coronavirus — Page 9

→ June 20, 2020
→ By keith

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…

Longreads first: USA Today has the story of the late scout Rudy Santin’s attempts to expose MLB’s broken system for signing international amateur free agents, which can include verbal (and thus unenforceable) agreements between teams and 12-year-old players. The system doesn’t really work for either side – players can, and do, walk away from these agreements as late as the day before the signing period opens – but the likely alternative, a draft, will just result in less money flowing to players from teams.
Vanity Fair‘s Jeff Sharlet goes deep inside the cult of Trump, talking to his diehard supporters and their beliefs in some of the most bizarre, antifactual conspiracy theories you could ever imagine. These are people who think Q is real, that leading Democrats are literal demons who eat children, and that Trump was sent by God to save us all.
One way to craft a response to a pandemic is to look at successful responses to past pandemics. STAT News explains how the pornography industry dealt with the HIV epidemic, successfully, and what lessons countries might take away from their strategy.
The New York Times looks at two major failures in the peer-review process this year, asking why this happened and if the process itself is flawed (or, as some of the quoted sources say, simply overtaxed).
Also in the Times, what exactly is a Twitter bot, and are they as numerous as many recent headlines have claimed? I shared a story a few weeks ago about research at Carnegie Mellon that claimed as many as half of the tweets about COVID-19 in the study sample were from bots, but multiple sources here say that conclusion was not supported by the data.
My friend Alex Speier looked at unconscious racial bias in baseball scouting, including the language used in scouting reports. I’m quoted in the article.
Arizona’s COVID-19 pandemic might be even worse than the official data indicate. The state’s Rt remains well above 1, there’s barely any contact tracing, and the current trend has the state on its way to running out of ICU beds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts has told counties that if they require citizens to wear masks in county buildings, they will not receive any of the state’s COVID-19 relief funds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
Stefan Fatsis, author of the entertaining Word Freak, writes about the debate within the competitive Scrabble world over whether to prohibit racial and other hateful slurs.
Expecting college students to behave prudently if they return to campus this fall is a fantasy, because people in that age range tend to engage in more risky and impulsive behaviors.
Troy Amen, who is entering his fifth year of a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard Medical School (and, I assume, Harvard Business School), writes about systemic racism at HMS and the school’s apparent refusal to hire a more diverse faculty.
Prosecutors allege that 18-year-old Chicago man murdered a trans woman after going home with her and learning she was transgender. According to the prosecution, he left, got a gun, returned to shoot her, left, and then went back to shoot her again.
Facebook Groups are fountains of disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories, according to this editorial in WIRED by two authors who research disinformation and fake news. This isn’t shocking to anyone who follows anti-vaccine activity online, as Facebook is ground zero for so much of their bullshit.
Civil rights groups are asking big advertisers to pause spending on Facebook ads for the month of July, citing the platform’s failure to police hate groups on the site, as part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign.
Two Virginia lawyers pleaded guilty to attempting to extort $200 million from Monsanto by threatening to file false legal claims around Roundup (glyphosate). This is notable because the two lawyers work with scaremonger Carey Gilliam and her anti-GMO organization U.S. Right to Know.
Plenty of bad actors are spreading bogus stories of service workers tampering with the food ordered by police officers, but now the police unions are doing the same, disparaging Shake Shack with a false claim that workers there had “poisoned” several cops’ milkshakes. The NYC Detectives’ Endowment Association didn’t admit their error or apologize for spreading the lie.
Writer and book critic Carolyn Kellogg revealed on Twitter why she quit the National Book Critics Circle’s board – the group’s refusal to issue a statement on Black Lives Matter and the verbal abuse directed at another board member who led the working group trying to craft a statement.
Zimbabwe may be on the verge of collapse yet again, and they’ve resumed arresting and torturing opposition activists.
Board game news: roll20 announced the upcoming release and pre-order availability for Burn Bryte, a new tabletop RPG that’s been three years in the making.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming port of the Game of Thrones board game, a big, complex, long game that might really benefit from a digital adaptation.
Bézier Games announced pre-orders for Maglev Metro, the newest game from the designer of Suburbia and the Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, nebraska, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ June 6, 2020
→ By keith

