Uncategorized — Page 7

→ July 11, 2024
→ By keith

Klawchat 7/11/24.

I have a new mock draft and a final top 100 Big Board draft prospects ranking up for subscribers to the Athletic.

Keith Law: I can’t stay too long. Klawchat.

Scott: You released an updated ranking earlier this week. I’m curious what you are hearing or seeing at this point that is causing the rankings to change.
Keith Law: Teams had players in for workouts, interviewed guys at the combine, full-season data is now available, more video from end of year/summer stuff… a lot has changed since my last update.

Lynn: Keith – I know that it’s still a relatively small sample size and questions remain about how hard he makes contact, and where he plays but has your assessment of Jacob Wilson changed at all?
Keith Law: No, he’s played in two insanely good hitters environments and still doesn’t make enough hard contact.

Tristan: With no rookie-level ball in spring (thanks again, MLB!), it was pretty clear Arjun Nimmala was overmatched with the Dunedin assignment to start the year. After a reset, he’s come back looking much better based on the stat line. I read up until recently he hadn’t faced a pitcher older than him all year. Green light from you that he remains on track? Start him in High-A in ‘25 or hold off?
Keith Law: We have more than two months left to this season, so any talk of where he should start 2025 is premature. I said before the year he should start in extended/the complex and that turned out to be an accurate assessment.

Turner: Wanted to thank you because I read my first Ann Patchett novel (Bel Canto) last week based on your praise for her work and loved it.
Turner: Sorry, my question is if any of her novels would crack your top 100 list if updated today? Probably not important but I do love a top 100 list!
Keith Law: Bel Canto remains a top 50 all-time novel for me. I’ve loved all of her work except Run, but Bel Canto is her masterpiece.

davealden53: Will Bednar has been promoted twice this year despite pitching less than 30 innings. The strikeout numbers are great but the walks are concerning. Any reports on whether he’s still shaking off rust from the back injuries or will control be an on-going issue?
Keith Law: He’s walked 11 guys in 8 innings in AA. I’m not hearing reports on him because that’s non-prospect territory.

davealden53: Even adjusting for the PCL, Drew Romo’s offense seems potentially worthy of an ML roster spot. But how does is his catching progressing?
Keith Law: He’s always been a strong defender, but I disagree on his offense. He’s walked 8 times in 66 games playing in maybe the best hitter’s park in professional baseball, at a mile above sea level, so pitches don’t move as much. What on earth will that look like in the majors?

Gurnam: Big fan of your work going back over a decade. What’s the likelihood that Oakland takes Wetherholt if he’s there at #4? More or less than 30%? Would you take Wetherholt at #4 if you were running their draft? Thanks.
Keith Law: Way less than 30%; I have heard it’s more likely Montgomery or Kurtz. I’d take Wetherholt over either but bear in mind I don’t see medicals or get a doctor’s opinion on them like teams do.

JJ: Garrett Crochet — should the White Sox build around him, or trade him before his next arm injury? Or should they just save us all the grief, and fold the franchise?
Keith Law: Trade him but maybe this winter since his likely output the rest of 2024 is limited by workload considerations.

Jackie: WAG time — who is the top ranked prospect that gets traded this month?
Keith Law: Someone in Baltimore’s system.

Heather: Would we be better off if we junked our whole system of government, and replaced it with a parliamentary system?
Keith Law: I mean, Italy changes governments every time someone sneezes, so I’m not sure that’s a solution.

addoeh: In the mock, you talked about how the Brewers will pick whoever falls to them that was ranked much higher. Are they just really neutral on the draft model they subscribe to that they can pursue this philosophy?
Keith Law: No, I think it’s that their draft model is very down-the-middle – and that’s a good thing. They’ve drafted well for a long time. Only Eric Brown Jr stands out as a miss, a guy who was an overdraft on the day he was taken and has proven to be so.

Jimmy: Which of the lsu arms goes first you think? Gage jump or holman?
Keith Law: They both go in the same range, I think. Second round.

David: Any chance Smith or Burns fall out of the top 10?
Keith Law: Unless there’s a medical I don’t know about, zero.

Mike G: Saw your comments about Ben Hess yesterday, do you think it’s possible he makes it to 50 for the Red Sox?
Keith Law: I’d be floored.

Jimmy: Is sloan a safe bet for top 30 pick at this point?
Keith Law: No.

Dana: Can Ben Rice be the Yankees’ long-term answer at first base?
Keith Law: Maybe as a platoon piece.

mike: What a day for Bluejay pitching prospects yesterday – both Tiedemann and Macko leave starts with forearm tightness. Manoah, Barriera and Maroudis already have had TJ this year. this is bad luck and not a systemic issue with the Jay right??
Keith Law: Tiedeman’s had arm trouble – and delivery questions – for a long time now. And Macko’s had arm trouble going back at least two years.
Keith Law: So I don’t think it’s systemic.

Matt: Why do some players like Gary Sanchez fall off a cliff at an early age and others like Beltre seem to thrive as they get older?
Keith Law: Beltre was a way better athlete than Sanchez.
Keith Law: Don’t know if that’s the answer, but it might be.

Joshua: Do you have you think the Nats preference would be to take any one of the “Big 6” college bats at #10 over Yesavage or anyone else in that spot? Thanks.
Keith Law: Oh yes. Yesavage is not in the top 10 by talent. He’s clearly in tier 2.

champdo: Who do you think has the better chance at success: Caminiti or Griffin?
Keith Law: Caminiti, but he also has the injury risk of a pitcher.

Lark11: Hey Keith, Jac and Condon are both taller hitters (6-5/6-6), but to my untrained eye Jac’s swing seems more compact and shorter to the point of contact, whereas Condon seems to have a bit more length. Basically, it feels like Condon has more “tall hitter risk” than Jac. Is this reflected in the fact that the main risk to Jac’s offensive game is chase rate rather than contact rate? Whereas some talk about the risk to Condon’s offensive game being contact rate/hit tool related. Is Jac better positioned to minimize the traditional “tall hitter/long levers” risk? Thanks!!!
Keith Law: Don’t agree on the swing length, and Caglianone has substantially worse plate discipline.

Ryan: How likely do you think it is that Seaver King is actually there at 21… I would love it.
Keith Law: Didn’t have a great year after the transfer, I think it’s even money or better he gets out of the top 20.

Josh: If you’re picking first what’s the point of all the smoke screens?
Keith Law: Trying to strike the best $ deal with whoever you’re taking.

Matt: Higher upside: Justin Crawford or Aidan miller?
Keith Law: Crawford more upside, Miller more probability.

Braydon: The 5 names you have with the Cardinals are Rainer, Burns, Smith, Montgomery, and Wetherholt. What are the odds their pick isn’t one of those 5?
Keith Law: If I thought they might take someone else, I would have listed them.

AK: As a Tigers fan, who of the consensus top 5/10 has the best chance to slip to their pick at 11? Thanks for doing this!
Keith Law: Griffin. And I’ve heard them on him.

Sleepy: I’ve seen it mentioned on other sites that it may be possible that Cags could play corner OF whereas others believe he’s 1B only. Could he cut it in a corner or is he 1B only in your eyes?
Keith Law: I’d try him in a corner to see. Good enough athlete with 80 arm. Dumb to waste him at 1b only.

JT: McGonigle was a guy you liked at this time last year, and he is hitting a ton so far. Do you see him developing enough power to be an above average regular / occasional All-Star?
Keith Law: Yes. He’s hitting the ball harder than I expected for year one. (And a lot harder than Jacob Wilson!)

Andy: If Condon goes pick 1, who is your prediction at pick 2?
Keith Law: Bazzana.

Kevin: Why is the MLB draft structured differently than the other major sports? Blows my mind that teams knowingly pass on the best available player to get someone worse but that can be signed cheaper. Would MLBPA not agree to some sort of structured rookie scale that locks in contract value at each draft slot? Thanks Keith
Keith Law: Why would the union agree to that? What do they get out of it?

Jordan: thoughts on george wolkow? please, white sox fans need something to take us away from this apathy
Keith Law: Dude has a 42% strikeout rate. This ain’t it.

Ryan: If you were the GM of the Red Sox, would you buy/sell/do nothing? Would you be willing to move one or two top prospects? A lot of mixed messaging happening in Boston on their intended path.
Keith Law: Buy.

Dallas: how good is James tibbs bat (only 50+ tool) where teams would consider taking a future platoon bat top 12 overall?
Keith Law: “Future platoon bat” is rather pessimistic.

Insert Witty Name Here: Curious to know what kind of speakers/headphones you use for music? I asked a few years ago I think and you said you don’t have use for high quality speakers. But the other day I listened to Moby’s new album through my phone and thought it sucked. Then I played it in my car with my expensive speakers and the added sound changed everything.
Keith Law: finally had to get airpods because I got a new phone. It’s that or the car. Nothing fancy, not willing to spend $ for more.

Craig: The groups of players who would have been traditionally taken in rounds 21-50, what are they doing in this new world? Are they going to independent leagues, signing post-draft FA deals with MLB orgs, giving up on organized ball and getting their teaching degree?
Keith Law: Indy ball, undrafted free agents, a lot will just go to college.

Ryan Hall: Hello Keith. What would you do in the Jays situation? Just trade expiring contracts or burn it down? Also, any pizza recommendations in Phoenix downtown?
Keith Law: Bianco, Cibo, Federal.
Keith Law: I’d wait ten more games to decide.

SJ: It looks like a lost year for Jordan Lawlar. Is he someone you’re concerned about long term or were the injuries all just bad luck?
Keith Law: Concerned that he seems to have trouble staying on the field.

Paul: I’m a new dad to a 4 month old. How are you managing raising kids under the looming specter of the collapse of democracy? I don’t even know how I’m going to begin to talk to him or try to keep him safe
Keith Law: It’s on my mind pretty often, but what’s the solution?

Miguel: Is there going to be anyone for me to watch at Stanford next season? Or, if I want to see some mlb prospects, should I just pick games to go based on which ACC team is in town?
Keith Law: Sasaki is worth going to see.

Jon: Do you think Jordan Walker will get back to the majors at some point this year?
Keith Law: Yes, but I’m starting to wonder about what’s happening to some of the bats over there – he and Carlson in particular have stalled out. Two former top ten prospects and neither has progressed as expected.

Matt: Rece Hinds is having a great start, but considering his MiLB K rate, can he really be a MLB regular?
Keith Law: No.

Matt: It was 118+ degrees 4 days this week in Las Vegas. Call me crazy, but maybe we shouldn’t be building cities in these locations let alone move a f’ing MLB team there.
Keith Law: Agree. We should be providing people with an incentive to live elsewhere, or if they’re in places like that to at least live in ways that are a little more sustainable (e.g., in Phoenix, incentivize residential construction near the light rail).

Section 34: Is Matt Etzel a prospect? 10th round pick but promoted to AA faster than the 1st rounder at the same position. Thank you.
Keith Law: Sort of. Need to get his lower half involved more to drive the ball. Great athlete. Wrote about him in February and again in May.

Kip: At what point would you transition Waldrep into a relief role? He didn’t get a lot of swing and misses in a small MLB sample, even with that split.
Keith Law: Uh, he’s less than a year out of the draft.

Jimmy: whats the likely order for catchers to come off the board? Sounds like moore/janek then a gap to lomavita?
Keith Law: Yes and wouldn’t be surprised to see Cozart get in there over Lomavita.

Insert Witty Name Here: Who would you like to see replace Biden at the top of the ticket?
Keith Law: If they replace him, it’s Harris or don’t bother.

Greg: Who is a better long term player- Cowser or Kjerstad?
Keith Law: I have ranked Kjerstad higher since he came back from his illness/injuries. Cowser is a platoon bat at best, and he’s been awful for three months now.

Anonymous: How would you fix Vance Honeycutt’s swing?
Keith Law: What’s wrong with his swing, exactly?

Jimmy: are there any players with medical concerns that may cause a small slide?
Keith Law: If I know any of that, I don’t report it unless MLB has put it out there. I am not going to be responsible for a player sliding like that.

TomBruno23: Quinn Mathews…A Guy?
Keith Law: Yes, if he holds up. Worked way too hard in college.

