→ January 13, 2022
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Being the Ricardos.

Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)

The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.

Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.

The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.

Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Snow.

John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea and was shortlisted for the noirish The Book of Evidence, but he also writes mysteries featuring a pathologist named Quirke under the pen name Benjamin Black. He published a new mystery in 2021, titled Snow, under his own name, with references to Quirke but a new lead in detective St. John Strafford, whose first name is pronounced “Sinjin” and last name is mispronounced by everyone he meets. Banville can’t help but write beautifully, and he has crafted a narrative that zips right along, in a setup that could easily have come from an Agatha Christie novel … but my god, the ending is so predictable you could probably guess it from this setup: In the prologue, a priest is murdered, stabbed in the neck and then castrated. If a possible motive for someone to kill a priest in this way came to your mind, you probably got it right.

I’m a fan of classic English mysteries, especially those of Christie – I’m a Poirot guy, but I’ll read anything she wrote, and have read more books by her than by any other author. There´s something about the simple setup and intricate plotting that will always appeal to me; it’s similar to my taste in board games, where most of my favorites have simple rules that lead to complex strategies. There’s an elegance to it that I appreciate.

Banville follows the template to a tee, other than, perhaps, the detail of the gelding of the priest’s corpse. But is he subverting the genre, or playing it straight and just adding too little to the form to make it interesting? Banville’s prose evokes the setting, the place, and the cultural conflicts that lie beneath the surface of the story, including the Catholic/Protestant split in 1950s Ireland. The Osborne family, owners of the house where the priest died and where he was often a visitor, are Protestants, as is Strafford, which the Osbornes seem to think should make them allies, especially against the power of a Church that will eventually show up to lean on Strafford to let the truth lie. Yet the motive for the murder is mundane, and figuring out who did it won’t be difficult.

The novel also suffers from Strafford’s blandness: he’s neither likeable nor unlikeable, lacking the conceited air of Poirot or the wit of Archie Goodwin or the debonair of Lord Peter Wimsey. Strafford enters the book early enough to establish some sort of defining qualities for himself, even an eccentricity or two, but beyond his name and the running gag that everyone loses the ‘r’ in his surname when he introduces himself, there’s nothing.

Banville does seem to be making a bigger point here with this story, about Ireland, the Church, the aftereffects of trauma, and doing that in a murder mystery feels a bit off. I doubt Banville wanted to trivialize his subject, but that’s how it comes off in the end, especially with the last-minute twist to the resolution (which is also reasonably easy to see coming). There’s a follow-up novel coming this year called April in Spain that unites Strafford with Quirke, to be published under Banville’s own name rather than the pseudonym, and perhaps that will answer some of these questions. As much as I enjoyed reading Snow while I was in the middle of it, the ending revealed it to be just empty calories.

Next up: I’m reading Mike Schur’s upcoming book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which, so far, is just as good as you’d expect.

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→ January 12, 2022
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The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

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→ January 8, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/8/22.

My latest game review for Paste covers the great, easy-to-learn Super Mega Lucky Box, from the designer of Silver & Gold and Sushi Go! It has elements of both games, and will remind non-gamers of bingo enough to get them started. We played this over the holidays with my family, and everyone liked it, from my 9-year-old niece to my mother, who generally does not like games.

My prospect rankings are still on track to start running on The Athletic on January 31st, leading off with the top 100, with team-by-team rankings following afterwards. My podcast will also return this upcoming week.

And now, the links…

  • The Guardian hasan excerpt of Michael Pollan’s most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, asking whether we should be giving up caffeine. (The answer is “no,” whether Pollan knows it or not.)
  • This Hidden Brain episode titled “Both Things Can Be True,” about dealing with the apparent contradictions we find in other people, is a remarkable and compelling story in its own right, and also feels especially apposite in the wake of the recent Hall of Fame vote. You can also find it on iTunes.
  • Is there really enough taste difference among different varieties of rice to justify an annual rice-tasting competition? The mere question would be heretical in Japan.
  • Climate change is coming for everyone and every industry, including pro sports. Hannah Keyser asks if MLB is ready for it.
  • “America’s Frontline Doctors” are a giant fraud, as its members haven’t worked on the front lines against COVID-19 and profit off quack treatments like hydroxychloroquine.
  • A Deputy DA in California who was expected to run for the state Assembly this year has died of COVID-19 at age 46, just weeks after speaking an anti-vax/anti-mandate rally.
  • I don’t especially care that an Australian writer doesn’t like board game nights, but what possible aim is there to writing a piece that does nothing but shit on something thousands of people enjoy?
  • The New York Times‘ David Streitfeld has a post mortem of sorts on the Theranos trial, with an eye on the people who failed to ask Elizabeth Holmes the obvious questions about her technology that didn’t work. John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood has quite a bit more on this in its history of the con.
  • Alec Karakatsanis, founder of the Civil Rights Corps, has been critical of mainstream media outlets’ slanted coverage of police shootings. He had a Twitter thread this week calling out the New York Times for its framing and for use of biased sources when covering a recent shooting in LA, pointing out that police unions and departments spend a lot of money to try to get this kind of positive coverage.
  • Asmodee’s Unexpected Games division announced a new title, Voices in My Head, where players try to play aspects of a suspected thief’s persona against the one player who plays the prosecutor.
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→ January 6, 2022
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tick, tick … BOOM!

