→ September 6, 2017
→ By

Chameleon and Cobra Paw.

My latest post for Insiders is my annual Prospect of the Year award column; this year’s winner is Toronto’s Vlad Guerrero, Jr. I name several runners-up as well as the top-performing draftees from 2017.

I don’t really play many party games – they’re fine, just not my bag, and most of the time I’m playing games it’s with my wife and/or daughter rather than a large group – but I do get them from publishers on occasion. Two of those titles, both from Bananagrams/Big Potato, actually made it to our table recently: Chameleon, a party game for adults and older kids, and Cobra Paw, a matching game probably more suited to kids than adults.

Chameleon is a social deduction game where one player has to pretend to know what’s going on – but if s/he’s caught, which is pretty often, then that player gets one chance to win by guessing the clue everyone else had but s/he didn’t. In Chameleon, the dealer plays a topic card to the table to start a round, rolls two dice, and all players but one get a code card that indicates which of 16 words on the topic card is the clue for that round. One player gets a card that looks like the code cards from the back but only says “you are the Chameleon” on the front. The players then go around the table, starting with the dealer, and must each say one word that relates to the specific word on the topic card for that round. That means the Chameleon will have to throw a word out without knowing which word on the topic card other players are talking about. After each player has said one word, everyone has to decide who the Chameleon is, which is decided by a vote. If the Chameleon is not identified, s/he wins the round. If the Chameleon is identified, however, s/he gets one guess at which word on the topic card was the keyword for the round; a correct guess gives the Chameleon the win anyway.

You can probably see the one problem with this mechanic. If the Chameleon isn’t the first person to say a clue word, then s/he gets some useful information from every player to go before him/her to help narrow down which word on the topic card is the round’s keyword. But if the Chameleon goes first, the only options are to say a word that’s incredibly vague and could apply to almost anything on the topic card or to say something specific to some of the words on the card and hope that the guess is correct. It’s only marginally better if the Chameleon goes second. If the Chameleon goes third or later, the game works well, and the subterfuge and subsequent witch hunt are fun. The game suggests 3 to 8 players; I’d say you need at least 4 to make it worthwhile. Each round only takes five minutes or so. The game was previously published as Gooseberry, with a different theme but the same core mechanic.

Cobra Paw is much more for kids, a simple matching and dexterity game for two to six players. The Cobra Paw box contains two six-sided dice with various symbols on their sides and 36 dominoes with all potential combinations of those symbols. In each round, someone rolls the two dice, and then all players must find the matching domino on the table. The first person to grab the domino gets it – and yes, you can swipe one from another player’s play area – and keeps it until it’s stolen or the game ends. When one player collects six dominoes, s/he wins. There’s a definite advantage for adults between their chance to remember where certain tiles are and quicker reflexes, although I think the proper counterstrategy for kids is to smack the dominoes as hard as they can as a form of intimidation against faster-moving grown-up hands. My daughter enjoyed this one a lot more than I did, and I think it’ll get a lot more play when she has friends over than it will when we play as a family.

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→ September 3, 2017
→ By

Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

Chris Cleave has written several global bestsellers, notably the 2008 novel Little Bee, but his 2016 book Everyone Brave is Forgiven was his first foray into historical fiction. This quick-moving novel of four young people caught up in World War II is heavy on both action and emotion, but the character development lags behind the pace of the text, and it can’t help but suffer in comparison to a contemporary novel that does so much more with the same setting.

The quartet of characters at the heart of the book are Mary, Tom, Alistair, and Hilda, although Hilda is secondary to the main trio and bizarre love triangle that occupies the first half of the book. Mary and Tom are a quick item, meeting by chance at the start of the war when the manor-born Mary signs up and runs into Tom at the war office. Alistair, Tom’s more worldly, witty roommate, meets Mary later and the attraction is instant and mutual – but she and Tom are already engaged by this point and Alistair is heading back off to war after his first stint ended in the evacuation at Dunkirk. Mary is beautiful, so of course Hilda, her best friend, must be ugly, in what I believe is the 4th or 5th law of popular fiction (I get the order wrong sometimes), and attempts to set Hilda up with Alistair go nowhere.

Cleave can really write – the pace is brisk but never skimps on evocative imagery, especially the scenes of Blitz-plagued London or the privations Alistair suffers while stationed in Malta. The section where Mary, Tom, and Mary’s little class of non-evacuated students are caught in a bombing is the most memorable passage in the book, especially in how Cleave communicates the characters’ confusion in the shock of the attack – everything was fine, and now it’s not. His rendition puts the reader in the fog right next to his characters, so you feel the disorientation and the revelations seem to come in reverse, as if time has rewound and played back at half-speed.

He adds to the sense of disorientation, however, through the way he reveals big twists, such as the death early in the book of a side character whom Alistair has just befriended. The nonchalant description of the death, in the final sentence of a chapter, feels manipulative, although Cleave uses the aftermath to explore more of Alistair’s character in the first real window the reader gets into his emotions. But the regular use of jarring reveals wears thin very quickly and gives the novel a pulpy feel that doesn’t marry well with the subject matter.

Alistair is easy the most interesting character of the four, as Tom is a blank page and Mary’s appeal must lie in her looks rather than anything about her personality. Cleave builds the characters and then puts them through the ringer, but they come out on the other side relatively unchanged, just older and short a limb or with a visible scar. This is the real disappointment of Everyone Brave is Forgiven: Cleave set a novel during the Blitz, put real thought and energy into depicting the city in ruins, and then had his characters drift through the setting without sufficient growth or development.

This book appeared just one year and one day after Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his own WWII novel, All the Light We Cannot See, one of the best contemporary works of fiction I’ve read. Doerr crafted a more complex, meticulous plot, and in the soldier Werne gave readers a memorable, thoroughly-developed character who faces real moral challenges, without falling into the sentiment that traps Cleave. Doerr doesn’t skimp on the narrative greed – his novel moved faster and worked with higher stakes than Cleave’s, but along the way we get much more insight into Werne, and even Marie-Laure, who bears a few marks of the stock character, is better developed than Mary or Hilda. I find it hard to judge the latter novel without considering Doerr’s work, given their settings and how close the release dates were, but even on its own Cleave’s book is more a well-written page-turner than a work of good literature.

Next up: Still reading T.S. Stribling’s The Store, which has managed to pile a dash of anti-Semitism on top of its pervasive racism.

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→ September 2, 2017
→ By

Stick to baseball, 9/2/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote four pieces. I broke down the Astros’ trade for Justin Verlander and the Angels’ trade for Justin Upton. I put up scouting notes on prospects from the Yankees, Phillies, Jays, and Rangers. And I looked at five potential prospect callups for September. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Vulture this week, I looked at five major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames, not just reskinned games but several original titles like the excellent GoT Card Game. For Paste, I reviewed the Tour de France-themed boardgame La Flamme Rouge, which is light and good for family play. And here on the dish I reviewed the strong app version of the two-player game Jaipur, a steal at $5.

I’m trying something new this week, and if you find it useful I’d appreciate your feedback. I get a lot of press releases on boardgames from publishers, so I’m including the best of those at the end of this run of links along with boardgame-related news items. These will include Kickstarter announcements that look interesting to me, and if I’ve seen a game at all I’ll indicate it in the blurb.

This is your regular reminder that my book Smart Baseball is available everywhere now in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook formats. Also, please sign up for my free email newsletter, as my subscriber count is down one after I removed that one guy who complained about the most recent edition and called me a “tool.”

And now, the links…

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→ September 1, 2017
→ By

Evicted.

I have two new Insider posts on the Verlander trade and the Justin Upton trade.

Princeton sociology professor and ethnographer Matthew Desmond won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a stunning work of first-person research that examines a major socioeconomic problem from the ground level, rather than the top-down, data-driven approach I expected from a book in his genre. Desmond spent several months living among the inner-city underclass in several neighborhoods in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, shadowing tenants and landlords, witnessing evictions and forced moves, accompanying residents to rehab, AA meetings, even to court, recording what amounted to over 5000 pages of transcribed notes and conversations, to produce this devastating and utterly human portrait of people who simply do not exist to the house-secure classes.

