→ July 2, 2020
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Music update, June 2020.

June started out very slow for new music but finished with a bang, enough that I ended up culling some songs before posting this playlist, which runs the gamut of genres and features a couple of tracks from some of the best albums of the year so far. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

Khruangbin – Pelota. The Thai funk/jazz/rock trio’s third album, Mordechai, is among the year’s best new records, and it’s their first with significant vocals, which should allow them to make real inroads on the commercial side. I’ll do a list of my favorite albums of the first half of 2020 shortly, but Mordechai is on it.

Doves – Carousels. Doves have reunited and released their first new music since 2009’s Kingdom of Rust. The time off has done them some good, as this sounds like peak Doves around the time of The Last Broadcast.

Bananagun – The Master. This weird Australian funk/alternative group sound a bit like someone smashed together folk rock sensibilities with late ’70s funk-rock or early ’80s new wave on their debut album The True Story of Bananagun. It’s very strange, but it works quite well even at different speeds.

Sad13 – Sooo Bad. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz is set to release her second solo album as Sad13, with three new singles in the last few weeks, headlined by this track. All three songs are poppier than Speedy Ortiz’s music, but still have her offbeat lyrics and signature use of unexpected transitions.

Frank Turner – Bob. Turner and NOFX recorded covers of five of the other’s songs; I’m not a NOFX guy (although their desire to offend is admirable in a quirky way), but this reworking of a snotty track from their debut album into an acoustic ballad that sounds like Turner could have written it himself is impressive.

The Lazy Eyes – Tangerine. This Sydney quartet just released their first EP, cleverly titled EP1, showcasing a psychedelic rock sound that appears to owe a small debt to their countrymate Tame Impala.

Glass Animals – Heat Waves. I tend to like Glass Animals more when they’re a bit restrained, which they are here, as opposed to songs where it feels like they’re trying to be strange or eccentric.

Arlo Parks – Black Dog. Not a Led Zeppelin cover, as it turns out, although Parks did record an acoustic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” as the B-side to this love song to a partner (or friend?) suffering from the black dog of depression.

Shamir – On My Own. If you know Shamir, it might be from his 2014 song “On the Regular,” which featured him rapping at a pitch that convinced a lot of people – me included – that the vocalist was a woman. He’s honed his sound in the intervening years to create an expansive mash-up that spans indie rock to classic soul to house and beyond, but I’ve been waiting for years for him to write another great hook. This song has it, along with a mid-80s Prince vibe to the music.

Tricky – Fall Please. Adrian Thaws is still at it at age 52, and still capable of producing a banger like this one, which features vocals from Polish singer Marta Z?akowska. It’s just short (2:27) for a song with such a great groove.

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist – Look at Me. Gibbs is probably the best MC working today, and continues to challenge himself musically, although I have a hard time buying in fully given how he speaks about women in his lyrics.

Dirty Streets – Can’t Go Back. Bluesy hard rock from a fairly new Memphis trio whose music I first heard while watching Netflix’s Sex Education. This is one of three tracks from their upcoming fifth album Rough and Tumble.

Muzz – Knuckleduster. Muzz is Paul Banks of Interpol, Matt Barrick of the Walkmen, and producer Josh Kaufman; they released their self-titled debut album in early June. It’s a mixed bag, often too lugubrious, but generally lush and often harking back to early shoegaze with more pronounced vocals.

Coach Party – Bleach. A new indie rock quartet from the Isle of Wight, with this song reminding me a bit of their labelmates Wolf Alice (at least from the latter’s first album).

The Beths – Out of Sight. This New Zealand indie group made a small splash in 2018 with their album Future Me Hates Me, with “You Wouldn’t Like Me” appearing on my top 100 for that year; their second album, Jump Rope Gazers, drops on July 10th.

Everything Everything – Planets. E2 will release RE-ANIMATOR, their fifth album, on August 21st; given the first three singles it seems like it might be their weirdest record yet.

Hinds – Take Me Back. I was into this all-female quartet’s earlier work but sort of assumed they’d get more proficient as musicians over time, so the charm of their first two records has started to wear off a bit now that it’s clear that there isn’t another level coming.

Medium – Life After Death. This isn’t the ’90s Minneapolis band Medium, but a project from musician Cotter Phinney, a big Ariel Pink fan who also professes to be into classic metal solos, with the former more evident on this track.

Protomartyr – Michigan Hammers. If there was a moment in some alternate universe when post-punk started to morph into metal – instead of the two strains descending from different ancestors – the result would have probably sounded a lot like Protomartyr.

Mekong Delta – Mental Entropy. I had no idea Mekong Delta, a minor band from the halcyon days of German thrash metal, even still existed, but they sound like they’re still recording in 1989 and I’m here for it.

Ensiferum – Andromeda. This Finnish folk/death metal act show off some great technical guitar work and strong melodic riffs, but the accessibility of their music varies from song to song – “Rum, Women, and Victory,” their previous single, was way more on the death metal side of things, while this has just a little of that and is more traditional metal, which is still my preference.

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→ June 27, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 6/26/20.

I had one new piece for The Athletic subscribers this week, talking to player development execs about what they plan to do this summer and fall with minor leaguers who may not get to play in any games this year. (I’m extremely pessimistic about instructional league or the Arizona Fall League, given those states’ incompetent responses to the ongoing pandemic.) I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope video chat on Wednesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Santa Monica, a really cute, mostly clever new game that just doesn’t quite work because there aren’t enough ways to use one of the most important mechanics in the game.