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…

Writer Jake Lawler asks “What more can we do to show you that we deserve to live?”
Nylah Burton writes in The Independent that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 is just a continuation of our government’s ongoing war on black Americans.
The media become complicit in Trump’s plans by dismissing the protests as “chaos” – they’re not.
The same white, wealthy Americans who preach libertarianism have no problem with authoritarian rule for those on the other side of the income gap.
As of Friday morning, there had been at least 140 incidents of U.S. police attacking journalists. It’s as good an argument as many for those saying it’s time to defund the police.
Alex Pareene writes in The New Republic that the police have sided with white vigilantes in cities across the United States.
From July 2019: Tear gas has been banned in warfare, so why do police still use it?
Tear gas may have led to the death of a protester in Columbus, Ohio, who had asthma.
The National Guard occupied my adopted home city of Wilmington, Delaware, for nine months in 1968. The city has never recovered, including economically.
Breonna Taylor’s family spoke to NPR about grieving her loss and the life ‘robbed’ by police.
The Washington Post has a guide to deleting old Facebook activity, if you’d like to reduce your presence on the service (for any reason) but aren’t ready to delete your account entirely.
The U.S. unemployment rate probably didn’t decline in May after all – it was a “misclassification error.”
Coronavirus appears to attack the lining of blood vessels, leading to a spiral of inflammation that culminates in a cytokine storm that has proven fatal for many patients with underlying cardiovascular conditions.
Anti-vaxxers are already mobilizing against the coronavirus vaccine that doesn’t yet exist.
Without a vaccine, herd immunity against COVID-19 may not be possible.
Poland’s ruling right-wing party is taking advantage of the pandemic to tighten its authoritarian grip on the country, including making abortions almost impossible for women to get.
BBC film critic Nicholas Barber pays tribute to the light comedic touch of author P.G. Wodehouse, the “crafter of perfect sentences.”
Board game news: Maztec, a jigsaw puzzle that plays like a competitive board game, is now up on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, blm, coronavirus, links, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 30, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/30/20.

My second mock draft went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic; I think it was a lot better than my first one, which went up two weeks ago, based on the feedback I got from sources after it was posted. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday to take your questions about it. I’ll do another mock plus a draft ranking this upcoming week, then a final mock on June 10^th, the morning of the draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Azul: Summer Pavilions, the third game in the Azul series (Azul and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra). If you liked either of the first two Azul games, you’ll probably like this one as well, which offers the same tile-selection mechanic but new ways to place and score. Here on the dish, I reviewed La Isla, a midweight game from the designer of Castles of Burgundy and Carpe Diem.

My podcast this week featured Dr. Claude Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford and the author of Whistling Vivaldi, who spoke to me about stereotype threat and how players and evaluators might cope with it in sports. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify. I also appeared on the Romantic About Baseball podcast to discuss my new book The Inside Game, the draft, and other issues in baseball.

And now, the links … many of which are from the Washington Post this week, which wasn’t deliberate.

