The dish — Page 56 — The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law

→ April 22, 2021
→ By keith

Klawchat 4/22/21.

My latest post for subscribers to the Athletic looks at Louisville catcher Henry Davis, maybe the best prospect in this year’s draft class, and other draft prospects from Louisville, Virginia, and the high school ranks.

Keith Law: I’ve got the answer. Open the envelope. Klawchat.

Mac: Will Jackson Jobe get top 5 consideration?
Keith Law: No. The last two drafts didn’t include a HS pitcher in the top 15 picks. Jobe shouldn’t be a top 5 pick on his own merits, or with what might be an industry trend away from HS pitchers up top.

Larry: Do you think Henry Davis’ receiving will improve? He has a problem with the catching part of catching.
Keith Law: That’s wrong. He receives well, throws plus, could use some help with blocking. I’m not sure where you got that information but it’s bad.

addoeh: It might be confirmation bias on my part, but it seems there are more HS seniors from cold weather states projected to go in the first couple of rounds the last few years or so, but especially this year. Is this accurate?
Keith Law: It seems accurate this year, but I don’t see a trend. California and Texas are just having their worst HS years in memory, and that’s creating opportunity (or need) for cold-weather kids to fill the gap.

Bill G: Thanks as always for doing these chats. How would you use Ohtani? Starter/DH, Starter only, DH only, DH/Closer? Thanks!
Keith Law: Just pick one. He’s a hitter or a pitcher. I think the Angels are losing some value by trying to have him do both.

AJ: Jazz is sure looking like the star you’ve said he would be. What is his ceiling? And do you think he’ll get that K rate down, or is 25-30% just who he is?
Keith Law: I could see him settling into the 23-25% range, but between the way the game is now and the way he swings, I doubt he ever has a year where he’s better than the league median in K%. I’m glad to see his at bats overall are better, though.

Fuzzy Dunlop: Around what round projection do you start seeing 6-8 organizations area scouts at that particular player’s game/starts? Our local HS Friday starter has probably seen that many at every one of his starts, but I can’t see him being more than a 15th-20th round guy. I know its obviously not an exact formula, but I always wondered.
Keith Law: That doesn’t add up. If he’s a HS pitcher on Fridays – the night most colleges throw their best guys – he wouldn’t have six area scouts there unless he’s a first-rounder. You’re seeing part-timers or they’re not scouts at all.

RickG: Hey Keith. Have you considered returning to Top Chef recaps, or would you ever? This season has been very interesting. I re-watched some seasons during the Pandemic and whenever possible re-read your takes – I’ve learned much more about cooking then I knew when the shows first aired and found your perspective even better the 2nd time around.
Keith Law: I appreciate that very much, but those took around 3 hours (viewing + writing) to do, and I just don’t have that kind of time any more.

Tom: Pavin Smith seeing some regular playing time. With the adjustment to his launch angle over the past year, what do you see his offensive output looking like?
Keith Law: He’s still getting on top of the ball a little too much, but I see a high-OBP 20-homer guy.

Guest: A few weeks (months?) ago you appeared on an Orioles podcast mentioned that one thing were concerned about for Kjerstad was his strikeout rate. What is more concerning about his strikeouts than, say, George Springer’s, who is someone you were higher on than consensus when he was coming out of college?
Keith Law: Kjerstad struck out way more often with far fewer walks. Springer had plate discipline, but didn’t bring a two-strike approach (other than “swing hard”). Kjerstad doesn’t have that.

J: Do you know where Pedro Leon is headed once the minor league seasons start? Or is he going to be in limbo for a while? Also – more impossible question – what can/should expectations be for him?
Keith Law: I doubt we’ll see many assignments till next week. Minor league season starts in 12 days, though!

davealden53: From 2009 to 2019, two friends and I took annual minor league trips of a week or more to different regions. 2020 was lost and 2021 isn’t looking a lot better. Instead, we’re considering the Arizona Fall League for the first week of November. What have you heard about the AFL plans for this year? Will the season extend into November? And will fans be allowed to attend games?
Keith Law: I haven’t heard anything yet and I’m concerned MLB will just decide to axe the league to save another $23.

TomBruno23: For years the Vitae Foundation, a pro-life organization based in Jefferson City, MO, has been a sponsor of St. Louis Cardinals baseball on KMOX. This season they bring us the starting lineups each and every game. How upset should I be about this? I honestly do not know. https://vitaefoundation.org/
Keith Law: I wouldn’t give my money to the team in that situation, but my guess is that they’re playing to their base.

Tom: Joc Pederson off to a slow start. Sure, SSS, but he’s K’ing a lot even for him. Think he can be a solid offensive contributor?
Keith Law: I do, but I’m concerned that he’s whiffing so much against RHP. He’s never really hit lefties and expecting him to is foolhardy.

Sedona: Is Aaron Ashby the 3rd best SP in the entire org?
Keith Law: No – I’m not completely sold that he’s a starter.

Michael: Hi Keith. Giants fan here – interested to see what you think of farhans strategy the past two plus seasons? I know we are better than we were when he got here and appreciate that we didn’t “tank”, but do you feel we are actually closer to competing for a championship now than two years ago? Thanks!
Keith Law: Yes, I like the overall direction, and especially the way they’re trying out veterans who might benefit from a change of scenery and approach, players who’d be great trade pieces in July if the Giants are out of it. The worst thing that could happen would be some fake contention where they keep all of those guys instead.

Moe Mentum: It’s still early (SSS) but what should the Phillies do about their glaring hole in center field? I know you won’t recommend Odubel Herrera, but…
Keith Law: I’d probably play Quinn out there, of the options on the roster. They can fire Herrera into the sun for all I care. Moniak isn’t the answer, and while I wish the best for Haseley, they have to move on. I don’t think they have anyone close enough in the system to be better than a replacement-level Quinn.

Aaron in Indy: Glad to see Yankee fans handling their early season struggles with the patience and level headedness that we could only come to expect.

But seriously, does Boone make it thru the year if they don’t drastically improve. And I think they will start hitting more especially when Volt comes back. But do they have enough pitching (including minor league) to make a run at the division???
Keith Law: It’s not even 10% of the season, though. Joe Sheehan wrote somewhere the other day that every team has a 5-10 stretch at some point, even the best teams. The overreaction to the small sample is mind-boggling, even if you buy into the stereotype of the Yankee fan (I think Yankee fans are no different than fans of other teams, but we think they’re louder because there are so many more of them).

Sedona: Has Kopech shown anything differently so far to change your outlook on him?
Keith Law: No, this is what I thought he’d do in a relief role – now we’ll see how it goes as he stretches out, if his command holds (it really turned a corner in the last two months he spent in the minors) and he stays healthy.

Jason: Are reverse splits a real thing for relievers? Chris Martin was substantially better against lefties in 2019 (and better in 2020, though his numbers were really good against both), but I’m curious as to whether that can be sustinable
Keith Law: They can be real, but you’d probably need about three years’ worth of innings to be sure of it. It would help if you could see it in the arsenal – a pitcher with a great changeup or split, but not much of a breaking ball, would likely have a reverse split.

John: An mlb.com mock draft published yesterday showed Rocker falling to the Red Sox at 4. What do you see as the chances of that happening?
Keith Law: Not unreasonable.

Noah: Re: the Mets front office, don’t you think at this point Sandy Alderson has to step down? One mistake in hiring is maybe something you can shrug off (although with sexual harassment, I don’t think so), but this is a pattern.
Keith Law: Yes, he absolutely does, for rehiring someone with a history of harassment over the active objections of multiple current employees. I have always liked and respected Sandy, but this is not just an error in judgment, and his response to the Athletic article did not help matters.
Keith Law: My guess is that he’ll finish the year and be allowed to “resign” on his terms, since his departure now would leave an interim GM and no baseball executive above him, but I wouldn’t even wait that long. It sends a horrible message to the organization.

Jason: Is billy mckinney (with his former first round pedigree) a breakout candidate or is he just having a hot start?
Keith Law: He has a .297 OBP. That’s not a hot start.

Steve: What is the main reason Wander Franco isn’t a major leaguer yet?
Keith Law: He’s never played above A-ball.

Ben Z: Alright Keith. Hit us with your Oscar picks. I know you haven’t seen MINARI yet (I think), my choice for Best Picture of the nominees, albeit in a deservedly tight, strong 1-2 race with Nomadland…so setting that movie aside for now…
Keith Law: I think Nomadland will win, and it would be my pick. This year’s possible Green Book is The Trial of the Chicago 7, which is very actorly and Such an Important Movie, You Know, In This Moment, but which I would rank 8th of the nominees.