tick, tick … BOOM! is the ‘other’ Jonathan Larson musical, the one he wrote and performed himself a handful of times before he finished and sold Rent. As you probably know, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, likely the result of undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, the night before Rent opened. That makes the story of tick, tick … BOOM! even more poignant – and sometimes painful – to watch: It’s about a young would-be playwright who is about to turn 30 and is wondering if he’ll ever get a play produced, or if he has to give up his dream and find a ‘regular’ job like his roommate Michael.

Lin-Manuel Miranda directed this film from Steven Levenson’s adaptation of Larson’s stage musical, splitting the film into two threads: A live performance of the play itself, powered by Andrew Garfield as Larson, and recreations of scenes from Larson’s life to which he refers within the play. At the time that he wrote this play, Larson was working at a diner while trying to get his first play, a dystopian sci-fi musical called Superbia that was loosely based on 1984, produced. His difficulties and his approaching birthday have led him to an existential crisis, and to a breaking point with his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who gets a big opportunity in western Massachusetts that would force her to move out of New York. Larson’s roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), has given up his acting dreams to take a job in advertising, earning a steady income that’s enough to get him a better apartment and a fancy car. The story takes place against the backdrop of late 1980s/early 1990s New York, especially the AIDS crisis, with one of Jonathan’s co-workers dealing with the disease (which became a major subtheme in Rent as well).

Garfield is tremendous here as Larson – he’s brimming with enthusiasm and dry wit when he’s doing the stage part, anxious and frazzled and torn in different directions when he’s in Larson’s regular life. He carries the movie, even with a raft of strong supporting performances, including Shipp, de Jesús, and a surprisingly strong turn from Vanessa Hudgens as his foil in the stage play. It hinges on the lead, though, given how much of the movie is him singing and talking on the stage, and he delivers. I’d be floored if he didn’t join Will Smith among the Best Actor nominees for the Oscars this year.

I didn’t see Rent during its 12-year run on Broadway, or any of its tours; I’ve only seen the recording of the last date of that initial run, and have listened to the soundtrack. I know the music well enough now to know that it’s much better than the music in tick, tick … BOOM! This musical doesn’t have anywhere near the memorable numbers of Larson’s magnum opus – a tautological argument, since that’s why Rent is his magnum opus in the first place – but this film feels like the double A version of Rent‘s big leagues. These songs sound like they come from Larson in both music and lyrics, but they lack the strong hooks of “Seasons of Love,” “Take Me or Leave Me,” “Light My Candle,” or “La Vie Bohème.” The best song here might be the finale, “Louder Than Words,” which is the song that would sound most at home in Rent. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge this musical against a critically acclaimed juggernaut, but that’s the inevitable result of a compelling story that adheres so closely to Larson’s real life.

That might imply that tick, tick … BOOM! isn’t worth watching – it is. Being less than Rent is hardly an insult. The plays differ primarily in how the stories differ: This is autofiction, where Rent is a broad study of a set of characters, a time, and a place. It’s more than a historical artifact, not just of interest only because Rent became a Broadway classic, but my honest response was that it was fun and enjoyable but the music didn’t hit me like I want a musical’s soundtrack to.

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→ January 1, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 1/1/22.

Happy New Year, everyone. I had one new piece for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down my Hall of Fame ballot, which went about as well as you might expect. I held a Klawchat on the 23rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Iberian Gauge, an 18xx game that’s on the shorter side for that genre, and wrote up everything I saw and played at PAX Unplugged this year.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, talking about music and how we consume and categorize it has changed since I first became a big fan of pop music about 40 years ago.

I also appeared on my friend Elliott Garstin’s podcast, Twenty Eyes Radio, to talk about my favorite songs and albums of 2021.

And now, the links…

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→ December 31, 2021
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Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

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→ December 30, 2021
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The Power of the Dog.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the closest thing we have this year to a Best Picture front-runner, although its status as favorite rests on the slimmest of margins according to Gold Derby. It appeared first on more critics’ year-end lists than any other film, and received more second-place votes than any other film received first-place votes except the acclaimed Japanese-language Drive My Car. Based on a 1968 novel of the same name, it follows a tense family drama on a ranch in Montana in 1925, with long, expansive shots of the landscape alternating with close-ups of characters, an auteur’s film that builds on several great performances and the slow burn of its plot.

Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is one of the ranchers, a tough guy who refuses to use the bathtub inside the house he shares with his daintier brother George (Jesse Plemons), whom Phil thinks is soft and often derides as “fatso.” George falls for the widow who runs the local inn, Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Rose has a son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who speaks with a lisp, makes paper flowers, and generally acts and looks un-masculine, earning him the ire of Phil, who mocks and bullies the boy, a situation that only worsens when George marries Rose, moving her into the ranch while Peter attends boarding school. Phil bullies and torments Rose as well, driving her to drink, so when Peter returns from school, the situation threatens to boil over.