Longreads first: The Daily Beast looks at the questionable fundraising efforts of Shaun King, sometimes known to his detractors as “Talcum X,” who has a history of not really accounting for funds he’s raised.
The Salt Lake Tribune has a very useful, practical guide to how the coronavirus spreads in various public spaces, so you can assess the risk of various activities.
We haven’t heard much about “draining the swamp” recently, have we? Trump is now appointing watchdogs beset by ‘preposterous’ conflicts of interest, like the one who is now responsible for investigating his own actions.
Why do people often support or vote for narcissists in times of trouble? Professor Charles O’Reilly at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business explains that and how narcissistic leaders destroy from within.
Meanwhile, Twitter finally took a very modest step to rein in Trump’s lies on their site, and Trump had a tantrum over it.
Many African nations have had more progressive – and, to date, more successful – approaches to slowing the spread of coronavirus than the U.S. has, including aggressive lockdowns and bans on international travel.
My colleague at the Athletic Marcus Thompson wrote about the murder of George Floyd and what it means to be in a rage all the time.
NPR reviewed federal records showing that the Trump administration killed a federal rule that would have protected health workers in case of a pandemic.
I found the maps on the COVID Policy Responses tracker site to be both useful and mesmerizing.
COVID-19 may become endemic, even with a vaccine, and we need to prepare for that possibility (but we aren’t).
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) pleaded with anti-mask twits to act reasonably and stop this stupid culture war.
A trio of Penn professors suggest three things we can do to persuade more people to wear masks.
The Washington Post‘s Max Boot writes about the three reasons why conspiracy theories are especially dangerous right now: social media, higher stakes, and a President who spreads them like they’re butter.
Also from the Post, a new study tries to explain why some kids are experiencing massive, Kawasaki disease-like reactions to COVID-19 – a cytokine storm.
Here are five things those of us not in underrepresented groups can do to help those who are in our workplaces.
Board games: Asmodee has issued a bunch of print-and-play expansions and modules for existing games you own, such as the one that lets you play 7 Wonders Duel as a solo game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, boardgames, coronavirus, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 23, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/23/20.

This week I had two related columns for subscribers to the Athletic – my 2010 redraft and my list of the 2010 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. A few people got particularly unpleasant over the redraft, which is quite unusual, mostly because they didn’t read the intro. I held another Klawchat on Thursday.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had Cubs’ superutilityman Ian Happ as a guest to talk about coffee, especially his collaboration with Connect Roasters to sell a specific blend of Guatemalan beans, with $3 from every bag going to COVID-19 relief charities. You can buy the coffee at coffeeforcovid.com, and you can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Spotify.

My second book, The Inside Game, made the New York Times‘ list of six recommended summer reads in the sports category, which is incredibly flattering. You can buy The Inside Game or Smart Baseball on bookshop.org or at any local stores if they’re opening back up near you.

I’ve been better about sending out my newsletter lately – feel free to sign up here to get weekly-ish musings and links to everything I write.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his outstanding coverage of the pandemic for The Atlantic with a sobering look at the “patchwork” pandemic, including the lack of a peak and rolling outbreaks still going on across the country. Note how many instances he documents of the federal government abdicating its responsibilities to state and local authorities, and his statement that Arizona reopened “while cases were still rising” – bad news for MLB teams with training sites there.
Former NHL player Akim Aliu’s essay “Hockey is Not For Everyone” is a damning look at racism in North American hockey.
Serious Eats explains the science behind sourdough starters.
Drowned out by some dubious news about a commercial COVID-19 vaccine venture was the news from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center about two studies showing another vaccine protected primates against the same virus.
Quarantine fatigue is real, but policymakers can learn from HIV-prevention efforts who realized abstinence-only efforts don’t work and instead focused on risk reduction strategies.
The shutdown has forced many LGBT kids to return home to families that have rejected them or parts of their identities.
Nearly half of the accounts on Twitter tweeting about the pandemic are bots, according to new research from Professor Kathleen Carley and others at Carnegie Mellon.
VICE looks at the disturbing AF world of COVID-19 “truther” groups on Facebook, which promulgate bullshit conspiracy theories and engender anti-lockdown protests.
BuzzFeed runs through some of the quacks and fake experts pushing pseudoscience and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, including Judy Mikovits, the disgraced researcher behind the bogus documentary “Plandemic.”
Some COVID-19 patients show severely depleted levels of T cells, which may be a clue to potential treatments.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about from the pandemic, it has interrupted inoculation efforts around the world to the point that measles and polio outbreaks are becoming more likely.
Iowa’s efforts at testing for COVID-19 and sharing that data with local officials appear to be a disaster.
Dr. Dannagal Young, a Professor at the University of Delaware, describes how her late husband’s brain tumor led her to chase numerous conspiracy theories in a quest to regain control of their lives.
White people’s “unreasonable fear,” which is itself unjustified, is killing black Americans, writes conservative journalist David French for TIME.
I knew this was likely coming, but I’m still so disappointed that Gen Con 2020 has been cancelled.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bread, coronavirus, hockey, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 16, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/20.