The Boston Globe recently named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, although I took this week off since I didn’t have much to say. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

  • Elizabeth Kolbert, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for her book The Sixth Extinction, looks at how Iceland beat COVID-19, with virtually no cases and one of the world’s lowest fatality rates, for the New Yorker.
  • MEL‘s Isabelle Kohn looks at police officers who commit domestic violence – how it ties to violence against unarmed black citizens, and how often these officers get away with it, even to the point of killing their partners.
  • Henry Abbott of TrueHoop added his thoughts on the Bill Simmons situation, explaining how much ESPN catered to Simmons during the time they were both there. I saw some of this firsthand around Grantland, which always had resources that should have gone to the main site. I never had any negative interactions with Simmons myself.
  • Astronomers may have discovered a black neutron star, which would fill in the ‘mass gap’ between lighter neutron stars and heavier, denser black holes.
  • Three Wilmington, North Carolina, police officers were fired for stating that they’d like to kill all Black people and making other racist comments. The comments only came to light because one of their cameras was activated inadvertently; otherwise, they’d still be on the job, armed, planning to kill as many Black people as they could.
  • No link yet, but Ravensburger announced the five villains that will be available in the upcoming Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power game, a standalone expansion that will be available for preorders on July 6th: Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Killmonger, and Taskmaster.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ June 25, 2020
→ By

Klawchat 6/25/20.

Starting at 1 pm ET. My latest piece for The Athletic subscribers looks at how player development execs are working with minor leaguers who won’t play games this year. I also reviewed the new board game Santa Monica for Paste.

Keith Law: Delivered by mortal hands. Klawchat.

Casey: Should the Dylan Carlson be starting immediately in the Cardinals outfield with such a short season?
Keith Law: I think so. Who’s the clearly better option?

Ben: With the 60-player pool, it sounds like the plan is to just anticipate a lot positive tests and play through them while those that test positive quarantine. Is that your understanding too? Do you see a scenario where they end the season, other than the virus simply getting out of control and preventing teams from even fielding enough players?
Keith Law: I do not think that’s the plan – I think the 60 player roster is to account for typical baseball injuries, bereavement, etc. If there are a lot of positive tests I would expect a halt to the season.

BVW: Do you like my draft strategy from the last 2 years? I like a few high upside guys with lesser talent rather than solid guys across the board.
Keith Law: I like the Mets’ draft strategy for the last several years. I don’t think that is Brodie’s strategy.

Mike: How much of the acrimonious public negotiation between MLB and the players was because of a desire to bust the union once and for all?
Keith Law: I’ve said this in a few places – I think MLB wanted to set the tone for the 2021 CBA talks by pursuing a hard line in these negotiations as well as those with MILB and the umpires’ union.
Keith Law: It’s a credible commitment strategy. The union, to their credit, did not blink.

Brandon J.: Hey Keith, do you think that Clayton Beeter has the ceiling of a Lugo/Pressly type reliever? Or do you think he has a higher ceiling if healthy?
Keith Law: Starter ceiling. Just higher risk with the delivery, one injury, lack of a definite third pitch.

Todd Boss: So, elephant in the room, but with a third of all MLB teams already having players test positive before we’ve even started “spring training,” with Toronto banned from traveling to its home stadium, and with cases exploding in the two ST states … who actually believes we’re gonna play baseball??
Keith Law: The optimistic take on this is that those positive tests came with players working out essentially on their own rather than under the health and safety protocols from the new agreement.

Todd Boss: So post-draft, is there any evidence that a team “punted” on the 2020 draft like some were worried about?
Keith Law: Nope. That story did not check out even before the draft.

Steve: Hey Keith, have you heard any buzz on draft picks that you’re concerned might NOT sign with their team?
Keith Law: None. I expect them all to sign unless they fail physicals. Jim Callis tweeted the same thing yesterday.

John: With the introduction of the new extra inning rule placing a runner on second base to start the inning, how do you feel about bunting him over to third to start the frame? I know you have had a strong stance against bunting before, but does this change it?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s good strategy for the visiting club, since the home team gets the same starting position.

Mike B: Is this chat mask-optional?
Keith Law: Masks are required. In all seriousness, I’m blocking anyone who tries to make anti-mask arguments to me on Twitter. Go do your science denial somewhere else.

Mr. Met: The last two drafts, it appears the Mets strategy has been to draft high end prospects early then money-savers the rest of the way to meet the bonus demands. Do you like this strategy?
Keith Law: Yes, especially for a team like that Mets that should, at least in theory, operate as a large-market club.

Joe: Any undrafted signings stand out to you as maybe being more than just filler?
Keith Law: Not really. $20K doesn’t get you a definite prospect. There were some good senior signs, though – Landon Knack (Dodgers, second round) stood out as one.

Todd Boss: how are players planning on even getting back into the country if they’re from the DR or Venezuela right now?   Isn’t there a travel ban on all “sh*thole” countries like theirs?
Keith Law: Shouldn’t the players be more concerned that after three months in the US they won’t be allowed back home? The EU appears set to ban us from travelling there, and they’re right to do so.

Guest: Which of the 2020 first round picks are most likely to see mlb action in a short season ?  Relievers seem most likely or SPs who can just air it out for an inning.
Keith Law: Max Meyer stands out.

Joe: Fair to be disappointed with the Orioles draft haul?  They had the most money but didn’t get any elite guys.
Keith Law: I didn’t care for it. They saved money on Kjerstad but passed on the best available HS players, and other teams’ scouts really panned the Mayo pick to me (as an overslot candidate).

