→ October 10, 2017
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A Ghost Story.

A Ghost Story reunites Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, and director David Lowery, who all worked together on 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints?, this time in a peculiar film that manages to combine elements of dark humor, pathos, grief, and existential fear in its 90 minutes. It’s about as slow-paced a movie as I can remember seeing, varying scenes that go on twice as long as necessary with compressed time-lapses, and for much of the second half of the film the direction seemed unclear or just lacking. It takes a strong payoff at the end – and this payoff is very strong, thematically and in terms of plot resolution – to justify some of the earlier choices Lowery makes in getting to that final scene. It’s currently available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes.

Affleck, who won Best Actor this spring for Manchester by the Sea just after allegations of sexual and personal harassment surfaced against him, plays M, who has just moved into a house with C, played by Mara. They seem to have an idyllic little romance, but shortly into the film, M is killed in a car accident just outside of their house. After C identifies his body at the morgue and leaves the room in her grief, M rises from the gurney … with the sheet on, and two dark ovals for his eyes, and then spends the rest of the film wandering around as a ghost in that sheet. It sounds ridiculous, and it largely plays out that way: It’s hard to take anything too seriously when the dude is standing there in the cheapest Halloween costume ever.

M goes back to the house and sees C mourning, including a scene that was longer than Krusty the Clown’s SNL sketch where C eats a pie left by a friend, and then sees her go on a date and starts moving things around in the house in his anger. She moves out, another family moves in, and suddenly M is haunting the house, leading to a fairly harrowing scene out of a gothic horror film, made worse because the son of the family can actually see him (the only evidence I saw that any living character saw the ghost). M even interacts with another besheeted ghost next door, although she at least gets a pattern on her sheet, in a couple of brief conversations that are so morose that they played out as the blackest of comedy to me. Eventually, the house is destroyed while M is standing in it, cleared out to make room for a skyscraper … and things just get weirder from there, as M loops backwards in time and eventually approaches the present where he can see himself as a ghost watching himself as a living person with C in their house.

A story like this only works if enough of the details that seem trivial in passing turn out to matter in the resolution, and by and large Lowery does so. The ghost next door turns out to matter. C’s habit of leaving notes in crevices of places she’s lived turns out to matter. The scene early in the film where a strange noise in the middle of the night gets the two out of bed matters. Some things don’t – I mean, really, I love pie, but the pie scene is just too damn long – but Lowery brings enough of these quirks home in the conclusion to justify the length and pace of the journey.

Although it’s a supernatural film in the sense that M is a ghost, A Ghost Story doesn’t dwell at all on the spiritual aspects of what’s happening, even though much of its internal theology draws from the practices and beliefs of modern spiritualism or religions that draw from it like Baha’i. What appears to be a story about a tragic romance ends up a story about moving on after loss, about how you can get stuck in your grief and unable to move forward, forced to repeat or relive the worst experiences of your life when you still have life ahead of you.

Affleck doesn’t appear in the film very much except under the sheet – I’ve read that it was usually him under there – and it could have been almost anyone in that role. Mara has more weight to carry, and I don’t think she was fully up to the task. Mara has a vacancy to her looks, her speech, even her appearance that undermines the character’s presence on the screen. I understand C’s grief, but I don’t feel it from Mara. It doesn’t help that she looks so much younger than Affleck, or that her voice is so insubstantial; she reminded me of Zoe Kazan in The Big Sick or Emily Browning on American Gods (easily my least favorite actor on that show), where the casting director seems to have confused “waifish” with “vulnerable.” I don’t care about how a character looks if s/he brings the right emotion to the role, but Mara just isn’t present enough in C’s character to sell me on the depth of her grief or make her recovery from it feel compelling.

A Ghost Story is a tough sell on so many levels, and I’m still not sure how much of what I found comic in the role was intentional. Had Lowery flubbed the ending, I’d have little positive to say about it, because he constructed the script on the foundation of that concluding scene. But it works extremely well when he gets there – and it’s fast, so if you do watch this, don’t blink – and infuses almost everything that came before with greater meaning, so that A Ghost Story really does tell us something about loss and continuing to live beyond it.

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→ October 8, 2017
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The Big Sick.

The Big Sick was one of the few bright spots in an ugly summer for the movies, racking up over $40 million in a limited release to lead all indie films from 2017, 2016, or 2015. The romantic comedy is a rarity in its genre, a genuinely funny film with a big heart that doesn’t talk down to its audience, and is boosted by two strong supporting performances by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. Oh, and one of the two romantic leads spends about half of the film in a medically-induced coma. (I know, it’s serious.) Amazon purchased The Big Sick in the spring but hasn’t put it on Prime (yet), so you can rent it from the usual sites in the meantime, including amazon and iTunes.

The script draws from the true story of Kumail Nanjiani (playing himself) and Emily Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan), incorporating her real-life illness and the cultural conflict Kumail faced as the secular son of religious, traditional Pakistani parents in Chicago. The two strike up an unlikely relationship that falls apart when Emily finds out that Kumail hasn’t told his parents, who expect him to make an arranged marriage to a girl of Pakistani descent, that he’s dating a white woman. Shortly after their breakup, however, Emily ends up in the hospital with what appears to be a serious infection, and one of her friends calls Kumail – perhaps unaware how things ended between them – to ask him to go be with her in the ER until her parents get into town. In the interim, the doctors put Emily into a coma, so that when her folks, played by Hunter and Romano, arrive, Kumail meets them for the first time under strained cirumstances, and since they know what he did, they’re not especially open to his presence. Over the remainder of the film, of course, they grow fond of each other, pushed along by outside events, while Kumail has to confront his inner conflict between fealty to his parents and his desire for an independent, non-Muslim life in the U.S.

While Nanjiani is affable and charming throughout the film, Hunter and Romano – especially Hunter – carry this movie beyond regular meet-cute territory, with performances that manage to feel real without crossing into pure sentiment. Hunter, playing Beth, pulses with a sort of quiet rage that spills out in the most unlikely place, where she defends Nanjiani from a bigoted heckler, signaling (obviously) a turning point in her view of her daughter’s ex and making clear that his ethnicity or background are just not relevant to her. The strained relationship Beth and Terry (Romano) have also gets a little more explanation as the story progresses, but this is primarily about how Kumail and Emily’s parents formed a bond while Emily was under, and Kumail’s own realization that he’d rather defy his family and face the consequences than walk away from Emily forever.

There are bits of The Big Sick that don’t work as well, that feel a bit more like, if not exactly cheap laughs, then slightly less expensive ones. I don’t know how true to life the scenes of Kumail with his family are, but we’ve certainly seen these assimilation stories before, right down to the mom blithely pretending she’s not trying to arrange a marriage for her son while she’s obviously trying to arrange a marriage for her son. His parents come off as very one-note in the film, and in an unconvincing way – the importance of tradition or religion for them is just assumed, never shown, and their reaction when he reveals that he’s dating a white girl and has no intention of accepting an arranged marriage feels out of proportion to what we’ve seen before then.

I also didn’t feel like Kazan, who of course isn’t in the movie as much as Nanjiani, brought a ton of personality to Emily’s character; she’s little, and has a cute smile, but there’s little depth to her personality on screen and Kazan’s youthful appearance ends up working against the character by making her seem insubstantial. The story is more about Kumail and Emily’s parents than it is about Emily, and there’s enough chemistry between the two leads that the romance itself is credible, but I thought Kazan was less than ideal for the role.

This feels like perfect fodder for The Golden Globes, with that show’s separate category for comedies, and could end up with nominations for best comedy, maybe best actor in a comedy (Nanjiani), and perhaps a supporting nod for Hunter (although the Globes don’t distinguish between supporting roles in dramas or comedies). It seems most likely to me to end up a film that while generally unrecognized by industry awards makes a slew of critics’ year-end top ten lists.

