→ August 10, 2016
→ By

Clockers.

All of my GenCon wrap-up pieces for Paste are now up, including the top ten new games I saw, the summary of every other interesting title, and an essay on the experience of attending for the first time.

Richard Price is back in the news these days with the critical acclaim for the HBO limited series The Night Of, an adaptation of a British series, with Price as lead writer on the U.S. version. (I’m only through episode three, but it’s excellent.) Price isn’t new to HBO, writing five episodes of The Wire, and gritty urban stories are his milieu in literature as well, with his 2008 novel Lush Life one of the best novels of the century so far. I just tore through his 1992 novel Clockers, later adapted by Spike Lee into a film that also featured The Night Of‘s John Turturro, an unsparing, compelling portrait of both sides of the pointless battle in the war on drugs.

Set in Price’s fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, Clockers focuses on two primary characters, the low-level drug dealer Ronald Dunham, known as “Strike,” and the homicide detective Rocco Klein, who end up on a collision course when another dealer who works for the same person as Strike is shot and killed execution-style, and Strike’s clean-cut brother Victor surprises everyone by confessing to the crime. Klein doesn’t buy the confession, and Strike is certain Victor is covering for him (even though Strike was assigned to make the kill, he wasn’t able to follow through), so each is, in his own way, trying to get Victor off the hook without knowing who actually committed the murder.

Price’s gift in his work is his ability to create entire universes populated with a variety of realistic, distinct characters from the kids known as “clockers” working the street for Strike and his boss to the mixture of homicide and drug cops, some of whom are incredibly bigoted, to the handful of extras whose lives intersect with Strike’s and Rocco’s. There’s substantial balance in all of his portraits, avoiding the cliched cops-good-clockers-bad mentality without losing sight of the murder that set the entire story in motion, so that the reader feels empathy for the “bad” guys and plenty of antipathy for some of the “good” ones. While Klein and his partner are flawed, they’re relatively well-behaved compared to the street cops responsible for policing the drug trade at the housing project where Strike works, and Price gives us racist cops, cops on the take, drunk cops, and okay maybe the cops don’t come off too well in Clockers, perhaps worse in a lot of ways than the majority of the clockers, most of whom are kids, come off.

If there’s a message in the novel at all, and I could see Price arguing there isn’t one, it’s that the drug trade exists because of the lack of other opportunities for poor urban youth. There’s a constant dialogue among the clockers, including Strike, his boss Rodney, Strike’s brother Victor, Strike’s intended protege Tyrone, Tyrone’s surrogate dad Andre the Giant, and so on, about the limited alternatives to dealing. School is barely mentioned, and only with disdain. Young black men who work regular jobs, like Victor, are respected, but Strike et al see the brighter financial outlook from dealing and decline to take the difficult, legal route. Andre, a cop who tries to mentor some of the at-risk kids in the projects, especially Tyrone, is respected and feared, and is known to use violence to make his will known because that’s the language that works. He might be the closest thing Clockers has to a “good guy,” except that he’ll use extrajudicial means to protect the kids he’s trying to help, and the other kids are terrified of him, so if that’s your good guy … well, then you get the gist.

Price doesn’t moralize much anywhere in the book, though; this is dispassionate, plot-driven writing, and even an easy target like the wastefulness of the War on Drugs doesn’t get a whiff. (The book was published in 1992, when drug decriminalization was only far-left hippie talk.) The only time he goes astray is in the scenes of Klein’s home life; he’s an older first-time father, struggling to balance the amorphous time demands of his job with the desire to be a father and a wife who may or may not understand how his job works (he thinks she doesn’t, but we don’t really get her side of this). It’s thinly drawn, especially the characterization of the wife, but also because we don’t see enough of his family relationships to get more out of it than that he loves his daughter and is thinking about the future after his career as a detective. That’s the difference between this novel and the superior Lush Life, by which point Price had honed his plot development skills so that the scenes off the streets were every bit as compelling as the scenes on them.

Next up: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in her Neapolitan Novels tetralogy.

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→ August 8, 2016
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Everybody Wants Some!!

My first GenCon wrap-up post for Paste covers the top ten new boardgames at this year’s convention.

I wasn’t sure about seeing Everybody Wants Some!! (amazon • iTunes), Richard Linklater’s 2016 movie about a college baseball team set in 1980, because baseball-themed films are generally quite terrible and I was concerned this might be a big bro-movie too. The indispensable Grierson & Leitch podcast convinced me to see it anyway when both critics put it on their top six movies of 2016 to date, and when Will Leitch said it’s only tangentially a baseball movie anyway (which is true). As it turns out, the movie is more of a slice-of-life portrait than any kind of baseball story, and it’s witty and endearing, full of memorable lines and characters, without getting too sentimental or losing its pacing.

There’s little plot to speak of in Everybody Wants Some!!, so Linklater has to keep the dialogue moving to keep the movie from dragging, but the script must have looked liked the one from His Girl Friday given how little silence there is anywhere in the film. (If no one is talking, it’s because there’s music playing, and if there’s music playing, there’s probably someone singing or rapping along with it.) We start with the arrival of Jacob (Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher who was second-team All-State as a Texas high schooler, at the two off-campus houses where Southeast Texas State University’s baseball team resides, which also serves as a rapid-fire introduction to most of Jacob’s new teammates, led by the garrulous intellectual Finn (Glen Powell) and frat-boyish bro McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin, former ASU baseball player and a dead ringer for Angel Eyes from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in this film). Within a few minutes, Jacob is in the car with four of his teammates – Finn, Dale (J. Quinton Johnson, the only African-American player on the team), Roper (Ryan Guzman), and another freshman, slow-witted catcher Plummer (Temple Baker) – heading out on the prowl while doing a Bohemian Rhapsody-esque take on “Rapper’s Delight.” Their brief cruise puts Jacob in contact with Beverly (Zoey Deutch), the film’s only substantial female character; his brief courtship of Beverly is the closest thing the movie has to an actual narrative, a meet-cute subplot that takes up maybe 10% of the movie.

From there we follow the boys – and the film makes it clear that these are boys who just look like men – from one party to the next, with only a little bit of action on the field, and a few hilarious scenes at the house (including the stoner/hippie Willoughby trying to exchange thoughts telepathically with Dale, Jacob, and Plummer). There’s no real direction but “forward,” so the film ends up driven by its characters and dialogue, the latter of which sparkles whenever Finn or Dale takes center stage, Finn for his rapid-fire delivery and vocabulary full of $20 words, Dale for his note-perfect delivery and spot-on facial expressions. The only character of the dozen or so we meet who misses the mark is Jay Niles, played by Huston Street’s brother Juston, a bombastic, tightly wound pitcher who claims he throws 95, was drafted by the Blue Jays, and calls himself “Raw Dog” … because he’s the raw dog. It’s all caricature, no nuance in a cast of characters who otherwise have some two-dimensionality.

Linklater captures the time and place of Everybody Wants Some!! perfectly between the music, the clothes, the hair, and the dialogue, and takes advantage of it in ways that he couldn’t if the movie were set closer to today. There’s some mild hazing of the freshmen, at least one part of which would be completely unacceptable today, and the boys’ attitudes towards women are definitely a product of their time. The sexual liberation of the 1970s is still in full swing with no thought of STDs, let alone the virus that changed the landscape in the following decade. The script takes full advantage of the liberties of its milieu, giving us comic moments that would be unsettling (or just offensive) in a contemporary setting.

Five or ten years from now, we’ll look at Everybody Wants Some!! as the starting point of the careers of a number of these actors, especially Powell and Johnson, each of whom grabs hold of the viewer’s attention whenever they get the opportunity. Johnson manages to be hammy the way a college kid plays for laughs without ever seeming to be “acting” so, and he gets extra points for writing the music for the rap song that airs with the closing credits. (He told me on Twitter that the actors each wrote their own verses.) Powell takes dialogue that would sound ridiculous out of just about any character’s mouth and infuses it with charisma that manage to make it just believable enough to fly in a film where no one else talks in a way remotely resembling his hifalutin speech. I wish Deutch had had more to do than to stand around and look cute; she gets two little moments to act, and the one at the costume party near the end of the film showed some comic chops that might have come in handy elsewhere in the movie.

Doing that would have gone against the ethic of Everybody Wants Some!!, though, since at heart this is a smart “bro” movie, one that neither celebrates the idiocy of young men nor mocks them for the same. Instead it celebrates camaraderie with a heavy dose of nostalgia, hitting that moment right before you realize that your life choices might be limited, that the dream you’ve always chased might not come true, and that there are also new possibilities you hadn’t previously imagined. Linklater’s script is never maudlin, even in moments where the characters almost acknowledge that their baseball careers are probably stopping here on campus, and the humor doesn’t stop long enough for the mood to turn bittersweet. It’s a bunch of guys who are living in the moment and having a good time in that brief span of post-adolescence where you have yet to hit adult maturity, and while I didn’t see myself in any of these characters, it still evoked that memory of being part of a big group of people with nothing more in mind than having fun.