Tom: What are the odds we look back in a few years and wonder how Blaze Jordan lasted so far into the draft?
Keith Law: 1%. He’s just nowhere near the prospect the Internet proclaimed him to be.

Ben: Is it there a chance Torkelson debuts late this summer? Would that be ill-advised?
Keith Law: My guess is no, because the Tigers are unlikely contenders, but I wouldn’t call it ill-advised.

Tommy: What is the actual science right this moment regarding masks? It seems like there’s no consensus, yet everyone is still advocating for them, so maybe I’m just reading too many comment sections.
Keith Law: Using a mask drastically reduces your odds of spreading the virus if you have it. If everyone used masks, we’d be in far better position now than we are – we’d be where Italy and Spain and other countries that actually enforced mask-wearing and physical distancing are. The economy would be mostly open, and we wouldn’t have surges and increasing deaths.
Keith Law: There is NO argument against masks, except for “I have a tiny brain and don’t care about other people.”

TomBruno23: What would it take to get you to attend an MLB game this summer?
Keith Law: For work, yes, I expect to go. As a fan, I would not.

Jason: What’s the point of Bolton coming out now and saying the President is incompetent and corrupt. Should he have done more or is he a coward just like everyone else? Or is it just about the 2 million from his book deal.
Keith Law: Filthy lucre.

Ben Davis Bunts: What are the chance the Padres sign Wilcox?
Keith Law: Barring a failed physical, 100%.

Mike: Am I wrong for thinking that most sports should just shut it down for the season & start from fresh next season? I’m concerned that we will now have difficulties with at least 2 seasons instead of just writing off this season.
Keith Law: I am of the opinion that it is worth making the effort, with proper protocols in place, even knowing that there is a 50% or greater chance we fail to complete a season. However, I am very open to the idea that we shouldn’t try at all, because doing so creates risks I’m not foreseeing.

John: Will teams have to use player options to move them between the active roster and taxi squad?
Keith Law: I just re-read the manual; it says that all optioned players will be treated as assigned to the alternate-site roster, which is the converse, but I infer from that that a player sent from the active roster to the satellite roster must be optioned. The taxi squad refers to up to three players brought to the major-league stadium as emergency replacements but not actually on the active roster.

Mike: I get that Manfred works for the owners, but do the owners not see they are all hurting the game with their stance.  It’s probably wrong to be playing at all, but if they are going to play it should have already started when no other major sports were out there.
Keith Law: I don’t think the owners in that camp care. I think they’re wrong, and are underestimating the elasticity of demand as well as how vulnerable the capital appreciation of their team values is.

Turlock Tom: The buzz surrounding Tyler Soderstrom seemed a bit overinflated prior to the draft. Do you think going #26 is about the right range for him?
Keith Law: I do.

Arnold: Best post-draft signing by the Giants?
Keith Law: None. As I said above, you’re not getting players we already know to be prospects for $20K. Some may turn into prospects in time, but they’re not right now.

Mike: There were only 133 news cases in Italy yesterday. We are legit the dumbest country in the world
Keith Law: My cousins live there, and I’ve been several times. Italy is hardly the exemplar of a compliant, rule-following culture. Yet they did it, and they beat this thing back enough to resume something resembling normal life. Our current state in the US is our fault, from the leaders we elected to the tolerance we’ve had for those who act only in their own self-interest or who believe whatever they read on Reddit or Facebook about deepstate conspiracies to reduce your oxygen intake.

Bighen: Truly no agenda here but a lot of people outside the game talk about how awash it is in cash.  Several sources (including the NY Times) have stated that the Mets have lost $50M in certain seasons and might lose $100M+ this season.  I realize that there is SNY shenanigans going on, but SNY can’t generate enough cash to offset a loss like that – revenue yes, actual profits no.   Where is the disconnect?   I am really just a Mets  fan that wants to be rid of the Wilpons ASAP.   Valuation <> cash flow
Keith Law: Yes, SNY absolutely can, especially since they’re (likely) paying a pittance for those broadcast rights.

Ken: A couple weeks old now, but: JK Rowling, why?
Keith Law: Very disappointing. She’s hinted at this before – and, let’s face it, retconning Dumbledore as a gay character was pretty weak when she absolutely could have revealed this in books 6 or 7 and nobody would have stopped her – but for her to lay bare her transphobia like that was extremely disappointing.

TomBruno23: Balancing safety concerns and the need to keep my wife and children sane we have booked a week-long trip to Holland, MI for the end of July. Private home, etc etc blah blah blah. How dumb am I?
Keith Law: I don’t think it’s dumb. Michigan is among the leading states in their response to the virus – their Rt is extremely low, they’re testing adequately, and their contact tracing rate is about 75% already. If they continue on this track, I think it’d be safe to go there in late July. Then it’s a matter of what you do yourselves once there – avoiding crowds, wearing masks, etc.

addoeh: “Kung Flu”.  I hope there aren’t a lot of kids of Asian descent, like my son, who get called that in the fall because the President said it.
Keith Law: It is fucking gross that our President says it and his toadies defend it. I never thought I’d see the day when a U.S. President was openly racist like that and a third of the country shrugged. Even when I was a kid, our leaders were good enough to keep their racism subtle.

J5: Should KeBryan Hayes be starting immediately?
Keith Law: I think so.

Guest: How many times do you think we’ll see this in extra innings: Bunt the runner to third followed by two intentional walks to set up a force at home? I hope never but…
Keith Law: Many times.

