→ September 7, 2022
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Corrosion.

I’m a fan of midweight engine-building games, from Gizmos to Fantastic Factories to Wingspan to Everdell to Furnace; it doesn’t seem to matter what else is in the game, as long as there’s a straightforward engine-building mechanic and the game doesn’t take two hours or require a 20-page rulebook, I’m interested.

Corrosion appeared in the U.S. last winter, another import by Capstone Games (publishers of Ark Nova, one of the best games of 2022 so far), and seems to have slipped a bit under the radar, but I like its twist on engine-builders: Most of the machines you build, and even some of the parts you use to build them, will rust after a few turns and must be discarded. Only the most expensive machines, which require chrome gears that don’t rust, last for the remainder of the game. It reminded me in theme of the CPRG Baldur’s Gate, where weapons and other items you get in the early part of the game randomly fall apart because of impurities in the iron mined in that region, but here is seamlessly integrated into an engine-building game with some contract bonuses and very light deckbuilding elements as well.

Players in Corrosion are trying to build the most valuable factories, using three types of gears (small, medium, and chrome) and steam to do so, taking actions by playing engineer cards from their hands and placing them in the sector matching their number. You can recruit better engineers to improve your deck, and you can build “one-shot” machines that work one time and are discarded, “turning” machines that operate several turns until they rust, and two levels of permanent machines that require chrome to build but are also worth victory points at game-end. You can also take bonus certificates that give you game-end points for certain conditions, although doing so requires trashing an engineer card from your hand.

Each player’s board has four sectors on it and a wheel that you will turn one sector at a time; when the wheel’s fourth segment, marked X, passes a sector, the player discards all gears stored in that sector and all one-shot or turning machines built in that sector, retrieves any engineers played to that sector, and then activates all turning machines in other sectors and all permanent machines on their player boards.

The game ends when the supply of award certificates or of special victory point markers (which players can get in several ways) is about to run out, which means you don’t actually get that many of your own turns, so Corrosion also lets you follow other players’ actions if you want. When one player plays an engineer card, any other player can mimic that card’s action by playing an engineer from their own hands of the same color and a higher value (cards are 1-4 and 4+, which is wild and matches any color). It allows you to fine-tune some of your action choices during the game so you’re not just restricted to the engineers in your hand, while also giving more value to the recruiting action, as all of the engineers you’ll add to your hand are valued 2 and up.

Corrosion also comes with an excellent solo mode where you’re just trying to maximize your score before you run through the automa deck four times; all the automa player does is remove some engineers and machines from the display, which can include the chrome machines that also carry special victory points. It’s more a matter of cycling through the machines and engineers, occasionally tripping you up by removing something you wanted but also giving you more options, and testing your ability to build a productive engine. I haven’t cracked 50 points yet, which is a low bar to clear, but I do find the solo mode fun.

The art is great here, but I do think the darker industrial theme makes this look heavier than Gizmos or Fantastic Factories despite being of similar weight, possibly even lighter weight than FF is; those games, which I do like better than Corrosion for other reasons, have bright colors and almost goofy artwork that make them seem lighter. Gizmos is definitely easier to learn, but the engines you build aren’t any less complex, maybe even more complex than those here but without the rust mechanic. Games should take 60-75 minutes once everyone has the idea. I give it a thumbs up, even though I would probably always pull Gizmos off the shelf before this one.

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→ September 6, 2022
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Get on Board: New York & London.

Get On Board: New York & London is the latest game from the designer Saashi, whose solitaire game Coffee Roaster is the best purely solo game I’ve ever played (and very accurate to its theme – the man clearly knows his coffee). This one is a two to five player game, a flip-and-write game with a fun route-building mechanic on a shared central board, as players compete to build bus routes to pick up and deliver passengers in the most efficient way for victory points.