Guest: Is there a combination of Pirates minor league pitchers, not including Bubba Chandler, that gets an impact bat with some years of control back? Thinking guys like Harrington, Solomento, Burrows, and Ashcraft. Thank you!
Keith Law: No.

Mike Trout: Can Vientos be a solid regular at 3B? 1B? Not expecting a 154 wRC+ going forward but he’s been fun to watch.
Keith Law: Yes.

Matthew: George klassan. Where the heck did he come from and do you think he’s for real?
Keith Law: I keep hearing reliever from scouts who’ve seen him but he’s a very different guy than the one they drafted, who was misused at Minnesota.

Insert Witty Name Here: Re: new dad. I have younger kids too, control what you can control. We’re an adaptable species, we’ll be fine. Keep perspective that the news never reports the good things because it doesn’t sell. Everything will be alright. People have been claiming the end of the world since forever.
Keith Law: Sometimes the world does end, so to speak. Dictators get elected. Stable countries collapse. Nothing is permanent.

Mucho: Does it seem like there’s any chance the M’s go hitter at 15, or is it basically down to Yesavage/Cijntje?
Keith Law: I keep hearing pitching for them.
Keith Law: Those are the main two names but there could be others.

Mike: From last year’s draft, would your rather have Teel, who is doing well in AA and is a catcher, or Jenkins who has a higher upside, but is in low A ball? The scarcity of catchers seems makes me actually think this is closer than it likely is…thanks,
Keith Law: Pretty sure I had them ranked 6th and 5th, respectively, on draft day, so I’d say that’s a toss-up.

Jeremy Haber: Are Jac C. and C. Condon destined to be 1Bs, and if so, why are they projected top-5 picks considering how that has gone recently (Vaughn, Torkelson)?
Keith Law: Please read what I wrote about Condon.

Matt: Biden is fine. You know Trump is gonna pick some batshit VP Qanon believer that Harris will eviscerate in a debate. He just has to stem the tide until then.
Keith Law: I don’t think the debates matter that much in the end. I think the endless media coverage matters a lot more. I was pleased to see the NYT editorial board belatedly write something about how Trump is a danger to our country.

JK: Have you followed the NY Times best books of the 21st century list? Thoughts?
Keith Law: OK, I just scanned it (I’d only seen 100-81 before). The ones I’ve read are mostly worthy; I think Trust is overrated, perhaps here for recency bias, and seeing Alice Munro on there after the stories this week revealed what a shitty human being she was makes me queasy, but seems like a decent enough list. I do think they got the wrong Adichie book, though. Half of a Yellow Sun is far better than Americanah.

chewbalka: Safe to assume you’ll do a midseason update after the draft? Thanks for everything you do, it really helps these days.
Keith Law: yes, I always do one a week or so post-draft, where I consider the just-drafted guys (and assume they sign, which is usually true but not 100%).

Luke: Chances of Angels taking Rainer or Griffin?
Keith Law: Zero.

addoeh: Trump is more likely to have his own health concerns become front and center or say something dumb about an important issue, like when he said women who get an abortion should be prosecuted. Oh wait, that’s already happened and not really covered.
Keith Law: Yep. And his speeches are rambling messes – you can see video and transcripts if you look for a minute. For some reason, they don’t generate the same headlines even in the mainstream (that is, non-rightwing) media.

Jacob: Do you have takeaways from the Cape so far this summer? In this draft class, ‘25, or ‘26?
Keith Law: I have absolutely no idea what’s happening on the Cape. I am focused on the draft that is happening in three days.

Mucho: Are teams concerned that Gillen might have chronic injury issues, or just that his arm hasn’t bounced back from the labrum tear?
Keith Law: That his arm hasn’t bounced back. I haven’t heard “chronic injury issues” from anyone.

Dan S: Even with his hitting struggles, how many teams would want KeBryan Hayes in a trade? Is he someone you’d trade away or trade for?
Keith Law: I highly doubt he’s available but I bet you there are teams looking at him as a buy-low guy of sorts. The Pirates have had so many hitters underperform in the majors, especially in terms of power and hard contact, in the last decade.
Keith Law: Also, I think almost every team without an established 3b would want him.

Danny: Are you surprised by the links to Tommy White and Blake Burke to the Yankees in the first round? Last time they went something akin to that route in the first round (or first pick) was Eric Jagielo in 2013.
Keith Law: Yes but 1) they tend to go their own way in the draft and 2) I’ve heard them linked to a lot of names who’d be for later rounds, I think. They may just be holding their cards close to the vest on the first round. I know they value exit velo a ton but Oppenheimer usually prefers athletes.

Danny: Do you think Dakota Jordan could/is likely to fall to the Yankees at 53?
Keith Law: Yes.

The Darkness: Who are some of the really high-grade character guys this year, a la Nick Solak from a few years back?
Keith Law: I absolutely could not care less about who the nicest white guys in the draft are, sorry.

Jim: Trump looks and sounds like the same guy he was in 2015, for better and worse. Biden in 2015 vs. Biden in 2024 looks like he’s had a lobotomy in the interim. It’s obvious why one is a much bigger issue.
Keith Law: Trump’s threat was insufficiently covered in 2015-16, too.

Matt: One huge concern of mine is Project 2025. Sooner or later the GOP WILL win- whether it’s this year or 4-8 years from now. And the christofascism will be implemented into our laws.
Keith Law: It’s already happening in the south. Oklahoma forcing the Bible into schools – although the late Daniel Dennett probably would have approved, knowing kids will read it and see how often it contradicts itself etc. – and Louisiana forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms … it’s all indoctrination. And I thought these folks were against indoctrination in public schools!

Josh: Is Kristian Campbell becoming a GUY?
Keith Law: Yes.

Tim: The consensus on this years draft is its not very deep. So if you are a HS player who gets drafted in the middle to late rounds does it make sense to go to college with the assumption 3 years from now will probably also not be a very deep draft?
Keith Law: I wouldn’t take that bet. Three years is an eon in baseball terms. Charlie Condon wasn’t on the radar out of HS; Travis Bazzana wasn’t in the same hemisphere as the top HS guys in 2021, literally.

Brian in NoVA: The main difference between Trump now vs in 2016 is that the institutions and supposed safeguards put in place by the Constitution have been greatly weakened by the Courts. There will also be no adults in the room to slow him down this time if he gets elected.
Keith Law: This is also accurate. The adults in the room will be enabling him and the Project 2025 people.
Keith Law: Honestly, the Democrats should be pushing two messages – abortion rights and Project 2025.
Keith Law: A few folks have asked some character/makeup questions about specific draft players. I’m avoiding those because I have made that mistake in the past, spreading that kind of gossip, and while sometimes it’s right, it’s unverifiable and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s draft stock based on innuendo.

Danny: You saw Agustin Ramirez a couple weeks ago and I think you said at the time he looked rough at the plate. Any feedback since and how legit is his offensive profile?
Keith Law: Haven’t seen him since – and I just said he had a rough night. Didn’t evaluate him either way.

Chris: I think your response of it being Harris or no one to replace Biden demonstrates the problem with the Democratic Party and underscores what got them into this mess to begin with: namely, they treat the nomination as a coronation rather than an open process. It’s also why we got Clinton in 2016 when Biden decided not to run. It leaves voters feeling left out of the process and taken for granted.
Keith Law: I’m saying Harris or no one as a practical matter – if the party passes her over, they risk alienating large groups of multiple voter blocks they need to win. The time for a larger pool of candidates has passed.

UGW: Ready to believe in Jake Irvin?
Keith Law: Maybe when he shows he can get LHB out at a better clip. Guys with large platoon splits don’t last as starters until they close them.

Danny: How concerned should we be about Roderick Arias and Spencer Jones’s K rates?
Keith Law: Way more on Jones due to his age. Arias would be in Staten Island if Rob Manfred hadn’t gone all General Sherman through short-season ball.

Salty: Keith – when watching upper-minors games, do you notice any talent or maybe diminished player development due to the contraction of teams a few years ago, or is that too general of a topic to comment on?
Keith Law: The rumor is MLB is going to try to cut another level from the minors. I think that’s the absolute stupidest idea I’ve heard in 20 years. You’re destroying the product. We are already seeing the harm done to players from the loss of a level (technically two, advanced rookie + short-season). So … let’s make the problem worse?
Keith Law: That answer applies to both questions.

Alex: Sebastian Walcott- on schedule for an 18 year old in High-A?
Keith Law: Ahead.

Mike J: Hey Keith, thoughts on what Leo Jimenez can do if he’s the starting SS rest of the way due to Bichette missing time with injury or getting dealt? Is a league average WAR (good defense, below average bat) reasonable or do you think he’ll struggle out of the gate?
Keith Law: I don’t predict what guys will do in half a season but I think long term he’s a regular or better.

Jimmy: I would guess cintje goes before brecht just bc brecht viewed as rp and?
Keith Law: Brecht isn’t viewed as a reliever, but he has more reliever risk because of his lack of command/control and the need to help him get a more consistent arm swing. He’s raw for a college arm, but has big upside in his size, athleticism, and arm strength (both on the FB and SL, so this isn’t just pure velo).

Tim: So the Democrats should run a fear-based campaign centered around the idea that tens of millions of their fellow citizens are trying to turn the country into Nazi Germany, while providing little to no positive messaging about their candidate or his/her plans for the future?
Keith Law: Yeah, Tim. That’s exactly what I meant. ?

Salty: More contraction is wild. Everyone I know with kids that have taken them to the Lakewood Blue Claws talks about how great a time everyone had, and I’m sure that’s a sentiment shared by many other ML parks across the country. There has to be a better way to either market or support that product then just letting them die out.
Keith Law: I know some people at MLB look at that and say, ‘why are we paying the players for minor league owners to reap the profits?’ instead of saying, hey, these teams are providing us with a service of value, giving prospects a place to play, where we just have to pay their salaries but don’t have to worry about running entire teams.

Mike: Was going to ask about the Phillies and Vance Honeycutt and realized you mocked him to the Phillies this morning. Teams really that concerned he won’t hit enough in the pros that he falls that far despite all of the other tools?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s “falling” … as far as I can tell, no hitter has ever gone in the first round after striking out 80+ times that spring.

RoyalBlue: I read Hader comparisons with Hagen Smith. Do you see reliever risk?
Keith Law: I’m sorry, but there is no comparison here. That’s just bad.

Danny: What chance (is there a chance) Waldschmidt makes it to the Yankees?
Keith Law: Highly doubt it.

Kendall: I think one of the big issues is that the whole republic was based on everyone acting in good faith. It’s not like the Supreme Court ever had an army available to enforce the Civil Rights Act or Roe. Thankfully, everyone mostly did act in good faith for a long time, but it seems now that one party has decided to stop.
Keith Law: Yep. And those SCOTUS justices appear to be available for purchase.

Kevin S.: There was an open primary process. Nobody of substance lined up to run against Biden, and quite frankly I can’t think of a single example of when a serious primary challenge worked out for the incumbent party (whether successful or not). At this point, there are practical and structural reasons why harris is the only alternative if Biden withdraws.
Keith Law: Yes. There may be a really strong case here that Biden and his camp should have planned for a strategic withdrawal from the 2024 race last fall, but they didn’t, so the options right now are limited.

Michael: I know Amaya didn’t have a ton of at bats in the minors but do you see any chance that he develops into an acceptable everyday catcher? He’s looked terrible all years.
Keith Law: I am really surprised at how bad he’s looked at the plate. I know a lot of people who at least thought he’d hit for some power/hard contact, and I would put myself in the group too. He’s done none of that.

Adam: Does AJSS have a 3rd starter future? If not what is he missing?
Keith Law: A viable third pitch.
Keith Law: Gotta go see a man about a dog … no, really, I have to go to the vet to pick up medicine for the dog. I’ll be contributing to the Athletic’s live draft blog throughout Sunday night and will write up my thoughts on day one for subscribers for Monday morning, and if I have anything new at all I’ll update the mock before the draft begins too. Thanks as always for reading!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ July 9, 2024
→ By keith

Chicago eats, 2024, part one.