Desmond’s aim here is clear: eviction is more than just a temporary loss of shelter, but a massive disruption to the economic and psychological well-being of entire families, a process that can lead to job loss, substance abuse, and crime, and a scarlet letter on a person’s record that can make it harder to obtain future housing and employment. The vulnerable class of the working or semi-working poor are victimized repeatedly by a system that takes the majority of their income, often over 75% of it, to cover rent for substandard housing, then punishes them if they fall behind and are evicted in a process that overwhelmingly favors the landlords. Tenants are often afraid to assert their rights, if they have any, or to report building code or maintenance violations for fear of retaliation. Once evicted, families may end up having to pay exorbitant fees to place their limited possessions in storage, with no access to their things, until the almost inevitable time when they can’t afford the monthly cost and lose what little they had.

Desmond accompanies several single residents and entire families on their journey through multiple evictions and the Lodge, a homeless shelter readers will know all too well before the book is complete. The access these people gave him is remarkable, as he captures their words at some of their most vulnerable and depressed moments, often witnessing their stuff being carted out to the curb in trash bags by Eagle Movers, who apparently maintain a truck (or two?) just for the purpose of serving landlords who are evicting residents. He also relates a firsthand account of housing discrimination – and explains in an afterword how the Fair Housing Authority did nothing with his formal complaint. (And that was under a Democratic administration; I doubt it’s any better today.) He also spends significant time with two slumlords – although he refuses to refer to either as such – to give their perspective, usually in their own words, even explaining how one, Sherrena, was “proud” of her landlord status and her collection of properties, even though Desmond makes it very clear that she is a nightmare landlord whose failure to maintain safe conditions in her buildings should probably have landed her in court.

By spending so much time with poor residents, Desmond also makes it clear what critical needs are not addressed when most of someone’s income – often income from disability payments – goes to cover the rent. Going without food, or without enough food, is an obvious outcome. But such tenants often have no heat or hot water, or sometimes can’t cover the gas or electric bills. Medical care is often entirely out of the question. Buying a new pair of shoes for a child, a mundane event for even middle-class families, is an enormous achievement. One of the few success stories in the book, Scott, a former nurse who lost everything when he became addicted to painkillers, has to borrow from his parents to cover the cost to get into a rehab program and begin taking methadone. Many other people Desmond follows don’t have even that bare safety net of a parent or relative to help cover a payment – or, in the case of one single mother, her safety net repeatedly refuses to help.

Desmond saves his prescriptions and recommendations for the epilogue, choosing instead to let the individual narratives tell the reader the overarching story of a system that traps these American untouchables in a cycle of poverty from which it is very difficult to escape. It’s easy to say, as so many politicians like to do, that the solution to poverty is to make poor adults go to work. That facile, elitist answer ignores the realities of work for the underclass: Available jobs barely pay enough to cover the rent, evictions and other related actions (police are often involved, with Milwaukee employing sheriffs specifically for this purpose) can count against someone on a job application, and missing time to try to find new living space can cost such a person his/her job. Affordable – or “affordable” – housing is often located far from work, with poor public transit options in many or most cities. We get repeated examples of people evicted because of the actions of someone else. One woman is evicted because the police were called to her apartment by a neighbor because her partner was beating her. Another loses what sounds like a perfect apartment because her young son got in a fight and her babysitter asked neighbors if they had any weed. And landlords get away with this because tenants don’t fight back, enforcement of what few rights they have is scarce, and there’s a line of people waiting to get into every apartment the evicted vacate.

In that epilogue, Desmond offers ideas and potential solutions, including universal housing vouchers that can be used anywhere, without discrimination, the way that recipients use food stamps. He speaks of reasonable housing as a fundamental human right, which is how western European governments and societies view it, arguing that “the pursuit of happiness” is impossible without adequate shelter. Desmond also pushes solutions that are, at best, antithetical to the capitalist underpinnings of our society, including broader rent control, without sufficient consideration of the economic consequences of such policies (rent control programs can stifle construction and push landlords to convert rental properties to non-rental ones). He seems to advocate for more public housing, but doesn’t discuss how we can expand the housing stock without repeating the problems of previous housing projects, many of which became unsafe and were razed within 20 years of their construction. His proposed solutions should spark discussion of how to solve the American housing crisis – or, at least, a discussion that there is a housing crisis at all – but seem like they will trade current problems for new ones rather than creating comprehensive solutions that at least consider how the market will react to major policy shifts. That’s a minor issue in a remarkable work that is dedicated more to exposing these problems to the wider audience, to bringing people in distress out of the shadows and into the public consciousness, because without that there won’t even be a conversation about how best to help them in an economy that still places a high value on the rights of private property owners.

I listened to the audio version of Evicted, which is narrated by actor Dion Graham, whose voice will be familiar to fans of The Wire. Graham does a masterful job of bringing the various characters to life with just subtle changes in tone – and treats these people, who are largely less educated and less articulate than, say, Graham himself is, with respect. It would be easy to caricature these underprivileged tenants, but Graham’s renditions infuse them with the quiet dignity they deserve, so that the listener may feel sorrow or pity for them, but not scorn.

Next up: Thomas Stribling’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Store. I’m about 60 pages in, and while the story is moving along, the casual racism in the writing – Stribling was from Alabama, set the novel in Florence, and has it taking place shortly after the Civil War – is appalling.

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→ August 31, 2017
→ By

Klawchat 8/31/17.

Recent content: looking at five potential September callups of note (Insider), my monthly new music playlist, reviewing the Tour de France-themed boardgame La Flamme Rouge, and reviewing the Jaipur boardgame app.

Keith Law: I know you love the way it’s going down. Klawchat.

Sourman: So… Austin Hays. He can hit it hard and make a lot of contact. He’s a really good prospect, right?
Keith Law: He’s a prospect. He doesn’t work the count much and he’s a corner outfielder. He does have power even the other way and I think he can hit, but perhaps not with much OBP.

Tyler: I am under no delusion that Ian Happ will be able to hit HRs at his current pace (almost 40 homer pace), but what kind of return do you think he could command in the offseason. I have to assume the Cubs will try to shop him, Russell, or Baez – who has the most value of the three?
Keith Law: Russell might have the least given the injury, the domestic violence accusation, and the nonperformance before he got hurt. I think Happ has more offensive potential than Baez because he has a much better approach, so that would imply Baez – who has a .291 OBP without those 13 IBB – would be the one to market.

Sean: In your September call up article you talked about Chance Adams, do you think if he converted to being a reliever full time he would be able to be above average? Or is he just someone who’s destined to be average regardless of role?
Keith Law: I think he’d be above-average in relief and below if he starts.

Andrew: Have you seen or heard anything about Pete Alonso? What are your thoughts on him? Thank you.
Keith Law: Heard he got way too big.

Dog: Given his success in the upper minors this season, will Miguel Andujar get some consideration for being a top 50 prospect?
Keith Law: Nope.

Adam: It’s not fair to say teams “missed” on a player who went 17th overall in the draft, but what was missing from Forrest Whitley’s profile as an amateur that had him ranked lower than other pitching prospects in his class?
Keith Law: He missed over a month at the start of that spring with a thumb injury; I was supposed to go see him but he got hurt and I never got back to texas.

Tracy: Could you explain how the Az Fall League is organized? How are the groupings of the teams are arranged?
Keith Law: I can’t explain it because I don’t know of any explanation.

Eric: Really enjoyed listening to your talk in Berkeley, I’m glad you were able to make it out this far. During that session, one person asked about how teams are using data to position fielders. (Or something to that effect) My follow-up question to that would be the Game Theory approach to that information: If you as a hitter (and your coaches) know that the defense is going to shift for you, don’t you try and adjust your approach to hit against the shift? Why don’t we see more guys laying down bunts or trying to drive the ball the other way?
Keith Law: Of course they should; I’m sure some guys can’t execute it, but there are more guys who can do it and aren’t.

Adam: Scouts are reportedly concerned with how quickly Kevin Maitan has matured physically. Is it really that worrisome considering the successes of huskier prospects like Devers and Vlad Jr, or does the concern have more to do with his conditioning?
Keith Law: I haven’t heard that from any actual scouts, and I think it’s funny that everyone comped him to Miggy when he was 14 and now they’re upset that he (allegedly) has a mature body … like Miggy did even when fairly young.
Keith Law: There’s some weird shit going around with people taking oblique shots at Atlanta and I don’t get it.