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→ August 6, 2016
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Stick to baseball, 8/6/16.

Seems like it’s been a lot more than a week since my last links post, since I’ve traveled twice in the interim. Here are all of the Insider pieces I wrote in that span, all of which relate to the trade deadline:

• How the Yankees’ rebuild gives them a top 3 farm system
• The Liriano/Hutchison trade
• The Matt Moore trade
• The Jay Bruce trade
• The Lucroy trade
• The Will Smith and Zach Duke trades
• The Carlos Beltran trade
• The Reddick/Hill trade
• The Andrew Miller trade
• The Melancon trade

My review of Quadropolis, the fun new city-building game from Days of Wonder, is also up over at Paste. It’s a little more complex than Ticket to Ride (DoW’s biggest title), but my daughter, who’s now 10, loved it. There are many ways to score, so it’s a game of choosing two or three of those paths to focus on rather than trying to do a little of everything.

There was no chat this week due to travel, and I’ll be taking the beginning of this week off to work on my book, returning to ESPN duties on Thursday (and chatting as well).

And now, the links:

  • HTTPS is now now vulnerable to a new exploit. This is kind of a big deal because the “s” is supposed to mean that the connection is secure.
  • The Rio Olympics are probably going to be a disaster, and the IOC is a corrupt mess, but the inclusion of a separate team of athletes who are refugees was one of the IOC’s most noble decisions in ages. One of those ten athletes is a Syrian swimmer who swam for three hours to push her refugee boat to safety, saving the lives of 20 other refugees in the process.
  • This week, vaccines and the Presidential race collided in a big way, as delusional Green Party candidate Jill Stein continued to pander to the anti-vaxer movement with equivocations so broad the Porter in Macbeth thought she was overdoing it. She’s wrong, and so is snopes’ defense of her statements, according to the important pro-science (and anti-pseudoscience) blog Skeptical Raptor.
  • Stein’s moment of science denial means Hillary Clinton is the only one of the four candidates who hasn’t pandered to anti-vaxers. This is important, because if you think people who believe something so monumentally stupid as this anti-vaxer bullshit are a constituency you can and should capture, I’m not voting for you.
  • The Sacramento Bee, a paper in a state where I’d guess Stein has some support, also ran an op ed calling her view disingenuous.
  • On to the election … Meg Whitman, a politically active Republican who ran for governor of California on the GOP ticket, has chosen to support Hillary Clinton with her money and her time, because she views Trump as a dangerous demagogue, comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini and – the part I both liked and agree with – “warned that those who say that ‘it can’t happen here’ are being naïve. I connected the Sinclair Lewis book of that name to Trump back in March.
  • The former head of the CIA quit his job at CBS and endorsed Clinton, explaining why he believes she’s the right choice for our national security in this first-person op ed.
  • In the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, columnist Nick Cohen writes that the cowardice of other Republicans has allowed Trump to get this far. This isn’t the GOP of Ronald Reagan, nor is it the GOP for whose candidates I have voted dozens of times in federal, state, and local elections since I first gained the vote in 1991.
  • I thought this was the best political-comedy tweet of the week:

  • Let’s move on to food, including this piece from 2015 on how resting the meat improves barbecue, even when the resting time is a few hours.
  • I missed this outstanding piece from the New York Times when it first ran in October, on genetics Ph.D. and wheat breeder Stephen Jones, called Bread is Broken, which explains how our wheat and thus our bread has become so much less nutritious over the last two centuries, and how we might fix it.
  • I’ve saved this recipe for watermelon rind preserves with ginger and lemon to make the next time we buy a whole melon.
  • The nation’s third-largest poultry producer is defying rising concerns and even a CDC warning about prophylactic use of antibiotics in our food chain, even running ads bragging that they still use these drugs. Antibiotic resistance is as real as evolution – the latter causes the former, inevitably – and this is flat-out irresponsible. But I’m glad they’re outing themselves so I can try to avoid their products.
  • Remember when I was horribly sick in January with a fever of 101+ for six straight days? The drug that finally defeated the infection was Levoquin, part of a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, but those drugs have some nasty side effects, including tendon damage. WHO considers these antibiotics an essential medicine, one of the most effective drugs against gram-negative bacteria, but more doctors need to reserve them, as my doctor did, until other safer antibiotics have failed.
  • Germany’s Condor Airlines has started a “book on board” program that grants travelers an extra kilogram of weight allowance if they show a sticker from their local bookseller.
  • Jess Luther has done great work on the systemic problem of coddling college athletes who rape women, especially the rampant corruption in Baylor’s football program. Her book on the topic is coming out this fall and here’s her first interview about it.
  • In a related story, the University of Florida appointed a booster of the football program to adjudicate a Title IX hearing on a rape case involving Gator football players.
  • Deadspin reports on the opening hostilies in the battle over the Texas Rangers’ new ballpark boondoggle. The City Council of Arlington approved the stadium proposal 7-0 despite no evidence whatsoever of economic benefit and some early signs of public dissent.
  • ISIS has become a hot-button term in our Presidential election, but that doesn’t change what they are, the evil the Daesh do in Syria and Lebanon, or their attempts to sow terror in Europe. This piece on how they’re kidnapping and training child soldiers will chill your soul.
  • House Speaker Paul Ryan is facing an opponent in the Republican primary for his seat. This wouldn’t be notable except that his opponent wondered aloud why we allow any Muslims to be in our country.
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→ August 3, 2016
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Music update, July 2016.

I don’t know if this was a weak month for new music or if I was just too busy to find as much of it as I normally do; either way this is a shorter-than-normal playlist, but anything I didn’t discover in July will just have to come find me in August. If the embedded panel doesn’t work you can access the Spotify playlist directly instead.

The Naked And Famous – Higher. I’ve liked most of the Naked & Famous’ output to date, including this anthemic new single, but they also seem to me like CHVRCHES without the charisma of Lauren Mayberry. N&F’s lead singer Alisa Xayalith does her job, and the group’s lyrics typically bring a few clever flourishes, but for whatever reason her voice doesn’t compel you to listen. “Higher” is their most radio-friendly track since “Young Blood,” though, and I’m hopeful they’ll get some crossover airplay.

Jagwar Ma – O B 1. Jagwar Ma is among the leading lights of Australian indie pop, with drawn-out takes on spacey psycheledic pop music. Their first hit “Save Me” appeared in 2011, followed by a full-length album in 2013. This track appears to be the first ahead of their second album, and it’s just as weird and spaced-out as their work to date, almost defying you to grab hold of its twisted melody.

ELEL – When She Walks. ELEL – again with the all caps, although I suppose Elel might look odd – is a pop octet (yep) from Nashville led by Ben Elkins, with a sort of roots-rock element to its instrumentation and arrangements. I kind of liked their debut single last year, “40 Watt,” but this is much catchier and the instrumental bridges elevate the song well above your standard alt-pop track.

Biffy Clyro – Howl. Biffy Clyro is a band name you could only get away with if you were from Scotland, but this trio is, so it’s all good. Once an experimental rock act, they’ve gone indie-pop as they’ve gotten older, with this track reminiscent of another Scottish power-pop act, Teenage Fanclub. Their seventh album, Ellipsis, is due in September.

Local Natives – Fountain Of Youth. Good Local Natives have a little more tension, almost a yearning, the way “Heavy Feet” stood out from the overall mellow Hummingbird album. This song, like “Past Lives” earlier this year, has me cautiously optimistic about their upcoming album Sunlit Youth.

HUNGER – Amused. HUNGER (stylized in all capitals because reasons) is an Austrian electronic pop trio about to release its second album, which is a deep throwback to the post-new wave synthpop era – mid-period Depeche Mode, for example. They also really remind me of Cause & Effect, a band I don’t even know that well.

Jeff Beck – Right Now. Jeff Beck’s guitar work, both technical proficiency and his ability to craft compelling riffs, is incredible for someone in his ’70s, and while the vocals of Rosie Bones are a distraction here I’m still buying in to hear Beck’s fretwork.

Wild Beasts – Tough Guy. Wild Beasts are huge critical darlings in the U.K. but are probably too strange and artsy to find much of a following here; if you’re a fan of alt-J or Everything Everything, then you’d probably enjoy their work, which has a heavy electronic component and plays around with song structures. It’s also very distinctly British, which I consider a positive but others may not.

Zhu – Palm of My Hand. Stephen Zhu had one of my favorite songs of last year with “Hold Up Wait a Minute,” an inspired collaboration with Bone Thugs N’ Harmony and Trombone Shorty, but the California-based DJ and producer’s output is so all over the place I haven’t found another song I’ve liked from him until this almost completely instrumental electronic track, which starts with a melodic guitar solo before spacing out with a mournful piano riff, mostly over a throbbing drum-and-bass line. Zhu’s debut album, Generationwhy, came out last Friday.