The board here has two sides, New York for 2-3 players and London for 4-5, with only one rule difference between them (put a pin in that for a moment). Players start at different traffic lights on the map, and then will build a route from there by adding their own road pieces to cover individual blocks, never branching or doubling back, and marking off every icon their route touches on their personal scoresheets. There are twelve ticket cards that will determine how many pieces each player places per turn, and in what shape, with each player placing a different number/shape for tickets from what their competitors place.

Every intersection on the map has something there, and you score just about everything. Little old ladies are just happy to be there, so you score 1 to 3 points just for picking them up; everyone else has to be dropped off in some way, though. Tourists want to be delivered to tourist sites, and you get more points if you gather more tourists on your bus, up to 4 at a time, before getting to one of those sites. Workers want to go to office buildings, up to 3 at a time, with a bonus when you do so. Students don’t need to be dropped off in order at schools, but you do need to get your route to both to score, because your points are the product of the number of students you picked up and the number of schools on the route.

When you place a piece on a street where your opponent already has one, or, on the New York map, on a midtown block that’s marked in black, you cause Traffic, and you fill in one of the circles on the bottom of your scoresheet. The first few are just -1 point for every other circle, but eventually it’s -1 every time, and if you place a piece on a block that has multiple opponents’ pieces on it, guess what? It’s one circle for every piece already there. You can also choose to lose points if you want to alter the shape of pieces called for by the ticket – for example, if the ticket’s number calls for you to place three pieces all in a straight line, but you want to make one turn, you’d mark off one of the five spots at the top of the sheet. The first costs you 1 point, the next three cost you 2 points each, and the last one costs 3, after which, you’re stuck.

There are two other bonuses available, which can be worth up to 10 points each. Every player gets a card showing three lettered spots on the board, and will score 10 points if they get their bus route to hit all three of them. There are also two common objective cards in every game, where you have to pick up five students/tourists/workers or visit all three light blue or dark blue tourist sites, worth 10 points each for the first player to achieve it and 6 points for everyone after. Finally, there are four named sites on each map, a university, two tourist sites, and an office building, and when you reach one of those, you get a bonus equal to the number of matching people you’ve picked up in total to that point in the game.

It’s a lot of scoring rules, but the game play itself is simple and quick. Flip the next ticket. Add to your route, from the endpoint, matching the shape given by the ticket number and the guide on your scoresheet. You place those pieces, marking off everyone you pick up and every building you cross on your sheet, and if your route ends at a traffic light, you get to place a bonus piece for free. After twelve rounds, you’re done – add up your points (six categories), make your deductions (two), and you get your total. For two people it can take under a half an hour; for four, the most I’ve played with, it can take 45-50 minutes.

I do think the game shines at four players; the London map is a little better than the New York one, because it’s wider and gives you more flexibility. It’s worst with three, as the New York map gets too crowded, although I haven’t tried London with five. It’s probably fine for players 10 and up, maybe even as young as 8 if they know games, and I love the way the game encourages cognitive flexibility. You can also play this online at Board Game Arena, which has a great implementation. I think it’s likely to make my best games of 2022 list when I do that in December.

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→ September 4, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 9/4/22.

One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at some of the more significant or interesting September callups from the last seven days. Some other good names, like Triston Casas, came up after I wrote it.

My podcast returned this week with Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

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→ September 3, 2022
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Music update, August 2022.

And we’re back, after I missed a non-December monthly playlist for the first time in something like six or seven years, thanks to the combination of the late draft, trade deadline, Gen Con, and my big family vacation to the UK, so this playlist covers stuff from two months rather than just the one. We’ve got a ton of potentially great new albums and EPs due out the rest of the year, including stuff from the first four artists here, plus something new from the Arctic Monkeys, Suede, Christine & the Queens, Editors, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dry Cleaning, and more. As always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the Spotify playlist here.

The Beths – Knees Deep. The Beths have released three fantastic singles ahead of their album, Expert in a Dying Field, due out on the 16th. I have gotten much worse at predicting which bands will break out into broader success, but man, if any band seems poised to do so right now, it’s the Beths.

