and Profar all ahead of him. If he doesn’t get ABs with universal DH then what is the point?
Keith Law: I think I’d still prefer Naylor’s bat, but I don’t know what they think internally on these guys.

Nick: What do you make of Rhys Hoskins’ struggles over the last half of last year into this year? Seemed so promising after his first two seasons.
Keith Law: His rookie year was pretty fluky; he’s much more of a low-average, high BB/K power hitter, and probably needs to DH. Useful player, not a star.
Keith Law: At least he spells his first name correctly.

Jason: Can Eric Lauer stick in a rotation?
Keith Law: I’m leaning towards no at this point.

Tom: Think Tony Gonsolin can be a solid starter? Looked pretty good last night
Keith Law: He definitely has the weapons to do so.

Mike: I miss minor-league baseball in the Summer.  What does minor league baseball look like when we return?
Keith Law: Short of MLB subsidies, we don’t get MiLB back until it is safe to have fans in the park, and that could be a while, even with a vaccine.

Kip: With their international sanctions ending next year, are the Braves linked to any notable prospects?
Keith Law: I have no idea, as I don’t cover that market or players under 16. Jesse Sanchez at MLB would be a better source.

Amy: Is it bad to just cheer for your team (redsox) to keep losing so they get a high draft pick? it honestly seems like the best thing they could get out of this year.
Keith Law: No, especially since they’re just not that good a team anyway.

Kevin: Nick Solak looking good with the bat  what kind of ceiling does he have and will he be better than Willie in LF ( I know not hard to do) or can he stay on the dirt
Keith Law: Maybe gets to regular status as a multi-position guy. Don’t think his glove is good enough for 2b regular.

Guest: “Say Anything” was a great read.  Are there other historical books like that, not necessarily by Keefe, you’d recommend?
Keith Law: Manhunt by James Swanson.

Mark: Thanks for doing the chat. Do you have a pizza dough recipe recommendation?
Keith Law: For a regular home oven that maxes out at 500-550 degrees, I use Peter Reinhart’s recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. For my little Ooni outdoor oven, which can get over 800 degrees, I use Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza.
Keith Law: You need totally different hydration levels for those two temperatures.

Luke: Is there something noticeably different about the Cubs or just a hot 15-game stretch?
Keith Law: No 15-game stretch is meaningful in terms of evaluating performance. However, it’s 1/4 of a season, so it’s meaningful in the standings this time.

Thomas: HI Keith; First off, thanks as always for these chats. Curious about your thoughts on Charlie Montoyo as a manager so far. I was really excited by his hire, and while anecdotally I think his bullpen management has been fine, his batting orders (moving hot guys down in the order so that the top of the order can bat with men on base) and bunting in extras with the new rule are just a couple of the things that I’ve noticed that seem very anti-Rays.
Keith Law: Agreed. I’ve been surprised at some of his outdated in-game tactics. The fealty to Biggio, who hasn’t performed this year and gets overmatched by velocity, is weird – he shouldn’t be leading off just because he draws walks, not when his OBP is below the league median.

A: Anything surprising about Spencer Howard’s debut?
Keith Law: See my column today.

Ben: When playing guitar are you interested in music theory too or is it more about being able to play songs for a hobby/enjoyment?
Keith Law: I took a music theory class in college but haven’t thought about that stuff since. I just play to win the game. Wait, wrong topic.

Nelson: Does Lamet need another pitch to succeed as a starter at a high level?
Keith Law: I think so. He’s been really good without it this season, though.

Michael: If the season ended today, three below .500 teams would make the playoffs.  Not great, right?
Keith Law: Eh, I’m willing to accept pretty much whatever this season gives me. We have baseball and that alone is a surprise.

Nick: Any thoughts on how Justin Dunn has looked so far?  Is his future in the rotation or the pen?
Keith Law: He’s been 90-91 a lot. This isn’t the guy he was in the minors, certainly not the guy who hit 99 in relief in college and would still sit mid-90s as a starter after that. If this is all he has, he has to go to the pen.

Brian: A couple of Brewers questions: (1) Hiura’s defense has been awful – do you DH him this year and hope the DH sticks in the NL in the long term? (2) What is Adrian Houser’s ceiling?
Keith Law: 1. Yes. 2. Fourth starter.

Dave: Are the Orioles actually interesting? That Ruiz play from last night was pretty impressive.
Keith Law: I haven’t found them that interesting to watch, in terms of players who I think will be part of their next good team or who have real trade value. And those last two games vs the Phillies were ugly all around.

Henry: Hi Keith, what burr grinder do you use for pour-overs? I’m looking to replace mine.
Keith Law: This Baratza Virtuoso. Mine is an older model without the timer. It’s been tremendous, requiring just two part replacements (a new burr, and a plastic housing that eventually cracked) in almost seven years, plus their customer service is an 80.

addoeh: A couple team below .500 making the playoffs isn’t that bad.  1980’s NHL played 80 games to only eliminate 5 of the 21 teams.
Keith Law: I made a joke about this somewhere recently, where I remembered the 1981-82 season (I think) and noticed what you just said, and felt really bad for the five teams that were left out.