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→ October 7, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 10/7/17.

My lone Insider piece this week looked at the top under-25 players on playoff rosters, so of course someone complained that I’d left Manny Machado off the list. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Next Saturday, October 14th, I’ll be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, talking about and signing copies of Smart Baseball, starting at 2 pm ET. This Changing Hands location serves beer and wine, which may help make me more interesting.

And now, the links…

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→ October 5, 2017
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Robert Heinlein won four Hugo Awards for Best Novel, tied with Lois McMaster Bujold (at the moment) for the most in that category, with two of those wins coming for his iconic books Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s works, whether novels, short stories, or young adult fiction, tend to me a little lighter on the science and heavier on story, while always being readable, often compulsively so. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress diverges completely from the pattern of his other three winners – and everything else I’ve ever read from his pen – in its turgid prose and emphasis on irrelevant details, turning what might have been a compelling political allegory into a bloated sci-fi stereotype.

Set in the 2070s, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has the moon functioning as a penal colony and, strangely, an agricultural entity, growing wheat and shipping it back to earth. (Heinlein’s works often reflected the limited knowledge of the chemistry and geology of foreign bodies; in several of his novels and stories, he has humans colonizing Venus, because at the time we didn’t know how utterly inhospitable that planet’s environment is.) Mannie is the narrator, a free person on Luna who is agitating for political autonomy for the colony, and joins forces with “Mike,” a massive supercomputer that has achieved sentience without its developers realizing it; Prof, an old hand with broad knowledge of political systems; and Wyoh, full name Wyoming Knott (Wye Knott … get it?), a young woman who shows promise in an underground political rally that turns violent. These four characters plot and scheme, building a communist-style, decentralized, self-protecting network of cells that proves impenetrable for Authority forces from Earth, with Mike playing a critical role in both running scenarios and calculating odds of success and in using his pervasive presence on Luna to control and monitor communications and movements.

Heinlein has created a few iconic characters, but I associate him more than anything else with great stories – he cooks up novel situations in sci-fi settings, then puts his characters through the paces with quick prose and fast-changing plot details. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he fails on both of those latter two counts. Luna residents speak in a Russian-inflected slang, similar to the one Burgess employed in A Clockwork Orange but with more Russian loanwords, and with many articles and prepositions dropped from Mannie’s dialogue and narration, which makes for a slower, actively frustrating read.

And it turns out that revolution is kind of boring. Heinlein wastes far too much time on internal discussions of how the revolutionaries will set up their org structure, how they’ll govern if they gain independence, how they negotiate with hostile countries on Earth (which still includes a “SovUnion” … predicting the future was never Heinlein’s strong suit), or how the Lunar colony’s “catapult” to lob projectiles at earth is supposed to work. At one point he lists all of the officials in the new Lunar provisional government, many of whom are names that only appear that one time in the book.

There is a real metaphor here – and I know Heinlein disdained attempts to read into his work – about the relationship between colonizer and colony, about rights of self-determination, and about economic oppression. Heinlein wrote this in the mid-1960s as European powers were slowly and often reluctantly granting independence to their colonies in Africa, a process that wouldn’t really end until Portugal ceded Angola and Mozambique in 1975. Whether he meant the book as a criticism of such colonialism or not, it is impossible to avoid such a reading of the work given the time in which he wrote it and the exploitation of the natural resources of Africa (and previously Asia and the Americas) by paternalistic and often violently repressive European nations. It’s the most potentially interesting part of the novel, but is constantly subsumed by Heinlein’s focus on irrelevant details or dull tangents like the ones where he describes the polygamist culture of Mannie’s “warren” on Luna.

I’d read any of Heinlein’s other winners before this one, even Double Star, which lacks the philosophical weight of his other works but tells a cracking good story with a few clever twists. The early years of the Hugo Award produced some pretty questionable honorees, and I wonder if there was a Gold Glove effect here – Heinlein had won it before, and was a huge name, so this book earned some votes on that basis rather than on its own merits. It’s in the bottom half of the roughly 50 winners I’ve read so far.

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→ October 5, 2017
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Klawchat 10/5/17.

Keith Law: If it’s all right with you, I’ll rip this here joint apart. Klawchat.

Tyler: Given what we know as of now, do you think the Braves will lose Kevin Maitan? Do you think that would be a fair punishment for what seems like a league wide practice?
Keith Law: Given what we know to be true, I don’t think so, but MLB confirmed to me that their investigation is still ongoing. If this is merely about verbal agreements with players before they turn 16 and “hiding” them from other clubs, everyone does it, and I’ve argued for a while that the CBA provides compelling incentive for everyone to do it. If they want to root out the corruption in the July 2nd market, they need to stop trying so hard to prevent teams from paying money for talent.

Gabriel: Seems hard to believe that the johns werent involved in this whole coppy mess right?
Keith Law: I find it hard to believe they weren’t aware of these industry standard practices.

Jack: How would you go about fixing the Giants? Full rebuild necessary?
Keith Law: The system isn’t going to produce enough starting pitching in the near term to make them a contender; if Cueto and Shark turn around and have big bounceback years in 2018, they might contend, but that’s their hope for near-term success. The problem I see with a full rebuild is a lack of tradeable assets on the ML roster other than Posey, and I can’t imagine them dealing him – I’m not sure I could even advocate that.

Joe: Will all the teams that have agreements with international players for July of 2019 be told they can not sign those players or do you think the Braves will be the only team that doesn’t sign the player that they had a deal with?
Keith Law: July of 2018 … and 2019 … and 2020. MLB is very good at pretending this isn’t happening all over the place. In the draft too – I’d estimate 75% of players taken in the top 5 rounds have predraft deals in place.

Jeremy: If a team goes 86-76, are they 10 games over .500 or 5 games over .500?
Keith Law: I would rather engage in a two-hour debate over whether a hot dog is a sandwich (it is) than get involved in this semantics argument.

John: Feels like Nolan Jones is semi forgotten about. But he’s put up great numbers in A-. Does he skyrocket in 2018?
Keith Law: Don’t think he’s forgotten about, any more than a typical non-first-round HS prospect. Big progress this year, definitely a guy on the radar again, probably on the outside of my top 100 (although I haven’t even started that process yet).

Bill: Is Kris Bryant under rated or over rated? I hear both.
Keith Law: (wanking motion)

Eric: Should the Diamondbacks put Archie Bradley back in the rotation next spring or is he a bullpen-only guy from here on out?
Keith Law: I’d like to see him get a shot to start, but when a pitcher who struggled as a starter finds this kind of success in relief, he and the club may both want to leave well enough alone and I don’t argue with it. I only have an issue with teams leaving ex-starters in the pen when the pitcher still wants to start and the scouting indicators were in favor of him starting.

Bauer: Do you buy Cleveland’s reasoning for starting Bauer over Kluber in game 1? It sounds to me they’re managing for games they’re not guaranteed
Keith Law: That was my take – this was an October-long strategy rather than a win the ALDS strategy.

Scouting: I really enjoyed your scouting articles on the Phillies young hitters and Darvish and was wondering what, for you at least, are the biggest differences in scouting MLB vs MILB players? Are there different things you’re looking for?
Keith Law: As you move up the ladder, physical tools and projection become less important, approach and feel for the game become more important. You can be strong as hell, or have a beautiful swing, but if you can’t distinguish balls from strikes or fastballs from breaking balls, it’s not going to matter.

Snap into a Slim Jim: A. Cam Newton is dumb; B. Of Course he should apologize; C. We don’t need 40 articles written about it though, do we?
Keith Law: We’re going to get at least that many. If he had just apologized after the fact – the reporter said he didn’t, he actually made it all worse – then maybe we could have gotten around this. Now it’s going to go on for days and days.

