football

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ October 22, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/22/22.

My second and much longer notebook on guys I saw in the Arizona Fall League went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Craig Calcaterra, writer of the excellent Cup of Coffee newsletter and author of the book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter and maybe I’ll send another edition out this week. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

My friend and former colleague at ESPN Sarah Langs announced a few weeks ago on Twitter that she has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mandy Bell of MLB.com set up a GoFundMe for Sarah, if you’d like to join me in contributing.

And now, the links…

Climate change could cause the collapse of Antarctica’s ice shelves even sooner than forecasted, in case you were feeling too good about anything this week.
Two stories of women who nearly died because anti-abortion laws denied them access to medical care, one in Texas who suffered a miscarriage and had to wait so long she developed sepsis before doctors would intervene, and one in Missouri whose own state Senator referred her to an anti-abortion clinic. The latter woman had to go to Illinois to get medical care to save her life.
Parker Molloy wrote about how the English press, buoyed by transphobic parents, bullied a schoolteacher who came out as trans into suicide. One of the main writers who attacked Lucy Meadows was Richard Littlejohn, who is still alive and writing twice a week for the Daily Mail, which ignored calls to fire him for his role.
WIRED has an excerpt from Rebecca Gilbin and Cory Doctorow’s new book Chokepoint Capitalism on how streaming services control what we hear and what music gets made, abrogating the promise that the technology would democratize music.
A Supreme Court case around copyright law, fair use, and an Andy Warhol piece may permanently alter the landscape of American art.
Florida’s state Surgeon General issued new guidance around COVID vaccines based on research that produced howls of derisive laughter from actual experts. Here’s one takedown of its many, many flaws. Charles Pierce put it well when he wrote that Florida will just keep “asking questions” until it gets the answer it wants ($).
Dr. Mehmet Oz, currently running for Senate, met a gun-violence victim at a campaign stop, but failed to disclose that she works for him and has received over $2100 from the campaign. The Associated Press reported on the encounter without noting the conflict. Do your fucking jobs, AP.
While on TV, Dr. Oz also promoted Joseph Mercola, long one of the biggest purveyors of anti-vaccine and other forms of medical misinformation online. Mercola has been selling supplements by denigrating evidence-based treatments since at least the 1990s, when I first came across his site’s claims that aspartame caused multiple sclerosis and all sorts of other health problems that it doesn’t cause at all.
Oz’s opponent, John Fetterman, accused the super PAC Democratic Coalition, run by Scott Dworkin, of misleading donors into thinking their money is going to support candidates like him.
Will Leitch wrote about the abysmal media response to Tua Tagovalioa’s second head injury in five days.
Slate’s Evan Urquhart defended Jon Stewart’s interview with and humiliation of Arkansas’s bigoted Attorney General, where he makes it clear she’s either ignorant of the facts on the issue of gender affirming care or just denying them.
How did social media content moderation become such an issue in the culture war?
This is sort of old news by now, but if you haven’t heard the racist comments by members of the Los Angeles City Council, you should check it out. Only one of the three people making those comments, Nury Martinez, has resigned, as calls mount for the other two to do the same.
Wildfire smoke doesn’t just pollute the air, but it can carry bacteria and fungal spores across long distances, thus potentially expanding the area where Valley fever and other diseases of rural/desert areas into more population regions.
Research published in Polymers showed microplastics in human breast milk.
Many artists are pushing for more student debt relief, as the $10,000 offered is a “drop in the bucket” compared to their debt loads.
An Oklahoma teacher encouraged students to call a special-needs student in the class the f-slur. The school district dragged its feet, so the state is investigating while many parents are calling for the teacher’s removal. This is the lowest bar, really.
Is hip-hop’s dominance in American popular music finally slipping? Billboard spoke to industry executives who believe it is, and I would point to the lack of innovation in the space as a reason – and streaming may be the cause, as seen above.
A terrorist group calling itself a branch of ISIS is attacking villages in northern Mozambique, killing men and raping women, while threatening one of the most important natural gas supply lines in Africa.
