→ May 9, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 5/9/20.

I was back writing this week, with three new pieces for The Athletic: how MLB’s decision to cut the draft to five rounds hurts players and the sport; a look back at the 2004 draft and what might have happened had the Padres taken Justin Verlander at #1 overall; and a profile of Dodgers prospect Brandon Lewis, who changed his diet and conditioning habits to transform his body and become a fourth-round pick .

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now out, and you can buy it anywhere you buy books, like here via bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores directly or by providing logistics and delivery for them. I’m donating my proceeds from sales of my book through my affiliate account there to charity, sending $100 this week to the Food Bank of Delaware, our local food pantry.

WIRED excerpted part of the first chapter of The Inside Game, on anchoring bias and why it tells us to move to an automated strike zone; the link made Pocket’s Best Of list this week. I also spoke to Inside Science about the book.

I appeared on the Poscast this week with Joe Posnanski and Ellen Adair, which you can listen to on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher; and on the Inquiring Minds podcast, which you can get on Apple or Stitcher. On The Keith Law Show, I had Meghan Montemurro, our Phillies writer, on to talk about that team and the Athletic’s ongoing OOTP simulation of the 2020 season; you can listen on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter this week to subscribers – it’s free, and easy to sign up, and no one has ever complained that I send it too often.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Donald Trump has long claimed he was a top high school baseball player who was scouted by a couple of MLB teams. Leander Schaerlaeckens looked into this at length for Slate, and found the answer is “not bloody likely.” The piece includes a quote from me in reaction to hearing some of the stats Schaerlaeckens was able to unearth.
  • ExplainCOVID.org is a new site, launched by Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown, and Galit Alter, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, designed to answer common questions about the virus, how to protect yourself, and what you should (or shouldn’t) believe in the news.
  • The LA Times ran with a story last week about how SARS-CoV-2 had already mutated into a new, more dangerous strain … but that report was wildly premature, says Ed Yong, author of We Contain Multitudes and an essential writer on anything COVID-19 right now.
  • Coronavirus cases continue to spike in Arizona, but the state is already reopening as if everything were fine. This could have a huge impact on MLB’s schedule – it’s hard to imagine the season restarting if Arizona is in an unplayable state.
  • This is after the state government in Arizona told university researchers to stop modeling COVID-19 outcomes and limited the researchers’ access to data, presumably because the models showed the Arizona government to be making reckless policy decisions that will lead to more deaths and serious illnesses.
  • If you’re pushing to reopen the economy, you probably don’t need or care about child care.
  • Texas is also reopening, too soon, and the governor even admitted in a private phone call that the reopening will lead to a new surge in cases. They don’t care how many people die, as long as they’re okay financially.
  • Anti-vaxxers are trying to use COVID-19 to recruit more people to their delusional cause.
  • Why do Republicans keep comparing COVID-19 public health policies to the Nazis? Pennsylvania State Rep. Chris Dush (R) did it, and now multiple Ohio legislators have done the same.
  • A Native American health center in Seattle asked the federal government for COVID-19 medical supplies. The Trump Administration sent them body bags.
  • Mosquitos infected with the fungal parasite Microsporidia MB may have total immunity to the genus of parasites that causes malaria, Plasmodium, notably P. Falciparum, which is the most common and lethal agent of transmission. It’s an early study but notable in that Microsporidia MB has many biological and ‘lifestyle’ similarities to Wolbachia, a gram-negative bacterium that protects mosquitos from many viruses and has potential to limit their ability to spread malarial agents as well.
  • Six people were killed in March 2019 when a flawed pedestrian bridge built by FIU in Sweetwater, Florida, collapsed just five days after it had been raised. FIU just announced plans to replace it, although nobody has actually been held accountable for what appear to be multiple failures in the design and construction process last time around.
  • I felt personally attacked by this (parody) column called “No One Wants to Play Your Weird German Game About Trains, Dude.” Russian Railroads is a fine game and I don’t care what you say.
  • Days of Wonder announced Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, the third mini-TtR game after New York and London.
  • Two Kickstarters of note: High Noon, a tactical card game that promises to be easy to learn but takes 1-2 hours to play, already passed its goal this week; while the narrative board game Sea of Legends funded in just six hours after launching the same day.
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→ May 7, 2020
→ By

The Parable of the Sower.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the highly decorated author N.K. Jemisin, was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and published 14 novels in her career before her untimely death at age 58 in 2006.