Ethan: Hi Keith – love the chats and feedback, as I have learned a lot from you and your book! My question is around Dinelson Lamet. I completely understand the need for three pitches. However, is there a situation and/or example of a SP that thrived with just two elite pitches? And what level would those need to be? 60? 70? And do you think Lamet’s fastball/slider combo can reach those levels to lessen the need for an average third pitch?
Keith Law: You’re sort of begging the question here. If your two pitches leave you with a massive platoon split, then it doesn’t matter. And that’s Lamet’s problem: Neither of his two current average or better pitches gets LHB out, and his changeup is ineffective.

Coppolella : If you were running a team would you be looking to add Coppolella or Blakeley to your front office given that they’re by reputation quite smart and seemingly got caught doing something that everyone does?
Keith Law: If MLB clears one or both of serious wrongdoing, yes, but I think every team has to wait for the outcome of that. And let’s not pretend that MLB never blackballs anyone, players (coughBondscough) or execs.

RaysBiscuit: Why are defensive oriented catchers picked highly in the draft? I’m sorry for any recency bias, but whenever I see Reese McGuire, Taylor Ward, Justin O’Conner, Nick Ciuffo, Mike Zunino… I wonder why they were picked that high and it seems catchers don’t turn out to be worth the selection compared to the others though hindsight is 20/20. I’ll give Zunino a pass as he was bullet rushed but is every team hoping for a Posey type catcher when one picks a catcher in the first round?
Keith Law: Teams overdraft catchers because of positional scarcity, not just in the majors but within the draft. There are so few decent catchers in any class that they tend to get elevated on draft boards because the scarcity makes them seem more valuable – or because there’s a fear of having a draft where you don’t get any catching at all. (Solution: Draft one or two guys every year who are possible conversion candidates.)

Frankur: Yankees making a mistake by not pitching Severino in game 2?
Keith Law: If there is no physical impediment to him pitching game 2, then it’s an odd choice. But maybe he doesn’t feel right and that’s part of why he was so off in the wild card game

LDS: Which series do you think represents the biggest mismatch of the LDS and which series is the tightest to you?
Keith Law: No real mismatches to me. I’m not doing a preview piece, but I’ll at least give you some picks here: Astros, Cleveland, Nats, Dodgers.

Anti-Intellectualism: What do you think is the best way to combat the rampant anti-intellectualism that’s seemingly on the rise in our country?
Keith Law: I wish I had a good answer. I do think that the more intellectuals – really, subject matter experts – who speak up, the better chance we have for facts to win out over myths, but humans have a rather strong tendency to believe whatever they want.

Dana: Do you think football’s brain injury problems will lead to more African-Americans in baseball down the road?
Keith Law: I think that’s already happening – although it’s less “in baseball” and more “in alternatives to football.”

Jeff: I have a coworker that checked himself in to the hospital a couple of weeks ago because he thought he may commit suicide. Our boss has verbally displayed his displeasure about him missing all the work he has and has openly talked about demoting him and even firing him. Is he allowed to do that? I have great respect for my coworker for being able to reach out for help, but I hate that it could cost him his job. That just doesn’t seem right to me.
Keith Law: Don’t think that’s legal, but I’m not a lawyer. Of course, what was illegal for employers a few months ago may become legal any day now…

delatopia: Everyone in the Bay Area raves about the A’s youth but I basically see Chapman and maybe Barreto and then a bunch of second division starters and bench guys, at least among position players at the MLB level. Is there more there that I’m not seeing?
Keith Law: I agree with you – I don’t know if there’s a core player in the bunch. Lot of 2-WAR types. Nice, cheap guys to fill out a roster, but lacks the couple of 5+ WAR guys you need to build a contender.

Jim: MLB starting investigating Coppy because of a Draft Room incident? Have you heard of what went on? Hearing of plates being thrown at people…..
Keith Law: I was told that story is false. (In one version it’s a plate; in another it’s an ashtray. Good sign the story might not be quite accurate.)

Pat: How would you grade Tim Beckham defensively at SS? The metrics seem to like him, but my eyes tell me he kind of sucks.
Keith Law: I haven’t seen him there much myself in a couple of years; I thought he had the physical ability to be an above-average defender there, but didn’t have the consistency you want, more in his hands than anything else.

Dan(NJ): Do you see much difference in how the Yankees approached the WC game and a true “bullpen” game? If the goal to “bullpenning” a game is to use your 4/5/6 best pitchers, then surely Severino fits that mold. I think there were some people disappointed that a team with the staff resources like the Yankees didn’t start Green or something, but I think that in how it was played and how Girardi managed, it was a true bullpen game.
Keith Law: It ended up a bullpen game, but I don’t think Girardi planned that in any way. He did a nice job responding to the crisis, but it’s a bit different than going into a game with the expectation that your starter will only throw, say, 40-50 pitches.

Bob Villar: How close are you to believing in the Alec Hanson hype?
Keith Law: I always take the advice of Harry Allen in these situations.

Hinkie: If you were forced to predict the team Shohei Otani plays for next season, who would you pick ?
Keith Law: If I can only pick one team, I’d pick the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Jim: Are you concerned that all these pitching changes, particularly in the first couple innings, is affecting the overall product? I love baseball and having 8 innings of relievers diminished my interest. I understand the strategy but there’s no flow to the game.
Keith Law: It lengthens the game needlessly. The long innings are fine when there’s lots of action – baserunners, homers, what have you – but not when it’s commercials and mound visits.

Jeff: You called Rosenthal’s article about the Braves in-fighting a “non-story”. What’s your take now?
Keith Law: Same. Monday’s debacle was about the MLB investigation, not in-fighting.

RunawaYEM: Please confirm whether Luiz Gohara is a guy, or a full-on GUY
Keith Law: I believe he’s a GUY, but I worry that he looks more like a guy and a half.

addoeh: When would you start being interested in reports on international players that won’t be officially signed until 2019 or 2020?
Keith Law: A few days before those signing dates. There’s so much nonsense around them that I find it hard to parse, and the reality is when you verbally commit to sign a player when he’s 14, you may get a very different product when the player actually signs at 16.

Richie: Do you watch October baseball with the sound on or off?
Keith Law: Off more than on.

Andy: If Maitan is declared a free agent, what kind of deal/bidding do you think he gets? Has his “unexpected thickness” affected the market for him?
Keith Law: I’d guess north of $10 million. And you know MLB would REALLY rather not make a top prospect a free agent because it would underline just how severely underpaid amateur players are.

Aaron: The Padres had by far the worst run differential but still won 71 games (just 7th worst) in baseball. Keith, would you attribute this to randomness, or give props to Andy Green’s management ability? Thanks.
Keith Law: I think Green’s a very good manager, both in game and in development.

Luke: What’s the best new board game that both you and your daughter enjoyed most?
Keith Law: Azul, which comes out later this month, has been a big hit here. She liked the Cities of Splendor expansions a lot too.

Dave: The Yanks have gap year coming up at 3B before Machado hits FA. Is it ok to just pencil in Andujar, or does he need more work?
Keith Law: Pencil but not pen would work for me. You have to be able to live with a lot of variance in your forecasts for him in 2018 – I think he’s a legit prospect for the long term, but I couldn’t tell you that he’s definitely going to hit in his rookie season.

Ryan: Do Tatis and Gore have a chance to both be top 10 prospects by the summer of 2018.
Keith Law: Tatis already is. That’s a lot to ask of Gore and I don’t think so.

Chris: I’m guessing you have same take re starting again as to Chad Green?
Keith Law: yes, maybe even more so (leaving Green in relief) because he’s a totally different guy in this role.