BK: I couldn’t believe that a former GM on MLB radio questioned the Giants for drafting Bailey in the first round because they had drafted Bart high 2 years ago. How silly is the idea of drafting for needs in the MLB draft? If Bailey is the best player on the Gaints’ board, then the pick is perfectly defensible…do you agree?
Keith Law: I have a guess at that former GM and I’d say consider the source.
Keith Law: Also, Bart has already had multiple injuries that might impact the Giants’ internal projections for him staying at C.

Mike: Can you explain how athleticism helps a pitcher with their delivery? I heard that discussed with one of the picks and don’t really get it
Keith Law: The better the athlete, the better he can repeat any series of movements – a delivery, a swing, an arm stroke – which, for pitchers, appears to be positively correlated with command.

Dave: How long of a look does Tork get at 3B before ultimately moving back to 1B?  or do you think he can actually stick at 3B long term?
Keith Law: I think he’s a 1b.

Ben: What do you make of Fauci’s “necessary lie” early on in the pandemic that mask’s weren’t necessary for average people (in order to preserve the supply for medical professionals)? The ends may have justified the means, but I did lose a level of trust (and resisted masks earlier on as a result)
Keith Law: Look at the harm it did. Some people still use this as a reason to disbelieve Fauci and/or the government.

Adam: Do you expect Adley Rutschman to see time this year?
Keith Law: No.

Dave: Do you expect to see Gore and Pearson on OD rosters?
Keith Law: No but I think both will appear.

Greg: So… My wife and I are lucky enough to be comfortably middle class. I lost my job, but we’re getting by, and actually donating more money and tipping service people more than usual, given the circumstance. This isn’t any sort of brag, but just saying WTF BASEBALL OWNERS!? The terrible bar by my house has figured out how to stay open and safe and keep people employed. Are we to believe baseball ownership runs on such paper-thin margins as the third-best falafel restaurant in town?
Keith Law: That’s what they want us to believe, but they have lied about their profits for at least forty years now, so why should we accept their statements now when they won’t open their books to anyone?

Andrew Brotherton: What do you think will be done about the minor league season? Some sort of super AZFL? An instructional league? A taxi-squad league?
Keith Law: The most likely answer is none. I don’t expect any minor league game action this year.

Ben: The A’s acknowledged that Jeff Criswell’s delivery needs to be cleaned up in order for him to project as a starter. Do you agree with that assessment and are you optimistic that Oakland can do that given their player/pitcher development history?
Keith Law: I do agree. I don’t think it’s that easy to do.

Tom: Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I used to really believe that it didn’t matter who the president was. But now… not being hyperbolic: Has there been an American president, even fiction, who’s done more tangible harm to a greater number of people, not just in the US but around the world?
Keith Law: Not in my lifetime.
Keith Law: Buzz Windrip is close, though.

Rick: A co-worker I’m around a lot tested positive for COVID-19, so now I’m on day 2 of my 14 day quarantine.  I’m participating in your chat to help me get through my boredom.  Can I get a shout out for being a good person and not going out and putting others at risk?
Keith Law: Indeed. Sorry for the tough break, though.

Tommy: Again, not questioning, just genuinely curious, but there’s nothing about masks and building immunity against the virus?
Keith Law: No. People pushing ‘immunity’ as a counterargument to masks are doing so without facts to back them up – we still don’t know what kind of immunity people who are infected have against future reinfection.
Keith Law: There’s an assumption – because science education in the US largely sucks – that if you get a virus once, you can’t get it a second time. That’s obviously not true with the common cold or the flu, but for whatever reason there are who people who assume this is true of COVID-19, and we do not know that.

Rob: Finally saw Knives Out now that it is streaming free.  As someone who has tried and failed to read it twice, the Gravity’s Rainbow joke had me rolling. Any advice for getting through books that are particularly tough reads?
Keith Law: I try to set reasonable per-day reading goals (e.g., 40 pages), and go into it knowing it’ll take me, say, three weeks to finish the book. That makes it more mentally manageable, and I don’t end up procrastinating.
Keith Law: That said, Gravity’s Rainbow is not worth your time.

Dave C: Do u think teams will run milb camps out of their Dominican camps and/or minor league affiliates?
Keith Law: No. There are multiple reasons why not.

Matt: I’m a 44 year old white guy. Yesterday I got pulled over for a broken taillight. Cop frisked me, asked if I had drugs and demanded he search my car. I refused and he called K9. K9 sniffed my car for 5 minutes and both let me go. I’m a stereotypical white dude with a pickup truck. I can’t even imagine what might have happened if I was a POC. Cops have way too much power. Something needs to be done.
Keith Law: We need a paradigm shift. I don’t like the phrase “defund the police” because I don’t think that’s the solution. Demilitarize the police. Shift to community policing models. Change hiring practices. But you’re never getting a majority of people to buy into a model with no police.

Jon: I read that Ed Howard was a possible Top 5 pick but for the HS season being entirely halted and therefore nobody seeing him play this year and a result was a lot of college prospects instead. Any truth to that or just Cubs homer-talk? What’s his ceiling?
Keith Law: Extreme homer talk. Arrant nonsense.

Alex: I can’t believe there haven’t been any Braves prospect questions so… has the ship sailed on Touki Toussaint and Bryse Wilson as starters? The 60-game season makes it hard to work in these kind of bubble players. Are they change of scenery guys?
Keith Law: Jeez, why are you giving up on them so quickly?

Doug: Would you rather have Hassell/Wilcox or Veen and an underslot 3rd rounder?
Keith Law: Hassell/Wilcox.