One thing often absent from science fiction novels and short stories, especially those written in the first few decades of the genre, are realistic women characters, something that inspired Butler to start writing her own stories. The Parable of the Sower is narrated by a young woman of color named Lauren who is a “sharer,” born with a condition called hyperempathy syndrome, so when she sees anyone else suffering physical pain she’s hit with the same pain even though she didn’t suffer the injury.

Set in the United States in the 2020s in a post-capitalist collapse that seems like it might have inspired the Purge movies, The Parable of the Sower follows Lauren from her poor but protected compound in southern California on her flight north while she develops her belief system, which she calls “Earthseed.” Her father is a pastor, which is a rare source of guaranteed income in this dystopian economy, but she finds herself unable to believe in his traditional Christian religion, or even in its conception of God, instead writing down verses and descriptions of humans as Earthseed, driving towards a heaven in the stars where man colonizes new planets now that he’s destroyed this one.

The Parable of the Sower is grim and unflinching, especially in its depiction of women as an oppressed underclass in this still-patriarchal facsimile of a society. If you leave the protection of the compound where Lauren and her family live, you put your life at risk; if you do so as a woman, especially alone, you are extremely likely to be sexually assaulted, and Lauren sees multiple women who appear to have been victims of brutal rapes whenever she heads outside of the commune’s walls. In a world where so many people have too little to eat, and very little to lose, and the police are worse than useless, theft is almost expected, and everyone is armed to protect themselves and their property. Butler also adds the wrinkle of a new drug, nicknamed ‘pyro,’ that causes addicts to light fires so they can be mesmerized by watching the flames. This isn’t our world today, but Butler’s prescient writing about the impacts of increased income inequality and food insecurity on top of a country already armed to its teeth feels a lot more possible right now than it would have when she wrote it in 1993 – even before you layer on a global pandemic and the rise of an entire political movement ready to discard tens of thousands of citizens just to goose the stock market.

The Earthseed belief system, which revolves around the idea that God is change and holds that man’s destiny is to colonize the stars, gets some treatment within this book, but the specific tenets are less important than Lauren’s development of the system, and how she uses it to try to build a fledgling community around herself while in flight to northern California. The core idea of Earthseed that God is malleable, and humanity can shape God, conflicts on some level with its idea that God shapes the universe, which I assume Butler would continue to address in the sequel (The Parable of the Talents); even within this book, Lauren is challenged by the people in her ragtag band of followers, who range from ardent skeptics to curious adherents, to explain this and other paradoxes – or even explain why anyone should believe at all in the face of such widespread misery and existential dread.

I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts about a year and a half ago, and was constantly reminded of that book, which also has a young female protagonist struggling against multiple levels of oppression in a dystopian environment, while reading Parable; searching now, I see multiple references to Solomon and their novel as a ‘successor’ to Butler’s work. The connections are undeniable, but it also seems like a reminder that voices like theirs and Jemisin’s remain uncommon in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing, and thus these themes of sexism, racism, inequality, and othering are also underrepresented, even as they become so much more prevalent in mainstream literature (e.g., with Colson Whitehead winning two of the last four Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction with novels about race and racism). Butler also wrote with a gritty, unflinching realism that existed in that era but was, at least, outside the more genteel strains of sci-fi that won awards and garnered more attention, a style that probably put her twenty years ahead of her time. It’s a particular shame that she died so young when, if she were alive today, she’d have seen her influence spread so far, and have seen the world of science fiction expand to include voices and styles like hers become not just accepted, but lauded.

Next up: Still reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, by Willie Mays and John Shea. John will be on my podcast next week to talk about the book.

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→ May 6, 2020
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Music update, April 2020.

A shorter-than-normal playlist this month as I think the pandemic has played havoc with release schedules and has obviously kept many artists out of the studio, but there are still some strong singles in advance of albums already planned for releases this summer and fall. As always, you can access the playlist directly if you can’t see the widget below.