I’d been to Little Goat at least three times over the last ten-plus years, but had never eaten at Top Chef winner Stephanie Izzard’s flagship restaurant The Girl & the Goat … until now. I kept it pretty simple, with some advice from the bartender, ordering the sautéed green beans, the wood-fired broccoli, and a brand-new item at the time, the strawberry salmon poke. The green beans have been on the menu since the doors opened, or so I was told, and come with a fish sauce vinaigrette and a lot of cashews. The vinaigrette seemed more like an aioli, but regardless of the actual recipe it was the best part of the dish and something I’ll try to replicate at home. There were, however, too many cashews. I know that’s an odd comment, especially since I love cashews, but the ratio of beans to nuts was too low and I ended up with a lot of the cashews in the dish. The wood-fired broccoli came with a harissa dill vinaigrette that was an actual vinaigrette and a Moody Blue labneh underneath. Moody Blue is a smoked blue cheese from Wisconsin and very mild for a blue; the labneh here tasted pretty much like a labneh with a little smoke flavor, but even that could just have come from the broccoli itself, which had a nice level of char from the grill. The star of the three dishes was that ora king salmon poke, featuring maybe the best raw salmon I’ve ever had, just incredibly tender and, I hate to use the hackneyed term, buttery. The poke also had strawberries, cherry tomatoes, avocado, and chili crunch sprinkled on top. It shouldn’t work, but it does – it was perfectly balanced in every way, faintly sweet, just acidic enough, plenty of fat from the salmon and the avocado, and exactly the right amount of heat and salt from the chili crunch. They appear to do a salmon poke riff at least every summer, so you may not get the same version I did, but damn this was spectacular in every way. For a cocktail, I did their house version of an old fashioned, which was just average and came with a glass full of small ice cubes rather than one large one; I should have asked for it neat. I didn’t get dessert, as the menu was actually kind of unappealing – there was a chocolate and ginger concoction, two great tastes that do not taste great together, and a hazelnut thing, and nothing I wanted for $15 a pop. I walked across the intersection and got some gelato at BomboBar instead.

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The food at Rose Mary was rich, and in pieces it was very well executed, but both savory dishes I had were a little overdone. The radiatore cacio e pepe had too much black pepper, and way too much sauce; the pasta itself was excellent, perfectly al dente, but there were several tablespoons of sauce left on the plate once I’d eaten the pasta, and that ratio is off. There should be very little sauce left over – my rule of thumb is that there shouldn’t be any more than you can sop up with one piece of bread, and this was several times that. The duck sausage with polenta, giardiniera, and broccolini was also somewhat out of proportion – for one thing, there was too little of the non-sausage bits for the amount of meat on the plate, including a microscopic amount of broccolini; and for another, the sausage itself had too much black pepper. I actually like black pepper and use it liberally at home, but these two dishes overdid it. The meal was salvaged by the chocolate budino with coffee gelato and pizzelle crumble; I would gladly die in a vat of that gelato, which had the flavor of a perfectly made cappuccino. I was a fan of the Giant Orchid cocktail, which I’d compare to a souped-up daiquiri but with a lemon profile in place of lime.

—

I’ve raved about Monteverde in the past, but this was my first visit there post-pandemic, and I’m pleased to say that it remains my favorite Italian restaurant in the country. I danced around the menu a little bit because I wanted to try so many things, and ended up with the Nduja arancini, the sicilian tuna not-quite-crudo, tortelli with sheep’s milk ricotta, and a butterscotch budino. (Yes, I ate too much.) The tuna almost-crudo was really interesting, in a good way, as it had such a broad mix of flavors from the other ingredients – salsa verde, charred olives, celery, capers, mandarin EVOO – but the flavor of the tuna still came through. I might have preferred it totally crudo, but I’ve also never been a huge fan of seared tuna anyway so that’s probably my own bias. The tortelli, like all of the pastas I’ve ever had at Monteverde, was spectacular, freshly made, perfectly al dente, with the brightness of the ricotta balanced by a mint-pistachio pesto. The budino is a can’t-miss, with whipper mascarpone and buttered pecan toffee on top.

To drink, I tried their limonini, a sort of twist on a negroni that replaces the Campari with acqua di cedro, a grappa -based liqueur that uses the peel of a specific lemon to impart a pronounced lemon flavor without the sweetness of a limoncello, along with a white vermouth instead of red; it was exactly what it promised to be, lemony and herbal and pleasantly bitter, but I switched to a traditional negroni for a second drink because I didn’t want that flavor profile with dessert.

—

Obélix is indeed a character in the Astérix comics, but also a French restaurant in Chicago with a focus on my favorite protein, duck, so I had to get the duck confit salad lyonnaise, along with the just barely still in season ramp tart, which turned out to be more than enough for a meal. The confit salad came with the confit and crispy skin on top of a mixture of frisée and escarole, with a poached duck egg and duck-fat croutons. The confit meat itself was excellent, tender and flavorful without becoming tough through the reheating, but the whole salad ended up really heavy and the greens couldn’t stand up to the huge flavors of everything duck all at once. The ramp tart was just what it sounds like, with Comté cheese, but was also on the heavy side (less surprising) and I couldn’t even finish it. I did hang out for a while because I ended up in a very interesting conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me at the bar, long enough that I decided to try their house-made ice cream, but it was just okay (I got the crème brûlée flavor) I’d probably skip that given all of the other dessert options around Chicago.

—

La Serre pitches itself as a Mediterranean restaurant, but come on, it’s French, the name is French, the menu is French, the décor is French. It’s a French restaurant. And it’s quite good.

They have several large mains that include various steaks (not for me) and two dishes that are for two people (including a duck dish, which made me sad), so I stuck with the smaller plates, ordering one amuse, one crudo, and one pasta dish. The crudo was tuna with osetra caviar, tomato, shallot, and yuzu, and I’m probably going to sound like a philistine but I don’t think the caviar added anything to the dish but prestige, and, as the clerical workers at my alma mater will tell you, you can’t eat prestige. The tuna itself was exceptional in every way, from freshness to texture to flavor, boosted by the acidity of the three other ingredients and something not listed that gave it a little kick – I think chili oil, but I’m just guessing. It was one of those dishes that I could have ordered twice with nothing else and been totally satisfied. For the amuse, I went with the duck profiterole, a small choux pastry with a filling of duck confit, foie gras mousse, and a sweet earthy sauce that reminded me of char siu marinade (from Cantonese BBQ pork bao). It was two bites’ worth, and delivered plenty of duck flavor, even with the foie gras a threat to overwhelm the duck confit, although I didn’t see or taste any of the duck cracklings promised on the menu.

For the pasta, I was leaning towards the gnocchi Parisienne, and my server recommended it, but it didn’t quite meet up to expectations – or to the same dish at Le Cavalier in Wilmington, which still makes the best Parisian gnocchi I’ve had. This style of gnocchi differs from traditional Italian gnocchi by skipping potatoes, instead using choux paste that’s piped into a line, cut into individual pieces, and then lightly poached. For one thing, these were very dense for Parisian gnocchi, so either they were overworked (creating gluten and removing some of the air in the mixture), or they included potato, or both. For another, they weren’t finished by frying or broiling them to add some texture to the outside; they were served in a basil pistou with “semi-dried cherry tomato” and pine nuts. The basil pistou was just a looser version of pesto with a fancy name, and the whole dish just felt a little flat. I actually enjoyed the very crusty bread they brought me dipped in the pistou more than the gnocchi. That’s not to say these were bad, but I’m holding them to a high standard because I love gnocchi, I’m Italian, and I’ve had this dish done much better.

For drinks, I had a very interesting house cocktail they call the Gold Fashioned, with a brown-butter wash, Old Forester bourbon, Lillet Rouge, and a hint of allspice. It’s less an Old Fashioned than a Manhattan-adjacent drink, as Lillet Rouge is a French aperitif wine that has much in common with sweet vermouth but is more complex. It came smoking, literally, which I always think is just showy, and which disappeared a minute after I got the drink so I didn’t get much benefit from it. The core of the drink was quite good though – I would definitely do a whiskey/Lillet Rouge drink again.

—

The most recent meal on the list was at Aba, which I think one of you recommended back in April, and which I saw last week while eating at La Serre. It’s “Mediterranean” cuisine, because that’s the neutral term for it, but this is Levantine food – the cuisine of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and so on. I kept it light this time around, ordering the muhammara; the Brussels sprouts with almonds, cashews, and honey harissa; and, at the bartender’s suggestion, the truffled salmon crudo. Muhammara is a traditional meze made from roasted red peppers, walnuts, pomegranate molasses, bread crumbs olive oil, and some kind of acid; it’s pureed or pounded into a dip, served as you might serve hummus (of which Aba has at least five varieties on the menu). Aba’s muhammara is moderately spicy, and very, very smoky (I think there was smoked paprika in it), with a chunkier consistency than you’d get if you pureed the ingredients. It comes with warm, soft flatbread, not enough because I could eat a pound of that bread at a sitting and still want more. I ate more than half of the muhammara before the spice level started to bother me a little bit, but the dish is meant to be shared, so, you know, FAFO.

The Brussels sprouts were fried, but not greasy in the least, and if anything they were a little dry; the honey was at the bottom of the bowl, which may be to keep the halved sprouts from losing their crunch but did leave the dish lacking something on the palate. The truffled salmon with fried leek, roasted garlic, and cilantro was excellent because the fish was extremely fresh, but I barely noticed the truffle flavor and really don’t know why it was necessary except so they could call it “truffled.” A plate of this same raw salmon with some EVOO and sherry vinegar would have been just as good. Let the ingredients speak!

Also, I liked their “summer Negroni” with peach. I don’t usually do drinks with fruit, but it was a hot summery night and I love both peaches and Negronis.

—

I did eat at Publican when this whole adventure started in April, but I 1) don’t remember a ton of details about what I ate and 2) had a LOT to drink that night, because the bartender offered me a free shot and I’d already had two cocktails, so my memory’s a bit hazy. I remember the bread plate was huge and one of the two breads, the multi-grain one, was delicious; and that I got the swordfish, something I rarely make at home, and loved the fish itself but didn’t care especially for what came with it. Two drinks and a shot is more than I can handle, or probably ever will be able to handle, although I did get back to the hotel in one piece.

—

Bonci Pizza has been lauded by chefs and food writers, but it’s just decent pizza al taglio, a Roman style of pizza that’s sold by weight or by length. The cool part about Bonci is that you can buy just a tiny sliver of something to see if you like it, and get a whole bunch of different slices for variation, but I also found nearly all of their pizzas a little too salty and a little too oily. Good place to fill up for less than $20, but not a destination for me.

—

Finally, a cocktail bar recommendation: Lazy Bird, in the basement of the Hoxton hotel in Chicago, offering a very broad array of classic cocktails done right, with an extensive menu that helps you navigate through the various drinks and see how they’re connected to each other. My bartender was extremely knowledgeable, asking what spirits I preferred and whether I was open to trying a cocktail I’d never had before.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chicago, cocktails, duck, french cuisine, israeli cuisine, italian cuisine, lebanese cuisine, mediterranean cuisine, pasta, pizza

→ July 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/6/24.

One piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, wrapping up some minor league games I went to over the past week, including notes on Orioles, Rangers, Phillies, and Pirates prospects. Oddly enough, there’s nothing worth going to this holiday weekend, even though I’m home and available. I’m working up the top 100 draft prospects instead, and then will write my next mock, both to run in the Tuesday-Thursday window. I’ll also try to work in a Klawchat this week – the holiday messed up my schedule this past week. I also owe you a newsletter, which is somewhere on the to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker has the story of a murder in Queen Creek, Arizona, the work of a gang of affluent teenagers who called themselves “the Gilbert Goons,” in an it-can’t-happen-here sort of story that comes down to parents not parenting and community officials prioritizing economic boom times over prosecuting violent offenders.

While working up my post with my top ten albums of 2024 so far, I was listening again to the new High on Fire record, which didn’t make the cut. That sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to this 2022 NPR piece on HoF’s Matt Pike, and his embrace of some insane conspiracy theories – and the antisemitic wack job David Icke. It’s a fantastic piece of writing.