Zach: Do you think Tejay Antone’s stuff can hold up in the rotation? It looks like has video game cheat codes.
Keith Law: Big spin guy but more likely a reliever in the end. Stuff plays, though.

Uli Jon: I thought this was going to be an above average draft a year ago, which maybe says something about early projections as well as Covid weirdness. If you had to pick one, would you say this class is weak or more of a shrug emoji?
Keith Law: It’s ended up weak. Now maybe it’s because guys were rusty, or are dealing with more fatigue than usual, but it’s a weak class.

Anthony: If Tatis was still a prospect would you drop him in your rankings because of this shoulder issue?
Keith Law: No, that’s absurd.

Frank: You seem to be a big Henry Davis fan from your article. If you were picking 1-1 would you take him over any of the pitchers?
Keith Law: I am going to see Leiter (if possible) in the next few weeks, but right now, I think I would. Elite bat at catcher. Position player > pitcher. And the pitchers this year, while very good up top, are not Strasburg/Cole/Price.

Michael: Vlad is crushing it. Is it because he’s really in the best shape of his life or something else?
Keith Law: Two possible explanations: either it’s because he’s putting the ball in the air a lot more (launch angle is way up over 2019 or 220), or it’s because I made him a breakout pick last year and those names always seem to be a year too early (or, as with Rickie Weeks, just never right).

Jays: Are the Jays’ defensive issues an organizational failure or the logical outcome of a bat first bottleneck? Is improvement even possible?
Keith Law: Bat-first bottleneck, sure, but also, why play Bichette at short over Semien? why play Biggio at third? They’re making some specific choices that, while probably not huge individually, might add up to 10 or more runs allowed over the course of the year.

Ben Z: What do you think is the proper course for my Nats? It seems like their window has finally shut. It’s been a great decade and I’m not complaining (nor can I get too upset over things like the Strasburg and Corbin contracts or their failure to extend young position player superstars or trading away Giolito and Luzardo…who knows, remove one of these, and maybe they don’t get their ring)…but this will be a tough plane to take apart and rebuild…
Keith Law: Scherzer would be quite the coveted midseason acquisition if they choose to trade him. I know that’s not Rizzo’s MO, but he could probably make a killing.

Amos: Hi Keith – If you were in charge of the A’s, would you roll the dice on Jaden Hill towards the end of the 1st round? They’ve gambled on high end tools in Beck and Murray and Hill seems like a similar lottery ticket type pick if given the time to recover from TJ surgery. Thanks.
Keith Law: Depends on the medicals, but yeah, where they pick, it would be a worthwhile gamble in this draft.

Guest: The standard answer is you should never draft for need and the worst result is you have multiple talented prospects at the same position which you can trade- buuuut, would the Yankees take another catcher at 20 (given the prep catcher talent) if they’ve drafted 3 catchers in the top 2 rounds in the last 3 years?
Keith Law: Why, though? It’s not a great prep catcher class, so I’m not sure why they’d specifically take one with greater depth in other areas of the class.

Max: What does Del Castillo have to do to get back into the top-5ish part of the draft a lot of people pegged him at earlier this year?
Keith Law: That’s just not happening.

HH: Are teams allowed to ask players whether they’ve had the Covid-19 vaccine, and if not, whether they plan to get it? Would you downgrade a player who refused relative to a similar player who wouldn’t? If so, how much?
Keith Law: That’s a good question. I assume they could ask, given what they’re allowed to ask players about their medical histories. I would consider refusal to get a vaccine as an indicator of questionable makeup. It shows a lack of critical thinking.

Mac: I get all that about Jobe but what if he’s a unicorn? HS right hander aside he sure checks a lot of boxes for a TOR pitcher.
Keith Law: He’s not, though. He doesn’t check any more boxes than Abel did. And you’re ignoring the base rate – why is he going to be a unicorn? Because he’s tall and athletic? So are lots of top HS pitchers. Because he throws hard? Well, even more do that.
Keith Law: Jobe is a good prospect. He doesn’t belong in the top 5.

Dylan: Re travel to Texas for scouting Lawlar — I was in Dallas this past weekend, and nearly everyone I encountered was masked. My sense is that the metro areas still act about like they did under the mask orders, but that it’s a different story in rural areas.
Keith Law: That’s great to hear, although his season is about to end on Tuesday, and there will only be limited chances to see him beyond that.

Chris: Thoughts on Frankie Montas?
Keith Law: He’s a reliever, always has been. I’m amazed how much of a chance he’s gotten to start.

JC: Austin Riley’s baseball savant’s page is hard to look at – do you think this was a case of the Braves actually thinking he could get better, or just being cheap and hoping they can get anything for min salary? Just all around frustrating to watch him now
Keith Law: I assume it was more cost than anything else – play the existing options, wait for Shewmake to pop by the end of this year.

Rob: Have you seen a single coherent argument *against* DC statehood? I mean sure, it is a “power grab” to a certain extent. But what isn’t these days? Tell me why DC doesn’t *deserve* statehood and maybe I’ll listen, wingnuts!
Keith Law: I haven’t. It’s all rooted in race or party.

Graves: Should I impute to an organization the beliefs of its advertisers? If so, why?
Keith Law: They made an active choice to partner with an anti-abortion group. If your favorite team chose to partner with a white supremacist group, would you not impute those beliefs to the team?

Brett: Have you seen Arkansas outfielder Christian Franklin? Any thoughts on his draft stock?
Keith Law: Second/third round type. Been much worse since conference play starter, but has some tools on both sides and could be an interesting project for someone. Maybe he gets into the comp round – there are a lot of guys in that Kam Misner sort of category, toolsy college outfielders who swing and miss way too much but have upside. After Jeren Kendall, though, teams seem reluctant to take them in the first round.

John: How serious is Jarren Duran’s swing and miss issue?
Keith Law: I’m sorry, what swing and miss issue? Did he play in some games this year I missed?

Pete: Do you think LaRussa is mis-handling Andrew Vaughn right now? He’s playing him sporadically and batting him 8th a lot, all while Vaughn is learning a new position. Is this messing with Vaughn’s development or is this the appropriate way for a win-now team to break in a prospect?
Keith Law: James Fagen said this on my podcast this week – if they’re not playing Vaughn every day, he should be in the minors once those start.

Mitchell: Klaw, how well do you think the Dbacks are set up for the future with Hazen. Lost cause this year but do they have enough in the system to be competitive down the road with Carroll, Robinson, Corbin, etc?
Keith Law: Yeah, the system is really strong, especially with some of the pitching on the come – if guys like Grammes and Cecconi really have turned the corner, the system will look a lot better in July when we reassess. The lack of a season last year to see if their supposed changes were real does hurt their perception, although it makes no difference in reality.

Ben Z: Do we think Victor Robles is ever going to reach what seemed to be his potential as a prospect to be a decent offensive player? Or has he regressed in a way that seems permanent?
Keith Law: His main problem seems to be that he just doesn’t hit the ball hard enough often enough. I’m not really sure how you fix that.

ivy: Do you see Dean Kremer as having the potential to become, say, a #3 starter? He can look terrific for several innings, seems to have problems sustaining his performance for more than a few innings. How fixable is that sort of problem?
Keith Law: The delivery isn’t great, but I think he can be a back-end guy, a 4 or a 5 who eats innings but is worse than league-average at run prevention.

Rodney: Slow start for Rowdy Tellez. Lots of folks were highlighting changes in his BB and K rates last year. But… it was 36 games, right? He’s still probably the same 4A/platoon guy?
Keith Law: Yep, same as he ever was.

Roger: when do we see kelenic and Franco in the majors?
Keith Law: I’m guessing May and June, respectively. We’ll see what Seattle does with Lewis back and the minors starting, so Trammell would have somewhere to play.

Bree: Keith – Love your work. The A’s have had a number of players who were relatively underrated as prospects v their big league performance (Olson, Chapman, Canha). Why do you think that’s the case, if there’s an underlying reason at all and who in their current system do you think could be next to outperform their current prospect status?
Keith Law: Canha was a rule 5 pick who’s been fine as a part-time player – he’s never even qualified for the batting title. He’s not in the class of Chapman, who cut down on his swing and miss right when he reached the majors, which is really remarkable. I asked some A’s people about it a few years ago for a column on “guys I got wrong,” and they said they didn’t have a great explanation for it, either. It was something he did on his own and they gave him the credit.

