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Klawchat 5/25/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Keith Law: It’s just a change in me – something in my liberty. Klawchat.

Spencer: Corey Ray recent performance is reminding me of what made him so intriguing coming out of L’Ville. Obviously a SSS, but what do you think his ceiling as a prospect is nowadays?
Keith Law: Seems like an everyday player, but the chance of him being much more than that is very slim. I’m not sure who changed his setup at the plate, or why, but it cost him a year of development time, and he hasn’t totally regained what was lost.

Bill G: Hi Keith. Given the extreme shifting and the lack of offense, would you support a rule that forces teams to start infielders on the dirt? Seems like the “rover” in the OF is hurting offense more than stacking infielders on one side of the field. Thanks as always for doing these chats.
Keith Law: No, I don’t. One, I think hitters should be more comfortable dropping bunts or shortening up to push groundballs to vacated areas. Two, there’s some research (Russell Carleton has covered this) that the shifts are less effective than they first appear to be.

Jc Cuevas: Is there place in an outfield for a guy like Brandon Nimmo to start? Or is the dreaded SSS? Ty Keith
Keith Law: He should be playing every day vs RHP, and that was true on Opening Day. Of course, the Mets will probably sign Gorman Thomas instead.

David: How likely are the Phillies to maintain their current winning percentage over the course of the season? Also, your thoughts on Kingery’s play so far and what you would do with Crawford when he returns from the DL? Back to AAA or starting SS? Thanks.
Keith Law: They’re not going to win 60% of their games this season. Very few teams do that in any given year. Crawford should be the everyday SS.

Dan: Keith, what’s going on with Giolito? He’s shown flashes during his time with the Sox but getting concerned about his consistency. Anything to worry about long term or just a young pitcher finding his way?
Keith Law: He was great in March, and it seemed like when he left spring training he left all the gains he’d made mechanically back in Arizona. I don’t know if it was the cold, or some undisclosed physical issue (not an injury, but maybe soreness that led to a change), but he’s been totally out of whack all season. His velo is down and command is gone right now. I can’t see rolling him out there as a starter right now until they’ve reestablished his delivery.

addoeh: I see there are more high schools players in your top 10 big board than your mock drafts. Is the difference down to personal preference (maybe higher ceiling vs higher floor) or purely that college players may sign for lower figures? Or something else entirely?
Keith Law: Teams fear the risk of HS players. I get that, but I also think the safety of college players is somewhat overrated. Look at what Haseley and Pavin Smith are doing in high-A right now.

Harrisburg Hal: Do you listen to albums in order (tracks 1-X) or shuffle? I’ve been shuffling ever since i started to listen digitally. I feel like I’m in the minority when talking to others.
Keith Law: In order. I figure the artist intended that.

Todd Boss: What do you think of Tampa’s “opener” strategy? Do you think a team could really try to do an entire staff of relievers? Isn’t that kind of the logical end-game of today’s move towards high velocity short inning reliever focus?
Keith Law: I wonder if teams will respond to this by tweaking the tops of their lineups and eliminating any such advantage. I do like the experimentation, though. Tampa has been so short of starters anyway that they had to do something creative.

Jay C.: Keith, Given Austin Meadows’ impressive SSS performance, does he have a chance to stick w/ the Pirates when Marte returns? How would you project his overall ceiling now after a fairly lackluster minor league career…any changes from your initial assessment?
Keith Law: It’s 25 at bats. you might as well roll a couple of dice.

LexSteele: If you were running the Giants’ draft, assuming the Tigers take Mize #1, who would be your pick at 2?
Keith Law: That’s what my top 100 represents – my personal draft board, based on what I’ve seen (I think I’ve gotten more than 40 of those top 100 in person, the rest are from video + talking to scouts).

Andy: I fully agree that there is a problem with the justice system in this country. The justice system absolutely railroads people into pleading guilty in order to get them through, especially poorer minorities. There are many fundamental issues that should absolutely be debated and rectified. I just don’t think that a white guy who pleaded guilty to doing something untoward with a 6 year old relative is the hill I’m going to start that fight on.
Keith Law: I’m with you. The fact that he was even offered such a deal, with no jail time, is indicative of the privilege of his race & background.

eric: what would a good cardinals package for machado be? you think bader, knitzner, Hudson and helsley get it done?
Keith Law: That actually feels light at the top. It’s a lot of quantity, but I would assume baltimore would want a deal with a better headliner even if it means fewer players.

Andy: Can you imagine how badly the Padres would be doing without Eric Hosmer and his veteran leadership? I mean they would almost assuredly be in last place, competing with the Marlins and Reds at the bottom of the NL.
Keith Law: He actually hasn’t been that bad at the plate, at least – but it’s been irrelevant to them, and by the time they’re good, he probably won’t be.

Rick: Have you seen/ heard any updates on Haseley over the past month? Is this just a blip or has he possibly turned a corner after a rough first year?
Keith Law: I just got a report the other day from a scout who saw Clearwater and had nothing positive to say about the bats on the roster – not Haseley, not Moniak, not Gamboa.

Andy: In NBA and NFL draft circuits, there are a number of guys who rise in the draft based on they look in workouts. Their measurables are huge, but they don’t really impress much in game. Kelenic seems to be a baseball version. He looked good last summer, and now is looking good in basically workouts. Could this lead other players to basically work out for a year instead of playing in a less than rigorous high school baseball season that could expose actual flaws?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’ll ever be widespread, but for kids who play in weird environments – cold weather states, states without HS baseball or who only have it in the summer – it could make a ton of sense. However, such players lose out on the benefits of playing real games in a team environment, and scouts lose the opportunity to see how the players react to real game situations.

Rick: Just wanted to say I bought your book last week on Amazon and already finished. It was great. Thanks for writing it.
Keith Law: Thanks! I’m thrilled you liked it. It makes up for that alt right meanie who said he’d never read my “damn book” this morning.

Jo-Nathan: Any chance you move Vasil up on your board after his clean two innings?
Keith Law: Two whole innings? Wow.

Trixie: What is the funniest book you ever read?
Keith Law: Gosh, that’s a good question. Jasper Fforde’s books have really made me laugh out loud in a way that few other authors have. Wodehouse too.

Matt: Been watching Josh Stowers tear it up for Louisville this season. Top-200 kind of guy this year?
Keith Law: Top 200 yes. Interesting combination of a little pop, some speed, probably CF in the long term, doesn’t have the present hit tool of some of the other college CF in the class.

George R.: Fernando Tatis, Jr’s April: .177/.231/.333, BB 6%, K 33% May: .340/.427/.649 BB 10%, K 26% And he’s still 19 in AA. Can people chill out with the doom and gloom talk?
Keith Law: Yep. We do this every year. By the way, i saw Bloom from MLB is still killing the Padres’ system, including Tatis. I don’t get that at all.

Justin: Hi Keith, With HS/College pitchers throwing excessive amounts of pitches in games. What would be the reaction from MLB front offices if the kid decided he was done at a certain amount of pitches and took himself out of the game? ie looking toward his future instead of one game. Thanks and have a great weekend.
Keith Law: Teams would be thrilled. They know who’s been overused, and they often slide such players down slightly on their boards.

Matthew: You’ve previously stated that baseball is mainly just a job for you, and that your hobbies lie more in the other things you write about. If money were not an issue for you, which subjects would you continue to write about, among your many published interests (baseball, books, movies, board games, music, cooking, etc.)? Would you keep writing at all?
Keith Law: I’d definitely keep writing. If I won the lottery (which I don’t play, because lotteries are a tax on people who suck at math), I’d still keep up the blog.
Keith Law: I’m not sure I’d keep writing about baseball if it weren’t a job, because I would be afraid I’d no longer be good at it if I weren’t pursuing it full time.

Slidepiece: Just curious, have you ever participated in a fantasy baseball keeper league?
Keith Law: Not in more than 15 years.