Amidst news of ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, the Economist called for sanctions against Eritrean dictator Issaias Afwerki ($), calling him “equally malign” as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Randy Kaufman, running for the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board and who said he wanted to “protect our children from the progressive left,” suspended his campaign after he was arrested for masturbating in his car near a preschool. Always be wary of those who doth protest too much.
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) refused to say whether she would accept the election results if she loses.
Republicans in Congress have introduced a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit schools, libraries, and other institutions that receive federal money from teaching children about, well, anything related to sex, gender, gender identity, and so on, and would allow parents to sue if they did. The Human Rights Campaign has denounced it. The end result of bills and laws like this is more youth suicides, and if that’s your goal, we’re not going to agree.
George M. Johnson wrote about his experiences seeing his book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir of growing up Black and queer in America, become the second-most banned book in the country.
Michigan Republicans introduced an anti-trans bill that would jail parents for life if they sought gender-affirming care for their kids. This is the totalitarian playbook: demonize a small, vulnerable minority to rally your adherents and get them to the polls.
Florida Times-Union columnist called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ closed-door selection of Sen. Ben Sasse, both Republicans, as the new President of the University of Florida, the “crowning achievement of the DeSantis-led effort to defile” the college, questioning Sasse’s qualifications and his intentions.
A Texas sheriff certified that the nearly 50 migrants DeSantis trafficked to Massachusetts are “crime victims,” creating the possibility they could receive special visas to stay in the U.S. Unintended consequences FTW!
In the wake of Hurricane Ian, DeSantis relaxed voting restrictions in three heavily Republican counties, but not in heavily Democratic Orange County.
Police body camera footage shows officers arresting people for so-called voter fraud, as DeSantis proudly announced a sweep and emphasized the criminal records of the arrestees, who were overwhelmingly Black.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist James Causey called Sen. Ron Johnson’s comment that his opponent this year, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D), has “turned on America” and “finds America awful” a “cheap shot,” saying that you can love America and still criticize it. Johnson’s campaign has also run ads that darkened Barnes’s skin tone and claimed he’ll be soft on crime.
South Carolina’s medical licensing board has yet to discipline any physicians for spreading misinformation on COVID-19 or the vaccines that help prevent it, apparently for fear of backlash from the conservatives who run the state government.
Marin County in northern California was once a haven for highly educated anti-vaxxer parents. COVID-19 vaccines changed that, and the county now has one of the highest uptake rates in the country at 91%.
Jazz Chisholm was impressive in his brief stint on MLB Network’s studio coverage of the first round of the playoffs.
A new property, the Hotel Lyra, is trying to revive a nearly-abandoned town in Croatia called Licko Petrovo Selo. The town, which is near the country’s scenic Plitvice Lakes National Park, was destroyed during World War II, rebuilt by the Yugoslav government, and then heavily damaged during the Balkan wars, with most of the population, especially its Serbs, driven out.
The white nationalist teenager who opened fire outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia had posted anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ+, and white replacement views on Twitter and 4chan. The Anti-Defamation League says in response that Twitter and similar sites don’t do enough to moderate hate speech.
Board game news: Rock Manor Games, run by my friend Mike Gnade, has a Kickstarter up for its new role-playing game The Few and the Cursed.
BoardGameTables, who make tables for board games (!) and have also published titles like On Tour and Sequoia, have a Kickstarter up for three small-box games, including Pollen, a re-theming of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: The Card Game.
Rising Waters, the historical co-op game about the 1927 Mississippi Flood and the racial disparities it exposed, just funded in the last few days, with about a week and a half to go in its Kickstarter.
Race to the Raft, a cooperative game from Isle of Cats designer Frank West, is already about 8x funded on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, arizona, arkansas, art, baseball, board game news, california, climate change, croatia, florida, football, frauds, hip-hop, lgbt rights, links, los angeles, missouri, Music, oklahoma, pennsylvania, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