The Wombats – Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This? One of my favorite bands going, the Wombats are putting out a six-track EP in November, just nine months after releasing their latest album, and this title track is a banger.

GIFT – Gumball Garden. The first time I heard this I was sure it was Tame Impala, or a Kevin Parker side project. It’s that precise psychedelic-rock vibe – or you might think DIIV if you’re familiar with them – and the vocalist sounds a good bit like Parker, but there’s no connection. GIFT is a five-piece band from Brooklyn and their debut album, Momentary Presence, is due out on October 14th. I love the whole track but the surprise guitar riff around the 1:35 mark is next-level.

Sports Team – The Drop. Sports Team’s second album, GULP!, is due out on September 23rd, a two-month delay due to production issues, but we’ve got four strong singles from the album now, including this, “R Entertainment,” “The Game,” and “Dig,” showing some versatility beyond their initial art-punk style.

STONE – Waste. Heavy post-punk music from a band led by the son of John Power, former lead singer/guitarist of the La’s (“There She Goes”) and Cast (“Alright,” “Sandstorm”), which is quite the way to rebel against your parents, I guess.

YUNGBLUD – Don’t Feel Like Feeling Sad Today. I’m not a big YUNGBLUD fan but this is a perfect little 2-minute punk-pop song.

The Mars Volta – Blacklight Shine. TMV’s first album in a decade, just called The Mars Volta, will drop on September 16th, and will feature this track as well as their latest release, “Vigil,” both of which are experimental yet also somehow rather accessible.

The Lounge Society – No Driver. This punk/post-punk quartet comprises four teens from Yorkshire who’ve been releasing music since 2020 and just released their debut album Tired of Liberty on Friday.

Young Fathers – Geronimo. The Mercury Prize winners return with their first new music since 2018’s tremendous album Cocoa Sugar, bringing a track that combines multiple genres with just a dash of rap mixed in.

Black Honey – Charlie Bronson. Definitely a rougher edge this time around from the Brighton indie-rockers, although you can still hear their melodic tendencies underneath the grit.

Two Door Cinema Club – Wonderful Life. This Northern Irish band will release its fifth album, Keep on Smiling, on Friday; this lead single came out in mid-July and is more of the electro-pop we’ve come to expect from the trio, maybe skewing a little more towards rock than “I Can Talk” or “Sleep Alone” did.

The Killers – boy. A leftover track from before last year’s Pressure Machine, one that sounds like it belonged on 2020’s Imploding the Mirage.

Martin Courtney – Sailboat. Courtney is the lead singer/guitarist for Real Estate, but released his second solo album, Magic Sign, this summer; this track might be my favorite thing he’s done, a soft psychedelic-rock track that features a perfectly timed guitar riff that elevates the song into something more.

Sam Fender – Alright. A B-side from the Seventeen Going Under sessions, this could easily have appeared on the album, and I do think it’s a good rule of thumb that when an artist’s B-sides are good enough to consider as singles in their own right (or, say, to include on one of my playlists), then the artist is pretty damn good.

Stella Donnelly – How Was Your Day? Donnelly is an acclaimed singer/songwriter in her native Australia, but hasn’t received a ton of attention outside of it, although her quirky vocal style and hooky melodies would fit in well in the British indie scene. Her second album, Flood, dropped a week ago. I am also obligated to mention that, according to Wikipedia, Donnelly’s mother is Welsh.

Rina Sawayama – Catch Me in the Air. Sawayama is a pop artist at heart, and this is one of her most straightforward pop tracks so far, with a big hook in the chorus.

Lizzo – 2 Be Loved (I Am Ready). I thought Special was generally strong, with two big standout tracks in “About Damn Time” and this song, which I think most clearly reflects her work with Prince before he died.