Campion directs the hell out of this movie. It cuts both ways; there are moments in this film when you just know it’s being directed, especially some of the lingering shots on characters’ faces (or sometimes hands) that last a few frames too long. It works for setting scenes, in the incredible landscape shots, or for framing segments like Phil’s awkward conversation with his parents and the state’s governor, shot from behind Phil with the other characters all facing the camera beyond him. There’s a solo scene with Phil on the side of the river that is so overwrought that it took me completely out of the movie. It may be the kind of direction that wins awards, but I prefer a subtler touch.

The acting shines across the board, starting particularly with Dunst, who does the most with a limited but critical role as a suicide widow who becomes the victim of Phil’s bullying, losing herself in drink and seeing her relationship with her son deteriorate in the process. Cumberbatch delivers, as he always does, although I found his American accent a little forced – but given some of the character details, that might be deliberate. Smit-McPhee may have the most to do, even though it’s a supporting role, as his character is the only one that truly evolves over the extent of the story, and the one we understand the least at the beginning, as Peter is far more than a weak, effeminate mama’s boy.

Much commentary on The Power of the Dog has revolved around the ambiguous ending – which isn’t ambiguous at all. You might argue that what comes next is uncertain, as is true in just about every movie, and the argument that what came before the film starts is now uncertain is even stronger, but there’s no doubt in my mind what happened at the end of the story. It simply casts what preceded it in a different light, and that is one of this film’s strongest attributes. You can see this ending coming if you watch carefully, but once it occurs, it should change your interpretation of the first ¾ of the film – and even some of what we were told about its prehistory. (If you want to discuss that part, throw it in the comments – I just don’t want to spoil anything here.)

I haven’t seen enough potential nominees yet to say what nominations the film and its people deserve, but it definitely feels like a movie that voters will support. It’s a movie that puts its movie-ness out in front of you, especially in the direction, for better and for worse. I think this is a very good movie, a B+ if I assigned letter grades (as my friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch do on their superb podcast), but could have been an A- or better with a different director, someone whose fingerprints were less evident in the finished product. In hindsight, it’s the sort of film I should have loved – cowboy noir, in a sense – but that I respected and liked instead.

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→ December 29, 2021
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The Promise.

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise won this year’s Booker Prize, beating a tough field that included Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Klara and the Sun made the longlist); Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers; and the delightful No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. It’s a fine novel, but I think without more knowledge of the recent history of South Africa, I didn’t get the full gist of the work.

The novel focuses on a white family in South Africa, the Swarts, whose matriarch dies as the novel opens. She made her husband promise her that he’d leave the family home to the Black woman, Salome, who helped raise their children and take care of the home, but he later denies this – except that Amor, their youngest child, heard it. She refuses to forget what she heard (or says she heard, as Galgut only gives us her assertions), even as it causes a break between her and her siblings, Anton and Astrid. The four chapters in the novel each revolve around the deaths of one of the family members, leaving only Amor in the end to reckon with the family’s legacy.

Galgut sets The Promise againsta backdrop of societal upheaval in South Africa, including the end of apartheid, the tenure of HIV/AIDS denialist Thabo Mbeki as Prime Minister, and his corrupt successor Jacob Zuma, who was in the news again this month when a judge ordered him to return to prison. Each of the Swarts family members dies in a way that could serve as a metaphor for one of those larger changes – one dies as a result of religious mania, a clinging to old and outdated ways; one dies in a carjacking, of which there are over 10,000 a year in South Africa. Without knowing a lot more about the recent history of South Africa, however, I can only guess at any deeper meanings here.

Lacking that context, the novel doesn’t have as much to offer the reader as the accolades imply. Amor is the only remotely interesting or sympathetic character in the book. The father, Manie, is two different messes in two different chapters. Astrid is shrill, materialistic, and selfish. Anton could have been a deeper character in his own novel, but he’s off the page enough in The Promise that we only see the surface, never getting at, say, why he deserted from the military, or what he did in the intervening years before he returns for the next funeral. Galgut keeps all of his characters, even Amor, at arm’s length, giving the whole text a feeling of emotional reserve and thus preventing the readers from getting to know any of the characters enough to connect with them. I’m only assuming that Amor is supposed to be the central character, or most central one; she is the moral compass, refusing to budge from her recollection of the promise or belief that the remaining family members should fulfill it, even when it leads to a rupture between her and her siblings. Her life away from the farmstead would appear to be more interesting, or at least a way to further develop her character, but instead she comes across as cold and remote even when she has the strongest feelings of any character in the book.