→ May 22, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of 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…

Longreads first: A new “war on terror” is the wrong approach to fighting domestic terrorism, but would just further curtail our civil liberties withot making us any safer.
A politically connected testing lab earned contract after contract for COVID testing in Nevada, but its tests didn’t work.
In an extra from her memoir, Selma Blair talks about first learning she had multiple sclerosis.
Miami’s mayor is a crypto advocate, and got the city involved with one such scheme – and the coin’s value has since dropped 95%. The article doesn’t even mention the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining, which would seem especially important to a city like Miami.
Texas’s General Land Officer, led by Commissioner George P. Bush, diverted federal hurricane relief funds away from coastal communities to inland ones that are whiter and more likely to vote Republican.
The New York Times ran a story commemorating the 50^th anniversary of Dr. John Fryer’s speech to the American Psychiatric Association, where he revealed he was gay, doing so while wearing a disguise and without revealing his real name. The speech led to the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The excellent documentary Cured covers this story at greater length.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong points out that modest hospitalization numbers don’t tell the whole story about how much stress COVID-19 has put on our health care system.
Why are there gigantic blobs of molten rock and water in the Earth’s lower mantle?
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has the inside story on how the Rams’ ownership worked the NFL to secure the team’s move back to Los Angeles.
Pennsylvania Republicans who helped pass a mail-in voting law are now trying to get it thrown out.
The deaths of two Ohio State students due to fake Adderall that contained fentanyl gave rise, once again, to the myth that there’s fentanyl-laced cannabis in the wild.
Police in Highland Park, Michigan, seized a privately-owned building on dubious grounds, and then demanded that the owners buy the department two new police cars for its return. The department did give the building back to its owners without the ransom, but what are the consequences for the officials involved in this extortion?
Now right-wing politicians and media figures are targeting comedians who mock them, sending a torrent of threats and abuse their way.
A Twitter exec posted some thoughts on how much spam there actually is on the site, and what the company is doing to combat it.
The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine held its annual convention in New Orleans, and they posted (and deleted) a tweet from there showing members unmasked at an indoor concert.
A couple of right-wing nutjobs who also happen to hold office in the Virginia Beach area are suing Barnes and Noble to get specific LGBTQ+ books removed. I’m sure the party of laissez-faire capitalism will put a stop to its own people doing this any minute now!
These ridiculous laws in the American South that prohibit teachers from discussing racism are now making it very difficult for them to discuss the white nationalist who shot up a grocery store in a majority-Black Buffalo neighborhood.
The assaults on voting rights and abortion rights are inextricably linked, writes Brandon Tensley at CNN. It’s clear that the theocratic minority is more than happy to subvert the will of the majority if it suits their superstitious purposes.
The highly polarized public debate over abortion does not accurately reflect the nuanced views of the public, writes Christine Emba at the Washington Post.
Board game news: I didn’t know that a new version of Can’t Stop!, Sid Sackson’s addictive push-your-luck game, had come out from Eagle-Gryphon.
I backed the campaign for a new solitaire game called Resist!, based on the rebels who fought the fascist regime in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, football, health, links, longreads, nevada, police, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas

→ November 28, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/28/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic – one on the Puerto Rican Winter League, and how MLB needs to support the league more; and one on the Starling Marte, Mark Canha, and Steven Matz signings.

My guest this week on the Keith Law Show was Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You can subscribe and listen on iTunes and Spotify.

I appeared on the Five Games for Doomsday podcast, talking mostly about boardgames – my favorites, my interest in them, writing about games and about baseball, and more.

