→ July 12, 2020
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Walking in Burano.

Walking in Burano is a 2018 game from Taiwanese designer Wei-Min Ling, who also designed the semi-abstract, chess-like game Shadows in Kyoto; and Mystery of the Temples. Ling owns one of the most important board game publishers in Asia, EmperorS4, which produced Hanamikoji and Realm of Sand, and uses Taiwanese artist Maisherly Chan for the majority of their games. With great art and a fairly simple set of mechanics, Walking in Burano is one of the best EmperorS4 games yet, not quite at Hanamikoji’s level but on par with their other top titles, especially given how quickly you can learn to play.

Players in Walking in Burano will acquire cards from the central market to create three-story buildings on their streets, ultimately filling out a 3×5 grid with five scoring cards, one beneath each house. These represent streets on the Venetian island of Burano, and the idea is to appeal to tourists and locals with various combinations of features on single buildings or streets as a whole. The catch is that building cards come in six colors, where each building (or house, they’re the same in this game) must comprise three cards of the same color, but adjacent buildings can’t share a color – unless you want to use one of your ‘rule-breaking’ tokens to break that rule and cede three points at game-end.

The market has three rows of cards, each of which corresponds to a specific floor of the houses you’ll be constructing. You may take one, two, or three cards from any column in the market, although you must start with the top or bottom row and can’t skip the middle card (e.g., you can take cards 1, 3, 1-2, 2-3, or 1-2-3). If you take an entire column, you don’t get any coins; if you take one card, you get two coins, and if you take two cards, you get one coin. You may then choose to build as many floors as you can afford, with the first floor you build on any turn costing you one coin, the second costing two coins more, and the third two coins beyond that. You get two scaffolding cards that you can move as needed, so you don’t have to build from the first floor up. You don’t have to build cards immediately when you take them; you can keep up to three from one turn to the next.

Once you complete any building of three cards, you can choose a scoring card from the available supply. There are four tourist cards that are worth four points each, and then give you additional points based on what’s showing on the three cards in the building you just finished – one point per flower pot, one point per plant, three points per cat, or two points per cat/awning/lamp/chimney. There are seven inhabitant cards in the base game, the supply of which is more limited, that offer very different bonuses that often apply to entire floors or to several adjacent cards. (I also have the one mini-expansion for the game, which adds three more inhabitants; you shuffle all ten types together and randomly choose seven to use in any single game.)

Once any player finishes their fifth building, it triggers game-end. You get points from your bonus cards, points from some first-floor cards that show shops, and 3 points for each rule-breaking token you still have. All players then count their “closed” windows on cards, those with X’s on them, and the player with the most loses one point per such window.

Even tough turns are quick, there’s quite a bit of strategy involved in Walking in Burano, as you try to collect certain symbols on cards to maximize your potential bonuses from cards you don’t yet have. You can end up losing out on a bonus card after collecting the house cards that would have granted you a huge bonus from it; you won’t end up with nothing, as you get another bonus card, but you’ll probably get fewer points than you’d planned. You are also betting on the availability of future cards, and future symbols, regularly during the game.

The rules also include a solo mode that works extremely well, almost exactly mirroring the two-player rules (where, after each round, you remove all cards in the rightmost column of the market, to keep it moving and create a bit more urgency), but also requiring you to remove one Character bonus card of your choice after each turn. This creates an upper bound on the number of turns you can take, as the game ends either when you complete your fifth building or when there are no bonus cards remaining, after which you score your street as you would in a multi-player game, deducting one point for every closed window you have, then comparing your score to the table in the rules.

Walking in Burano only came out in the United States in 2019, although the Chinese edition was released a year earlier, and I think the timing of the U.S. release during the flood of July/August releases last year led it to fall through the cracks. It’s pretty great across the board – easy to learn, quick game time, deeper strategically than you’d guess at first glance, with gorgeous art. Light-strategy games in small boxes that give you more to chew on than the typical short game are right in my wheelhouse, since it’s just easier to get people to sit for a game that’s short and that doesn’t require a long explanation of the rules; Walking in Burano is exactly that kind of game.

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→ July 11, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 7/11/20.

I had one solo post for The Athletic subscribers this week, something out of the ordinary: To participate in the site’s Book Blitz, I gave 25 recommendations for non-sports books, five apiece in literary novels, sci-fi/fantasy, detective/mystery, non-fiction, and short story collections. I also joined the site’s Authors Roundtable, answering some questions on the book-writing process.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Floor Plan, a new roll-and-write from Deep Water (publishers of Welcome To…) that is quite easy to learn, but where the theme and the strategy don’t work together.

My second book, The Inside Game, is out now, and you can buy it on bookshop.org through that link, or find it at your local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

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→ July 9, 2020
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The Dutch House.

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing the top honor to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. The honor was long overdue for Patchett, who received a Pen Faulkner award and what is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Bel Canto and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Commonwealth. She’s in the uppermost echelon of American novelists, and worthy of more critical acclaim than she’s received. The Dutch House isn’t her best – that would be Bel Canto, a more ambitious novel that Patchett says was her attempt to write her take on The Magic Mountain – but it’s something different from her, a return to the narrower character studies of her earlier career but with greater emotional depth, informed by the wisdom of a quarter-century of living.

 The Dutch House tells the story of Danny, the narrator, and his older sister Maeve, who live in the colossal estate that gives the book its title, in the northeast Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother left the family several years earlier for unknown reasons, leaving them with their real estate mogul father, who, as the novel opens, is about to marry Andrea, a much younger woman, and then brings her and her two daughters into the house. Andrea loves the house and the status it confers, but has little use for Danny or Maeve, and eventually casts them out when the opportunity presents itself, starting the siblings on decades of acrimony and grief for what they lost, emotions and memories they process by parking outside the house, often for hours, over the ensuing years.

Danny tells us the story, but Maeve is just as much a central character here, better developed than Danny is, and the most influential figure in Danny’s life. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but picture Maeve as Emma Mackey, who plays the character by that name on Sex Education.) Maeve has the memories of their mother that Danny lacks, and has just enough of an advantage of age to be wiser and more perceptive than her brother, which serves them both well when Andrea arrives on the scene. She’s a diabetic, which becomes significant at multiple points in the book, and appears to sacrifice some of her future to help Danny – although it’s possible her motives are mixed up with nostalgia and an unwillingness to leave the area where she grew up.

The story jumps forward and back in time, so we see Danny as an adult, after medical school, then find out how and why he ended up pursuing that academic path from the point where we first saw him as a kid who played basketball and loved going around with his father once a month to collect rent and see properties, but didn’t have a ton of use for school. The relationships between the siblings and their distant father, and the siblings and the two older women who work in the house and end up helping raise the kids – at least until Andrea kicks them out –  form part of a foundation for both Danny and Maeve as they mature into adulthood. The problem they encounter is that the void left by their mother’s departure, which they’re told was so she could go help the poor in India, leaves the foundation incomplete, and their obsessive, nostalgic attachment to the house, even after there’s no one living there who truly matters to them, seems both symbolic of what they’ve lost and a sad testament to how the past can prevent us from moving into the future.

I had a hard time reading Danny’s voice for at least a solid third of the book, continually ‘hearing’ the narrator as a young girl, probably because I know Ann Patchett’s style so well (and know that she’s a woman), and can’t recall her writing in the first person for a male character before. That sensation faded as Danny grew up in the first half of the novel and his voice became more distinctive, while he also felt like more of a participant in the action rather than a passive observer (to whom many things happen, however). I think this also arose because Maeve is a much more clearly defined character from the start of the book, while Danny starts out as unmolded clay and grows into adulthood before the reader, a maturation that comes in fits and starts and doesn’t end up where you – or Maeve – expect it to finish.

Of all contemporary authors whose work I know, Patchett might have the most empathy toward her main characters, no matter how flawed; only Andrea, who is a bit of a one-dimensional plot device here, misses out on this, while her two daughters, Maeve and Danny’s mother, and the nanny who was fired when Danny was just four all reappear in some form before the novel is out to get resolution, if not actual redemption. You can probably see the main plot event at the book’s conclusion coming, but I was neither surprised nor dismayed to see it happen, because in Patchett’s better novels, the pleasure of reading is in the journey. These two characters are so richly textured, and so realistic, that I was willing to buy into the less believable aspects of the story, just to get to the end of Danny’s arc, and to read more of Patchett’s prose.