Michael: Is Jake Junis with the Royals for real, or just a small sample size?
Keith Law: He could be a fifth starter.

EricVA: Did you hear something about Severino not feeling right or was that just a guess?
Keith Law: I’m just saying that would be a valid reason for pushing him back. I haven’t heard anything to this effect.

Chris: Speaking of catcher’s defense, broadcasters got all over Sanchez for the one ball he missed that Robertson slingshot into the other batters box and not the countless pitches he blocked (or took in the marbles). This is a very tough staff to catch imo, and that narrative about him is ridiculous. Thoughts?
Keith Law: I think he’s a below-average receiver but more than makes up for it with his bat. Catcher defense is a favorite topic of broadcasters, though, probably because it is so visible.

Jeff: So was Coppy well-liked in the industry? Passan’s article painted a rough picture of him.
Keith Law: My sense is that there was a mixed view of him. I had a major agent call me out of the blue on Tuesday to talk about that whole story, and he said – unprompted – how much he liked Coppolella and enjoyed negotiating with (or against) him. I’ve heard more positive comments on him than negative since Monday. But this industry loves to smear people on their way out the door – look at what happened when Francona left Boston.

Kevin: After Reyes, which arms in the Cards system do you find most intriguing?
Keith Law: It’s probably Alcantara, even with the up-and-down year.

Alan: What’s your feelings on Dayton Moore to Atlanta?
Keith Law: I understand that the job will be his if he wants it. He’d fit their system, and he has worked there before, which I think all works in his favor. He’s highly regarded as a person within the industry, too. A mutual friend suggested Tony Lacava — full disclosure, I worked with Tony in Toronto and consider him a mentor – as someone who’s worked under Hart and Schuerholz, has scouting & PD experience (as does Moore), and comes with a pristine reputation. If you just forced out your GM over ethical violations, you want your next hire to be squeaky clean.

Steve: In light of the Coppella investigation, do you think the O’s concern over participating in the international market because of shady practices of buscones is warranted? It’s possible to participate in the Latin America market “ethically” right?
Keith Law: You can participate ethically but you will likely be shut out of the top end of the market.

Dennis: Your favorite Ishiguro novel? Which would be the best to start with?
Keith Law: Remains of the Day is an absolute masterpiece of English fiction. Never Let Me Go is #2. Avoid The Unconsoled – I think it’s an outright failure of a novel.

Salty: Keith – Eric Longenhagen mentioned in his chat the potential value someone like Gose could have as a LOOGY/pinch runner. If he entered a game as a PR, could he stay in the game and pitch, and if so, would he then slot into the DH spot, with the defensive replacement slotting in to the spot vacated by the guy who was pinch-ran for?
Keith Law: You can’t switch your DH spot in the lineup like that. BTW, Gose got hurt after a few innings, and I’m not very optimistic about him even if he stays healthy.

Craig: Is Adbert Alzolay the Cubs top prospect? Can he scratch his way onto the big league team as early as next summer?
Keith Law: Top pitching prospect and yes.

Andy: Dillon Maples had this breakout season. Does he regress, keep improving, or what? How does one predict this?
Keith Law: You don’t. You just enjoy it. And I think this is very legit – the stuff matches up with the numbers.

Dennis: Do you think Jo Adell might end up in your Top 100?
Keith Law: Not this year.

Joe: Keith, what do you make of Blake Rutherford? I know to not write him off, but it is mind-boggling that a kid of his talent and pedigree put up the kind of line in low-A.
Keith Law: Same. And the swing is fine. But the ball just didn’t come off his bat well this year – poor exit velo, no power, didn’t even sound that great (I saw him the day before he was traded).

Aaron: Keith, can you explain why there’s often so much change in a prospect’s ranking between the time of the draft & the end of the season? Do we really learn that much from a month or two of professional competition? Because otherwise, this screams Small Smaple Size, and you are one of the biggest anti-SSS-ites out there. …maybe I’ve just answered my own question there…
Keith Law: I don’t think there is, not in my rankings. If you compare my final predraft rankings to where those prospects appear on my top 100 the following winter, the order is generally very similar. Any changes would be more because post-draft more scouts & execs are willing to talk about players than they are pre-draft (“I really liked that guy, we were going to take him if they didn’t”).

Joe: Fair to say that the worst thing Coppy did was send the 2000 word text messages? Honestly who does that?
Keith Law: I don’t think I’ve ever even read a text message that took more than one screen.

Dan: Are you at all encouraged by Paul Ryan’s comments on bump stocks? (I suppose I was, somewhere around 2% encouraged)
Keith Law: I wish I was but I’ve been burned by optimism before.

Oren: If you were the Jays GM, how seriously are you shopping Josh Donaldson this winter?
Keith Law: Very seriously. I generally don’t say you *have* to trade a player, but you want to make it clear you’re going to take the best offer if anything meets your standard.

MJ: Just finished your book and loved it. My question to you is do you think there is any chance at a big industry breakthrough regarding player health in the near or medium term future? Something with biometric data perhaps?
Keith Law: Having just read Erik Malinowski’s Betaball, on the Golden State Warriors, which mentions a few technologies that team used to improve player health, I’m even more convinced now than I was before that baseball teams will invest heavily in such technologies (and probably already are, we just don’t know about it) to try to reduce injuries.

Tim: Thoughts on Hader to the rotation in 2018? Or does his stuff/approach play better in the pen?
Keith Law: Better in the pen, but I wouldn’t blame the Brewers for at least giving him a chance to start and see if it works. He was great as a starter until he got to Colorado Springs, and that’s not a fair test.

Boots Poffenberger: How good is Nick Neidert?
Keith Law: Very polished, not a big upside. Maybe a league-average starter?

Dennis: Who are some writers that you would like to see win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Keith Law: I don’t know that I could name one – I believe the honoree has to be still living, which eliminates the top 8 authors I’ve read (by # of titles), and as much as I enjoy the works of Jasper Fforde and J.K. Rowling I don’t know that either is really a serious contender for the award.

Snit: With Coppy gone, how do you think this changes the Braves’ plans for this offseason? Do you think they only kept Snitker because of scandal?
Keith Law: That’s my sense – Snitker probably would have been replaced had this not happened. I expect this will change their modus operandi more than it changes specific plans – trades like the Gohara move are much less likely now.

HugoZ: Which team is more modern-metrics friendly–Royals or Blue Jays?
Keith Law: Both are pretty forward in that department; I get the sense the Blue Jays use it more, but that may just be that they’re more open about it.

addoeh: The NRA has second highest membership of any group after AARP. And like the AARP, they vote. Until their members start leaving it because of how their leadership resistance to any sort of changes in the law, there will never be any changes.
Keith Law: They vote AND they pay dues that are then funneled to politicians.

Boots Poffenberger: What happened to Jeff Hoffman this year? Will he ever achieve his ceiling?
Keith Law: I don’t love the fit of his very flat fastball and Coors Field. Great arm, great athlete, but not a very finished product as a pitcher.

Jack: Johan Camargo…..bench piece or could he be a starter somewhere?
Keith Law: Bench piece to me.

JP: the Yankees carrying 12 pitchers in a 5-game series seems like overkill (even with Green/Robertson being unavailable today), no?. If Ellsbury pinch-runs, there isn’t a backup OF on the bench…
Keith Law: I’d never carry 12 P in a 5 game series. Hamstrings your bench too badly.

Chris: BTW for that guy who said the Yanks have a gap year til ’19, Headley is still under contract, Gleyber could be a factor, and I wouldn’t be so sure theyre gonna throw 350m at Machado.
Keith Law: All fair. I assumed he meant they weren’t going to let Headley be the everyday player next year, though.