Harvard Magazine asked several professors at the law school there to weigh in on the recent spate of decisions from the Supreme Court.

A network of Russian-based websites that appear to be American newspapers is spreading fake news with the help of AI, according to a BBC investigation. They have names like the “Houston Post” and the “Boston Times.” Careful what you read and believe.

The Guardian ran an excellent interview with the Libertines’ two main songwriters, Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, in February, before their superb fourth album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, was released.

The head of the right-wing, astroturfing ‘think tank’ the Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, is promising violence if Trump/the GOP win and anyone opposes them. This should be on the front page of every newspaper and leading every news program.

A Christian summer camp in Missouri stands accused of ignoring and covering up decades of sexual abuse allegations and of threatening one of the alleged victims if he chose to come forward. The Hunt family, owners of the Kansas City Chiefs, are not just big supporters of Kanakuk camps, but Clark Hunt’s wife Tavia is harassing family members of abuse victims online. No drag queens or trans people were involved in any of this.

The Guardian’s Marina Hyde turns her wicked wit on the morbid Tories in the wake of their electoral defeat. Few writers are as deft with the language, or as willing to deploy their extensive vocabularies, as Hyde is: “Farage is the horror version of Inside Out, where Mendacity is only just holding off Racism at the control console.”

Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum looks at Labour’s win and how Democrats here can learn from their successful fight against populism. She’s not wrong: Culture-war battles aren’t going to win elections for the Democrats.

The Tories’ loss might be good news for higher education in Britain, as their tenure has pushed universities there to the edge of bankruptcy.

Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina and a Holocaust denier, gave a long, rambling speech where he said “some folks need killing!” and appeared to include “socialists and communists” in that category.

Meanwhile, the majority-Republican North Carolina Supreme Court decided not to discipline two Republican judges who violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, with one of those cases leading to the death of a defendant.

On SCOTUS’s dismantling of our system of government: The BBC explains what the Chevron deference meant and why the recent decision is disastrous for all sorts of policies, and for the executive branch in general; Elie Mystal writes that the President can now assassinate you, officially, and claim immunity. He could do it on live TV, call it an official act, and be immune from prosecution for the crime, even after he left office. Great system we have here.

Why did Justice Clarence Thomas switch his position on the Chevron deference? It might have something to do with all the gifts he received from conservative benefactors.

After the Grey Lady called for Biden to end his campaign for President for the good of the country, the Philadelphia Inquirer had the proper response, calling for Donald Trump to end his campaign for President for the good of the country. It’s a good dose of perspective.
A letter to the editor in Science notes that academic freedom is under attack by right-wing politicians and provocateurs, notably the attempt to monitor and rebut online misinformation.

Should parents praise each other more in front of their kids? I think this is an obvious yes.

This CNN story on Bhutan’s attempts to balance its high levels of happiness with a young population that wants more modernization is a reminder that even that often useless site publishes some good journalism, here covering a country that I would wager most Americans don’t know exists.

Closer to home here in Delaware, New Castle County (where I and most residents of the state live) released body-cam footage that shows police officers beating a woman in the head when she was already on the ground after a traffic stop.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, biden, delaware, great britain, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, north carolina, police, scotus, stick to baseball

→ July 5, 2024
→ By keith

The ten best albums of 2024 so far.

I don’t think I’ve done one of these midyear album updates since 2020, but given how many solid or better albums there have already been this year, I had plenty of choices for this post, and I know from experience it helps me do the year-end wrap-up if I’ve at least gotten a head start and summarized the first six months. This list is in alphabetical order by artist, although I do identify my favorite album of the year in the text. (No spoilers.)

Alcest, Les chantes de l’aurore

Alcest started out as a death-metal project for the musician who goes by Neige, then incorporated shoegaze sounds to create something called “blackgaze” that was later co-opted by Deafheaven (with whom Neige has worked), after which Alcest added a second member and released an album that was all shoegaze with no metal. They’ve varied their mix of genres on subsequent albums, but this latest one gets the balance right, as they did on 2016’s incredible Kodama. The album is primarily heavy shoegaze, with some very infrequent screamed vocals deeper in the mix, so the wall-of-guitars sound is really the emphasis. Other strong metal albums this year include Wheel’s Charismatic Leaders, Pallbearer’s The Mind Burns Alive, and Crypt Sermon’s The Stygian Rose.

Courting, New Last Name

Quirky pop music with a post-punk edge, New Last Name grabs you right away with the 2023 single “Throw,” followed by the poppiest track on the record, “We Look Good Together (Big Words),” both of which are anchored by infectious, clean guitar riffs. They show their post-punk influences more on “Flex,” which has some clear Buzzcocks influence and lyrically references “Mr. Brightside,” because that song is over 20 years old. You’re welcome.

Kid Kapichi, There Goes the Neighborhood

They’re probably never quite going to match their incredible, no-skips debut album, but Kid Kapichi keeps churning out angry yet catchy working-class anthems with a touch of Alex Turner in the lyrics but a heavier, crunchier backdrop of guitars more inspired by punk and pub-rock. Highlights here include “Let’s Get to Work,” “Can EU Hear Me?,” and the wonderfully weird “Tamagotchi.”

The Libertines, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

This is my most listened-to album of the year so far, as the likely lads came back better than ever, with a slew of intoxicating and surprisingly upbeat tracks – ”Oh Shit,” “Run Run Run,” “Shiver,” and “Night of the Hunter” – that still bear that clear Doherty/Barât sound, just with better production and less breaking and entering.

Mdou Moctar, Funeral for Justice

This is my album of the year so far, and it’ll be hard to top. Hailing from Niger, a country that has been torn by political strife including a military coup this time last year, Moctar blends Tuareg music with western rock styles, particularly psychedelic rock and blues rock, crafting indelible guitar riffs and furious solos beneath the protest lyrics (sung in his native language, Tamasheq) that have boosted his popularity in the Sahel. I caught the last show of Moctar’s U.S. tour, at Union Transfer in Philly, and he blew the doors off the place, with incredible shredding and extended jams for several of the songs he played, including jumping into the crowd for his final guitar solo.

The Mysterines, Afraid of Tomorrows

I loved the Mysterines’ early output, fun, punchy, uptempo tracks like “Gasoline,” “I Win Every Time,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” and more, but their debut album Reeling didn’t include any of those, and saw Lia Metcalfe & co. wallowing a bit more in slower and less catchy territory. This album, released last month, is far more in line with what I want from the Mysterines, because it puts the rock part front and center, and then Metcalfe’s smoky voice is that much more potent. Highlights include “Sink Ya Teeth,” “Stray,” and “The Last Dance.”

Pond – Stung!

Pond are all over the place yet again, and I’m good with it because the highs are high enough. They’re an experimental rock band from Australia with a heavy emphasis on psychedelic rock, but are comfortable veering into funk-pop (“So Lo”) or a mélange of 1970s hard rock and 1960s Motown rhythms (“(I’m) Stung”), or just straight-up psychedelic rock that your parents might have heard at Woodstock (“Neon River”). The album is 14 songs and 54+ minutes long, so it does wear out its welcome a bit as it goes on, but I put it on this list over some other albums I liked, such as Ride’s Interplay and Parsnip’s Behold, because it’s more ambitious.

Sprints, Letter to Self

The long-awaited debut full-length from this Dublin punk-rock band did not disappoint, and it’s one of the most true-to-form punk albums of the last few years, with spare lyrics and repeated lines over fast-paced guitar lines that mostly get out in under 3½ minutes. (Unfortunately, lead guitarist Colm O’Reilly left the band abruptly in mid-May.) Highlights include “Heavy,” “Adore Adore Adore,” “Literary Mind,” and “Up and Comer.”

Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood

While I loved Katie Crutchfield’s 2020 album Saint Cloud, I think I respect this album more than I love it, as it’s a slower, more tenebrous affair than the previous record, and I like her music when she incorporates a little more rock or folk and works less in the traditional country lane. Highlights include “3 Sisters,” “Evil Spawn,” “Bored,” and “Crimes of the Heart.”

Yard Act, Where’s My Utopia?

This wasn’t quite up to the level of their debut album The Overload, but Yard Act are always messing around with styles and genres, and “Dream Job” might be their mostly overtly poppy song yet, even with their typical offbeat lyrics – how many pop hits can you name that use the word “kowtow?” Vocalist James Smith has cited his love of hip-hop in interviews, and that’s more evident in the words and his delivery across this album, and he moves seamlessly between rapping, talk-singing, and outright singing across the record. Other highlights include “We Make Hits,” “Petroleum,” and “When the Laughter Stops.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, Music

→ July 3, 2024
→ By keith

Music update, June 2024.

June brought three of the best albums of the year so far and a slew of comeback singles from bands I thought weren’t recording any more, so I’d call it a good month even beyond the part where it included my birthday and my daughter graduating from high school. Anyway, if you can’t see the playlist below, you can access it here.

Rakim feat. Kurupt and Masta Killa – Be Ill. The world has been waiting for new music from Rakim for 15 years, and for good new music from him for at least 25 years. We’re getting a new album, modestly titled G.O.D.s NETWORK: REB7RTH, on July 26^th, and this song has Rakim sounding as good as he has since the 1990s.

GIFT – Later. More shoegazey than straight shoegaze, with a heavier dose of ‘80s synths, cleaner guitars, and way more prominent vocals. GIFT’s second album, Illuminator, their first as a full band (rather than a solo project for vocalist/guitarist TJ Freda), comes out on August 23^rd, but the three singles they’ve released so far are all bangers – this one, “Going in Circles,” and my favorite, “Wish Me Away.” There’s definitely some Slowdive/Ride influence here, but Freda is doing more than just mimicking his idols, especially when it comes to building towards a big chorus or other hook.

Hundred Waters – Towers. I had long given up on hearing more music from Hundred Waters, whose sophomore album The Moon Rang Like a Bell was also one of my top albums of the 2010s, but whose last release was 2017’s Communicating. The trio, led by singer Nicole Miglis, released a four-song EP called Towers on June 14^th, and Miglis still sounds incredible, while the band continues to experiment with the electronic sounds that back her up. I’m hoping there’s a full album to come but I’ll take what I can get.

The Mysterines – Hawkmoon. The Mysterines’ sophomore album Afraid of Tomorrows came out on June 21^st, the same day as Pond’s and Alcest’s newest albums, and it’s a huge step forward from Lia Metcalfe’s quartet across the board, but especially in the quality of its hooks. My friends at Paste interviewed Metcalfe and drummer Paul Crilly about the new record.

Pond – So Lo. Stung!, the latest album from these Australian experimental psych-rockers, is all over the place, for better and a bit worse, but I take that as the price of admission given their willingness to jump between genres. This has strong mid-80s Prince vibes, as well as the 1970s funk songs that inspired his Revolution era sound.

The Howl & the Hum – Same Mistake Twice. Imagine a mashup of gang of youths and the Front Bottoms and you get this song from the Yorkshire quartet whose name unfortunately sounds like a discount version of The Head & the Heart.

Sløtface – Ladies of the Fight. This is what I want from Sløtface’s Haley Shea, who is now the only official member, and has a knack for punk-pop hooks and witty, sardonic lyrics. This track is full of movie references, including Fight Club and A League of Their Own, fitting since the upcoming album is titled Film Buff (September 27^th).

Color Green – God in a $. This is just good old-fashioned blues-based rock and roll, maybe with a dash of jam-band sensibility thrown in. I’d love to see them live, although their summer tour doesn’t go anywhere west of Boise.

Good Looks – Broken Body. This Austin jangle-pop band released their second album, Lived Here for a While, in June, featuring this track and the lead single “If It’s Gone,” which showcase their sense of melody and wistful lyrics.

Chime School – Give Your Heart Away. More sunny jangle-pop goodness from San Francisco Giants fan and Seablite drummer Andy Pastalaniec, whose second album, The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel, drops on August 23^rd.

Los Campesinos! – Feast of Tongues. We do love Welsh bands around here, but I have to admit that Los Campesinos! have often missed the mark for me – they’ve often struck me as trying too hard to be snarky or different, or just generally too cool for school. This track, from their upcoming album All Hell (out July 19^th), is something I at least haven’t heard from them before, reminiscent lyrically of Okkervil River and musically of Mercury Rev.