Adam: Hudson Potts has had a strong second half to the season. Has his projection changed for you at all?
Keith Law: Nope. But I also wasn’t declaring him a non-prospect when he struggled this spring at 18 in low-A.

Josh Meyer: Think Royce Lewis will have a better MLB career than Buxton?
Keith Law: I don’t, but I also think Buxton is a star.

Dog: Given that his peripherals make him roughly equivalent to Mike Leake (looking at FIP and DRA), wouldn’t the Cardinals (or any other team in free agency) be crazy to give Lance Lynn a long term contract in the $20m/year range?
Keith Law: That would be crazy money, yes. Maybe if he had never been hurt, but it’s not like he brings 200 automatic innings a year.

Adam: Can Bryse Wilson be added to the list of great Braves pitching prospects or is his ceiling lower than a lot of the other guys in that system?
Keith Law: I think I said last week (?) that he’s ahead of Wentz for me.

Sourman: Is Dustin May already a top 100 prospect?
Keith Law: Nope.

Nic AZ: Hey Keith, what do you make of the season Joey Lucchesi is having? Stat line looks good, have you heard much about him?
Keith Law: Yeah, better than a senior sign when they drafted him, but more of a deception guy than stuff with a funky delivery.

Adam: Do you read graphic novels? Not necessarily the superhero stuff, but other stories told through that medium?
Keith Law: No, I dislike the medium entirely.

Rahn: Hi Keith, the Nicasio release/waivers deal is just the latest in deflating, $-grubbing moves by the Nutting-owned Pirates. Stood next to the Penguins and Steelers (who obviously work within the league salary cap), the Pirates are seen rightfully as nickel-and-dimers that never make the commitment to winning the others do. What has been your perspective on the Pirates franchise?
Keith Law: Don’t think that’s remotely fair to the club.

Michael: Hi Klaw- Do you have any go-to cookbooks, sites, or recipes for quick (under 30 mins prep/cook time) dinners for family that actually taste decent?
Keith Law: I don’t per se, but any decent cookbook for beginners (I always start with Joy of Cooking) should indicate total time – and remember to add a little bit if it’s your first time doing a recipe.

Roger: What do you think the Reds do with Senzel and Suarez? Senzel looks like a future star while Suarez just turned 26 and has worked himself into a very good hitter and solid fielder. Move one to second? Outfield?
Keith Law: Suarez to 2b, Senzel stays at 3b.

Otanimania: If you were a GM who was told by Otani’s agent that allowing him to hit was a mandatory part of signing him would you do it? I imagine given the IFA restrictions his decision will probably come down to something like that
Keith Law: If we’re doing handshake deals I’d rather do one that says, hey, we’ll tear this up in a year and give you $20MM a year than hamstring myself like that given the probability that he’s not even an adequate MLB hitter.

Rob K: Terry keeps pinch hitting for Dom Smith against lefties. Jose Reyes is on pace to lead the Mets in plate appearances. Sandy had to prioritize dumping payroll over restocking a now-empty farm system. The only treatment for Matz’s clearly swollen elbow (before season-ending surgery) was weeks of injecting painkillers. No question, I am just sad.
Keith Law: No answer other than that Teflon Terry needed to be gone a year ago.

Your Honor: How worried should the Yankees be about Aaron Judge’s post all star break? Have you seen anything in his swing that would indicate he’s hurt or is it just something wrong mechanically? It just seems very odd that his hard hit ball% would fall off a cliff so suddenly.
Keith Law: He is hurt, right? I’m pretty sure the shoulder is a problem.

chito: Why is Allard ranked higher in most prospect rankings than Soroka? Thanks!
Keith Law: LHP with plus CB vs low-slot RHP without.

Jake Lewis: Can you talk for a little bit about Miguel Castro? The Kids been filthy ever since he got called up in Baltimore. Thoughts on his long term as a SP?
Keith Law: More likely a reliever but an electric arm.

ExExpos: Taylor Ward, Matt Thaiss and Jahmai Jones have been doing well after their recent promotions. Do any have a shot at being in your top 100? And do you think Thaiss could develop more power?
Keith Law: Jones was already there. Ward has no shot – why would you just ignore how awful he was in a larger sample before the promotion? I don’t think Thaiss will develop more than average power, if that; he’s a high hit tool/low power type.

Derek: If you squint, Robles’s 2017 numbers don’t look all that different from Acuna’s. Numbers wise, Robles was better in High-A and not quite as good in AA. Robles has high BABIPs, though not completely insane for a fast guy who makes good contact. Acuna’s numbers are clearly inflated – though surely just somewhat – by his pushing .400 BABIP. If Acuna merits a call-up in September, doesn’t Robles? Yes, the Nats aren’t going to do this, but should they? They need OF help in the short term with Harper out and maybe Robles is lightning in a bottle. Why not give him a look?
Keith Law: There are service-time/40-man reasons not to promote a guy before he’s needed, especially if he’s not likely to be on the OD roster the next year. Not least is that if he gets hurt, now or in March, you’re going to have to carry him on the major-league DL, pay him a ML salary, and give him service time while he’s out. Bigger risk for pitchers, obviously.

Advanced: Do you view statcast stuff like spinrate, exit velocity, launch angle, perceived velocity, etc as a way to put a number on things scouts pick up on?
Keith Law: Some. I discuss this at length in the last few chapters of Smart Baseball.

addoeh: I know rosters expanding to 40 in September gives some guys a chance to play in the majors and some young players experience. But shouldn’t we still keep a 25 man roster for the games? That 25 man roster can change every day if managers want to, giving players opportunities to play. But it seems better solution than each team having 15-20 pitchers in the bullpen and countless pitching changes. These games still have meaning and it seems silly to play 80% of the year with one set of rules and 20% with another set. Agree?
Keith Law: I’d be fine with 28-man rosters, a nod to the need to maybe ease up on some pitchers and rotate some hitters out but still let them get 2 AB for themselves or for the fans (like in spring training). 40 is bonkers.

jay_B: Over/under two 3-WAR seasons for Kyle Schwarber in his career? BABIP in the 230s is going to make it tough.
Keith Law: I do not believe he’s a .230 BABIP guy. I’ll say over.

AD: How do you think society can get to a point where things like anxiety, depression, and substance addiction are widely viewed/treated as the diseases that they are instead of a state of mind or a defect?
Keith Law: Eh, we’re a long way from that. We can’t even seem to accept that a trans person is an actual person.

Chris: Thanks for another chat, Keith. I’m a Mets fan and readily and freely admit many Mets fans are panicky clowns. Many are already having the vapors over Dom Smith’s weight/lack of immediate production. What do I tell my friends who are ready to move Smith in favor of Peter Alonso, who is older than Smith but only now in AA and off to a good start there? I’ll just go on ignoring all together the ones wanting to bring back Jay Bruce to play 1b.
Keith Law: You need better friends.

Derek: Assuming Eaton is healthy in 2018, do you think the Nats should (a) put Eaton in CF and pursue a corner guy in a trade/FA; or (b) platoon Michael A. Taylor and Brian Goodwin and invest resources elsewhere? Put another way, is a MAT/Goodwin platoon good enough for a club that has WS aspirations in 2018?
Keith Law: Harper’s last year means you go all in.

Satya: Hi Keith, is it too early to get excited by Austin Riley’s better numbers at AA than he had at A+? And has he made swing adjustments to help overcome his slow bat speed?
Keith Law: He’s striking out at a much higher rate in AA. And a good rule of thumb is that if a guy stunk at high-A and then has 100 good AB in AA, the first part is real.

Benny: I saw your tweet about Greg Allen’s call-up. Think he can be a starter or more of a 4OF type?
Keith Law: 4OF. Zero power, and not a super-disciplined guy for high OBPs. Plus I can’t see pitchers pitching around him much.

J: Vlad the Impaler with Impaling Discipline is doing more than fine at High-A at age 18 (33/26 BB/K). Start 2018 at AA? Or do they slow him down a bit and return to Dunedin?
Keith Law: I bet he starts in Dunedin and gets to AA around May 1st when the snow melts.

