Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

Black Panther.

I’ve never been a big fan of the superhero genre of fiction, whether it’s comic books, TV cartoons, or the recent wave of movies set in the Marvel or DC universes. (I never collected or read comic books as a kid.) The characters never really work for me as fully realized individuals; the “it’s hard to have super powers” theme always felt rather silly, yet it keeps coming up in this corner of fiction. The Dark Knight is the only major superhero movie I’ve seen in the last decade, and I thought it was fine, but overlong and probably too ambitious for its execution. I never saw its sequel.

So I originally figured Black Panther would be another big hit that I skipped because it’s just not my kind of story; only when the critical praise was as effusive as the public’s reaction did I figure I should check the film out. There are two major elements here that I feel like I’m unqualified to discuss – how it compares to other superhero films, and the script’s attention to detail and and authentic depiction of sub-Saharan African culture – but I can at least break it down as a movie like any other work of fiction, and it is, of course, very good, with performances and visuals strong enough to overcome some flaws in the second plot and a sudden loss of momentum partway through the film.

Black Panther is both superhero and king of the (fictional) African kingdom of Wakanda, which appears to be located somewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa near present-day Rwanda, a utopian society with technology well beyond that of any other country thanks to its location on top of the world’s largest deposit of the (fictional) metal vibranium. Wakanda has sealed itself off from the world, cloaking its location and its riches so the world doesn’t show up at its door with hands out or guns aimed. The story opens with a brief prologue showing the former king seeking out a traitor, his own brother, in Oakland, after which we see the coronation of the new king and Black Panther, played by Chadwick Boseman (42), and the first plot, around the theft of a half-ton of vibranium and the assassination of his father, kicks into gear.

That first storyline takes up about half the film, and it’s a chance for some great special effects and superhero-style combat, although the enemy, named Claue (no relation), is just a madman and not terribly interesting. That turns out to be a red herring of sorts, as the second half of the film involves a different, more politically-oriented plot, with a threat to the king coming from an unexpected outside source with connections to Wakanda, forcing the Black Panther to defend his throne and eventually retake control of the kingdom in a giant battle reminiscent of that in The Return of the King.

Boseman is solid as the title character, and apparently the ladies very much approve of his casting, but I thought he was overshadowed by the three leading actresses around him: His former lover, Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o; his sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright; and the head of the (all-female!) presidential guard, Okoye, played by Danai Gurira. are all more dynamic and fill roles more commonly filled by men in action films, especially Shuri, the tech expert who gets to make all the fun gadgets for Black Panther to wear, and who also gets the best one-liners in the movie. (“No, it’s Kansas,” was second only to the joke about vegetarians if I’m ranking the quips in the movie.) This isn’t just a movie that stars African-American actors in nearly every significant role, but it’s also one of the most female-forward action films I’ve ever seen, and never stoops to jokes about their femininity or contrasts their toughness with their gender. Boseman himself has somewhat less to work with, even in the titular role, because of what he has to be – the even-keeled statesman who sometimes puts on a mask and funny suit and kicks some ass – and there’s very little room for him to work beyond that, even when he tries to convince Nakia to stay in Wakanda and be his queen. Their chemistry is much better when they’re plotting and scheming than when they’re supposed to be in love.

The story itself starts to drag around the 2/3 mark, when Black Panther has been deposed by the usurper, even though we know he’s going to come back to fight to reclaim it. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of a movie here.) The loss of momentum in the action comes as the script tries, with modest success, to delve into more contemporary political themes and into some perennial philosophical questions. Does Wakanda, a nation of endless prosperity (and great health care!), have a moral obligation to share its technology or resources with the world? Should Wakanda open its borders to refugees from war torn or famine-struck nations around it? With black populations in U.S. cities like Oakland (where the real Black Panther Party started) caught in a cycle of poverty and crime, does Wakanda have any responsibility to help its brethren?

The usurper arrives and all but promises to Make Wakanda Great Again with a “Wakanda First!” speech and belligerent mentality, arguing that Wakanda should show the world its greatness by force. His arrival and his words split the ruling council of tribal leaders, some of whom are rather quick to abandon their king’s pacificist-isolationist policies in support of the upstart. We know how this is likely to end, although the final battle is drawn out to try to infuse some drama into the inevitable outcome; there are few surprises, unless you still have a hard time seeing these badass women in every fight scene.