Next up: I just finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland yesterday.

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→ July 6, 2020
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Mindware.

I appeared on the Inquiring Minds podcast this spring to promote my book The Inside Game, and co-host Adam Bristol recommended a book to me after the show, Dr. Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Dr. Nisbett is a professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and co-directs the school’s Culture and Cognition program, and a good portion of Mindware focuses on how our environment affects our cognitive processes, especially the unconscious mind, as he gives advice on how to improve our decision-making processes and better understand the various ways our minds work.

Nisbett starts out the book with an obvious but perhaps barely understood point: Our understanding of the world around us is a matter of construal, a combination of inferences and interpretations, because of the sheer volume of information and stimuli coming into our brains at all times, and how much of what we see or hear is indirect. (If you want to get particularly technical, even what we see directly is still a matter of interpretation; even something as seemingly concrete as color is actually a sensation created in the brain, an interpolation of different wavelengths of light that also renders colors more stable in our minds than they would be if we were just relying on levels of illumination.) So when we run into biases or illusions that affect our inferences and interpretations, we will proceed on the basis of unreliable information.

He then breaks down three major ways in which we can understand how our minds process all of these stimuli. One is that our environments affect how we think and how we behave far more than we realize they do. Another is that our unconscious minds do far more work than we acknowledge, including processing environmental inputs that we may not actively register. And the third is that we see and interpret the world through schemas, frameworks or sets of heuristics that we use to make sense of the world and simplify the torrent of information coming at us.

From that outline, Nisbett marches through a series of cognitive biases and errors, many of which overlap with those I covered in The Inside Game, but explains more of how cognition is affected by external stimuli, including geography (the subject of one of his previous books), culture, and “preperception” – how the subconscious mind gets you started before you actively begin to perceive things. This last point is one of the book’s most powerful observations: We don’t know why we know what we know, and we can’t always account for our motives and reasons, even if we’re asked to explain them directly. Subjects of experiments will deny that their choices or responses were influenced by stimuli that seem dead-obvious to outside observers. They can be biased by anchors that have nothing to do with the topic of the questions, and even show effects after the ostensible study itself – for example, that subjects exposed to more words related to aging will walk more slowly down the hall out of the study room than those exposed to words relate to youth or vitality. It seems absurd, but multiple studies have shown effects like these, as with the study I mentioned in my book about students’ guesses on quantities being biased by the mere act of writing down the last two digits of their social security numbers. We would like to think that our brains don’t work that way, but they do.

Nisbett is a psychologist but crosses comfortably into economics territory, including arguments in favor of using cost/benefit analyses any time a decision has significant costs and the process allows you the time to perform such an analysis. He even gets into the thorny question of how much a life is worth, which most people do not want to consider but which policymakers have to consider when making major decisions on, say, how much and for how long to shut down the economy in the face of a global pandemic. There is some death rate from COVID-19 that we would – and should – accept, and to figure that out, we have to consider what values to put on the lives that might be lost at each level of response, and then compare that to economic benefits of remaining open or additional costs of overloaded hospitals. “Zero deaths” is the compassionate answer, but it isn’t the rational one; if zero deaths in a pandemic were even possible, it would be prohibitively expensive in time and money, so much so that it would cause suffering (and possibly deaths) from other causes.

In the conclusion to Mindware, Dr. Nisbett says that humans are “profligate causal theorists,” and while that may not quite roll off the tongue, it’s a pithy summary of how our minds work. We are free and easy when it comes to finding patterns and ascribing causes to outcomes, but far less thorough when it comes to testing these hypotheses, or even trying to make these hypotheses verifiable or falsifiable. It’s the difference between science and pseudoscience, and between a good decision-making process and a dubious one. (You can still make a good decision with a bad process!) This really is a great book if you like the kind of books that led me to write The Inside Game, or just want to learn more about how your brain deals with the huge volume of information it gets each day so that you can make better decisions in your everyday life.

Next up: I just finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House this weekend and am about halfway through Patrick Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

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→ July 5, 2020
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Top albums of 2020 so far.

This year has sucked across multiple dimensions, but new music has been one of the few bright spots of the first half of 2020 – although I worry that there’s a time lag here, and we’re getting great singles and albums recorded before the world ended. Anyway, here are the best albums I have heard so far this year.

7. SAULT – Untitled (Black Is). SAULT released one of the best albums of 2019 but did so after my 2019 rankings came out – in fact, they released two albums (7 and 5) last year, and both were great, but I didn’t hear either until May of this year. The identities of the band members are still unknown, but they’ve gained some critical attention nonetheless for their soul/funk/spoken word sound, and with Untitled (Black Is) they’ve become overtly political with a series of anthems supporting Black Lives Matter and other causes of equality and justice. Standout tracks include “Bow,” featuring Michael Kiwanuka; “Monsters;” “Why We Cry Why We Die;” and “Black.”

6. Tame Impala – The Slow Rush. I’ve always been a few degrees short of the critical acclaim for Kevin Parker’s music; I’ve liked many of his tracks but he often needs an editor to rein him in, and his albums haven’t come together as well as they should. The Slow Rush still has too many tracks that go on too long – half of the twelve songs here run five minutes or more, up to 7:13 for the closer – but it’s the most coherent record he’s released to date. Standout singles include “Borderline,” “Lost in Yesterday,” and “Breathe Deeper.”

5. Bananagun – The True Story of Bananagun. I only heard about this Melbourne psychedelic rock/funk group a few weeks ago, but I’m all about this album and their strange mélange of late ’60s flower-child rock and funk guitar work from the decade afterwards. Standout tracks include “The Master,” “Freak Machine,” and “Bang Go the Bongos.”

4. Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud. Folk-rocker Katie Crutchfield bares her soul, recounting her struggles with alcoholism and decision to get sober after her previous album, the uneven Out in the Storm (which still gave us “Never Been Wrong”), and the result is her best and most complete album to date. Standout tracks include “Lilacs,” “Can’t Do Much,” and “Hell.”

3. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene. A good example of when to separate the art from the artist. Grimes’ last album, Art Angels, was my #1 album of 2015; this record is more experimental and expansive, but still has several tracks that stand well on their own thanks to strong melodies, including “Violence,” “4ÆM,” and “Delete Forever.”

2. Khruangbin – Mordechai. I was late to the Khruangbin party, only hearing their last album, Con Todo El Mundo, a year after it came out, helped by The RFK Tapes’ podcast’s use of “Maria También” as its theme song. I think I got here just in time, though, as Mordechai is going to be their big breakout, as it has the same kind of Thai jazz/funk/rock hybrid sound as their last album, but now with extensive vocals from all three members. Standout tracks include “Pelota,” “Time (You and I),” the funky “So We Won’t Forget,” and “Connaissais de Face.”

1. Moses Boyd – Dark Matter. I don’t have any comparison for this album by percussionist Moses Boyd, one half of Binker and Moses. It’s a dark, swirling journey of modern jazz and house that has the energy of improvisational music but the tighter focus and melodic sensibility of more mainstream genres. Standout tracks include the stellar “Shades of You” (feat. Poppy Ajudha), shimmering opener “Stranger than Fiction,” and the guitar-laden “Y.O.Y.O.”

Upcoming albums I’m at least excited to hear: The Beths – Jump Rope Gazers (7/10); Dirty Streets – Rough and Tumble (7/31); Everything Everything’s RE-ANIMATOR (8/21); Cut Copy – Freeze, Melt (8/21); Sad13 – Haunted Painting (9/25); Doves – untitled (TBD); Noname – untitled (TBD).

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→ July 5, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 7/4/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I looked at the prospects who made their teams’ 60-player pools – and some notable prospect omissions as well. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest podcast episode was one of my favorites so far. Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change at San Jose State University joined me to discuss her research on Black athletes’ experiences, their obstacles to playing and becoming coaches after playing, and what leagues and universities can do to break down structural barriers these athletes face.