Mercury Rev – Patterns. Oh hey, what a coincidence. I thought Mercury Rev had hung it up after 2015’s The Light in You (which I barely remember), and I can’t say I’ve been into anything they’ve done since 2001’s epic All Is Dream. This song feels like a throwback to that record, with spoken, philosophical (or just) lyrics over a psychedelic space-pop backdrop. Their new album Born Horses drops on September 6^th.

The Jesus Lizard – Hide & Seek. These 1990s noise-rock icons haven’t released an album in 26 years, but Rack drops on September 13^th. They’ve promised a departure from their old sound; this track sounds more like the clean punk sound of the Descendents than Goat or Liar.

Amyl and the Sniffers – Facts. Seth Meyers’ favorite band put out two singles at the end of May, this one and “U Should Not Be Doing That,” and they haven’t changed their fast-driving throwback punk sound a bit.

Fontaines D.C. – Favourite. Fontaines D.C. go Britpop on the closing track from their forthcoming album Romance, due out in August. I saw this Irish post-punk band open for Arctic Monkeys last September and they were unbelievable live, so much so that I would have said I wasn’t a fan before seeing them but definitely became one after.

Hayden Thorpe – They. Thorpe was the lead singer of Wild Beasts, whose final album Boy King ranked 5^th on my list of the best albums of the 2010s, but his solo output since their breakup has lacked some of the urgency and verve of Wild Beasts’ best material. I’m cautiously optimistic about his next album, Ness, out September 27^th, given the more ambitious music on this track.

One True Pairing – Mid-Life Crisis. So Hayden Thorpe’s return sent me down a Wild Beasts rabbit hole that led me to One True Pairing, the nom de chanson of their bassist Tom Fleming, who put out a self-titled album under that moniker in 2019 and has put out three singles in the last eight months. He also doesn’t sound quite like Wild Beasts did, but there’s a sweeping, lush texture to this song that kept me coming back to listen to it again. (It’s not a cover of the Faith No More track. Sorry.)

Griff – Anything. Griff’s full-length debut Vertigo comes out on July 12^th and includes a bunch of the singles she’s already released, including this banger, the title track, “Astronaut,” and “Pillow in My Arms.” She’s playing Philly in September … on a Monday when I’ll be in Chicago for Stadium.

Soccer Mommy – Lost. A lovely acoustic ballad from Sophia Allison, her second single (along with last year’s “Lose You,” with Bully) since her 2022 album Sometimes, Forever.

Hinds – En Forma. Hinds began as a duo, became a quartet, went dark after a one-off single in 2021, lost two members, and now are about to release their first album with their original lineup of Carlotta Cosials and Ana García Perrote, Viva Hinds, on September 6^th. They’ve released three singles so far, and it sounds like they’ve cleaned up their sound and production enough that they no longer sound like they recorded the record in a subway bathroom or are just learning to play their instruments.

METTE – MUSCLE. I had no idea who METTE was when I heard this song, and while I don’t generally go for this kind of commercially-oriented electro-pop, this damn thing would not let go of my ears for days. Then I found out METTE is actress Mette Towley, who was in Hustlers and The Old Guard and briefly in Barbie, and she’s opening some of Taylor Swift’s shows in the UK, so, uh, good job me finding out about the famous person.

Nubya Garcia – The Seer. Garcia is an English jazz saxophonist who released albums in 2017 and 2020 but nothing since; this track, which caught my ear for the obvious John Coltrane influence on her playing, is her first in four years and the lead single from her forthcoming album Odyssey, due out September 20^th.

NIJI – A13 Fuji. Nigerian-British jazz pianist Niji Adeleye released his first proper LP Somewhere in the Middle in January and is already back with another track that blends western jazz styles with Afrobeat sounds. The main horn riff here is quite an earworm.

Ezra Collective feat. Yazmin Lacey. Ezra Collective won last year’s Mercury Prize for their 2022 album Where I’m Meant to Be, and have now released a pair of singles from their follow-up record Dance, No One’s Watching, due out September 27^th. I think they’ve embraced a more pop-oriented sound, going more for strong melodies in either their music or in the guest vocals. I didn’t quite get the acclaim for the last record, at least compared to other candidates for the Mercury Prize, but I’ve liked both this and “Ajala” quite a bit more.

Jamie xx – Treat Each Other Right. Jamie xx put out two singles in June, this and “Life” featuring Robyn, leading up to the release of his second solo album In Waves on September 20^th. So far, I haven’t heard anything as strong as “Loud Places” or “SeeSaw,” both featuring his bandmate Romy from the xx; it’s been more tracks like this, big house beats but without the same hooks or cross-genre experimentation.

Alcest – Komorebi. Alcest’s new album Les Chants de l’Aurore is the best metal album of the year so far by a mile, and one of the best albums of the year, period. It’s at least the best thing they’ve done since 2016’s Kodama, and I think represents the perfect balance of progressive metal, shoegaze, and extreme/death metal, three genres with which guitarist/singer Neige has experimented for his entire career, varying his use of all three. This album is a journey and I have already taken it many times.

Crypt Sermon – Thunder (Perfect Mind). Crypt Sermon does a souped-up take on doom metal, with a little more groove to it than typical adherents of that genre, with a very polished but still heavy, crunchy take on the style on their new album The Stygian Rose, which came out in June.

Flotsam & Jetsam – Primal. Props to Flotsam & Jetsam, who just keep churning out thrash tracks like it’s 1986. I’ll always be a sucker for this style of metal even though its moment was short and it’s hopelessly outdated now.

Dark Tranquility – Not Nothing. Dark Tranquility are one of the leaders of the Gothenburg style of metal, often called melodic death metal, here mixing clean and growled vocals with a heavy, proggy guitar riff through the chorus.

Tribulation – Saturn Coming Down. Tribulation gets labelled as “black metal” or “death metal” because their vocals are growled and they wear silly corpse paint, but their music isn’t actually that extreme – it’s straight metal and often wouldn’t be out of place on a compilation of ‘80s metal. On this new track they switch to clean vocals with a very goth sound in the chorus and it really elevates the whole endeavor; I know the death growls are part of their schtick but they’re leaving money on the table because the music is way more accessible than the labels indicate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, alternative, doom metal, hip hop, indie, jazz, melodic death metal, metal, Music, rap, thrash

→ June 29, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/28/24.

I posted my second mock draft for 2024 on June 19^th, and on Friday posted a scouting report on Japanese first baseman Rintaro Sasaki, who’s playing in the Draft League this summer and will play for Stanford in the spring. Both are for subscribers to The Athletic. I also held a Klawchat the day of the mock draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Pixies, a great small-box game for family play, good for kids as young as 7 but solid enough for the adults to enjoy.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams, assuming American Airlines doesn’t wait six hours and then cancel my flight like they did this past week. So much for my idea that flying the night before would help make travel easier.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sellout Crowd tried to create an Athletic-like site for Oklahoma sports news, but it appears the founders’ claims of funding weren’t true and the writers, many of whom left established jobs to join Sellout, weren’t paid for months.
Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending his country’s long war with its former province Eritrea … and then started a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Tigrayan people. The Guardian looks at how he beguiled – or fooled – the western world.
Extremely important: Scientific American has a piece on how the dual-heart cardiovascular system of a Time Lord might work.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has the story of three former conspiracy theory believers who found their way out of hoax-world.
An economist whose work on gun rights and laws is often cited by opponents of gun regulations has failed to disclose his financial ties to the gun industry and the NRA, according to an investigative report by the New York Times.
SCOTUS declined to hear a challenge to Connecticut’s termination of religious exemptions to the mandatory vaccination laws for schoolchildren (which only applies to new schoolkids – older ones can be grandfathered in, regardless of how fraudulent their exemptions were). This is good news for public health: You can choose not to vaccinate yourself, but you shouldn’t have the right to harm your kids or those around them.
Did you see the headlines claiming that lab-grown or plant-based meat alternatives caused heart disease? Not exactly. It turns out that the study behind that didn’t distinguish between types of “ultra-processed” foods, so it included items like ketchup, potato chips, soda, and vodka alongside these so-called vegan “meats.” The lesson, as always, is to think critically about any sensational reporting.
Vaccine developer and scientist Paul Offit debunked the New York Times lab-leak op ed point by point, showing just how badly that piece’s author lied and misrepresented the facts to support her point of view. Over at The Nation, epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves and immunology & microbiology professor John P. Moore also called out the Times for its coverage of COVID-19, including the same debunked lab-leak story, authored by someone who “has never worked on infectious diseases or the science of how viruses enter the human population.” Even the Toronto Star weighed in.
The British Medical Association’s BMJ Public Health journal published a study that seemed to claim that excess mortality in Western countries from January 2020 to December 2022 was linked to COVID-19 vaccines. The paper had very serious problems, sparking calls for a retraction from other scientists. The BMJ finally placed a semi-correction called an “expression of concern” on the paper two weeks ago, but that’s far too late after right-wing media pounced on it and claimed it showed these very safe, effective vaccines were the cause.
A Texas woman tried to drown two Palestinian children, including holding a 3-year-old’s head under water, after she made racist remarks to their mother. I’ve seen all kinds of reports online about the accused’s ethnicity or religious background, but none of it appeared real or properly sourced.
Texas’s draconian abortion ban has led to a 13% increase in infant and newborn deaths, many of them nonviable pregnancies or pregnancies where the fetus had some congenital abnormality that would lead to death shortly after birth. I see this as nothing but an increase in suffering.
A Kentucky woman who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was just 12 years old is now campaigning with Dr. Jill Biden. In many red states today, she’d be unable to get an abortion.
What’s been killing off monarch butterflies? Looks like it’s neonicotinoids, an insecticide that is also a prime suspect in colony collapse disorder, which has led to large die-offs of bees across the world. Both bees and monarchs are important pollinators on which we rely to keep our food supply going.
Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” megachurch leader Robert Morris, resigned after it came out that he groomed and molested a 12-year-old girl. The victim told church officials of the abuse, but they allowed him to remain in his position for over 30 years. A senior pastor at a Baptist church in Florida was arrested for possession of child pornography. Michigan state Rep. Neil Friske (R-) was arrested after chasing a stripper down the street while waving a gun. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these cases.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former national security adviser conceded that Trump lost the trade war with China. One of the few topics where you get wide agreement from economists is that tariffs are bad, but Trump is promising to enact huge tariffs if he’s returned to office.
A right-wing group is compiling a hit list of federal employees to fire if Trump takes office, as they might interfere with his Project 2025 plans. Totally normal stuff for a liberal democracy.
A Houston doctor has been indicted for leaking documents, including patient names and treatment information, related to gender-affirming care at Texas Children’s Hospital. Eithan Haim has been accused of accessing this information through the hospital’s electronic system without authorization. He’s claiming he’s a “whistleblower” and that gender-affirming care is some form of “abuse.”
The mother of a trans girl who was playing girls’ volleyball at her Florida high school has said the state’s investigation has destroyed her daughter’s life. What a fantastic use of state resources!
This is how you cover a candidate who peddles falsehood after falsehood: CNN’s Daniel Dale goes through 30 lies from a Trump rally in under 3 minutes.
Indie no more: Barnes & Noble is buying Denver bookstore mini-chain Tattered Cover, which has struggled for several years, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and closing three locations. B&N has pledged to keep the five remaining stores open under the Tattered Cover brand and keep “substantially all” of its current employees. Tattered Cover became the nation’s largest Black-owned independent bookstore in 2020 after a sale to Bended Page LLC.
Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution in India for remarks she made in 2010 on the disputed territory of Kashmir. The United Nations Human Rights Office has called for India to drop the charges. The Washington Post ran an editorial on Thursday saying the prosecution is a sign of Prime Minister Modi’s weakness.
California is returning about 2800 acres to the Shasta Nation, over a century after the United States stole the land as part of the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project, damming the Klamath River and creating an artificial lake. The project also nearly wiped out the native salmon population from the region, but the lake and the two dams that created it are now gone.
A so-called “wilderness therapy” program in North Carolina was shuttered in February after a 12-year-old boy died there, leading the state to revoke its license. Now the coroner has declared his death a homicide after the autopsy revealed he died of asphyxiation while sealed in a bivy to sleep and had no way to extricate himself from the contraption.
The Scottish brewpub chain BrewDog had advance warning that a group of neo-Nazis planned to visit its flagship Waterloo bar, and when they arrived and a staff member of Asian descent complained, BrewDog fired her, according to a story in the Guardian. The brewer has been embroiled in numerous controversies, including their apparent failure to pay fair wages to employees.
Board game news: Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for Iliad and Ichor, two new two-player games from Reiner Knizia.
John D. Clair, designer of what I think is the original “card-crafting” game Mystic Vale, has a new card-crafting game in the works called Unstoppable, with a Kickstarter live now and way past its funding goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, bookstores, california, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, frauds, guns, india, links, longreads, nobel prize, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ June 24, 2024
→ By keith

EO.