Mike: Is there a manager more overrated than Buck Showalter?
Keith Law: There’s some competition there, yes. But I think Buck manages to skate on a lot of things that at the very least should be called into question.
Keith Law: Pitcher usage at the top of the list.

Dan: Do you have particular non-fiction interests: eras, settings, subjects, etc? (and I apologize if you’ve already made this common knowledge; I appreciate your time)
Keith Law: Particularly interested in books on science (especially physics), math, or food.

BD: For the postseason would you go with an uber talented but green guy like V Robles, or a boring but veteran backup OF ?
Keith Law: Robles. More ways he can impact the game in a small sample.

Jason: Would it make more sense for Atlanta to start 2018 with 2 of Fried/Gohara/Newcomb in the rotation, or should they get another vet (2 if Dickey retires) to fill out the rotation?
Keith Law: Would get a veteran to provide some bulk innings. You have to assume those guys might not pitch well enough to average 5 innings a start.

DBACK BACK BACK BACK’s: What’s JD’s contract look like this winter?
Keith Law: Wouldn’t shock me if he got 5 years and over $20 million a year … but he’ll play at 30 next year and has negative defensive value. Ton of downside risk.

Mark: Would you rather break the bank for Harper or Machado next year?
Keith Law: Either. Going to depend more on health than anything as both guys have had some injury issues.

BigPapaChuck: Does Coppy ever get a job in baseball again?
Keith Law: As of today, I think it’s unlikely, but it will depend a lot on what MLB finds and what they tell clubs privately.

Hinkie: With Scott Kingery knocking on the door, and the market likely to be flooded with second basemen (Daniel Murphy, DJ LeMahieu, Brian Dozier, Ian Kinsler, Logan Forsythe, and Jed Lowrie) next winter, don’t the Phillies need to trade Cesar Hernandez this off-season ?
Keith Law: I think they need to trade one of him or Galvis, maybe both, and let Kingery and Crawford be the DP combo for the next six years (we hope).

Bobbo: In the beginning of the season, my friends and I wondered who was to blame for Conforto making the big-league team but mostly riding pine. i reasoned that it was on Alderson, since TC is gonna do what the GM says. it never occurred to me that TC was operating on his own with the owner’s protection. did it occur to you?
Keith Law: I have called him Teflon Terry for a reason.

Bobby T: Do you own one baseball card?
Keith Law: I still have a few lying around. Loved them as a kid.

Dog: If you could go back in time and see one player live that you never got a chance to see, who would it be?
Keith Law: I’d go to a Negro Leagues game.

PhillyJake: Eating a Biscotti from Enrico’s in Pittsburgh. I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh for over 11 years now, but when friends from there come to visit, they always bring me one. Ever had the pleasure?
Keith Law: Yep. Best thing on the Strip when I lived there.

Steve: The Gerrymandering case before the Supreme Court is the most impactful in the past _____ years? Could argue since Roe v. Wade, right?
Keith Law: Or Brown v Board of Education.

Andy: With how good Ozzie Albies looked this season and how Dansby Swanson had lapses in the field at times, I’ve heard people suggest they switch places in the field. Do you see an advantage to that?
Keith Law: I would hate to see the team overreact to one season, but bear in mind Albies primarily moved off shortstop because of Swanson, not because of his own deficiencies.

Ridley Kemp: Any thoughts on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations (other than “I struggle to think of a more irrelevant institution”)? I’m pulling for The Zombies this to get in this year just because they’re so much better than The Doors.
Keith Law: Yeah, they make our HoF look rational.

ML: Should MN trade Gordon or Sano for a proven starter this off-season? Both being mentioned as options in MSP.
Keith Law: I would not. Both look like potential core players.

Jerry: Which White Sox prospects will reach the majors in 2018? Is Kopech, Collins, Hansen and Eloy a decent guess?
Keith Law: Kopech very likely. The others are all less so. Collins in particular is going to have to show more ability to hit (despite the big hitch in his swing).

JP: would a perfect postseason for you be all series going to Game 7’s (Game 5’s in DS)?
Keith Law: Yes – and it’s the perfect outcome for MLB, too. Ratings go up when series go to the limit.

Cool Hand Luke: If you were Sandy Alderson, who would you target as the next Mets manager?
Keith Law: I’ve recommended my former ESPN colleague Alex Cora a few times now. I believe I dropped some other names in chat last week.

Drew: There’s no validity to the concern that a team like the Nats clenched too early and haven’t played meaningful games in a month, is there? They looked a bit flat towards the end of the season, but it seems bogus to think that’ll carry over to the postseason.
Keith Law: There’s no evidence that this supposed effect – it’s momentum, really – is true. There are plenty of counterexamples of teams who all but backed into the postseason and still advanced or even won it all.

Ben: Hey Keith, not sure how much you pay attention to portions coaching staffs outside of manager, but did it surprise you STL is parting ways with Lilliquist? Have seen nothing but positive words about him over the years. It eems to me that pitching, itself, has not been as big a problem for the Cardinals since Matheny has taken over, as much as, oh I don’t know… Matheny has been?
Keith Law: It did surprise me, but I also don’t know the inner workings there. Was more surprised to see the Rays let Jim Hickey go.

Tom: If it were entirely up to you….how would you fit the MLB draft and international signings highly visible problems?
Keith Law: The more MLB tries to prevent teams, which are absolutely flush with cash, from spending money to acquire talent, the more avenues MLB opens for rule bending and rule breaking. It’s analogous to corruption in developing countries, especially non-democratic ones: You can’t get rid of corruption by outlawing it. You have to address the incentives that enable or even encourage it. In baseball’s case, that’s going to mean going in the opposite direction from recent CBAs, allowing teams to spend more on international talent rather than less.

Pace of Play: Dumb question, maybe, but why do pitchers coming out of the pen need more than, say, three warmup pitches from the mound? Isn’t warming up what the bullpen’s for? Or do they get all those warmups to fill commercial breaks?
Keith Law: I think warmups extend to fill the time allotted by commercials.

Ben: Randomly saw you recommending Ballplayer: Pelotero on twitter. I went ahead and watched it last night; I always figured that world would be sort of slimy…
Keith Law: It’s worse than you think it is.

Mac: When evaluating a hitter what is the most important thing you look for?
Keith Law: It depends entirely on his age and level. For a younger hitter, it’s more about tools, physical ability, swing mechanics. Older hitter, I care more about approach, ability to adjust, frequency and quality of contact.

CB: Scioscia is going into the last year of his contract. Is there any argument at all in favor of extending him?
Keith Law: I think it’s best for the Angels to move on from him – to let Eppler hire his own manager, and ensure that the team doesn’t fall any farther behind the curve in terms of managerial use of analytics. It’s a handicap right now, and that’s only going to get worse going forward.

Jon: Stupid hypothetical: do you think Votto wins NL MVP if Cincy wins 85 games? Despite being the worst baserunner in the history of MLB, he was unbelievable this year.
Keith Law: If they’d made the playoffs, maybe. Otherwise, I don’t think so. He did have a tremendous year.

Josef: Only 22% of Americans own guns and many NRA members are not opposed to banning high capacity weapons or requiring licensing or training. Will we ever have common sense laws on guns?
Keith Law: Not until money stops talking.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week. Thank you all for reading and for all of your questions. If you’re in Arizona, I’ll be at Changing Hands in Phoenix on October 14th at 2 pm to talk and sign copies of Smart Baseball. Hope to see you many of you there!

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→ October 4, 2017
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Alhambra app.

The boardgame Alhambra is a modern Euro classic, winner of the 2003 Spiel des Jahres award and a host of other prizes, and still rated fairly highly on Boardgamegeek even thought it’s a bit light for that crowd. It’s also one of my least favorite Spiel winners, and one of my biggest disconnects between what I think of a game and what the gaming community thinks. I reviewed the original game back in 2011, and while I’ve softened on it just a little bit, it’s still not something I’m eager to pull off the shelf.