I posted my first mock draft of 2020 on Wednesday for subscribers to The Athletic, since we are now just 26 days away from the first night of the draft, which will only be five rounds. I wrote last week about the impact of the shorter draft on players and the sport as a whole, and also did a “what-if” lookback at the Padres’ decision to take Matt Bush over Justin Verlander in 2004. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, my first in ages.

My new book, The Inside Game, is now out and you can buy it everywhere fine books are sold, including here on bookshop.org; I’m donating my affiliate commissions from sales of my book through the site to my local food bank. The Eugene Register-Guard has a nice review of both The Inside Game and Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer John Shea, whose book 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, co-authored with Willie Mays, was released on Tuesday. I’m scheduled to have Cubs infielder/outfielder Ian Happ on the show this upcoming week to talk about his charitable endeavors with artisanal coffee. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

At Paste, I reviewed The Sherlock Files: Elementary Edition, a new card-based deduction game that played better than I expected, although the Sherlock character isn’t remotely involved in the game’s story or mechanics. My review of the excellent digital adaptation of Sagrada is up over at Ars Technica.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter on Friday night to subscribers; it’s free and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads … well, medium-reads first: The New Yorker has a look at the secret world of fungi, the botanical kingdom that goes way beyond the mushrooms you likely pictured when you read that.
ProPublica has a piece explaining how climate change is pushing up infectious disease rates, and making pandemics more likely in the future.
The Guardian looks at former US army sergeant’s abortive plot to overthrow Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground — an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex.” This from The Week’s Ryan Cooper, who also points out that the United States’ response to COVID-19 has been the worst of any developed nation and argues that the problem of conservative victimhood has made governing the U.S. impossible.
Some countries are easing restrictions on movement and gatherings, but other nations are restoring such isolation measures because of increases in new cases.
Get ready for a massive disinformation effort against a COVID-19 vaccine; it has started online even though such a vaccine doesn’t actually exist.
A commentary in CalMatters, authored by two professors in the University of California system, gives helpful tips for journalists asked to cover anti-vaccine or anti-lockdown “protests,” most of which are very small and may be astroturfed events.
For example, Creative Loafing Tampa revealed that a “reopen Florida” rally was, in fact, organized by an anti-vaccine group – which multiple mainstream Tampa media outlets failed to mention in their coverage of the protest.
Various states’ lockdown efforts have led anti-vaccine groups to team up with pro-Trump agitators in some of these protests, the strangest of bedfellows other than their shared denial of science.
Many red states are now seeing cases surge even as Trump claims (falsely) the pandemic is subsiding.
GOP-controlled legislatures are up to some shit while we’re distracted by the pandemic, such as Missouri Republicans attempting to gut gerrymandering reform.
An interesting topic for debate: Do works by authors accused of sexual harassment belong in the classroom? I think the answer at the university level would mostly be “yes,” but what about high school? Junior high school? Can you have a serious discussion about separating artist from art, or about the specifics of any accusations, with 16-year-olds or 12-year-olds or younger kids?
Tribune Publishing is furloughing workers and cutting pay to save about $550,000 just months after distributing $9 million in cash to shareholders.
Nik Sharma, author of the wonderful cookbook Season, writes in the Washington Post on how to make a flavorful vegetable stock that contains just five ingredients other than water.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent warns that, as in 2016, too many media members lend credence to bullshit conspiracies and outright lies from the Trump camp through weasel wording.
From a few weeks ago: McSweeney’s hits rather close to home with “Emails from My Children’s School Before 8:00 AM During the COVID-19 Crisis.”
Jess Grose’s latest parenting column for the New York Times, on dealing with home-schooling burnout, has a note at the end from a name familiar to board game fans.
Renegade Game Studios are holding a virtual game convention on June 5-7 where they’ll announce a bunch of upcoming new games as well.
Cranio Creations has a Kickstarter up for their planned reissue of the 2004 Wolfgang Kramer/Michael Kiesling game Maharaja, reimagined by Simone Luciani (Tzolk’in, Grand Austria Hotel).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Cooking, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, mushrooms, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 9, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/9/20.