Iceage – Lockdown Blues. Yep, he’s saying “Covid 19 lockdown blues/the only way out is through.” There have been some regrettable songs written and released during the pandemic; this one is actually good.

Space Above, So Below – Golden. Space Above is former The Naked & Famous keyboardist Aaron Short’s new project, with So Below (singer Maddie North) contributing vocals on many of their songs so far, including this darkly ethereal track.

Khruangbin – Time (You and I). This new single from the Texas-based funk/jazz trio features extensive vocals from Laura Lee Ochoa, a departure from their primarily instrumental work to date, and is the lead single from their third album Mordechai, due out next month.

Village of the Sun – TED. VotS is a new collaboration between Binker and Moses – as in Moses Boyd, whose Dark Matter is my favorite album of the year so far – and Simon Ratcliffe of Basement Jaxx. This track takes its name and inspiration from a song called “Dreamship” by the Ted Moses Quintet, which I only know from googling.

Talk Show – Petrolhead. I’ve enjoyed Talk Show’s snarling mix of classic post-punk sounds, more contemporary rock rhythms, and just a hint of the energy of dance music without heavy electronic elements.

The Wants – Clearly a Crisis. The Wants are pure post-punk, influenced by Gang of Four and other icons of the earliest new wave bands, and it comes through most successfully on this track and “Motor” from their debut album Container.

bdrmm – Happy. A five-piece shoegaze band from Hull, bdrmm released their debut EP If Not, When? in October, and have returned now with this subdued, swirling track that has some early Lush to it with a more upbeat tempo.

Everything Everything – In Birdsong (Edit). Lead singer Jonathan Higgs has described this song’s lyrics as an attempt to capture what it might have been like to be the world’s first self-aware human, although I find it more interesting for the highly textured keyboard layers below Higgs’ falsetto, crescendoing into a sort of wall of sound that seems almost tactile by the end of the song.

Jake Bugg – Saviours of the City. Bugg seems to have come back around to the Dylanesque sounds of his Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album, eight years later, with this second single ahead of his fourth album, which is due out later this year.

The Naked and Famous – Blinding Lights. TNAF’s cover of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” from his new album After Hours, beats the original for me – not least because of Alisa Xayalith’s voice.

Asylums – A Perfect Life in a Perfect World. The Southend rock quartet have produced a song that sounds like it could have been recorded and released in 1994, and I mean that as a high compliment.

Ministry – Alert Level (Quarantine). I’m not as big a Ministry fan as you might guess from my age and musical tastes, as I find a lot of Al Jourgensen’s work with the band after their shift from new wave to industrial designed more to shock than to entertain. “Alert Level (Quarantine)” is still harsh and abrasive, but also has one of the best guitar riffs of any song in Ministry’s catalog.

Pure Reason Revolution – Ghosts & Typhoons. I don’t know how to categorize PRR’s music, with its peculiar mixture of progressive rock, electronic, and extreme metal elements, often in songs that run six to ten minutes in length, but their new album Eupnea, their first LP in a decade, has really grown on me this year thanks to songs like this and “Silent Genesis.”

Katatonia – The Winter of Our Passion. These Swedish prog-metallers started out as a death metal act but have shifted to clean vocals and doom sounds that sometimes incorporate metal aspects, but often don’t – if you heard this without knowing who the artist was, I doubt you’d call it metal. It’s one of the most accessible things they’ve done but retains the sophistication of their most recent albums.

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→ May 5, 2020
→ By

All Our Names.

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on the description and what I could find in a quick search about Mengestu himself. It’s a smart, incisive, and very fast-reading novel of alienation and identity that spans two continents and asks us to examine who we really are.

The novel alternates narratives between those titled Isaac and those titled Helen, but both are connected by a man who came from an unnamed central African country to a midwestern U.S. city as a refugee. In the Isaac sections, two young, poor men, one of whom will eventually flee for America, get caught up in a budding revolution that’s stirring around a university campus where the men hang around but can’t afford to be students. In the chapters titled ‘Helen,’ Isaac, the refugee, and the woman who picks him up at the airport begin a complicated love affair – and, since the novel is set in the 1960s or early 1970s, good ol’ American racism is one of those complications, so Isaac ends up facing threats on both ends of his trip.