EO was one of the five nominees for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in March of 2023, losing to the incredibly overrated All Quiet on the Western Front, which was so obviously going to win that it deterred me a bit from seeing all of the nominated films. (I have one left of the five, Close, and still want to catch a couple of the other submissions from other countries.) EO is a bold film that has a very clear point of view and uses an unusual perspective to set it apart from just about anything else I’ve seen in the last few years, although it does meander at many points – like its protagonist – leading to some pacing issues that made me a little lower on the film as a viewer than I would be if I were a professional film critic. (You can watch it for free on Max or rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

EO is the main character in the film, and he’s an ass – literally. He’s a donkey who is in a traveling circus when the film begins, but when the circus goes bankrupt, he’s packed up and sold, which leads to a whole series of adventures, some funny, many tragic, and eventually lead to violence both against him and against some of the humans and other animals he encounters. The woman who minded him at the circus finds the farm where he’s living after he’s been sold off, but their drunken encounter – she’s inebriated, not EO – leads the donkey to escape and wander of into the woods, which starts off as a sort of modern picaresque story until he runs into the wrong people and things begin to turn darker.

You can’t possibly watch this film and miss its message about how badly we treat the animals that we meet. It’s not your typical animal-rights screed, like all of the documentaries out there that aim to convince us to be vegetarians (which, to be clear, is fine if that’s your choice; I don’t eat cow or lamb any more, and that’s my choice) or otherwise shock and horrify us with how we mistreat animals we raise as food. EO takes a completely different tack, and it’s more powerful as a result. It focuses on a single animal, anthropomorphizing him by making him the main character and through some of the things that he does – pin that tail for a moment, please – so that we will see him more as an individual, sentient being with feelings who deserves more consideration than we give most animals who aren’t pets. There are at least a few people who see EO as at least worthy of some kindness, but he runs into more people who treat him like they might an inanimate object or, worse, a target for their anger or something for the slaughterhouse.

Unfortunately, the film overdoes the humanizing aspects of its main character, such as a scene where EO appears to be crying. The only animals that cry as a response to emotions are humans. Donkeys may feel basic emotions such as fear, joy, sadness, and so on, but they don’t cry, and it’s one of the ways in which EO lays it on a little too thick when it didn’t need to do so. There are some real scenes of emotion here, not just for EO but for us as the viewer; there’s a hunting scene, for example, where you can grasp EO’s fear through context, rather than, say, having the donkey turn to the camera and say “I’m scared.” (He does not actually do that in the film.)

There’s a whole history to EO that I don’t know, from its director Jerzy Skolimowski’s extensive filmography to its inspiration, Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar, itself inspired by a passage on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I haven’t seen or read any of those works, so perhaps I missed some of the context here and didn’t appreciate the way the film built on the earlier works. The cinematography is very strong, from close-ups of the six donkeys who played EO to some of the broader shots that create the perspective of EO as a smaller part of a larger scene. There’s also a short appearance by Isabelle Huppert that is somewhat ridiculous but, also, it’s Isabelle Huppert, still looking incredible at 71 and commanding every bit of her scene. (I still can’t figure out how that scene with her and her stepson fits into the larger whole without making a whole bunch of leaps of logic.) I do recommend EO and think it deserved its nomination – and was much better than the winning film – but some lapses in the execution keep it from reaching its full potential.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2022 movies, 2023 best international feature nominees, polish films

→ June 19, 2024
→ By keith

Klawchat 6/19/24.

My second mock draft of 2024 is now up for subscribers to The Athletic.

Keith Law: You say you love me but not quite yet. Klawchat.

JP: If you had to assign a 20-80 grade to this year’s draft class as a whole, what would it be?
Keith Law: It’s a 40. There have been worse, there could conceivably be much worse, but this is well below the median for me.

Paul: Do you anticipate a substantial change in the Nats draft prospect preference given the front office additions over the past year, or do you expect Rizzo’s classic archetypes to prevail?
Keith Law: New group making the picks, so I expect a new philosophy. I doubt it will contradict Rizzo’s preferences but I expect a different tone to the draft.

KC: SSS, but Matt Shaw is struggling and younger James Triantos is doing what we thought Shaw would do. Is he a legit prospect and will Shaw turn it around?
Keith Law: Not just SSS but the batted-ball data on Shaw is way better than the superficial stats. Don’t scout the stat line.

Jay: I am a loyal Astros whose views align with most of what you’ve said over the years about the franchise. Does Dana Brown have a chance to be successful? I hope so.
Keith Law: Not if Crane’s Cronies are pulling the strings. I was at least glad to see they acknowledged the sunk cost on Abreu and took him off the roster – I expected them to cling to the contract. Now, whether they’ve changed the process that led to such a clearly bad signing is another matter.

J.: If Ernie Clement keeps playing high level defense at 3B and maintains .700+ OPS, he’s an everyday guy, yeah?
Keith Law: No. He’s doing virtually all his damage against LHP, and in this tiny sample (136 PA) he’s faced a disproportionately high percentage of lefties (41%). I’d also argue that the .700 OPS he’s posted is on the less valuable side, with an OBP under .300.

Hogie: The Nats’ rotation as a whole seems to have made great strides. Is it still small sample size/smoke and mirrors with some HR luck, or have guys like Jake Irvin and Mitchell Parker shown you something?
Keith Law: I’m taking the under on Parker (wildly lucky so far, no out pitch) and Irvin (still can’t get LHB out, doesn’t have an average pitch for them) and the over on Gore.

JJ: You’ve indicated that this year’s draft class is weaker/shallower than past years, correct? I’ve heard the same thing about this year’s NFL draft, and the upcoming NBA class as well. Is that a coincidence, having off years in all three sports?
Keith Law: I’ve heard the argument that the 2020-21 cycle of losing an entire spring/summer for most kids is the reason for this, but I’m not sure why that would be true when it didn’t adversely affect last year’s class.

John: Do you view the top of the class high school bats (Griffin/Rainer) as star ceiling types or something less than that? Which of those two would you pick first if it were your call at this point?
Keith Law: The answer to any question like that is on my ranking of the top 100 prospects in the draft.

Will: Initial thoughts/reaction on Skenes so far?
Keith Law: Not really.

J: The CWS broadcast showed that Nick Kurtz and James Tibbs have fairly significant platoon splits-would this concern you if you were drafting in the top 10?
Keith Law: Yes, it’s a factor, but not a ‘kill’ for me on its own because a lot of amateur players just lack much experience facing LHP. I’d dig deeper into just why they have those splits, such as whether they’re getting crushed by certain pitch types or locations, and talking to the area scouts involved to estimate the odds of them improving in that area.

Punk in Drublic: What Mets prospects do you think have improved the most this season?
Keith Law: Too broad a question, sorry.

Kevin: Kristian Campbell is tearing up AA with a 426/500/741 slash after tearing up High A. Going from High A to AA seems to be the biggest jump in the minors. I know it’s a SSS for the year but do you think he is close to being a top 100 prospect?
Keith Law: He’s a real prospect but you are citing a slash line from 13 games. That is a drop in the bucket.

Ed H: Hey Keith, Rest in piece Say Hey Kid… so if you were in the front office, what would you say to the GMs/managers to play prospects like Marco Luciano more? A few errors at now he’s not allowed to bat anymore…
Keith Law: Teams have to adjust their approach to position player call-ups – so many of them are struggling on first exposure to MLB pitching and many teams aren’t willing to give them the long runway to make adjustments. It’s easier for non-contenders, but even contenders have to consider the call-up decision differently – how do we handle player X if he strikes out 50% of the time at first? Are we willing to guarantee him 100, 200, more PA before deciding whether to return him to AAA, where he’ll probably hit .480 because the pitching there will look like Little League compared to what he saw in the majors?

Ken: Is Gunnar Hoglund anything more than a back of the rotation starter?
Keith Law: Is he even that?

Guest: How shocked are people going to be when Gage Jump blows out early in his MLB career. Jay Johnson doesn’t care I guess. Shameful
Keith Law: Nobody will be shocked, not in pro ball at least. Jump already blew out once, too.

Big Fan: Klaw, how much are teams shying away from using a high pick in a 1B given recent history?
Keith Law: In a stronger draft, the 1B would go a little lower, but this draft just isn’t very strong.

André René Roussimoff: In retrospect, was infield shifting actually doing much to suppress offense or has pitching development and coaching just improved more than hitting has? (Rest in power, Willie Mays.)
Keith Law: I don’t think banning the shift has helped much if at all. It’s theater.

KC: I know the perception of Biden is meh, but he does have wins to point to and while I’d prefer a younger President, why isn’t there more panic about what could/would happen if Trump gets in office. It would be legitimately disastrous for our country and for the disenfranchised.
Keith Law: The mainstream media is busy bothsidesing this. The coverage should be focused on one candidate’s pledges to persecute his enemies and further erode the rights of huge swaths of the population.

Sam: Jacob Gonzalez’s numbers look good this year after a poor start to his pro career. WIll he be in top 100 contention if he keeps it up?
Keith Law: He’s slugging .399 this year. The top 100 isn’t just a ranking of performance, but that’s not pushing someone who was off the list on to it, either.

MIKE S: Any book recs about Roman Empire and/or Vatican ?
Keith Law: I, Claudius. Perhaps not what you were asking for.

John: Hey Klaw, How back is Druw Jones? Top 50/25izh?
Keith Law: Jones was on my top 50 this winter. He was also on the top 50 I posted three weeks ago.

Chris: Are any of these players in the upper system potential next year starters for the Yanks at 1B, 2B, 3B? Rice (assume you think he has less chance than Wells to catch), Rumfield, Durbin, Vivas, Peraza, Hardman?
Keith Law: Rice can’t catch. Peraza might end up a starter, but that’s it from that list. Rice has too much swing and miss on stuff in the zone, and it’s a function of his swing.

Matt: I know that fans and some writers can overreact too early when a young player struggles(like fans who complain that Elly de la Cruz is a disappointment because he didn’t show up as an MVP at 22). Are there examples of teams giving up too early on a young player (a version of MLB ready prospect fatigue)?
Keith Law: Gary Sheffield comes to mind. Brandon Phillips too.

Guest: How does Bazzana as a prospect compare to Matt McLain last year?
Keith Law: Do you mean McLain in his draft year? He had a broken hamate for part of that spring and didn’t get a chance to put up big numbers or even show what sort of power he had.

Jared: Wondering which of the Orioles prospects as you see as the “easiest” for team to move in possible trades, given their glut of talent, current roster construction and which prospects are desirable to other teams.
Keith Law: They could easily trade two outfielders and not even notice – Mayo is the best of them and the one I’d keep if possible, but he has to be in that group with Kjerstad, Cowser, even fringier guys like Stowers if they can fill out a trade. Norby and Westburg would also have a lot of value as guys who could step right into a major-league role but who the Orioles don’t entirely need.

J: What position do you think Seaver King initially plays in pro ball?
Keith Law: Depends on who drafts him but my best guess is someone tries him out at SS again.

Jerry: If the Astros are in the same place at the deadline, should they give serious consideration to trading Alvarez, Tucker, or Valdez? Seems like those would be the only ones who would bring a substantial return.
Keith Law: I’d really try to extend Tucker and shop the other two. You build around guys like Tucker.