The cast is really strong across the board, with solid supporting performances by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Martin Freeman (yep, that’s Watson, with an American accent), and Michael B. Jordan, and smaller but still notable contributions from Angela Bassett as the queen mother and Sterling K. Brown as the first King’s brother. (His name, N’Jobu, is a little unfortunate if you grew up with Major League, which I don’t think bothered as much with cultural accuracy or sensitivity.)

I’ll be very curious to see if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considers Black Panther seriously for any non-technical awards, given its critical reception and awareness of the awards’ tendency to overlook African-American films and actors in several recent slates of nominees. Star Wars earned a Best Picture nod in 1977, one of ten nominations for the film that year, and it’s probably the best historical analogue to Black Panther as a sci-fi action flick. It shouldn’t hurt that the cast includes two Oscar winners for acting (Nyong’o and Forrest Whitaker) and two more past nominees (Bassett and Kaluuya). If I had to bet money right now on one non-technical nomination, it’d be for Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler (who directed this and also wrote and directed Creed and Fruitvale Station) and Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson). I also wonder how many voters would check off Octavia Spencer’s name if she made the original ballot, even though she’s not actually in this movie.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve largely avoided superhero films because their stories just don’t speak to me, and I don’t think Black Panther will change that – it is so exceptional in the depth of its setting and back story while also bringing together as strong a cast as you could assemble that it’s not something other films in the genre could easily replicate. Even with that jarring momentum shift while Black Panther is temporarily off the throne is just a brief setback, one that made me more conscious of the film’s running time (a little over two hours) but didn’t truly detract form the experience. I will predict, however, that it ends the year as one of the top ten English-language movies I see.

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 9/9/17.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, naming ESPN’s 2017 Prospect of the Year (hint: it’s Vlad Jr.) and covering and on the strange saga of Juan Nicasio over the last ten days. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Last week, I wrote about the major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames for Vulture. My next boardgame review for Paste will come this week.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

And now, the links…

Boardgame news will return next week; I know of two significant Kickstarters to launch on Tuesday, but at least one of them is currently covered by an embargo so I can’t talk about it just yet.

Stick to baseball, 8/26/17.

The big piece from me this week was about GenCon, the massive annual boardgaming convention held in Indianapolis; I went from Thursday to Sunday and my wrapup post covers every game I saw or tried, with a ranking of my top 20. I even slipped in a mention of some upcoming boardgame apps of note.

My latest piece for Insiders was a minor league scouting notebook covering prospects from Pittsburgh (Mitch Keller), Baltimore (Austin Hays), Philadelphia, and Colorado’s systems. I also did my annual rankings of the top tools in the majors: the top hit, run, and power tools, the best pitches of each type, and the
top gloves and arms for catchers, infielders, and outfielders. I don’t particularly love writing these pieces, but readers seem to enjoy them. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I gave a Talk at Google last month, discussing my book Smart Baseball, which you should definitely buy if you haven’t already.

And now, the links…

The Blue Sweater.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of a non-profit called Acumen, which funds and encourages poverty-reduction efforts that work like business endeavors rather than aid dumps. Foreign aid itself is, in general, not very useful, and often nothing more than a way to prop up corrupt third-world regimes; the U.S. is slated to send out $42 billion in foreign aid in FY2017, but there’s little to no information on how well it works – something like an ROI, for eample. Novogratz has spent over three decades working in the developing world, including substantial time in Rwanda both before and after that country’s civil war and genocide, and her 2009 memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, chronicles some of her work – but also has an unfortunate tendency to show her inability to escape her own privilege when describing the people she’s met and places where she’s worked.

The book works as part memoir – Novogratz has lived an incredible life, not least of which is the incredible story of the titular sweater, which she gave away to a donation outlet while in high school only to find a boy wearing the sweater ten years later in Rwanda – and part plea for a more sensible, rational approach to helping alleviate poverty. Novogratz details projects in multiple countries, from creating jobs for women in central Africa to developing mosquito nets that don’t lose effectiveness to expanding access to cataract surgery in India, where a small upfront investment coupled with some expertise led to a substantial return, particularly in economic growth for people who had no opportunities beyond subsistence farming and in improving health and sanitation conditions. (If you’re poor, and you’re not healthy or don’t have access to clean water, you’re much more likely to stay poor, since you can’t work if you’re sick and then can’t pay for the care to get well.)