Ryan: I’m a Twins fan, please tell me it is going to be ok. On another note, Kiriloff has to be up this weekend right?
Keith Law: I thought he was going to make the OD roster, so of course I’ll say yes.

David: What would you put the odds at that the Pirates draft someone other than Lieter? Your piece of Henry Davis opened my eyes.
Keith Law: I think they should explore Davis as an option, yes, absolutely, both because he might be the #1 prospect in the class, and because maybe they can get the best deal between him and Leiter (I don’t think they’re on a HS kid there) and do more at their next pick.

Jason: dinselson lamet– should he have gotten TJ
Keith Law: Uh … didn’t he have TJ?

Rob: Bummed that the Phils had to recall Kingery while he was still working on swing changes, and reportedly struggling with it. Seems like another setback for his development, no? What’s the prognosis now?
Keith Law: Not ideal, no.

Guest: The Yankees are obviously tanking for Elijah Greene right?
Keith Law: Man, I’ve heard some really mixed things on him. I talked to one scout who said it’s among the best tools prospects in years, and a day later another scout who wouldn’t take him in the first round.
Keith Law: I will say I find these year-ahead hype guys pan out less often than you’d think. I’m not saying this on Green, but often it’s the kid who grew fastest rather than the kid who’s the best prospect.

Matt: Thoughts on Cedric Mullins? Was a switch hitter who gave up hitting from the right side this year. Now top 5 in the AL in hits. Small sample size, but it seems to be clicking more this year.
Keith Law: SSS.

Chris: Cape Cod League just announced their season! Can’t recall, do you still come up for some CC games ever? Be fun to run into you.
Keith Law: Yes, not since 2018, but I do love going up there and really hope to work it in this summer. Might have to be after the draft, though.

Amir: Do you think Thatcher Hurd could go in the 1st round? What do you think about him?
Keith Law: Maybe 5% chance. He’s a second-round talent and I think he’s someone’s second pick overpay, not a first-rounder. We’ll see, though – almost three months to the draft, so a lot of time for Hurd (or anyone) to show something new, throwing harder or showing more power or something, and change that.

Kevin C: Tatis’s slow start, not just at the plate but in the field is concerning. How much should be attributed to the shoulder injury?
Keith Law: I’m assuming all of it is.

Mike: Point me to some Asheville eats please
Keith Law: Never been. Isn’t that sad?

Guest: Will the Pirates draft another “number three” pitcher 1-1?
Keith Law: I have had that worry with Leiter … he’s a better prospect than Bullington was, but if he’s not a future ace, will Pirates fans just put them in the same category?

Chris: George kirby is touching 101 now? I know all the reasons to not get excited, but have you heard/seen anything that makes his outlook change?
Keith Law: I heard that from Eric Longenhagen – I assume he wrote it, too – and if Kirby’s throwing that hard, yes, it changes his outlook, because his fastball played below its velocity in college. At, say, 96-101, though, “playing down” might still be okay.

Tim: Does Nick Madrigal have value even without the ability to hit for extra bases?
Keith Law: Yes, absolutely – I’ve never said he had no value. He just has no ceiling.

Danial W: Glad you got to try Al Carbon while you were in town. Next time there are a couple pizzas up your alley, Lampo near downtown and surprisingly from Vivace near the stadium. Have you had a chance to notice any significant changes from any major leaguers in this short season?
Keith Law: Lampo had a 140 minute wait for take-out that night. I didn’t have that kind of time. I’ve mentioned a few of those changes above, like Vlad Jr.’s swing change, and I don’t suppose it’s any news to talk about Corbin Burnes’ cutter (and he was already an ace in my mind).

David H: Thanks as always for doing these chats, Keith. Long-time reader, first-time poster. Wednesday was the 5th anniversary of Prince’s death, so I went through your archives to find your ranking of his top songs. I also read the LA Times list that ranked his 85 singles. The Times’ No. 1, “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” didn’t make your list, so I was just curious, given your status as a Prince fan, why that was?
Keith Law: What a weird choice. It’s not a very interesting or catchy song.

Matt: During weak draft classes, why don’t we see more teams punt to the next year? If you’re 7th in a weak draft year, aren’t you better off not getting a deal done and picking 8th if the next year is stronger?
Keith Law: No, you’re definitely not. For one thing, you don’t know if the next draft is stronger. For another, you could lose your job before then, maybe for fucking up the draft, and then someone else gets that pick.

wickethewok: Would a season-long Buxton break out be the most gratifying case for you of a player fulfilling your projected potential (short of Rickie Weeks coming out of retirement)?
Keith Law: Yes, because good Byron Buxton is extremely good for baseball. The man is a walking highlight machine.

Jason: Hi Keith, do you ever listen to audiobooks? I know you prefer dead trees, but audiobooks have really allowed me to get back to consuming books again
Keith Law: I do, but only certain genres, because I don’t have the same level of concentration and often miss stuff. It’s hard to do that with a novel and fully appreciate the work.

John: Bobby Witt Jr. over/under July 1?
Keith Law: After.

Dallas: Corbin Burnes went 4th round out of college. What was the report coming out of college and how much of this is talent vs. “pitch building” especially with the unreal spin rates on all of his pitches? My real question is how much of this is “pitch building”/adding spin?
Keith Law: Looks like I had him 46th overall on my Big Board that year. He faded somewhat toward the end of that spring for St. Mary’s, and I guess it really scared teams off; at the start of the year he looked like he might get into the late first round. Of course, his stuff is substantially better now than it was then.

Mike: What are your thoughts on the experiment of moving the mound back a foot?
Keith Law: I think it’s going to get a lot of pitchers hurt. MLB is incredible at failing to foresee the consequences of its actions.

Richard: Were you ever a baseball card collector?
Thoughts on the new Topps NFTs or NFTs in general?
Keith Law: As a kid yes. I would buy NFTs but I don’t want to sell off my South Seas stock.

Todd: Hi Keith – How did you rate Matt Olson as a prospect? What did you hit/miss about how he has turned out?
Keith Law: Made my top 100 once, then not the next year, then he was in the majors. This fluke start aside, he’s hit for some more average than I expected.

Rob: I enjoyed the Henry Davis article – I realize it’s too early for a mock draft, but any indication that teams’ thinking is evolving to have him as a top five and maybe 1-1 guy?
Keith Law: I ran that idea by a bunch of people before writing it, and nobody said it was crazy or just wrong. Most folks agreed that Davis should be in the top tier – I didn’t really go further than that – with the Vandy boys and Lawlar.

Food Fan: Hey, thanks for the chat! Cooking question. I have never used sherry vinegar but find myself with some recipes I want to try where I need it. I can’t find it easily without long drives to places I don’t usually go, something I just don’t want to do during a pandemic. Therefore, I will buy online. The options are overwhelming and I’m not sure which to select or how much to spend. Any specific recommendations?
Keith Law: I usually buy it at Whole Foods when one is on sale – any brand – because it is expensive. Jose Andres has one that’s good and often is $2-3 off at my store.

Mike: At what point does marijuana get federally legalized? And with that can we get the records of those locked up because of it exspunged?
Keith Law: I think that happens under this Administration. More than half of the population lives in states where it’s at least decriminalized. And it is such a waste of time and money to treat its possession or use as a crime. I’m in favor of the latter part as well.

Rick: You need to relax and stop trying to do the right thing.
Keith Law: Well that’s the worst advice I’ve ever gotten.

Jason: You mentioned weird defensive decisions – remember when the Phillies played Kingery at SS and Crawford at 3B for a while? Did that make any sense?
Keith Law: No, but lo and behold, Crawford improved when he went to Seattle and played shortstop full time.

Jason: When are you coming out with a LawCoin?
Keith Law: Climate change is serious enough without me adding to it.
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. Thank you all for all of your questions and for reading! I should be back next week for another chat, and I’ll be back on the Athletic’s daily baseball podcast tomorrow morning. Don’t forget to pick up The Inside Game, now out in paperback, at your local bookstore or online via Bookshop. Thanks again!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ April 22, 2021
→ By keith

A Sun.

The gripping Taiwanese neo-noir film A Sun mostly escaped critical notice in 2020 after hitting Netflix last January, only coming to broader attention when Variety critic Peter Debruge named it the best film of 2020. Even now, it has just 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, only three from major U.S.-based outlets, despite making the short list for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It should have advanced to the final five, because it’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2020, wrapping a 21^st century crime drama and a story of family tragedy ripped out of 19^th century Brit Lit together in a strange and totally compelling picture.