Dan: Is Lazaro Montes simply doing what he was expected to do in A-ball this year, or has he shown something that changes how evaluators are viewing him?
Keith Law: His pitch selection is improved from last year.

Chris: long term thoughts on Gil as a starter?
Keith Law: Didn’t think he could start pre-TJ with a non-functional changeup, but now he has a plus one and that makes him a high-end starter for me.

Ken: Where do you see Vanderbilt RHP Bryce Cunningham falling in the draft?
Keith Law: solid season but college relievers don’t typically get much above the fourth round.

Mike: Why wont Bal call up Kjerstad?
Keith Law: I don’t know. They seem too committed to Cowser, who’s been a replacement-level guy for two months now, and undercommitted to Kjerstad.

Brian: What position would you move Marco Luciano to? 2nd? LF?
Keith Law: I think LF and you just let him hit.

Michael: Why is Kris Bryant so bad? You can’t say injuries
Keith Law: Why can’t I? That’s the most parsimonious explanation.

JR: A couple months ago, the Mets/Dodgers was the Saturday game of the week on Fox. Fox was having technical difficulties that day, so for the first few innings you couldn’t hear the announcers, but you could hear all the sounds of the game (the crowd, the crack of the bat, the batter being announced, etc.). It was awesome. Wish that was a viewing option.
Keith Law: I’ve said this for years – some announcers are great and I would listen to them (Benetti, Sciambi, the comedy act that is the Phillies’ TV booth), but sometimes I’d rather just hear the ambient sounds of the game.

CVD: It looked like Dylan Crews had started to settle into AA, but his numbers weren’t overwhelming. Agree with the promotion to AAA?
Keith Law: Yes, he was ready.

Dusty Rhodes: Were we wrong to question Jacob Wilson as the first of the non-big 5 drafted last draft? He’s been tearing it up.
Keith Law: Yes, it was a huge reach given who else was on the board.

Gordon: Going to the bay area this weekend to catch an A’s and a Giants game. Favorite restaurants, things to do in SF? Is the colosseum really that bad?
Keith Law: The A’s stadium is a dump. I haven’t been to the area in years but Cotogna and Del Popolo stick out in my mind.

Ricky Morton: Elijah Green. It’s over, right?
Keith Law: Way too soon for that.

Joseph: Have your thoughts changed at all on the viability of Nick Gonzales?
Keith Law: Viability?

Donald: Hi Keith,

I loved your scouting notebook on the Hartford/Somerset games. Do you have any immediate plans to see Portland in person? Aside from the Mayer/Anthony/Teel trio, I’m curious about Kristian Campbell. He’s been mashing this year but his swing is absolutely ugly. What have you heard about him as a prospect?
Keith Law: They don’t come down here till the second half of July; if the group is still there I’ll definitely go see them.

KC: How do players like Biggio, Volgenbach, Dalbec, etc. maintain their roster spot year after year?
Keith Law: Inertia.

Eric: Hi Keith – loved the mock draft earlier today. You noted that Jac is one of the names under consideration for the White Osx at 5. Given the relatively lackluster start to Andrew Vaugh’s career (as well as other recent highly-drafted first basemen, like Torkelson), do you think the White Sox would go with another college first baseman?
Keith Law: I wouldn’t let Vaughn/Torkelson deter me from taking any 1b. I would consider whether their failures carry any lessons for evaluating future bats at any position.

romorr: Have you heard/seen anything that points to Coby Mayo being able to handle 3B, at least for a few years? I’ll wait to ask you about Sammy and his defense, after he gets more time behind the dish.
Keith Law: I think he’s better than he was when drafted but probably still better suited to RF/1B.

Moose: Thoughts on Seattle’s transitioning of Logan Evans to the bullpen so they can call him up this summer? Will it seriously hamper his development as a starter (which Dipoto says is still how they view him in the long term)?
Keith Law: Don’t mind it because they weren’t likely to get him make 25 starts this year in the minors. They do have to be mindful of how they use him in the majors – he’d be better suited to longer outings with more rest.

KC: Do you watch the WNBA at all?
Phillies: Do you think Johan Rojas will ever hit enough to be passable as an everyday CF?
Keith Law: The only sports league I watch besides MLB is the NFL for the Eagles.
Keith Law: Rojas could do that, but he needs both strength and time.

Eric: Is Edgar Quero turning into a GUY at this point?
Keith Law: I think of it more as him returning to his 2022 form, when he really looked like a GUY, then somehow lost his power last year.

Ken: When does MLB press the panic button on John Fisher’s move to Vegas and the lack of progress on the stadium? No way this stadium is built by the 2028 season.
Keith Law: I’m just guessing but I bet there’s some panic already in the MLB offices. They have to see how bad an idea this is.
Keith Law: Vegas is a terrible market for MLB. It will have one of the smallest populations and possibly the worst income demographics of any MLB market. And climate change is going to make living and working there much, much worse.

Fresh: If the Nats are still in contention for a Wild Card spot in the wildly mediocre NL at the deadline, would you hold onto Thomas/Finnegan/Harvey/Winker or sell, given that it could be a seller’s market with so many ‘contenders’ and few teams willing to pull back?
Keith Law: I’d like them to take a Rays approach and selectively sell while also possibly buying. Lane Thomas has had a nice couple of years there, but he’s not a long-term piece for them. The four guys you mentioned are all on the margins and won’t be there the next time this team wins 95 games.

Lenneal: Can Nacho Alvarez start?
Keith Law: Leaning yes.

Woodsy: Who are the best case scenario prospects to get to the Red Sox at 12?
Keith Law: I think I outlined that in the draft today – you can see scenarios where a Rainer or Yesavage gets there. No sense yet on what teams think of Montgomery’s injury.

Simon: Have you watched any of the Cricket World Cup?
Keith Law: No.

Ken: Is Darell Hernaiz an everyday player, or just a utility guy? Where should the A’s play him?
Keith Law: Chance for a regular, most likely outcome is utility IF. Not a shortstop.

Brian: Heliot Ramos has been an absolute menace for a month, the Giants themselves didn’t even appear that high on him, he mostly forced the issue. Does he look like he has a chance to stick as a regular?
Keith Law: I think he’s a regular. He’s rocking a .414 BABIP this year with a 29% K rate. He’s going to come back to earth – but I think he can be an everyday guy, lower OBP with power.

Ben: TWP’s are becoming more commonplace ever since Ohtani’s success. Are there any you have your eye on right now you believe can do well at both hitting and pitching?
Keith Law: TWPs are becoming more commonplace in college/the minors. They are not becoming more common in the majors because it’s next to impossible to do. Ohtani’s a unicorn.

Guest: Any reason to get excited about DJ Herz, or was that last start just a one- off against a poor hitting team?
Keith Law: The latter.

Guest: While the Nats may want to take a Rays approach, I’m guessing you think the Rays should take a traditional firesale approach given they’re 6 below .500 and Pythagoreas says they’re really 11-12 below. Rasmussen and Springs coming back and a possible Caminero return in the second half aren’t going to save them.
Keith Law: Depends on where they are in a month.

Dallas: Do you have a top tier of draft prospects this year? Is Condon in a tier by himself? If I’m the Guardians, I establish a top tier and take the guy who costs the least. If Condon (or Bazzana) is by himself, I take him.
Keith Law: I think it’s Condon, Bazzana, and Wetherholt (if healthy) in tier 1.
Keith Law: But I have Condon at 1.

André René Roussimoff: When Jurickson Profar was in the minor leagues, you predicted he’d be an All-Star level talent. You were right!
Keith Law: Hey, I never said when he’d be an All-Star…

Danny: Have you heard anything about Henry Lalane and Carlos Lagrange’s status?
Keith Law: Both still on the IL.

Eric: keith still believing in climate change hoax
Keith Law: How dumb do you have to be to still be a climate change denier? Do you not believe that CO2 and methane levels have increased substantially in the atmosphere, or do you think that there’s some sort of magic here where that doesn’t change the climate? It’s beyond magical thinking. It’s delusion.

Bob: What kind of car do you drive ?
Keith Law: Bitchin’ Camaro.

Candler: What do you think the ceiling on Ezequiel Tovar is? Super aggressive approach but the results are impressive so far
Keith Law: He’s an elite defender with pop but the approach is a 30. Away from Coors he has 41 Ks and 4 BB this year.

Alex (CA): Can you shed some insight on what’s going on with River Ryan?
Keith Law: He pitched the other night for OKC. Sat 98 with the cutter at 93-94. Still effectively rehabbing as he didn’t throw any breaking stuff.

Ben: Is Xavier Isaac beyond what you predicted he’d be at this point? Speaking of which, any word on his status? Can’t find anything on him since last week.
Keith Law: No, he’s showing the same strengths and weaknesses I described before the season. He’s been horrendous vs LHP.

nelson: I’m sure there’s an obvious reason that I, not being a scout, do not understand but why is it scouts are comfortable writing reports about players they see in person take a handful of ABs, but will call 100 or more ABs a small sample size and not indicative of future results?
Keith Law: Because those are two entirely different things. Scouts are evaluating mechanics, athleticism, approach, etc. A hitter’s mechanics are not subject to the same random variation that his results are.

Steve: What is your take on how all-stars should be selected? It seems the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of “guys having a great first half” rather than actual stars. I’ve always thought players should at least play at an all-star level for a full season before being considered, with exceptions for rookies with real prospect pedigrees and of course the proviso that every team must be represented.
Keith Law: I’m with you – this is a marketing game, put the stars in, no one is turning on the game to watch Joey Rando who had a great April and May start the game over Mookie Betts.

Roberto: You ever been to Tuscany area? Any recs ?
Keith Law: Yes but the last time was in 1999 so probably not useful.

Danny: Do you feel differently from preseason about Roderick Arias or George Lombard? Arias has some great tools but he’s run scary strike out rates in 2 of his 3 pro seasons so far
Keith Law: Arias belongs in short season, which of course doesn’t exist, so thank Rob Manfred for that.

Ken: I know he’s been hurt, but what do you think of the A’s Max Muncy? I thought starting him in Vegas was really aggressive. Are the A’s rushing him? Assuming Jacob Wilson is the SS of the future, where should the A’s play Muncy?
Keith Law: I agree it was really aggressive and I think Muncy might be a UT while Wilson … well, he might be a UT too if he doesn’t hit the ball harder, but at least he has a better chance to be a regular.

Chris: Have you ever seen a player with good mechanics, athleticism, approach, etc., but did just did not perform in the MiLB or MLB?
Keith Law: Josh Vitters had one of the best swings I’ve ever seen. He never did make any adjustments to his approach.

Jesse: Bryce Boettcher out of Oregon have a chance at going in the first few rounds?
Keith Law: I had to look him up, which probably answers your question. He’s a senior who isn’t performing particularly well.

romorr: I like every Orioles prospect, but you really turned me on to Joseph Anthony Ortiz. And even though he’s not an Oriole, I am very happy with how he’s playing. Love a guy who puts the work in, and gets rewarded.
Keith Law: I’m just thrilled he finally got an opportunity to play every day. I know people in the O’s system who loved him, but he wasn’t getting a chance once Holliday reached AAA.

Howie: Thanks as always for doing these Keith and apologies if you’ve received this already. But how long do you run with Rice before you make a deal for a 1B/3B if you’re Cashman. I don’t think Rizzo is going to come back as the old guy. And their in-house options don’t seem super appealing.
Keith Law: Rizzo looked toast before the injury. I’m fine giving Rice a month before going outside. He does hit the ball pretty hard when he hits it; I just question whether he’ll hit it often enough.

Corey: Red Sox roster question – if Mayer and Anthony are ready, Story healthy + Hamilton is legit, how do you configure the roster given you have one extra IF and OF ? They trade Yoshida by retaining $, move Devers to DH and Story to 3B ? Trade Abreu for SP ? How would you handle the roster construction moving forward ?
Keith Law: I’m sorry, Story and Hamilton are not players you let block your best prospect.

Guest: should the padres be sellers at the deadline? It doesn’t seem like they could do anything in the playoffs.
Keith Law: They’re currently in that mess of teams 1-2 games under .500 who are all effectively tied for the last two WC spots. They’re not selling if that’s still true.