Tim: Hey Keith did you get a chance to listen to the new Arctic Monkeys album yet? Very different sound for them.
Keith Law: The good news is that if you liked “No.1 Party Anthem,” the new album contains Party Anthems Nos. 2-12.

Larry: Would Gorman still be your pick for Atlanta?
Keith Law: Yes. Could also see Singer there. They loved Vasil before the injury; not sure they’d do that at 8 now.

Swag: Thoughts on Welington Castillo’s suspension and apology?
Keith Law: I couldn’t care less about the suspension. The apology was surprisingly straightforward. That’s as close as we’ve gotten to an actual admission.

Greg: Can you talk me into liking Nolan Gorman? Contact questions, no clear defensive spot. I just don’t know what makes him in consideration for top 10 teams?
Keith Law: He has the most power of anyone in the class.

Mac: Is Jonathan India in play for the White Sox at 4? If he can play 2B does he have a higher ceiling than Madrigal?
Keith Law: I think he’s probably on the outside for them but in consideration. By that I mean that he’s probably not in their top 4 (I think, it’s not like they showed it to me), so it’s very unlikely he ends up their pick.

Matt: If you were running the Jays when would you call up Vlad Jr.?
Keith Law: I liked Buster’s idea of calling him up to DH when they trade Donaldson. Right now, he should be in AAA, but they also should either make it clear to him he has to improve on defense to get a callup, or just move him to a position he can credibly play. He’s no better than a 40 defender at third right now and probably less.

WarBiscuit: Mize has seemed to struggled(for his standards) in 4 of his last 5 starts after yesterday and past his innings of 85(college+USA) already. Concerned? And could this caused him to slip slightly from 1?
Keith Law: Not concerned. He hasn’t really struggled either; the start vs Florida he was outpitched by Singer in the box score but looked much better to scouts.

Andrew: I’m terrified the Tigers are going to take a bat instead of Mize. Is this concern valid?
Keith Law: That they might do so? Yes. That it would be a mistake? That’s debatable. I would take Mize. I don’t have a pick or a budget.

Sal: Peterson, Kay, Dunn, Alonso…cause for cautious optimism for Mets fans? What kind of GUY is Alonso?
Keith Law: Yep, most of the healthy guys are faring well at the moment. I saw they put Dom Smith in LF in AAA, though, which is … interesting, and not in a good way.

Bret: Which Cardinal OF prospect are you buying long term as an every day player, if any…Bader, O’Neill or Mercado? I’m personally bias towards Mercado. Thanks.
Keith Law: Mercado has the most upside. Bader’s a regular. Still see some real swing and miss concerns with O’Neill. He’s also the worst defender of the 3.

Joe: When will Brendan Rogers be up?
Keith Law: Next year? I’m not sure there’s an impetus to get him up sooner.

Jordan: Nick Dunn from University of MD a first day guy, or return to school guy?
Keith Law: There’s an ocean in between those two options and he’s in it. Probably 6th-10th round.

Mike: Dennis Santana a major league starter? If so, more back-end or something more?
Keith Law: The performance this year would indicate starter and he has two pluses in the FB and breaking ball. What I do not buy is the sudden flip in his platoon split.

Bill: Love the chats, will finally be getting around to your book this summer. What are your thoughts on Shane Bieber’s ceiling?
Keith Law: Lack of huge stuff might mean a league average ceiling but the command is very real and should help him pitch well above what the radar gun might indicate.

Mark: Do teams emphasize certain pitches? The fangraphs Padres prospect list seemed to have the changeup as the best offspeed pitch, is that organization specific?
Keith Law: That’s been a Preller fetish going way back to Texas. He loved signing DR/VZ kids with arm strength and a changeup.

Alex: Was recently reading the UZR section of Smart Baseball – with how much shifting there is now, is that stat essentially meaningless for assigning individual credit/blame because the historical data is so different?
Keith Law: I believe UZR still omits plays listed as having shifts, but you’d be better off asking Mitchel on Twitter (he’s very responsive) about how he’s handling such plays now.

Mac: Who’s the guy moving up draft boards that surprised you the most?
Keith Law: Schnell. Power is real, good athlete for sure. Not a CF, big arm bar at the plate. Curious whether his above-average speed lasts – his body type seems more likely to settle in as average speed as he gets bigger & stronger.

Dan: Chances that Schwarber wins the Gold Glove? His #s are looking pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Keith Law: Defensive numbers in ~50 games are really not meaningful.

Greg: Any concern about Kyle Wright this year? Numbers are extremely mediocre for a college arm who was in consideration at 1.1.
Keith Law: No they’re not. He’s in AA – most college players are in high-A less than 12 months out of the draft.

Dylan Bundy: Why do the Orioles trot me out for the 9th inning of a 9-3 game??
Keith Law: I have no idea. Letting him go 8 at just over 100 pitches seemed fine. I’m sure they had at least one reliever who could get three outs without giving up six runs. Given Bundy’s history of elbow and shoulder problems, plus the way he faded last year after a few weeks when he was very good and worked harder, they should be extremely cautious.

Joe: Your Kepler vs. lefties prediction looks good so far, but do you think his numbers vs righties will improve?
Keith Law: Yes.

Aaron C.: So…of all the players you’ve ever scouted — who actually became successful major leaguers — who had the worst swing as an amateur/minor leaguer?
Keith Law: Pedroia comes to mind. Max effort, kind of straight uphill.

Marc: Listened to the rest of the CHVRCHES album? Overall thoughts?
Keith Law: I’ve heard five songs and none are good.

addoeh: Are the people who defend Heimlich that say “I hope I’m not judged on the worst thing I ever did” subtlely admitting the worst thing they ever did approaches molesting a six year old? I hope not.
Keith Law: It’s amazing how people will tie themselves in knots to defend the kid with nary a thought for the victim.

Ed: Hi Keith. A few years ago I made your Guiness Stout Cupcakes and everyone agreed that they were some of the best we’ve ever had. Recently, when I asked my wife what kind of birthday cake she’d like me to make this year (we have a tradition of making each other’s cakes from scratch), she said the best, moistest chocolate cake possible. After thinking about it, it crossed my mind to use the guiness recipe, but for a traditional 2 layer cake instead of cupcakes. 2 Question for you – any reservations about doing this? And if you did it, what changes would you make to the temp, baking time, recipe, etc. Thank you so much!
Keith Law: Drop the temp 50 degrees. Line the cake pans with parchment circles and then butter them. I think everything else would be fine. Cupcakes really are just mini cakes; the recipes tend to work the same way.

Joe: Heard anything about David Fletcher? The numbers are outstanding
Keith Law: The numbers are in Salt Lake, a great hitters’ park. He had a .316 OBP and .339 SLG last year.

Nate: Will Dwight Smith Jr. hit enough to be a passable everyday OF?
Keith Law: I would bet against it.

Kevin: Good move in your opinion DFA’ing Hanley to make room for Pedroia? Probably means playing time for Moreland and Swihart.
Keith Law: If Swihart plays more, yes. Hanley might be done. After a hot start he fell back to earth with a thud.

Aaron: If kershaw were to opt out after this year what kind of contract would you be comfortable offering him?
Keith Law: That’s more a question about his medical outlook than performance. I’d be fine going $30 million a year if the doctors told me they expected him to stay healthy.

Rob: Based on early season results, which farm system seems to have taken the biggest step forward and which has taken the biggest step back?
Keith Law: I don’t like using early season results to draw broad conclusions.

Adam Trask: It’s not the ball, so can we now blame climate change for the increase in home runs?
Keith Law: It is the ball, right? But MLB says they don’t know why. The drag coefficient dropped. If it’s not the ball, then what is it?

Walker: Any new food recommendations for your trip to Durham?
Keith Law: Had great meals at M Kokko and Luna.