Rob: What are your overall impressions of Villains? I feel like the album starts out and closes very strong, but really falls flat in the middle. Thanks.
Keith Law: Two great tracks, a lot of solid album tracks. Planning to listen to it again on my drive to Reading tonight.

Nate: Keith, My observation of Moncada has been his high k-rates have been a lot about a passive approach. Has this always been the case?
Keith Law: No, he has trouble getting the bat head to the zone in time especially on stuff in on his hands.

Jason: What do you see as a realistic outcome for Scott Kingery’s career? I’ve seen on other chats that you’ve compared him to Altuve but do you see that as his ceiling? Or is he a star?
Keith Law: If he develops some patience – he really just goes after the first pitch he can hit, and so far, he’s hit most of them – he could turn into an Altuve type, but that’s a top 5% kind of outcome. Very few players go from this sort of approach to Altuve’s level of patience.

Sean: When will you admit that you were wrong about Dylan Bundy?
Keith Law: Maybe when I’m wrong about him. Pro tip: “When will you admit…” is a grade 20 approach.

Andrew, NY: i didnt read the article about the TEX/HOU swap, but did see some of your back and forth on twitter. if the idea was to just swap the home games how is Tex negatively effected? would the cost be that high to accommodate the switch?
Keith Law: Those home games are not equal. Houston lost those three home games to the hurricane. Those games and the associated revenue were gone. Houston wanted to be able to move those dates to the future, to games Texas already had on their calendar, for which they had sold tickets and likely set up promotions, games Texas might need for their wild card chances (unlikely, but nonzero), to recoup the lost revenue at Texas’s expense. There’s no reason on earth the Rangers should take that deal, because it’s a pure loss for them and gain for Houston. Instead, the Rangers offered to host the games, let Houston be the home team, and give Houston all the revenue. That was so much clearly better than 1) status quo for Houston or 2) playing in the St. Petersburg mausoleum that the Astros declining the offer left them without a nose.

Stanley: Hi! Percentage odds Tatis Jr. stays at short?
Keith Law: Better than even.

Chris: With Acuna’s streak, he’s obviously a hot topic in Braves country. He’s not Mike Trout (no one is), but is Jim Edmonds a reasonable expectation?
Keith Law: Edmonds hit 393 homers in his career and topped 40 twice. I would not bet on Acuna doing that.

Brian: What exactly IS Tommy Pham? A guy enjoying a temporary spike in performance? Or someone who’s achieved a newfound level of health (mostly on account of corrective eye surgery) who can be a solid everyday player going forward?
Keith Law: Both. Some of this is clearly flukish, and he’s 29, so it’s not like we’ve got a long window here, but he’s had some history of hitting (and has some tools too) around his nonstop injuries.

David: Loved the book! Surprised you didn’t take the opportunity to vent about the double whammy of a guy blowing the save and then getting credit for the win when his team bails him out later. There’s a special level of hell in the scorebook for that one. Pickings too easy there, or just got left on the editing room floor?
Keith Law: Too big a tangent.

Adam D.: As it’s impossible to know who will be best player available come June, who is the better fit for the Giants right now, Brady Singer or Seth Beer and why in your opinion?
Keith Law: Neither. Singer has big reliever risk – reminds me a bit of Jonathan Crawford – and Beer is at the far end of the defensive spectrum.

Brian: In the preseason you said that Jack Flaherty had great command, good-but-not-great stuff, and projects as a mid-rotation starter. Is that still how you see him? Or has his stuff improved over the past year?
Keith Law: Yep, still that guy. Excited to see him tomorrow.
Keith Law: on TV, that is. I won’t be there.

Aaron: In Houston. Thanks for the chat Klaw. Much needed after all the devistation. It’s the little things. When will climate change be taken seriously by our govt.
Keith Law: You are already seeing alt-right voices rushing to say this has nothing to do with climate change, and the basket of gullibles who follow them will eat it right up.

Hunter Harvey: What are your current thoughts on Hunter Harvey now that he is back throwing successfully for the first time in a long time?
Keith Law: Stuff is great but still very cross-body, the way the O’s changed him before he got hurt … not many guys stay healthy throwing like that.

Jake: So…Rafael Montero has actually been okay the last month. Is he a GUY?
Keith Law: Yes. I think he’s more than OK but has had some horrible luck/non-support from defense.

Mike: Lord knows I’ve tried, but somewhere in the rubble of the late 70s/early 80s there’s a “Saturday Night Fever” ripoff that starred Adrian Zmed and only played on Cinemax. The new Arcade Fire is the soundtrack for that movie.
Keith Law: That’s frighteningly accurate. The shame is that “Everything Now” is one of the five best songs I’ve heard this year. The middle of the album is a pretentious mess.

J: Do you think WIllie Calhoun gets a cup of coffee next week, or gets held off til next April? Bat seems ready…
Keith Law: See the answer above about premature callups. They have some disincentive due to the CBA, which is unfortunate for players and fans.

Hank: The Braves obviously have a lot of arms in the minor league system, but I’m still nervous about it. I don’t scout these guys, so please give me your thoughts. I just don’t see anyone with front line upside besides Wright and maybe Gohara. Looks like a bunch of mid rotation guys, no?
Keith Law: Anderson and Wilson would be in that group too.

Steve: Any books post- Lush Life to be added soon to KLaw Top 100?
Keith Law: I do need to update that this winter. All the Light We Cannot See and In the Light of What We Know would both make it. Infinite Jest would. The Orphan Master’s Son and The Sense of an Ending would both require some thought. I finished the Bloomsbury Must-Read Novels list after I posted that last 100, I think, so something like Middlemarch or Bleak House might belong.

Jeremiah: Before the season, you were tauting Daniel Norris as a potential #1/#2 starter, but he has been terrible. (He currently has a 10.50 ERA after five rehab starts in Triple A.) Has his stuff regressed? Has he lost command? Has he been hurt all year? What’s going on here?
Keith Law: Hasn’t been healthy all year.

Danny: Hoping to hear your take on Nick Solak and Kyle Holder with the Yankees. Do they profile as MLB regulars to you after the seasons they’ve had?
Keith Law: Holder is a backup for me – all glove no bat. Solak might be a second-division regular, I think, but I’d like to see him more.

Tim: Was hoping for a Strand or other NYC book store signing this summer. Any chance of that still happening over the off-season?
Keith Law: Nothing worked out. If you have a local store that does signings and they want to try to set something up, let me know or have them contact Danielle Bartlett at HarperCollins.

Angelo: Is it to early to ask which players are worth watching in the AFL?
Keith Law: Yes only because I’m not going to spend time on the rosters until we get closer to October. Some guys won’t be there when AFL Opening Day rolls around.

Jeremiah: Jordan Hicks has been great since his promotion to Palm Beach (1.00 ERA, 32 Ks/6 BBs in 27 innings.) Has he turned a corner? What can we expect from him? Front-end starter?
Keith Law: Front-end starter stuff, but command isn’t there yet.

Jack: Think the Phillies can pencil Hoskins into their 3 hole for the next 5 years?
Keith Law: I think he’s their first baseman for the next 5 years. I don’t want to overreact to a crazy first 20 games.

Chris : Who would you like Mets to look at to replace TC?
Keith Law: There’s a potted plant in my office that would make a nice upgrade.

Larry: I’m an Atlanta fan terrified about rebuilding around pitching. Why is the next group of pitchers different from Blair, Wisler, Newcomb, Sims?
Keith Law: The next wave is better across the board – better stuff, better athletes, more command.

Jon Orr: Have you/are you doing a write up on the Leake trade?
Keith Law: Nope. I don’t bother with salary dumps.

romorr: Keegan Akin, did his season go as you expected, anything he did better or worse? Going forward, what could he work on to improve on his 2017 season?
Keith Law: I wasn’t a big fan, so I guess as expected? Also he’s hurt and I heard he wasn’t good his last few outings.

Jim: So, I’m not trying to name names….but, it sure sounds like that Rosenthal article had the Wren family(Frank or Jeff) written all over it. Okay – so there are some names.
Keith Law: That was my immediate assumption too. Atlanta promoted and reassigned a bunch of people, like every team does every fall. The rest sounded like bullshit.