My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought The Inside Game. If you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m due for another issue my my email newsletter. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

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→ July 3, 2020
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Klawchat 7/3/20.

My latest column for subscribers to the Athletic is up now, looking at prospects who were included in 60-man player pools, and notable omissions as well.

Keith Law: Where lands are green and skies are blue. Klawchat.

Matt: A few weeks ago there was a video of Tarik Skubal throwing 102 during a work out.  As a Tigers fan should I be concerned with him overthrowing like that or is stuff like that commonplace with pitchers when they train?
Keith Law: No, I wouldn’t be concerned, but I also wouldn’t believe that that was some new normal for him, or that he’ll start throwing like that in games. Kevin Gausman used to hit 102-103 in college by crow-hopping one throw at the end of his pregame warmups. That’s not real. And these guys throwing 101+ in highly controlled situations that show up on twitter videos are not going to throw that hard when they’re in real games, going 90-110 pitches, with actual batters and umpires involved.

Matt D: Does the cultural appropriation in board gaming ever give you pause? Ever passed on playing a game due to theme, artwork, accuracy, etc.? I struggle with this esp given prevalent whiteness of board gamers.
Keith Law: Yes, I gave a critical review to the original version of Five Tribes (since revised) for including slave cards in the game. The argument from the designer was that it was accurate to the history of the time and culture covered, but it was unnecessary and insensitive. I’ve avoided some other games with themes that made me uncomfortable, and shared a big article from the New York Times a year or so ago about a game that never saw the market that depicted European countries’ rush to colonize Africa around 1900.

Guest: I have to make a long term fantasy decision, Grayson Rodriguez or Tarik Skubal. Who is the better prospect?
Keith Law: Skubal for me. My answer to these questions will usually line up with my rankings of the players on my top 100, unless there’s a timing issue (one player being far closer to the majors than the other).

Guest: Kyle Wright or Felix Hernandez for the Braves 5th rotation slot
Keith Law: Depends a little on how Felix throws. If he has some velocity back, I’d be fine giving him the spot. I wonder if the longer layoff will help some older pitchers like him who’ve lost velocity in the last year or two.

Matt: I can’t be the only one nonplussed about celebrating tomorrow.
Keith Law: What is there to celebrate right now?

Guest: At what point do the Braves address the surplus of young, big league ready pitchers on the roster? Newcomb, Toussaint, Wilson, Wright, Muller and others seem stuck.
Keith Law: Some will end up in bullpen roles but I think we’ll see some of those names traded either in August or this offseason to fill an offensive hole somewhere.

Tom: How do you evaluate SP Jose Urquidy for Houston?
Keith Law: Fourth starter ceiling, since his four-seamer is probably too hittable. Full report on him in my Astros prospect rankings from the spring.

HH: Do you think it’s strange that after all this time baseball still doesn’t have a real definition of a “checked swing”?
Keith Law: I do, and I don’t. I do think it’s strange that the definition hasn’t been clarified in, what, decades? But I also can see an argument that a checked swing is about intent, and judging intent is inherently subjective.
Keith Law: I might look up that definition several times a year, because I find my mind tries to put language into it that isn’t there, and it’s so unsatisfying to get a non-answer from the rules.

Pat D.: Why are they still pretending like the Field of Dreams game is going to happen?
Keith Law: I have no idea. Field of Pipe Dreams is more like it.

Adam: What is the percent chance we see a game on the 23rd in your opinion?
Keith Law: I think we get games on the July 23rd. I am way less optimistic that we see games on September 23rd.

kc: what do you see out of Montas, Luzardo and Puk? Kaprelian, Jefferies?
Keith Law: All are covered in my Oakland prospect rankings. I do think that Luzardo and Puk belong in their rotation right now.

Will: You’re high on Bryce Wilson. Should the Braves move him now before they settle him into a bullpen role and kill his value?
Keith Law: I don’t think it would kill his value to use him in relief. Other teams have scouting reports from the last two years that show what he can do as a starter (and what he still needs to work on).

x: two questions about Atlanta already but your time has come! it’s over in Washington, Atlanta and Cleveland next right!?
Keith Law: Cleveland is far more egregious than Atlanta. I think if Cleveland falls – and my god, it has to now, it’s an absolute embarrassment that it’s even taken this long – then we can shift our focus to Atlanta (and the chant, it’s the chant more than anything).

Ryan: Hey Keith. My in laws are right wing nut jobs. They keep trying to get my wife to go visit them, but they don’t wear masks and insist that covid is a hoax. My wife is stressed out because she feels like she is betraying her family. I told my wife I don’t want her visiting them anymore with how much they don’t care. How should I handle this situation? For context, I’m in Arizona. Thank you.
Keith Law: You shouldn’t visit them – it’s now a matter of safety, especially since they’re older and all the information we have says that the older you are the more able you are to catch AND to spread this virus.

Matt: Why don’t sports leagues just relocate to countries that have very low cases of covid and just quarantine there?
Keith Law: Why would those countries take us? Imagine sending all MLB players, coaches, and staff – easily over 1000 people – to Uruguay. Why would Uruguay let us in, knowing that the odds are quite high that at least one person in the group would have the virus?

Guest: So I get the obvious reasons why the Redskins’ name has to go.  But does the logo?  If the Redskins were renamed the Lakota or the Comanche, would the name/logo combo still be racist?  Why?
Keith Law: Yes. And yes.

Nate: Do you think the short season could help Forrest Whitley finally get back on track again? Seems like it would help with his workload a lot, but who knows if he’s finally figured his mechanics  back out again?
Keith Law: Don’t think the short season matters. His mechanics were fine in the AFL.

AJ: Who was a better prospect as an amateur for you, Zac Veen or David Dahl? Are they similar prospects in any way other than LHH HS OF’s?
Keith Law: Veen, by a small margin. He’s got more raw power at the same age.

Lark11: Do you think Jesse Winker gets the majority of the DH ABs for the Reds? What do you think Winker’s offensive peak will be? Thanks.
Keith Law: He’s nearly a .400 OBP guy vs RHP already in the majors. I think he’ll do well enough against lefties, given more experience, that he won’t have to be platooned. Even at 15 HR/year that’s a regular, and that ballpark may mean he gets well past that.

Greg: The NBA has a “bubble” set up that the players aren’t supposed* to leave, and even then players are worried. Baseball players… are just coming and going as they please? Who knows how many different people they’ll come into contact with? Realistically, there’s almost no way even this shortened season is completed, right?
Keith Law: As far as I can tell, it’s an honor system, assuming that players will behave outside of the ballpark, and there is no way I will believe that all of these men, some of whom are barely adults, will adhere strictly to basic safety procedures (like, say, avoiding bars).

Greg: Low on the list of concerns I know… but is this going to be the worst/best/most interesting Oscars year ever? Are they going to have to change the rules for movies released VOD? Does anyone really want to go back top movie theaters?
Keith Law: They have already changed the rules to allow movies that go right to VOD to compete – you no longer have to have a theatrical run. So I think Hamilton is now eligible. The bigger concern from an overall quality perspective is that many studios may just push movies into 2021 – like In the Heights, for example.

Amin: Hi Keith – Is it fair to read into Austin Beck’s omission from the list of 60 players as a sign of Oakland’s diminishing faith/frustration with his development? It seems rather odd that they wouldn’t invite a player that they picked 6th overall and gave $5 million to only 3 years ago even though his production has been underwhelming.
Keith Law: I see it that way, at least. Just get him reps and time working with your coaches in Stockton.

Rich M: How would you grade the Padres 2020 draft now that they signed Cole Wilcox?
Keith Law: I loved their draft from the start because I had no doubt they would sign Wilcox.

Jason: Are projected rookie starters like Lux and Kieboom on a much shorter leash with the abbreviated season?
Keith Law: I don’t know but it seems foolish. What’s a short leash in 60 games? A week? You can’t evaluate anyone off that.