Adam: Not a question, but a link worthy for your Stick to Baseball column. Talks about how fringe conspiracy sites and “news” are all free and easily accessible, while quality journalism with high standards is increasingly behind a pay wall. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-…
Keith Law: The solution, if there is one, is for sites that facilitate the wide spread of fake news and disinformation sites, such as Facebook, to crack down on them.

James: I saw you liked some tweets defending “WAP.” That song is trash; it’s not art. Cardi B has every right to put it out, of course, but why elevate or defend indecency?
Keith Law: Who are you to decide what is “art?” I actually don’t care for the song, although Megan Thee Stallion is a far better rapper than I realized. But it’s not really a genre of music I especially like, and so much of that song’s meaning is about female sexuality, and I’m really loath to call that “trash” especially when we’ve had several decades of songs where men extol their own sexual prowess without comparable criticism.

Brandon: Yeah absolutely nothing can backfire with having Facebook determine what is and isn’t real news. For such a smart guy you really are extremely naive sometimes
Keith Law: Good comment, Brandon, thanks for making something personal that didn’t need to be. I never said “nothing can backfire.” I am arguing that Facebook and Youtube and Twitter would do better to police content posted on their services instead of letting Miracle Mineral Solution (bleach as a fake health cure) and QAnon (a domestic terror movement) use their sites to spread their messages and recruit new followers.

Andrew: Is it even possible for baseball to do a bubble like the NBA?
Keith Law: I don’t think so, although that’s a better question for scientists in that field. It strikes me that it’s easier for the NBA with rosters less than half the size of MLB rosters.

Dodgers: What makes their player development system so great?  The talent they’re producing is incredible.
Keith Law: They have drafted extremely well in the last few years, and their player development system is one of the best at integrating analytics, mechanics, and traditional methods.

Big Fan: Great article today.  Can Austin Riley be fixed?
Keith Law: His issues with velocity are tied to bat speed, and that’s not an easy fix.

Rick: Brandon Marsh an impact guy? Seems like the Angels should’ve given him a chance over Adell.
Keith Law: Yes, he is. Not sure I agree on him over Adell to start, but switching them now would make sense.

JR: Any idea what AZ will do with Varsho? Seems tough to develop a C in the bigs. Are they resigning themselves to using him as IF/OF?
Keith Law: Plus his speed might be better used at another position. And Carson Kelly is really good. Their alternatives are better than they would be for most teams.

Ridley: I’d put the Republican party’s change all that way back to Goldwater’s defeat. That was the end of the intellectual conservative movement-the party made a conscious effort to be a grass roots, pro-religious-freedom-and-we-know-what-that-means and anti-civil rights party. My parents were part of that movement. They recognized that you don’t start a movement at the top; they organized at the local level, winning schoolboards, winning county posts, and setting the agenda in state agendas. Reagan was their first victory, and he was as anti-expert, anti-intellectual as Bush 2.
Keith Law: It sounds like you know this stuff better than I do – and I’ll at least plead age, since Goldwater’s defeat was 9 years before I was born.

Jackie: Can Charlie Blackmon hit .500?
Keith Law: He can definitely hit .400.

Will: Do you agree with Mo Rivera that a team can’t be a world champion in a sixty game season?
Keith Law: No, and it’s not even the biggest thing on which Mo and I disagree.

Jay: Basic policing of content is not hard.  When a toxic source like the two you mentioned becomes prominent enough to get attention, drop the ban hammer and don’t look back.  A gazillion other sites already do it.  Facebook simply doesn’t want to.
Keith Law: Exactly. And Youtube doesn’t either. I’ve reported videos promoting MMS, which their policy explicitly bans, and nothing happens. I don’t like the idea of the government creating new regulatory structures but maybe that’s the threat we need to get these companies to step up their own enforcement.

Brian: The Mets have started Dom Smith at DH and Pete Alonso at 1B in each of the past three games.  Is the wrong thing to do because Smith is objectively a better defender?  Is it the right thing to do because Alonso may not perform as well if he’s only DHing (which is speculation, for sure), or because they may not have the benefit of the DH next year and Alonso needs to maintain his skills in the field?
Keith Law: My guess is that it’s status quo bias: Alonso was the primary 1B last year and moving him to DH would constitute a change. I don’t know anyone who’d argue Alonso is a better defensive 1B than Smith; Smith is probably a 70 there. Even if you love Alonso’s glove, it’s a 50, and I’d argue it’s less. So  what explanation is there? Inertia.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for your questions and for reading. Please stay safe, stay distant in public, and wear your masks. Someday we will meet again.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ August 10, 2020
→ By

The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 9, 2020
→ By

Music update, July 2020.