I’ll send out a new edition of my free email newsletter Monday or Tuesday this week. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: An investigation by local TV channel 11-WXIA in Atlanta revealed corruption and sexual harassment among Johns Creek police officers, leading to the termination of three of the department’s officers – although others involved haven’t been sanctioned and remain on the force.
This seems especially vile, preying on truly vulnerable people: scammers are using fake job ads to defraud would-be applicants.
Over 200 American academics, researchers in history and political science in related fields, signed an open letter in support of the Freedom to Vote Act.
Two conservative commentators quit lucrative roles at Fox News in protest of Tucker Carlson’s program that pushed false narratives and outright misinformation about the January 6^th insurrection. One of them, Jonah Goldberg, explained his decision in an editorial for the L.A. Times.
The QAnon JFK Cult in Dallas is tearing families apart. Did you know “Q” hasn’t posted in a year? Yet the hoax’s adherents still can’t let it go. The cognitive dissonance is strong with them.
The Kenosha protests were not violent or deadly until Kyle Rittenhouse showed up. Media coverage of his acquittal is revising history.
One of the co-creators of the game Oregon Trail says he never made any money off the game, but that was never his goal anyway.
The USFL is coming back! I’ll believe it when we get the first kickoff, but I’ll wash my Tampa Bay Bandits jersey just in case.
An epidemiologist wrote a lengthy overview of what the omicron variant of COVID-19 might mean. Dr. Peter Hotez says it’s a concern, but “the sky isn’t falling.” Our bodies aren’t helpless against new variants, though. The emergence of new variants is an inevitable outcome of rich countries hoarding vaccines (or destroying them).
COVID denialists like to say that Japan used ivermectin to stop the virus’s spread there. They are wrong.
It’s better than nothing, I guess: A St. Louis cop who assaulted an undercover colleague posing as a protestor was sentenced to a year in jail.
The superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in Florida wrote an op ed in the Washington Post saying that the state’s new ban on any future mask mandates or quarantines robs schools of critical tools to fight the virus and keep kids in school. DeSantis’s pandering is going to kill people.
South Carolina Republicans are trying to cancel tenure, replacing it with five-year contracts and requiring at least a 2/2 course load, which will go a long way towards killing research at universities there.
Civil Liberties International added the United States to its list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time.
A Tory MP in the UK claims that having a woman play the main character in Doctor Who is hurting boys by removing a role model for them, and contributing to young boys turning to crime, never mind that the Doctor is a genderless alien who takes human form. He obviously doesn’t even watch the show, since the main character is not named “Doctor Who.”
Jared Leto is unrecognizable in House of Gucci under prosthetics and a bald cap, part of a growing trend toward physical verisimilitude on screen. Is that a good thing for actors or viewers?
A new paper published in Nature describes superionic ice, a newly-discovered phase of water that might resemble what’s found deep inside outer planets like Neptune.
A “good guy with a gun” took down a mass shooter, and then was shot and killed by a cop who mistook him for the bad guy. That cop will not face charges.
There will also be no charges for the man who “accidentally discharged” his gun and killed a 10-year-old boy the other day.
Ark Nova, an upcoming heavy game from Capstone, is available for pre-order. The description and images make me think it’s at least inspired by Wingspan but more complex.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, democracy, football, frauds, guns, links, longreads, physics, south carolina, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ October 19, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/18/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I had a long piece covering all the players I saw in the Arizona Fall League plus some other notes from instructs and games I saw in September. I held a Klawchat on Thursday and Periscope on Friday.

Over at Ars Technica, I ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride maps available on tabletop. I also reviewed the new strategy game Tapestry, from the designer of Scythe and Charterstone, over at Paste.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out from HarperCollins on April 21st, 2020. You can pre-order it now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Mina Kimes wrote about Houston Texans receiver DeAndre Hopkins and his mother’s survival story; she was disfigured and blinded by one of her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriends, who attacked her with acid and bleach.
The Guardian looks at the resurgence of traditional bread-baking methods in the UK, starting with naturally bred wheat strains and milling that retains more of the wheat’s germ and flavor characteristics. I don’t know that I agree with the author’s speculations on “gluten sensitivity,” but longer fermentations do make more nutrients in wheat available to our bodies.
Host to the 2022 World Cup, Qatar is one of the fastest-warming areas of the world outside of the poles, but the country’s solution to the rising temperatures is to air-condition open-air spaces, contributing further to emissions that warm the planet. There are some positive lessons here from changes to architectural designs and new materials for buildings and roads, but the overall message is not positive. And what happens in Qatar is a harbinger for what may happen in Arizona.
The Atlantic looks at the enduring appeal of children’s book author Sandra Boynton. My favorite of her books – one I’ve given many times as a gift – is Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs!, mostly because of one specific panel.
Eric Asimov of the New York Times lists five ways climate change is already altering the global wine industry. Many of these same factors will also apply to other highly climate-sensitive crops like coffee and cacao as well.
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports says LeBron James whiffed with his ‘stick to sports’ comments on Daryl Morey. Longtime NBA player Etan Thomas uses James’ comments to talk about the hypocrisy of the player’s critics, nearly all of whom are right-wing pundits exploiting James’ fame to advance their own views.
Warriors forward Draymond Green writes in the Washington Post that college athletes should be allowed to profit from their own names and images, calling the NCAA a “dictatorship” and arguing that players might stay in college longer if they didn’t have to go pro to earn money.
The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Craig Laban posted his ranking of the top 25 restaurants in the Philly area for 2019. I do need to update my own list; I’ve been to 9 of his 25, and I think he’s particularly remiss in omitting High Street on Market and The Love. I’m also kind of over seeing $200+ prix fixe places on these lists. So few readers can go there; the food may be wonderful, but if only a sliver of the 1% can try it, I’m not sure who is served by the restaurant’s inclusion on such a list.
Jay Greeson wrote a gross, misogynistic tweet that trashed Daniel Hudson for leaving the Nationals to attend the birth of his third child; he was excoriated, and worse, for the comment. I can’t excuse the original statement but Greeson wrote a thoughtful mea culpa about his poor judgment.
An Arizona policy adviser won her lawsuit alleging sex and race discrimination while she worked for state Senate Democrats, including lower pay based on her sex and unlawful termination. She’ll get $353,000 in back pay and damages, and will also get her job back. The main culprit, according to her lawsuit, is now the state’s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs.
It appears that Germany denied visas to board game industry visitors from Iran who wanted to attend SPIEL 2019, the world’s largest board game convention and trade show, held every October in Essen.
Concerns about the addictive and deleterious nature of games go back thousands of years, from the Buddha to Fiorello LaGuardia to modern handwringers fretting over video games.
The New Yorker speaks to Anthony Veneziale, a member of hip-hop improv collective Freestyle Love Supreme about freestyling and what it might tell us about our brains and creativity. FLS is probably better known for some of its other members, like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs.
A small Iowa newspaper reported on a local police officer’s inappropriate relationships with multiple girls aged 16 or 17, leading to the officer’s termination. He sued the paper and lost, but the paper’s costs to defend itself were substantial, so someone at the paper set up a GoFundMe to offset the expenses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: basketball, bread, climate change, food science, football, links, longreads, stick to baseball