Mengestu succeeds here by making both stories equally compelling despite their substantive and dramatic differences. The half of the book set in Africa is fraught with danger as the two boys are swept up by events surrounding them, and eventually join forces with one revolutionary group, so that they’re frequently endangering themselves or merely endangered by their mere existence as young men in a newly independent, barely functioning state. The half set in the United States, by contrast, has very little physical danger; the risk is of an interracial romance in an era and place that did not accept such couples, and of Isaac’s distance from Helen because of the unknowns in his past.

How he ties those two together is enough of a spoiler that I won’t go into it, but it’s clever, and revealed early enough in the novel that you have time to adjust to this new knowledge and reassess what’s come before while still working through the remainders of both stories. It could seem like a gimmick, and it didn’t quite help that I encountered the same gimmick two months earlier in a novel from 2019, but Mengestu makes it work because the eventual revelation makes everything that came before it fit. (I had a suspicion of what was coming a few chapters ahead, so it’s not that big of a spoiler.)

There are just three characters in the book, the two named and the other young man in Africa, with Helen probably the weakest of the three. The two men seem to stand in for the two paths available to young men in such environments, with revolution brewing around them – the true believer, ready to stir up trouble and even take up arms; or the reluctant rebel, seeing no other path out of poverty but hardly believing in the cause of the rebels any more than he believes in the government. Helen comes across more as observer than participant, and it’s never really clear – despite her narration – why she went to bed with Isaac, or how they fell in love. Once there, what follows is far more convincing, but the lead up to that requires some buy-in.

If you accept the twist that ties the two narratives together, All Our Names works as a portrait of a man adrift in two countries, fleeing his homeland, where he couldn’t feel safe, for a new life as a refugee in a country that will always view him as an outsider. It left me hoping Mengestu will return to fiction at some point, as he hasn’t published anything in the six years since this book came out.

Next up: I’m several books behind but right now I’m reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, Willie Mays’ and John Shea’s collaboration that’s part autobiography, part biography of the New York/San Francisco Giants great, due out on May 12th.

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→ May 2, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
  • CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
  • Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
  • Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
  • Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
  • It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
  • Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
  • Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
  • Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
  • Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
  • Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
  • The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
  • Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
  • Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
  • Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
  • Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
  • No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.
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→ April 30, 2020
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Gingerbread House.

Phil Walker-Harding is probably my favorite game designer right now, one of the only names that would get me to buy a game just because I saw it on the box. Silver & Gold was my #2 game of 2019, and Imhotep the Duel was #6. Gizmos made my top ten for 2018. Cacao remains a favorite, and I think his Sushi Go! Party is one of the best games for 5+ players. Imhotep itself was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. I’ve never played a PWH game I didn’t like, and still have one unplayed game of his (the first Adventure game).

Gingerbread House came out in 2018-19, and I think it’s slipped a bit through the cracks because he’s released several better games in the last two years that overshadowed it. I suspect the goofy theme and art might lead people to think it’s a simpler game than it is, although Broom Service had very similar art and that’s definitely more complex than this game is.

Gingerbread House is like a kicked-up Kingdomino, or a better reimagining of Kingdomino than Queendomino is, asking you to place two-square tiles on your 3×3 house card to gain tokens based on what you cover up. You’ll then collect those tokens and use them to buy points cards, while also gaining up to three bonus cards for each level you complete. There are specific twists to the rules beyond that, but that’s the framework of the game – you place one tile on each turn, collect two things (or maybe three), and then buy a card if you can.

There are four colors of tokens in Gingerbread House, and the cards you buy, which represent humans and monsters you’re trying to ‘trap’ by enticing them to your house, can require as many as eight tokens and can require tokens of just one color or up to all four. You’ll cover two spaces on each turn and take tokens matching those spaces, although if you cover two spaces showing the same symbol, you get a third one as a bonus. There are other spaces that give you an extra stairway (see below), or let you swap one token for another one, or let you reserve a card to try to pay for it later.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you probably caught on to the fact that you can’t cover a 3×3 grid with two-square tiles. You start the game with one ‘stairway’ file, which is a square ring that allows you to see what’s beneath it. You can place that for free at any time, but you must cover it with a regular tile on the same turn. You also get a one-square wild tile whenever you pay for a card, and must place it immediately, taking whatever token or symbol you’ve covered; if you later cover the wild tile, you can take any color token or treat it as if it were any of the other three symbols.