Of Montreal – it’s different for girls. These guys are delightfully bizarre; their sound doesn’t always come together for me, but when it does they make some of the most unique alternative pop music out there. Lead singer Kevin Barnes’ lyrics don’t always rhyme, and they cover topics not typically found in pop music. His delivery is over-enunciated and effeminate. The song structures vary from track to track and often fall apart mid-song, like Barnes forgot where he started and didn’t bother to go back to it. This song, which is like a psychedelic reimagining of a vintage Blur track, is the lead single ahead of their album Innocence Reaches, due out August 12th.

Prophets Of Rage – Prophets Of Rage. Prophets of Rage are a supergroup that could easily end up a disaster – the three musicians from Rage Against the Machine together with Chuck D (Public Enemy) and B Real (Cypress Hill). On the plus side, either one of those guys would represent an upgrade over Zack de la Rocha. On the minus side, this could end up some cliche-ridden rap-rock. This lead single, bearing the band’s title, is probably a 55: above average, better than I’d feared, not as good as it might have been 20 years ago.

Pixies – Um Chagga Lagga.

pixies

Nani – I Am Volcano. This LA-based quartet, featuring a singer born in Bosnia and raised in Canada, just dropped this lead single in June, a manic punk rush powered by lead singer Nina’s tumbling, vaguely poetic lyrics.

Descendents – Beyond The Music. The Descendents are pretty much an automatic inclusion on these lists; they’re older but they haven’t grown up musically, just in their lyrics (like “No Fat Burger,” an ode to fighting high cholesterol). Their new album Hypercaffium Spazzinate features twenty-one mostly short, mostly similar tracks, but there are a half-dozen with melodies just a bit better than the rest, including this one, “Without Love,” and “On Paper.”

JEFF The Brotherhood – Idiot. I saw JEFF (grr) the Brotherhood in Tempe in 2012 with Nick Piecoro. They were … adequate. Kind of loud, not very hooky, but “Idiot” definitely brings the hook without materially changing their heavy guitar/drum sound (think Drenge, Royal Blood, and all these other rock duos mining the same formula).

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→ August 3, 2016
→ By

The Third Plate.

Chef Dan Barber first came to my attention with his 2010 TED talk “How I Fell in Love With a Fish,” where he describes his visits to the Spanish fish farm Veta la Palma in Spain, which defies almost everything we think we know about aquaculture. Veta la Palma is an open, integrated operation that connects its waterways to the Mediterranean and thrives because the fish – primarily bass but also grey mullet, which plays a large role in Barber’s new book – are part of the larger ecosystem of the farm, attracting fish from the outside environment with clean waters rich in food for each of those species. It’s a new paradigm in raising fish for human consumption, one that doesn’t keep the fish in unnatural conditions that would require dosing them with antibiotics or feeding them with artificial products that might keep yields high but are unsustainable (if not damaging) and don’t produce flavorful fish.

Barber’s 2014 book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, expands on the concept he explored in that TED Talk, reconsidering how to feed the world in a way that’s environmentally sustainable, sufficiently nutritious, and – let’s not forget – produces tasty food. While some of what Barber prescribes, such as reducing the prominence of meat in the American diet, is obvious, much of it is not unless you’ve spent a lot of time on a working farm. (I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Barber himself.)

The basic premise of Barber’s book isn’t new – our food system is broken, disconnecting diner from food source – but his approach to the question is novel. He points out the role that chefs play in determining food trends and consumer awareness, and that merely going “farm to table” is a superficial and ultimately insufficient way to try to fix the broken chain between the grower and the diner. He rightly decries the monoculture approach of modern agriculture – grow a lot of one specific plant or strain over and over, using synthetic nitrogen sources, antibiotics, herbicides and fungicides, and so on to maximize yields and reduce costs. But he points out that simply going organic doesn’t always address the real problems with Big Ag, as organic farms can be monocultures too and may use organic chemicals that aren’t actually any safer or more sustainable than their synthetic analogues.

Indeed, if there’s one common thread through all of Barber’s anecdotes – and he meanders extensively, both on the map and within the book – it’s soil. Traditional agricultural practices centered on soil health: crop rotation, composting, cover crops, plowing under, encouraging anything, even “weeds,” that might benefit the soil. Modern practices, whether “conventional” or organic, ignore soil quality or health, instead using chemistry to provide an artificial supplement to soil that’s been depleted through malpractice. Healthy soil is teeming with microbes that make the soil more fertile and ultimately help produce healthier plants that contain more nutrients for us and can be more flavorful as well, but soil itself is part of a cycle that even what Barber calls “big organic” agriculture tries to circumvent. Whether your nitrogen source is synthetic or organic doesn’t really matter to soil health (although synthetic N is typically derived from petroleum and thus contributes to climate change and ocean acidification), because if you’re not feeding the soil, you’re just going to have to dump more N into it next year and every year after that.

Barber doesn’t limit himself to plants, although that’s understandably the main focus of the book. Barber talks extensively about the practices at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit research center that works with chefs and farmers to develop sustainable agricultural practices, including a working farm that supplies Barber’s Blue Hill restaurants, including one on site and one in New York City. Much of what he and his colleagues there discover around the world, such as the rare strain of ancient wheat they found in Aragon, Spain, or the long-forgotten eight-row corn strain that arrived at the farms one day, unsolicited, in a FedEx envelope, become experiments on the farm’s eight-plus acres. They’re raising some livestock now as well, using all parts of the animal on Blue Hill’s menus and using animal waste to supplement the biomass they till into the soil. Everything revolves around soil health and its connection to long-term sustainable agriculture. The farm isn’t just “organic,” because that’s as much a marketing term as anything else (and indeed isn’t clearly better for the environment than conventional ag); it’s searching for the best possible agricultural practices that will satisfy three goals simultaneously: feed the world now, feed it tomorrow, and make the food flavorful and nutritious too.

The Third Plate is a book of anecdotes, not one of research. Barber travels the world – he’s in Spain a lot in this book, poor guy – in search of these best practices. He goes to Veta la Palma, eats fish served with a phytoplankton sauce, visits the site of the annual almadraba bluefin catch, and hangs out in a Spanish dehesa that produces the world’s best cured ham, jamón iberico, as well as a form of natural foie gras that requires no force-feeding. He visits the Bread Lab at Washington State and plays around with cross-breeding wheat strains. He goes to the Carolinas to the farms that supply Anson Mills, the country’s main purveyor of artisanal strains of corn, rice, and other grains, including the story of how its founder managed to obtain some of his seeds from a family of moonshiners on the South Carolina coast. He talks at length about the grain farmers in upstate New York who supply much of the flour used at Blue Hill. But there isn’t a lot of data here. It’s easy to follow Barber’s logic and understand why these practices might be better for the soil, and thus for the planet and the future of our food supply, but the research isn’t cited here, and what I’ve found over the years, while tilted in favor of these practices, is scattershot. Soil health matters, but if there’s a comprehensive study that proves this, or even provides substantial evidence for it, it’s not here and I haven’t found it either.

However, The Third Plate is a compelling enough argument on its own that it should simultaneously change the way we eat and the policies we support. Going to a farmers’ market is great, but far from enough. Chefs who cook “farm to table” menus are helping, but it’s not enough. We need to think about eating the whole animal and, as Barber puts it, the whole farm too, emphasizing less-consumed cuts of meat, less-common fish in the food chain, less-common plants that might be part of a successful crop rotation scheme. Our diet has become highly specific, and only a fraction of what farmers might grow ends up food for people. Barber says that is going to have to change, something he lays out in an epilogue with a potential menu of the future. But it might be a change we embrace if it means we recapture lost strains of foods we consider ordinary now: a variety of wheat that carries notes of chocolate, a carrot with twice the sweetness of even good local carrots, a pork shank from an heirloom pig grilled over carbonized pig bones. Barber manages to make an environmental alarm reminiscent of Silent Spring that promises a food future that’s still appealing to our palates.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Richard Price’s 1992 novel Clockers.

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→ July 30, 2016
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Stick to baseball, 7/30/16.

It’s been a busy week already and I assume the next 52 hours will be even more so; here are my three Insider posts on trades from the last seven days:

• The Aroldis Chapman trade
• The Texas/Atlanta trade and the Blue Jays’ two deals
• The Andrew Cashner and Eduardo Nunez trades

I also have a draft blog post up on last week’s Under Armour Game, and I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ll be on ESPN’s trade deadline show on Monday from 1 to 4 pm ET, after which I’m taking a few days off to work on my book and on some other personal projects.

