Stick to baseball, 5/23/21.

I had one post this past week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the four-player trade between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay along with the implications for Wander Franco, Taylor Walls, and Luis Urías. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still 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.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/11/20.

I didn’t publish anything this week at the Athletic, but hope to have two pieces up next week, as well as a new review at Paste and possibly new pieces at Ars Technica and Vulture as well. I did hold a short Persicope video chat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold.

My publisher is holding a contest where one winner will get a 30-minute chat with me before the baseball season starts, and several other entrants will win free copies of The Inside Game. You can enter for free here.

Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I appeared on the Big Fly Baseball podcast this week and spoke with WHB’s Soren Petro about the shutdown, the draft, and the Royals for almost a half an hour.

And now, the links…

Furious Hours.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is more like three non-fiction novellas in one package, tied together by overlaps in the stories but not by any significant theme, so the inclusion of all three in a single tome feels a bit forced. Each of them is interesting and tightly told, none more so than the first of the three, as Cep has done substantial research, although ultimately she can’t create a conclusion where none exists.

Harper Lee did not write another book after the runaway success of the novel she would refer to as “the Bird” for the rest of her life, and barely wrote any words at all for publication, leading to a popular myth around her that she had said all she wanted to say – a myth into which her famously reclusive nature also played. Lee did try to write another book, however, about the story Cep unfurls in Furious Hours, that of the Reverend William Maxwell, a black preacher and timber worker in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s who took out numerous life insurance policies on family members, including two wives, and then killed at least five of them to collect the payouts. He was arrested and charged with one murder but acquitted mostly due to the lack of direct evidence, and the killings only stopped when the uncle of his last victim executed him point-blank at the funeral service. Lee heard about this story and spent years researching the Maxwell case, interviewing the man’s killer and Maxwell’s longtime attorney, Tom Radney, among others, but for reasons Cep tries to address in the final third of the novel, she was never able to finish it – or even submit part of a manuscript.

Maxwell’s story is a crackerjack, right up to his dramatic death. He wasn’t just a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, but a traveling, revivalist preacher, a longtime con man, and a hard worker on timber sites, respected if a bit feared by the men with whom he worked. His decision to kill off his first wife, and then continue to kill off several other family members, for no other apparent purpose than to collect insurance money, came fairly late in his life: he was around 44 when his first wife was found dead in her car – this was a common method for Maxwell, with four of the five corpses for which he is assumed to bear responsibility discovered in or under cars – and he was killed at age 52, right after delivering the eulogy for his last victim. Cep details the murders and how Maxwell managed to get away with so many, even as a black criminal in 1970s Alabama – although the fact that all of his victims were also black may also have helped him.

Maxwell spent a lot of time over those eight years in court, sometimes defending himself against murder charges but more often fighting insurance companies that tried not to pay him for deaths they thought he’d caused. His lawyer through all of those cases was a white man, Tom Radney, formerly an idealistic state legislator who came home to open up a private practice and made good money off Maxwell, since he was so frequently at war with the law. Radney’s story makes up the middle third of the book and it’s the weakest by far; he’s not as fascinating a character as Maxwell or Lee, nor is any part of his life as interesting as what they both did, but there’s also a reliability problem with Radney’s story that isn’t present in the other two – he helped Lee in her research, which then became part of Cep’s. History is told by the survivors, and Radney outlived Maxwell by over 30 years, while Lee was alive but chose silence.

The third section tells Lee’s story, not just the story of her work on the never-submitted book she titled “The Reverend,” but her whole biography – no small task given the author’s disdain for media attention and her nearly half-century of self-enforced silence. Cep does her best work here, because there is so much in the Lee section that I never knew about her – details from her childhood and adolescence, the extent to which she worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (and perhaps wrote, or rewrote, parts of it), her reactions to the book’s enormous and almost immediate success, and some of the real explanations for the writer’s block that kept the world from ever seeing “The Reverend,” or anything else, in print. (The book that was released a year before her death, Go Set a Watchman, was her first manuscript, which multiple publishers rejected before J.B. Lippincott responded favorably but asked for major revisions; the revised book is the one we know.) Perhaps there isn’t enough material for a full-length biography of Lee, who wrote numerous letters but was obviously very protective of her privacy, but this is a very good use of the limited material that is available.

So Furious Hours is a good read – three good reads, really, or at least two, and the middle one is fine – but a disjointed one. The first section is a true crime story with lots of drama and salacious details; the last one is a thorough if short biography of a pivotal figure in American literature who, herself, was a flawed, regular human whose success contributed to her undoing. The through line of Furious Hours is a tenuous one: it’s the Maxwell case, but without Maxwell there, the connection feels forced. If you approach this book as three distinct reads that share a particular connection, it’s probably going to be far more satisfying than the series of loose ends left by trying to into the three a single narrative that isn’t quite there.

Next up: Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl, in its first translation.

Stick to baseball, 6/29/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week, my annual look at the top 25 players under 25 (which has an error in it around German Marquez’s contract status, sorry) and a scouting blog post on Grayson Rodriguez, Deivi Garcia, Alec Bohm and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

This piece went up a little while ago but I waited to post it until some small editing mistakes were corrected: I listed eight of my favorite noir and neo-noir films for Caavo and my friend Desi Jedeikin.

I’ll be at the MLB Futures Game in Cleveland on July 7th, and I’m staying in the area Monday night to give a talk and sign books at the Hudson Library and Historical Society at 7 pm. I hope to see many of you there.

I’ll send out the next copy of my free email newsletter this weekend, so feel free to sign up for more of my words.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/16/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at which teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects in last week’s draft.

On July 8th, the day after the MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at the Hudson Library in Hudson, Ohio, about Smart Baseball and signing books.

My free email newsletter is back, at least in the sense that I’ve sent it out twice in the last two weeks, so maybe sign up for that too.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/8/19.

Of course, most of my content this week was around this year’s MLB draft, but my biggest piece is actually free for everyone to read – my oral history of the drafting of Mike Trout, as told by the people who were there. For ESPN+ subscribers, you can read my draft recaps for all 15 AL teams and all 15 NL teams. I also held a Klawchat during day two of the draft and a live Periscope chat on Friday.

I really am trying to take time off this weekend, but I still plan to send out a new email newsletter to subscribers (it’s free, you just have to sign up) by Monday.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 5/25/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my 2019 MLB draft Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I’ll tweak that before the draft but this is the last complete re-ranking. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I’m behind on just about everything else these days, but I’ll have a fresh game review up for Paste this upcoming week, and I swear there will be a new email newsletter issue soon. Really. I promise. Mostly.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:


Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…