Stick to baseball, 8/17/24.

I’m on PTO from the Athletic this week and next, so there won’t be any new content from me over there until the week of August 26th. I had some plans to hit a Blue Rocks game last week, before my PTO, but 2+ inches of rain in our area scotched that (although they did play on one of those days, which flabbergasted me because that field doesn’t drain well). I was on the road a ton this week – something like 23 hours in the car in the last five days – so I don’t have as many links as usual, either.

I’ve got a review filed to Paste for Rock Hard 1977, the board game designed by Runaways bassist Jackie Fox (Fuchs) that was also my #1 new game from Gen Con this year.

I do have a newsletter half-written, so feel free to run over and sign up (it’s free) before I finish the damn thing already.

And now, the links…

  • The plastics industry is pushing to change the rules on what they can label “recyclable” – in short, if something could, hypothetically, be recycled, they want to label it as such, regardless of whether such recycling is readily available or feasible. I see this crap already with things labeled “compostable” that require access to industrial composting, so you can’t just throw it in your home compost bin or pile.
  • The chief of police in Millersville, Tennessee, is under investigation by the state for all kinds of malfeasance, and when Channel 5’s Phil Williams spoke to him, the chief called Williams a pedophile.
  • These weirdos’ attacks on Vice-President Harris for not having kids will only backfire on them, writes Jess Grose of the NY Times. I think it already has, to some extent.

Stick to baseball, 6/28/24.

I posted my second mock draft for 2024 on June 19th, and on Friday posted a scouting report on Japanese first baseman Rintaro Sasaki, who’s playing in the Draft League this summer and will play for Stanford in the spring. Both are for subscribers to The Athletic. I also held a Klawchat the day of the mock draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Pixies, a great small-box game for family play, good for kids as young as 7 but solid enough for the adults to enjoy.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams, assuming American Airlines doesn’t wait six hours and then cancel my flight like they did this past week. So much for my idea that flying the night before would help make travel easier.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/8/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects currently in the minor leagues and then wrote about five prospects who’ve fallen off so far this year. One of them, Adael Amador, is actually in the midst of a hilarious run where he’s hit 6 homers in his last 9 games after hitting just one in his first 37 games … and he’s still only hitting .194/.337/.329!

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday for Diamond Dreams at 2 pm ET, one segment on Unpacked at around 2:40 pm ET, and possibly a segment on The Rally in the 5 o’clock hour.

I’m at Disharoon Park again today for game 2 of Kansas State vs. Virginia, so I’m rushing to get this posted. So now, the links…

  • You may have seen the piece in the New York Times op-ed section claiming evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis, written by an author who is not a virologist or epidemiologist and who has been flogging a book (co-authored with a climate-change denier) pushing the lab-leak deal for several years. Scientists have been picking it apart all week: Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen posted this thread on BlueSky debunking Alina Chan’s terrible editorial, virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen did the same on Twitter, and biochemistry professor emeritus Larry Moran also debunked her points in a concise blog post. Chan is wrong, and we have copious evidence showing she’s wrong, but she persists – and she got a giant platform to sell her view.
  • House Republicans moved on from attacking Anthony Fauci to smearing Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent voice in the pro-vaccine and pro-science movements who co-developed a low-cost vaccine against COVID-19.
  • The Columbia Law Review published a massive story from a Palestinian researcher on the Nakba that had been killed by the Harvard Law Review, but the CLR’s board of directors didn’t like it so they took down the journal’s entire website.
  • Hamilton Nolan explains that allowing the rich and powerful to opt out of public systems, like mass transit and public education, allows those systems to atrophy and discourages government from repairing them. I think it’s more complicated than that – if you have the money to afford life-saving medical care, should the government prevent you from receiving it? – but his point about mass transit seemed quite relevant given our country’s dismal record on that front.
  • Jared Kushner’s investment fund is in bed with the Serbian government – which is aligned with Russia and denies its role in the Bosnian genocide – in a construction project that will include a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression.”