Dr. Bob: The Luke Heimlich story just gets worse. Last year he said he took “responsibility for my conduct as a teenager.” But earlier this month said that absolutely nothing happened and they took the plea deal for reasons. If nothing happened, there was nothing to apologize for a year ago. If something happened, then he’s lying now. An even bigger red flag to me.
Keith Law: Agreed. This all feels like a publicity campaign orchestrated by a lawyer. Another team reached out to me in the last hour to say he’s off their board, so that’s at least two (with Texas, per Gerry Fraley).

Billiam: What was your assessment of Ryan McMahon coming up? Seems like the Rockies have yo-yo’d him around and not given him a fair shot to succeed.
Keith Law: I think he’s an above-average regular, but they won’t play him every day or close to it.

Tony: I know all the SSS caveats still apply, but has something philosophically shifted in Nick Pivetta that has turned him into a throw-in in the Papelbon dump to an actual bona fide mid-rotation or better starter?
Keith Law: He’s not a mid-rotation or better starter given his trouble with LHB.

Joshua: Does H. Ramirez contract vest if he accumulates his at bats with another team?
Keith Law: If someone trades for him or claims him, yes. If he’s released and signs a new deal, no.

SL: Do you remain bullish on Dominic Smiths long term upside as you have in the past?
Keith Law: Yes. But he’s stagnating in AAA now.

Benny Agbayani: You were leading the Nimmo bandwagon for years before anyone else, so kudos for that, but it seems you are less enthused than others now. Do you see any hope for him against lefties? Even his approach seems off against them.
Keith Law: He might improve vs LHB if he faces them more, but the Mets don’t seem inclined to give him more reps. It’s not ideal. I think he can be a half a star – a guy who’s so good vs RHB that, with the right platoon partner, they get star-caliber production in total from one lineup spot but require two players.

Rob: Thoughts on the new At the Gates?
Keith Law: A little predictable and less melodic than the comeback record or Slaughter of the Soul.

Sammy: Have you seen/heard anything about a Jeff McNeil?
Keith Law: He’s 26 in AA.

Greg: Did Denaburg’s recent outing mean he’s likely to sign now?
Keith Law: I would say it means he’s healthy enough that someone will try to draft and sign him. That’s not saying he WILL sign. I don’t know what his bonus demands might be.

Robbie: Do you think at some point the negatives of keeping pujols playing will finally outweigh whatever negatives the angels feel benching him (PR, embarrassment, “disrespect”, money) this season? Or could they be determined to go down with him on the ship? I feel like Moreno is specifically tied to him rolling out there everyday.
Keith Law: With Pujols reaching 3000 and Ohtani making all the headlines, they could probably fade whatever backlash they receive, if any, from releasing the guy. He’s toast.

Aaron C.: Rumors on the west coast that the A’s may be relocating their AAA team to the new Las Vegas ballpark. Can *anything* be done to make a MiLB park less cartoonish regarding offensive numbers it produces?
Keith Law: First thing I’d do out there would be install a humidor. Vegas is dry as hell.

Jeff: Brandon Nimmo now has a career 128 wrc+ in over 400 PAs—this Guy for real?
Keith Law: wRC+ is a great stat, but it doesn’t know if you’ve played full-time or been platooned.

Don: Can Zack Collins be a league average player if he’s not behind the plate?
Keith Law: I don’t think so, but maybe he has enough power + patience to pull it off.

Matthew: A first round pick turns into an above average #4 starter. Is the pick a success because he is a regular contributor or a failure because of the low ceiling given the draft position?
Keith Law: That depends on where in the round he was picked. At pick 1, that’s a disappointment. At pick 20, that’s a win.
Keith Law: “Failure” is not a nice word for any player, but especially inapt for an above average #4 starter (so, like a league average starter).

Jo-Nathan: Are you planning to watch the new season of Arrested Development?
Keith Law: Probably. I haven’t read the NYT interview yet – I have it saved to read later today.

Eron: Folty taken a real step this year or expect him his numbers to start declining soon?
Keith Law: I’m buying it.

Bill: You had K. Hayes > Meadows preseason. I never saw an explanation. Care to elaborate ?
Keith Law: If you didn’t see an explanation, then you never read my Pirates farm report. Hayes is an elite defensive 3b. He’s still the better prospect.

Gore : If you can remember, how does Singer compare/contrast to Nola as a prospect out of college?
Keith Law: I remember very well. Nola had better fastball command and a better third pitch.

Pete: Profar seems to be coming on a little bit here. Do you think he could still be a star offensively? Or has his ceiling changed now?
Keith Law: After all that lost time I’m almost afraid to get excited about his little run of success.

Nick: So I understand that you dropped Alex Reyes in your prospect rankings due to the uncertainty around TJ recovery which makes sense. Now that he is healthy and completely dominat. Where would he rank among other starting pitching prospects? First ?
Keith Law: No, not first, not after multiple arm issues. He’s also dominating a level below where he’s pitched before.

Pete: Blake Snell looking like the real deal here as you predicted. Still a #2 in your eyes or potentially higher?
Keith Law: I’ll probably stick with that.

Jeff: What are your thoughts on Grant Lavigne? Where do you think he ends up going?
Keith Law: Day one. Maybe comp round, more likely second. I’ll continue filling in capsules on the remaining top 100 players without them over the next week.

Gest : Do you think the splitter is becoming more popular for American amateur pitchers?
Keith Law: I do not.

Lel: What does your mock schedule look like at this point? How many more until the 4th?
Keith Law: One next week, Weds or Thurs, and one on the morning of the draft itself.

Jon: So far a 6-man rotation has been working for the Angels. At this rate will Angels pitchers be less fatigued come September compared to other teams (i.e. Heaney, Skaggs)? Also Do you think other MLB teams take note and say “hey maybe this works” and implement it in their rotations maybe next year?
Keith Law: I think the experimentation – Angels, Rays – will continue across baseball. Teams are looking for better ways to get more from their pitchers while also limiting injuries/

Butts: Curious on your take on Griffin Roberts. Starter? Heard his change looked pretty okay yesterday.
Keith Law: His change was there in March too. It’s the delivery. There isn’t a starter in the majors who looks like that.

Mark: Did Mackenzie Gore ever have blister problems in HS? Does he project higher than a #3 starter?
Keith Law: He projects as a 1.

Mike: Brad Brach to the Nats for Y Antuna…. Who says no?
Keith Law: The Nats would laugh at that.

Estuve : What possible adjustment do you think there might be for pitchers to make to Meadows? He has looked great at the plate so far.
Keith Law: They could wait a minute.

John: I wrestle with at what point do we allow those who have served their time to fully reintegrate into society and what jobs do we allow them? Heimlich appears to be making it easy to deny rehabilitation given his reversal on responsibility. Where does one draw the line on acceptable jobs for them (and what does that say about the non-convicts who do those jobs) and how much rehabilitation it takes to migrate up the acceptable job scale. What’s the worst thing someone could have done and how much time served before they can professionally play baseball?
Keith Law: If you commit acts of violence, sexual or physical, against children, you don’t get to play pro baseball. It’s not really that difficult. There isn’t any rehabilitation for paraphiliacs.

Ed: I’m really curious about the 6’11 pitcher in the draft. Have we ever seen anyone who could produce such downplane? And what effect would you expect that produce?
Keith Law: We have – but nearly all of them ended up hurt and/or in relief.

Darryl: Due to medicals is T.Beck now a 3-4 round pick? Does Nico Hoerner have a chance to be an early round pick?
Keith Law: Hoerner goes day one. I’ve heard late first but I think somewhere in 31-45 more likely.
Keith Law: Beck … I don’t know what the medicals say. He’s a huge risk having missed a whole year with a back injury, but that’s about all I know.

John: Have you seen or heard anything about Jonathan Hernandez? Is he making a case for T100, or not until he shows it in AA?
Keith Law: You don’t get on to the top 100 because you had two great starts against the same (not that good) lineup.

Darryl: Does Senzel get the phone call before/after the ASB?
Keith Law: He’s out with vertigo. No timetable.