When you complete a level of your house, you get to take a bonus card that’s worth points at the end of the game. In the basic game, you just take the highest-points card still on the table. In the advanced game, however, you choose one of the bonus cards, which are dealt out at random at the start of each game, and can thus tailor your strategy afterwards to maximize the points you get from the cards you obtain. Individual character cards are worth 4 to 10 points, but bonus cards can be worth as much as 12 points, so if you play your cards correctly (pun intended), you can gain the equivalent of another character card or more from each bonus card. There are some bonus cards that only give you two points, but instead reward you with tokens based on what’s visible on your board at the time you take them.

That interplay between bonus cards and character cards is what makes Gingerbread House more than just a basic family game. You could certainly ditch the bonus cards and play with younger kids, but the bonus cards are what make this fun for adults. What Gingerbread House lacks is any real interaction between players. Unless two of you are gunning for the same card, and maybe one of you uses the ‘cage’ symbol to reserve it, you’re mostly working on your own. That’s fine – Gizmos is like that, Silver & Gold is like that, Bärenpark is definitely like that – and the game is fun enough for a couple of plays, but I don’t know that this has the same huge replay value as his better games.

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→ April 28, 2020
→ By

The Double.

Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s novel The Double seldom appears on the list of his most notable works, even though it was adapted into a movie by Dennis Villeneuve (retitled Enemy) starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the two title roles – two, because the story revolves around a man who discovers that there’s another man, an obscure actor who has minor roles in various films, who is a carbon copy of himself. The two men are completely indistinguishable, not identical twins, but identical in every way, down to scars and blemishes, leading the first character into an existential crisis, one where he tracks down his double and causes a spiral of problems for both of them and for the people closest to them.

Tertuliano, whose name roughly translates as “chatty” (or something more pejorative), is the first man, a history teacher whose colleague suggests that he rent a particular movie without explaining up front what the significance of the film might be. It turns out that a minor character actor in the film is a dead ringer for Tertuliano, a similarity that affects the teacher far more than you might expect at first. He tries to find the actor’s name, renting any movie he can find from the same production company, and eventually uses a subterfuge to contact the actor. Even their voices are identical – the actor’s wife thinks it’s her husband on the phone, not Tertuliano, playing a prank on her – and when the two men meet, there’s an immediate, mutual disdain as you might see when two cats meet each other for the first time and each decides that it’s his territory and the other is an intruder. As with cats, this leads to a sort of pissing contest where each man tries to demonstrate some sort of dominance over the other, as if to say that he’s the real person and the other the facsimile, with consequences that are both shocking and foreseeable, with a clever little twist in the novel’s very last paragraph.

Saramago expresses the existential crisis that Tertuliano undergoes rather well throughout the book, keeping the character’s anxiety and dread visible but at a slow boil, so his actions and gestures aren’t overly dramatic or forced. Once you accept the premise that he’s undone by this thought that he has a clone in the world, and loses some sense of himself in the process, everything that follows makes sense. It’s his clone who seems harder to buy, especially when he bullies Tertuliano into accepting something extraordinary, an action that ultimately leads to the novel’s climax and resolution – although the payoff does mostly justify the torturous path that got us there.

The bigger question around The Double is how well Saramago communicates the reasons for the existential crisis – that is, why Tertuliano goes off the rails just because he saw his duplicate in a movie. It might be unnerving to see someone who looks just like you in a film, but would you stalk that person and try to meet up with them? Would you let this unravel your entire life? Probably not, unless your life was already a bit threadbare, but Saramago doesn’t give us any real reason to believe that Tertuliano was already in that kind of state – he’s not a happy man or very fulfilled by work or his relationship with his girlfriend, yet he doesn’t come across as a man on the verge before he sets off on his quixotic effort to find his double.