A Sun starts out with a shocking scene, as we see two teenage boys heading through the kitchens of a large restaurant into the dining room, where one of them approaches another teenager at a table, takes a machete, and hacks off the victim’s hand, leaving him screaming and covered with blood on the floor. The reasons for this won’t become apparent for some time, but we learn that Chen Jian Ho, called A-Ho throughout the film, is one of the two attackers, along with his friend Radish, and claims at the trial that he thought they were only going to scare the victim, not maim him. This incident sets off ripples throughout A-Ho’s family – his seemingly perfect brother, studying in cram school so he can become a doctor, starts to crack from the added pressure on him as the good son; his father refuses to acknowledge A-Ho as his son, and is beset by the victim’s father, who demands the compensation the court awarded him; his mother, quietly devastated time and again in this film, takes in A-Ho’s young girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child and living with an aunt. We follow A-Ho through his time in prison and his release, but when Radish, who received a longer sentence, gets out as well, he tracks A-Ho down and proceeds to make more trouble for his ‘friend’ even as A-Ho is trying to live a quiet, law-abiding life.

There are so many layers to A Sun, which is titled “Sunlight Reveals All” in Taiwanese, but at its heart it’s a story about A-Ho and his father, who works as a driving instructor and clearly wants more for both of his kids than he’s gotten from life. Chen Yi-wen, who plays A-Ho’s father Wen, won the Taiwanese equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awardst, but his performance here builds over the course of the movie; what starts out as a hackneyed “I have only one son” character develops into far more by the time the movie hits its climax and Wen has to make a choice to help A-Ho when Radish once again has him in trouble. Chen’s performance is anguished and understated, and the dynamic between him and A-Ho (played by Wu Chien-ho, who was also nominated for the Golden Horse for Best Actor) reveals itself slowly to be more complex and emotional than it first appears.

There’s some irony both the original and English titles of A Sun given how much of the movie takes place under cover of night or in pouring rain; even when the sun is out, it’s often shining a light on something we’d rather not see. Director and co-writer Chung Mong-hong gives the film its neo-noir feel by keeping so much of the film in the literal and figurative dark; we don’t learn anything about the reasons for the initial attack until well into the second half of the film, by which point it threatens to upend the audience’s established opinions on various characters, and resets the tone for the drive to the finish. Chung’s script avoids black and white answers, right up through the final scene, in depicting a family that has made mistakes but is also being pushed around by inexorable fate. The sun will rise tomorrow, but you might not like what it shows you.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2020 movies, highly recommended, noir, taiwanese films

→ April 21, 2021
→ By keith

The Father.

Nominated for six Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, The Father gives a devastating portrait of dementia from the perspective of the sufferer, recasting the experience as a psychological mystery – but one without the promise of a neat ending. It brings together an incredibly clever screenplay and a BAFTA-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, while making superb use of the limited space of a film set almost entirely in one flat. (It’s available to rent now as a premium/early access option for $19.99 through amazon and other VOD sites.)

Adapted from the stage version by the playwright Florian Zeller, The Father starts out simply enough: Anthony (Hopkins) is arguing with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman, also nominated for an Oscar) because he has scared off his most recent carer. He says it’s because she stole his watch, and rants about his other daughter, Lucy, whose name seems to bring the film to a screeching halt whenever Anthony broaches the topic. In the following scene, Anthony finds a strange man (Mark Gatiss) in his living room, and the man says he’s Paul, Anne’s partner, whom Anthony doesn’t recognize – and when Anne returns, she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams) and Anthony doesn’t recognize her either. Is this just his memory failing, or is something more sinister at play?

The Father utilizes those tricks and more – details of the flat change as well, part of the nonlinear nature of time in this film – to express Anthony’s disorientation to the viewer beyond having him show his confusion. His flat and his daughter’s share a structure, but things like light fixtures, furniture, and wall colors differ slightly, just enough to throw Anthony and the viewer off as we try to figure out not just where we are, but when. Hopkins is truly incredible here, still showing a plus fastball here at age 81 (when it was filmed), delivering the sort of performance the film requires and that you’d expect to see in a stage production. His confusion is palpable, his attempts to mask it through word and action realistic, and his rapid mood shifts – one of the scariest aspects of dementia for family members – are just a series of hard line drives, impressive because they’re subtle and yet impossible to ignore. The script avoids the obvious, such as having Anthony become violent, or scream obscenities, or other possible behaviors of someone with his condition, and instead lets Hopkins deliver the smaller but no less devastating changes in a way that hammers them home to the viewer.

This film is as replete with symbolism as any I can remember watching, perhaps a reflection of its stage origins, although in this sense it felt just as much like a classic novel. The color blue is everywhere in this film – walls, backsplashes, furniture, clothes – which seems like an obvious nod to the sadness and depression suffered by both a patient developing dementia and their loved ones, while the color also appears in a new setting at the end of the film that makes the connection more explicit. Anthony’s obsession with his watch, which can be a common behavior in patients with memory loss, may also represent his slipping grasp of time; in one scene, the time jumps from early morning to evening without a cut, leaving Anthony, still in his pajamas, even more confused than usual. There could be more – the shattered tea cup, the painting above the fireplace, the trees – but I will assume the chicken is, in this case, just a chicken.

The one quibble I have with The Father is the ending, which may be completely realistic but does take away some of the mystery that Zeller built up in the preceding 100 or so minutes with a resolution that, again, is probably accurate to such stories, but took some air out of the dramatic balloon. We spent much of the movie trying to come up with possible explanations for everything that was happening – for example, are Gatiss and Williams some sort of confidence artists? – but the story is much simpler than that.

Hopkins is just incredible here, my favorite lead actor performance of the year, although I don’t think there’s any chance he wins the award over Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (and I’m not sure I would want to see the reaction if he did). Colman is superb as well, my favorite of the three nominees I’ve seen, although it appears the favorite is one I haven’t seen, Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. It’s also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, which could be its best chance for a win on Sunday. As for the film itself, I would still lean towards Nomadland for Best Picture, but this sits at #2 on my ranking of movies from the 2020-early 2021 awards cycle, with just a couple of candidates left to see, and one more that made my top 5 still left to review.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2020 best actor nominees, 2020 best adapted screenplay nominees, 2020 best picture nominees, 2020 best supporting actress nominees, 2020 movies, adaptations, highly recommended

→ April 20, 2021
→ By keith

Charlottesville eats.

On my way out of Charlottesville to drive home, I stopped at The Fitzroy, a gastropub in the city’s Downtown Mall, to grab dinner for the road. I went with their roasted broccolini and mozzarella sandwich, served on ciabatta with lightly roasted cherry tomatoes and basil pesto, which turned out tob exactly what I wanted – filling but not heavy, with a huge quantity of the star broccolini, which were roasted deeply enough to get some color and caramelization on them. The menu is small but has plenty of options for carnivores and vegetarians, and apparently they make their own tonic water for G&Ts, which I’d love to try when I’m not facing a 220-mile drive.

Al Carbon is a fast-casual Peruvian chicken place up Seminole Trail about 3 miles north of campus, serving the standards of that cuisine as well as some Mexican-inspired dishes like elote, esquites, and cemitas. I went with the basics – a quarter dark with maduros (fried sweet plantains) and elote con mayonesa (corn on the cob, rolled in mayo, cotija cheese, chile powder, and lime zest). The chicken was good but the least interesting thing I ate; it was still juicy but the bulk of the flavor was on the skin, not in the meat. The plantains were absurdly good, slightly crispy and chewy at the edges, but bordering on custardy at the center, while the elote was spicier than what I’m using to having in that dish, but in a good way. Al Carbon also shares a parking lot with a Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard stand, if you’re so inclined. I was.

MarieBette is a small French bakery that the internet told me does great breakfast sandwiches, which seemed like an ideal thing to eat on the go. Their croissants are divine, flaky and buttery with barely enough flour to hold the whole thing together, and I definitely ate it while it was still too hot. They do a full coffee service as well, but I skipped that to go check out JBird Supply, a small coffee micro-roaster with a shop in a shared office space that serves pour-over, drip, and espresso options from a small selection of their own beans. They seem to focus on small growers who provide for their workers or communities, whether it’s Uganda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, or anywhere else where they source their beans. I tried their Ethiopia Sidamo as a pour-over, which was less overtly citrusy than the typical Ethiopian coffee, and picked up a bag of beans from the Gorilla Summit station in southwestern Uganda, near the border with Rwanda. The latter have a powerful black cherry aroma the moment you open the bag, and the coffee from it has the same note but with some nuttier undertones.