Boots Boots: Luis Alexander Basabe. Is he legit? Everything seems so much better this season so far.
Keith Law: He was also hurt for part of last year, IIRC.

Zac: Where would you rank Mize in the Tigers pitching prospects? I believe you have it as Perez, Burrows, Faedo, and Manning
Keith Law: He’s better than all of those guys. I really think he could pitch in a major league bullpen right now.

Jason: Chris Davis in the running for worst contract in MLB history? 4 more years at $23mil per and an OPS+ of 37 this year!
Keith Law: Ralph thought it was a good deal.

Adam: Is Sean Newcombs hot streak SSS? Not sure where his walk rate stands but the eye test says hes throwing way more first pitch strikes.
Keith Law: He’s really not throwing more strikes; he had one outlier start vs the Mets where he threw 70 out of 97 pitches for strikes, but the rest of the year he’s still down around 61%. Great stuff, below average control. Definitely someone you keep starting while he’s missing bats, but I think he’ll always leave you expecting more given how good the pitches are.

Bernard: Is there a current MLB comp for Eloy Jimenez?
Keith Law: Probably.

YABoySwaggyP: No chance that the White Sox dont take Madrigal if there at 4, right?
Keith Law: Absolutely a chance they don’t. Maybe a good chance they don’t.

Newt: Have you checked out Cobra Kai, the Karate Kid reboot with Macchio and Billy Zabka. Surprisingly, it’s really good.
Keith Law: I’m in the minority of folks my age, but I never loved Karate Kid and don’t share the nostalgia for it that my peers seem to.

j: Thoughts on Garrett Whitlock and/or Erik Swanson of the Yankees?
Keith Law: I was hoping to see Swanson’s next start for Trenton, but he’s in AAA now; I’m going to try to see him on SWB’s homestand after the draft (I can’t go tomorrow because it’s Date Night with my daughter). I
Keith Law: I’ve heard he’s changed a few things and I want to see it for myself.

Steve: Hey Keith, two years ago I bitches at you for saying the Phillies shouldn’t/wouldn’t take Groome number one overall. I will never doubt you again. Having said that, if you were in the Phillies organization, where would you like to see Sixto by the end of this year? With regards to stats and level in the minors.
Keith Law: Double-A is fine. I would love to see him stretch a little more out within games, but after he had some minor arm soreness in the spring they may not want to push him.

Jay: KC’s top prospects look good so far this year. Do you see any of Matias, Pratto, Lee, or Melendez as top 100 guys next year?
Keith Law: Lee would be today – he barely missed the cut. I’m not sure what you’re looking at when you say Pratto or Matias look good, though; both have OBPs in the .310s and Matias is still striking out at an untenable rate.

Mark: How close was Grant Little to making the top 100?
Keith Law: He wasn’t a consideration. (He’s a draft-eligible sophomore at Texas Tech, for folks who don’t know the name.)

Zac: Does a team draft Luke Heimlich?
Keith Law: Someone will.

Tom: Just saw Ashcroft perform last week – he was amazing. It’s too bad bands like the Verve can’t make it work.
Keith Law: Their one comeback album before they called it quits was good even without any standout singles.

Chimmy: Know anything about Trent Deveaux?
Keith Law: I do. As does everyone who read about him in my Angels org report in January.

Joe: Your insightful mock and earlier comments aside, would Kelenic be a reach at 2?
Keith Law: No, not IMO. Not my choice at 2 but not a reach. At 1, over Mize, yes.

YABoySwaggyP: Would Seth Beer be a good value pick for the White Sox at 46?
Keith Law: Yes, I’d be good with that, but I bet he’s gone by then.

Neil: I will use Vlad as an example here, but realise in his case this question may be flawed. But what do you do with a prospect that has a tool that is major league ready, but still needs to develop elsewhere. In the case of Vlad, are you hurting his development as a hitter by keeping him in AA where he is dominating, even though he still needs experience there for other parts of his game?
Keith Law: It depends on your long-term plan for the player – and you need to have one. If you think he can really learn that position, then you get him somewhere where he can work on it, with the best coach you have for that skill. If you think, as I do, that Vlad probably never plays 3b as a regular, then just call him up and make him a DH.

Alec: Why is it that most people ignore the existential threat that Donald Trump brings by being president? From talking to a lot of people, it is as if most of them have this built in idea in their brains that everything will turn out okay in the end. I think this stems from religion, but it is scary wherever it stems from.
Keith Law: I see, at best, a decade of trying to undo the damage done just in the last eighteen months. And it could be MUCH worse.

DaveAlden53: The Dodgers lead the NL West in run differential and are back to within 3.5 games of the lead. Is the ship righted or is it still leaking below the waterline from injuries?
Keith Law: Can’t it be both? I think it’s kind of both.

Jordan: Should I take the significantly K lower rate from Austin Beck as a sign of his progress?
Keith Law: It’s lower, and that’s good, since he seemed like a guy who might punch out like crazy with the jump to full-season ball.
Keith Law: BTW, Jordon Adell’s contact rate in his first month-plus in full-season ball has been amazing. No matter what else he did, I figured he’d swing and miss a lot more.

JaKob: Hey Keith, do teams track the amount of pitches thrown opposed to the number of actual innings they throw.. Seems like the # of innings could be skewed for a guy that labors through innings and throws say 100 pitches in a 5 inning game.. He would be getting more work than a guy that averages 80 pitches per inning (however, it’d appear they pitched the same amount if you just looked at IP)
Keith Law: Of course they do.

Pat D: Keith, I’ve said before I’m not on Twitter for any number of reasons. Lately when I’ve read your Twitter feed, I’ve been filled with notions of joining Twitter just to argue with people who comment on yours (all due respect, stick to baseball guy comes to mind). Please reassure me that such an action would be a very silly thing to do.
Keith Law: Twitter is essential to my job and my career as a whole. It is also a massive source of aggravation, especially since they still don’t take their own policies on harassment, abuse, or copyrights seriously at all.

Kevin: Where would Tirso Ornelas go in this draft? Love his swing
Keith Law: Back of the first.

PhilW: Keith – have you had a chance to see Chris Paddack pitch at Lake Elsinore? Seems to be fully recovered from TJ and putting up ridiculous K/BB ratios. Does he have a chance to move way up the prospect rankings or are there any factors limiting his ceiling?
Keith Law: I saw him throw a sim game in March and raved about him then.

Greg: I get that Gorman’s power is the reason he’s in the top 10. But that’s the only thing he does well, right? Is that really worthy of a top 10 pick?
Keith Law: He’s not a slug; he’s a decent athlete who could probably become a solid enough defender at third with work. You’re really underrating him.

Jordan: Does Virginia ruin good prospects?
Keith Law: Pitchers, yes.

Paul: Are you a believer in the Mets Peter Alonso, if so, why not shift him to LF like the Phillies have done with Hoskins and leave 1B to D. Smith who is the better fielder at 1B?
Keith Law: Have you ever laid eyes on Alonso? Smith is the better defender but that doesn’t mean you can just put Alonso wherever you want to.

Moe Mentum: If you’re a prospective college student who is undecided on a major, is an Ivy League school a good or bad place to “figure it out”?
Keith Law: I can only speak to Harvard, and it’s a terrible place for that. We had to declare at the end of our freshman year, and I certainly wasn’t ready at that point.

Brian: Being on below average team in a below average conference is killer for a prospect. Owen Miller of Illinois State had a fantastic year and he is nowhere to be found on any prospect lists. Similar to how Paul Dejong was overlooked.
Keith Law: Dejong wasn’t overlooked. He went in the 4th round. But yes, playing bad competition hurts your stock, and Miller hasn’t posted a good walk rate or shown any power in a really bad conference this year.

Roger: Since you are higher than the industry on Noah Naylor, what do you think his ceiling could be if everything clicks? Perhaps a Devers type?
Keith Law: Nothing at all like Devers. I think Naylor’s an above-average regular at third who hits for high average with some pop and value on the bases. Devers is a fucking monster.