I was back writing this week, with three new pieces for The Athletic: how MLB’s decision to cut the draft to five rounds hurts players and the sport; a look back at the 2004 draft and what might have happened had the Padres taken Justin Verlander at #1 overall; and a profile of Dodgers prospect Brandon Lewis, who changed his diet and conditioning habits to transform his body and become a fourth-round pick .

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now out, and you can buy it anywhere you buy books, like here via bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores directly or by providing logistics and delivery for them. I’m donating my proceeds from sales of my book through my affiliate account there to charity, sending $100 this week to the Food Bank of Delaware, our local food pantry.

WIRED excerpted part of the first chapter of The Inside Game, on anchoring bias and why it tells us to move to an automated strike zone; the link made Pocket’s Best Of list this week. I also spoke to Inside Science about the book.

I appeared on the Poscast this week with Joe Posnanski and Ellen Adair, which you can listen to on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher; and on the Inquiring Minds podcast, which you can get on Apple or Stitcher. On The Keith Law Show, I had Meghan Montemurro, our Phillies writer, on to talk about that team and the Athletic’s ongoing OOTP simulation of the 2020 season; you can listen on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter this week to subscribers – it’s free, and easy to sign up, and no one has ever complained that I send it too often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Donald Trump has long claimed he was a top high school baseball player who was scouted by a couple of MLB teams. Leander Schaerlaeckens looked into this at length for Slate, and found the answer is “not bloody likely.” The piece includes a quote from me in reaction to hearing some of the stats Schaerlaeckens was able to unearth.
ExplainCOVID.org is a new site, launched by Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown, and Galit Alter, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, designed to answer common questions about the virus, how to protect yourself, and what you should (or shouldn’t) believe in the news.
The LA Times ran with a story last week about how SARS-CoV-2 had already mutated into a new, more dangerous strain … but that report was wildly premature, says Ed Yong, author of We Contain Multitudes and an essential writer on anything COVID-19 right now.
Coronavirus cases continue to spike in Arizona, but the state is already reopening as if everything were fine. This could have a huge impact on MLB’s schedule – it’s hard to imagine the season restarting if Arizona is in an unplayable state.
This is after the state government in Arizona told university researchers to stop modeling COVID-19 outcomes and limited the researchers’ access to data, presumably because the models showed the Arizona government to be making reckless policy decisions that will lead to more deaths and serious illnesses.
If you’re pushing to reopen the economy, you probably don’t need or care about child care.
Texas is also reopening, too soon, and the governor even admitted in a private phone call that the reopening will lead to a new surge in cases. They don’t care how many people die, as long as they’re okay financially.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to use COVID-19 to recruit more people to their delusional cause.
Why do Republicans keep comparing COVID-19 public health policies to the Nazis? Pennsylvania State Rep. Chris Dush (R) did it, and now multiple Ohio legislators have done the same.
A Native American health center in Seattle asked the federal government for COVID-19 medical supplies. The Trump Administration sent them body bags.
Mosquitos infected with the fungal parasite Microsporidia MB may have total immunity to the genus of parasites that causes malaria, Plasmodium, notably P. Falciparum, which is the most common and lethal agent of transmission. It’s an early study but notable in that Microsporidia MB has many biological and ‘lifestyle’ similarities to Wolbachia, a gram-negative bacterium that protects mosquitos from many viruses and has potential to limit their ability to spread malarial agents as well.
Six people were killed in March 2019 when a flawed pedestrian bridge built by FIU in Sweetwater, Florida, collapsed just five days after it had been raised. FIU just announced plans to replace it, although nobody has actually been held accountable for what appear to be multiple failures in the design and construction process last time around.
I felt personally attacked by this (parody) column called “No One Wants to Play Your Weird German Game About Trains, Dude.” Russian Railroads is a fine game and I don’t care what you say.
Days of Wonder announced Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, the third mini-TtR game after New York and London.
Two Kickstarters of note: High Noon, a tactical card game that promises to be easy to learn but takes 1-2 hours to play, already passed its goal this week; while the narrative board game Sea of Legends funded in just six hours after launching the same day.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, science, stick to baseball