Chris: Was a bit disappointing to hear your take on Adams, but it seems the Yanks themselves may be not all in on him as a SP. BTW, what did you think of Yard Goats’ field never heard?
Keith Law: Both Hartford and Scranton have beautiful parks. Really impressed by both. Love that Hartford’s park is in a ‘bad’ area of town, too, since that might actually spur a little growth – never enough to justify the public expense, but at least it might help.

Jack: So apparently Buxton has a hamate bone injury. They don’t know if it’s broke yet or not. Is the Twins season over if it is?
Keith Law: No, but if he broke his hamate I don’t want to see him play again until March. Players who’ve had that talk about how long it takes to regain full strength in the hand.

Strohm: Best version of Ticket to Ride?
My vacation rental house had the USA version and my nephew was really into it. Want to get him one for upcoming bday.
Keith Law: USA with the 1910 expansion and Europe are still my favorites. France map (coming soon) will drastically change the game, maybe making it better but also more complex.

Kris: The phillies rebuild is an unmitigated disaster right? Having guys like Joseph and Galvis block top prospects makes zero sense. No imminent pitching help. Most of their prospects not named Sixto having disappointing seasons. MacPhail needs to go.
Keith Law: Well, that honeymoon ended quickly.

TJ: What do you make of billy McKinneys good statistical season? Do you think he can be an every day caliber player in MLB?
Keith Law: Saw him. Probably not a regular, but there’s a chance. Still a lot of swing and miss there for a guy with such a pretty swing.

JR: Have you made any donations to charity to help Houston? I’ve read too much bad stuff on red cross to consider donation to them, but want to help. Any thoughts on most worthwhile places to donate too to help?
Keith Law: I don’t give to the Red Cross, ever. I had just written a check to a local food bank last week, so all I’ve done so far is bought about $50 in supplies for that law firm (Merritt) in Dallas that’s loading up trucks with essentials to ship down to Houston.

Michael Devon : Thanks, Keith. Logan Allen and Freddy Peralta. Curious what scouts are saying. Thanks!
Keith Law: Discussed Allen last week. Peralta is a short RHP who’s 88-92. Not sure why I’ve been asked about him a few times this week on twitter. He’s just a guy.

A: Hi Keith, thanks for chatting. What would you expect to see out of Cornelius Randolph in the AFL?
Keith Law: I’d like to actually see him hit; he’s been pretty disappointing at the plate, and that’s his entire game.

Ben, the NYC: Have you seen Ronaldo Hernandez?
Keith Law: I have never been to an Appy League game in my life.

Dallas: Have you heard anything on Gabriel Arias the 2016 July 1st signing moved up to Lo-A for the Padres?
Keith Law: Saw him in March, he’s pretty young for low-A but they have so many young SS that someone had to move up to get everyone playing time. I liked what I saw in spring training but he seemed a long way away, like most of their 17-year-old kids. Tatis was there, and even one year older made him look like the grown-up in the group.

TG: If you are the Nationals and are concerned you can’t sign Harper, would you try to get Stanton and his comparatively friendly deal compared to what it might take to sign Harper.
Keith Law: Stanton’s deal is the opposite of friendly, IMO, but I could very much see the Nats acquiring him if they believe Harper is as good as gone. They also need to figure out how much they’ll pay Rendon, who is quietly having an MVP type of season.

J: What do you think about Cleveland’s C prospect Mejia playing 3rd base now? Defense stalled at C? Or just trying to get him on the roster?
Keith Law: I have a feeling it’s to get him on the roster and/or give him some time off from behind the plate. I don’t think his defense has stalled or that he needs a new position.

Tom: 538 had a column confirming what we pretty much knew: Albert Pujols is the worst everyday player in MLB (despite the RBIs). But… in your opinion, what can the Angels really do with him at this point?
Keith Law: Nothing. I don’t see them releasing him so they have to wear it.

Jesse B: Does Adbert Alzolay have the size to pitch 200+ innings, or is he more reliever? What’s his ceiling?
Keith Law: I haven’t seen him myself, but others tell me he’s a clear starter with a chance to be a very good one, a two or better.

Layton Sheets: Do you see Alex Jackson as a future star in the Major Leagues ?
Keith Law: No, but unlike a year ago, he looks like a big leaguer.

TG: Do you support nuclear power as a way to combat climate change? It really is the only carbon neutral technology that is capable of powering our grids in the near future.
Keith Law: I do but I fear Fukushima may have ended our hope of a nuclear power renaissance.

Jim: So Anderson and Wilson have higher upsides than Allard and Soroka?
Keith Law: Yes, that’s accurate.

Chris: i read somewhere the upside comp for Billy McKinney is Seth Smith. Fair?
Keith Law: I can’t go that far.

Bro: Who are your top 5 pitching prospects at the end of the year? Based on previous chats and media, I was thinking your top 5 would be (in no particular order) Whitley, Kopech, Keller, Buehler, and I don’t really know who the 5th would be. Quantrill maybe?
Keith Law: Those are the top four, clearly, and then there’s a big black line between that group and the next tier. The next group of high-upside guys are all kids a long way off – Sixto, Groome, Ian Anderson – too far to put them in the top tier.

Josh Gilbert: What do you think about old guys collecting baseball players autographs ?
Keith Law: Whatever finds your lost remote.

Terpitude: Hunter Greene reportedly 100-102 in one short inning of work. Having just turned 18, could this be a guy who pitches at around 105 with command when his body fills out? That would be unprecedented as a starter. Thanks.
Keith Law: No, I don’t expect him to add any velocity. His arm ain’t getting faster. Nor would I want that.

Joe: Did you do a write-up on your trip to SWB? I want to see your thoughts on Andujar and McKinney.
Keith Law: Not yet; if I had you would certainly be sick of me posting the link. I post writeups every few games, so that the individual posts aren’t too short or too specific to one team.

Drew: Any cause for concern with Erick Fedde’s rough start, especially with diminished velocity in his last outing? I know us Nats fans were spoiled by Strasburg’s debut but Fedde isn’t separating pod from sock right now…
Keith Law: Yes, big concern. He looks awful.

Keith: Do you view the rising K rate of hitters as a problem that MLB needs to solve? If so, how? 4 strikes and you’re out?
Keith Law: Raise the bottom of the strike zone.

Dr. Bob: I have the 30-minute cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen. Good stuff in there.
Keith Law: Their stuff is pretty solid overall, too, although I find Kimball’s writing a little cloying.

David: Knowing what you know of Urias’ injury, do you see he or Buehler with the higher upside (in 3 years) to be the Dodgers’ #2 starter?
Keith Law: Urias’ career might be over. I would assign him a value near zero at this point because of the probability that he’s done or comes back greatly reduced.

MJ: Verdugo getting called up. Has hit .252 in last two months. Is it smart to start his service time now?
Keith Law: I don’t care what his average was in the last two months if I’m deciding whether to call a player up.

Dave : Hey Keith, anything to read into with Mason Martin destroying GCL? Probably not, right?
Keith Law: Not really. He hit 7 homers in the first 12 games (I think) then 3 in the next 40 or so. Weird stuff happens in short season. At least, that’s what Mitch Einertson and Dante Bichette, Jr., told me.

Rahn: So if that is not fair to the Pirates, what is fair comment or consideration, Keith?
Keith Law: Nicasio had limited trade value; I know they shopped him in July, asked for a lot, and didn’t get an offer they liked. It’s two months of a rental reliever who is very good now but has only been good for a year and a half. I had an AGM with another club speculate to me that the team that claimed Nicasio on trade waivers – which he was, by an NL team – offered the Pirates bupkis, so rather than do that they chose to just let him go and figure he’d at least get to go pitch for a playoff team in the AL. I can’t confirm that, but it makes sense, and it doesn’t make the Pirates “cheap.”

Tom: Is Grayson Long a legitimate mid-rotation starter?
Keith Law: No, back-end at best.

ML: Twins just announced it’s a bone contusion for Buxton. Not a hamate
Keith Law: Hamate is a bone, though.

Gerry: I know he’s better on DL twice but is Aaron Altherr for real from what you’ve seen?
Keith Law: He’s intriguing – athlete who never really put it together at the plate, suddenly does so in the majors, so the track record isn’t there but the physical tools are. That’s an “I’m not sure.”

Jesse B: Why isn’t Honeywell in the top 5?
Keith Law: Why would he be? Doesn’t have the stuff of those guys.