You’re also not going to get any explanation of how the clones came about, either, so don’t go into The Double expecting one: the resolution is about the characters, not the mystery of their existence. I was hoping for some kind of answer, but Saramago never actually implies that he’s going to provide one, and the book heads in a different direction from the start; it’s hard to see a way where he could have given that explanation and still taken the story where it goes. It doesn’t live up to Blindness, one of his best-known and best-regarded novels, which pulls off the trick of a compelling (if often gross) story that conveys a stronger philosophical message, but is at least thought-provoking with a plot that works right up through its resolution.

Next up: I’m a few write-ups behind but am currently reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower.

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→ April 25, 2020
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/25/20.

The Inside Game is out!  You can buy the physical book on Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or get the Kindle version on amazon. (Some of my biggest fans have already left one-star reviews!) Audible named it one of their top picks in History/Nonfiction for the spring of 2020 too.

To promote the book, I did a live ‘virtual’ bookstore event with help from Nats reliever and voracious reader Sean Doolittle, which you can watch if you registered and bought the book through Politics and Prose. I also appeared on several podcasts:

There are also some very positive reviews for The Inside Game out already on Throneberry Fields, Farther Off the Wall, and Porchlight Books. It also made a Wall Street Journal roundup of three recommended baseball books for the spring and was recommended by Inside Hook.

I did a Q&A at the Athletic on Thursday, and part two of my diptych on scouting, covering pitcher grades, with Eno Sarris is also up for subscribers. The Athletic ran an excerpt from The Inside Game on base-rate neglect and why teams draft too many high school pitchers in the first round.

My own podcast this week featured Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, talking about COVID-19 and baseball fandom. You can listen to it on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

I did send out a new edition of my newsletter last week, and I’ll be back on it more often now, I think; you can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

  • Those of us in the United States are living in a failed state.
  • This editorial on Eater London explains how restaurants have to adapt to survive what could be another year and a half of “corona time,” with two important takeaways for us: Doing what you can to support restaurants still operating during the shutdown is critical to their survival, and we are not going to see fans in ballparks any time soon.
  • Scientists are tired of explaining that COVID-19 was not made in a Chinese lab.
  • Are you having stranger dreams during the pandemic than you usually would? National Geographic looks at reasons why that is happening to so many of us.
  • Governors talking about reopening their states – or actually doing it, in the case of Georgia – are being way too cavalier, as the pandemic is not under control yet, according to this New York Times editorial by Professor Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
  • Nationalist groups are using COVID-19 to push their agendas to reduce civil liberties, consolidate power, and spread hate and distrust of marginalized populations.
  • Why did Nikola Motor, whose CEO just bought a $32 million ranch, get a $4 million payout from the COVID-19 small business fund?
  • Those Facebook groups pushing anti-lockdown protests are largely just astroturfing by the Dorr brothers, a family of conservative pro-gun activists whom Republican lawmakers have called “scam artists.”
  • Are COVID-19 mortality rates higher than they need to be because so many developed nations’ citizens are fundamentally unhealthy?
  • The New York Times looked athow children’s shows are responding to kids’ needs during the shutdown, such as Sesame Street’s episode with a virtual playdate for Elmo and various real and Muppet friends. (I especially enjoyed Cookie Monster’s appearance.)
  • A few German citizens are protesting lockdown measures under the guise of liberty or some nonsense.
  • Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) failed to disclose stock sales in 2019 while she was serving in Congress, violating federal law.
  • Board game news: Renegade is now taking pre-orders for Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the West Kingdom trilogy, for delivery at Gen Con (if the convention takes place).
  • I don’t know much about the upcoming game Sea of Legends other than that it’s narrative-based and looks like it has a great theme.
  • Boardgamegeek’s annual Golden Geek Awards balloting has now opened. I do wonder if Wingspan will suffer any backlash to its crossover success in the voting. I’d vote for it for Game of the Year, Innovative Game, Strategy Game, and Family Game of the Year; Watergate for two-player game of the year; and either Res Arcana or Point Salad for Card Game; plus Evolution for best app.
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→ April 18, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 4/18/20.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out in three days! You can buy it wherever you can buy books right now, but allow me to recommend bookshop.org, which sources books from independent bookstores or just gives some of their proceeds from direct sales to indie stores.