Tom: What do you think of Spencer Torkelson? Can he be a guy?
Keith Law: Not really – not like the HR total would imply, at least.

Dan: Most likely to fall in the draft due to signability concerns?
Keith Law: Cecconi would have gone top 10-15 if he’d been healthy & was signable up there.

Rum Guy: Knowing you’re a rum guy, you recommend dark & stormy or what else?
Keith Law: That’s fine if you have a blended dark rum. Better rums are for sipping neat.

Cletus: How much of Giolito’s struggles are related to the Nats’ changing his mechanics, and how much is he just “not the guy the scouting report claimed 4 years ago” ?
Keith Law: He was that guy in March. If his velocity wasn’t back at that point, then your snark might have a kernel of truth to it.

UGW: Jakson Reetz finally becoming a *guy*? Still just 22.
Keith Law: I was a big fan out of the draft, but I saw him here two weeks ago and I don’t think so. It’s just 100 PA, and it’s really all walks – he’s working the count but the impact isn’t there.

Alec: Thoughts on Tomi Lauren incident?
Keith Law: She’s awful. I think throwing water on her just feeds her victim complex. And I don’t know what it accomplished.

PD: Where does Moniak rank in the all time #1 draft busts?
Keith Law: He’s 20. Let’s hold off on that, shall we?
Keith Law: OK, sorry I can’t get to more questions – there are hundreds unanswered in the queue – but I do have a few other things to do today and am hoping to take most of tomorrow off. Thank you as always for reading. Stay tuned for another mock next week, either Wednesday or Thursday (please don’t ask me Weds where it is, it’ll run whenever my editors want to run it), and one more on draft day. I’ll also tweet/post to FB when I add more notes to the top 100. Have a safe Memorial Day weekend!

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→ May 25, 2018
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Whistling Vivaldi.

In this era of increased awareness of cognitive biases and how they affect human behavior, stereotype threat seems to be lagging behind similar phenomena in its prevalence in policy discussions. Stereotype threat refers to how common stereotypes about demographic groups can then affect how members of those groups perform in tasks that are covered by the stereotypes. For example, women fare worse on math tests than men because there’s a pervasive stereotype about women being inferior at math. African-American students perform worse on tests that purport to measure ‘intelligence’ for a similar reason. The effect is real, with about two decades of research testifying to its existence, although there’s still disagreement over how strong the effect is in the real world (versus structured experiments).

Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele, a former provost at Columbia University and himself African-American, wrote a highly personal account of what we know about stereotype threat and its presence in and effects on higher education in the United States in Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. Steele blends personal anecdotes – his own and those of others – with the research, mostly in lab settings, that we have to date on stereotype threat, which, again, has largely focused on demonstrating its existence and the pernicious ways in which it can affect not just performance on tests but decisions by students on what to study or even where to do so. The resulting book, which runs a scant 200 pages, is less academic in nature than Thinking Fast and Slow and its ilk, and thus a little less intellectually satisfying, but it’s also an easier read and I think the sort of book anyone can read regardless of their backgrounds in psychology or even in reading other books on human behavior.

The best-known proofs of stereotype threat, which Steele recounts throughout the first two thirds of the book, come from experiments where two groups are asked to take a specific test that encompasses a stereotype of one of the groups – for example, men and women are given a math test, especially one where they are told the test itself measures their math skills. In one iteration, the test-takers are told beforehand that women tend to fare worse than men on tests of mathematical abilities; in another iteration, they’re told no such thing, or something irrelevant. Whether it’s women and math, blacks and intelligence, or another stereotype, the results are consistently – the ‘threatened’ group performs worse than expected (based on predetermined criteria like grades in math classes or scores on standardized math tests) when they’re reminded of the stereotype before the test. Steele recounts several such experiments, even someone that don’t involve academic goals (e.g., whites underperforming in tests of athleticism),and shows that not only do the threatened groups perform worse, they often perform less – answering fewer questions or avoiding certain tasks.

Worse for our academic world is that stereotype threat appears to lead to increased segregation in the classroom and deters threatened groups from pursuing classes or majors that fall into the stereotyped category. If stereotype threat is directly* or indirectly convincing women not to choose STEM majors, or steering African-American students away from more academically rigorous majors or schools, then we need policy changes to try to address the threat and either throttle it before it starts or counteract it once it has begun. And Steele argues, with evidence, that stereotype threat begins much earlier than most people aware of the phenomenon would guess. Stereotype threat can be found, again through experiment, in kids as young as six years old. Marge and Homer may not have taken Lisa’s concerns about Malibu Stacy seriously, but she was more right than even the Simpsons writers of the time (who were probably almost all white men) realized.

* For example, do guidance counselors or academic advisors tell female students not to major in math or engineering? Do they discourage black students from applying to the best possible colleges to which they might gain admission?

To keep Whistling Vivaldi readable, Steele intersperses his recounting of academic studies with personal anecdotes of his own or of students and professors he’s met throughout his academic career. The anecdote of the title is almost painful to read – it’s from a young black man who noticed how differently white pedestrians would treat him on the street, avoiding eye contact or even crossing to the other side, so he adopted certain behaviors, not entirely consciously, to make himself seem less threatening. One of them was whistling classical music, like that of Vivaldi. Other stories demonstrate subtle changes in behavior in class that also result from stereotype threat, and show how students in threatened groups perform better in environments where the threat is diminished by policies, positive environments, or sheer numbers.

Stereotype threat is a major and almost entirely unaddressed policy issue for teachers, principals, and local politicians, at the very least. Avoiding our own use, even in jest, of such stereotypes can help start the process of ending how they affect the next generation of students, but the findings Steele recounts in Whistling Vivaldi call for much broader action. It’s essential reading for anyone who works in or wishes to work in education at any level.

Next up: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

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→ May 24, 2018
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A Brief History of Infinity.

Infinity is a big topic, to put it mildly. The mere concept of a limitless quantity has vexed mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians for over two centuries. The Greeks developed some of the first infinite series, some divergent (they approach infinity) and some convergent (they approach a finite number), with Zeno making use of these concepts in some of his famous paradoxes. Galileo is better known for his observations in astronomy and work in optics, but he developed an early paradox that he argued meant that we couldn’t compare the sizes of infinite sets in a meaningful way, showing that, although we know intuitively that there are more integers in total than there are integers that are perfect squares, you can map the integers to the perfect squares in a 1:1 ratio that appears to show that the two sets are the same size. Georg Cantor later explained this paradox in his development of set theory, coining the aleph terminology for infinite sets, and then went mad trying to further his theories of infinity, a math-induced insanity that later afflicted Kurt Gödel in his work on incompleteness. There remain numerous – dare I say infinite? – unsolved problems in mathematics that revolve around infinity itself or whether there are an infinite number of some entity, such as primes or perfect numbers, in the infinite set of whole numbers or integers.

Science writer Brian Clegg attempts to make these topics accessible to the lay reader in his book A Brief History of Infinity, part of the Brief History series from the imprint Constable & Robinson. Rather than delving too far into the mathematics of the infinite, which would require more than passing introductions to set theory, the transfinite numbers, and integral calculus, Clegg focuses on the history of infinity as a concept in math and philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks, walking through western scholars’ troubles with infinity (and objections from the Church), telling the well-known story of Newton and Leibniz’s fight over “the” calculus, and bringing the reader up through the works of Cantor, Gödel, and other modern mathematicians in illuminating the infinite both large and small. (It’s $6 for the Kindle and $5 for the paperback as I write this.)