I didn’t get to visit my favorite dinner spot in Charlottesville, Mas Tapas, as its hours conflicted with the game time Friday and I wanted to hit the road as soon as I could on Saturday. I did get a quick to-go meal from Moe’s Original BBQ right near the UVA stadium; it’s a regional chain of passable barbeque, but I think their collard greens are very good, just spicy enough, salty but not too much so, and their ‘marinated slaw’ is vinegar-based rather than mayo-based, which I prefer. You can do better in Charlottesville if you have the time, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: breakfast, charlottesville, coffee, peruvian cuisine, virginia

→ April 19, 2021
→ By keith

A Promised Land.

I usually don’t read political autobiographies, because I feel reasonably sure that I’m going to get more self-serving renditions of history than true eludication or, dare we expect so much, real candor from the authors. I’m just not that interested in hearing the stories from people who have much to gain or lose from the way in which those stories are told.

So when my daughter bought me Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, the first part of his memoirs from his time as President, I was more than a little skeptical that I’d enjoy or appreciate it. I admire President Obama, and believe his tenure was more successful than his critics on the right or the far left want you to believe, and that Republican obstructionism was the major reason why he didn’t accomplish more – but I also see many missteps and lost opportunities, as well as policies that just defy reason (the use and frequency of drone strikes in the Middle East, especially Yemen) or that took too long for him to embrace (marriage equality). I was unsure in 2016 and 2017 how much blame to lay at the Obama Administration’s feet for failing to anticipate the rise of Trump and white nationalism, going back to his handling of the birther hoax. And I didn’t want to read 700-plus pages of rationalization or revisionism.

That’s not what A Promised Land is, though. I’m sure there is some inexactness in the retelling of certain stories – I find it hard to believe he’d have all of those quotes written down or memorized, especially with some going back twenty-odd years – and it’s impossible to know what details he chose to omit from the book. But it feels thorough, in detail and in intent, as Obama does acknowledge multiple mistakes in policy and in his management of the executive branch, and if the book has a major flaw it’s that thoroughness – he recounts so many conversations and trips in so much detail that the book drags, and I can’t believe this is only half of the intended volume.

A Promised Land takes us from Obama’s youth through the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, so it’s more than a memoir of his time in the White House, or even in politics, and if you’re curious about the development of his character – or, as I was, how someone from a rather unlikely background rose so quickly from a state legislative position to the White House – that is the book’s true throughline. We learn far more about Barack Obama the person here than about, say, how certain decisions came to pass. That may seem a strange comment on a book of this length (and small font), but there’s a distinction between giving us every detail of a meeting, such as every word spoken or gesture made, and giving context and nuance to the scene. This book is a depiction rather than an explanation. So many of the compromises of Obama’s first term, large or small, are attributed to political expediency, often to the argument that it was “do this or the deal doesn’t get done.” Yes, that is how our unwieldy system of government works, but A Promised Land doesn’t connect enough of the dots here.

So much of the part of the book that covers his first two years in office is really a lengthy indictment of the existence of the United States Senate, which gives so much power to legislators who represent wildly unequal numbers of constituents. The camera needs to pan back and show the whole scene, and then Obama could, at least, argue that the system prevents those within it from enacting real, progressive change, even if a majority of Americans support it. The section on the fight over the Affordable Care Act, which is at least the most important event within the book and gets substantial coverage, shows how the sausage is made but never really concludes that the process means the sausage is hazardous to your health.

There is some self-serving messaging here, some rationalization that, as President, he had no choice but to do this or that, to leave troops in Iraq or Afghanistan longer than he’d promised, to check which way the wind was blowing before supporting marriage equality, and so on. A lot of the text around his first year in office amounts to “we inherited a colossal mess,” and that’s probably true, and more instructive now than it was a year ago, as President Biden appears to have inherited an even bigger mess. But doesn’t every President who replaces a predecessor of the other party feel, on some level, that he inherited a mess? Even though the transition of power from President George W. Bush to President Obama was smooth, and Bush deserves some plaudits for how open and cordial he and his staff were to their successors, in the end, you’re restaffing a giant monolith that moves at the pace of a glacier and trying to make quick course corrections that might run to 180 degrees. Did you succeed in spite of those limitations, and if not, what did you learn that you might tell the next guy (well, the guy after the next guy)?

Obama is witty, and he’s a gifted storyteller – his prose isn’t quick, but it’s evocative of image and place, and he captures many of the personalities around him well enough to help distinguish the many people around him in his office. He’s just wordy – his prose is, in fact, too prolix – although I imagine his editors might have been reluctant to ask him to cut back, because, hey, he’s Barack Obama. If there’s an abridged version, as much as I’m loath to recommend those, it might be better for readers who just want to know what happened and how. As for the why, and what we can learn from it, perhaps that’ll come in the second book.

Next up: I just finished Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autobiography, memoirs, non-fiction, politics

→ April 18, 2021
→ By keith

Collective.

Collective has repeated the feat of 2019’s Honeyland by earning nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature categories at the Oscars, and if I had a vote, I’d at least give it a nod in the first one. It’s an amazing story that became bigger and more impressive well after the filmmakers had already chosen their subjects, as a small group of investigative reporters helped bring down an entire government, only to have the same party voted back into power less than a year later.

Collective (Colectiv) was a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, that was the site of a deadly fire caused by the use of pyrotechnics at an indoor concert, which ignited the soundproofing in the venue – the same cause of the Station fire in Providence, Rhode Island, about 12 years earlier. Where the Collective fire differed, however, was the lower death toll at the site; 26 people died at the scene, but 38 more died later in hospitals, with 146 people injured. An journalist at a daily sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette, saw the number of deaths in hospitals as worthy of further investigation, and the work he and his colleagues did uncovered a massive corruption scandal that included a supplier of disinfectants to hospitals diluting the solution ten times, rendering it ineffective, and the refusal to send some patients abroad to burn units for fear it would reflect badly on the ruling party. The technocrat who takes over the Ministry of Health after the government collapses discovers that the state-run health system is rotten to the core, and there is no straightforward way to fix it or root out corruption. In the end, therefore, little really changes, and we are left to think that the corruption will resume with the restoration of the Social Democrats to power and the government’s failure to replace incompetent hospital managers. In parallel, we see parts of the journey of one of the survivors, Tedy Ursuleanu, who was very badly burned, losing parts of both hands and suffering burns all over her body, as she tries to reclaim something of her life, creating an art installation that provides the movie with some of its most central imagery.

Collective works as a documentary more than anything else because the story is so incredible and so vast in scope. What must have seemed at first to be just a film that followed some investigative reporters looking into irregularities around a major tragedy turned out to be a scandal that reached the top levels of the Romanian national government – something the documentary makers couldn’t have anticipated. They also received what appears to be unfettered access to meetings held by the technocrat Minister, who comes across as a would-be reformer who wants to be as transparent as possible with the press and public, but whose hands are tied by existing regulations and contracts and realizes he can’t do anything he’d want to do to try to fix the system. Meanwhile, the reporters keep uncovering new angles to the scandal, enough that you would think Romanian voters would have had no interest in voting for the same party that oversaw the erosion of the state hospital network, but they did so, the one event in the film that probably could have used some more explanation. It means the film ends on something of a hopeless note, which I suppose was unavoidable – documentary makers can’t choose their endings – but it’s a gut punch to watch all of the survivors and victims’ family members for nearly two hours, only to see that the state and the voters just don’t care enough to act on it.

I’ve seen all five nominated documentaries, and Collective would be my choice for the award, with Crip Camp second. This film does what I think great documentaries need to do – it stays out of the way of the story it’s telling. That’s not always possible, depending on the circumstances of the film’s subject, but in this case the filmmakers’ access to the reporters, press briefings, and eventually the Ministry’s internal meetings obviated any need for narration or other structure. It can be very hard to watch in the early going, because the camera doesn’t shy away from the details – we have footage from inside the concert venue, and we see plenty of burn victims, including one stomach-churning shot of a victim in the hospital whose wounds contain live maggots – but this film, more than any of the other nominated ones, has the power to force changes, if not in Romania, then perhaps elsewhere in the world. We need more documentaries like this, and more reporters like those who broke the story, and Collective should be an inspiration to anyone who tells stories for a living.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2020 best documentary feature nominees, 2020 best international feature film nominees, documentaries, highly recommended, romanian films

→ April 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, blm, coronavirus, longreads, new york city, racism, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ April 12, 2021
→ By keith

The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: contemporary novels, highly recommended, science fiction, speculative fiction, thrillers

→ April 10, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/10/21.