But there is now an Alhambra app (for iOS devices and Android), and because I take my responsibility to all of you seriously, I have played it for the purposes of reviewing it. And … I still don’t like the game that much, and I find the app a little clunky to use; after I’ve been spoiled by a run of Asmodee Digital apps and a few other super-clean ports, this one fell short of the mark for me. The AI players are solid, though, so it’s a good challenge for solo play, so if you enjoy the tabletop game, you may find value in the app that I didn’t.

Alhambra is a tile-laying game where players use money cards selected from a rolling display of four cards and use them to buy one or more of the four tiles currently in the market. You get one action per turn and can use it to buy a tile, take money cards (one card, or several if they add up to five or less), or move a tile already in your palace to storage/move one from storage to the palace. If you buy a tile and pay the exact amount, you get a bonus action, so in theory you could get five actions in one turn: you buy each of the four tiles for the exact amount, and then get a bonus action to take money or renovate. There are six tile types, and you score for having the most or second-most of each type, with three scoring stages during the game and points increasing at each scoring. Tiles also have wall segments on zero to three edges; at every scoring, you score one point for each edge on your longest contiguous wall.

The app version of Alhambra has two different views – a standard top-down look and an isometric view with graphics on the tiles to give them 3D textures, with the isometric one much more comfortable to look at in my experience. You can also tailor the app speed if you want to see AI or opposing players make their moves, or if you’d rather speed things up and have cards just disappear from the display as they’re taken.

Making moves in the app is not intuitive in the least. First, you must select your action from a box at the top of the screen – buy, take money, renovate. If you’re buying, then you must select the money cards you intend to spend to buy the tile, and selecting the cards is a pain because of the way they’re laid out, overlapping each other, forcing you to click on the edge of a card to select it. Then you pick the tile you’re buying. If you pay the exact price, the app automatically gives you a bonus action by asking you to select a new action type. If you don’t have enough money to buy any tiles, that action is greyed out.

Any tiles you buy go into a temporary storage bin on the screen until your turn is done, after which you place all of the tiles at once. You drag the tile you wish to place over towards your board, and the legal spaces for it light up in green, then go back to retrieve the next tile if there are more in your tray. Once you place a tile, I don’t think there’s a way to undo it. The isometric view only fails in this one spot – it’s hard to distinguish walls on the ‘far’ side of tiles.

The game ends when the supply of tiles is exhausted, at which point there’s a quirk in the rules – the remaining tiles are assigned to players based on who has the most money of each color, whether or not those players have enough to buy the tiles. That can also mean you acquire a tile you can’t place, and the app wants you to place that tile in one of your renovation slots … which I only figured out from trial and error. If you don’t know this, you’re stuck.

The app is stable now after some early bugginess, and some expansions are available as in-app purchases, but I find the UI here too frustrating – and, again, I’m not wild about the game underneath it. If you love the base game, go for it. Otherwise, I’d give this one a miss.

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→ October 2, 2017
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Marjorie Prime.

Marjorie Prime is a soft science-fiction movie that delivers a brooding, dark meditation on the interlocking nature of grief and memory, buoyed by a thought-provoking idea at its center and carried by several individual strong performances in demanding roles. Set almost entirely in one house, the film moves slowly through time for its first half, then undergoes a disconcerting acceleration that leads to a concluding scene that doesn’t deliver on the promise of the remainder of the film.

Marjorie, played by Lois Smith, is an 85-year-old widow whom we meet in the opening scene as she talks to a young man named Walter, played by Jon Hamm. Walter is actually Walter Prime, a holographic projection, powered by a machine-learning program, and Marjorie talks to Walter Prime to grieve the real Walter, her late husband, while teaching the AI how to be more like the real Walter was … or how she remembers him, at least. Her own memory is starting to fail, and her adult daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law John (Tim Robbins), have moved in with her; getting Walter Prime was John’s idea, and he also speaks to the AI to try to further train it, which includes teaching it certain subjects to avoid when it is with Marjorie, while Tess is uncomfortable with the illusion and more than a little creeped out by it. As the title implies, Marjorie dies, and we then get Marjorie Prime to help Tess grieve, so we see glimpses of the early learning process, along with a few flashbacks to reveal the truth of certain anecdotes the people and the Primes share with each other.

The script relies almost entirely on dialogue, which puts a tremendous weight on the actors involved to execute it, and to envelop the audience in the philosophical and emotional questions the script raises. How do we grieve? How do we remember the loved ones we’ve lost – and to what extent are our memories functions of what we choose, rather than what our brains have stored? (There’s one scene that’s a little too explanatory on this point.) Why does Marjorie choose a very young version of Walter for his Prime, while Tess chooses Marjorie as she was just a few years before her death? Why does she ‘correct’ Walter Prime’s story about the night when Walter proposed to Marjorie? Do the Primes give the bereaved closure, or merely prolong the grieving to a harmful extent? In Marjorie’s case, Walter Prime seems to help, and John has set up the AI to encourage Marjorie to eat (and deduce when she’s not eating), while Tess seems to suffer from the experience of talking to Marjorie Prime in the second phase of the story. The film asks how we should grieve, but the answer it gives seems no more specific than “it depends on the person.”

The four main actors do all of the heavy lifting in this film, with just brief appearances by a few others. Hamm only has to play a Prime, except for one flashback scene, but has to convince the audience that his affect and expressions are real enough to evoke genuine conversations with the bereaved, which he does thoroughly and handsomely, displaying a little rakish charm in the film’s final scene. Robbins was the revelation here; I’ve seen plenty of his work and often found him too obtrusive an actor, a big guy who could only deliver a big personality on screen. In Marjorie Prime, he’s understated throughout, playing small in voice and in deed. When John has one brief moment where he acts out of frustration, it’s shocking because it’s so out of character, and Robbins loses just enough of his equilibrium to keep John together as, a heartbeat later, Tess enters the room. He’s also kind to Marjorie in the way of a doting son-in-law, a counterweight to Tess’s resentful, frustrated daughter, which Davis presents by frequently talking through her teeth.

(In general, I don’t discuss the physical appearance of actresses, because it’s superficial and generally irrelevant, and the pressure on women in film & TV to never age must be immense. Something was amiss with Davis’ face in this film, however; whether it’s plastic surgery, Botox, or something beyond her control, it altered her way of speaking in a way that I found distracting and a little hard to understand.)

Smith’s portrayal of Marjorie, first as person and then as Prime, hit me a little more than the other performances because she had some of the same expressions and cadences as my own grandmother did in the last few years of her life, including the same gait – not quite a shuffle, but a careful one, the walk of someone whose every step shows her awareness of the possibility of a fall. There’s a scene early in the film where John is standing behind a seated Marjorie, and she turns to talk to him … and in her facial expression I saw my grandmother, making the same face, talking to me as I stood behind her (she was tiny, no more than about 4’9″, so she didn’t have to be seated for this to take place). Smith hits all of the micro-elements of an elderly person facing both mortality and memory loss, like the little irritations at having someone prompt her with something she did remember, or the visual response to the confusion of, say, asking about someone who died many years ago.

The flaw in Marjorie Prime is the script’s failure to stick the landing, reminiscent of a film I just mentioned the other day, Being John Malkovich, which had a brilliant premise but sputtered at the conclusion without any real resolution of the movie’s many plot strands. Marjorie Prime has one real plot, rolling it forward a few times, but the end of the movie shifts the focus from the living to the Primes, creating far more questions than it resolves. Are we to empathize with the Primes now? Is it a comment on our own impermanence, and how technology may outlive us all? Should we feel some obligation to AI entities we create and teach? And if any of this was the point, where were these themes in the first 90 or so minutes of the film?