Brian: Quick math for the herd immunity crowd. The CDC estimates 70% of the population would need to have recovered from COVID-19 to get us there (assuming you’re permanently immune). That equates to roughly 200 million US citizens. At a death rate of .4% (which seems to be the bare minimum), you’d need to be okay with 800,000 deaths.
Keith Law: Well, there’s a pretty significant portion of the GOP that is okay with that.

Doug: Is WAR going to be adjusted based on the short season? Wouldn’t homers and strikeouts this year be worth 3 times more than a previous year?
Keith Law: No. You’ll just see WAR leaders of about 3-4 this year.

Dave C: any Idea how service time will work for shuttle team? Actually days on active roster?
Keith Law: I believe that’s correct.

Mattey: How do you think Utley will fare on first Hall of Fame ballot?
Keith Law: I’m just hopeful he’ll get the 5% to stay on it.

Guest: I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoy your work and for your reasoned opinions on a host of issues in addition to baseball. I don’t always agree with you, but I respect that your opinions are based on reason and conviction. Keep up the good work!
Keith Law: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Nick: I don’t read as much as I’d prefer, and when I do I have a bad habit of choosing dense literary masterpieces. They’re great, but very time consuming. Any advice on authors/genres that are better to build a constructive habit?
Keith Law: There are plenty of literary masterpieces that are on the shorter side – you may find you enjoy those, and still get the psychic value of reading such acknowledged classics, with less effort.

Dave C: When’s the last time u were as surprised during the draft as the Sox taking Nick York’s this year?
Keith Law: Hayden Simpson.

JP: So NASCAR released a photo of the noose in Bubba Wallace’s garage – and now all the pedants are out in full force – “AKSHUALLY, that’s not technically a noose!” I swear these are the same guys that love pointing out that “assault rifle” is not a real legal phrase after every school shooting. “Who gets to decide what an assault rifle is?!”
Keith Law: I mean, I suppose you can argue it wasn’t put there just then … but the word for that type of knot is a noose.

Chris: I think every post-draft analysis of a draft pick not taken in the top 10 is “if there was a full season, this guy could have been a top 10 pick, so this could be a steal”… for some reason, reading every writer/blogger of every team say that bugs me lol
Keith Law: It should bug you because it’s a fabrication.

Jabroni: Did you like the WS strategy of going big with picks 1&2 then punting 3,4 and 5?
Keith Law: I liked the strategy but not specifically those picks. I would have targeted other players with the same plan.

Todd: Do you trust the polls at all that show Biden comfortably ahead? How possible is it Biden wins the popular vote greater than Hillary did but loses the electoral college?
Keith Law: It’s going to come down to 3-4 states, no? Whoever wins PA, OH, MI, WI wins the election. I would guess most other states are locked up already.

Pat D: Disney is apparently going to re-design Splash Mountain.  I’m genuinely shocked.  Any thoughts on this pretty insignificant development?
Keith Law: I was just on that ride in December. It’s a little cringey. There’s nothing overtly racist about it, but if you know the genesis of the stories (or the movie based on them), you know what’s going on.
Keith Law: I’ll be sad if “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” is gone, though. I loved that song when I was a kid.

Matt: If the batting leader at end of the year has something like a .517 batting average, will it count in record book for highest batting average of all time?
Keith Law: That’s not happening. Someone could hit .400, though, and I would argue that it shouldn’t be considered on the same level as Bill Terry/Ted Williams … but that we should also enjoy it for what it is. If Trout comes out hot and is hitting .400+ going into the last week, let’s make it a thing. Embrace the weirdness of the short season.

NL: I hate the DH, but understand the argument at least for this year. My question is why we worry about pitchers getting hurt running the bases. Seriously? An athlete running?
Keith Law: How about the part where pitchers are not good at hitting? This isn’t 1955. Pitchers are so much better today at pitching that asking them to hit when they get little time to practice and only face live pitching themselves every fifth day if that is a bit absurd.

Tyler: is Trump vs Joe “Weekend at Bernie’s” Biden the worst candidates to vote from in US history?  it’s even worse than Trump/Hillary, where I refused to vote for either.  I’m afraid I’ll do the same this year.
Keith Law: Check your privilege, Tyler. There is too much riding on this election to sit it out, even if you think it doesn’t affect you.

addoeh: Biden could win with Clinton states + FL and either AZ or NC.  He has more paths than just the Midwest route.
Keith Law: I guess that’s true, especially with Arizona and NC in COVID death spirals right now. I’m shocked there isn’t more of an effort to recall Ducey in AZ – the only recall effort I could find was from people arguing in April that he shouldn’t have locked down at all!

Dave C: Thoughts on the schedule this year? Seems weird that 1/3 of ur games are against teams that you aren’t competing against in ur League
Keith Law: I’m trying to just accept the weirdness for what it is. Getting worked up over details when the real goal is just to have a full season without anyone getting sick seems silly.

Sammy So-so: If Tyler Soderstrom doesn’t stick at catcher, does he still have the ceiling of an everyday player? Thanks.
Keith Law: Yes but he’ll need a position. Third base is at least the next stop.

Jason: How is drinking a cup of water or walking down a ramp considered newsworthy in 2020?
Keith Law: And it gets him praised as the “best president ever!” by the sycophants.

Tyler: “Check my privilege?”  You know nothing about me.  I am not white or rich, so what is my “privilege?”  All I know is when Biden was with Obama, all I got out of their presidency was losing my health insurance (that I was told I’d be able to keep) and am now paying about $200+ more a month than I did before their presidency.
Keith Law: I know that you have enough privilege to think about sitting out what is almost certainly the most important US election since the 1930s.

Gus: Is Bohm the Phillies opening day DH?
Keith Law: If Bohm makes the OD roster, Hoskins should be the DH.