Broken Bells – We’re Not in Orbit Yet… James Mercer (the Shins) and Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) are back with their first new music since 2019’s “Good Luck” and first new album since 2014’s After the Disco with a track that reminds me in good ways of “The High Road” off their first record.

Tei Shi – GRIP. Tei Shi ended up in a fight with her old label after they refused to pay her the rest of her advanced for her last album, La Linda, and wrote this song in 2021 about the experience.

Death Cab for Cutie – Here to Forever. DCFC return with their tenth album, Asphalt Meadows, on September 16th, featuring this very upbeat song with an existentialist message as well as “Roman Candles.”

Jack White – A Tip From Me to You. A surprise second album from White, Entering Heaven Alive, dropped in July, this one more acoustic/downtempo and less experimental than this spring’s Fear of the Dawn.

The Linda Lindas – Tonite. The Linda Lindas are media darlings, which makes me worry their label (or manager) will turn them into some bland pop act, which is largely what happened to the Donnas back in the 1990s. This is a cover of a Go-Go’s song the Lindas often cover live, and it’s a great version, but ironic because the Go-Go’s were also co-opted by the mainstream music industry.

The Front Bottoms – More than It Hurts You. From their new EP Theresa, this track feels like a throwback to the earliest days of emo, with the overly earnest vocal delivery but an inherent pop sensibility underneath the emo trappings.

Muse – Kill or Be Killed. I fell off the Muse bandwagon probably around The Resistance in 2009, although I’d been a big fan of their earliest work, and this track has a strong “Muscle Museum” or “Cave” vibe to me, so maybe they’re going back to their roots a little bit.

Archers of Loaf – In the Surface Noise. I wasn’t a big Archers of Loaf fan in their 1990s heyday, but they are about to release their first new album in 24 years, Reason in Decline, on October 21st, and I do like this vaguely psychedelic-rock track.

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→ August 30, 2022
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SCOUT.

SCOUT was one of the three finalists for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award, losing out on the honor to the great game Cascadia, and just became widely available in the U.S. this summer with a new print run. It’s a small-box game from the Japanese publisher Oink, whose other tiny-box games include Deep Sea Adventure and A Fake Artist Goes to New York, and is their best title yet – a smart, abstract card game that’s very easy to teach but offers huge replay value.

In SCOUT, players receive hands from a deck of cards numbered from 1 through 10, with two numbers on each card, so it has a different value depending on its orientation. The dealer deals out the entire deck of 45 cards (removing a few for player counts below 5), and each player looks at their hand without rearranging any cards. You have to fight that instinct to sort them, which is difficult for most people. You can only flip your entire hand upside down, so you have two choices for your starting hand.

During the game, players will try to play sets (cards with the same value) or runs (cards in sequential value, ascending or descending) of greater value than whatever set/run is currently on the table, playing only cards that are adjacent within their hands. A set beats a run, if the number of cards in each is the same; a set or run of more cards than what’s currently on the table always wins; and if the type and number are the same, you need higher card values to beat the active set/run. So two 9s beats two 8s, a 5-4-3 run beats a 4-3-2 run, but a 9-8 run doesn’t beat a 2-2 set.

If you can play something better than what’s on the table, you take the current active set/run and put them face down in front of you, earning one point per card thus captured at the end of the round. If you can’t or don’t want to beat the active set/run, you can “scout,” taking one card from either end of the active group (but not the middle) and putting it in your hand, anywhere your like, oriented either way. The player who played that active set/run then receives a one-point token from the supply. This is the key to the game – taking the right cards to create new sets or runs in your hand, and doing so in a way that can create further sets or runs when you remove other cards by playing them.

Each player also has one “scout and show” token, usable once per round, where they can do both actions in the same turn – take one card from the table, then play a new set or run to beat and capture the active one. The round ends when one player has no hand cards remaining, or if all players scout and the turn passes back to the player who originally played the set/run on the table. Players get one point per captured card, one per token received from other players scouting their cards, and then deduct one point for every card left in their hand (except for the player whose set/run ended the round). The game continues with one round per player, so everyone gets to be the start player once, after which you add up all your points from all rounds.