The Inside Game is now out in paperback! Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available, and you can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock as of Wednesday. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic, a draft notebook with some notes on the top of the draft, and a look at prospects from my top 100 who are currently on MLB rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest review for Paste covers the pickup-and-delivery train game Maglev Metro, from the designer of Suburbia and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I have some quibbles with the art choices but the underlying game is pretty great.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke to White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito about his transformation as a pitcher, from reworking his delivery to developing one of the game’s best changeups. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about my second book, The Inside Game, in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association. For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks was Prof. Simukai Chigudu’s essay on growing up in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, the repressive, murderous, racist colonizer for whom Chigudu’s native Zimbabwe was once named, and who is still honored with a statue at Oxford.
Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic about Alex Berenson, the “pandemic’s wrongest man,” who wrote a very wrong book about cannabis and has now spent the last year being wrong about COVID-19 and, more recently, the vaccines against it. Berenson also bullies and harasses people on Twitter, name-searching himself and encouraging his followers to pile on.
“VC Lives Matter?” That quote from a venture capitalist trying to oust San Francisco’s reformer District Attorney is the most tone-deaf thing I’ve heard in some time. The story is really about a moneyed few trying to buy the government they want – the United States in miniature.
I’m not a huge fan of Brandi Carlile’s music, but this New York Times profile of her and partial review of her new memoir Broken Horses is excellent.
Delaware’s Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) features prominently in this article on how websites use deceptive techniques called “dark patterns” to fool users, as she has introduced legislation to crack down on the practice.
The Journal of the American Medical Association is embroiled in a scandal of its own making, as one of their podcast hosts dismissed the possibility that there might be racist doctors or racism within medicine, and they responded poorly to the backlash, too.
There’s a genocide going on in northern Ethiopia, led by the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed.
The NYPD has a “goon squad” manual that explains how police officers can violate citizens’ rights to freedom of assembly, according to an investigative report from the Intercept.
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced a new finding around the wobbliness of muons that appeared to be the death knell of the Standard Model – but another new paper might explain it within the Standard Model. Physics is fun!
The Anti-Defamation League has called for Fox to fire Tucker Carlson after he espoused the white supremacist dogma called the Great Replacement during his show on Thursday.
Dr. Peter Hotez writes that the anti-science movement is going global and thousands of people will die needlessly as a result.
And, shocker, white evangelical Americans are saying they won’t get vaccinated.
A gun in the house increases that someone living there will commit suicide – like 11-year-old Tyler Paxton did with his dad’s gun.
The economic impact of sporting events, like the MLB All-Star Game, is usually wildly overstated.
Prof. John Ioannidis had a significant, positive impact on the world of science in 2005 when he argued that most published research was wrong, as researchers only had to find statistical significance to be published, resulting in many false positives and conclusions that couldn’t be replicated. He has since become a COVID-19 denialist, and wrote an unhinged personal attack against two experts who dared question him, publishing it in the journal of which he was previously the editor in chief.
A bunch of right-wing grifters and pundits were tweeting at length about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant killed in a robbery by two Black teenagers, but Wajahat Ali explains why this was all done in bad faith.
A new neurological disease that resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome (the prion disease that you could get from eating beef from ‘mad’ cows) has emerged in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, killing 6 and sickening up to 38 others.
A longtime bartender at St. Elmo’s Steakhouse in Indianapolis died of COVID-19 after an outbreak at the restaurant. St. Elmo’s has been an annual stop for me during Gen Con, and I know it’s a favorite of many during the NFL combine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, coronavirus, guns, longreads, religion, stick to baseball, technology

→ April 9, 2021
→ By keith

Klawchat 4/9/21.

Starting at 1 pm ET. I have a new game review up at Paste, of the pickup-and-delivery game Maglev Metro; and a new post for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at the top 100 prospects who’ve played in the majors so far this year.

Keith Law: A thousand times I’ve seen this road. Klawchat.

Richard: Early in their respective careers, you thought Correa and Bregman should probably switch defensive positions to highlight their respective strengths. Now it seems like Correa is likely to be paid as a top-flight SS…has he worked to improve his defense that much over the last 3 seasons?
Keith Law: He might be paid as one, but he’s not a top-flight defender at short; he’s probably a 45 defender who’s helped by shifting/positioning. I’m still going to rank him very highly as a free agent but with some expectation that he’ll move off SS over the course of a long-term deal.

Tom: If Tanner Houck’s increased velocity is sustainable, does that change your expectations for him, or is that more contingent on developing a change up to counter lefties?
Keith Law: The latter.

Moe Mentum: What improvements do the Phillies need to see from Scott Kingery at the plate to bring him back to the majors? Technical adjustments? Mental reset? And are you still a believer?
Keith Law: It’s a swing adjustment IMO. And maybe a mental reset but I can’t really speak to that from here – I do know his swing degraded first and the approach second. I am still a believer.

addoeh: So you recently tried Burmese cuisine. What cuisine do you plan to try next or is the biggest missing cuisine in your culinary passport?
Keith Law: I’ve tried to work in one of the two (I think) Ghanaian places I’ve heard good things about in the Phoenix area on some trips out that way, but it’s never worked out for timing, and one of the places had a lot of beef on their menu that limited my options, but that springs to mind as something I’ve never had that would also probably open my mind to some new flavors.

Hinkie: Hello, Keith. Looking forward to an updated draft prospect list. Since your initial rankings, what players have done the most for their draft stock and what guys are going in the wrong direction (other than Jaden Hill)?
Keith Law: Next week will be the new list, probably 50 names this time. I wrote in this week’s draft notebook that Frelick and Henry Davis are probably top 5 picks now. Andrew Painter has picked it up after two really awful starts to open the year. Jud Fabian continues to flounder – I said he couldn’t hit the slider and opposing teams appear to have heard the same thing. James Wood might end up at Mississippi State at this point; I heard he was hitting just a shade above .200. Also something is clearly amiss with Dick Fitts. He’s gone from first-round starter to a reliever who can’t get anyone out.

Ben (MN): Have you heard anything in the industry along the lines of the “Paul Molitor and Co. stunted Buxton’s development” narrative? I always wondered at the time because Buxton seemed to go up swinging at absolutely everything in his early days with the Twins (even though he walked a lot in A Ball), but nobody in MN wanted to criticize Molitor, the local legend. Now, even the Twins tv announcers are saying that Molitor’s insistence that Buxton be aggressive and hit the ball on the ground stymied his development.
Keith Law: I haven’t heard that myself but it seems plausible, at least.

Michael: My favorite team/player had a great first week! Ha! I knew you were wrong with your opinions based on “data” and “scouting”. I am vindicated! (By the way, I sometimes see the initials “SSS” in your chats – what does this mean?)
Keith Law: Joking aside, someone tried to tell me I was wrong about Ryan Mountcastle’s likely regression after Mountcastle got one hit on Opening Day. That’s a new record, I think.

Deke: How do you approach someone who is genuinely well-meaning but just patently wrong? Not in a Matt Walshian, bad-faith sense. Like today, the Senior Bowl’s Jim Nagy was pretty dismissive of the concept of racial bias in scouting QBs because NFL front offices only want to win, so they wouldn’t downgrade a guy just because he’s black, which is absurd on the face of it. How would you approach that without immediately putting him on the defensive?
Keith Law: I’m not sure you can do that without putting him on the defensive, but in my view the best response to that is data. Put him in a position where he has to say that he doesn’t believe the evidence in front of him.

Todd Boss: Kopech pitching in relief; would you have believed that the CWS wouldn’t have room for a 100-mph throwing strikeout machine starter?
Keith Law: I believe this is really a development strategy, both to build him back up to eventually start and help him build confidence as he continues to return after two years of not pitching.

Tom: Tyler Matzek for Atlanta. Failed starter but can he be a backend relief pitcher now?
Keith Law: Hasn’t he been that? Great story, too. I wonder how different his whole career might have been had another team taken him – getting more money in the draft came from high bonus demands that may have deterred teams from drafting him in the top ten.

Tom: Jon Grays fastball averaged about 92 last start. Any concern there?
Keith Law: I’d say I want to see at least 2 starts of reduced velocity before I’d be concerned, 3 before I panic.