It seems like new music releases might be slowing down now, perhaps a lagged effect of the pandemic, although I still see a half-dozen or more albums coming out in the rest of 2020 that I’m excited to hear. As always, you can listen to the playlist here if you can’t see the Spotify widget below.

The Beths – Dying to Believe. The praise for the Beths’ new album Jump Rope Gazers is a bit ahead of my opinion of the album, which I liked, but wouldn’t say I loved it; they’re so much better when they use their energy and go uptempo.

Doves – Prisoners. That’s two strong tracks of the three singles they’ve released so far off their comeback album, The Universal Want, due out on September 20th.

Space Above featuring Boyboy – Movements. Aaron Short, who records as Space Above, may sound more like early The Naked and Famous, the band Short left, than TNAF does today – and I’m here for it.

The Naked and Famous – Everybody Knows. And here’s the remaining duo, with one of their most melodic songs since their debut album in 2010. Their latest album Recover, features this, last year’s “Sunseeker,” “Death,” and “Bury Us.”

Everything Everything – Violent Sun. This latest single from these British avant-garde rockers definitely grew on me over multiple listens, further reason to be eager for their fifth album, Re-Animator, which drops on September 11th.

Nation of Language – The Wall & I. Nation of Language’s latest album Introduction, Presence came out on May 24th, and closes out with this track, which feels heavily influenced by peak New Order.

Jorja Smith – By Any Means. This was the singer/songwriter’s first single on her own since last year’s hit “Be Honest,” and I hope it signals her sophomore album will come soon.

Black Honey – Beaches. More indie-pop goodness from one of my favorite bands of 2018.

San Cisco – Messages. Scarlett Stevens takes on lead vocals on this very sunny pop track, although I think her lack of vocal depth shows here when she doesn’t have Jordi Davieson to share singing duties.

PAINT – Strange World. This really sounds like a lost Badly Drawn Boy track from 2000. PAINT is Pedrum Siadatian, formerly of the Allah-Las; this is the best track from his first album under the name, Spiritual Vegas.

Inhaler – Fade Into You. It’s tough to cover a song like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but Inhaler, led by Elijah Hewson (son of Bono), does a very credible job here.

Hinds – Spanish Bombs. A bit of a different sound for the Spanish quartet, maybe a little more polished than their previous output, although that’s kind of a low bar.

Glass Animals – It’s All So Incredibly Loud. This song is wonderfully weird, and has Glass Animals’ trademark use of unusual percussion sounds, and the more I listen to it the more I like it. The synth lines here are relentless.

Serpiko – Sleep State. Nobody seems to know who Serpiko is, but his debut EP, also called Sleep State, has garnered some positive press for its unusual blend of electronic, funk, and jazz elements. This title track is by far the best on the record, meandering in a purposeful way thanks to a persistent percussion line.

The Go-Go’s – Club Zero. Showtime has a new documentary out on the pioneering all-girl pop/rock group, and the quintet recorded this new track to go along with it … and it’s great. Other than Belinda Carlisle’s vocals, you might guess this was something from their peak years.

Ihsahn – Spectre at the Feast. Ihsahn is one of the founding members of the Norwegian black metal band Emperor, probably as well remembered for their involvement in church burnings and for their drummer’s conviction of the murder of a man who solicited him for sex than for their four albums, the last of which came out in 2001. That’s a long way of saying that this track is nothing like Emperor’s music – it’s progressive rock, not really even metal, with clean vocals and some intriguing guitar work.

Pallbearer – Forgotten Days. The champions of American doom metal are back with this title track from their new album, due out October 23rd. This track was labeled (Edit) so I presume a longer version will appear on the full-length LP.

Ensiferum – The Defence of the Sampo. I really enjoy Ensiferum when they stick to the thrash elements more common in Viking metal and go light on the death growls; it’s like listening to strange Norse metal drinking songs.

Mastodon – Fallen Torches. This is on the heavier side for Mastodon, a previously unreleased track that will appear on the band’s forthcoming B-sides and miscellany collection Medium Rarities, which will also include the band’s cover of Metallica’s “Orion.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 8, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/8/20.

I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.

For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.

I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.

My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
  • Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
  • The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
  • Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
  • Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
  • You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
  • A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
  • My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
  • Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
  • Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
  • NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
  • The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
  • Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
  • An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 4, 2020
→ By

Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ August 2, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ August 1, 2020
→ By

Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 31, 2020
→ By

Klawchat 7/31/20.

I’ve got two scouting blogs up for subscribers to the Athletic, one today and one from Tuesday, covering rookies and young players of note.

Keith Law: You’ve got that pure feel, such good responses. Klawchat.