Infinity can be inconvenient, but we couldn’t have modern calculus without it, and it comes up repeatedly in other fields including fractal mathematics and quantum physics. Sometimes it’s the infinitely small – the “ghosts of departed quantities” called infinitesimals that Newton and Leibniz required for integration – and sometimes it’s infinitely large, but despite several millennia of attempts to argue infinity out of mathematics, there’s no avoiding its existence and even the necessity of using it. Clegg excels when recounting great controversies over infinity from the history of math, such as the battle between Newton and Leibniz over who invented the calculus, or the battle between Cantor and his former teacher Leopold Kronecker, who disdained not just infinity but even the transcendental numbers (like π, e, or the Hilbert number) and actively worked to prevent Cantor from publishing his seminal papers on set theory.

Clegg’s book won’t likely satisfy the more math-inclined readers who want a crunchier treatment of this topic, especially the recent history of infinity from Cantor forward. Cantor developed modern set theory and published numerous proofs about infinity, proving that there are at least two distinct sets of infinities (the integers, aleph-null, are infinite, but not as numerous as the real numbers, aleph-one; aleph notation measures the cardinality of infinities, not the quantity of infinity itself). I also found Clegg’s discussion of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems rather … um … incomplete, which is understandable given the theorems’ abstract nature, but also meant Gödel earned very little screen time in the book other than the overemphasized parallel between his own descent into insanity and Cantor’s. I was disappointed that he didn’t get into Russell’s paradox*, which is a critical link between Cantor’s work (and Hilbert’s hope for a resolution in favor of completeness) and Gödel’s finding that completeness was impossible.

Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of R … but that produces a contradiction by the definition of R.

Clegg does a much better job than David Foster Wallace did in his own book on infinity, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which tried to get into the mathier stuff but ultimately failed to make the material accessible enough to the reader (and perhaps exposed the limits of Wallace’s knowledge of the topic too). This is a book just about anyone who took one calculus class can follow, and it has enough personal intrigue to hold the reader’s attention. My personal taste in history of science/math books leans towards the more technical or granular, but I wouldn’t use that as an indictment of Clegg’s approach here.

Next up: I’m reading another Nero Wolfe mystery, after which I’ll tackle Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient.

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→ May 23, 2018
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Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

Hayao Miyazaki is retired, or so he says – he’s pulled this trick before, at least – but his protégés continue to make films that are very much in the spirit of his work, with the latest incarnation Mary & the Witch’s Flower (amazon • iTunes), a 2017 release in Japan that received a brief theatrical release here in January. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (who also directed The Secret World of Arriety and When Marnie Was There for Ghibli) and animated by Studio Ponoc, the film was an enormous commercial success in its native country and deserved a far better fate here. It was eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this past winter, and was yet another entry that was passed over for the execrable Boss Baby.

Based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart called The Little Broomstick, Mary & the Witch’s Flower tells the story of the young girl of the title, who discovers a rare flower in the woods near her great aunt’s estate: the fly-by-night, a glowing flower that, according to local legend, is valued by witches for its immense magical powers. She finds the flower with the help of two cats, Gib and Tib, who then lead her to a broomstick that takes her to a secret magical school in the clouds, Endor, but this isn’t Hogwarts or Brakebills, and something is very amiss with the headmistress (voiced by Kate Winslet) and the chemistry teacher (Jim Broadbent). When they find out Mary (Ruby Barnhill of The BFG) has the fly-by-night, they drop all pretense and seem willing to try anything to seize the flower, including kidnapping Mary’s friend Peter to try to turn him into a warlock. Mary has to choose whether to use her last remaining bulbs to rescue her friend, and also finds out (somewhat predictably) that this isn’t her family’s first encounter with the fly-by-night or Endor and its faculty.

Miyazaki’s films have a distinctive look and feel, including a particular appreciation for natural landscapes and an obsession with flying; Yonebayashi brings all of those visual and aural elements to Mary & the Witch’s Flower, to the point where I doubt most casual fans of the genre would recognize that Miyazaki wasn’t directly involved in this film. It also has the same sort of childlike sense of wonder that most of the master’s scripts brought, but the story itself isn’t as tight or compelling; it’s pretty obvious that Mary’s getting home, Peter probably isn’t going to turn into some sort of monster, and who the mysterious girl in red from the cold open grows up to be. It’s a kids’ movie that’s really just for kids, whereas Miyazaki’s best movies — Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Ponyo — were much more nuanced and thoughtful, so that they offered something for adults as well as children. I know Miyazaki’s students won’t and can’t just replicate all aspects of his films, but Yonebayashi seems to have focused here on mimicking the style of his mentor without providing the same kind of substance that a film like this should offer.

Of course, it’s still #BetterThanBossBaby.

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→ May 21, 2018
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Thank You for Being Late.

Thomas Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is a solid book about the fast-moving present and immediate future written by a man whose prose is firmly, almost embarrassingly stuck in the past. Friedman has obviously thought deeply about the topics in this collection of connected essays, and talked to many experts, and there are many insights here that would be useful to almost anyone in or soon to enter the American workforce, as well as to the people who are attempting to manage and regulate this fast-moving economy. It was just hard to get through the clunky writing and jokes that don’t even rise to dad level.

Friedman’s main thesis here is that the world is accelerating, and many people – I think his main audience is Americans, although it’s not limited to them – are unprepared for it. Technology has substantially increased the pace of change since the Industrial Revolution, and 100-plus years of accelerations now has the developed world changing at a rate that leads us to a point where it doesn’t even take a full generation of people to churn through more than one generation of tech. These technologies also collapse borders, threaten sovereignty of states, and increase economic inequality. Everyone reading this likely knows about the debate over automation and machine learning (please, stop calling it AI, they are not the same thing), but Friedman is arguing that we need policy makers at all levels to accept it as given and respond to it with policies that produce a populace better equipped to cope with it – and that people themselves accept that continuous learning is likely to be a part of their entire working lives.

Friedman refers to the cloud – a term I’m not 100% sure he even understands — as “the supernova,” a pointless and confusing substitution of a fabricated term for a more commonly accepted one, and then refers back to it frequently throughout the book as the source of much of this technological change. He’s certainly correct that the power of distributed computing has allowed us to solve more problems than we were ever able to solve previously, no matter how many chips you were able to cram into one box; he also gives the sense that he thinks P = NP, that this accelerating rate of growth in computing firepower will eventually be able to solve problems that, in nonmathematical terms, probably can’t be solved in a reasonable time frame. And Moore’s law, which he cites often, has changed in the last few years, as the growth in the number of transistors Intel et al can put on a chip has slowed from 18-24 months to more like 30, and with Intel projecting to hit the 10 nm transistor width this year, we’re probably butting up against the limits of particle physics.

The strongest aspects of Thank You For Being Late are Friedman’s exhortations to readers to accept that the old idea of learning one job and then doing it for 40 years is probably dead. Most jobs, even those we might once have spoken of dismissively as blue-collar or low-skilled, now require a greater knowledge of and comfort with technology. (There’s an effective CG commercial out now for University of Phoenix, where we see a mom working in a factory where all of the workers are slowly replaced by machines until one day the supervisor comes for her. She eventually pursues some sort of IT degree through the for-profit school, and the commercial ends with her walking through stacks of servers.) He lauds companies like AT&T that have already set up programs for employees to take new courses and then make it easier for those employees to identify new jobs within the company for which they qualify – or could try to qualify with further learning. He also discusses municipal and NGO efforts to build job sites that help connect people with skills with learning opportunities and employment opportunities.

There is, however, a bit of a Pollyanna vibe about Friedman, who refers to himself repeatedly as an optimist, and seems to think that more people in the American working class have the time to be able to take classes after hours – or that they have sufficient background to go get, say, a certificate in data science. I looked up some of the programs he mentions in the book; the one related to data science expected students to come in with significant knowlege of programming or scripting languages. He supports government efforts to support lifelong learning and to improve diversity in the workplace and in our communities, but doesn’t even acknowledge the potential government role in ensuring equal access to health care (essential to a functioning economy) or the mere idea of universal basic income, even if to just explain why he thinks it wouldn’t work.