Tom: Call Your Mother, my favorite dc breakfast place. glad you enjoyed it. If you like Georgian food, theres a place right across the street from CYM called Tabla. Highly recommend!
Keith Law: We went to a location of CYM in the suburbs but I can say I have never had Georgian food (assuming you mean the democracy-challenged country in the Caucusus, not the democracy-challenged US state in the Jim Crow belt).

JT: Long term, do you see too much swing and miss in Kjerstad’s complicated approach?
Keith Law: Without any adjustments, yes. I assume the Orioles will try at some point to make adjustments with him.

Jesse B: Is there something there with Yermin Mercedes?
Keith Law: A hell of a story.

Pat: So, about 2-3 weeks ago I was able to get the COVID vaccine even though technically not eligible. (Rural areas have too much supply, so I was able to finagle an appointment thru a contact). I felt guilty like I was “jumping the line”. Is that right or should it just be everyone get vaccinated as quickly as possible?
Keith Law: At this point, yes, everyone should get vaccinated as soon as they can.

HomerSomethingSomething: Do you think Garret Whitlock can stick in the Majors all year so he doesn’t have to be offered back to the Yankees? He’s looked good in Spring and in SSS this season.
Keith Law: Sure, as a two-pitch reliever with AA experience already, it’s not surprising he’d be MLB ready.

Pat: BTW, the joyous reaction of Akil Baddoo’s parents to his HR last weekend was one of the joys I’ve gotten so far this season. To watch your kid work for years & year (& for the parents to spend the $$ & drive him to all the practices/games/showcases) & get the payoff of him hitting a HR in his 1st MLB AB. It’s a lot of work & a long road, but, seeing your child succeed at the highest level in his chosen field has to be such an experience.
Keith Law: Especially in his case, where he hasn’t played since elbow surgery in May 2019.

Justin Y: Corbin Burnes has given up 2 hits in two starts, that cutter is devastating. He’s gonna be in the CY Young conversation isn’t he?
Keith Law: I said in September he might have been the best pitcher in the NL had he spent the whole year in the rotation and avoided the oblique strain he suffered, which cost him the innings he needed to make a real argument for the CYA. He’s a stud. Former #24 overall prospect in my rankings.

Mudville Nine: Hey Keith, really enjoyed Inside Game! I’m curious to know your thoughts on Russ Atkins 5 years extension with the Blue Jays. Obviously, Rogers ownership is happy with how Shapiro and Adkins manage their budgets but what do you think this tandem getting a guaranteed 5 years commitment to continue teambuilding?
Keith Law: Ehhh … I don’t think I have a strong feeling either way on this. This front office built a very strong farm system – about two years after they said they did – and that’s worthy of praise, but I also would like to see more on-field results in the majors.

HomerSomethingSomething: Mountcastle looked absolutely horrific on defense yesterday – probably cost the O’s 3 runs alone in that game. But hey, he hit a home run so that’s good, right?
Keith Law: I think he can be something if he’s just a 1b/dh who hits for power with a low OBP.

Jason S: If I said the Pirates have the worst assembled team of all time, and Dodgers have the best. How much of a reach is that?
Keith Law: You clearly didn’t see the 2003 Tigers.

Jesse The Body: Balazovic and Duran should be up at some point this year for the Twins, correct?
Erin: Is Simmons/Buxton the best defensive SS/CF combo in recent memory?
Keith Law: I would say yes on Duran, Balazovic maybe in September?
Keith Law: Good question, not a pair of positions we usually think of together, but that is probably true. Simmons is the best defensive SS post-Ozzie, and Buxton is probably the best defensive CF in baseball right now.

JT: Can we believe in Carlos Rodon again? I am not really a White Sox fan, but it’s hard to be against someone finally healthy and able to make good on unfulfilled promise.
Keith Law: I apologize for using the technical vernacular here, but his shit was ridiculous the other night. Averaging 95 again? 30 sliders with 8 whiffs in 11 swings and no balls hit fair? I just pulled up his K of Kyle Seager on 3 swinging strikes on sliders – two in the zone, one below it. Filthy.
Keith Law: I have NO idea if he can hold up, but this is basically the guy I saw at NC State as an underclassman.

Justin: Do you think the strategy of going under slot on a top pick in order to spend more later works? Should the Pirates consider this or should they just not get cute, and take Leiter instead?
Keith Law: You have to take the right guys, both in the first round and then later. The Pirates should take Leiter, though. There isn’t a good second choice right now.

Aaron: Do you get any info from teams regarding players that are currently at the alternate sites? Are those open to scouts or media?
Keith Law: I did last year, but I’ve been draft-focused the last few weeks, and those alternate site guys will be out playing minor-league games soon enough. I know at least some are open to scouts/media but I don’t think all are.

Oz: How do you feel about the 7 inning doubleheader rule? Atlanta and Washington played on Wednesday and I like the quicker games.
Keith Law: Hate it.

Mike: Hi Keith – thoughts on Rocker’s dip in velocity over his last few starts? A blip on the radar or more of a red flag?
Keith Law: I discussed that in my draft notebook this week.

Jason: Is it time to panic yet about Keston Hiura? He strikes out so much. I have hope but, maybe he needs a run in the minors?
Keith Law: That’s another guy who needs to restore an old swing (like Kingery). It’s frustrating to see a player who can hit, and did hit for several years in college and in the minors and even his first year in the majors, change an approach that worked.

Greg: If everyone can IMMEDIATELY see something was called wrong on replay, why do we have to sit there and be told something is “not reviewable”? Shouldn’t blatant and obvious errors be able to be remedied. It just feels like baseball being the stodgy old sport its detractors paint it as when they seem to be behind other sports in terms of technology, like replays.
Keith Law: That HBP should have been reviewable but they’d have to change the replay rules.

Cristian Javier: am I in the rotation the whole year? Can I be in contention for rookie of the year?
Keith Law: Yes, probably. No, because you’re not a rookie.

Beau: I realize we haven’t seen real games in over a year, but is Gore’s seeming lack of command/polish at this point in time concerning at all? (compared to absurdly high expectations)
Keith Law: No. call me when he’s pitching in real games.

Noah: Wife and I are both fully vaccinated, going to dinner tonight with another couple (one fully vaccinated, the other not and pregnant) at an indoor dining establishment with limited capacity. Currently having an anxiety attack, is that wrong?
Keith Law: I mean, I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. I don’t understand your pregnant friend’s decision-making here.

Sean: Thoughts on Ty France? Was he not a prospect due to his limited defense? He consistently has the best at-bats on the team, and hits the ball to all fields. Is there something here?
Keith Law: Bench guy, but that’s probably it. No position and didn’t hit much in the minors until AAA El Paso (a good hitters’ park). Has value, though – could play a long time bouncing around as a bench piece who fills in at the corners (I don’t think 2b will really work).

Kevin: If Tatis misses a lot of time any chance Abrams will get the call up? The first part of this question made me cry.
Keith Law: I can’t imagine they would hold off all year on Abrams if Tatis does have to miss most of the season.

Tony: KLAW, I am having bad anxiety but not sure whether to go to a social counselor, psychiatrist, or clinical psychologist. No idea the difference neither. Any advice?
Keith Law: You want a clinical psychologist who uses evidence-based practices first.

Zack: Who do you like to make more of an impact in 2021 at/behind the plate, Tyler Stephenson or Alejandro Kirk?
Keith Law: Kirk but I like both guys.

James: How higher of a ceiling is the current Ryan Weathers who holds 96+ through multiple innings vs the previous Ryan Weathers who would bottom out at 89?
Keith Law: Well this version made my top 100 this winter and the last version did not. Difference between an above-average big league starter and a back-end guy at best.

Paul K.: Great review of Maglev Metro. Have you played Lost Ruins of Arnak yet? If not, it’s a lot of fun and plays well with two.
Keith Law: I have not – it’s on the long side, listed as 30-120 minutes, and even I as the biggest boardgamer in the house find my attention flags past about an hour and a half.

AnalyticsPlant: Is The Inside Game eminently more readable in hardcover or in paperback?
Keith Law: I’m speaking against my own self-interest but I prefer paperbacks. They’re just so much more portable.

Beej: As a scout, how do you evaluate bat speed with the naked eye when the difference between a quick bat and a slow bat may only be a few hundredths of a second?
Keith Law: I think it’s pretty easy to see the difference with experience.