→ May 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

Jeremy Schaap’s The Sporting Life: ESPN Podcenter, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Inquiring Minds: Apple; Stitcher
Wharton Moneyball: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Sox Machine: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
KPCC Airtalk: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher (around the 93:00 mark)

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bookstores, coronavirus, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, michigan, restaurants, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ April 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/25/20.

The Inside Game is out! You can buy the physical book on Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or get the Kindle version on amazon. (Some of my biggest fans have already left one-star reviews!) Audible named it one of their top picks in History/Nonfiction for the spring of 2020 too.

To promote the book, I did a live ‘virtual’ bookstore event with help from Nats reliever and voracious reader Sean Doolittle, which you can watch if you registered and bought the book through Politics and Prose. I also appeared on several podcasts:

Grierson & Leitch: Conversations (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Baseball by the Book (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Birds All Day (Athletic, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Creative Nonfiction (Apple, Stitcher)
The Good Phight’s Hittin’ Season (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)

There are also some very positive reviews for The Inside Game out already on Throneberry Fields, Farther Off the Wall, and Porchlight Books. It also made a Wall Street Journal roundup of three recommended baseball books for the spring and was recommended by Inside Hook.

I did a Q&A at the Athletic on Thursday, and part two of my diptych on scouting, covering pitcher grades, with Eno Sarris is also up for subscribers. The Athletic ran an excerpt from The Inside Game on base-rate neglect and why teams draft too many high school pitchers in the first round.

My own podcast this week featured Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, talking about COVID-19 and baseball fandom. You can listen to it on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

I did send out a new edition of my newsletter last week, and I’ll be back on it more often now, I think; you can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

Those of us in the United States are living in a failed state.
This editorial on Eater London explains how restaurants have to adapt to survive what could be another year and a half of “corona time,” with two important takeaways for us: Doing what you can to support restaurants still operating during the shutdown is critical to their survival, and we are not going to see fans in ballparks any time soon.
Scientists are tired of explaining that COVID-19 was not made in a Chinese lab.
Are you having stranger dreams during the pandemic than you usually would? National Geographic looks at reasons why that is happening to so many of us.
Governors talking about reopening their states – or actually doing it, in the case of Georgia – are being way too cavalier, as the pandemic is not under control yet, according to this New York Times editorial by Professor Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Nationalist groups are using COVID-19 to push their agendas to reduce civil liberties, consolidate power, and spread hate and distrust of marginalized populations.
Why did Nikola Motor, whose CEO just bought a $32 million ranch, get a $4 million payout from the COVID-19 small business fund?
Those Facebook groups pushing anti-lockdown protests are largely just astroturfing by the Dorr brothers, a family of conservative pro-gun activists whom Republican lawmakers have called “scam artists.”
Are COVID-19 mortality rates higher than they need to be because so many developed nations’ citizens are fundamentally unhealthy?
The New York Times looked athow children’s shows are responding to kids’ needs during the shutdown, such as Sesame Street’s episode with a virtual playdate for Elmo and various real and Muppet friends. (I especially enjoyed Cookie Monster’s appearance.)
A few German citizens are protesting lockdown measures under the guise of liberty or some nonsense.
Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) failed to disclose stock sales in 2019 while she was serving in Congress, violating federal law.
Board game news: Renegade is now taking pre-orders for Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the West Kingdom trilogy, for delivery at Gen Con (if the convention takes place).
I don’t know much about the upcoming game Sea of Legends other than that it’s narrative-based and looks like it has a great theme.
Boardgamegeek’s annual Golden Geek Awards balloting has now opened. I do wonder if Wingspan will suffer any backlash to its crossover success in the voting. I’d vote for it for Game of the Year, Innovative Game, Strategy Game, and Family Game of the Year; Watergate for two-player game of the year; and either Res Arcana or Point Salad for Card Game; plus Evolution for best app.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, podcasts, stick to baseball

→ April 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/18/20.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out in three days! You can buy it wherever you can buy books right now, but allow me to recommend bookshop.org, which sources books from independent bookstores or just gives some of their proceeds from direct sales to indie stores.