And now, the links…

  • Dr. Mike Sonne, an injury prevention researcher and a baseball fan, argues that pitch clocks may increase pitcher injury risk by reducing recovery time for fatiguing muscles. So maybe pace of game isn’t such a huge problem.
  • If you missed this on Twitter you really should read Eireann Dolan’s story about her autistic brother, from how he was bullied as a kid to the nightmare they all just went through with him.
  • Iowa Republican Steve King says racist stuff on a regular basis and keeps winning re-election. The Iowa Starting line blog looks at why.
  • As always, I’m nobody’s expert on these matters, but I feel like the rejection of state “vote fraud” laws, including this week’s invalidation of North Carolina’s law as racist, is the biggest story of this election cycle. One, with African-American voters favoring Clinton in historic proportions, it seems like striking down these laws could help her in several critical states, including the swing state of North Carolina. Two, killing these laws – based on the entirely fraudulent fear of fraudulent voting – will have an effect on many elections to come, and, one might hope, will slow efforts to disenfranchise entire demographic groups.
  • BuzzFeed political editor (and longtime reader of mine) Katherine Miller wrote a great longread on how Trump “broke” the conservative movement.
  • Trump has faced multiple allegations of sexual assault from women over the last several decades, including one from his ex-wife Ivana. Everyone dismissed such claims against Bill Clinton in 1991-92, but a quarter-century later, the climate around rape and sexual assault is, or seemed to be, much changed. Perhaps Hannibal Burress needs to joke about it before it’ll go anywhere.
  • A large Swedish study on the environmental impacts of organic agriculture versus conventional found differences in each direction, with neither side clearly favored. This is especially important for consumers, in that food labeled “organic” isn’t going to be more nutritious or necessarily better for the environment. But there’s a problem within the problem here – the term “organic” has itself been watered down (pun intended) from what the term meant when Lord Northbourne coined it in 1940. So-called “natural” pesticides aren’t going to automatically better for the environment, for example, and dumping organic fertilizers into the soil won’t have the same effect as using compost and working in crops (like clover or legumes) that increase nitrogen content in the soil.
  • Those “recyclable” disposable coffee cups aren’t recyclable at all, not unless you have access to one of the very few facilities capable of doing so. This means tons of cups end up in landfills every year, so why don’t we demand better?
  • Scientific American explains a card trick that relies on a simple cipher and the cooperation of a partner.
  • A tough longread on a 20-year-old unsolved missing persons case on the Isle of Wight. The police seem to have botched the earliest stages of the investigation, which may render the case unsolvable.
  • German scientists found a bacterium living inside human noses that produces a chemical toxic to Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that causes MRSA. Now if only it worked against gonorrhea, the bacterium behind which has evolved resistance to all known antibiotics.
  • Joe Biden has to acknowledge the LIQUID SWORDS tweet at some point, right? If I see him around here I’m going to ask him.
  • Why are police officers enforcing Trump’s ban on Washington Post reporters? They’re claiming it’s a security issue, but that’s clearly not the case.
  • I wrote about a year ago about an essay I read on the unsolved abc problem in mathematics and the abstruse proof offered by a Japanese mathematician, Shinichi Mochizuki, who created a whole new branch of math to solve it – which meant no one was sure if he actually had solved it at all. Scientific American offers an update and some new commentary, including criticism of Mochizuki’s unwillingness to travel or work with others on the proof.
  • In a new book, Innovation and its Enemies, Calestous Juma explains why people often hate new stuff, and talks about what variables affect adoption rates or drive opposition.
  • The National Post gave the fraudumentary Vaxxed zero stars and an admonition not to see it.
  • Speaking of fraud, anything that claims it can “boost your immune system” is lying and even they worked, it’s a terrible idea. If you pay for these “enhanced” water products, or for useless supplements like Airborne, you might as well flush your money down the toilet.
  • The elusive DC-area chef Peter Chang is opening what he calls the restaurant of his dreams in Bethesda. I’ve been to his place in Charlottesville, and I thought it was excellent but have very little history or knowledge of Sichuan cuisine to compare it to.
  • Congrats to Pizzeria Vetri, our favorite pizzeria in Philly and just one of our favorite restaurants there period, for winning Philly magazine’s Best Soft-Serve Ice Cream nod for 2016.
  • Seth Meyers on “Bernie or Bust” twits:

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→ July 28, 2016
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Klawchat 7/28/16.

My latest post for Insiders breaks down the Texas/Atlanta swap and the two Toronto trades from earlier this week. Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter!

Klaw: See I’m not insane – in fact I’m kind of rational. Klawchat.

FG: Thoughts on chance adams? baseball america sees him as a number 2 down the line. I would think that would get him on some top 100 lists. whats your take? thanks klaw
Klaw: I haven’t seen him yet but reports I have gotten would put him way below that, with questions over whether he’s a starter because he’s barely 6 foot and isn’t getting fastball plane.

CR: Favorite class at Harvard
Klaw: Comedy and the Novel, taught by Donald Fanger. Reading list included The Master & Margarita, Jacques the Fatalist, If on a winter’s night a traveler…, The Charterhouse of Parma, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Joseph Andrews, and Dead Souls. I asked Prof. Fanger six or seven years later if he had other suggestions in that vein, and he said if the class were a week or two longer he would have assigned At Swim-Two-Birds, which is also on my top 100 and is one of the earliest and best examples of metafiction in literature.

David: How would you compare Bogaerts’ bat and Polanco’s bat at this point? Are they fairly similar with XB having more positional value?
Klaw: I think Polanco’s going to end up with more power in the long run but Bogaerts is the more valuable player due to positional and defensive value.

Chris: Any thoughts on Tomas Nido? Seems Josh Thole-ish.
Klaw: Better defender than Thole ever was.

Patrick: One of DFW radio host was critizing Yu Darvish for being selfish by “striking out too many batters” and not pitching to contact, thus increasing his pitch count. He’s arguing that if he’s good enough to strike out batters, he should be able to get weak grounders whenever he wants. I thought that it was an absurd statement. Thoughts?
Klaw: I’ve said for a while now that there’s a chunk of the DFW media that is positively atavistic in its view of baseball and athletes in general. It’s embarrassing. Your host there doesn’t understand the first thing about the sport and shouldn’t be commenting on it.

Dale: Would you pay Reddick 4 year / $56 million for Josh Reddick. Reportedly that’s the ask and A’s countered 3 yr / $39 million. Cheers.
Klaw: I wouldn’t but i bet he’ll get it in free agency. The FA class this winter sucks and good Reddick is worth more than that.

Dave: I’m a Cubs fan, and I’m bothered by the Chapman trade. When Theo and Tom say they believe Chapman is a changed man, I believe that they believe it. Aroldis probably believes it himself. I don’t think anyone’s lying. But I wonder how differently that conversation might have gone if there’d been some women in the room. We hear about baseball’s struggles with racial diversity in management, but we don’t hear much about gender. Maybe this is willfully naive, but I’d feel better about this whole thing if it were a woman saying she was comfortable with the odds of Chapman re-offending.
Klaw: I think two things on this. One, if someone hits or throttles or otherwise abuses his wife or girlfriend and tells you six months later he’s a changed man, he’s full of shit. Two, there are no women in the room in baseball, and while you can certainly have men in the room who are thoughtful about issues like domestic violence or sexual assault, having a woman in the conversation would certainly change its tenor. I also wonder how often teams looking at acquiring a player like Chapman or Reyes talk to real subject-matter experts about the chances of rehabilitation vs recidivism.

Davis: Buster Olney has been pretty vocal recently about the Pirates shopping Melancon. While they are fighting for a wild card spot, it’s seems like one of those moves that really wouldn’t have much of an impact on that pursuit, and could land them a decent prospect. Would you deal him if you’re Neal Huntington, especially with how inflated the closer market is?
Klaw: He asked me about this on his podcast this morning and I agreed. Melancon’s a FA anyway and I doubt the Pirates intend to re-sign him. Trading him will have virtually no impact on their odds of winning a wild card spot, and with Nicasio pitching fairly well in relief you could argue they have a surplus.

Bret: Hey Keith – just curious who you would have as the Jays #1 prospect at the moment? Seems like there are a few names in that conversation (Reid-Foley, Urena, Alford, Greene)
Klaw: Alford, still.

Ron: Molitor is out of touch writing a line up and his love of bunting and playing gritty, hard nose players that aren’t any good(D. Santana). Last night down by 2 with 2 on in the 8th and no outs, he has their hottest hitter this year (Nunez) bunt and it didn’t turn out(surprise, surprise). The Pohlads scared off all potential GM candidates by saying Molitor is the manager in 2017. Why did they do that? I don’t think he will work with the young ones. Will you please take the job, Keith? They need a complete house cleaning, don’t you think? Thanks!!!
Klaw: I don’t understand why owners do this with their managers. The GM should have full autonomy to hire the manager he thinks is right for the job – and in Molitor’s case and in Counsell’s case in Milwaukee the evidence we have before us said that those guys were NOT right for the job. If I were GM there, I’d hire a manager who has actually managed somewhere before in pro ball. Novel concept, I know, but I’m way out the box like that.

Anonymous: Is John Coppolella in the top 5 GMs in baseball? Care to rank top 5?
Klaw: No, I do not care to rank the top any number of GMs.

Mike: Thoughts on Dylan Bundy’s return to the rotation? He seems to be showing good velo, three pitches and is generating lots of swinging strikes.
Klaw: Velo’s good. Curveball isn’t close to what it was. Arm swing looks more restricted than it did way back in HS. I’m just hoping he stays healthy – I think they’re asking a lot of a guy who hasn’t had a full season since 2012.