And then there’s Friedman’s overuse of hackneyed quips that felt dated twenty years ago. “Attention K-Mart shoppers!” didn’t resonate with me in the 1980s, since there wasn’t a K-Mart anywhere near where I grew up; the chain has since been obliterated by competition from Wal-Mart and Target, and K-Mart operates 75% fewer stores today than it did at its peak, fewer than 500 nationwide. “This isn’t your grandpa’s X” is just lazy writing at this point; besides, if my daughter read that, she’d likely point out that her grandpa is a retired electrical engineer with two master’s degrees who already did a lot of the lifelong learning that Friedman describes.

Friedman’s writing is also dense, which I find surprising given his background as a newspaper columnist; perhaps he feels like he’s finally set free to prattle on as long as he wants, without anyone to stop him. There’s a level of detail in some parts of the story, such as his overlong descriptions of the halcyon days of the Minnesota town where he grew up, which I’m sure was very nice but probably not quite the Mayberry he describes.

There’s value in here, certainly, but I found it a grind to get through. This could have easily been a series of a dozen or so columns in the New York Times — that they wouldn’t run today because they’re too busy running columns denying climate change or explaining how so-called ‘incels’ need sex robots — rather than a 500-page book. He’s right about his core premise, though: Expect to learn throughout your working life and to see your job, whatever it is, change regularly over the course of your career.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

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→ May 20, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 5/20/18.

I was busy this week, including posting another first-round mock for next month’s MLB draft (Insider).

For Vulture, I ranked the 25 best board game apps for mobile devices, considering anything available for iOS or Android. Steam-only titles were not eligible.

For Paste, I reviewed the light deduction/puzzle game Automata Noir, a fun filler title that lets you do a little more than most deduction games where you’re just trying to guess who’s the bad guy.

PennLive asked fifty Pennsylvania librarians for their summer beach read recommendations and one kind soul recommended my own Smart Baseball, now available in paperback.

I’ll be appearing at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose on July 14th along with Jay Jaffe to talk baseball & sign our respective books (or I can sign Jay’s and he can sign mine, whatever you fancy).

And now, the links:

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→ May 19, 2018
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Locking Up Our Own.

James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation’s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city’s black residents. He discussed the history and causes of this system in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which lays much of the blame for the high incarceration rates on policies embraced and advocated by black community leaders themselves. The book won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction this past April.

Forman’s parents met while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (known colloquially as “snick”) during the civil rights movement, which he says spurred his decision to move off the career track into the public defender’s office, eventually moving from there into teaching at Georgetown’s and now Yale’s law schools. Where the 2016 documentary The 13th laid all of the blame for the high rates of black incarceration in the United States on two-plus centuries of racism and white domination – a view that is largely justified – Forman’s book lays bare the role that leaders in black communities played in supporting those policies. Foremost among them: Fighting early progressive efforts to decriminalize possession and personal use of small amounts of marijuana.

Washington DC didn’t achieve some semblance of home rule until 1973, and Congress still holds the power to overturn some laws passed by the DC council and could even, in theory, dismiss the city’s council at will. This gives the city’s residents a status not too much greater than those of territories like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, although I suppose if two hurricanes knocked out power to DC for several months the federal government would be a little quicker to address the problem. DC’s population is nearly half African-American, and the high rates of incarceration and different policing strategies in its neighborhoods with higher black populations have had a severe effect on the city’s economy, including continuing high crime rates. Forman explains how DC got into this mess, going back to the end of the civil rights movement and explaining how it was actually a white progressive council member who tried to decriminalize marijuana possession, but found himself opposed by black church leaders, Nation of Islam leaders, and even some black city council members, all of whom ended up working together to scotch the proposal (which may not have passed muster with Congress anyway). When a similar proposal arose a few years later to create mandatory minimum sentencing to fight rising crime rates in DC – themselves at least in part the result of the crack cocaine epidemic – black community leaders were all for the new law, responding to residents’ concerns about violent street crime and home invasions, but also enforcing a longstanding moral viewpoint that African-Americans could defeat stereotypes about them by, in essence, behaving better. If DC cracked down on even trivial crimes, even misdemeanors, the theory went, it would improve the quality of life for all DC residents while also working against white politicians and community leaders who worked to disenfranchise and/or limit the economic mobility of people of color.

None of this worked, as Forman writes, and instead helped fuel a new DC underclass – as it did in other cities, including Detroit, the US city with the highest proportion of residents who are African-American – of blacks, mostly men, who were now de facto unemployable because they had criminal records. Such ex-convicts also could find themselves ineligible for certain government assistance programs, turned down for housing, and even unable to vote. Forman, as a public defender, worked with many such clients, but, in his own telling, he was struggling upstream against a system that simultaneously limited the advancement of African-Americans in its police force and judiciary and also aggressively pursued policies that further hindered the black community. He touches on greater arrest rates in black wards of DC versus white, the long-term harm of “stop and frisk” policies (formally known as a Terry stop, and of dubious constitutionality, especially when opponents can show disparate impact by race of police targets), and the formal and informal obstacles that efforts at community improvement can face from municipal police forces – even when officers and administrators are themselves African-American.

Locking Up Our Own is a sobering look at how we got here, but perhaps short on prescriptions for undoing forty years of damage. Marijuana decriminalization is finally happening, although it’s driven by white stoners and libertarians rather than black citizens and provides no procedure for vacating past convictions for trivial possession cases. Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in NYC in 2013, but our current President and Attorney General have both explicitly endorsed the practice. Mandatory minimums remain popular, in large part because they serve “tough on crime” candidates well – and who would dare to stand up and say that criminals deserve shorter sentences? A path to greater African-American enfranchisement and sovereignty in majority black neighborhoods would likely be impossible in any system where higher level, white-dominated government bodies can invalidate city or state policies. Any change that starts at the bottom will fail without a change at the top.

Next up: Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.

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→ May 17, 2018
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The Insult.

The Insult (iTunes • amazon) was the one modest surprise among the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this past year, edging out Golden Globes winner In the Fade and the highly-regarded Israeli film Foxtrot. The first Lebanese submission to earn such a nomination and just the fourteenth film ever submitted for consideration from Lebanon, The Insult is a multi-layered drama that uses a minor disagreement to build a courtroom drama, a fable about racism, and a demonstration of how tiny gestures in either direction can have enormous consequences.

Toni Hanna is a Lebanese Christian man who works at a garage and lives in an apartment he hopes to buy, along with his very pregnant (and ridiculously beautiful) wife Shirine. He’s hosing off his balcony on one day when the excess water runs out his drain pipe, which apparently is a code violation, on to a few construction workers led by the foreman Yasser, a Palestinian man who has lived in Lebanon for years and married a Lebanese woman. When Yasser and his crew fix the pipe without Toni’s permission, he destroys their work, leading Yasser to call him a “fucking prick.” Toni demands an apology, but when Yasser balks, Toni takes him to court in a lawsuit that begins as something trivial and ends up a national news story, spiraling well beyond the control of either man. The trial exposes the origins of Toni’s racism and the ‘forgotten’ history of sectarian violence in Lebanon, including one incident where the PLO and PFLP (both major Palestinian terrorist organizations) played a significant part.

The superficial story in The Insult plays out a bit like a smarter Law & Order episode. The two trials – the first in a small court, the second an appeal argued by experienced lawyers working pro bono – feel overly dramatic, although it’s possible the Lebanese justice system works something like this, with judges asking witnesses and even members of the courtroom audience questions. There’s a big twist right before the midpoint of the film that amps up the drama quotient of the trial, although in the end it doesn’t matter much to the main plot around the dispute between the two men.