SCOUT is incredibly easy to teach, and quick to play, working really well at 4-5 players; I actually haven’t tried it with 2, because there are a bunch of extra rules that I think will make it far less fun and simple. There’s some strategy to when you choose to take cards, and how you integrate them into your hand to create new sets/runs and perhaps set up further sets/runs after you’ve played something, while you also have to keep an eye on opponents’ hands to see if anyone is getting close to playing their last card. Full games take a half hour or so once everyone has the hang of things. The list price is $23, but Oink’s second printing of SCOUT sold out almost immediately; I sprinted to their booth on my first day at Gen Con to secure a copy because I was sure this would happen. If you can get a copy somehow, or are willing to wait for the next print run, it’s a definite winner, with bonus points for the easy teach and for its portability.

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→ August 28, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 8/28/22.

I jumped right back into the minor league thing this week, and have a new scouting notebook for subscribers to the Athletic, with notes on Anthony Volpe, Ricky Tiedeman, Orelvis Martinez, Everson Pereira, Quinn Priester, Jackson Holliday, and many more players.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres finalist Lost Ruins of Arnak, a great midweight game that looks like it’s going to be complex but plays simpler than that, combining a lot of common mechanics for a game that’s more than the sum of its parts.

My podcast will return on Monday, and my newsletter will return this week as well.

And now, the links..

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→ August 25, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a madcap adventure, a martial-arts action film, a dark comedy, a sci-fi romp, bursting at every seam with ideas and dad jokes. It’s a brilliant work of screenwriting, carried by a career performance from the always wonderful Michelle Yeoh – who nearly wasn’t even in the film. (You can rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, etc.)

The film, written and directed by the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, who also directed the bawdy video for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”), follows Evelyn (Yeoh), a harried, unhappy laundromat owner, married to the hapless Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). They have a daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong, who turned 91 during filming), who is just arriving from Hong Kong. Evelyn is preparing a welcome party for her father while also staring down piles of receipts for an upcoming IRS audit (with Jamie Lee Curtis playing the tax authority’s agent). It’s clear that Evelyn is unhappy across the board in her life, but while the two are in the elevator at the IRS offices, Waymond suddenly changes and begins telling Evelyn that theirs is just one universe among many in the multiverse, and in his (the Alphaverse), people can verse-jump, gaining special skills from their parallel selves – but one person, Jobu Tupaki, has used this to accumulate immense power and is threatening to destroy all universes at once. It’s up to Evelyn, our universe’s Evelyn specifically, to save them all.

Part of the genius of this script is its combination of highbrow philosophical questions with lowbrow humor. The difference between existentialism and nihilism, with the former holding that the only meaning in life is created by the individual while the latter views life as meaningless, full-stop, is at the core of the movie; Jobu Tupaki sees and experiences all universes simultaneously, and thus believes that there is no meaning anywhere, only pain. (I don’t think there’s a Major League reference here, but I also wouldn’t say it’s impossible given some of the other allusions here, including one to a 1990s alternative song that is so perfectly integrated into the dialogue I had to pause the movie just to admire it.) Jobu is the film’s Bazarov, accumulating followers in a sort of nihilist cult, even as she seems to be speeding towards her own destruction.

The Daniels originally envisioned Jackie Chan in the main role, but rewrote the script to make the lead character a woman, with Yeoh their first choice, and the decision to re-center the film around not just a woman but a mother and an immigrant changes one of the film’s core messages. Evelyn is asked to run the family business and manage the family, to handle the finances and the relationships and organize this ridiculous party for a father who disowned her decades earlier when she chose Waymond and his dubious financial prospects against her parents’ wishes. Of course she has to save the universe: She’s a mother. If this wasn’t written as a commentary on the modern working American mother, who is expected to do it all and 20% more, it sure as hell plays like one – and Yeoh never lets us forget it, with an undercurrent of stress on her face throughout almost the entire movie. It’s a tour de force of a performance, one that lets her show tremendous range, and I’m going to hazard the opinion that it’s the best thing she’s ever done, even though I know I haven’t seen most of her performances because she’s been extensively pigeonholed since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Look at her filmography – it’s a sad commentary on the industry’s narrow view of Asian-American actors, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is Quan’s first film role in 20 years after he retired due to the lack of interesting parts offered to him.