Ben: Keith, any thoughts on how MLB is handling the Jung Ho Kang Rape allegation?
Klaw: I don’t know anything about how they’re handling it – do you? We’ll see what comes out of it and how the league and team react.

Dave in Irvine: Royce Lewis. Is he probably drafted in the top half of the first round pick next June, the lower half of first round pick next June, or is going to end up at UC Irvine due to his advisor (Boras) thinking he could go higher in the draft in three years?
Klaw: I think he’s a first rounder right now, but wouldn’t get more specific than that. Remember Daz Cameron was a first-rounder, not a top 10 talent, but ended up with top ten money as a later pick.

Daniel Wexler: Keith, a prominent MLB pitcher voiced being pretty salty about being left off of prospect lists and critical analysis as a HS player/minor leaguer. What is your take on this? Have current/ex-players ever contacted you in regard to their displeasure with things you have said/written?
Klaw: A few, but the majority understand that what I do is not that dissimilar to what scouts do, and that a ranking or an evaluation is inherently impersonal. The players who do speak up about it tend to be immature, failing to understand that they are being evaluated all the time by lots of people they never see.

JB: A colleague of yours at ESPN wrote an article this week about each team’s “most untouchable players.” And while he limited it to minor league players for contending teams, he listed Bickford as the Giants untouchable player. Sorry for the roundabout way of asking, but does Bickford have any real trade value to headline a deal for a mid-level starter or corner outfielder for the Giants? Between the velocity drop and his issues in college, I don’t see him being very highly sought after
Klaw: That’s just wrong. I know from other teams that Bickford’s available right now.

JD: Have you gotten a chance to read Lila yet? Obama’s speech last night reminded me of Marilynne Robinson, with its quiet, homegrown patriotism and faith in humanity — I see why he has such an affinity for her. And Lila may be the best of the trilogy, IMO — looking forward to your review.
Klaw: I did and didn’t like it – worst of the trilogy IMO. Robinson’s prose is such a joy but she lost that in Lila’s voice.

Patrick: Keith, finding my balance with a Brewers question. Moving two former SP’s down to AA from Colorado Springs–smart move to help them mentally? Or false reinforcement for facing lower-quality hitters than they were facing in the bigs?
Klaw: Smart move. I said on Twitter to Tom Haudricourt that I bet they’ll reconsider sending top pitching prospects to Colorado Springs going forward.

Brad: Gleyber, Mateo, Judge, McKinney, Severino for Sale. Who says no?
Klaw: I hate these fake trade proposals in general, but why on earth would the Yankees do that?

Marco: Velocity is definitely an indicator of success for pitchers, however….while guys are running it up there 95-100, it seems the best guys, the ones who last a long time and provide a steady level of excellence, sit around 90-93 and ramp it up when they need it. Of course, they also have great command of many different pitches. Shouldn’t that tell teams that big strong oxes are great, but they need to spend more time evaluating the pitchability of guys, since there is already a glut of middle relievers with great arms, but not enough starters who can actually pitch?
Klaw: I think the missing variable in your statement is that guys who throw 95-100 can be extremely effective in short periods of time. They don’t last, but while they’re around, they tend to be really good. So if you’re focused on winning now, you don’t mind investing in assets like that. If you’re thinking long-term, then yes, maybe look at guys who aren’t blowing gas all the time, or who aren’t pitching at 100% effort, because it seems more and more like the hardest throwers are at the highest risk of injury.

Daniek: I saw your recent chat comments on Chris Shaw after he was promoted to Richmond. Want to know if you also paid much attention to Hinojosa and/or Duggar – two underperforming college players who’ve had early success and were promoted at the same time. Anything stand out or catch your eye?
Klaw: Not a big believer in any of those three.

Adam: So from what I gather…..Demerritte has Joey Gallo’s swing and miss without his power?
Klaw: No one has Gallo’s power. Demeritte has probably 70 power, and he can play second which Gallo could not.

Kurts: In a top 200 prospect list, off the top of your, about where would Szapucki rank?
Klaw: He’s probably going to end up on the top 100 this winter although I haven’t done any real work beyond the top 50 or so yet.

Alan: Can Dustin Peterson be an every day LF for Atlanta? He’s still just 21, hitting .293/.352/.442 at Double A in a pitcher’s league.
Klaw: I think he can hit. I don’t know if he’ll have quite enough power for everyday in LF but he’s good enough to give him that opportunity. Maybe he’s a high-doubles 15 HR guy who has a high enough OBP to make it all add up to regular status.

Jack: Has Lance McCullers’ dominance of late made you change your mind about the possibilities of him as a starter?
Klaw: No because it was never about his stuff, ever. People who think that was my concern on him either never read what I said or just made shit up.

Doug: Since he wasn’t worth a mention in you’re Upton trade write-up, did Padres pay too much of Uptons contract for Hansel?
Klaw: I thought so. Hansel’s 89-95, below average secondary stuff, good delivery, looks like a starter.

Drew: With Corey Ray’s recent struggles in Hi-A, how do you rank Ray, Senzel, Collins, and Groome for fantasy purposes?
Klaw: Probably right in that order top to bottom. Ray and Collins went right to high-A which is pretty unusual for college guys right out of the draft.

Jesse B: Strahm, Russell, and Blewett. Who looks the best? Who’s got the most upside?
Klaw: Strahm looks the best. I’ve heard Russell’s looked awful and Blewett not very good.

Nick L: Does Oscar De La Cruz have TOR upside? Your protege Eric L over at Fangraphs says future reliever, while some others have talked about a possible ace.
Klaw: Definitely not possible ace. Some starter potential. I’m more in line with Eric than the wishcasters who think he’s a top of the rotation guy.

Scherzer’s Blue Eye: Can you please inform people why don’t trade the #1/#2 prospect in all of baseball for a closer? Thank you, kind sir.
Klaw: If the Nats trade Giolito for a reliever when they already have a reliever of that caliber in Reynaldo Lopez they have lost their damn minds.

Ryan: How likely is it that Atlanta’s rebuild ends in disappointment, seeing that their #1 prospect has a limited ceiling, and all of the pitching prospects have some questions regarding either health or walk rates?
Klaw: Do you complain about the air pressure on a cloudless 78 degree day? Jeez.

Mike: Is Jahmai Jones MLB regular good, or are Angels fans just clinging to any prospect who might be even MLB worthy as a reserve?
Klaw: More than that. Potential star.

Josh in Vt.: Thank you for not sticking to baseball! Your recommendation of “Undeniable” is one everyone living in the real world should follow. Nye doing his own narration of the audiobook adds his incredible passion to the words.
Klaw: You’re welcome and I totally agree. Listening to Dan Barber’s The Third Plate now, also narrated by the author, which is definitely to the good.

Tom: Why is Jose Berrios still in AAA? Duffey was destroyed by Atlanta last night while Berrios had another QS in AAA.
Klaw: I don’t know. Their handling of Berrios has been baffling. Their handling of Buxton has been baffling. They are baffling.

Lyle: In 2015 under JackZ the Mariners farm system had a universally terrible year both in terms of team performances and individual performances (with maybe a couple exceptions). In 2016 under JerryD, the Mariners farm system is putting out playoff teams at virtually every level with a few pretty solid individual performances as well. So my question: how much of this attributable to the change in administration (including the difference in philosophy of promotion) and how much is attributable to just the randomness of a new year? (Feel free to expand as necessary.)
Klaw: The farm system isn’t that much better or even different than last year so I’d say it’s mostly randomness.

Tyler: Have you started The Night Of? I really like it so far through 3 epiosdes.
Klaw: Yep, I think it’s outstanding. I could do without the eczema storyline because it seems irrelevant and frankly doesn’t play well as humor. (I know it’s adapted from a UK series and the storyline was in the original.)

Mike Sixel: Would you rather have Kyle Gibson or Shelby Miller going forward?
Klaw: Miller. I’d absolutely see if the Dbacks would sell low on him now, try to reestablish his 2015 delivery, and recapture his value.

Anonymous: Hey Keith. I know you listed a while back an acronym to deal with anxiety/depression. (Involving a routine and medication if I remember correctly.) Would you mind sharing that again? Thanks.
Klaw: EMMET: Exercise, Meditation, Medication, Eating, Therapy. That’s not in order – therapy might be the most important of the five – but TEMEM doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Judlow: Thoughts on story Eireann Dolan posted re: brother? For dad like me of young autistic son, emotional roller coaster.
Klaw: I retweeted it because it was a great story, well written, and highly relevant with the Republican candidate for President finding it appropriate to mock a disabled person.

TJ: Am I the only person who loves seeing someone not on the top prospect lists make it and become an outstanding MLB player? Not because I like to see the experts look bad, but because it shows to other players not on those lists that it can be done…
Klaw: You’re not the only one. Seeing a low draft pick or Latin kid who signed for peanuts become a star is one of the joys of this business. You’re watching some 8-year-old’s backyard dream come true.