John: Two drafts with really awful picks (besides the obvious with Rutschman) for Mike Elias. Time for O’s fans to worry about the direction?
Keith Law: I do not agree that they’ve had “awful” picks.
Keith Law: That’s an overreaction, at the least.

Howie: Hi Klaw, unless the value of a MLB franchise takes a hit due to pandemic owners should be able to get financing to mitigate short term cash flow concerns. Where I see this going though is the free agent market is much softer, concerns about collusion result in another work stoppage. Thoughts?
Keith Law: Free agent market will probably be softer for mid-tier FA and below. I don’t think that leads to collusion claims.

Jabroni: 88 days after the March agreement the owners finally agreed it was an agreement?? What the hell??
Keith Law: This is better framing than the bothsidesism I’m seeing everywhere. The owners spent 12 weeks trying to avoid the terms of the agreement they’d accepted in March, and ended up adhering to the agreement when the players said they expected the owners to live up to what they’d signed.

Ben: The “if you like your insurance you can keep it” line was was a commitment that Obamacare wouldn’t require any existing plans to fold.  Which it didn’t.
Keith Law: Yes, and if you want insurance or health care to cost less, you’re going to have to choose an entirely different model than the current one.

Pat D: To everyone complaining about not having a better choice than Biden:  do you really want Trump making a couple hundred more judicial appointments that will re-shape laws for the next 20-40 years?  I hope you don’t care about voting rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, government transparency, checks on presidential power……do I need to go on?
Keith Law: Environmental laws. Or handling the next pandemic.

Nick: How would you compare Robert Hassell to Jarred Kelenic coming out of high school?
Keith Law: Kelenic was the clearly better prospect.

Pat: I don’t see how MLB is going to pull this off without doing a bubble like the NBA is doing. So many health variables with the way they’ve chosen to do it
Keith Law: I guess the counterargument is that the NBA’s bubble increases the odds of a bigger outbreak if one person gets sick, no?

TomBruno23: My draft-crazy friend, let’s call him Baby Foley, keeps telling me the Cardinals really scored with Ian Bedell. We read your recap on The Athletic about his back-end starter potential. Anything else to add?
Keith Law: No, nothing more. That’s what he is.

J5: Which starter will break out this year to a top of rotation starter?  Plesac?  Ross?  Others?
Keith Law: I’ll do some kind of breakouts piece in July, although it’ll obviously be a bit different than normal.

Dave C: If Marcus Stroman has a typical year how much would a qualifying offer ruin his Free Agent market?
Keith Law: He’d be near the top end of the market and I don’t think it’ll affect him. Mid-tier FA get killed by the comp picks.

Joe: Keith: Did this recent nonsense increase or decrease the odds of a work stoppage down the line?
Keith Law: It didn’t alter the odds, but made it clear that the odds were higher than we realized they were.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for your questions and for reading. Stay safe everyone, and please, wear a mask, even if your little corner of the internet tells you otherwise. Do it for the elderly, the immune-compromised, the high-risk, even if you don’t feel like doing it for your friends and your family.

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→ June 22, 2020
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Being Wrong.

Kathryn Schulz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her New Yorker story “The Really Big One,” about the earthquake that is likely to devastate the Pacific Northwest in the next half-century. It is one of the greatest longreads I’ve ever read, and one of the major reasons I’ve expanded my Saturday link roundups from what used to be a few links on most weekends to a dozen or more stories headlined by the best longreads of each week. It’s also why I wouldn’t move out to Seattle or Portland despite all of the benefits of living in that part of the country.

Her first book was 2010’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a meditation on and paean to the power of making mistakes, and an explanation of how our brains respond to the feeling of being wrong and how we use it, sometimes without realizing it, to learn and make better decisions in the future. It’s a book I wish I’d read a decade ago, and certainly before I wrote The Inside Game, but also helped affirm my longstanding commitment to owning my mistakes at work by detailing when and why my evaluations of certain players were wrong.

Schulz writes with a clarity and joy in the subject that is evident from the first lines. She asks “Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is a second-order one at best,” and immediately has your attention: It is fun to be right, but why? And why does it feel so bad to be wrong, even if what you’re wrong about is ultimately something trivial?

Being Wrong breaks down the experience into three parts – where errors come from, what it’s like to be wrong, and what we can gain from being wrong and learning to embrace it. Part one dovetails well with other books I’ve read about the ways we think, but gets even further down into our mental processes than the sort of cognitive biases and errors I discussed in The Inside Game, such as describing how inaccurate our own memories can be (and why eyewitness testimony isn’t the unassailable truth our judicial system has long assumed it to be), how prior beliefs affect memory and observation (leading to cognitive dissonance), and how our thinking evolves as we mature and yet is still vulnerable to confirmation bias or forming conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

Part two goes into how we experience wrongness, while also continuing to explore the ways in which we are or become wrong. We can disbelieve things we know or strongly believe to be true simply because of the influence of others, which applies to spheres as different as religion or science. Schulz looks at some of the history of doomsday prophets who claimed that the Second Coming or a similarly cataclysmic event would occur on a certain date; when it didn’t happen, many of these prophets’ adherents didn’t give up on their faith in their soothsayers, but cooked up post hoc rationalizations why the prophets weren’t actually all that wrong in the first place. One such event, in 1844, spawned the Seventh Day Adventists, a sect that claims over 25 million followers even though it was founded by three followers of a prophet whose prophecy failed, leading them to concoct an explanation – utterly unverifiable, of course – that has hoodwinked people for over 150 years.