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/15/23.

I haven’t written in the past week-plus due mostly to getting sick, something that wasn’t COVID-19 but might as well have been for this stupid cough I’ve still got. I did get to a couple of HS games in the Boras Classic in Orange County this week and will write that up after I get to another HS game on Wednesday.

My own podcast returned this week with guest Ozan Varol, author of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist and the new book Awaken Your Genius. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I did appear on two other podcasts this week – Sports Sometimes, with my friend Chris Crawford; and the board game podcast Meeple Town, with Dean Dunning. (Not Dane Dunning. That’s Calcaterra’s bit.)

You can also get more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which went out again on this past Monday.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: This New Yorker profile of Pinky Cole and her fast-growing vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan probably isn’t as complimentary as the subject hoped it would be; if anything, it makes it sound like the quality of the food there is entirely secondary to the owner’s ambitions. It also highlights some of the challenges in bringing a broader audience to vegan food, given the latter’s reputation.
  • Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (guess) introduced a bill to ban kids from attending drag shows and has ranted about LGBTQ+ people “grooming children,” so it was no surprise at all to learn that an intern filed a complaint against him, saying that they had an inappropriate relationship and he served them alcohol even though they were younger than 21. Slaton, who likes to post Bible passages on his Twitter account, also proposed a bill to give property tax cuts to straight, married couples who’d never been divorced. To their credit, two Republican lawmakers in Texas have already called for Slaton to step down.
  • All those conservative commentators rushing to defend Thomas and Crow? Yeah, a lot of them rely on Crow for their paychecks in one way or another, Ilya Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charles Murray among them. Whatever you may think of the first three, if Charles Murray comes to your defense, you may want to ask him to pipe down.
  • Speaking of Goldberg, I did appreciate his longish essay in his Dispatch newsletter on how the rising generation of Republicans are becoming, in his words, jerks, taking their cues from Trumpism and the old-conservative God complex model of government (government should enact God’s will, and only we know what God’s will is). He argues that it’s not just bad for the Republican party, but bad for these kids as humans.

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
  • Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
  • A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
  • The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
  • I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
  • The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
  • There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
  • If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
  • Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
  • Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
  • Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
  • The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

  • Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.
  • Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.
  • The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”
  • Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.
  • An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.
  • Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.
  • Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.
  • Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.
  • Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.
  • Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.

Stick to baseball, 6/18/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I also held a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it, in which I was accused of “not doing my homework,” of course. Look for a mock draft this upcoming week, most likely Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Fantastic Factories, a fun engine-builder very similar to the great game Gizmos, but with the added twist of dice-rolling.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, talking about going back to the Cape League for the first time in years, only to have a travel fiasco in multiple parts keep me from getting there. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 7/31/21.

I had a lot of content this week around the trade deadline for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I also wrote up my notes from a game between the Yankees’ and Pirates’ AA affiliates. I was planning to do a chat but the pace of trades made that impossible.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Slate‘s Josh Levin, talking about his One Year: 1977 podcast episode about baseball broadcaster Mary Shane and his book The Queen. You can subscribe on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Whistle Mountain, a medium-heavy worker placement game from the designer of the train game Whistle Stop.

I returned to my email newsletter, with a note on why I’ve been absent from there and largely from here over the last six weeks. Also, my second book The Inside Game is out in paperback and available from bookshop.org or wherever you buy books.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

I had two pieces this week for subscribers to The Athletic, one on six non-tendered players who would make my rankings of the top free agents, and another on what this week’s news of realignment and contraction in the minors might mean. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the unique new game Pendulum, which is turnless – players move simultaneously, but when and where you can move, and what you can do, is dictated by three sand timers, each of which has a different duration.

I have two books out for the readers on your holiday shopping lists. The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, available in hardcover; and Smart Baseball, available in paperback.

My podcast will return on Monday, with two episodes scheduled before we break for the holidays. You can also get more of me by subscribing to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…