The Booker Prize has always felt more enigmatic than the Pulitzer Prize, even though they are often seen as analogues to each other; it’s easier to understand why a book wins the Pulitzer than why one wins the Booker, at least in more recent times. (I won’t even get started on the early Pulitzer committees’ apparent love for wildly racist novels.) In the case of The Promise, I’m assuming I just missed what they saw in the novel. If it won because it serves as an allegory for the last forty years of South African history, I plead ignorance. As a narrative, however, it was merely good – an interesting premise, with solid execution and a strong conclusion, but lacking the well-defined characters that might have elevated this novel to something greater, and something that I would associate with the sort of plaudits The Promise has otherwise received. For whatever it’s worth, I would have voted for No One Is Talking About This instead.

Next up: I’m between books but just finished Harold Evans’ Do I Make Myself Clear?, a wonderful book of advice for writers and editors by the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times and founder of Condé Nast Traveler. Evans died last September at 92.

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→ December 23, 2021
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Klawchat 12/23/21

It’s been too long, so let’s do one more of these before the holiday.

Keith Law: It was Christmas Eve (Eve), babe … in the Klawchat…

Joe: For the Eppler and Showalter hires, fair to say they are bad process, but good result?
Keith Law: Absolutely not. Eppler, maybe a bad process, but a great result. Showalter is a terrible process leading to a bad result. The owner saw the red flags, and ignored them. They may win a few more games this year, maybe even advance in the playoffs (although Showalter doesn’t have a great playoff track record), but the internal personnel cost will supersede that.

Hank: At what point in the lockout will we have to worry about a delayed season and/or missed games?
Keith Law: If the players can get in 3 weeks of spring training, we won’t miss regular season games.

Mac: If Carter Young cuts down on the swing could he go in the top half of the first round?
Keith Law: Cuts down on the strikeouts, yes. Right now, he’s Logan Davidson, at best, which is the very back of the round.

Evar: Best guess…who is the fastest player to even play in MLB?
Keith Law: Billy Hamilton.

Bruce: Is it feasible for the Phillies to use Stott at SS starting in 2022, both from the is he ready to hit in MLB side and also can he succeed as a SS long-term and improve their defense?
Keith Law: No.
Keith Law: On what evidence would you say he’s ready to hit in the majors right now? I mean, it’s possible that he is, but the evidence doesn’t seem to suppor that.

addoeh: Least favorite household chore?  Washing the dishes is the worst for me.
Keith Law: Don’t mind that. I hate chores that don’t produce a visible or tangible result. Wash the dishes? Clean dishes, clean sink, clean counters. That’s sufficient psychic reward for me.
Keith Law: Laundry, vacuuming, ironing – all produce a visible result. I don’t mind those. I actually like ironing. I get in the flow of that one. For least favorite … I mean, weeding produces a tangible result, but it’s endless.

Chris: What’d you think about Jerry dipoto’s comment about trying Julio in centerfield some this year?
Keith Law: Not out of the question. I don’t think he’s a CF long-term, but sounds like he could handle it on a part-time basis now.

Ethan: There was talk of Heaney having a Robbie Ray like breakout in LA. Buying it?
Keith Law: There is a lot of space between Andrew Heaney 2021 and Robbie Ray 2021. I’ll take something in the middle.

Molly: What should we expect from a full MLB season from Joey Bart?
Keith Law: 20+ homers, some walks, low average, OBP in the low .300s, plus defense.

Skrip: Is Ted Cruz actually serious about running for president in ’24? Or is this yet another blatant attempt to keep himself in the news as often as possible? I’d sooner vote for Big Bird as governor of Texas.
Keith Law: If you’d asked me in 2014 if Trump was serious about running for President in ’16, I would have said it was a blatant attempt to keep himself in the news, and he’d never win. I overestimated the country.

Johnny Utah: I really wanted to listen to your interview with Alton Brown but I boycotted your podcast because you gave Julie DiCaro a platform. She’s literally the worst. Literally.
Keith Law: I’ve never interviewed Alton Brown, and you’re a moron. Fuck off.

Dana: Can Gallo handle a season in CF if the Yanks sign/acquire a corner OFer?
Keith Law: I think he can handle the defense, but worry about him being healthy and productive if he’s playing 150 games there.

Aaron Rodgers Family: We told you he was nuts.
Keith Law: He’s about two webcast interviews away from endorsing Q.

Tom: What’s your Favorite Alcoholic Holiday Beverage?
Keith Law: I don’t drink anything different around the holidays, unless there’s homemade eggnog around, but I haven’t made that in years because no one drinks it from me.

Brenden: Critical race theory gets a lot of attention. But I haven’t been able to find a good read on what it actually is in practice that isn’t coming from a political angle. What is a good source I can learn more about it?
Keith Law: I’d go back to Kimberlée Crenshaw, who coined the term, for her definitions. She also gave a great interview with Vanity Fair this summer about the made-up controversy around CRT. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/how-critical-race-theory-maste…

Troy: Is Keston Huira fixable offensively?
Keith Law: Yes, but someone has to undo whatever the Brewers did to his swing. He looks like he’s swinging an axe, but upside down.

JR: Were you surprised how many deals were completed before the lockout? Wouldn’t both sides have an incentive to wait and see what new CBA looked like? Or the uncertainty made the existing rules more appealing?
Keith Law: I was – but your second question might be right. Maybe both sides just wanted to lock in what they could.