John: Man, Bieber’s command looks really strong.  How did you see him as a prospect?
Keith Law: I saw him as a back-end starter because he was more 88-91. His velocity kept creeping up, which I absolutely did not see coming, so now he’ll sit 94 and his secondary stuff has improved as well. He’s at least a legit #2 starter. I think over time he’ll give up a few too many home runs to be an ace, but I could be wrong again.

Brett J: Jp Crawford has been noticeably better in his small sample size this year. Are you seeing anything that shows his improvements might stick?
Keith Law: I’d say this is more a continuation of what we saw from him last year.

Mike: Just wanted to say the Scouting Notebook pieces you’ve been running on The Athletic have been stellar. Really looking forward to that series for the next week that baseball will be around.
Keith Law: Thank you. The response to the first one was so good that it made doing a second one an easy call. Now I am a bit stuck as we wait for some more debuts, but if we get another week of games, I’ll have enough guys to discuss. Could always look at which players seem noticeably different from last year too.

Andrew: What is the point of the Mariners carrying 2 actual outfielders while Kelenic sits idle in Tacoma? Shouldn’t they just see what he can do against Major League talent?
Keith Law: At this point, no. They’ve pushed off his free agency by a year already.

Jibraun: In his newsletter today, Joe Sheehan mentioned that MLB’s K rate is rising again this year. What rule changes do you think should be instituted to lower K rates?
Keith Law: Raise the bottom of the strike zone. I also think the automated strike zone would help too.

Jebediah: Since you’re a grump with no emotion for baseball, can you just calculate the teams with the highest WAR so we can award the World Series trophy to them?
Keith Law: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Arnold: Did Giants make right choice to not put Joey Bart on roster? On one hand, Posey opting out created space for him and he looks to be major league ready as a hitter. On the other hand, who knows if MLB will make it through the shortened season and Giants aren’t contenders so why waste a year of salary control.
Keith Law: This is the one variable that might stop teams from recalling prospects now – what if the season ends in a few days, and you called up a guy to play three games only to have him get most of a year of service, and maybe put him on the 40-man too soon? I hate that that’s a consideration, but it’s real.
Keith Law: It’s like when the White Sox recalled Michael Kopech a few years ago, and he made two starts before blowing out his elbow. He got a year-plus of service out of that.

Robert: What would it take for the MLB to admit failure and call the season? Half the league not being able to play?
Keith Law: I bet a player in the hospital in serious condition would do it.
Keith Law: Or another Marlins-level outbreak.

AJ: Who were better prospects as amateurs, Cole and Bauer at UCLA or Rocket and Leiter at Vandy?
Keith Law: I haven’t seen the Vandy boys in college, but I think Cole and Bauer.

Deke: Even if we get anything approximating the rest of the 2020 season, it’s still basically going to be a wash. So my question is: Should we be at all optimistic for NEXT YEAR’s MLB season? It seems like there’s every chance this is comparably bad then.
Keith Law: We shouldn’t be optimistic about anything as long as the hoaxers are in power. We should have had a national shutdown for 6 weeks in the spring. Instead we have the worst situation of any developed country, even worse than many developing countries, out of every place that’s been hit with the pandemic. How anyone can see this and not immediately blame the Administration is beyond me.

Kevin W: What would you do with ohtani?  Keep status quo?  Hitter only?  Pitcher only?
Keith Law: I’d pick one. Still prefer him on the mound but if he hasn’t really come back from TJ yet then maybe you let him hit only and have him throw on the side?

Cubs: Is it way to early to call up someone you just drafted?
Keith Law: In theory, now. In this environment, probably.

Patty O’Furniture: Max Fried looked the best he’s ever looked last night!  Not ready to call him an ace or anything, but damn.  He pitched like a grown man
Keith Law: Feeling good about all the years I kept him as a top 50ish prospect. Great athlete, smart kid, just needed time.

Kevin W: Has any player you have scouted ever had all 5 tools rated above 50?
Keith Law: I can’t think of one. Many guys have the power-run-glove-arm tools. Few also have the hit tool.

addoeh: If a player getting seriously ill from COVID nor having half a team testing positive have stopped the season, nothing short of a player dying is going to.
Keith Law: This is also possible.

Kevin W: How are you going to handle school this year with your daughter?
Keith Law: We’re going to do what her school offers, which I believe will be hybrid (a few days in school, a few remote).

Robbie: Were you impressed at all/ have an opinion on the way William Contreras handled his surprise early debut?
Keith Law: No opinion. Minuscule sample. I saw him get overwhelmed in his last game, unfortunately.

Greg: Should Dylan Carlson be playing every day instead of Billy Hamilton 2.0 (Bader)? If so, what kind of numbers would you expect from him in a full season?
Keith Law: I think so. .350+ OBP this year which would be a big help.

Bob: Tatis seems to be worth the $27m it took to pay off Shields.
Keith Law: Yes, yes he does.