For The Athletic subscribers this week, Eno Sarris and I examined the five tools for position players from both scouting and analytical perspectives. There will be another piece for pitchers, which I hope to get done this week (I think Eno’s well ahead of me for his part). On my own podcast, I spoke with former Angels scouting director Eddie Bane about Mike Trout, all-time draft busts Bill Bene and Kiki Jones, and more. You can subscribe here on Apple and Spotify.

On the board game front, I reviewed Oceans, the new standalone sequel to the game Evolution, over at Paste this week. For Vulture, I looked at pandemic-themed games, including the one by that name, with thoughts on why diseases are such a popular theme.

I did a virtual bookstore event with Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar on Thursday, which you can watch here if you missed it. I’ll do another such event on Friday, April 24th, with Sean Doolittle via DC’s Politics & Prose; you can sign up by buying a copy of The Inside Game here.

I spoke to Ryan Phillips of The Big Lead about The Inside Game and my move to the Athletic, among other topics, appeared on the Sports Information Solutions podcast with my former ESPN colleague Mark Simon to talk about the book, and talked about boardgames during quarantine on the Just Not Sports podcast.

And now the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED piece on the neurological decline of a brilliant young coder is devastating and kind of hopeless, yet so well-written.
John Horton Conway died this week of complications from COVID-19; this Guardian profile of the master mathematician from 2015 gives you a sense of his works and his persona. Conway invented the zero-player game The Game of Life, which proceeds according to fixed rules from whatever starting position you create. It’s famous in mathematical and computer science circles, at least.
The economic pain from the pandemic will be unfairly distributed. This piece from the New Yorker makes some strong points, although there’s a bit of a survivorship bias angle to the conversations with an investor who claims he saw the pandemic coming and profited heavily from investments around it.
Republicans are trying to use the pandemic as cover to remove thousands of voters from the registration rolls, with Wisconsin a prominent example of how they’re targeting voters of color too.
Anti-vaxxers are already spreading disinformation about COVID-19 and preparing to fight vaccinations if and when a vaccine is developed for it – but there are also signs that some vaccine hesitant people are reconsidering their views.
Dr. Grace Farris, the chief of medicine at Mount Sinai West in New York and author of some very clever cartoons on her Instagram account @coupdegracefarris, wrote a bittersweet piece in the New York Times about how she hasn’t seen her kids in four weeks to try to keep them away from the coronavirus while she’s working at the hospital.
No matter what Fox News tells you, there is no evidence that COVID-19 came out of a laboratory in China or anywhere else.
South Dakota’s Republican governor is one of five who’ve resisted issuing stay-at-home orders, and now the state has one of the nation’s worst hotspots for COVID-19.
Ohio Republicans are trying to get the state’s governor, Mike DeWine (R), to reopen the state’s economy. This is becoming a trend across the Midwest and south, despite public health experts’ recommendations that the states remain closed.
And we may not be able to reopen at all until we start testing a lot more people – especially those who aren’t visibly sick.
An email chain involving experts inside and outside the government shows just how far behind the curve Trump and even the CDC were in preparing for the pandemic here.
Why did a company with no employees and no history of producing medical equipment get a $55 million contract to make N95 masks for the federal government?
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has had to arrange covert shipments of protective masks from China to avoid the federal government seizing them, since the feds haven’t provided enough masks to the state in the first place.
Molly Roberts, writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems the Tara Reade allegations pose for Democrats looking to support Joe Biden (or who simply want to defeat Trump in November).
Bill Simmons bought a $16 million home outside L.A., and Variety reported on it but took the story down within hours.
There’s a GoFundMe open to support Oakland’s Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest black-owned independent bookstore.
CMON’s Kickstarter for Ankh: Gods of Egypt, the newest game from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun), has already crossed $1.25 million.
Jupiter Disco, a Brooklyn cocktail bar owned by a friend of my partner, has a Kickstarter out (already funded) for a new cocktail zine called PRESERVATION! to help keep the bar afloat during the shutdown.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, bookstores, coronavirus, links, longreads, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