Mick: Will you be following the U18 Thunder Bay Canada tournament? Any prospects from non traditional baseball countries that you’re excited about?
Keith Law: I wanted to go see team USA in Minneapolis but the forecast was for rain all weekend. I wouldn’t follow any team but ours there.

Connor: Another injury for Meadows. Do his repeated injuries now effect his prospect ranking for you at all?
Keith Law: Injuries are why I omitted him from my top 50 at midyear.

B: What happens if Albert Pujols retires? I mean, if he continues to struggle and doesn’t want to “tarnish” his legacy, could the Angels quietly offer him a buyout to retire?
Keith Law: I don’t know the man but I wonder if he’s conscious of some upcoming milestones. He’s 61 hits from 3000, and 18 homers from tying Griffey. Junior limped through the last decade or so of his career and still sailed into the Hall.

Bradley: What are your thoughts on Mickey Moniak’s struggles this year? Young for that league…struggles with hitting LHP? Do you imagine he will right the ship from what you’ve seen?
Keith Law: Didn’t like what I saw this year but he’s still just 19. Recognition of breaking stuff was awful.

Jon, WI: How do you like Orlando Arcia’s first full year of performance? What’s his ceiling hitting wise?
Keith Law: Was hoping for a little more but I am pleased with his progress. Still a lot more upside in the bat especially as the approach improves.

Jon: Just looking at your tags and found that the last time you used “sushi” was in 2014. Have you stopped eating sushi?
Keith Law: I’m glad someone uses the tags on these posts – I tag everything and put a lot of thought into them. I do eat sushi but not frequently because I’m really picky about it (it’s raw fish, I think it’s fair to be picky).

ML: Touche. Just meant they’re saying it’s not broken and he’s available for defense and on the bases today
Keith Law: That’s good news. But I’d be fine if they said they’re giving him the weekend off or something.

Jared: Jimmie Nelson seems to have had a breakout year (5th in Fangraphs WAR). Is this who he is or is he still more of a 3/4?
Keith Law: This is probably a peak but I’d be fine with a forecast of a run of seasons that range from league-average to comfortably above-average.

Patrick : Medina, Suarez, Kilome, Dominguez, Romero…all legit prospects after Sixto? Thanks Klaw
Keith Law: Yes, no idea, seeing tonight, probably, yes. I’m assuming those are Luis Suarez and Seranthony Dominguez.

romorr: Mancini is putting up some nice numbers, HRs seem right, but with his lack of patience, hes bound to lose some average. Just curious if that was what you saw, or is there a better eye as he matures.
Keith Law: Suprised by the power, but I guess everyone hits 20+ homers now. Agree that the average seems likely to come down.

Grover: is it really a foregone conclusion that the Nats won’t resign Harper? They aren’t exactly a small market, and aren’t averse to spending. Just seems like everyone has been expecting them to part ways for years.
Keith Law: Not a conclusion but a likelihood. I see no chance he or Machado signs for less than the best offer. With the number of likely bidders for both guys, how likely are you as one team to have the best offer on either? You have to plan like he’s gone.

Adam F.: What are some games that would scale well as a four player game, with two ten year olds, an eight year and a six year old? They have played Ticket to Ride and King of Tokyo, but not much else outside of your basic generic board games. Thanks!
Keith Law: I’d give Splendor a shot. Takenoko is very cute and might work if you help the six-year-old a little. I also reviewed Kingdomino here last week and think it would work for that group: http://klaw.me/2wqhy0y
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. I’ll be in Reading tonight and hope to hit a couple more minor league games next week before the season wraps up. I should be back for another chat next Thursday. Thank you all as always for reading and for all of your questions!

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→ August 31, 2017
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New music update, August 2017.

Big month for new music in multiple genres, with new music from a number of artists I didn’t think were still recording and a slew of brand-new artists working towards their first album or EP releases. I lead off with one of my favorite bands of the last few years and bounce around between familiar and new names, finishing up with a trio of metal tracks at the very end. If you can’t see the widget below you can click here to access the Spotify playlist directly.

Everything Everything – Can’t Do. E2 are part of a small movement of British art/indie acts, along with alt-J (who seem to have gone full commercial this year) and Wild Beasts, who engage in a sort of hysterical version of indie-pop, with lots of falsetto vocals, strange arrangements, weird tempos, and other things you wouldn’t expect to find in a four-minute song on the radio … but with compelling melodies that tie their best songs together. Everything Everything’s fourth album, A Fever Dream, dropped last Friday and I think it’s their best overall LP yet, although it doesn’t quite have a huge single like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” or “I Believe It Now.” “Can’t Do” is my favorite track from the album and the most likely to creep on to American radio.

Confidence Man – Boyfriend (Repeat). Speaking of weird, artsy acts, Confidence Man is an Australian quartet whose music is just … peculiar. Actually, the music is great; the lyrics and vocals are the peculiar part. I don’t love the flat affect the singer uses here, although it’s of a piece with the subject matter – and damn that’s a catchy beat.

Queens of the Stone Age – The Evil Has Landed. Villains is QotSA’s seventh album, their first working with producer Mark Ronson of “Uptown Funk” fame, and the influence is immediately obvious, as this is the funkiest output of Josh Homme’s career, although I think there’s been a soulful, groove element to lots of his work in the past.

Daughter – Burn It Down. Singer Elena Tonra gets angrier on this darker-than-usual track from the folk/electronic trio, which comes from their forthcoming album, Music from Before the Storm, the score to the brand-new episodic video game Life is Strange: Before The Storm, released today from Square Enix.

Birdtalker – Looking for Love. Birdtalker is a little bit country, and a little bit folk, and I guess there’s a little rock and roll in here, but I’m as drawn to the group’s lyrics as their music; I’m still waiting for a release date on their debut album One, the title track of which appeared on my June playlist.

The Pale White – Downer. A trio from Newcastle-upon-Tyne – that doesn’t matter, I just like saying it – the Pale White do guitar-heavy alt-rock, along the lines of other recent British acts with big guitar sounds like Drenge, the Amazons, and early Muse. Their debut EP is out later this month.

Death From Above 1979 – Never Swim Alone. If the White Stripes covered a Sleigh Bells track, it would sound something like this.

Wu-Tang Clan featuring Redman – People Say. Every time I think the Wu-Tang Clan is done, they pop back up, although I also couldn’t tell you exactly who’s in the Clan and who just keeps showing up on their tracks like Redman. (Does he need to go through some sort of initiation? Give them all his worldly possessions?)

Beck – Dear Life. It’s not “Dreams” – my #1 song of 2015, and probably my favorite song of his prolific career – but it’s a lot better than last year’s dismal “Wow,” too.

The War On Drugs – Nothing To Find. It’s a little long, as all their songs are wont to be, and I find it hard to listen to any of their songs without picturing Richard Belzer doing his Bob Dylan impression, but I like their uptempo stuff more and the new album A Deeper Understanding, which came out last Friday.

Starsailor – All This Life. I wasn’t aware this Britpop (or “post-Britpop,” as Wikipedia calls them, which I think is a question of time rather than genre) act had reunited until last week; their comeback album, All This Life, comes out on Friday, their first new material since 2009.

Maisie Peters – Place We Were Made. Just 17 years old, Peters built up a following on Youtube and has now released her “first proper single,” this worldly paean to home that feels like it should have been written by someone many years her senior. I’m projecting big things for young Ms. Peters, not least because of the evocative nature of the imagery in her lyrics.

Sarah Chernoff – Markings on You. Chernoff is (was?) the singer of the Superhumanoids, whose last album, Do You Feel OK?, was my #5 album of 2015, thanks to their combination of her powerful, multi-octave vocals and intricate electronic tracks. Chernoff just released her debut solo album, Warm Nights, which showcases her incredible voice – never more than on this track – in a new milieu, soft rock that wouldn’t be out of place on 1970s radio between 10cc and …

Anna Of The North – Fire. Anna Lotterud’s first album, Lovers, comes out on September 8th, featuring her electronic-infused indie pop reminiscent of The Naked & Famous.