Jason: Over/under on Gore’s innings in 2020?  Also, I saw the picture of Gore in your piece today and his leg kick is ridiculously high.  Do you expect that will be an issue for him in the majors?  Thanks and have a great holiday weekend.
Keith Law: He’s always had that leg kick and repeats it every time. No issue there. I am not making any guesses on innings/at bats at this point when we don’t even know who’s passing their entrance COVID-19 tests.

addoeh: The major European domestic soccer leagues have re-started and Germany has even completed their’s.  Leagues for various sports in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand have all re-started.  The NHL is probably going to complete it’s season in Toronto and Edmonton.  But the US can barely get to square one.  Pretty pathetic.
Scott: Any new book recommendations?
Keith Law: Yep. It surprises me that more patriotic Americans aren’t pissed off that other countries’ responses are so clearly superior to ours. We’re not #1. We are probably last. Shouldn’t that make you mad if you want to be proud of your country?
Keith Law: I just reviewed Being Wrong and would recommend it strongly, as I would Mindware, a review of which I was writing this morning. I am also 3/4 of the way through Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, one of the finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it’s excellent.

Rob: We’ve done a relatively decent job of containing covid here in Canada.  I love the Jays but don’t want any part of them playing regular season games here.  Am I off base?
Keith Law: I won’t blame anyone who opposes sports leagues trying to resume play, or doesn’t want them playing in their town/area.
Keith Law: There’s a good argument that this is all folly, that no league should be trying to play games in the US right now while the pandemic is still raging across the south and threatening to surge again in California and New York.

Matt: Honor system? Imagine how pissed off 10 year veterans with 9 figure bank accounts are gonna be when they find out some taxi squad scrub tested positive because he ate at Olive Garden and sang karaoke at the dive bar across the street.
Keith Law: The veteran can yell at them from six feet away.

Jason: Do you know whether the criteria for rookie eligibility will be lowered and/or prorated?
Keith Law: I have not heard anything about that – I don’t think they will, or should be, but it’s possible I missed it.

Jason: Will starting pitchers be at the park on game day?  Should they?  Wouldn’t it be much better to keep starters separate from the relievers and starting position players from everyone else.  I fear that they will do this all wrong.
Keith Law: If you’re not starting or otherwise unavailable on game day there’s no reason for you to be at the park this year. Again, I don’t know if that’s a policy.

Mike: i know boras is involved but shouldn’t signing Austin Martin be pretty straightforward?  Seems jays are often late in getting deals done…
Keith Law: Don’t think this is anything to do with the Jays. Martin was the best player in the class and went fifth. That’s going to make the negotiations a bit slower.
Keith Law: He should sign, though. He doesn’t really have leverage here – returning to school, with pandemic uncertainty, a strong likely class, and age working against him, is not a good alternative to whatever the Jays’ best offer is.

scrapper: do we know yet how many minor league teams will be gone permanently, starting in 2021?
Keith Law: I believe we’ll be down to 120 full-season teams, then some unknown number of GCL/AZL teams, plus a DSL that looks probably like it did last year.
Keith Law: So all short-season leagues between the complexes and low-A will be gone. Many of those franchises (Aberdeen, Brooklyn, the Northwest League) will move up to full-season leagues. But the number will be 120 plus the complex teams.

Scrapper: Do you Netflix?  Any preferred shows on that platform?
Keith Law: Of course. We just finished Sex Education (the two seasons so far); the acting in that show is incredible, but the writing falls short so often, turning way too much into a teen soap opera. Loved Russian Doll, Never Have I Ever, Big Mouth. Money Heist was very disappointing.

Joe: I got into a Twitter debate a while back with a baseball writer with a national platform who was making the argument that there is no difference between a vote for Trump and a vote for Biden. This is a relatively insane opinion, right?
Keith Law: It is an incorrect statement, probably given by someone unfamiliar with the current administration’s rollbacks of environmental protections or equal rights protections.

Paul: Is Hassell’s hit ability enough to take him above Veen?  Can he stay in center?
Keith Law: Yes to the hit tool, probably no to center.

Scrapper: How soon before we hear teams trying to stick 10-15k fans per game into their stadiums?
Keith Law: Wasn’t Texas already trying this?

Pat D.: If Mike Trout were to opt out, how many others do you think would follow, and would that effectively end the season?
Keith Law: I don’t think him opting out would lead to a big flood of defections. I think it’s more of a tipping point issue – if the trickle of opt-outs keeps going, the pace will accelerate, and eventually we’ll hit some percentage (20%? 30%) where the season becomes infeasible.

Matt: I know it’s not MLB,  but keep in mind the Super Bowl is scheduled in *checks notes* Tampa.
Keith Law: Imagine a Super Bowl without fans. Dead quiet for three hours of football. All because we couldn’t stand to shut the country down for two months.

Joules: Let’s say Ender’s hamstring explodes, could Pache do enough at the plate to be an everyday CF in 2021 assuming that season is ~normal
Keith Law: Yes.

Andy: Bettendorf, Iowa, is having a youth baseball tournament next weekend featuring over 100 teams from at least 4 different states. So the reason the Field of Dreams game is still on, is because Iowa is denial about anything being different.
Keith Law: As they have been since the start of this. Iowa, Nebraska, Arizona, Texas … weird, what do all those governors and legislatures have in common?
Keith Law: I think I just deleted a question by mistake – someone asked if I’d read The Ghost of King Leopold and, if they meant King Leopold’s Ghost, I have.

Taylor: Are you a fan of power metal? If so, i recommend a band called Unleash the Archers. The singer’s voice is gorgeous.
Keith Law: I am. I’ll check it out.

Steve: I’m curious, as an analytical person, how do you decide what political efforts (PACS, candidates, initiatives, etc) to support to get the most bang for your buck. I have limited resources, my local races are fairly set, so I’m looking at the KY, ME Senate races, for example.
Keith Law: Same. I keep the same approach as I do with charitable donations – I give where my buck likely gets the most bang. Food pantries are generally great for this.

Erik: Speaking of Big Mouth and other shows that are changing voice actors. Performative wokeness or actual good?
Keith Law: It absolutely bugged me that Missy, the one prominent black character on Big Mouth, was voiced by a white actor. (Duke Ellington is kind of a side gag.) Also, the show is long over, but my daughter watched Littlest Pet Shop, and the fact that a white person was voicing Sunil with a stereotypical Indian/south Asian accent was kind of appalling.

Doug: How do you think Mateo fits into the Padres plans this year? Still think he has star potential?
Keith Law: I’d probably stick him in CF – they don’t have a proper CF on the roster, right? – and see what happens. I don’t think there’s star potential there any more.

Adam: If Cole Wilcox was highly rated and apparently valued at his $3.3 mil asking price, why was he not selected in a more traditional slot to meet that price?
Keith Law: Perhaps not every team saw him at that price, and there’s certainly an opportunity cost to taking him there.

Guest: Of all, the bad ideas, wasn’t allowing bars to open in a pandemic one of the all time dumbest? With how people act when drunk, it was always clear bars would help cause a surge.
Keith Law: Yes. But the liquor industry has a lot of political power.

Jake: I’m also a huge footie fan and, watching the Premier League’s “Project Restart” is painful. No fans, fake crowd noise, and the intensity of a summer friendly (think spring training).

Is there anything that MLB can do to make these “baseball” games feel like Baseball?
Keith Law: Eh, I’m fine without fans. I’d be fine without broadcasters. I’d skip the fake crowd noise for sure.

Kevin: I think the Padres plan on Grisham in center.
Keith Law: He’s not a CF.

Mike: I think I’ve suggested this before, but you should give the books of Guy Kay Gavriel a shot……a great writer.
Keith Law: Sean Doolittle recommended Sailing to Sarantium and it’s on my Kindle right now.
Keith Law: I’m reading Say Nothing next, though. I got that from my local library – they’re doing curbside pickup now.

Adam: Do you prefer Jarred Kelley for $3mil or Cole Wilcox for $3.3mil?
Keith Law: I ranked the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft class right before the draft itself.

Patrick: How do I square my malignant life-long love of the Cubs with my complete disrespect for Pete Ricketts? Can I support a team when one of the owners is willing to allow people to die?
Keith Law: You could watch them, and root for them, but decline to spend money on them in the form of tickets or merchandise.