Matt: Why did free agents sign deals if they knew they were gonna be locked out? Aren’t they missing out on what’s probably gonna be more money in a new CBA?
Keith Law: We don’t know that. What if the minimum salary goes up by 80-100%, so there’s relatively less money going around for veterans.

Don: Do you buy that the Sox didn’t give the qualifying offer to Rodon as a favor to him? Or did they just mess up?
Keith Law: They know his arm better than anyone.

JR: You were about the only one I saw to note how little sense Thor’s signing was for both sides. Thor wants to rebuild value and stay healthy; LAA will push him hard to make playoffs and will have no incentive to limit his innings if they are in contention late. Seems like a potential for both sides to end up regretting it.
Keith Law: Agreed.

section 34: Who is the Carson Wentz of baseball?
Keith Law: I’m sorry, your question was intercepted on its way to the chat.

xxx(yyy): favorite Christmas cookie?
Keith Law: We make tricolor cookies, sometimes called 7-layer cookies (wrong, there should only be chocolate on one side) or rainbow cookies (wrong, unless your rainbow has three colors) or Italian flag cookies (I’ll allow it). They’re such an endeavor that we almost never do it any other time.

Brian: What’s the early timeline on offseason prospect list updates?
Keith Law: If you’re asking when my prospect lists will come out, we are aiming for January 31st.

Matt: Did you know the “War on Christmas” started when southern evangelicals complained to Ronald Reagan that they didn’t like people saying Merry X-mas, and not Merry Christmas. The Right ran with it for 40 years and here we are.
Keith Law: Anyone who falls for the “war on christmas” nonsense probably also thinks we’re teaching critical race theory in kindergarten and that vaccine mandates are communism. Also, the real threat to christmas is the inexorable decline of religiosity in developed nations. Good luck with that one!

xxx(yyy): 2021s best new cookbook?
Keith Law: Nik Sharma’s The Flavor Equation.

Jason: When are players no longer part of the union? When they officially retire? I’m mainly curious about retired players who now work for teams
Keith Law: You’re in the union if you’re on a 40-man roster. That’s it.

Adam D.: If the reports are true that the Giants are no enamored enough with the current free agents to hand out any nine-figure deals, do you agree with Farhan and company sticking to that process, or do you feel like a big-market team like the Giants owe it to the fanbase to make a splashy move?
Keith Law: I don’t agree with the idea that a team has to mollify a fanbase with a deal they think isn’t good from a baseball perspective.

Chris: Keith, have you had a chance to scout Boston’s Brayan Bello? Does he have the ceiling of a MLB Starting Pitcher in a system thin (barren?) on SP prospects?
Keith Law: Reliever risk there for sure. I don’t think he’s their most likely big-league starter.

Dave: True or False. Trump endorsing the vaccine will begin the MAGA backlash against him
Keith Law: Already has, no?
Keith Law: The cognitive dissonance around that one will be enough to cloud out the sun for weeks.

Joshua: As a Nats fan, is there any chance that Victor Robles becomes even close to the top 10 prospect player many thought he would become? Or is it time to maybe trade him and let him get a clean start? Thanks.
Keith Law: Not until he starts hitting the ball harder.

Don: Andrew Vaughn and Garrett Crochet for Matt Olson? Who says no?
Keith Law: Why would the White Sox do that? If Vaughn is what they believed him to be on Draft Day, he’ll become Olson or better.

Matt: If pitching velocities keep going up, doesn’t there reach a point where hitters can’t hit?
Keith Law: They can’t go much higher than they are now, but also, we’ve learned that hitters can hit 100 mph+ if they can figure out when it’s coming.

JR: Did you get to meet Lauren Mayberry in person when you saw her on tour recently (if so, you’re a lucky bastard)? Or did your podcast not result in an in person invite? PS – I caught the tour in Vegas, show was excellent. I was glad they didn’t have the guys sing a song, like they did last time I saw them live lol.
Keith Law: We did not, alas, but the show was still wonderful.

Joe: The Cubs keep saying they’re going to “spend intelligently,” which is probably a euphemism for “continue to be cheap.” But with their resources and lack of long term commitments, wouldn’t Correa be the most intelligent way to spend?
Keith Law: They spent on Stroman, so they weren’t cheap on that one.

Joshua: What type of ceiling do you believe Cole Henry has? He looked pretty good in the AFL (or so I’ve heard because I saw none of the AFL haha).
Keith Law: He’s had so many injuries already that his probability of staying a starter isn’t that high.

Grant: Do you see Congress enabling section 3 of the 14th amendment if Trump officially announces his intent to run?
Keith Law: I doubt they have the courage.

Cormac: Read Blood Meridian yet? Thoughts?
Keith Law: Yes, maybe 10 years ago. Great novel if you can stomach the violence.

Tom: D-backs will have a top ___ farm system after the 2022 draft.
Keith Law: Depends on who they take, no?