Greg: What way do you prefer to cook zucchini  or yellow squash
Keith Law: Fritters! I just made zucchini/corn fritters the other day. Recipe was on Serious Eats.

John: Seems like its impossible to find a reasonable argument with non-maskers, how did our country fall so far, is it really too much to ask to look out for others for 2-3 months?
Keith Law: Masks, evolution, vaccines … so much of this is misguided “liberty” talk, and often is really about people clinging to a vision of yesteryear.
Keith Law: That includes white power, religion, and patriarchy.

Luis: just wanted to congratulate you on the amazing book. I’m at chapter 4 at the moment and waiting for the day to end to dig into ch5! Enjoy your weekend!
Keith Law: Thank you! Glad you’re enjoying it.

addoeh: 2020 is drunk.  The President is promoting a doctor who believes in demon semen.
Keith Law: She’s a massive, massive quack. This is like the President promoting Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Wakefield or Uri Geller as authorities on science and medicine.

Mike: Can Tony Gonsolin be a #2 starter? Do you see him seizing a rotation spot this year from Stripling or Wood, if he’s ever healthy?
Keith Law: I like him more than those two guys, but thought he was more of a fourth starter or an ace in a swingman role. Wouldn’t rule him out from a higher ceiling given how far he came just in his first year in pro ball when he was pitching full time.

Benji: I really don’t like Espn anymore
Keith Law: You should hear what ESPN says about you.

Buck: With his changeup looking so good can B Woodruff become a legit ace?
Keith Law: Above league-average starter.

Matt: Keep seeing the White Sox are playing around with Vaughn at 3rd base – assume the chances of him actually being able to play there are ~0%, right?
Keith Law: I think so. Same for Torkelson. Third basemen are usually a lot more agile than those guys.

Mike: Could Dustin May end up starting a playoff game this season?
Keith Law: Why not?

Josh: Might the league be better off pausing the season, and setting up a “bubble” in Southern California, where they can easily play into November while (probably) leaving time to rest for next season?
Keith Law: I suppose we could see if the NBA bubble works, although MLB has more than twice the player count.

Jack: Nick Madrigal making his MLB debut tonight. Do you think he immediately becomes the non-pitcher with the least present power in the big leagues?
Keith Law: It’d be a close competition between him, Leury Garcia, and David Fletcher, I think. Billy Hamilton would win this but he’s not in the majors.

Tom: do you believe padres catcher mejia can be an above average contributor offensively?
Keith Law: He was on my breakouts list last week, so clearly I do.

TC: How much of Edwin Diaz’s struggles are mental vs mechanical? He looked fine in his first two outings up until giving up the home run to Ozuna & last night he had zero command & no feel for a slider.
Keith Law: I think the altered baseball last year really hurt him. His slider went poof when the baseball changed.

Chris P: Hey KLaw, are you going to be able to get any information on the secondary sites for each team? I’m wondering if we’re able to get any information on prospects that aren’t in the show this season.
Keith Law: I expect to get some information, filtered through team sources though, after a few weeks.

Pat D: I’ve been desperate to get this question answered by multiple people.  Shouldn’t the MLBPA fire Tony Clark at the very least get him a MUCH better negotiating partner for the next CBA?  It seems like his track record is pretty terrible so far with these negotiations.
Keith Law: I think it’s more about who’s advising him, and whether he even has final say over negotiations. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that he’s been overruled by people around him, which – if true, and I want to be extremely clear that this is unverified – would be the worst position for a leader.

TC: Is it fair to say the only true way we can have a safe season is if we have a vaccine widely available? Should MLB be concentrating on being able to safely open 2021 spring training?
Keith Law: Other countries have limited the virus’ spread without a vaccine. They locked down nationally, enforced it, and got compliance from the populations. We had a piecemeal approach, hoaxers and deniers in the White House, and mouthbreathers in the streets claiming masks were tyranny (but abducting protesters in unmarked vans and calling for delaying an election isn’t?).

Nate: Will you be able to do a prospect list this offseason? With no minor league games and only the opinions of team officials as to what is happening at their satellite camps, it seems like there just wouldn’t be enough unbiased info to make the process legitimate this year.
Keith Law: Sure, it just won’t change as much year over year as it usually does.

Guest: Does it seem odd to you that Markakis saw how things are going and now has decided to play?
Keith Law: Yes, although maybe he thinks he’ll play for a few weeks, the season will be cancelled, and he’ll at least go back into free agency with some playing time?

Lee: Has Trump officially killed the Republican party?   How the hell did any sane person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: If he loses in November, which I am not willing to assume just yet, the party will quickly move to disavow him, and individual politicians will rewrite history to say they never really supported him. It is on us to stop them from doing so.

Dave: You prefer the Vetri Neopolitan dough to Reinhart? I’ve gotten decent results with Reinhart, but it’s so sticky it’s hard to handle unless I keep it cold, which is suboptimal.
Keith Law: Different doughs for different temperatures. I use Vetri’s Neapolitan for my outdoor oven, which gets to 800+. Reinhart’s is my go-to for indoors, where I set the oven at 500.