JT: Are some prospects losing their shots this year?

Can players still develop in workouts, or is this just too hard?
Keith Law: That was the subject of my column last week … short answer is yes, some will lose their shots, and some will still be able to develop at home, but the only players who might be better off not playing than playing are pitchers who might have pitched this year at less than 100% and get more recovery time.

Rick: Thank you for the enormous amount of work that you put into draft coverage.  I am just curious..  do you get emails from agents or parents of prospects?  I hope that they are civil in nature.
Keith Law: Occasionally. I try not to engage with parents who are anything but civil, because there is no gain for anyone in arguing with a parent that their kid isn’t as good as they think he is. It’s pointless and mean. Agents are another story, as interacting with them is generally part of my job, and most of them can still be civil even when we disagree because they understand that this is just business.

JD: You get to rename the Redskins.  What’s their new name?
Keith Law: I like the suggestion that they use the Grays for its historical significance (that’s the most prominent Negro Leagues team to play in DC), but it’s not the most inspiring name beyond that. I don’t have a better suggestion, though.

KRod: When do you move Vladdy over to 1st?  is that even the best move?
Keith Law: Now. Or right to DH. He’s not going to be very good at first, given his size and conditioning.

Chris: What 60 man pool interests you the most?
Keith Law: I highlighted quite a few teams that stuffed their 60-man rosters with prospects – the Padres were one, the White Sox another. If I could go to watch the Yankees satellite camp (no media or scouts allowed, alas) I’d be there a bunch.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for reading and for your questions, as always. Please be safe this holiday weekend, on the roads and out and about. Wear your masks, avoid enclosed spaces, stay out of bars, wash your hands. The last thing the country or MLB needs is a big surge in cases after this weekend because people got pandemic fatigue and stopped taking basic precautions. Stay safe everyone.

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→ July 2, 2020
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Music update, June 2020.

June started out very slow for new music but finished with a bang, enough that I ended up culling some songs before posting this playlist, which runs the gamut of genres and features a couple of tracks from some of the best albums of the year so far. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

Khruangbin – Pelota. The Thai funk/jazz/rock trio’s third album, Mordechai, is among the year’s best new records, and it’s their first with significant vocals, which should allow them to make real inroads on the commercial side. I’ll do a list of my favorite albums of the first half of 2020 shortly, but Mordechai is on it.

Doves – Carousels. Doves have reunited and released their first new music since 2009’s Kingdom of Rust. The time off has done them some good, as this sounds like peak Doves around the time of The Last Broadcast.

Bananagun – The Master. This weird Australian funk/alternative group sound a bit like someone smashed together folk rock sensibilities with late ’70s funk-rock or early ’80s new wave on their debut album The True Story of Bananagun. It’s very strange, but it works quite well even at different speeds.

Sad13 – Sooo Bad. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz is set to release her second solo album as Sad13, with three new singles in the last few weeks, headlined by this track. All three songs are poppier than Speedy Ortiz’s music, but still have her offbeat lyrics and signature use of unexpected transitions.

Frank Turner – Bob. Turner and NOFX recorded covers of five of the other’s songs; I’m not a NOFX guy (although their desire to offend is admirable in a quirky way), but this reworking of a snotty track from their debut album into an acoustic ballad that sounds like Turner could have written it himself is impressive.

The Lazy Eyes – Tangerine. This Sydney quartet just released their first EP, cleverly titled EP1, showcasing a psychedelic rock sound that appears to owe a small debt to their countrymate Tame Impala.

Glass Animals – Heat Waves. I tend to like Glass Animals more when they’re a bit restrained, which they are here, as opposed to songs where it feels like they’re trying to be strange or eccentric.

Arlo Parks – Black Dog. Not a Led Zeppelin cover, as it turns out, although Parks did record an acoustic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” as the B-side to this love song to a partner (or friend?) suffering from the black dog of depression.

Shamir – On My Own. If you know Shamir, it might be from his 2014 song “On the Regular,” which featured him rapping at a pitch that convinced a lot of people – me included – that the vocalist was a woman. He’s honed his sound in the intervening years to create an expansive mash-up that spans indie rock to classic soul to house and beyond, but I’ve been waiting for years for him to write another great hook. This song has it, along with a mid-80s Prince vibe to the music.

Tricky – Fall Please. Adrian Thaws is still at it at age 52, and still capable of producing a banger like this one, which features vocals from Polish singer Marta Z?akowska. It’s just short (2:27) for a song with such a great groove.

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist – Look at Me. Gibbs is probably the best MC working today, and continues to challenge himself musically, although I have a hard time buying in fully given how he speaks about women in his lyrics.

Dirty Streets – Can’t Go Back. Bluesy hard rock from a fairly new Memphis trio whose music I first heard while watching Netflix’s Sex Education. This is one of three tracks from their upcoming fifth album Rough and Tumble.

Muzz – Knuckleduster. Muzz is Paul Banks of Interpol, Matt Barrick of the Walkmen, and producer Josh Kaufman; they released their self-titled debut album in early June. It’s a mixed bag, often too lugubrious, but generally lush and often harking back to early shoegaze with more pronounced vocals.

Coach Party – Bleach. A new indie rock quartet from the Isle of Wight, with this song reminding me a bit of their labelmates Wolf Alice (at least from the latter’s first album).

The Beths – Out of Sight. This New Zealand indie group made a small splash in 2018 with their album Future Me Hates Me, with “You Wouldn’t Like Me” appearing on my top 100 for that year; their second album, Jump Rope Gazers, drops on July 10th.

Everything Everything – Planets. E2 will release RE-ANIMATOR, their fifth album, on August 21st; given the first three singles it seems like it might be their weirdest record yet.

Hinds – Take Me Back. I was into this all-female quartet’s earlier work but sort of assumed they’d get more proficient as musicians over time, so the charm of their first two records has started to wear off a bit now that it’s clear that there isn’t another level coming.

Medium – Life After Death. This isn’t the ’90s Minneapolis band Medium, but a project from musician Cotter Phinney, a big Ariel Pink fan who also professes to be into classic metal solos, with the former more evident on this track.

Protomartyr – Michigan Hammers. If there was a moment in some alternate universe when post-punk started to morph into metal – instead of the two strains descending from different ancestors – the result would have probably sounded a lot like Protomartyr.

Mekong Delta – Mental Entropy. I had no idea Mekong Delta, a minor band from the halcyon days of German thrash metal, even still existed, but they sound like they’re still recording in 1989 and I’m here for it.

Ensiferum – Andromeda. This Finnish folk/death metal act show off some great technical guitar work and strong melodic riffs, but the accessibility of their music varies from song to song – “Rum, Women, and Victory,” their previous single, was way more on the death metal side of things, while this has just a little of that and is more traditional metal, which is still my preference.

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→ June 27, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 6/26/20.

I had one new piece for The Athletic subscribers this week, talking to player development execs about what they plan to do this summer and fall with minor leaguers who may not get to play in any games this year. (I’m extremely pessimistic about instructional league or the Arizona Fall League, given those states’ incompetent responses to the ongoing pandemic.) I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope video chat on Wednesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Santa Monica, a really cute, mostly clever new game that just doesn’t quite work because there aren’t enough ways to use one of the most important mechanics in the game.

The Boston Globe recently named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, although I took this week off since I didn’t have much to say. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

  • Elizabeth Kolbert, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for her book The Sixth Extinction, looks at how Iceland beat COVID-19, with virtually no cases and one of the world’s lowest fatality rates, for the New Yorker.
  • MEL‘s Isabelle Kohn looks at police officers who commit domestic violence – how it ties to violence against unarmed black citizens, and how often these officers get away with it, even to the point of killing their partners.
  • Henry Abbott of TrueHoop added his thoughts on the Bill Simmons situation, explaining how much ESPN catered to Simmons during the time they were both there. I saw some of this firsthand around Grantland, which always had resources that should have gone to the main site. I never had any negative interactions with Simmons myself.
  • Astronomers may have discovered a black neutron star, which would fill in the ‘mass gap’ between lighter neutron stars and heavier, denser black holes.
  • Three Wilmington, North Carolina, police officers were fired for stating that they’d like to kill all Black people and making other racist comments. The comments only came to light because one of their cameras was activated inadvertently; otherwise, they’d still be on the job, armed, planning to kill as many Black people as they could.
  • No link yet, but Ravensburger announced the five villains that will be available in the upcoming Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power game, a standalone expansion that will be available for preorders on July 6th: Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Killmonger, and Taskmaster.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ June 25, 2020
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Klawchat 6/25/20.