Appa Yip Yip: Rewild your lawn throw down clover and wildflowers. Grass is for suckers.
Keith Law: Better for the environment, too. Just not sure the neighbors would be cool with that.

JR: Toronto had Ray on their team for a year, so probably knew him better than anyone and essentially elected to give Gausman (a year older than Ray) the same money Ray got (OK, Ray got $5MM more), but does this alarm you at all? Obviously we don’t know Ray’s mindset (maybe he was adamant about not going back to Tor), but  wouldn’t you rather have Ray at 5/115, then Gausman at 5/110?
Keith Law: Would you? I’m not sure I would. It’s at least extremely close, to the point that I would not draw any conclusions from Toronto’s choice here.

Dude: Thoughts on Buxton signing? They do a good job of meeting in middle?
Keith Law: Yes, and I like the idea of him staying with the Twins, and the Twins potentially getting his MVP-level years, too.

Sedona: Did you get to watch Owen White at the AZL?  He was awarded as the best pitcher and seems like he has the tools.  Do you think he’s a legit rotation arm?  Ceiling?
Keith Law: Saw him, he looked good, and it’s great to see him healthy. Further than that, you’ll have to wait for the prospect rankings.

xxx(yyy): favorite Christmas movie?
Keith Law: Muppet Christmas Carol, obviously.

Mike: Keith, what did you think of the Red Sox trade with the Brewers?
Keith Law: Yawn. Binelas does hit the ball very hard, at least.

Turner: You have mentioned in your system rankings that the Orioles need to be much better on the international signings, when is a realistic time to check in and see if they have made improvements on that front?
Keith Law: They’re not there yet, at least. That takes years, maybe 4-5 years after you first reinvest in that side of the business, since you have to strike oral agreements with players when they’re 13 or 14 years old.

Ml: Is Ryan mountcastle a good enough hitter to be valuable despite his lack of defense?
Keith Law: To be more than replacement level? Yes. To be consistently above-average? Given his lack of defense and lack of patience, no, not yet.

Uncle Aaron: Weren’t you on track to have a HOF vote at one point?
Keith Law: I’ve had one for three years already.

John: Do you see Triston Casas eventually developing significantly more power?
Keith Law: I’d bet on yes.

Dude: Haven’t seen any Jud Fabian talk on ‘22 draft boards. Is there ANY chance he goes higher than last year?
Keith Law: Slim chance. The guy struck out at an excessive rate and couldn’t make adjustments.

John: The Brandon Walter emergence is interesting.  Considering that he was in your backyard in college, was ever on your radar?
Keith Law: Never. Not a prospect out of HS, of course. Missed his junior year with TJ, and wasn’t throwing this hard as a senior at UD.

JJ: Jesus was never vaccinated!
Keith Law: I mean, he also died at 33, so perhaps that’s not the W you think it is…

R. Mann: Have you ever heard the NYPD choir sing “Galway Bay”? It. Is. Stunning.
Keith Law: Only the Bing Crosby version.

Pat: How worried should Mets fans be about Showalter’s track record with young pitchers. Granted, they’re trying to win now & it won’t affect DeGrom & Max,, but, if he pulls the same idiocy that he pulled in Baltimore, it’ll affect them down the line.
Keith Law: Do they have any young starters to worry about? The system is heavily weighted towards bats right now, they don’t have a young starter in the potential OD rotation right now, and by the time someone like Matt Allan is on the radar, Buck will either have won a WS or been fired.

Henry: Thoughts on Joan Didion? Saddened about her passing.
Keith Law: Likewise. I feel like she’s remembered more for her novels and memoirs and not enough for her feature writing in the 1970s.

Curious in Seattle: Best guess on Harry Ford’s long term position?  Enough bat for the outfield?
Keith Law: Catcher.

Bob: Will the IFA date be pushed back if the lockout is still in effect, as expected?
Keith Law: Shouldn’t affect that.

Fradog: Why are Jays fascinated with Biggio? Can he play 2B at MLB level?
Keith Law: 1. I don’t know. 2. Not well.

Matt: Do you think Schilling gets in? Im seeing an alarming number of public votes for him.
Keith Law: Don’t know. I didn’t vote for him.

Heather: Did you have a reaction to everybody and their dog getting into the HOF a couple of weeks ago?
Keith Law: That process has become a farce. It’s largely invalidated the writers’ votes. Jim Kaat was never a Hall of Famer. Neither was Harold Baines. The players and managers on the committees are just putting in their buddies.

John: As a lefty who loves to cook, how do you feel about the municipalities banning gas stoves in new construction?
Keith Law: Sucks for cooking, but the environmental damage wrought by fracking is no joke.

JR: Have/will you watch new Spiderman or Matrix movies? Or not your thing?
Keith Law: Zero interest in the Matrix movie. I only watched the first one and thought it was fine but incredibly derivative.

Fradog: Can Espinal be MLB avg for Jays? Love the glove but not sold on bat.
Keith Law: Great extra player. Not a regular for me. Same reason you said.