Another Matt: What are you missing most about having no minor league season this year?
Keith Law: All of it. Going to games to scout, and to see scout friends, and watching stuff online, and following players through box scores, and talking to scouts and player development people about players.

Leprekhan: Long term Soroka or Fried?
Keith Law: I feel better about Fried staying healthy over the long term than Soroka. Both are probably #2 starters.

Ethan: Any suggestions for Carcassonne expansion packs? Already have hills and sheep and traders and builders. Thanks!
Keith Law: I like Inns & Cathedrals. Haven’t tried Hills & Sheep.

Todd Boss: I know he’s not a major prospect, but Nats farmhand Tres Barrera (who was recently hit with an 80game PED suspension) filed a counter suit.  In the complaint he says he tested positive for “10 picograms” of DHCMT.  In mass units, a picogram is equal to 0.000000000001 of a gram.

If this is true, is this just a patently ridiculous suspension?  Is a MLB player actually being suspended without pay for 80 games for ingesting less than a millionth of a gram of a performance enhancing substance?
Keith Law: I’m probably out of my league answering this, but I think the issue is that you wouldn’t have that in your system at all unless you’d ingested it, because it’s synthetic.

Adam Trask: Nick Madrigal gets the call. You see real value there or replacement level?
Keith Law: More than replacement level. Maybe an average regular if he can keep his average up. My concern remains his inability to make hard contact, with zero power.

Todd Boss: So are you in a Sinclair market that’s being forced to show Plandemic?  Are you setting your DVR?
Keith Law: I am not. I think we’re an hour-plus from their nearest affiliate.

Danny: Simple question and not at all wishcasting- what are the odds that Trump is indicted at some point post-presidency (i.e. election fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, improper profiteering from office?)
Keith Law: I hope that whoever succeeds him, whenever it happens, holds him and his cronies (and his children) accountable for any crimes they’ve committed, rather than pardoning them and saying we need to move forward or turn the page. The latter would simply encourage the next set of grifters who come along.

Adam Trask: We’ve learned JK Rowling is a bigot. I was looking forward to reading the Potter books to my baby girl. Should I still?
Keith Law: Yes.
Keith Law: There is a lot of good in those books, even though their author has revealed herself to be a TERF.

Don: How did we get brainwashed as a country to prefer chicken breasts over chicken thighs?
Keith Law: Our national fat phobia, along with bad advice from some quarters of the federal health establishment.

David: Keith, do you think Jeff Lunhow will work in an MLB front office again?
Keith Law: My guess is no.

Eric: Sadly, my father unexpectedly passed. Do you have any tips for grief or any good books to rec? It’s…hard.
Keith Law: I’m so sorry for your loss. I don’t have a book to recommend, but would certainly suggest talking to a therapist or psychologist, even if it’s just for a few sessions.

Robbie: He’s already 29, so clearly he’s not a prospect, but what’s your opinion of Yaz. He seems to have a great approach and has continued to hit the ball hard to start the season
Keith Law: Extra outfielder at best.

Pat D: Is there any movie that’s SUPPOSED to come out this year that would get you into a theater?  I’m still very determined to see Tenet in IMAX.
Keith Law: No, I’ll wait to see them all at home.

Drew: If you saw an anti-mask tirade in real life like we’re seeing all over the news, would you step in? I keep picturing myself wanting to get involved but also not wanting to be in the cloud of a covidiots screaming and spittle.But my 2020 rage could use a good screaming.
Keith Law: I think I would. I haven’t told anyone to put a mask on, even though I’ve seen people without them, or “wearing” them off their noses and mouths.
Keith Law: If they’re giving an employee a hard time, though, that employee would probably benefit from other customers voicing support. I think.

Greg: Why does there seem to be a very local contingent of fans who are seemingly convinced that sports media are driving some kind of agenda to get sports cancelled? Just general distrust of media of any kind? If the fans are for something, that means the media must be against it? Or just a more widespread dumbing of America?
Keith Law: Distrust of media, and wishful thinking. The funny part is that they think we have some power to affect the outcome.

Arnold: Today’s reports that national pandemic plan was tossed in trash by Jared because COVID-19 was hurting blue cities/states more is both least surprising and most frightening thing yet from this administration.
Keith Law: And should make more people mad … but it won’t.

Brett: Thank you for your taking time to do this today. Kris Bubic makes his big league debut tonight. Have you seen him live, and if so, what did you like/dislike? What’s your ceiling on him long term?
Keith Law: Low ceiling but command/changeup guy who should succeed for a while as a back-end starter.

Don: Leury Garcia is secretly a yoked muscle hamster. Jacked two dongs from both sides of the plate in the opener
Keith Law: ISO under .100 last year. He’s strong for his size, but that size is awfully close to me.