Her individual anecdotes tend to be pretty compelling, in part because Novogratz has worked in some areas that were either desperately poor or were caught up in conflicts. One of Novogratz’ close colleagues in Rwanda was killed, perhaps assassinated, for pushing women’s rights, and another, mentioned above, ended up a leader in the genocide. She runs into surprising interference from women in Africa who resent her presence – that local men will listen to her, a white woman from the west, but not to local women, even if they boast some western education. Getting money isn’t a problem per se; it’s getting it from donors who are willing to think small, who’ll accept modest goals that people on the ground can achieve, rather than lofty goals (let’s end hunger! Let’s cure AIDS!) that are unattainable. It’s the idea behind sites like GlobalGiving, where the projects are small but the objectives clear and reasonable.

Novogratz speaks of her work in these countries with two voices, one of which tends to undermine the other. When speaking about the actual plans and execution, she sounds like a businessperson, keeping others accountable, asking questions that an investor in a startup might ask, and ensuring that money is going to where it will do some lasting good. But when she starts to talk about the locals in Rwanda, Pakistan, Brazil, and elsewhere, or to describe the places themselves, she sounds like a tourist. Everyone is beautiful, every color is radiant, everyone is so nice, even the ones who turn out to be corrupt or, in one case, associated with the genocide (and later imprisoned for her role). There’s a strain in travel literature where the white westerner fetishizes the natives of developing countries, and that’s on display here. I can’t doubt Novogratz’ sincerity, and it sounds like she’s tough on locals who come in for microloans with half-formed plans, but she appears to have met a long string of perfect and handsome people while traveling the world. The stories themselves are interesting, and I salute the sacrifices she’s made to live this life and try to improve the world, but The Blue Sweater doesn’t do enough to convince the reader that this is the right way to help the world’s poor.

Next up: I’m still several books behind in reviews, but I’m currently reading Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

Stick to baseball, 7/28/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top five farm systems in baseball, broke down the Jaime Garcia trade to Minnesota, and broke down Tampa Bay’s trades for Lucas Duda and Dan Jennings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

UPDATE: I’ve got one more Insider post covering a few small trades from this week.

I appeared on the Freezing Cold Takes podcast this week, discussing my worst takes, my scouting process (and how failed evaluations have changed it), and Smart Baseball.

I’ve exhausted most of my signings schedule, but will be at GenCon in Indianapolis, signing books on Friday, August 18th, and I believe I will also be signing books at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia in November. Also, Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago has signed copies for sale; call (773) 697-8066 to purchase one.

And now, the links…

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters.

Five or six years ago, at least, I was at a game in Lake Elsinore when a reader whose name I unfortunately have forgotten recommended a book to me called King Leopold’s Ghost, a meticulous, infuriating non-fiction work on the colonial history of the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which for a few decades was the personal property of that king of Belgium. Leo’s abusive misrule was followed by colonial rule by the Belgian government that was only marginally better, with both regimes characterized by plundering of the massive territory’s natural resources, abuse of its natives, destruction of longstanding social and tribal structures, and the failure to establish any foundation for native rule after independence. It’s a great description of how white Europeans gave Africa’s second-largest country no shot at stability or progress once they left and are largely responsible for the failed state that the D.R. Congo has been for the last twenty to thirty years, including the seemingly neverending civil war(s) that have plagued it since late in the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko.

So at some point in 2016, while sharing a table with a woman in a Starbucks in LA, I started chatting with her about books – she was reading something that related to Africa, so I suggested King Leopold’s Ghost, and she recommended two books to me, one of which was Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. Stearns’ thorough history provides much of the second half of the history of the failed state, explaining how Mobutu came to power, how his regime fell, how the civil war in the Congo was itself an outgrowth of regional tensions and the Rwandan civil war and genocide, and why the country remains one of that continent’s biggest disasters in every definition – political, economic, and humanitarian. (A Human Rights Watch director just wrote an op ed in the Washington Post last week entitled “The crisis in Congo is spiraling out of control”, as the current dictator, Joseph Kabila, refuses to cede power and is backing increased violence against dissidents, which also includes the murders of two UN observers this spring.)