If you can live with a film that broaches important or thought-provoking ideas but doesn’t quite resolve its plot, then you should seek out Marjorie Prime, which is still in theaters. It’s a quick 98 minutes, even though it’s so dialogue-driven – there is no ‘action’ to speak of here, but there’s a sense of peeling away the layers of the family history that provides some narrative greed. And these characters are so well-inhabited that you’ll be glad to have the Primes around when one of them dies.

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→ October 1, 2017
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Music update, September 2017.

A whole raft of anticipated releases hit stores in September, including new records from Wolf Alice, Daughter, Hundred Waters, Cut Copy, Torres, The Killers, Death From Above, LCD Soundsystem, and the National, some of which lived up to expectations, some of which didn’t, and some of which were as bad as I expected. (I really couldn’t have any less interest in or respect for The Killers at this point, since they licensed a song and recorded an extra video to help promote the fight involving serial domestic abuser Floyd Mayweather.) Here’s my highly edited list of the best new songs of the month, with a half-dozen metal tracks at the end, increasing in heaviness as it progresses. You can access the Spotify playlist here if the widget below doesn’t appear.

Hundred Waters – Wave to Anchor. Hundred Waters had my #1 album of 2014 with The Moon Rang Like a Bell, an unconventional, experimental record of atmospheric electronica with breathy, acrobatic vocals by Nicole Miglis. The band’s second album, Communicating, came out on September 14th, and pushes even further into experimental territory, but with bigger sounds and more dramatic flourishes, very much in evidence here and on “Particle,” “Prison Guard,” and “Blanket Me.”

Daughter – Glass. Daughter’s Music from Before the Storm is the soundtrack to the new video game Life is Strange: Before the Storm, but works as a standalone album as well, with indie-folk trio Daughter using the game’s script as inspiration for a record that fits well in their own discography. It’s actually more cohesive than their last album, 2016’s Not to Disappear, even with instrumental tracks like this one, and I think stronger start to finish, buoyed by songs like this one, “Burn It Down,” “Voices,” and closer “A Hole in the Earth.”

Wild Beasts – Punk Drunk & Trembling. Wild Beasts are breaking up, with 2016’s magnum opus Boy King, a mesmerizing record of tremendous hooks built around a theme of toxic masculinity, their swan song. This track is one of the leftovers from the recording of that record and part of a forthcoming EP to close out their career.

Hippo Campus – Baseball. How could I omit a song called “Baseball?” Actually, that didn’t matter except that I pushed it further up the playlist – I wouldn’t include a song that wasn’t good, and this song has a great little guitar hook and catchy chorus to drive it. It’s on their newest EP, warm glow, which comes out just a few months after their debut album Landmark dropped.

Sløtface – Backyard. Try Not to Freak Out, the debut full-length from these Norwegian punk-pop purveyors, is uneven, but with a few standout tracks built around big hooks and fun lyrics, including this one and “Nancy Drew.”

Wolf Alice – Heavenward. I’ve been a little disappointed by Wolf Alice’s second album, Visions of a Life, released on Friday, as it doesn’t show any growth from their debut, My Love is Cool, and in some ways feels even less mature.

Death From Above – Holy Books. Their third album, Outrage is Now!, came out on September 8th, and it’s almost as if they’ve merged with Royal Blood, producing an album of huge, guitar-driven hooks that’s my favorite album of their three so far.

Portugal. The Man – Don’t Look Back In Anger. I don’t include many covers and almost never include live tracks, so you know this one, recorded in-studio for Spotify, must be pretty good.

Mourn – The Fire. These Barcelona punks put out a five-song EP, Over the Wall, on September 8th, with two standout tracks, this one and “Whatever.” They have a sort of anarchic, college-rock vibe to their best songs, as if the entire thing is going to fall apart at any second but the band just manages to keep it together until the song ends.

Van William – Never Had Enough Of You. Van Pierszalowski, lead singer of WATERS, put out a few singles on his own under the nom de chanson Van William (understandably so) earlier this year, and has now collected them with this new track and one demo on a four-song EP called The Revolution. This ballad is a definite shift in tone and feel for VW compared to the first two singles and to his work with WATERS, but you’ll recognize his signature sound in the shuffling guitar riff behind the lyrics.

Prides – Lets Stay In Bed All Day. I had Prides’ first single, “The Seeds You Sow,” as my #8 song of 2014,, but their debut album ended up a big disappointment, lacking any big hooks and really downshifting their overall sound. This song seems to get them back on track, with a big Wombats feel to both music and lyrics.

Tricky with Mina Rose – Running Wild. It only took me twenty years, but I have finally realized that I like Tricky’s music a lot more when he’s not the vocalist.

Von Grey – 6 A.M. I’m not sure about the “sexy goth sisters” marketing around this trio, but the sound on this track is a compelling, more vocal-driven descendant of the ’90s novelty act Rasputina.

Cut Copy – Black Rainbows. Cut Copy have produced so much music – 21 singles, five albums (including their latest, Haiku from Zero), a few EPs – since their 2001 debut, but despite a general sound that’s right in my wheelhouse, I’ve rarely found their songs even a little bit memorable because they haven’t had good pop hooks in what is otherwise very poppy music. This breaks that trend, the best song I’ve heard from them since 2010’s “Where I’m Going.”

The Riff – Weekend Schemes. I mean, if your band is named The Riff, you’d better bring the guitar licks … and they do, at least on this song, which is like a harder post-Oasis Britpop vibe with a dash of The Hold Steady in the vocals.

INHEAVEN – Bitter Town. Big, ballsy hard rock from their eponymous debut album, which also features the muscular “World on Fire” (on my August playlist). This song is more wistful, a little introspective even, with strong lyrical contrast to the heavy percussion and distortion that drives the music.

Mastodon – Toe to Toes. Mastodon have always been inventive musicians, frequently breaking out of traditional song structures, and often succumbing to melodic urges as if they couldn’t help but make a heavy song a little catchier. This song seems to split the baby; there’s a heavy, jazz-metal component, reminiscent of the work of ’90s metal acts Cynic and Atheist, and the song suddenly downshifts into AOR territory – but the juxtaposition works to the song’s benefit, providing a respite from the relentless riffs of the heavier sequences.

Chelsea Wolfe – Offering. Highly atmospheric, ethereal, gothic … something. It’s not really metal, although bits of metal creep into her latest album, Hiss Spun, and she employs a number of major names from the metal and hard-rock worlds on the record. There are doom and stoner elements here, but it’s all in service of building a dark, funereal edifice for Wolfe’s wide-ranging vocals. I thought the album as a whole dragged, but this track is a standout.

Myrkur – De Tre Piker. Myrkur is Amalie Brunn, a Danish vocalist who just released her second metal album under this moniker; her music is generally described as “black metal,” but that wildly undersells what she’s doing here. This music defies traditional categorization, borrowing from diverse genres and shifting tempos, themes, and styles multiple times within tracks, incorporating folk and classical elements along with extreme metal aspects, including screamed vocals that alternate with her own clean singing. It doesn’t always work, and she struggles sometimes with the lack of cohesion within tracks, but I’d put her in a very small group of artists who are trying to change the definitions of contemporary rock music.

Arch Enemy – My Shadow and I. I think I just don’t care for Alissa White-Gluz’s guttural vocal style – but I think the guitar riffs on Will to Power, their new album, are a big step forward from the slightly disappointing War Eternal (2014), still true to their melodic death-metal roots. (Founding guitarist Michael Amott was a member of seminal death-metal act Carcass for their breakthrough album Heartwork, which remains one of the founding records of the melodic death-metal subgenre.)