Wolf Alice – Beautifully Unconventional. If you just heard the first few measures, you might think this was a lost Blur track from their Britpop heyday – at least until Ellie Roswell’s distinctive vocals kick in. By the way, the London quartet – whose second album, Visions of a Life, comes out on 9/29 – says they got their name from an Angela Carter short story, but really, it’s because their name is pronounced “wool phallus,” right?

Kate Nash – Agenda. Kate Nash looked like she was going to be a superstar after “Foundations,” from her debut album, hit #2 in the UK and won her great critical acclaim, but she never quite produced a hit to follow it up and has been releasing music on her own the last five years. She’s a clever lyricist, at least most of the time, and I can’t decide if this song is a parody of people who wear their activism on their sleeves … or just something very silly.

Liam Gallagher – For What It’s Worth. Liam keeps releasing these faux-Oasis songs and I fall for it every time.

The Horrors – Something To Remember Me By. “Sheena Is a Parasite” is a distant memory, and now they’re a sort of hazy, neo-psychedelic band, supporting whatever is left of Depeche Mode on the latter’s tour this year.

Bad Nerves – Radio Punk. An anthemic punk-pop track from this Essex quartet on their third single to date.

Mourn – Color Me Impressed. These Catalonian punks are prepping to release their third album, having appeared a few times on my lists before (“Gertrudis, Get Through This!” was #66 on my top songs of 2015); Hinds gets all the love among Barcelona indie bands, but Mourn is much further along in both songcraft and pure playing skill.

Quicksand – Illuminant. This incredibly influential post-hardcore band just released its first new song in 23 years, which is weird because…

Less Art – Wandering Ghost. The three members of Puig Destroyer are all in this new post-hardcore quintet, whose debut album Strangled Light reminded me a ton of Quicksand’s first two LPs from the mid-1990s.

INHEAVEN – World On Fire. This south London quartet have released a bunch of singles but no album yet; this was the first of their tracks to hit my ears and I like the hard-rock leanings (the main guitar riff has a great hook) and ’90s college-radio feel.

Ensiferum – Way of the Warrior. Folk or Viking metal kind of cracks me up – it seems like such a strange mashup, these heavy riffs and loud percussion merged with what sound like Irish dance songs. This Finnish band just changed keyboard players, replacing Emmi Silvennoinen with accordionist Netta Skog, whose instrument is front and center on this track.

Mendel – Descending Upon Hades. Instrumental, progressive/classical metal from the Dutch guitarist Mendel bij de Leij, who is also the guitarist for the Belgian extreme death metal band Aborted, whose “music” doesn’t even deserve that moniker. It turns out Mendel is a technical wizard, however, and this track shows off his shredding skills and his creativity.

The Haunted – Preachers of Death. The Haunted were born from the ashes of At the Gates when that band broke up in 1996, although they later reformed and released a new (very good) album in 2014. The Haunted are similar musically to AtG, melodic death metal with a little less emphasis on melodic elements and heavier riffing … but this sounds for all the world to me like an At the Gates song. And that’s a good thing if you like extreme metal.

Arch Enemy – The Eagle Flies Alone. I really like the guitar work in this track … but if it weren’t for the death-growl vocals, this would barely qualify as metal, let alone as death metal, right? It’d be a better song with clean vocals given the disconnect, although the lyrics are so trite that perhaps it’s better if listeners can’t understand them. After “The World Is Yours,” I was optimistic about these Swedish stalwarts returning to form on this album; now I’m concerned they’re going the path of In Flames towards metal irrelevance.

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→ August 30, 2017
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Jaipur app.

Jaipur has long been my go-to recommendation for a pure two-player game, whether it’s as a “couples’ game” or just something light and quick to play with a friend or your kid. The mechanics are simple, the game moves very quickly, yet most turns involve tough decisions around what’s best for you now and setting yourself up for future moves while also avoiding helping your opponent. Asmodee Digital, who have quickly become the top publisher of app version of popular boardgames, released an app version of Jaipurearlier this summer, and it’s excellent across the board, including four levels of AI difficulty that provide me with a real challenge. (It’s possible I’m also just not very good at this game.)

I reviewed the physical version of Jaipur back in 2011, so I’ll just give a quick overview of the game this time around before focusing on the app. In Jaipur, players try to collect sets of cards, depicting six different goods or gems, to exchange for points. You may hold up to seven goods cards in your hand at any time. Trading in cards first nets you more points, as the point values decline for most goods as more of them are redeemed. The three gems – diamonds, gold, and silver – can only be redeemed if you have at least two cards of that type; you can trade in the other three goods with just one card, which can be a strategic move to grab the highest-point token first before your opponent trades in a big set. There are also bonuses for trading in sets of three, four, or five goods of a kind, the last ones ranging 8-10 points and kept secret until the end of the round.

Players acquire cards from a central market of five, which can include goods cards and camel cards; there’s an end-of-round bonus of 5 points for whoever has the most camel cards. On your turn, you can take one goods card from the market, take all camel cards there (not just one), or exchange camel and goods cards for two to five cards from the market. There’s a tactic here of trying to rig the market so your opponent gets a market of five camels and has no choice but to take them all, which will give you five new cards from which to choose on your next turn. A round ends when the deck is exhausted or when all of the tokens in three different types have been redeemed.

The Asmodee app is just about perfect, other than the lack of an undo/confirmation function in case you tap the wrong thing. The original graphics are bright and easy to see on any screen. The actions are easy – everything is a tap, rather than swiping or moving goods from one spot to another. When you tap on a goods card in your hand, the app automatically assumes you want to sell all of those, which is always the correct move, rather than making you tap all such cards. Animations make sense – you can see what your opponent sold, you can see which bonus token your opponent got – and I suppose you could write down what’s happening to track your opponent’s points. The app offers pass and play as well as online modes, the latter requiring an Asmodee Digital account (which you should have if you like playing boardgame apps at all).

The AI comes with four difficulty settings, and even level 3 is reasonably challenging. The AI is clearly keeping track of the cards you take, and also employs the strategy of exhausting the deck faster if it’s winning and the cards are almost gone. It’ll sell one good of a type you’re collecting to try to grab the highest-point token before you do. It’s particularly good at setting up that tactic I mentioned earlier, trying to force your opponent to take all five camel cards from the market, so you have to change your strategy in turn to avoid it. I haven’t even tried level 4 because level 3 is about an even match for me so far, although, again, I may just be really bad at Jaipur.

The app also includes a ‘campaign mode,’ which presents you with a number of variations on the game’s base rules, like changing the hand limit from 7 to 5, or changing goods values so that they don’t decline as more goods of any type are traded/redeemed. You earn rupees for your points in each game in the campaign, and then can spend those to open up new areas on the campaign map, each of which has a new rules tweak or gives you a harder opponent. There’s a light story in here, but it’s really just another way to play the game, forcing you to try some new strategies and changing up the base game if you get tired of playing the AI (or if you’re just better at it than I am).

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→ August 29, 2017
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The Wanderer.

Fritz Lieber won two Hugo Awards in the 1960s, first for his novella The Big Time and then for his novel The Wanderer, both of which I’ve read in the last two months. As with the early winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the early winners of the Hugo Award can be totally baffling, not least because of how incredibly dated much of the content seems. Many early Pulitzer winners are nonchalantly racist, and their stories are overly moralistic. Some of the early Hugo winners are great – the 8th, 9th, and 10th winners were Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, and Way Station, respectively – but some reflect the genre’s utter genre-ishness, descending into the sort of campy sci-fi stories I associate with pulpy magazines like Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where the emphasis was frequently on the fictional science part of science fiction. The Wanderer, which won right after Way Station, is one of the worst winners I’ve read, in part because Lieber was so obsessed with the science aspects of his setup, but even more so because the characters and story are so utterly one-dimensional.

The Wanderer is an object, initially presumed to be a planet, that appears suddenly in Earth’s sky, tearing the moon apart and causing huge shifts in the earth’s tides, including massive flooding that kills hundreds of thousands of people. Lieber shifts abruptly across at least a half dozen different narrative streams, following individuals or groups of people as they react to the Wanderer’s appearance and the immediate threats its waters pose, especially a gang of UFO-watchers who band together and try to head for higher ground, running into numerous threats from both the new object and from violent cliches marauding the countryside.