ChrisP: I had someone go off about “big pharma” and how it’s impacting society…and it just made me think that these people have no idea what the reason is behind people living longer today than 100 years ago. It’s just this big elusive “evil” thing to them.
Keith Law: It’s something they read on Facebook, not something they understand. There’s this sort of magical thinking about the human body that occupies most of the people who oppose Big Pharma … sometimes it’s a religious belief, sometimes it’s a false appeal to nature, sometimes it’s just ignorance, thinking the body is like a car or other machine that behaves predictably in response to treatments. We’re just not smart.

Sedona: Out of Ryne Nelson, Drey Jameson and Brandon Pfaadt…. which ones has the best chance to be a mid rotation arm?
Keith Law: That will certainly be answered in the Dbacks top 20 in January.

Cubbie Blue: Reginald Preciado, Kevin Alcantara, and James Triantos seemed to be getting a lot of buzz in short season ball.   You find them at least interesting as well?
Keith Law: I definitely answered that in the Rizzo trade writeup and Prospect of the Year columns.

John: This might seem like an odd question, but if you had a chance to do it again in the present day, would you go to Harvard again?  I hold the Ivy League schools in high regard, but depending on your major, I’d bet you might get a slightly better education at one of the top liberal arts schools.  (No bias — my alma mater is not in either category.)
Keith Law: Yes, because of the value of the name, and the power of the school’s network. But I agree I would have gotten a better education at a smaller school, and probably would have enjoyed it more.

Chris: What do you think about sports leagues shortening quarantine rules for vaccinated players who test positive?
Keith Law: As long as that’s based on the latest evidence, sure.

Chris: Just FYI I watched new Matrix last night and it was pretty terrible.  And I liked the first 3 (esp the first 2)
Keith Law: I’m not shocked. Fan service films/books usually aren’t very good.

Chris: i know youre usually *yawn* about the R5 draft, but im still having Whitlock PTSD, do you think someone could take Josh Breaux as DH/3rd C and I’d watch him bash homers?
Keith Law: Doubt that one.
Keith Law: I don’t think he’s that good and I don’t think he gets taken/kept.
Keith Law: Maria Torres wrote up a list of some Rule 5 candidates, and while I wouldn’t select all of those guys if I were a GM, there were some good names on there. Gilberto Jimenez is the best prospect who was left unprotected: https://theathletic.com/3020049/2021/12/16/a-rule-5-draft-candidate-fr…

Jenna: I know you have no interest in this whatsoever, but I’d seriously vote for you for president. Thoroughly impressed with your ideas, common sense, analytical abilities, virtually everything you opine. This country would be better off, I have no doubt.
Keith Law: Thank you, but that job would destroy me. I’m not cut out for that line of work, even assuming I could get more than my immediate family to vote for me.

Appa Yip Yip: My favourite thing (I hate it) about the people complaining about big pharma vaccines is that treatment is orders of magnitudes more profitable than prevention. Big pharma would love nothing more than to sell monoclonal antibody treatments in perpetuity to unvaxxed idiots.
Keith Law: Or a pill you have to take every day for the rest of your life. That’s the business model, and it’s why we have far more treatments for things like depression or high cholesterol or ADHD, even in the absence of clear evidence of efficacy, and fewer new antibiotics.

Jay: I watched the Veterans’ Committee HOF announcement on the MLB Network.  All of the announcers, without exception, acted like it was Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Satchel Paige finally getting the call.  Are the announcers told to keep it upbeat, and to keep any dissenting opinions of HOF unworthiness to the themselves?
Keith Law: State Television.

Yinka Double Dare: Less perturbed at getting rid of gas ranges now that there’s an alternative to the electric coils, which are horrid. Induction ranges do pretty well for changing your temp quickly more like gas, although you have to get compatible cookware.
Keith Law: Which is a big expense for most people.

Joe: A lot of HOF voters have tied themselves in knots making excuses not to vote for anyone they can loosely tie to PEDs in any way. Now the same guys are tying themselves in knots trying to explain why it’s not hypocritical to vote for David Ortiz on the first ballot. It’s almost like it was never really about PEDs, and was just about keeping out the guys they didn’t like personally.
Keith Law: No question. If you vote for Ortiz, and not A-Rod, you’ve dropped the curtain.

John: I learned from my aunt last night that there is an underworld of children being farmed for their adrenaline.  News you can use.
Keith Law: Do they do that in pizzeria basements?

CY: I know it’s early, but thoughts on Druw Jones or Elijah Green for the Rangers at #3?
Keith Law: There are a lot of other players in this draft class. Those are just the most famous ones.

Sedona: Do you think Mize becomes a #2 starter?
Keith Law: Yes. I’m still a fan, even though we haven’t seen what I thought we’d see from him when he was first drafted.

Nick: In reference to your Eric Davis response as to players you wanted to see without injury…is Buxton on that trajectory?
Keith Law: I certainly hope not.

Tom: Think with emerging SP’s bailey ober and Joey Ryan, that the twins can emerge to be competitive in 2022?
Keith Law: I don’t believe those guys are the answer.