Drew: What kind of ceiling do you put on Delvin Perez?
Klaw: If the makeup improves he’s a potential All-Star. Defense, speed, we think some power, maybe not much OBP.

Raphael: How exactly did Mookie Betts end up being a fifth rounder? What’s changed for him since he was drafted?
Klaw: Multi-sport guy without a ton of baseball experience or present skills at the time of the draft. Great job by Red Sox scout Danny Watkins to know the kid well enough to say he’d learn quickly once he committed to baseball full-time.

addoeh: Your thoughts on Tim Kaine? He seems smart, reasonable, experienced, without any big controversy. Should he be at the top of the ticket?
Klaw: I just wondered how anyone smart, reasonable, experienced, and without any big controversy has lasted this long in politics.

Carl: Austin Riley has improved in recent months since the bad start. When you’re a guy that doesn’t have much bat speed, what are some ways to fix that? It can’t just a death sentence to a career, right?
Klaw: Don’t see a lot of guys with slider bat speed in the big leagues. I’d say you’re hoping that I’m wrong about him, not that his bat speed will suddenly improve.

Tom: Christin Stewart seems ready for a new challenge, any reason he’s still in A+?
Klaw: I’m not sure as most of the other high 2015 draft picks from college are in AA or higher already.

John: Do you think we could see Randy Arozarena in top 100 in near future (next preseason)?
Klaw: Next year? No.

Brandon: Is Brevard a better placement for Erceg? SSS and all, but he commented that he didn’t feel challenged in rookie ball.
Klaw: Yes, I think so. College product. Yes, NAIA, but still, college product, too old for rookie ball.

Ben: Saw you dig the new Jeff Beck tune. Who are some of your favorite guitar players?
Klaw: I’m all over the place. Beck, Page, Vai, Hendrix, and of course Prince.

Zac: Manuel Margot. Do you see him growing in to some home run power? I know i’m scouting the stats, but he only has 4 HR in the hitter friendly PCL (albeit with 10 triples which is amazing).
Klaw: No, not particularly, but I don’t think he’ll need HR to be valuable.

Andrew: Are you still as high on Brendan Rodgers as you were at the beginning of the season? Seems as though he has been struggling for Asheville as of late.
Klaw: He hasn’t played as well since the hamstring injury. I don’t think his outlook has changed.

Tony H: I know you said you saw Lynchburg recently. I’m curious what you thought of Yu-Cheng Chang and Francisco Mejia
Klaw: Mejia didn’t play; he was sick. Chang was a little disappointing at the plate.

Drew: Do you see Alec Mills’ stuff playing up in relief, or is he still on track to be a solid #4 starter?
Klaw: I didn’t have him on track to be a 4.

Pat: What is your preferred exercise for both keeping depression at bay, and generally staying in shape?
Klaw: Anything works for the brain. You just need to exercise to produce more endorphins and norepinephrine, both of which may improve mood.

Peet: What happened with Szapucky that he went from 149th pick to possible top-100 prospect in a year?
Klaw: Pitchers, dude.

bo: If Hillary Clinton were a man, she’d be up 20 points on The Donald right now, no?
Klaw: Probably. She’s not exactly problem-free as a candidate, though. She’s just running against the favorite of the Aryan Nations crowd.

Tom: As someone who works in the area of criminal law, the statistics (which I sadly don’t have at my disposal) are pretty clear that the recidivism rate for someone who commits a violent crime of the sort that Aroldis Chapman did and then is subsequently not punished are very high.
Klaw: Right, and my understanding from psychology research is that it’s even worse for sexual assault, which may be the result of a paraphilia for violence or coercion. But hey, he throws hard, so let him play!

Nick: Alex Reyes would be devastating in the bullpen right now correct? What is the holdup, the wildcard race will likely come down to 1 or 2 games
Klaw: Sounds like they think they might need him to start. I worry about the third pitch with him but his FB/CH might just be so good he can turn a lineup over twice anyway.

Sam: If Gary gains momentum and gets into the debates, would you consider voting for him? Frankly, I think Hillary wins no matter what, but I personally will vote Gary because I’m somewhat sick of the two party system and its movements towards the extremes
Klaw: I would have gladly voted Johnson in most years, but I’m specifically voting against Trump this year, which means voting HRC, even though in my state it’s essentially meaningless. I’ve never been one to claim that the country was in great peril if so-and-so didn’t win – we survived 8 years of Bush and 8 years of Obama and whatever you think of them the two couldn’t be more different – but this time I think the possibility of disaster (if Trump wins) is very real. And I won’t sit idly by and watch it happen without doing whatever little I can.

John: Can the Phillies get a prospect that will have more value than the potential draft pick they’d get for not trading Hellickson? Thanks.
Klaw: I would be afraid he’d take the QO. He’s not getting $16 million a year in free agency.

sean: O’s got anyone in their system that can help this year? Looking pretty thin (thanks Obama!).
Klaw: Don’t think so. Love Sisco, not a position where they need the help. Everyone else of note is farther away.

John: Is Blake Rutherford a GUY or just a guy?
Klaw: He’s a GUY.

Bob: I’m a guitar player who does not have a fraction of Prince’s talent, but I don’t think he’s the guitar player some give him credit for. He is flashy and has incredible speed but his solos are a bunch of intense bursts searching in vain for a cohesive musicality.
Klaw: Oh, I think he could do things with the instrument others couldn’t. The outro to “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” isn’t a function of technical virtuosity, but it’s more compelling than any of the shredding he did on other tracks.

Theo: Isn’t it likely that Gleyber is the #1 prospect in baseball soon? Seems like a steal for the Yankees even without the filler prospects.
Klaw: Likely? No.

Pete: How does Michael Fulmer compare to the up and coming prospects (Glasnow, Giolito, Urias) is his ceiling high enough to be considered as valuable?
Klaw: I’m a big Fulmer fan and he’s probably worth more right now than those three because he’s had 100 successful big-league innings, but bear in mind the .252 BABIP is probably not predictive.

Dave: Cleveland is looking at the Twins Nunez. Would Mike Clevinger be enough for him? Probably a low floor but should be a starter with 6 years of control. Twins need pitching and we won’t miss him.
Klaw: All-Star Eduardo Nunez! … who is hitting .269/.295/.394 since june 1st, because he’s not very good and my word he cannot play shortstop. Take whatever you can get.

Ian: It’s horrible but why can’t Theo simply say that he got Chapman b/c if the Cubs win the World Series it will put him in the HOF and immortalize him among front office names. It’s likely that Chapman can stay on the straight and narrow for a few more months and then he is someone else’s problem.
Klaw: We need a sea change in how executives and managers discuss players with DV incidents behind them. Even well-intentioned folks seem to struggle with how to talk about the players and the accusations. I’d much rather see people be more forthright: “We’re aware of the accusations that Aroldis Chapman hit his girlfriend and fired a gun into his garage wall. We as an organization do not condone this behavior in any fashion and we have made it clear to Aroldis that we will have zero tolerance for it while he is playing for us. We believe he can help us win a World Series, which is our goal here in Chicago and the main interest of all of our fans, but want to be clear that this in no way condones what Aroldis did. We will be working with such-and-such shelter for victims of domestic abuse, both financially and with our time, to reinforce our commitment to these ideals.” Maybe that’s not ideal but I think it stops dancing around the subject.

Frank: When do we shift our expectations for what Buxton will be? Which isn’t a way of saying we should now, but rather, how many more seasons like this before we settle on “rich man’s Rajai Davis”; 2? 3?
Klaw: I’d like to see him get an opportunity to play in another regime, in Minnesota or elsewhere, before I walk away from the immense natural talent here.

Marcus: So is Demeritte now the Braves’ best chance at producing a legit power bat? And can he challenge Albies for the 2B job?
Klaw: Albies is a much better prospect and is closer to the majors, but if he doesn’t work out for whatever reason, at least now there’s someone behind him with potential. And if Demeritte can cut his K rate to maybe 25% (a LONG way from where he is now), his bat would play anywhere.

Scott: Do you think there has been improvement in curbing antiobiotic use for meat production, or is it still as bad as its always been?
Klaw: I think we’re seeing improvement in the west but not globally.

Cole: Do you think there will be a time where we go back to seeing relievers throwing more than 100 innings a season? Even pushing upwards of 120-130 innnings? or is that just overworking them at that point?
Klaw: It’s not overworking them if they’re going 2-3 innings an outing and getting 2-3 days of rest between. But that’s a different pitching paradigm than the one under which we’re operating now.

X: Most of the best guitar players probably play death metal which none of us really want to listen to.
Klaw: I listen to quite a bit of it; those guitar players might be the fastest, but that’s not always the best.

Johnny: I’ve seen you refer to Richard Russo books in other reviews, but I don’t recall you reviewing his books. Which are your favorites?
Klaw: I’ve reviewed them all on the dish. Empire Falls, Straight Man, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool are all wonderful. I haven’t read Everybody’s Fool yet.

Nick: any thoughts on Brady McConnell at the UA game?
Klaw: Didn’t like his swing, late trigger. Flew out to right and then struck out on a fastball up.