Satyricon – Deep calleth upon Deep. The vocals are bad – they just are, always have been for Satyricon – but they’re an unapologetic doom band now, a transition that, as many of you argued on Twitter, started somewhere around Rebel Extravaganza or Volcano. It’s not what original Satyricon fans want, but if you can stand the silly death growls there’s a good Pallbearer/Crypt Sermon vibe here.

Akercocke – Unbound by Sin. This is probably the most extreme metal song I’ve ever included on one of these playlists, which is why I left it till the end, but this song – and the entire album, Renaissance in Extremis – is a tour de force of progressive, technically proficient metal that incorporates elements of jazz and classical along with the standard death-metal trappings like blast beats (yawn) and growled vocals (mixed relatively low here, so the fretwork stands out). I used to think Akercocke was something of a joke, a so-called “blackened” death metal band that used controversial lyrics and album covers to grab attention, but this album, their first in ten years, just floored me with its complexity and textures. If you like extreme metal at all, it’s the best album of that niche this year and I think the best since Carcass’ Surgical Steel.

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→ September 30, 2017
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Get Out.

Get Out (amazon • iTunes) remains one of the top-reviewed movies of the year seven months after its initial release, despite multiple factors working against it: It’s a horror film, it was released in a dead spot in the calendar, and it was written and directed by an African-American man. The film has been a critical and commercial success, and is now the highest-grossing movie with an African-American director, along with a hilarious 99% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (And even that might be misleading; one of the two “negative” reviews is a 3/5 rating from a non-professional critic, while the other is noted gadfly Armand White.)

I’ve said several times here that I avoid most entries in the horror genre, almost entirely out of a dislike of graphic violence. The modern trend of “torture porn” and body horror may have its audience – sociopaths and prospective serial killers, I assume – but I am not of it. The handful of horror movies I’ve seen and liked have been psychological or gothic horror films; I often cite The Others as one of my favorites, because it’s creepy as hell, wonderfully acted, and free of violence.

Get Out does have some blood and a not insignificant body count, but it is very much a psychological horror movie, and even takes pains to keep the worst of the violence off-screen. The horror within the movie preys on our fear of mortality, our questions about identity, and racial guilt and animus, but not outright violence. There are unoriginal elements within the film, and one horror-movie cliché so pervasive I caught it despite limited experience with the genre, but the script as a whole is tight, unified, and clever, tackling subtle racism with a story that starts out equally subtle before it explodes into a paranoid and utterly bonkers physical manifestation of the problem.

Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose Armitage (Alison Williams) have been dating four months and are about to head to her family’s estate so he can meet her parents. He expresses reservations because she hasn’t told her parents that her boyfriend is black, but she assures him that they’re progressive, open-minded people who would have voted for Obama for a third term if they could have (a phrase her father, played by Bradley Whitford, repeats almost verbatim). When they do arrive there, Chris notices that the family employs a few black servants who speak and move with a strangely flat affect, while Rose’s mother (Catherine Keener) appears hellbent on hypnotizing Chris to cure him of his smoking habit. She later manages to do this, seemingly without his knowledge, in the middle of his first night there.

When the family hosts a big garden party the next day, the various older white guests make all manner of peculiar, racial (but not always overtly racist) comments towards Chris, while the one black guest, a young man named Logan who arrives with a much older white woman, is ‘off’ the way the servants are, and completely loses his composure when Chris takes his picture, as the flash triggers a total change in his demeanor and he attacks Chris while growling at him “get out!” Chris sends the picture to his friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who is a combination of Smart Brother and Conspiracy Brother, and Rod informs him that Logan is actually Andre, who had gone missing from their neighborhood six months earlier. After that, the movie largely confirms that everything that looked amiss is very much so, and then some, with a quick transition from psychological suspense to outright horror that works because the story is so tightly written up to that point.

The script works as a straight story, with a few jump scares along the way, but succeeds more by taking the stereotype of the “post-racial” white progressive and turning it inside out, using metaphor to expose such people as fakes or flakes – people who don’t really believe what they spout, or who simply fail to back up what they say when real action is required. Rod is the most dependable person in Chris’s life, and is essential to Chris’ hopes of escape at the end of the film, while one by one the “nice” white people Chris has met end up betraying him. You could even take Peele’s example of Logan/Andre as a warning about assimilation, about losing one’s identity and culture in an effort to fit into “American” culture and society by conforming to white norms and standards.

The remainder of this review contains possible spoilers.

The escape sequence of Get Out is taut and surprisingly focused on Chris’s psychological state, and has him relying on his mental skills at least as much as his physical to try to get himself out of the house. The one cliché I mentioned earlier appears here – the person who was pretty definitely dead suddenly appearing, not dead, and at full strength, despite (in this case) suffering a rather traumatic head injury – as if Peele needed one more person for Chris to fight before he could get out of the building. That same scene ends with an off-screen death that recalled Chris Partlow’s murder of Bug’s father near the end of The Wire season 4, but with all of the violence here left off screen, whereas the HBO series made the killing more visible and graphic. Even when Chris does one of the dumb things that the protagonists in horror films do, a choice involving Georgina, it’s at least well-founded in his character’s history and further explained through flashbacks at the moment of the decision (which turns out to be the wrong one, of course).

The core conceit of the film also struck me as a direct allusion to (or lift from) Being John Malkovich, which made the casting of Keener, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in the earlier film. BJM is more of a clever idea than a fully-realized film, like a short story that couldn’t bear the weight of two hours of plot, while Get Out turns the story over and makes the Malkovich analogue the center of the film, while actually finishing the story off properly. So while the central gimmick is not original, Peele manages to do in his first produced script to what Charlie Kaufman (who wrote BJM) didn’t do until his third, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won Kaufman the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The idea at the heart of Get Out may not have been Peele’s, but he turned it into a complete work with a clear resolution.

Peele has also spoken since the film was released about alternate endings he’d considered, one of which he filmed and most of which were darker than the one we get on screen, but I’ll stand up for the script as it was actually filmed. The film asks whether black Americans can depend on whites at all to help them achieve or move towards equality, and answers it with an unequivocal ‘no.’ The ending we get at least implies that black Americans can reach those goals, but only by helping themselves, and doing so in rather heroic fashion, relying on their wits more than they do the stereotyped physical qualities that the Armitages and their ilk ascribe to African-Americans.

After hearing multiple warnings about the nature of the end of the film, I thought Get Out chose the high road in presenting a horror-film sequence with more emphasis on what’s happening in Chris’s head than what’s happening to all the bodies, including his, and I enjoyed the movie far more than I expected. The film is also boosted by some strong performances, especially Kaluuya (born in England, but nailing the American accent), Williams, Keener, and especially Howery, whose role is largely comic but absolutely fills up the screen whenever he appears and delivers by far the movie’s funniest line near its end.

I imagine, given the critical acclaim for the film and the criticism of the 2014 and 2015 Oscar nominee slates for the lack of persons of color among major nominees, that this film will be the rare horror movie to find itself with an Academy Award nomination, perhaps for Best Original Screenplay, and likely a Best Original Score nod for Michael Abels. As far as I can tell, The Exorcist is the only straight horror movie to earn a Best Picture nod – even Rosemary’s Baby didn’t get one – so there’s an outside chance we’ll see some history made if Get Out does the same. It would be an incredible outcome for a movie that had so many factors working against it before its release.

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→ September 30, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 9/30/17.

My one ESPN column this week is a free one, covering my awards picks for 2017, excluding NL Rookie of the Year, the ballot I was assigned (again). I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I reviewed Azul, one of my favorite new boardgames of the year, for Paste, which will be my last review for them until November. I will continue to post reviews here in the interim.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit. I also have a new book signing to announce: October 14th at Changing Hands in Phoenix.

And now, the links…

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