The movie is also highly, consistently funny, from the allusions to wordplay to some gross-out jokes to some of the bizarre parallel universes we see, like the one where people have hot dogs for fingers, or the one where there are no people, just rocks. The sheer audacity of much of the humor, often right in the middle of a huge action sequence or a big emotional scene, helps some of the goofier jokes land, and even makes what is probably the grossest gag in the film much more acceptable. It feels like a film written by two people who never said no to the other’s wackiest ideas, and in this milieu, where we’re suspending disbelief to allow for its premise of travel between parallel universes, that sort of humor is almost a requirement. I do think the Daniels missed an opportunity by not having Eels or at least Mark Oliver Everett on the soundtrack, though.

I thought the story here ended exactly where it should, and the script gets to that point in a reasonable and not too predictable fashion, although it does involve a big downshift from the intensity of the first ¾ of the film. There’s yet one more theme that comes up in the back half of the film that further informs the ending, although discussing that would involve a significant spoiler; I’ll go as far as saying that I thought that was handled perfectly and hope those of you who’ve seen it know what I’m addressing. I doubt I’m going to find ten films this year that I liked more than this, or five performances by actresses I like more than Yeoh’s. It’s just a fantastic film in almost every way.

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→ August 20, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 8/21/22.

I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.

Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.

Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.

My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.

And now, the links…

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→ July 22, 2022
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Los Angeles eats, 2022 edition.

I’ll start with the two remarkable meals I had in Los Angeles, starting with Pizzeria Sei, which has already received quite a bit of good press for their incredible “Tokyo-style Neapolitan” pizzas. I had the funghi, with fior di latte, several types of mushrooms, entire cloves of garlic, pecorino, oregano, and thyme. This might be in the top five of pizzas I’ve ever had, from the ingredients to that incredible, airy dough, perfectly baked, just a little charred on the edges and spotted on the underside. I did take the garlic cloves off before eating it, because I am a 49-year-old man who will sweat garlic out of my pores for two days if I eat all that, but the garlic/thyme flavor combination is one of my favorites to have with mushrooms – and those were exceptionally high quality, with cremini, shiitake, and I’m pretty sure porcini on there. I would eat any pizza these folks make given how good the dough is.

Sushi-Tama was my splurge meal for the trip, which I think I earned after we got through ten rounds. It’s one of those sushi places where the fish arrives daily on planes from Japan (and, as my server informed me, elsewhere around the world) and where the staff all pronounces everything as if they’re native speakers. I stuck to nigiri and a mozuku seaweed salad, which was itself unlike any other seaweed salad I’d ever had. It wasn’t bright green and vaguely briny, but dark olive (I’ve had that before) and extremely vinegary. Enough about the seaweed, though … the fish was comparable to the best I’ve ever had. I would especially recommend the kinme dai, golden eye snapper served with a little lime zest and salt. Its slightly higher oil content gave it more flavor than the madai, true snapper that was one of the daily specials. I also tried the nogoduro, fresh sea perch that they serve lightly seared, a new fish to me; the anago, salt-water eel; and the medium-fatty tuna, which the server actually recommended even over the much more expensive, fattier tuna cut. Twelve pieces of nigiri plus the seaweed salad was under $100, which I think is a bargain by L.A. standards.