Starting at 1 pm ET. My latest piece for The Athletic subscribers looks at how player development execs are working with minor leaguers who won’t play games this year. I also reviewed the new board game Santa Monica for Paste.

Keith Law: Delivered by mortal hands. Klawchat.

Casey: Should the Dylan Carlson be starting immediately in the Cardinals outfield with such a short season?
Keith Law: I think so. Who’s the clearly better option?

Ben: With the 60-player pool, it sounds like the plan is to just anticipate a lot positive tests and play through them while those that test positive quarantine. Is that your understanding too? Do you see a scenario where they end the season, other than the virus simply getting out of control and preventing teams from even fielding enough players?
Keith Law: I do not think that’s the plan – I think the 60 player roster is to account for typical baseball injuries, bereavement, etc. If there are a lot of positive tests I would expect a halt to the season.

BVW: Do you like my draft strategy from the last 2 years? I like a few high upside guys with lesser talent rather than solid guys across the board.
Keith Law: I like the Mets’ draft strategy for the last several years. I don’t think that is Brodie’s strategy.

Mike: How much of the acrimonious public negotiation between MLB and the players was because of a desire to bust the union once and for all?
Keith Law: I’ve said this in a few places – I think MLB wanted to set the tone for the 2021 CBA talks by pursuing a hard line in these negotiations as well as those with MILB and the umpires’ union.
Keith Law: It’s a credible commitment strategy. The union, to their credit, did not blink.

Brandon J.: Hey Keith, do you think that Clayton Beeter has the ceiling of a Lugo/Pressly type reliever? Or do you think he has a higher ceiling if healthy?
Keith Law: Starter ceiling. Just higher risk with the delivery, one injury, lack of a definite third pitch.

Todd Boss: So, elephant in the room, but with a third of all MLB teams already having players test positive before we’ve even started “spring training,” with Toronto banned from traveling to its home stadium, and with cases exploding in the two ST states … who actually believes we’re gonna play baseball??
Keith Law: The optimistic take on this is that those positive tests came with players working out essentially on their own rather than under the health and safety protocols from the new agreement.

Todd Boss: So post-draft, is there any evidence that a team “punted” on the 2020 draft like some were worried about?
Keith Law: Nope. That story did not check out even before the draft.

Steve: Hey Keith, have you heard any buzz on draft picks that you’re concerned might NOT sign with their team?
Keith Law: None. I expect them all to sign unless they fail physicals. Jim Callis tweeted the same thing yesterday.

John: With the introduction of the new extra inning rule placing a runner on second base to start the inning, how do you feel about bunting him over to third to start the frame? I know you have had a strong stance against bunting before, but does this change it?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s good strategy for the visiting club, since the home team gets the same starting position.

Mike B: Is this chat mask-optional?
Keith Law: Masks are required. In all seriousness, I’m blocking anyone who tries to make anti-mask arguments to me on Twitter. Go do your science denial somewhere else.

Mr. Met: The last two drafts, it appears the Mets strategy has been to draft high end prospects early then money-savers the rest of the way to meet the bonus demands. Do you like this strategy?
Keith Law: Yes, especially for a team like that Mets that should, at least in theory, operate as a large-market club.

Joe: Any undrafted signings stand out to you as maybe being more than just filler?
Keith Law: Not really. $20K doesn’t get you a definite prospect. There were some good senior signs, though – Landon Knack (Dodgers, second round) stood out as one.

Todd Boss: how are players planning on even getting back into the country if they’re from the DR or Venezuela right now?   Isn’t there a travel ban on all “sh*thole” countries like theirs?
Keith Law: Shouldn’t the players be more concerned that after three months in the US they won’t be allowed back home? The EU appears set to ban us from travelling there, and they’re right to do so.

Guest: Which of the 2020 first round picks are most likely to see mlb action in a short season ?  Relievers seem most likely or SPs who can just air it out for an inning.
Keith Law: Max Meyer stands out.

Joe: Fair to be disappointed with the Orioles draft haul?  They had the most money but didn’t get any elite guys.
Keith Law: I didn’t care for it. They saved money on Kjerstad but passed on the best available HS players, and other teams’ scouts really panned the Mayo pick to me (as an overslot candidate).

Tom: What are the odds we look back in a few years and wonder how Blaze Jordan lasted so far into the draft?
Keith Law: 1%. He’s just nowhere near the prospect the Internet proclaimed him to be.

Ben: Is it there a chance Torkelson debuts late this summer? Would that be ill-advised?
Keith Law: My guess is no, because the Tigers are unlikely contenders, but I wouldn’t call it ill-advised.

Tommy: What is the actual science right this moment regarding masks? It seems like there’s no consensus, yet everyone is still advocating for them, so maybe I’m just reading too many comment sections.
Keith Law: Using a mask drastically reduces your odds of spreading the virus if you have it. If everyone used masks, we’d be in far better position now than we are – we’d be where Italy and Spain and other countries that actually enforced mask-wearing and physical distancing are. The economy would be mostly open, and we wouldn’t have surges and increasing deaths.
Keith Law: There is NO argument against masks, except for “I have a tiny brain and don’t care about other people.”

TomBruno23: What would it take to get you to attend an MLB game this summer?
Keith Law: For work, yes, I expect to go. As a fan, I would not.

Jason: What’s the point of Bolton coming out now and saying the President is incompetent and corrupt. Should he have done more or is he a coward just like everyone else? Or is it just about the 2 million from his book deal.
Keith Law: Filthy lucre.

Ben Davis Bunts: What are the chance the Padres sign Wilcox?
Keith Law: Barring a failed physical, 100%.

Mike: Am I wrong for thinking that most sports should just shut it down for the season & start from fresh next season? I’m concerned that we will now have difficulties with at least 2 seasons instead of just writing off this season.
Keith Law: I am of the opinion that it is worth making the effort, with proper protocols in place, even knowing that there is a 50% or greater chance we fail to complete a season. However, I am very open to the idea that we shouldn’t try at all, because doing so creates risks I’m not foreseeing.

John: Will teams have to use player options to move them between the active roster and taxi squad?
Keith Law: I just re-read the manual; it says that all optioned players will be treated as assigned to the alternate-site roster, which is the converse, but I infer from that that a player sent from the active roster to the satellite roster must be optioned. The taxi squad refers to up to three players brought to the major-league stadium as emergency replacements but not actually on the active roster.

Mike: I get that Manfred works for the owners, but do the owners not see they are all hurting the game with their stance.  It’s probably wrong to be playing at all, but if they are going to play it should have already started when no other major sports were out there.
Keith Law: I don’t think the owners in that camp care. I think they’re wrong, and are underestimating the elasticity of demand as well as how vulnerable the capital appreciation of their team values is.

Turlock Tom: The buzz surrounding Tyler Soderstrom seemed a bit overinflated prior to the draft. Do you think going #26 is about the right range for him?
Keith Law: I do.

Arnold: Best post-draft signing by the Giants?
Keith Law: None. As I said above, you’re not getting players we already know to be prospects for $20K. Some may turn into prospects in time, but they’re not right now.

Mike: There were only 133 news cases in Italy yesterday. We are legit the dumbest country in the world
Keith Law: My cousins live there, and I’ve been several times. Italy is hardly the exemplar of a compliant, rule-following culture. Yet they did it, and they beat this thing back enough to resume something resembling normal life. Our current state in the US is our fault, from the leaders we elected to the tolerance we’ve had for those who act only in their own self-interest or who believe whatever they read on Reddit or Facebook about deepstate conspiracies to reduce your oxygen intake.