Schulz also delves into the persistence of memory – and how easily it can lead us astray, giving the story of Penny Beernsten, whose identification of the man who attacked and sexually assaulted her was overturned by DNA evidence that identified her actual attacker 18 years later. Beernsten has been extremely open about her experiences, including describing how she tried to remember details of her attacker’s face during the attack and how certain she was about her identification after the fact, as well as what happened to her when she learned that she was wrong and had sent the wrong man to prison for nearly two decades. This leads into a discussion of flawed prosecutions, where police officers and/or government attorneys will often cling to prior beliefs even when tangible evidence disproves them.

The third section, Embracing Error, looks at people and institutions that have made the active choice to accept errors as a part of life and build processes to trap them, minimizing their short-term impact and long-term frequency. This covers medical errors, which ended up the entire impetus for Atul Gawande’s excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, and how simple solutions like pre-operation (or pre-flight, or pre-anything) checklists can lead to significant reductions in errors, saving lives, injuries, or just cash. Schulz also explains how the awareness that we might be wrong makes us more apt to listen to the feedback or contrary opinions of others, avoiding the ‘yes men’ mentality of many leaders in government and industry. She wraps up the book with a detour into humor, asking why it’s so funny to us when other people are wrong (there’s quite a bit of research on this, which surprised me) but less so when the mistakes are ours, and uses that to launch into a philosophical discussion of fact versus art, certainty versus uncertainty, and how being wrong is essential to our survival and progress as a species. That assumes, of course, that we can admit we’re wrong, and then do something about it, which is certainly not the case in the United States today, where falsehoods are merely “alternative facts” and an entire party preaches science denial from wearing masks to stop a pandemic to denying evolution and climate change in its platform. Maybe they should read Being Wrong, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t get through.

Next up: About 2/3 of the way through Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ June 20, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 6/20/20.

My one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this week looked at which MLB teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects. No chat this week as I was busy with work calls or family commitments every afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a cooperative trick-taking game that plays out over a series of 50 missions, like a legacy game but without asking you to change or destroy any components.

The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, which is a good sign for my mental health, I think. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

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→ June 18, 2020
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Mystic Market.

Mystic Market ($20) is a marvelous light family game that you can quite easily play with your kids, requiring nothing more than color-matching and a little arithmetic to play. There are just a few simple elements to it, with some direct and indirect player interaction, perhaps a little too much take-that for younger players, but also enough to satisfy gamers who insist on a bit of meat even in their lighter games. I’m surprised it hasn’t found more of an audience.

Players in Mystic Market are trying to gather ingredients, in the form of cards in six different colors, that can be combined in sets and sold for prices that vary depending on the color of the ingredients – and the timing of the sale. You can collect these ingredients by buying one or two of them them from the market for one, two, or three coins apiece, based on their current sale price on the ingredient track, or by swapping cards from your hand, one or two at a time, without regard to color or current value.

The game has a track with little ingredient bottles (filled with glitter), and at the start of the game they’re arranged in rainbow order, with purple at the bottom and the most valuable at 15 coins for a set, while red is at the top and returns only 5 coins for a set. The catch is that when you sell a set, its color drops in value to the top of the track (5 coins), with every other color falling down the track to the next highest price. Thus there’s a huge timing element to the game, both in terms of when to sell your own sets, and whether to try to take cards your opponents might need to sell high-value sets.

The number of cards you need for a set also varies by color, from four red cards or four orange cards for a set of those colors to just two of blue or purple, and their frequency in the deck declines as their starting value increases. Thus at some point during the game the purple set, which is hard to collect given its scarcity, will sell for just five coins because someone else just sold a set, and collecting it becomes less profitable.

It rarely makes sense to sell sets at 5 or 6 coins, and you’ll usually sell at 10-12-15 and turn a profit. The heart of the game is that process of buying and selling, working the timing of your sales, and keeping an eye on what your opponents are collecting, whether it’s to grab a card they might need or to time your sale in a way to get the high price for yourself and make whatever your opponents were collecting far less valuable. There are also three “supply shift” cards randomly shuffled into the deck each game; each one moves one bottle to the highest value on the track and moves everything that was higher than that bottle back to the lowest point, disrupting all of the values and thus your strategy if you were mid-set.

If that were all there was to Mystic Market, it would be good enough but probably wouldn’t have much replay value. The Potion deck contains cards with special, single-use powers, and you can buy those for specific combinations of two ingredient cards. Buying (“crafting”) a potion is a free action, as is using any potion. Several of them do something nasty to an opponent – stealing a card, forcing them to discard a card of your choosing, swapping a card with you – while others boost you, such as letting you sell a half set for full price, letting you substitute a potion card for one ingredient to complete a set, or letting you take a single ingredient card for free. There’s even a card that has no power at all, but can be redeemed for 15 coins, very useful if you’re left with a blue card and a purple card but can’t complete either set later in the game. You could choose to remove the take-that cards from this deck if you don’t want to play with them when you have younger kids in the game, but I do think they add quite a bit to the game both in strategy and in making it harder for one player to run away with things.

Mystic Market plays two to four players and is suitable for kids as young as 8, maybe a little younger if they’ve played a few games before; there’s a little text in the game, on the Potion cards, that requires sufficient reading and thinking skills that would stymie much younger players. You play until the ingredient deck is exhausted, which I’ve found takes about 45 minutes for a full game regardless of player count. If you’re looking for a good family game while we’re all still mostly staying home, I think this would fit the bill.

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→ June 17, 2020
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Cyteen.

I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen back in February, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it was so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for The Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day before the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that I had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the game Terraforming Mars.)