Nick: Rangers have interest in Velasquez – is there any incentive for the Phillies to trade him other than being blown away by an offer?
Klaw: Yes, because he has literally no history of staying healthy.

Ken T: Late to the chat today and I just saw your comment about the best guitar players. Your list was good, but how could you leave off Eric Clapton? I’ve heard him in concert and left knowing I could just listen to him play for hours on end.
Klaw: I’ve just never particularly liked his output post-Cream.

Marshall: Daniel Palka…any chance of being even a solid starting big leaguer, or just a 4-A type of player?
Klaw: I think he’s an up and down guy or bench player.

George: Derek Hill has been healthy and has put together a season that has been a huge improvement over the previous two. Is he figuring out how to hit at the professional level, or is his improvement more due to being healthy? Also, can we expect him to advance rather quickly toward Detroit if he continues to hit, since his glove is already big league quality?
Klaw: He hasn’t, though; his season looks a lot like 2015’s, and after a little streak of success in June he’s reverted to not getting on base and of course isn’t showing power. I don’t know that he’s made any progress at all this year, and that’s unfortunate because I like his swing a lot and as you said he’s a legit CF.

sean: Remember when Adam Eaton stabbed himself in the stomach opening a copy of Happy Gilmore? Is that, or Glenallen Hill falling down the stairs running away from dream spiders, the weirdest baseball player injury?
Klaw: Didn’t Rich Gossage throw out his back sneezing? And I remember something about Kevin Appier having a weird reason for the fall that injured his shoulder.

Nick: Is the price being paid for relievers a market inefficiency? It seems fairly easy to create good relievers with failed starters and then flip them 2-3 years later for good prospects?
Klaw: I guess the counterargument would be that teams like the Cubs or Nats need those guys NOW and can’t wait the 2-3 years. You pay the farmer in June for the strawberries he planted in April.

Marshall: Debates about “best guitar” player are always entirely subjective. Is anyone going to claim that Yngwie Malmsteen is the best guitar player ever because he could play really fast and technically perfect?
Klaw: George Lynch is kind of pissed you went Yngwie instead of him.

Mike: Jorge Mateo ends up at short or 2nd base?
Klaw: I think the bigger question is how much he’ll hit.

Jon: Any chance we see Jorge Alfaro in the majors this year?
Klaw: I think so since he’s already on the 40-man.

Ron: How much do you think Brunansky and/or Molitor have screwed up Sano and Buxton at the plate. Just leave them alone to get comfortable in their own way. It looks like Sano has regressed this year. Seems like all their rookies have a better track record in the minors and then lose it at the Major league level. Is it the coaching at the MLB level? I hope they leave Kepler alone and just let him develop. Mauers toast.
Klaw: Yes, I think it’s the coaching staff, which is yet another reason I don’t like the owner saying Molitor etc were staying. If the new GM walks in and says, hey, these guys are actively hurting our organization by mishandling players, then you freaking fire them.

Derek: Any thoughts about why Giolito didn’t miss many bats in his 11 inning MLB stint?
Klaw: It’s 11 innings.

Jon: I am thinking about making Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family this year. How difficult (and how many days of prep) is it to pull off the entire meal?
Klaw: I’ve done this many times. I usually start stuff on Monday, do the majority of the prep and cooking Wednesday, and set it up so that I’m not doing much on Thursday other than the final cooking and reheating. Then I take a nap.

Steve: 30 year old investing for retirement. Best best is just indexing funds with a mix between a US Stock market tracking, Int’l market tracking, and a broad bond fund? Weighted more toward the equity funds for now and shifting over time towards bond fund?
Klaw: I’ve always gone with index funds because that’s what all the research says to do. Paying anyone to pick stocks or funds for you is just money down the toilet because no one seems to be able to beat the market consistently. (I suppose if you’re very wealthy and have access to private equity investments or arbitrageurs that may not be true.)

Miguel: I respect your stance on DV. Do you think that it precludes you from realistically worjking in a front office again? You are essentially enforcing a lifetime ban for an accusation, no less a conviction.
Klaw: One, I don’t care if it precludes me from anything. Two, I’m not enforcing a “ban” by saying I wouldn’t sign such a player. I don’t smoke; that isn’t enforcing a ban on tobacco.

Cole: Do you think AJ Reed has quick enough hands to be successful at the MLB level?
Klaw: It’s a concern. I think he can do enough else that it won’t matter, but it is his one real weakness at the plate.

JDinHtown: Francis Martes, still a potential #2 starter or has his up and down year dropped him in your estimation. Still pretty young for AA.
Klaw: Don’t think it’s changed the evaluation other than that he might be further away from MLB value than I thought.

sean: What about that guy that made his guitar talk? His guitar SPOKE ENGLISH!!!
Klaw: wasn’t that Steve Vai?

Joe: Remember when you said Trevor Bauer would be better than Gerrit Cole? You stink. Oh wait, that was just everyone scouting the UCLA stats, my bad.
Klaw: People got angry over that one.

Danny: People vote based on emotion and their money. If wages don’t jump significantly over the next few months and ISIS keeps attacking people, we are going to have President Trump…..meaning, we are going to have President Trump, and the only people to blame for it are Obama and Hillary who messed up the middle east so much that Trump could create that fear among the masses.
Klaw: I agree with the first half of your statement, but US policy in the Middle East has been bad for probably 40-plus years now. And the invasion of Iraq in particular has been a giant fiasco for us across the board, financially and politically, and probably contributed to our unwillingness to act quickly in Syria. I’m nowhere close to an expert on this stuff but pinning our Middle East failures on the last 8 years seems awfully shortsighted.

Kyle: Any chance Heyward becomes a defensive replacement in Sept / Oct if he can’t manage to show some signs of life at the plate? If you have him and Montero / Ross + a pitcher in the lineup that’s three free outs.
Klaw: I don’t know if they’d do it but if he can’t start to drive the ball at all they should consider it.

Zapp: Would you say Profar is fully back? Obviously he missed two years of development, but did all the tools survive the injuries?
Klaw: The bat is certainly still there, although playing inconsistently isn’t helping.

Darryl: Is Bruce still on the Reds come next Tuesday?
Klaw: I can’t imagine he is. That would be a failure.

Johnny: If Tim Raines gets into the Hall next year, who is the #1 injustice among those not in the HOF?
Klaw: Lou Whitaker. Raines had better get in though.

Jason: Do you get extra enjoyment when you are more right about a prospect then any of your fellow prospect writers?
Klaw: Nah, guys like Callis and Mayo and Longenhagen are my friends and we all know we’ll get some guys right and some guys wrong.

Fito: Does Isan Diaz have all star potential?
Klaw: Best case scenario, sure. Not his most likely outcome.

Dallas Comegys: Apologies. It’s only 26 games and he’s older than the competition but Cody Thomas has 8d, 2t, 10hr plus at BP there is video of him beating out a routine GB to SS. Have you heard anything new about him since this performance. The lack of prior playing experience makes me ask the question despite the caveats
Klaw: He’s 21 in short season. Ignore it.

Alex: What are your thoughts on Ronald Guzman-could he be something special? Seems to be having a breakout year
Klaw: He is, now that he’s healthy, and apparently he’s developed some real patience at the plate too. Good chance for an everyday 1b, maybe a very good one.

Anonymous: What is your scouting report on Thomas Szapucki?
Klaw: He’s 92-96 with a plus curveball. I’m glad they started him off slowly but if he keeps missing bats like this they’ll have to move him up to challenge him and develop his command.

YMan: Have you watched Dylan Cease pitch in person this year? Reports are he’s lighting up the radar gun, but without much control. Do you have a sense on his realistic potential now that he’s pitching again?
Klaw: I haven’t in part because he’s hurt again.

Jason: Should I be down on Glasnow after his first 2 starts?
Klaw: You shouldn’t be down on any prospect after two starts, because it’s two starts.

Klaw: That’s all for this week – thank you as always for all of your questions and for reading. I’ll be in Bristol on Monday for the trade deadline TV special. There may not be a chat next week but if there is I’ll post it on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks again.

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→ July 24, 2016
→ By

Monteverde Chicago.

Fellow Top Chef fans will remember Sarah Grueneberg from season 9, where she was the runner-up to Paul Qui, who dominated the season like few other contestants have done, overshadowing her own skill set – especially when it came to fresh pastas. Chef Grueneberg left Chicago’s Spiaggia about a year ago to open her own place, Monteverde, in Chicago’s West Loop, and I finally got to try it out Friday night (and chat with Sarah herself) while in town for the Under Armour game. It could not have been any more impressive, not just for the pasta but for the quality of everything that went on every plate.