Bighen: Truly no agenda here but a lot of people outside the game talk about how awash it is in cash.  Several sources (including the NY Times) have stated that the Mets have lost $50M in certain seasons and might lose $100M+ this season.  I realize that there is SNY shenanigans going on, but SNY can’t generate enough cash to offset a loss like that – revenue yes, actual profits no.   Where is the disconnect?   I am really just a Mets  fan that wants to be rid of the Wilpons ASAP.   Valuation <> cash flow
Keith Law: Yes, SNY absolutely can, especially since they’re (likely) paying a pittance for those broadcast rights.

Ken: A couple weeks old now, but: JK Rowling, why?
Keith Law: Very disappointing. She’s hinted at this before – and, let’s face it, retconning Dumbledore as a gay character was pretty weak when she absolutely could have revealed this in books 6 or 7 and nobody would have stopped her – but for her to lay bare her transphobia like that was extremely disappointing.

TomBruno23: Balancing safety concerns and the need to keep my wife and children sane we have booked a week-long trip to Holland, MI for the end of July. Private home, etc etc blah blah blah. How dumb am I?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s dumb. Michigan is among the leading states in their response to the virus – their Rt is extremely low, they’re testing adequately, and their contact tracing rate is about 75% already. If they continue on this track, I think it’d be safe to go there in late July. Then it’s a matter of what you do yourselves once there – avoiding crowds, wearing masks, etc.

addoeh: “Kung Flu”.  I hope there aren’t a lot of kids of Asian descent, like my son, who get called that in the fall because the President said it.
Keith Law: It is fucking gross that our President says it and his toadies defend it. I never thought I’d see the day when a U.S. President was openly racist like that and a third of the country shrugged. Even when I was a kid, our leaders were good enough to keep their racism subtle.

J5: Should KeBryan Hayes be starting immediately?
Keith Law: I think so.

Guest: How many times do you think we’ll see this in extra innings: Bunt the runner to third followed by two intentional walks to set up a force at home? I hope never but…
Keith Law: Many times.

BK: I couldn’t believe that a former GM on MLB radio questioned the Giants for drafting Bailey in the first round because they had drafted Bart high 2 years ago. How silly is the idea of drafting for needs in the MLB draft? If Bailey is the best player on the Gaints’ board, then the pick is perfectly defensible…do you agree?
Keith Law: I have a guess at that former GM and I’d say consider the source.
Keith Law: Also, Bart has already had multiple injuries that might impact the Giants’ internal projections for him staying at C.

Mike: Can you explain how athleticism helps a pitcher with their delivery? I heard that discussed with one of the picks and don’t really get it
Keith Law: The better the athlete, the better he can repeat any series of movements – a delivery, a swing, an arm stroke – which, for pitchers, appears to be positively correlated with command.

Dave: How long of a look does Tork get at 3B before ultimately moving back to 1B?  or do you think he can actually stick at 3B long term?
Keith Law: I think he’s a 1b.

Ben: What do you make of Fauci’s “necessary lie” early on in the pandemic that mask’s weren’t necessary for average people (in order to preserve the supply for medical professionals)? The ends may have justified the means, but I did lose a level of trust (and resisted masks earlier on as a result)
Keith Law: Look at the harm it did. Some people still use this as a reason to disbelieve Fauci and/or the government.

Adam: Do you expect Adley Rutschman to see time this year?
Keith Law: No.

Dave: Do you expect to see Gore and Pearson on OD rosters?
Keith Law: No but I think both will appear.

Greg: So… My wife and I are lucky enough to be comfortably middle class. I lost my job, but we’re getting by, and actually donating more money and tipping service people more than usual, given the circumstance. This isn’t any sort of brag, but just saying WTF BASEBALL OWNERS!? The terrible bar by my house has figured out how to stay open and safe and keep people employed. Are we to believe baseball ownership runs on such paper-thin margins as the third-best falafel restaurant in town?
Keith Law: That’s what they want us to believe, but they have lied about their profits for at least forty years now, so why should we accept their statements now when they won’t open their books to anyone?

Andrew Brotherton: What do you think will be done about the minor league season? Some sort of super AZFL? An instructional league? A taxi-squad league?
Keith Law: The most likely answer is none. I don’t expect any minor league game action this year.

Ben: The A’s acknowledged that Jeff Criswell’s delivery needs to be cleaned up in order for him to project as a starter. Do you agree with that assessment and are you optimistic that Oakland can do that given their player/pitcher development history?
Keith Law: I do agree. I don’t think it’s that easy to do.

Tom: Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I used to really believe that it didn’t matter who the president was. But now… not being hyperbolic: Has there been an American president, even fiction, who’s done more tangible harm to a greater number of people, not just in the US but around the world?
Keith Law: Not in my lifetime.
Keith Law: Buzz Windrip is close, though.

Rick: A co-worker I’m around a lot tested positive for COVID-19, so now I’m on day 2 of my 14 day quarantine.  I’m participating in your chat to help me get through my boredom.  Can I get a shout out for being a good person and not going out and putting others at risk?
Keith Law: Indeed. Sorry for the tough break, though.

Tommy: Again, not questioning, just genuinely curious, but there’s nothing about masks and building immunity against the virus?
Keith Law: No. People pushing ‘immunity’ as a counterargument to masks are doing so without facts to back them up – we still don’t know what kind of immunity people who are infected have against future reinfection.
Keith Law: There’s an assumption – because science education in the US largely sucks – that if you get a virus once, you can’t get it a second time. That’s obviously not true with the common cold or the flu, but for whatever reason there are who people who assume this is true of COVID-19, and we do not know that.

Rob: Finally saw Knives Out now that it is streaming free.  As someone who has tried and failed to read it twice, the Gravity’s Rainbow joke had me rolling. Any advice for getting through books that are particularly tough reads?
Keith Law: I try to set reasonable per-day reading goals (e.g., 40 pages), and go into it knowing it’ll take me, say, three weeks to finish the book. That makes it more mentally manageable, and I don’t end up procrastinating.
Keith Law: That said, Gravity’s Rainbow is not worth your time.

Dave C: Do u think teams will run milb camps out of their Dominican camps and/or minor league affiliates?
Keith Law: No. There are multiple reasons why not.

Matt: I’m a 44 year old white guy. Yesterday I got pulled over for a broken taillight. Cop frisked me, asked if I had drugs and demanded he search my car. I refused and he called K9. K9 sniffed my car for 5 minutes and both let me go. I’m a stereotypical white dude with a pickup truck. I can’t even imagine what might have happened if I was a POC. Cops have way too much power. Something needs to be done.
Keith Law: We need a paradigm shift. I don’t like the phrase “defund the police” because I don’t think that’s the solution. Demilitarize the police. Shift to community policing models. Change hiring practices. But you’re never getting a majority of people to buy into a model with no police.

Jon: I read that Ed Howard was a possible Top 5 pick but for the HS season being entirely halted and therefore nobody seeing him play this year and a result was a lot of college prospects instead. Any truth to that or just Cubs homer-talk? What’s his ceiling?
Keith Law: Extreme homer talk. Arrant nonsense.

Alex: I can’t believe there haven’t been any Braves prospect questions so… has the ship sailed on Touki Toussaint and Bryse Wilson as starters? The 60-game season makes it hard to work in these kind of bubble players. Are they change of scenery guys?
Keith Law: Jeez, why are you giving up on them so quickly?

Doug: Would you rather have Hassell/Wilcox or Veen and an underslot 3rd rounder?
Keith Law: Hassell/Wilcox.

Brian: Quick math for the herd immunity crowd. The CDC estimates 70% of the population would need to have recovered from COVID-19 to get us there (assuming you’re permanently immune). That equates to roughly 200 million US citizens. At a death rate of .4% (which seems to be the bare minimum), you’d need to be okay with 800,000 deaths.
Keith Law: Well, there’s a pretty significant portion of the GOP that is okay with that.

Doug: Is WAR going to be adjusted based on the short season? Wouldn’t homers and strikeouts this year be worth 3 times more than a previous year?
Keith Law: No. You’ll just see WAR leaders of about 3-4 this year.