The plot thread around race is, I think, the Big Point of The Insult, and you could carry the framework very well to a similar story in just about any multi-ethnic state. Palestinians are an underclass in many nations in the Levant, and there appears to be widespread resentment against them and their somewhat protected status in Lebanon, so when Toni appears to be fighting back on behalf of Lebanese Christians, he garners public support and finds a well-known lawyer willing to take on his case to make a point. Yasser ends up with a young lawyer who says she wants to take his case because no one stands up for Palestinians’ rights, and she’s derided as a sort of limousine liberal by her opponents while also gaining popular backing from Lebanese Muslims and several politicians pushing for national unity.

The film goes too far in justifying Toni’s feelings towards Palestinians, however, when it delves into the history of his family and the incident from his childhood, the Damour massacre, that spawned his lifelong animosity towards them and support for nationalist-Christian politicians. The scene where that story is unfurled is also quite over the top, again feeling very TV-dramatized, and almost crushes the better plot thread of a quiet shift towards reconciliation between the two men. There’s one moment of sincere kinship that arises by accident, and then Yasser finds a way to deliver to Toni what he thinks Toni really wants from him, enough that the outcome of the trial – which we do see, even though I thought the script might end right before the verdict was delivered – feels a bit secondary. There’s an actual moral here, reminiscent of “A Thousand Trees” by Stereophonics, about how a tiny gesture either way can start a conflagration or defuse a potential riot: At any point, an apology from Yasser or a statement of forgiveness from Toni would have ended the entire conflict. The two men could have simply shaken hands in front of the cameras and brought the two sides together. The Insult doesn’t quite cop out to that extent, even though the legal stuff feels manipulative (even with a superb secondary performance from the wonderfully-named Diamond Bou Abboud as Yasser’s attorney). The story ends up taking a middle path, wrapping up the story in a satisfying enough fashion that still felt like it could have been stronger without the more crowd-pleasing aspects of the story to drown out the humanist plot at the movie’s heart.

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→ May 16, 2018
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Why We Sleep.

Why do we sleep? If sleep doesn’t serve some essential function, then it is evolution’s biggest mistake, according to one evolutionary scientist quoted in Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which explains what sleep seems to do for us, what sleep deprivation does to us, and why we should all be getting more sleep and encouraging our kids and our employees to do the same.

Walker, a sleep researcher and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Cal-Berkeley, begins by delving into what we know about the history of sleep in humans, and how sleep itself is structured. Humans were, for most of our history as a species, biphasic sleepers – we slept twice in each 24 hour period. We retain vestiges of this practice, which only ended in the 19th century in the developed world with the Industrial Revolution, in our Circadian rhythms, which still give us that post-prandial ‘slump’ that led to customs like the siesta. (It had never occurred to me that the word “circadian” itself came from the Latin words for “almost a day,” because that rhythm in our bodies isn’t quite 24 hours long.)

Sleep is, itself, two different processes that occur sequentially, alternating through a night of full sleep. Most people are familiar with REM sleep, referring to the rapid eye movements visible to an observer standing not at all creepily over you while you slumber. The remaining periods of sleep are, creatively, called nREM or non-REM sleep, and themselves comprise three different sub stages. Both phases of sleep are important; REM sleep is when dreaming occurs, which itself seems to serve the purposes of helping the brain process various events and the associated emotions from the previous day(s), as well as allowing the brain to form connections between seemingly unrelated memories or facts that can seem like bursts of creativity the next day. Your body becomes mostly paralyzed during REM sleep, or else you’d start moving around while you dream, perhaps kicking, flailing, or even acting out events in your dreams – which can happen in people with certain rare sleep disorders. N-REM sleep allows the body to repair itself, helps cement new information into memories in the brain’s storage, boosts the immune system, and contributes to feelings of wakefulness in the next day. The part of N-REM sleep that accomplishes the most, called deep or N3 sleep, decreases as you age, which is why older people may find it hard to sleep longer during the night and then feel less refreshed the next morning.

The bulk of Why We Sleep, however, is a giant warning call to the world about the hazards of short- and long-term sleep deprivation, which Walker never clearly defines but seems to think of as sleeping for a period of less than six hours. (He calls bullshit on people, like our current President and I believe his predecessor too, who claim they can function well on just four or five hours of sleep a night.) Sleep deprivation affects cognition and memory, and long-term deprivation contributes to cancer, diabetes, mental illnesses, Alzheimer’s, and more. Rats deprived of sleep for several days eventually die of infections from bacteria that would normally live harmlessly in the rats’ intestinal tracts.

We don’t sleep enough any more as a society, and there are real costs to this. Drowsy driving kills more people annually than drunk driving, and if you think you’ve never done this, you’re probably wrong: People suffering from insufficient sleep can fall into “micro-sleeps” that are enough to cause a fatal accident if one occurs while you’re at the wheel. Sleep deprivation in adolescents seems to lead to increased risks of various mental illnesses that tend to first manifest at that age, while also contributing to behavioral problems and reducing the brain’s ability to retain new information. Walker even ends the book with arguments that corporations should encourage better sleep hygiene as a productivity tool and a way to reduce health care costs, and that high schools should move their school days back to accommodate the naturally later sleep cycles of teenagers, whose circadian rhythms operate somewhat later than those of preteens or adults.

One major culprit in our national sleep deficit — which, by the way, isn’t one you can pay; you can’t ‘catch up’ on lost sleep — is artificial light, especially blue light, which is especially prevalent in LED light sources like the one in this iPad on which I’m typing and the phone on which you’re probably reading this post. Blue light sources are everywhere, including the LED bulbs the environmentally responsible among us are now using in our house to replace inefficient incandescent bulbs or mercury-laden CFLs. Blue light confuses the body’s natural melatonin cycle, which is distinct from the circadian rhythm, and delays the normal release of melatonin in the evenings, which thus further delays the onset of sleep.

Sleep confers enormous benefits on those who choose to get enough of it, benefits that, if more people knew and understand them, should encourage better sleep hygiene in people who at least have the discretion to sleep more. Sleep helps cement new information in your memory; if you learn new information, such as vocabulary in a foreign language, and then nap afterwards, you’re significantly more likely to retain what you learned afterwards. Sleep also provides the body with time to repair some types of cell damage and to recover from muscle fatigue – so, yes, ballplayers getting more sleep might be less prone to injuries related to fatigue, although sleep can’t repair a frayed labrum or tearing UCL.

Walker says he gives himself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep window every night. I am not sure how he can reconcile that with, say, his trans-Atlantic travel, but he does point out that changing time zones can wreak havoc on our sleep cycles. He suggests avoiding alcohol or caffeine within eight hours of bedtime — so, yes, he even says if you want that pint of beer, have it with breakfast — and offers numerous suggestions for preparing the body for sleep as you approach bedtime, including turning off LED light sources, using blue light filters on devices if you just can’t put them down, and even using blackout shades for total darkness into the morning.

There are some chapters in the middle of Why We Sleep that would stand well on their own, even if they’re not necessarily as relevant to most readers as the rest of it. The chapter on sleep disorders, including narcolepsy and fatal familial insomnia (about as awful a way to die as I could imagine), is fascinating in its own right. Walker also delivers a damning rant on sleeping pills, which produce unconsciousness but not actual sleep, not in a way that will help the body perform the essential functions of sleep. He does say melatonin may help some people, although I think he believes its placebo effect is more reliable, and he questions whether over the counter melatonin supplements deliver as much of the hormone as they claim they do.

Why We Sleep was both illuminating and life-altering in the most literal sense: Since reading it, I’ve set Night Shift modes on my devices, set alarms to remind me to get to bed eight hours before the morning alarm, stopped trying to make myself warmer at night (cold prepares the body for sleep, and you sleep best in temperatures around 57 degrees), and so on. I had already been in the habit of pulling over to nap if I became drowsy on a long drive, but now I build more time into drives to accommodate that, and to give myself more time to wake up afterwards – Walker suggests 20 minutes are required for full cognitive function after even a brief nap. Hearing the health benefits of sleeping more and risks of insufficient sleep, including higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, was more than enough to scare me straight.

Next up: I’m halfway through Brian Clegg’s A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable.

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→ May 12, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

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