The menu is short but covers a lot of ground, from small plates to a half dozen pastas (three traditional dishes and three of their own creation) to a few substantial mains, and they accommodated me as a solo diner with some smaller portions so I could try more things. I started with the fiore di zucca, fried squash blossoms, a special right now since they’re in season and a very traditional Italian delicacy. The squash blossoms are extremely delicate and usually must be cooked within a day of their harvest; they’re stuffed with ricotta, battered, and fried, in this case with a tempura-like coating and served with a grilled vegetable relish and bright pea hummus underneath it. One was plenty – they’re so rich – but a plate typically contains three for the table. I rarely get to eat these so there was no question I was ordering it, and it met expectations largely because of the ricotta. I assume Monteverde makes their own but if not they’re using some of the best around because the texture is just perfect.

The single best dish I had on the night was the tomato salad, which is Monteverde’s riff on an insalata caprese, here using several kinds of tomatoes, some whole and some blanched and salted; apricot slices; burrata, which is mozzarella wrapped around a filling of cream that was decadent; basil; and za’atar seasoning. The tomatoes were singing – bright, sweet, just a hint of acidity, like they’d been picked an hour before. The best restaurants I’ve ever been to around the U.S. have all had one thing in common: they care about produce enough to get items like these tomatoes. And yes, the burrata was incredible, but it ended up playing second fiddle to the tomatoes.

That salad is one of the piattini or small plates on the menu, along with two other items I tried. The grilled artichoke crostini comes with fontina fonduta (fontina cheese melted with milk and/or cream and Parmiggiano Reggiano to make it into a sauce), more ricotta, a sweet Italian onion called cipolla di tropea, and shaved summer truffle. I had just one piece but the balance was perfect across the various elements because I could still appreciate the quality of the bread underneath, which had a creamy texture on the interior but the hard crust of good old-world recipes.

The other small plate I tried, specifically at Chef Sarah’s suggestion, was the fegattini calabrese, wok-fired chicken livers – yes, wok-fired – with tomato, peperoncino, corn, fava beans, shallot, and polenta ‘fries’ around the outside. Sarah said customers compare it to an upscale chicken parmesan, which fits with the tomato/chicken combination, but I also found it reminded me of the Ecuadorian dish lomo saltado, where steak is served in a stir-fried dish with French fries cooked in the same pot or skillet. It’s a true one-pot meal, with your protein, starch, and lots of vegetables within it, hearty like a winter stew, bringing richness from the livers and unexpected sweetness from the corn and the polenta.

Chicken livers with tomato, shallot, fava beans, corn, and polenta "fries" at @monteverdechi

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

Choosing one pasta dish at a restaurant known already for its pastas was not simple, but sitting at the bar I could see the two chefs making the pasta dishes to order, including the “twin” ravioli, where each piece contains two pockets with fillings, one with eggplant, pinenuts, and more ricotta, the other with lamb sausage, yogurt (very little), and charred onion. They’re served in a piquant red sauce with olive oil and a crushed pepper mix, although there’s just enough sauce to coat the top of the dumplings. The pasta itself remains the focus of the dish, as it’s an incredibly strong dough (they use whole eggs and egg yolks) that the pasta chefs roll out very thin for the dumplings; I’ve made pasta at home a bunch and I doubt I’ve gotten close to this kind of dough strength before, because if I rolled anything that thin it would tear. Of the two fillings, I preferred the lamb sausage and onion, which sort of gave the dish an inside-out pasta and meatballs connotation.

I tweeted some pics while I was at the restaurant and several of you said I had to try the cannoli (but to leave the gun). Monteverde makes its cannolis in-house and fills them to order with sweetened ricotta, dipping one end in dark chocolate bits and the other in bright-green Sicilian pistachios, with a painted swipe of chocolate sauce and some bitter orange bits (candied, I think) on the plate. I grew up strongly disliking cannolis, because most Italian bakeries on Long Island didn’t make their own shells, which meant they had all the texture and flavor of fried wonton strips, and used lower-quality ricotta that gave the filling a cheesy flavor rather than a sweet one. Monteverde does it all from scratch and it shows, and the part with the chocolate bits brought me back to eating straciatella (chocolate chip) gelato in my last trip to Italy in 1999.

Ricotta cannoli with pistachios on one end and dark chocolate on the other @monteverdechi

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

As you’d expect Monteverde has a long wine list, but I’m not much of an oenophile and went for their cocktail menu instead. They do a take on one of my all-time favorite cocktails, the negroni, using mezcal in place of the gin and Luxardo bitter in place of traditional Campari (although Luxardo and Campari are very similar, with Luxardo bringing a more bitter and less sweet profile). It was a good way to riff on a classic, preserving the essential features, with the bitter flavors out front, with a subtle change underneath I doubt I would have identified as mezcal if I hadn’t known ahead of time.

So, I had a pretty good meal at Monteverde and while I did receive some special treatment I would have said the same things about the food anyway. I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys high-quality food, let alone high-quality Italian food, walking away unsatisfied. There’s enough diversity on the menu for just about anybody (I think you could be gluten-free here pretty easily, in fact) and every dish I had was just one bright flavor after another. I’ll certainly be going back.

The rest of my trip to Chicago featured places I’ve been before; I had coffee at Intelligentsia, as I always do when I’m in Chicago, and then stopped the Tortas Frontera location at O’Hare on my rebooked flight out (my original flight on Southwest out of Midway was cancelled). Frontera is one of the best airport food options in the country, with tortas, a pressed Mexican sandwich on spongy telera bread, made to order inside of ten minutes. I tried a new option this time, the vegetarian torta with mushrooms, black beans, arugula, and goat cheese, because I had to atone for my gluttony the night before. I’ve never had a bad sandwich at Tortas Frontera but I do find their sandwiches with meat a little heavy, whereas this turned out to be just right, especially since my flight was delayed over two hours by thunderstorms and I was on the plane for close to five hours in total.

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→ July 23, 2016
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Stick to baseball, 7/22/16.

My one Insider piece this week ranked the top five farm systems in baseball, a list that may look different by August 2nd. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and reviewed the reissue of the boardgame Agricola for Paste.

And now, the links…

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→ July 22, 2016
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Infinitesimal.

Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World is less a history of math (although there is quite a bit) than a history of the people and institutions who fought a protracted philosophical battle over something we now consider a trivial bit of precalculus. The idea of infinitesimals, at the time of their development called “indivisibles,” sparked vociferous opposition from the supposedly progressive Jesuits in the 1600s, becoming part of their vendetta against Galileo, leading to banishments and other sentences against Italian mathematicians, and eventually pushing the progress of math itself from Italy out to Germany, England, and the Netherlands.

If you’ve taken calculus at any point, then you’ve encountered infinitesimals, which first appeared in the work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes (the “eureka!” guy). These mathematical quantities are so small that they can’t be measured, but their size is still not quite zero, because you can add up a quantity (or an infinity) of infinitesimals and get a concrete nonzero result. Alexander’s book tells the history of infinitesimals from the ancient Greeks through the philosophical war in Italy between the Jesuits, who opposed the concept of indivisibles as heretical, and the Jesuats, a rival religious order founded in Siena that included several mathematicians of the era who published on the theory of indivisibles, including Bonaventura Cavalieri. When the Jesuits won this battle via politicking within the Catholic hierarchy, the Jesuats were forced to disband, and the work involved in infinitesimals shifted to England, where Alexander describes a second battle, between Thomas Hobbes (yep, the Leviathan guy) and John Wallis, the latter of whom used infinitesimals and some novel work with infinite series in pushing an inductive approach to mathematics and to disprove Hobbes’ assertion that he had solved the problem of squaring the circle.

Wallis’ work with infinitesimals extended beyond the controversy with Hobbes into the immediate precursors of the calculus developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, including methods of calculating the area under a curve using these infinitesimals (which Wallis described as width-less parallelograms). Alexander stops short of that work, however, choosing instead to spend the book’s 300 pages on the two philosophical battles, first in Italy and then in England, that came before infinitesimals gained acceptance in the mathematical world and well before Newton or Leibniz entered the picture. Hobbes was wrong – the ancient problem of squaring the circle, which means drawing a square using only a straightedge and compass that has the same area as that of a given circle, is insoluble because the mathematical solution requires the square root of pi, and you can’t draw that. The impossibility of this solution wasn’t proven until 1882, two hundred years after Hobbes’ death, but the philosopher was convinced he’d solved it, which allowed Wallis to tear Hobbes apart in their back-and-forth and, along with some of his own politicking, gave Wallis and the infinitesimals the victory in mathematical circles as well.

Alexander tells a good story here, but doesn’t get far enough into the math for my tastes. The best passage in the book is the description of Hobbes’ work, including the summary of the political philosophy of Leviathan, a sort of utopian autocracy where the will of the sovereign is the will of all of the people, and the sovereign thus rules by acclamation of the populace rather than heredity or divine right. (I was supposed to read Leviathan in college but found the prose excruciating and gave up, so this was all rather new to me.) But Alexander skimps on the historical importance of infinitesimals, devoting just a six-page epilogue to what happened after Wallis won the debate. You can’t have integral calculus without infinitesimals, and calculus is kind of important, but none of its early history appears here, even though there’s a direct line from Wallis to Newton. That makes Infinitesimal a truncated read, great for what it covers, but missing the final chapter.

Next up: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1966.

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