Dave C: any Idea how service time will work for shuttle team? Actually days on active roster?
Keith Law: I believe that’s correct.

Mattey: How do you think Utley will fare on first Hall of Fame ballot?
Keith Law: I’m just hopeful he’ll get the 5% to stay on it.

Guest: I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoy your work and for your reasoned opinions on a host of issues in addition to baseball. I don’t always agree with you, but I respect that your opinions are based on reason and conviction. Keep up the good work!
Keith Law: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Nick: I don’t read as much as I’d prefer, and when I do I have a bad habit of choosing dense literary masterpieces. They’re great, but very time consuming. Any advice on authors/genres that are better to build a constructive habit?
Keith Law: There are plenty of literary masterpieces that are on the shorter side – you may find you enjoy those, and still get the psychic value of reading such acknowledged classics, with less effort.

Dave C: When’s the last time u were as surprised during the draft as the Sox taking Nick York’s this year?
Keith Law: Hayden Simpson.

JP: So NASCAR released a photo of the noose in Bubba Wallace’s garage – and now all the pedants are out in full force – “AKSHUALLY, that’s not technically a noose!” I swear these are the same guys that love pointing out that “assault rifle” is not a real legal phrase after every school shooting. “Who gets to decide what an assault rifle is?!”
Keith Law: I mean, I suppose you can argue it wasn’t put there just then … but the word for that type of knot is a noose.

Chris: I think every post-draft analysis of a draft pick not taken in the top 10 is “if there was a full season, this guy could have been a top 10 pick, so this could be a steal”… for some reason, reading every writer/blogger of every team say that bugs me lol
Keith Law: It should bug you because it’s a fabrication.

Jabroni: Did you like the WS strategy of going big with picks 1&2 then punting 3,4 and 5?
Keith Law: I liked the strategy but not specifically those picks. I would have targeted other players with the same plan.

Todd: Do you trust the polls at all that show Biden comfortably ahead? How possible is it Biden wins the popular vote greater than Hillary did but loses the electoral college?
Keith Law: It’s going to come down to 3-4 states, no? Whoever wins PA, OH, MI, WI wins the election. I would guess most other states are locked up already.

Pat D: Disney is apparently going to re-design Splash Mountain.  I’m genuinely shocked.  Any thoughts on this pretty insignificant development?
Keith Law: I was just on that ride in December. It’s a little cringey. There’s nothing overtly racist about it, but if you know the genesis of the stories (or the movie based on them), you know what’s going on.
Keith Law: I’ll be sad if “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” is gone, though. I loved that song when I was a kid.

Matt: If the batting leader at end of the year has something like a .517 batting average, will it count in record book for highest batting average of all time?
Keith Law: That’s not happening. Someone could hit .400, though, and I would argue that it shouldn’t be considered on the same level as Bill Terry/Ted Williams … but that we should also enjoy it for what it is. If Trout comes out hot and is hitting .400+ going into the last week, let’s make it a thing. Embrace the weirdness of the short season.

NL: I hate the DH, but understand the argument at least for this year. My question is why we worry about pitchers getting hurt running the bases. Seriously? An athlete running?
Keith Law: How about the part where pitchers are not good at hitting? This isn’t 1955. Pitchers are so much better today at pitching that asking them to hit when they get little time to practice and only face live pitching themselves every fifth day if that is a bit absurd.

Tyler: is Trump vs Joe “Weekend at Bernie’s” Biden the worst candidates to vote from in US history?  it’s even worse than Trump/Hillary, where I refused to vote for either.  I’m afraid I’ll do the same this year.
Keith Law: Check your privilege, Tyler. There is too much riding on this election to sit it out, even if you think it doesn’t affect you.

addoeh: Biden could win with Clinton states + FL and either AZ or NC.  He has more paths than just the Midwest route.
Keith Law: I guess that’s true, especially with Arizona and NC in COVID death spirals right now. I’m shocked there isn’t more of an effort to recall Ducey in AZ – the only recall effort I could find was from people arguing in April that he shouldn’t have locked down at all!

Dave C: Thoughts on the schedule this year? Seems weird that 1/3 of ur games are against teams that you aren’t competing against in ur League
Keith Law: I’m trying to just accept the weirdness for what it is. Getting worked up over details when the real goal is just to have a full season without anyone getting sick seems silly.

Sammy So-so: If Tyler Soderstrom doesn’t stick at catcher, does he still have the ceiling of an everyday player? Thanks.
Keith Law: Yes but he’ll need a position. Third base is at least the next stop.

Jason: How is drinking a cup of water or walking down a ramp considered newsworthy in 2020?
Keith Law: And it gets him praised as the “best president ever!” by the sycophants.

Tyler: “Check my privilege?”  You know nothing about me.  I am not white or rich, so what is my “privilege?”  All I know is when Biden was with Obama, all I got out of their presidency was losing my health insurance (that I was told I’d be able to keep) and am now paying about $200+ more a month than I did before their presidency.
Keith Law: I know that you have enough privilege to think about sitting out what is almost certainly the most important US election since the 1930s.

Gus: Is Bohm the Phillies opening day DH?
Keith Law: If Bohm makes the OD roster, Hoskins should be the DH.

John: Two drafts with really awful picks (besides the obvious with Rutschman) for Mike Elias. Time for O’s fans to worry about the direction?
Keith Law: I do not agree that they’ve had “awful” picks.
Keith Law: That’s an overreaction, at the least.

Howie: Hi Klaw, unless the value of a MLB franchise takes a hit due to pandemic owners should be able to get financing to mitigate short term cash flow concerns. Where I see this going though is the free agent market is much softer, concerns about collusion result in another work stoppage. Thoughts?
Keith Law: Free agent market will probably be softer for mid-tier FA and below. I don’t think that leads to collusion claims.

Jabroni: 88 days after the March agreement the owners finally agreed it was an agreement?? What the hell??
Keith Law: This is better framing than the bothsidesism I’m seeing everywhere. The owners spent 12 weeks trying to avoid the terms of the agreement they’d accepted in March, and ended up adhering to the agreement when the players said they expected the owners to live up to what they’d signed.

Ben: The “if you like your insurance you can keep it” line was was a commitment that Obamacare wouldn’t require any existing plans to fold.  Which it didn’t.
Keith Law: Yes, and if you want insurance or health care to cost less, you’re going to have to choose an entirely different model than the current one.

Pat D: To everyone complaining about not having a better choice than Biden:  do you really want Trump making a couple hundred more judicial appointments that will re-shape laws for the next 20-40 years?  I hope you don’t care about voting rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, government transparency, checks on presidential power……do I need to go on?
Keith Law: Environmental laws. Or handling the next pandemic.

Nick: How would you compare Robert Hassell to Jarred Kelenic coming out of high school?
Keith Law: Kelenic was the clearly better prospect.

Pat: I don’t see how MLB is going to pull this off without doing a bubble like the NBA is doing. So many health variables with the way they’ve chosen to do it
Keith Law: I guess the counterargument is that the NBA’s bubble increases the odds of a bigger outbreak if one person gets sick, no?

TomBruno23: My draft-crazy friend, let’s call him Baby Foley, keeps telling me the Cardinals really scored with Ian Bedell. We read your recap on The Athletic about his back-end starter potential. Anything else to add?
Keith Law: No, nothing more. That’s what he is.

J5: Which starter will break out this year to a top of rotation starter?  Plesac?  Ross?  Others?
Keith Law: I’ll do some kind of breakouts piece in July, although it’ll obviously be a bit different than normal.

Dave C: If Marcus Stroman has a typical year how much would a qualifying offer ruin his Free Agent market?
Keith Law: He’d be near the top end of the market and I don’t think it’ll affect him. Mid-tier FA get killed by the comp picks.

Joe: Keith: Did this recent nonsense increase or decrease the odds of a work stoppage down the line?
Keith Law: It didn’t alter the odds, but made it clear that the odds were higher than we realized they were.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for your questions and for reading. Stay safe everyone, and please, wear a mask, even if your little corner of the internet tells you otherwise. Do it for the elderly, the immune-compromised, the high-risk, even if you don’t feel like doing it for your friends and your family.

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