Tom: Anything to Jon Singleton getting buff this offseason? Are you buying him?
Keith Law: Meh. He’d be a great story, but the odds are well against him.

Sedona: Trevor Story’s away stats are atrocious.  Especially last year.  How much will teams take this into consideration when offering what seams will be a long term deal
Keith Law: Most Rockies hitters have had large home/road splits that have closed at least partway when they left Denver.

Adam: Growing up did kids ever sing “ i fought the law and the law won”?
Keith Law: Not really. I’m the wrong age for that. Lot of “Breaking the Law,” though.

Dude: Hamilton’s faster than Gore?
Keith Law: I’ve timed both guys multiple times and Hamilton was consistently faster home to first.

Guest: Should the dodgers move will smith   off of catcher? If so, which position?
Keith Law: Why?
Keith Law: Like, did something happen with Smith that I missed?

Sedona: Do you have a favorite off the radar / non pedigree prospect?
Keith Law: I love seeing guys who weren’t high picks or big bonus guys come from nowhere to become real prospects. Someone mentioned Walter above. Matt Brash is another. Players do change in unexpected ways. That’s the fun way to be wrong.

Appa Yip Yip: Didn’t they drop the curtain when Bud Selig was elected to the hall?
Keith Law: Every Commissioner gets in, right? Except Fay Vincent, because he dared to go against the owners.

Will Smith: Cartaya is coming up and Smith’s bat plays at other positions.
Keith Law: Cartaya looks like a superstar in the making, but he’s not exactly MLB ready now.

Chris: do you agree with the Yanks’ plan of going stopgap til Peraza/Volpe are ready, given their massive long term commitments to Cole and Stanton aleady, w Judge possibly coming? (proviso obv they could do all of it)
Keith Law: It’s risky, but I understand it … at some point, you do have to decide THIS prospect is the one you’re going to let develop.

xxx(yyy): what is the story with Profar? was he just not able to recover after the injury? were folks too high on his floor?
Keith Law: I feel like it was the two lost seasons. That’s the most parsimonious explanation.

Matt: How did a guy like Mike Piaaza get drafted in the 63rd round? And as a favor to Tommy Lasorda more or less. Like, how do so many scouts miss that?
Keith Law: Scouts didn’t miss anything there. He was awful his first two years in the minors, too. He repeated high-A and suddenly had huge power, and that carried over as he moved up the ladder. He didn’t play at all as a freshman at U Miami, then went to junior college, so who knows how much he was even scouted as an amateur.

Brutus Beefcake: Apologies if I’ve missed it already, but do you plan to publish a column explaining your HOF votes?  I know in years past you’ve contemplated not voting at all but I take it from your mention of not voting for Schilling that you did vote this year.
Keith Law: I have voted every year, and I will absolutely reveal my ballot. The Athletic just wants us all to reveal ours at once, I think next week?

Appa Yip Yip: Is Nate Pearson the Jays closer for the next five years (or until his arm explodes)?
Keith Law: I wouldn’t give up on him starting yet. I understand the reason for the question, but consigning him to a 70 inning a year role really cuts off a lot of upside.

xxx(yyy): ballpark, how often do NPs actually make the major leagues? 1% of the time? 3%? 5%? less than 1%?
Keith Law: I would bet under 1%. One in a hundred sounds aggressive. If you’re calling 1 in every 50 future big leaguers a non-prospect, you need to adjust your bar.

Henry: I’ve always found Gary Sheffield to be an interesting HOF candidate, but his defense was beyond atrocious.
Keith Law: It was, but if he were a DH, he would have probably sailed into the Hall – or at least gotten in sooner. His WAR numbers would have been much stronger and enough voters lean on that now that I think it’s worked against him.

Joe: There’s one anti-vax meme I’ve seen that says something along the lines of “If the vaccine is free to keep the nation healthy, then why aren’t chemo and insulin free?” It’s a meme that just blows my mind that they think that’s an argument in their favor. The anti-vax voters are the ones who are electing Senators who refuse to address the cost of medicine.
Keith Law: That’s almost true, but there’s also a sizable chunk of anti-vaxxers on the far left too. Strange bedfellows etc., but not every anti-vaxxer is a Q-supporting nutjob. (they’re all nutjobs, though.)

Marani: Which is more irksome:  the HOF voter who doesn’t vote for Jeter, Seaver, Pedro, et al because “nobody deserves to go in on the first ballot”, or the guy who tosses a vote to Tim Salmon or Tony Phillips because they were super nice to reporters after the game was over?
Keith Law: The latter. Don’t care about unanimous votes. Mariano didn’t get a special plaque, did he?
Keith Law: But don’t cheapen the process by voting for a player who was nice. If that’s how unseriously you take it, don’t vote.

DEF: No question, just wishing you and yours a happy holiday.
Sedona: Glad to have you back for chat after a few weeks off.  Happy Holidays!!
Keith Law: Happy holidays to all of you as well. I’ll try to get back on a regular schedule with these as we approach prospect rankings – and then I’ll do several around the launch of the rankings too. Have a safe holiday, everyone. Thank you all for reading.

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