Whodini: What was your favorite song from that Eurovision Song Contest movie?
Keith Law: No interest, sorry.

addoeh: How would you describe yourself when you’ve had a couple adult beverages?  Happy, huggy, sleepy, loud, sings a lot, dances a lot, belligerent, wordy?
Keith Law: I’m more voluble, and I’m told I’m a funny drunk.

Chris: Given his crazy stuff, why has Dustin May struck out less than a batter an inning in his minor-league career? Do you think he ever wins a Cy Young?
Keith Law: He does, or should, get a lot of bad contact.

Guest: Ha the Socialist agenda officially killed the Democratic party? How the hell could any same person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: Please go read any actual history or economics book about what “socialist” means.

Ridley: So, I hear more than a few politicians saying that they’re not going to extend/increase unemployment because they don’t want people to make more money than if they were at work.

Isn’t that the point? Don’t we want to incentivize people to stay at home, avoid spreading the disease, and be safe?
Keith Law: Painting the poor as lazy has been a popular pastime for both parties, especially the GOP, for at least 75 years.

Craig: MLBPA has a say in how the draft is run because draft pick compensation is tied to free agency. Why don’t the owners get rid of free agency compensation so they can do whatever they want with the draft?
Keith Law: The union doesn’t want to give up that say, and they’d have to give that.

Chris P: Vladdy Jr seems to still be hitting mostly groundballs and has only 1 homer going back to last August. Are you noticing anything different from him or his approach that would give you pause? I know he was on your breakout list this year and I still think he’s going to be a star…but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a little concerned.
Keith Law: It’s been a week. Even with the high GB rate last year he had a 105 wRC+, because he hits the ball hard. Everyone I’ve asked who’s spent time around him thinks he’s such a smart hitter he’ll get to driving the ball more. Also, he’s just 21, way too soon to be concerned. He’d be a junior in college right now.

Sal: Earlier you said to raise the bottom of the strike zone to deal with the rise in Ks. Is that suggestion for a hard rule change or for umps being less generous with the low strike?
Keith Law: A hard rule change.

Jonny: “individuals with a cervix” by CNN today.   At some point this becomes Orwellian speech, no?
Keith Law: Please go read 1984 if you’re going to allude to it.

xxx(yyy): do you listen to any podcasts? have any recs for non-baseball related ones?
Keith Law: Grierson & Leitch, The Hidden Brain, BBC’s The Inquiry. I don’t have time to get through any more right now with no car time.

Sal: One last one….can you give Mets fans *any* reason not to start twitching when they hear or read the name “Kelenic”?
Keith Law: No, sorry. You should be permanently angry over BVW just giving him away.

Frank: The Giants traded for Zach Cozart and released him before the season was shorted so they owe him the money for this contract under the 2020 season.  Since he was released before the new agreement and 60 game schedule, do they owe him the full amount of his contract or the agreed upon prorata amount?  If its the later, makes this trade even better for the Giants.
Keith Law: Great question. I assume pro rata but I do not know for sure.

Andrew: If MLB created a “Utility Man of the Year Award” (think: NBA 6th Man of the Year), who would you name it after?
Keith Law: Tony Phillips.

addoeh: For Eric, I lost my dad two weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer.  Talk to a therapist, talk to friends.  For me, it was time that also helped.
Keith Law: Thank you.

Samsonite: I wouldn’t normally recommend this kind of thing but this year is different – you should watch that Eurovision Song Context movie. Is it dumb? Very much so. Is it good? Well, I guess it’s not. But it made me happy for a couple of hours and I’ve had some really terrible songs in my head for a week.
Keith Law: It’s not even a style of movie I like. There are still so many movies out there I want to watch and don’t have time to see – plus a billion TV shows, although I’ve finally started watching Stranger Things – that I can’t see spending time on something I’m so unlikely to enjoy.
Keith Law: ok, apparently Cozart gets the full salary because he was released before the season.

That Guy in Detroit: The U.S. might benefit from the presence of an actual “socialist” party — and ranked choice voting to give it, and others, an actual shot
Keith Law: The presence of one, yes. I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere with a true socialist party in power.

Ken: Let me rephrase the question. Has the policies of the Democratic Party made it impossible for them to win a Presidential election?
Keith Law: Their candidate got 3 million more votes than her opponent last time, so I am pretty sure your questions reflect more about your desires than they do any political reality.

xxx(yyy): who would you rather have for the next 5 years as a team cornerstone – Vladito or Joey Gallo?
Keith Law: Vlad.

Mickey: hey Keith – loved the book, of course. Are you less active on twitter these days or am I just missing your tweets (or mis-remembering you as being more active in previous years)?
Keith Law: Less active. It just doesn’t pay to have discussions on there, let alone to argue with anyone. Credit to Twitter for finally booting David Duke, but the site is still overrun by bots, racists, science deniers, and just general assholes.
Keith Law: People will say *anything* if they don’t have to put their names on it.