Tacos Baja was my first meal after landing, Enseneda-style tacos, burritos, and other dishes mostly revolving around fried shrimp and fish. I kept it simple, getting two fish tacos with beans and rice. The fish was baja-style (of course), very crispy with a beer batter, served with a giant amount of shredded cabbage, salsa, and white sauce. There was so much stuff on the taco I could barely fold the thing, but the important part is that the fish was good and perfectly fried so it stayed moist in the center. I probably should have skipped the rice and beans and tried another taco. They have three locations, one in LA proper and two in Whittier.

Ronan on West Melrose is a pizzeria with a bunch of small plates and three other mains on the menu, although I was just there for the pizza. Ronan’s dough is actually lighter and fluffier than Sei’s, or really any Neapolitan place I have tried – enough that I’m not sure you’d even call it Neapolitan any more, although it’s still great, just too airy for that style. I had the Sweet Cheeks – guanciale, ricotta forte, and black pepper honey. It was sort of a salt-and-pepper bomb, although that was good after I’d been out at the Futures Game for several hours. The dough was the real star, though. I felt like I just had delicious salty bread for dinner. With a little bacon. It turns out that the owner of Pizzeria Sei previously worked at Ronan, although I think he’s surpassed his former employers.

Angry Egret Dinette is set back in a courtyard off Broadway in the Old Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, so it’s not visible from the road, which meant I drove past it twice before just parking and walking to find it. This Beard-nominated spot has a large patio seating area and a take-out window, offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with inside seating available at some point in the past but perhaps not currently. I went with their shrimp po’boy, fried shrimp (and a lot of them) with cabbage slaw, salsa negra, pico de gallo, and avocado. Salsa negra is made from chiles mecos, a type of chipotle pepper, which is itself a dried and smoked jalapeño; mecos are ripened for a longer period, giving them a deeper red color, and then smoked for a longer period as well. To make salsa negra, you fry the chiles mecos in oil for several minutes until they turn dark brown, and then add garlic, salt, sugar, at the very least, with some recipes calling for vinegar, cumin, other spices, even soy sauce. Whatever Angry Egret uses, my Italian-American palate was not ready for that heat – this was very spicy, delicious, but whoa boy that was hot. The shrimp were quite fresh and fried just enough to cook them, still tender throughout. I liked this combination of flavors but I can’t pretend I tasted everything with my face on fire.

One breakfast spot to recommend – Aroma Tea & Coffee, which offers a smoked salmon “stack,” their take on a benedict that replaces that awful Canadian ham product with smoked salmon and replaces the English muffin with a crispy potato pancake. I’ve had this combination before, including over at Square One in LA, and I’ll never not order this if I see it on a menu. The salmon here was solid, which is the main differentiator – if that’s not up to par, the whole dish fails.

I did try two coffee places recommended by a friend in the specialty coffee business. Kumquat, over in Highland Park, brings in specialty coffees from small roasters all over the country, and focuses on espresso rather than brewed coffee, although they do offer a drip coffee each day. They do a daily blend for their regular espresso and a single-origin espresso that changes daily. I love the space, but there’s no indoor seating at the moment, just a shaded patio. They also offer some baked goods; I enjoyed the blueberry cornmeal scone, which was nice and crumbly and not too sweet, so it didn’t overpower the coffee. Go Get Em Tiger has multiple locations and a sizable food menu, although I just had a drip coffee, their Ethiopia Yukro, a tart, fruity coffee that’s less citrusy than beans from other Ethiopian regions that I’ve tried. They don’t have wifi, if you’re curious, which did matter as I was trying to work on draft recaps by that point, although I still recommend the coffee.

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Stick to baseball, 7/16/22.

My fourth and (almost) final mock draft is now up for subscribers to The Athletic, as is my final Big Board ranking the top 100 prospects, and scouting reports on 36 more guys outside of that list. I held a short Klawchat on Thursday, and will do Q&As on the Athletic’s site Sunday and Monday. I’ll also have a Futures Game recap on the site on Sunday morning.

Let’s get right to the links this time…

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