It turns out that the Wanderer is a giant spaceship populated by highly evolved cats who can read minds, and who are fleeing across hyperspace from other galactic forces and it’s just all so incredibly silly. The felines abduct two astronauts who had been working on the moon and bring them aboard the ship, with one of them developing a sort of Stockholm-syndrome attachment to his captors. Everything that happens on the Wanderer is even more ridiculous than the worst plot elements that happen on earth – among other things, Lieber appears to think women exist only to provide men with partners for sex – and the brief comedy of the cats dies out quickly when Lieber tries to give the creatures anthropomorphic personas.

Some hard science fiction at least gets by on the strength of the science itself, but other than Lieber’s early discussion of hyperspace, using the hypothesis that is now known as “quantum graphity” as a starting point for explaining faster-than-light travel across the universe, The Wanderer gives us very little of the science to compensate for the lack of interesting characters. And the responses of those characters to the catastrophic events that follow the Wanderer’s appearance are similarly uninteresting – Lieber has them focused either on survival or on sex, but doesn’t exactly give us anything new to ponder here. Wikipedia cites freelance reviewer James Nicoll’s argument that this book won the Hugo thanks to “blatant and unabashed sucking up to SF fandom” within the text. I can’t argue with this, or Nicoll’s conclusion that this is a “terrible” book.

The Big Time isn’t any better, although it at least has the virtue of being in the public domain and thus free as an e-book. Imagine if Sartre’s No Exit were about competing forces traveling the spacetime continuum, fighting a temporal “Change War” across the history of the cosmos, and meeting up in this room that may exist outside of spacetime entirely. It’s about as thrilling as it sounds.

I’m still on the same two books I mentioned in the last two posts, but since I’m discussing Hugos, the next one I’ll read is James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, which won in 1959, the year after The Big Time took the prize.

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→ August 28, 2017
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A Gun for Sale.

I’m on record as a huge Graham Greene fan, both of his serious novels and his “entertainments,” primarily because his writing was so crisp and evocative. Greene’s prose established the time and place with a minimum of verbiage. His 1936 entertainment A Gun for Sale, the 20th of his novels I’ve read, veers a bit towards the silly end of the spectrum, a bit more cliched than his later works, although it is still a pleasure to read and, as with all of his writing, infuses humanity into his villains and blurs the lines between the good and the bad.

Raven is both protagonist and antagonist in the book, a hired killer with a facial disfigurement that leads him to an abundance of caution and a strategy of eliminating any witnesses because he’d be too easy to identify. The novel opens with a scene of him in Prague, killing a foreign minister and one witness, only to discover that the man who hired him has double-crossed him, putting Raven on the run and also bent on revenge. The assassination was supposed to trigger a second European war, although the plot unravels in the background as Raven is hunted by authorities, including the ambitious police detective Jimmy Mather. A coincidental meeting puts Mather’s girlfriend, Anne Crowder, in the path of “Cholmondely,” the man who hired Raven but paid him in stolen banknotes, and she eventually intersects with Raven as well, helping him escape temporarily when she hears his side of the story.

The actual reasons for the assassination are at the same time overly familiar and tiringly current: A munitions manufacturer wants war to break out so he can make more money. (The manufacturer is Jewish, and Greene’s pre-WWII work was typical of the period of English literature in its casual use of anti-Semitic phrases and stereotypes.) It’s the least interesting part of the story, too, but becomes critical in the resolution. Greene does much better in making Raven a three-dimensional character – why he is who he is, how he feels persecuted at every step – and turning Anne into an important actor in the plot and giving her real moral dilemmas without clear right and wrong options. By the end of the novel, I wasn’t sure why she would still be interested in Mather, who seems a bit dull for her, whereas Greene leaves the reader with the strong implication that Mather had to choose to take her back after her role in helping Raven escape arrest at least once over the course of the novel.

Cholmondeley, pronounced “Chumley” and possibly named Davis, is a typical Greene villain, dotted with peculiar flourishes (e.g., a sweet tooth) that give a superficial sense of reality to what would otherwise be a sort of one-note scumbag. He had no qualms whatsoever about selling Raven out; if anything, he seems like he might have enjoyed it had Raven not gotten away from the police. He’s creepy with women and creepy in his personal habits, and when Anne ends up cornered by him, it’s one of the best horror scenes Greene ever wrote, even though it’s entirely of the psychological sort and ends the chapter with a pulpy cliffhanger.

Greene’s best novels bridge the gap between his spy-novel work and his attempts to tackle more serious themes, dealing with matters of politics rather than the theological questions of his Catholic novels. (Greene’s own Catholicism was complicated; he converted to marry a Catholic woman, but they separated and he was a notorious philanderer, often sleeping with friends’ wives, and described himself later in life as a “Catholic atheist.”) In The Quiet American, Greene explores and exposes the deep hypocrisies of western powers fighting a proxy war in Vietnam. In Our Man in Havana, my favorite of his novels, he lampoons British intelligence services and their willingness to believe anyone who tells them what they want to hear, a story that bears many elements of the real Operation Mincemeat and that was later imitated in John Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama. A Gun for Sale feels like a precursor to those later novels – an entertainment, certainly, but one bearing elements of the cynicism about war that would populate many of Greene’s later, better works outside of the Catholic novels. It’s a quick read, well short of 200 pages, instructive in the broader continuum of Greene’s work and a sign of how his attempts to split his output into two camps broke down over time as serious themes bled into the works he tried to distinguish as mere spy novels.

Next up: I’m reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and am also about 80% through the audiobook version of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. (Same as yesterday.)

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→ August 27, 2017
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Dreamsnake.

My omnibus post on all the new boardgames I saw at GenCon this year is up at Paste.

Vonda McIntyre won the sci-fi Triple Crown for her 1978 novel Dreamsnake, taking the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novel, yet the book appears not to have the legacy those honors might have indicated. I’d never heard of the book before starting to read the list of Hugo winners, and it was probably two years before I stumbled on it in any bookstore, new or used. Combining elements of fantasy novels and post-apocalyptic stories, Dreamsnake reads today like an advanced YA fantasy novel, maybe a little too mature for younger readers, but with timeless themes and an emphasis on the protagonist finding her identity.

Snake is a healer in what we later learn is Earth after a nuclear war has ravaged the globe and left large swaths of land uninhabitable. She plies her trade with three trained snakes whom she can use to produce medications through their venom, including one, a “dreamsnake” known as Grass, whose bite induces morphine-like effects in dying people and allows them to die without pain and to dream through their final hours. In the first chapter, however, Snake’s dreamsnake is killed by fearful peasants whose child she’s trying to save, starting her on a quest to go to Center, a feudal city hostile to healers, to try to obtain another dreamsnake. The journey brings Snake into contact with a young girl, Melissa, who becomes important in the resolution of the story, and has two men following them across the landscape, one out of love and one with unknown (but presumably sinister) intent.

The quest itself is unorthodox, and doesn’t end with the usual Kill the Big Foozle climax we expect from fantasy novels (and almost every fantasy RPG ever), which may be part of why the book doesn’t seem to have the following of some other acclaimed sci-fi/fantasy novels of the era. Snake is a fascinating protagonist, however, attuned to her own feelings and those of others, while the setting’s combination of lost civilization and scientific progress (genetic modification is common, for example, with no anti-GMO zealots in sight, probably because they’re dead) is a novel one. Melissa’s subplot is hackneyed – stuff like this exists, but it’s a familiar trope in fiction – and I expected her role in the conclusion to be more significant given the time spent on Snake’s relationship with her. The clarity of McIntyre’s prose breaks down in the final three chapters, when Snake approaches and enters the “broken dome” in search of a new dreamsnake, with more abstruse descriptions of both setting and action standing in contrast to the evocative writing of the first three-fourths of the book.

Dreamsnake also tackles a lot of themes that may have been out of the norm in the 1970s but would be unremarkable today – birth control and LGBT rights among them – that make it seem more like a young adult novel forty years later. I hesitate on that description because there is some sex in the book, nothing explicit but also enough that I wouldn’t let my daughter read this until she’s older. By the time she’s in high school, she’d be mature enough for the content, and the book does feature two strong female characters (although a male character does come and save the day at the end, alas).

Next up: I’m reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and am also about 80% through the audiobook version of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. The latter is narrated by the same actor who played state attorney Rupert Bond on The Wire.

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