Dr. Bob: Hey, Keith. I understand why a team would underdraft a player at the top to sign him to an underslot contract. But why would the player go along? Hey, I was drafted in the first round and I want first round money.
Keith Law: They agree to it beforehand.

Tyler: If you want to just say, explicitly, “the media should help Joe Biden get elected instead of Donald Trump” nobody is stopping you.
Keith Law: I never said any such thing. I said the media is not doing its job of reporting fairly and accurately on the threat to our democracy that Trump and his ilk pose.

Alex (CA): Does Ethan Salas debut before the age of 20?
Keith Law: It’s possible. It’s more likely if Preller is still the GM in 2026.

Guest: Do you have any insight on what’s going on with Jordan Walker? Is he not making adjustments or do you think the Cards have messed him up? Or is the jump to the majors just that difficult? Thanks!
Keith Law: The jump is that difficult. He got there very quickly and I don’t think he had to make many significant adjustments on the way up. I wish the Cards had been more patient with him.

Jerry: Should the Blue Jays trade Bichette and/or Vladdy before the deadline to maximize the return? Will Atkins do it if he is worried about his job?
Keith Law: It’s better for his job if he trades them for good returns, no? Rizzo was never in trouble in DC, but I imagine his standing with ownership improved when he traded Soto for a massive haul of prospects – and two years on it looks just as good if not better.

Ryan: Deyvison De Los Santos & Adrian Del Castillo are both raking this year – is that just Reno stat inflation or have there been real improvements there?
Keith Law: The ballparks (Reno and Amarillo) in that system are massive hitters’ parks. I don’t think either guy is actually that good.

Big Mike: Is Gavin Cross back on the radar as a legitimate prospect? The numbers obviously look much better, but haven’t seen him to know if it’s for real or not.
Keith Law: Yes, maybe not the guy I thought he’d be in college but definitely back on track to be a regular in an OF corner.

Corey: In my Sox question, i assumed that Mayer is the SS. Do they just move Story to 2B and have Grissom and Hamilton as UT ? When Anthony is ready, do they keep Abreu as 4th OF or move him for something else ?
Keith Law: Who’s playing LF in your scenario? Yoshida isn’t good – weird how Red Sox fans who trolled me after he had a good first month all went silent there – and Abreu/Anthony could just play the corners, no?

JP: Do you believe Orelvis Martinez’s turnaround will translate in Toronto, or do you think he’s getting the call too early?
Keith Law: I bet he struggles at first but I am also fine with the callup.

Ben (MN): Is there any real way to determine how long of a leash to give a former top prospect who has never made it? I’m thinking Alex Kiriloff on the Twins for example. After debuting in 2020 and showing flashes but never putting it together for any consistent run of success, is there any real way to determine when it is time to move on in favor of other young players?
Keith Law: There’s no single answer, but I think you anticipated that in your question. And teams haven’t figured it out either – we have seen teams move on too soon, or hang on too long, to prospects who struggled. Kirilloff’s situation is harder because he’s been hurt so often in his career.

Nervous Flyball Pitcher: Anything to Billy Cook in Norfolk? He’s 25 but is hitting perfectly well, with good zone contact numbers.
Keith Law: I don’t think so – seen him a lot, great org player, might be a 4A guy in the end.

BigApple3am: Can you rank these mets pitching prospects in order best prospect in your eyes:
Scott
Sproat
Tidwell
Tong
Keith Law: Scott is the best one. Tong has made the biggest jump this year – his FB really plays.

Jay: This week on Prospect Progression Is Often Non-Linear: see the examples of Jurickson Profar and Amed Rosario. Both were top prospects (I think both topped out at 1), Profar was nearly out of baseball to begin 2024 and now leads the NL OF in fWAR. And Rosario doesn’t have the same impact this year, he is a productive member for the Rays filling multiple holes in a lineup desperate for offence slashing 300/320/415.
Keith Law: Great post. Rosario is still just 28, and if he could learn to walk more than once a month, he might be an above-average regular.

Guest: Any opinion on the two righties out of NJ: Meccage and Levonas
Keith Law: Saw Meccage, missed Levonas (the weather around here didn’t help). Meccage’s velo ticked up, but I think the FB would play fine at 92-94 rather than 94-97, and his CB might be a 60.

Big Mike: So Cross is getting there. Blake Mitchell is a legitimate prospect. Is there anyone else in the Royals system you see yourself considering for your next list?
Keith Law: Mitchell is striking out 31% of the time, so I’m a little concerned, although I agree he is a prospect and he might be another guy who’d be great if short-season still existed. Maybe Noah Cameron?

Jay: Looking at the Pirates top 40 list from FG today, and it looks like their list is VERY pitcher heavy. How many of those guys would we have to give up to match with the O’s glut of position guys? Or would it be wiser to trade Keller and have the SP prospects fill the hole and hopefully get back more in return?
Keith Law: I don’t know if Baltimore would trade for pitching prospects, but those two organizations do line up well enough that someone needs to just shout ‘get a room’ to them already.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thanks for reading and for all of your questions. I’ll do another mock draft probably the first week of July, and I’ll update that top 100 ranking between now and the draft too. Stay safe!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ June 18, 2024
→ By keith

Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See, a marvel of storytelling and character development that ranks among my 20 favorite novels of the century. His follow-up novel, 2021’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, follows a similar template of intertwined narratives, each centered around a single, well-developed character, but he fails to bring these narratives together in any sort of coherent fashion, and the entire enterprise comes off as a failed attempt to mimic Cloud Atlas instead.

Cloud Cuckoo Land comprises five narratives in three distinct time periods, each of which has a lost Greek novel/saga called Cloud Cuckoo Land at the center of its plot. One is set in the 15^th century, as we follow two young people, Omeir and Anna, who both know of the story, and who sit on opposite sides of the 1453 siege of Constantinople – Anna trapped inside the walled city while Omeir is a reluctant aide to the attacking forces, helmed by a 21-year-old sultan. The second is set in our present day, again with two narratives, one centered on the octogenarian teacher Zeno, who translated what he could of the tattered pages of the novel, and the other centered on Seymour, a neurodivergent teenager who befriends an owl in the woods near his home, only to turn to eco-terrorism when developers raze the trees where the owl lives. The third, and least coherent, is set at some unknown point in the future, on a spaceship called the Argos that is taking a group of humans to an exoplanet where they might be able to start anew after climate change and ocean acidification have destroyed Earth. Those sections follow just one character, Konstance, who ends up alone in a sealed vault on the ship, copying out the text of Cloud Cuckoo Land from what she can find in the ship’s massive virtual library.

Doerr creates memorable, three-dimensional characters, and all five of his main characters in Cloud Cuckoo Land feel fully developed and strong enough to anchor their individual plot strands, each with some specific quirk or detail that helps define their personalities. Konstance is probably the least developed, although her circumstances and Doerr’s desire to keep some of her back story in his pocket until the last third of the novel both justify that choice. Seymour is infuriating at times, but also internally consistent and easy to understand even if, as a parent, reading about him made me want to pull my hair out. Zeno has the strongest back story of all of them, although his one key detail is pretty obvious from the start. Anna’s story does drag at times because much of it revolves around her sister, Maria, whose death is well foreshadowed from the start of that plot strand, although this sets Anna out on the course of autonomy that leads her to a copy of the book.

The book within the book, of which we get many snippets as the opening epigrams to various chapters, is supposed to be the throughline that connects all five stories, a testament to the power of books to transform our lives and deepen our understanding of the human condition. I didn’t find the novel within Cloud Cuckoo Land to be all that interesting, and the gimmick of having some of the text lost, so many words and sentences are missing, just makes the metafiction even more remote and inscrutable. The three timelines never intersect at all beyond the point that Anna and then Zeno uncover and/or create new copies of the book to make it available to future readers, so there’s no payoff to the extremely frequent jumps between timelines. It moves quickly, especially since the chapters are very short and there’s a lot of white space in the paperback’s 574 pages, but that velocity doesn’t change the weakness of the book’s resolution. It’s too long to call it a trifle, but Cloud Cuckoo Land lacks the depth and the emotional power of All the Light We Cannot See, which makes it a disappointment given that we know what Doerr can do at his best.

Next up: I’m going to try to tackle Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2021 novels, american novels, contemporary novels, disappointments

→ June 17, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/17/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft, looking back at the 2014 draft class, plus the annual column on first-rounders from that class who didn’t pan out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new deduction game Archeologic, which I thought was too easy to solve and didn’t offer any new mechanics to make me want to play it more.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter last week, detailing my misadventures with travel and phone alarms.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post is in crisis, but their investigative reporters are still doing good work, this time with a report on police officers who have sexually abused children yet avoided punishment or even prosecution and sometimes retained their badges. They found over 1800 such officers, and in 40% of cases where the officers were convicted they received no jail time.

Back to ProPublica, which reported on how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is using the state’s consumer protection laws to target organizations whose views he doesn’t like. ProPublica also revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas received at least three more free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow, then admitted he should have disclosed all of these junkets. There will continue to be no consequences for any of this.

Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler reports on how Samuel Alito and his comrades are trying to make the Supreme Court, and the country, more explicitly Christian. Lawdork had a post last month on the Alito problem and Chief Justice Roberts’ refusal to confront it.

Microbe.TV has a nearly two-hour episode debunking that awful New York Times op ed by explaining why we know that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from a lab.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) personally solicited a contribution from FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones back in 2018, after which the firm gave $500,000 to DeWine’s dark-money PAC. DeWine has denied any knowledge of the contribution, but text messages show him actively asking for more cash.

A Justice Department investigation found that the Phoenix Police Department used excessive force and violated the civil rights of numerous residents of the city. Meanwhile, a woman whose jaw was broken by deputies of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and whose son served in the Army is now facing deportation.

This Washington Post column from Sophia Laurenzi (which appears to be unlocked) about how she became a death row investigator to try to make sense of her own father’s suicide is beautifully written and avoids any pat answers to these difficult questions.

Some Texas cities have tried to fight poverty by giving money to people in need, with no strings attached, a policy that many economists have advocated for decades, but of course conservatives are fighting it, just like Jesus would have.

The American institute for Economic Research has a short post explaining how stadiums are not “magic” when it comes to urban development.

Meanwhile, the Economic Development Director for Charlotte is falsely claiming that a proposed subsidy for the Panthers’ stadium wouldn’t go to billionaire owner David Tepper.

Violent crime is dropping at historic rates, according to data from the FBI, even though a majority of Americans believe crime is up.

Conservative columnist David French wrote about how his church “cancelled” him for his divergence from the views of the modern Christian nationalist movement – notably their unwavering fealty to Trump and opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

These countries are the most dangerous for LGBTQ+ travelers, and perhaps places you don’t want to spend your money if you’re trying to be an ally.

CEOs who met with Trump found him meandering and incoherent, which shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s seen video of him speaking at any point in the last year. I imagine they’ll still fund him and vote for him, though, because taxes.

Astrophysicists have discovered evidence that the Earth collided with a vast interstellar cloud about 2-3 million years ago, which may have affected the development of life on our planet.

Disgraced singer Gary Glitter, in prison again for violating terms of his parole for previous convictions for sexual abuse of multiple children, has been ordered to pay over 500,000 to one of his victims.

The four members of R.E.M. were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and sat down with CBS’s Anthony Mason to discuss the honor, their careers, their opposition to a reunion, and more.

One AI lobbying group is asking Congress to pass a law banning deepfakes and protecting artists’ rights to their likeness.

The British Medical Journal published a paper that appeared to blame COVID-19 vaccines for a higher excess mortality rate in the last three years, but the employer of the paper’s authors has already come out against the paper’s conclusions.

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s government is considering allowing detention without trial for accused terrorists – but only for Arabs.

Stanford is shutting down its Internet Observatory, which reported on online misinformation and election interference, after attacks from House Republicans and lawsuits from conservatives claiming “censorship.” Renée DiResta, who worked at the SIO, wrote in the Atlantic about her experience at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, charlotte, crime, israel, lgbt rights, links, longreads, misinformation, ohio, phoenix, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

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