Henry: Isn’t the entire 2020 season just a small sample size? I’m not sure if we can count anyone’s performance this season seriously.
Keith Law: I tried to make a similar point at the top of my predictions column. Sixty games is less than half a season. It would get us to about June 10th in a regular year.

JJ: The Democrats’ candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections.  It’s not their policies that are keeping them from the White House …
Keith Law: It’s the electoral college, and maybe some gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Patty O’Furniture: Thoughts on Mike Foltynewicz?
Keith Law: Not sure where his velocity went, but he might be a candidate to take eight months off to try to regain strength, or let whatever’s gone awry heal up, and try again in February or March.

Jackie: Giving a 12 year contract to any player is just insane, right?  Mookie might be a great player now, but the vast majority of major leaguers don’t last nearly that long.  If the Dodgers employ an actuary, he probably pulled out all his hair.
Keith Law: It’s a luxury tax thing. You spread out the payments over more years to reduce the AAV and thus reduce the hit to your payroll for LT purposes.
Keith Law: Nobody thinks he and Harper and Trout will still be $30MM+ players at age 40. It’s just accounting.

Colin: Don’t you think Yaz as an “extra OF at best” is a bit harsh? He hit last year at a solid OF level already. After reading MVP machine, I feel more open to late bloomers, myself. Especially when I didn’t know what was not happening for the player in their early-mid 20s
Keith Law: No, it’s right. I’d go further: without the Happy Fun Ball, he wouldn’t even be that. I’m sorry that the .556 BABIP he has so far this year hasn’t changed my view.

Greg: I don’t like that there is a world series attached to this. Can we just call this a beefed up spring training. I’d be happy with that.
Keith Law: At this point, I’m happy with every day of games we get, and not looking any further.
Keith Law: I need to wrap this up a bit early and will be offline most of the weekend, so I won’t have a links post up Saturday either. Thank you all for reading and for all of your questions. Please stay safe and wear your masks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ July 30, 2020
→ By

The Famished Road.

Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his sprawling novel The Famished Road, which now sits as the start of a trilogy of novels about the spirit child Azaro, who moves back and forth between the spirit and material worlds until he decides to stay with one family in a nameless African country until he can make his mother happy. Okri’s prose is stunning and the book is replete with the magical realism common in postcolonial literature, but even a week after finishing it I still can’t quite decide what, if anything, this book was about.

Azaro, short for Lazaro (since he has seemingly returned from the dead multiple times), is the only child of a couple in a small African village where citizens are getting by, but where the mere appearance of a car or a radio is notable. Representatives of two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, visit the village, where the hub of activity is the bar owned by the mysterious Madame Koto, who lets Azaro hang around during the day while his mother hawks goods at a local market and his father does … well, a lot of nothing. Azaro’s father chases various chimeras throughout the book, at one point deciding he’s going to be a boxer and at another that he’ll be a politician, never doing much to earn money to feed his family (and, while he’s a boxer, eating more than his share, so Azaro and his mother go hungry). There’s also a blind man in a wheelchair who seems to just wish evil on Azaro and the other kids in the village, a photographer who runs afoul of the political thugs and begins to document the strife they cause in the village, and various incarnations from the spirit world who want to pull Azaro back to the other side.

Okri is a beautiful writer, and even descriptions of ordinary events and moments sparkle. Azaro is probably around eight or nine years old, but uses phrasings and imagery of a wizened adult – or, perhaps, an ageless being from the spirit world: “The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.” Even scenes of violence take on a mystical quality that lessens their graphic nature, which makes some of the rioting – a not infrequent event in The Famished Road – a bit easier to navigate as a reader.

I love both magical realism and postcolonial literature, but something about this book didn’t hit the mark with me, primarily because I couldn’t connect with whatever its underlying themes might be. It seems like Okri writes at a figurative level, but perhaps without the metaphorical meaning beneath it. If Madame Koto represents someone or something, or Azaro’s father does, I missed it completely, perhaps just because I lack the historical context (what I know of Nigerian history is fairly limited to their civil war), but even his depiction of the two political parties felt a little facile; if the message here is just “all politicians are corrupt,” well, sure, but I think we already knew that.

Because of Okri’s prose and the incredible imagery throughout the book, The Famished Road flies by, even at 500 pages, and even with a plot that meanders substantially. Okri sets a scene, creating a vivid environment with a clear atmosphere, but what happens in these scenes is murky and I was left with a constant sense that I didn’t really get what he was trying to express. It reminded me of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, which seems thematically similar, but is more grounded in the concrete and, as a result, has a more powerful and evident metaphorical meaning as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Tara Westover’s Educated and begun David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 29, 2020
→ By

The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,