→ April 11, 2020
→ By keith

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 21^st 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…

Longreads: The New Yorker looks at how cervical cancer is on the rise in the developing nation of Alabama, where sex education and Medicare/Medicaid coverage both lag behind most other states.
ProPublica finds that white nationalist authors have a haven on Amazon’s self-publishing platform for their racist and anti-Semitic works.
It’s hardly worth calling it a dilemma. If the President is going to lie and equivocate when talking to the public about COVID-19, the press should not give him a platform to do so. Don’t cover his ‘speeches’ when they contain disinformation or outright bullshit (like his touting of hydroxychloroquine or claims that the virus has ‘outsmarted’ antibiotics).
Scientific American looks at what developing antibodies to COVID-19 might actually mean – maybe two years of immunity, but perhaps less, and almost certainly not lifelong immunity as with some other, unrelated viruses.
“A fiasco of incredible proportions:” Epidemiologists tell The Guardian how Trump abdicated his responsibilities as President, dithering for six weeks over testing, a failure that will lead to thousands of needless deaths. Compare the U.S. debacle to the New Zealand government’s swift, decisive actions to shut the country down, thus far avoiding any significant outbreak of the virus.
Daniel Kahneman spoke to the New Yorker about why the scope of the pandemic is so hard for humans to grasp.
The Federalist – funded by nobody knows who, although their talking points often mirror those of Koch-funded entities – has engaged in dangerous coronavirus trutherism throughout the pandemic.
Clay Travis, a football/gambling writer turned meninist conservative heel, has also become a COVID-19 denialist – apparently because doing so is quite profitable.
Sean Hannity is trying to paint Trump as some sort of heroic leader – but his own statements serve as an indictment of Trump’s botching of the crisis, including multiple moves to undercut his own people.
Kansas Republicans overturned the Governor’s order to limit religious gatherings to no more than ten people, so that more people can get sick and die this Easter.
East Asian countries that successfully stopped the first wave of COVID-19 infections have seen new cases pop up as people brought the virus back in from outside countries – a huge warning for the U.S. not to let our guard down whenever we finally do get to a point where we might reopen things.
Here’s the apology Donald Trump should issue to the American public for his failure to act early enough to slow the pandemic and for his promulgation of false or misleading information as it has spread. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to happen.
Helen Rosner explores the ethics of ordering take-out during the pandemic … and concludes that it’s okay to do so, but if you do you should order directly from the restaurant.
“If there were ever a time to take a few extra moments to order through your local bookstore, it’s now.” Dave Eggers writes for McSweeney’s about the need to save local bookstores.
Afar.com listed 25 independent bookstores in the U.S. that they love. I’d add Phoenix/Tempe’s Changing Hands and D.C.’s Politics and Prose as well.
Ars Technica found that 80% of Steam games earn under $5000 in their first two weeks – which certainly doesn’t bode well for developers’ long-term business outlooks.
The Athletic’s Nando di Fino remembers Glen Waggoner ($), one of the original members of the first Rotisserie Baseball League and the author of several of the books that first described the game.
Finally, if you’re still confused about the role that our Administration played in making the pandemic more severe in the U.S. than in any other country, well:

Other countries responded quickly and aggressively to combat the spread of coronavirus.

Trump failed to do the same—and now the U.S. has the most cases in the world. pic.twitter.com/JpYn0okt2j
— CAP Action (@CAPAction) April 9, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, bookstores, coronavirus, fantasy sports, links, racism, stick to baseball, video games

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