Stearns’ book focuses primarily on the civil war itself, beginning with a detailed description of the collapse of Rwanda after its President, Juvenal Habyarimana, died in a plane crash in 1994 that his supporters claimed (without evidence) was an assassination, touching off the country’s civil war and humanity’s worst genocide since the Holocaust. The post-genocide government in Rwanda blamed Mobutu Sese Seko, who had a long history of supporting rebel movements and terrorist groups in the region, for supporting the Hutu majority who carried out most of the killings. Rwanda’s new government teamed with other regional leaders to form a coherent rebellion against Mobutu, recruiting a semi-retired Marxist revolutionary named Laurent Kabila to lead a new army called the AFDL to topple the Congolese dictator, who had renamed the country Zaire. Mobutu’s forces crumbled quickly under the advance of better-funded and somewhat more disciplined rebels, although the invaders were guilty of massive war crimes themselves, and the new boss proved to be no better than the old boss – true of Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated himself in 2001, and his son Joseph, who took over and showed authoritarian tendencies of his own. Laurent alienated the foreign leaders who helped him to power, leading to yet another attempt to overthrow him, and the two wars together (called the First and Second Congo Wars, although you could argue it’s all just one long ongoing conflict) have led to over five million deaths and over two million displaced persons along with the continued deterioration of the Congolese state.

This history gives more detail than you could ever want on the atrocities of the two wars and the direct causes of the conflicts – Rwanda’s civil war, the involvement of regional powers, the misrule of Mobutu, Laurent Kabila’s fast alienation of his backers. Stearns spent years on the ground in the D.R. Congo and includes numerous first-person accounts of massacres from survivors. There are no “good guys” here; every group appears to have committed crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, murder, even mutilation of the dead, and while it’s easy to handwave it away as racial animus, even that facile explanation seems to fall short under Stearns’ scrutiny. And the bulk of the deaths came not from violence – horrific as it was – but from starvation, malnutrition, and disease caused by the disruptions of the civil war. The total breakdown of the Congolese state, the displacement of millions of Congolese civilians, the inadequate international response to the humanitarian crisis, and the attacks on refugee camps by rebel and foreign armies all led to these preventable deaths. Stearns gives us plenty of stories of abject violence, which will shock and disgust the reader, but the majority of the deaths from the two wars occurred in more mundane fashion, making them less salacious on the page but no less tragic.

Where Stearns’ book falls short for me, however, is in assigning blame for the ongoing failure to establish a functioning state in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the Belgians, because at least one of the major causes of the catastrophe is that the country itself is a European fabrication. Most African borders today are based on European colonial borders, ignoring tribal or ethnic boundaries that dated back hundreds of years, but few nations are as constructed as the DR Congo’s, which still has the shape of “everything King Leopold could claim” and combines 80 million people from over 200 ethnic groups who speak over 240 languages under one national government. The country is also among the world’s richest in mineral resources, with over 70% of the world’s deposits of coltan (columbite-tantalite), the main source of tantalum for electrolytic capacitors found in many consumer electronic devices, and over 30% of the world’s cobalt and diamond deposits. The role of these “conflict minerals” in fueling the wars is debated and probably unanswerable, but their existence and uneven distribution – the country’s “mining capital” and second largest city, Lubumbashi, is over 2000 km away from the national capital, Kinshasa, and sits on the border with Zambia in the relatively well-off Katanga Province – means dividing the country along ethnic or historical lines would create huge economic disparities among the new nations. (Witness the problems with South Sudan, which was carved out of Sudan six years ago and took most of the country’s oil reserves with it – but not the pipeline to the Red Sea, which goes through Khartoum.) Perhaps the D.R. Congo was doomed to failure from before independence because the country itself is a creation of outside, white forces, and because the successful rebellions have taken over the national government rather than carving out independence for specific regions that might have a chance to function because they’re easier to run and combine fewer ethnic or linguistic groups.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters covers a tremendous amount of ground, literally and figuratively, even without delving into the question of whether this country can ever function properly given its colonial history; there’s enough detail in here on the two Congolese civil wars to give any reader more than enough insight into what happened, a good shot at understanding why, and plenty of despair over the future of that godforsaken country. The book was published in 2011, and nothing has improved in the D.R. Congo since then. A rebellion in the eastern Kivu region continues to roil, and the political crisis that began in 2015 is worsening as Joseph Kabila refuses to cede power and has been cracking down on opposition, a situation that has only further deteriorated since the main opposition leader, Étienne Tshisekedi, who was supposed to oversee a transitional post-Kabila government, died in February. Stearns tries to end the book with a little optimism, explaining at least what the international community might do to try to stabilize the country, but given everything that has come post-publication, I think the D.R. Congo is more likely to become the new Somalia than to become a functioning state again.

Next up: Louis Bromfield’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Early Autumn.