Cyteen is not very good, just as Downbelow Station, a novel set in the same universe as Cyteen that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not very good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent – books that were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to the aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen has a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650 pages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office to protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately interesting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine renderings of story and scene in the book.

Cyteen is set on a planet and two space stations of that name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared independence from the Alliance … none of which is necessary to know to read this book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise, Machiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune and serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after which some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone of her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her clone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’ Denys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would benefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone/son Justin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in the first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up and gains authority.

That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen‘s length, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all manner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to read. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was invading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young girl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the cloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the Alliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune politics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details of politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level and the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.

The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling, although it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically identical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many conditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a perfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a perfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to replicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux is still a person with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of her strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination, whether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by her genes and her makers.

The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an attempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed that their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works with more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose leaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the Hugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character – greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of fantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen is heavy on the science, both hard sciences and soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it would get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is still writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new books of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science fiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.

Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ June 14, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 6/14/20.

The MLB draft has come and gone, and subscribers to the Athletic can read all of my analysis. I broke down the draft classes for every team, with National League teams’ drafts and American League teams’ drafts in two separate files. I also wrote up my analysis of day one on Wednesday night, and held a Q&A for subscribers on Thursday afternoon, before round two began. You can also see my last mock draft, where I got 9 of the 29 first-round picks right, as well as pick #34, and at least alerted you to the possibility the Marlins would take Max Meyer over Asa Lacy at 3. My Big Board, showing the top 100 prospects in the draft class, went up last Saturday. It looks like 82 of those 100 players were taken; the other 18 all appear to have priced themselves off of teams’ boards.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Jonathan Mayo, one of the draft experts at MLB Pipeline, to preview the draft. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify.

The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’ll send out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday afternoon, once my latest game review (for The Crew) comes out over at Paste. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

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→ June 11, 2020
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Music update, May 2020.

This month’s playlist is as long as usual, but the writeup is shorter because of the draft. I thought it was a pretty solid month for new music though, including several tracks I think will end up near the top of my year-end ranking. If you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

The Eddy featuring Jorja Smith – Kiss Me in the Morning. I haven’t seen The Eddy, the jazz-themed Netflix show from Damien Chazelle, but this song features the Grammy-nominated Jorja Smith, whose Lost & Found was one of my favorite albums of 2018.

Khruangbin – So We Won’t Forget. I have loved both singles from their forthcoming album Mordechai, due out on June 26th, as they seem like the trio are approaching their artistic peak.

Oasis – Don’t Stop (Demo). It feels like this track, a previously unreleased demo recently rediscovered by Noel Gallagher, first resurfaced six months ago, rather than about six weeks ago. It’s very vintage Oasis, which is a good thing in my book.

Fontaines D.C. – A Hero’s Death. There’s something about the line “Life ain’t always empty,” which these retro-punks repeat throughout the song, during this of all seasons.

Little Simz – might bang, might not. I was a little let down by Little Simz’ EP Drop 6, given how great her 2019 GREY Area was, but she’s still a great rapper and rises above the less interesting music on the new record.

Everything Everything – Arch Enemy. This lead single from their upcoming album Re-Animator – due out in August – is very E2, soaring, ambitious, and slightly manic in its instrumentation.

Maisie Peters – The List. I’m still waiting for the world to catch on to Peters, who just turned 20 in May and already has several incredible pop songs to her credit. This isn’t quite at the heights of “The Best I’ll Ever Sing,” but it’s close.

Ten Fé – Nothing Breaks Like a Heart. I didn’t even realize this was a cover of the Mark Ronson/Miley Cyrus song because they’ve so completely changed the song, turning into a haunting acoustic number that’s almost dirge-like with its funereal vibe.

San Cisco – On the Line. Even San Cisco’s lesser singles still have great hooks, like this one, which, like most of their best songs, has Scarlett Stevens sharing some of the vocal duties.

LA Priest – Beginnings. When I first heard this track, I was sure it was something from the former lead singer of Wild Beasts,but it’s actually Sam Dust, whose second album Gene just dropped last week.

Spielbergs – Go! This track, part of Adult Swim’s singles series, captures this Norwegian band at their frenetic best.

The Mysterines – I Win Every Time. The Mysterines should be stars by now, with great rock hooks and Lia Metcalfe’s snarling, riveting vocals.

The Naked and Famous – Death. I mean, maybe now wasn’t the right time to release a song so explicitly about confronting our mortality?

Disclosure – ENERGY. Disclosure burst on the scene with 2013’s “When a Fire Starts to Burn,” which featured a sample of preacher and motivational speaker Eric Thomas; they went back to the well for this title track from their upcoming album, using more of Thomas’ words as the vocals above music that absolutely lives up to the title.

Black Orchid Empire – Natural Selection. I wasn’t familiar with BOE before, but this is my kind of metal, with big, muscular riffs, and a real melody in the vocals.

Caligula’s Horse – Valkyrie. Progressive metal from the Australian band’s newest album, Rise Radiant, released on May 22nd.

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→ June 6, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 6/6/20.

I had two columns up this week for subscribers to the Athletic: my third stab at projecting the first round for next week’s MLB draft, and my ranking of the top 100 prospects in the draft class. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast this week featured my colleague Evan Drellich, talking about the state of negotiations between MLB and the union when we spoke on Monday. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify.

The Inside Game has garnered several recommendations from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

My free email newsletter continues to not write itself, yet I keep sending it out anyway. Feel free to sign up for more words from me.

And now, the links…

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