Matt: How do we as a society deal with stupid people that have a major influence on others? Millions of morons believe Ted Nugent questioning why we don’t hear about Covid-1 to 18. You can look up how Covid-19 got its name in 3 seconds. Yet, a large group of Americans can’t be bothered to do so
Keith Law: Our public education system does not emphasize critical thinking … and plenty of right-wing nonprofits have been pushing for years to further deemphasize science and rational thought at all levels of education.

Zach: Word is Jonathan India has made big leaps behind the scenes the last two years. Did you hear the same, or is this all just small sample size?
Keith Law: I wrote about that in my top 100 this winter, which he was on.

Jeffrey: Gausman appears to be a much better pitcher with the Giants. Is this a credit to their pitching coaches or an indictment of Baltimore’s?
Keith Law: An indictment of Buck Showalter and his staff. They couldn’t stop messing with Gausman’s placement on the rubber. They messed up Arrieta’s delivery, wouldn’t play or even speak to Hays when he first came up … Elias et al inherited so much more than just a bad major-league roster.

BenL: I know the plan is to use him as a high leverage reliever this year to build innings for potential starter role in the future, etc etc., but do you recall anyone w/ the injury history of Alex Reyes becoming a relatively healthy, successful starter?
Keith Law: No, and FTR I always questioned whether he’d hold up given his delivery. He just had such great stuff I couldn’t ignore it, but in hindsight I should have been more conservative when ranking him.

Jeff: Should I worry about Soroka’s shoulder inflammation that shut him down for two weeks?
Keith Law: Yes because it’s not his first bout.

Chris: If rocker needs surgery how far would he slide in the draft?
Keith Law: I’m not anywhere near the point of thinking he needs surgery.

Joe: Trout mentioned he’s adjusted his swing in the off-season and it seems to have paid off with a slightly hotter than normal start….would you agree?
Keith Law: Yes, I was really concerned about the huge deficiencies in his game going into 2021.

Zihuatanejo: “Why do we hear so much about Malcolm X, and *nothing* about Malcolms I-IX?”
Keith Law: OK, that’s funny.

Beej: Is it fair to put Shane Bieber in the same category as Paul Goldschmidt as mis-identified prospect? I recall (apologies if I’m incorrect) that you had him pegged as a 4-5 starter who could be HR-prone.
Keith Law: I wrote him up as a guy I got wrong. He picked up more than a full grade of velocity after college, which is rare.

Deke: Listening to Monday’s pod right now, and how much did it hurt your brain to read an ad for “read nonfiction books condensed to 15 minutes”?
Keith Law: I read a lot of ads for products I don’t personally use. It’s part of the job.

TJ: In terms of Mountcastle and the Orioles probably not contending this year, is it worth playing him in LF and seeing if theres any possible development or is it not worth the bad defense to even try him in left?
Keith Law: Can the answer be maybe? As in, sure, it’s not hurting their playoff chances, but also, is it clear yet that it’s not going to work? When should they stop and say it’s not helping him or their pitchers who end up losing outs to his defense?

Mike Trout: Not judging at all — curious what changed that you felt comfortable taking your trip before getting vaccinated? I see a lot of people, sadly imo, struggling to adjust even after getting vaccinated.
Keith Law: My trip to DC/Maryland? I didn’t have to fly, and we didn’t eat indoors at any point. We were really only inside when in our hotel room and in one store. I don’t think we did anything unsafe to others and we didn’t feel like we put ourselves at risk.
Keith Law: (My wife is vaccinated, so it’s just me, really.)

Mac: Is Kumar Rocker falling out of the top 5?
Keith Law: No. Could he, yes. Is he right now, no, I don’t think so. But he might be the 3rd pitcher taken today rather than the second (Hoglund).

JR: How much of a sample size will you want to see before determining if mlb really did modify the baseball?
Keith Law: Rob Arthur wrote yesterday or the day before that the ball is livelier than ever. I’ll defer to experts like him.

Mac: Who is the first college position player drafted?
Keith Law: Davis or Frelick.

Moe Mentum: Two celebrated contemporary novelists who do not appear on your Top 100 Novels list are Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Franzen. I know that just because a baseball prospect misses your Top 100 doesn’t mean he sucks, but curious about your opinions of these authors’ works? Considering either American Psycho or Freedom for my next read.
Keith Law: Didn’t like Franzen’s The Corrections. Never read anything else by him, or anything at all by Ellis.

Deke: This spring, most of the projection systems had Nick Madrigal forecast for 7, 8, 9 homers. Seems obviously ridiculous to me. Is that just a product of those systems not really knowing how to forecast someone with Madrigal’s profile? He’s such an outlier to the modern ballplayer that the projection systems just have to throw their hands up?
Keith Law: They’re not my systems, so that might be a better question for one of their developers, but I would guess that you’re right, although we have seen fewer than 7 HR in full seasons from batters recently – Yolmer Sanchez hit 2 in 2019 while qualifying for the batting title. Nobody has hit fewer than 2 while qualifying since 2014, though.

Appa Yip Yip: Are you buying what Julian Merryweather is selling?
Keith Law: In one-inning bursts, sure. Picked up about a grade of FB moving to relief.

Andy: The AS game decision was MLB taking some heat off of players/managers of whether or not they would participate. It’s one of the first actual items I can think of Manfred doing to help his players be marketed ahead of the game of baseball.
Keith Law: Howard Bryant reported that corporate sponsors really pushed MLB to move the game. I agree that it did help the players out, but it sounds like money talked first.

Mac: Has Mayer overtaken Lawler as the top prep position player?
Keith Law: No.

Jack: Are the A’s really this bad?
Keith Law: No, but I don’t think they’re a 95-win team underperforming, either.

Adam: I second the Tabla recommendation, or Supra, their first restaurant. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried khachapuri (basically a giant boat filled with cheese and a whole egg). My question: how is DeGrom doing it??? First start against the Phillies, he was sitting 98-101 and hit 102. If that’s his velocity now, maybe the Mets will finally win when he starts occassionally.
Keith Law: I have had a peinirli, the Greek equivalent, and yes, it’s great. (Supposedly brought to Greece by emigrants from the Caucasus.) As for deGrom, I don’t really know the answer. He’s an outlier of the best possible kind.

Jason: Do you think Josh Lindblom can be of service in MLB? I believe you’ve said as a reliever. I hope the brewers keep him in the pen.
Keith Law: Yes, in relief.

Mike: Best breakfast place in az
Keith Law: 1. Hillside Spot. 2. Crepe Bar 3. Matt’s Big Breakfast.

Creedreader (TJ): Vlad jr. was touted as the first prospect with a consensus 80 hit tool. Is this true in your estimation? What does it mean that Wander Franco is the next prospect with an 80 hit tool? Has this happened before but wasn’t known because of the presence of the internet or are these two prospects truly remarkable in this respect? Has there ever been a prospect with an 80 hit tool that has underperformed or not been a major league regular? Really interested in your take on this and any other thoughts you have on a prospect being rated 80 on that particular tool which seems more qualitative and important than all the others
Keith Law: It was not true, IMO, and I think subsequent events have borne that out, although to be clear I still expect great things from his bat.

Frank: How does Henry Davis compare to other top of the draft catchers in recent years like Bart and Rutschman?
Keith Law: Better than Bart, below Rutschman.

Matt: I’ve noticed since being vaccinated, I tend to laugh (behind my mask) when I see people that refuse to wear one. Like, if you want to ignore science, fine. But sooner or later, you will get got. Am I a dick?
Keith Law: The problem is that those people ignoring science will get other people got. And then we all lose.

Santaspirt: I wonder if all the anti-DH people realize that the DH is optional. So even if it’s universal, teams don’t have to use one. I mean if it’s truly the better option for the game, I’m sure all their favorite teams will choose not to employ it.
Keith Law: Fair point. Watch how fast those 15 NL teams run towards the DH when they can.

ajd: One of the things I’ve struggled with recently while reading sportswriting is how many journalists seem to be carrying water for teams or MLB in general. I realize this isn’t anything new, but it’s depressing. How do you, as someone who is inside the game, handle this stuff? Laugh it off? Ignore this? Or is it just not a big deal?
Keith Law: When appropriate, I try to provide a contrary and I hope more objective viewpoint, with evidence.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week. A reminder that The Inside Game is indeed now out in paperback, and you can buy it anywhere you like – Midtown Scholar has many signed copies available right now. Thank you all for reading, and, for those of you who’ve already bought the book, thank you as well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

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