For The Athletic subscribers this week, Eno Sarris and I examined the five tools for position players from both scouting and analytical perspectives. There will be another piece for pitchers, which I hope to get done this week (I think Eno’s well ahead of me for his part). On my own podcast, I spoke with former Angels scouting director Eddie Bane about Mike Trout, all-time draft busts Bill Bene and Kiki Jones, and more. You can subscribe here on Apple and Spotify.

On the board game front, I reviewed Oceans, the new standalone sequel to the game Evolution, over at Paste this week. For Vulture, I looked at pandemic-themed games, including the one by that name, with thoughts on why diseases are such a popular theme.

I did a virtual bookstore event with Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar on Thursday, which you can watch here if you missed it. I’ll do another such event on Friday, April 24th, with Sean Doolittle via DC’s Politics & Prose; you can sign up by buying a copy of The Inside Game here.

I spoke to Ryan Phillips of The Big Lead about The Inside Game and my move to the Athletic, among other topics, appeared on the Sports Information Solutions podcast with my former ESPN colleague Mark Simon to talk about the book, and talked about boardgames during quarantine on the Just Not Sports podcast.

And now the links…

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→ April 14, 2020
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Bombshell.

Bombshell (Apple/Amazon) feels very much like Vice for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story – the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light – and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman. I was entertained, as I was by Vice, but I was not informed, and I don’t think the movie did enough to explain how the situation was allowed to persist.

The script has a glib approach where Megyn Kelly (Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) often break the fourth wall to tell the viewers background information relevant to the story, such as how Fox News operates behind the scenes or what Ailes’ history was prior to founding Fox News and building it into the country’s biggest cable news network. Bombshell then takes us through three roughly simultaneous storylines, one around each of the three main women in the film: Kelly’s meteoric rise at the network and Donald Trump’s subsequent attacks on her after she challenged him on his history of mistreatment of women; Carlson’s lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she was demoted from her show for illegal cause; and the fictional Kayla (Margot Robbie), a wide-eyed ingenue who calls herself an “evangelical millennial” and ends up another Ailes victim. The three stories eventually intersect as Kelly and Carlson independently look for other women to speak up against Ailes. (Ailes and Fox settled with Carlson, Fox paid off Ailes’ contract by way of firing him, and Ailes was dead within a year.)

Bombshell looks incredible. Theron is a ridiculous likeness for Kelly between the hairstyling and makeup, for which the movie won its lone Academy Award, and her mimicry of Kelly’s voice and delivery. Kidman’s not quite as dead a ringer for Carlson, but is pretty close. I thought John Lithgow did his best with Ailes, making him into a blustering, lecherous tyrant, although the physical resemblance isn’t there. Nearly every on-air personality at Fox who gets a moment in this film is played by someone who looks just like them, however, which you could view as incredible dedication to verisimilitude, or a big fat missing of the point, that it is story that matters, not imitation.

Theron and Robbie were both nominated for awards, Theron for Best Actress and Robbie for Supporting, but I don’t think either deserved the win and thought Robbie was better in a smaller role Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kayla is written so thinly and Robbie has no room to do anything except show some gross emotions, mostly because she’s a prop for the plot, not an actual person or a fully-developed character – she’s there to give Ailes someone to harass while we watch.

And that’s biggest problem with Bombshell: it’s so concerned with making things look right that it doesn’t bother telling the story behind the story. How Ailes got away with this for nearly twenty years – and probably longer, although the story doesn’t touch anything he did prior to Fox News – is never addressed, nor does the story touch on the toxic corporate culture within Fox News, or why the Murdochs didn’t care until they did care, or, perhaps most interesting of all, why so many women stayed quiet. If anything, the movie blames the victim a bit when Kayla confronts Megyn to ask why she waited ten years to talk about Ailes harassing her. It’s a jarring, wrong note for a movie that seems so eager to tell you it’s right. This story, and these women, deserved a lot better.

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