→ April 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/21/18.

My one Insider post from this week is my ranking of the top 50 draft prospects for this June’s MLB draft, a strong year without a lot of clarity up top after #1 overall prospect Casey Mize.

Here on the dish, I ranked all 90 Pulitzer Prize winners in the Fiction/Novel category in advance of Monday’s announcement of this year’s winners. I’ve now read the newest entry, Less, and will update the ranking next week.

I have a new event to announce: on July 14th, the day before this year’s MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at Politics & Prose, a Washington, DC, independent bookstore that is legendary for its author appearances. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball, which is now out in paperback.

And now, the links…

SI‘s Greg Bishop tracked down former NFL QB Jake Locker, who opens up about why he retired in 2015. Locker was a first-round talent in baseball, too, but he says in this piece he never had the same passion for it that he had for football.
Liberty University, run by extreme right-wing conservative Jerry Falwell, Jr., has built a $1 billion empire by aggressively recruiting students for its online degree programs, according to this expose from ProPublica and the NY Times.
ProPublica also released a long investigative piece on how waste from burning coal has contaminated drinking water in nearby communities. The current Administration is pushing increased reliance on coal and rolling back environmental regulations on its use.
Lindsay Gibbs looks at the continuing institutional failures at Michigan State in the wake of the school’s two-decade refusal to consider complaints about Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of patients on campus. MSU continues to deny any wrongdoing in the mishandling (or non-handling) of investigations into Nassar, even as one of his victims revealed that now interim MSU President John Engler tried to bribe her into staying silent.
New York ran a very long Q&A with many architects of the modern Internet, who then “apologize” for the way the stuff they built has been used to ruin everything.
Gizmodo’s John Cook argues that journalists should not be cheering the Sean Hannity-Michael Cohen revelation, as it’s deleterious to the operation of the free press. Hannity, meanwhile, has been busy promoting a company in which he holds an ownership stake, disguised by the use of a shell company, and may have violated federal securities laws.
Twitter accounts of questionable origin are pushing fake conspiracy theories around Syria, such as claiming the Assad regime didn’t use chemical weapons on its own people and calling it a ‘false flag’ operation.
Several Sandy Hook parents are suing Alex Jones & InfoWars for defamation in response to his repeated claims that the massacre was staged.
Surprising nobody, FiveThirtyEight reported that umpire calls in extra innings are biased towards ending the games. I wouldn’t really mind this if, say, the strike zone changed equally for both teams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The Marlins, having already scammed Florida taxpayers for a new stadium, are now trying to dodge a lawsuit from the state over profits from the recent sale of the team, are claiming they’re actually based in the British Virgin Islands … but Marlins Man found their ‘office’ there is just a PO box.
Prince’s estate released an early recording of his song “Nothing Compares 2 U,”, which, of course, later became a global hit for Sinead O’Connor.
Commencement Day speakers at my alma mater have tended toward the famous and dreary, but this year’s class will get a treat: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of several novels, including the superb Half of a Yellow Sun.
Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be about to elect a white supremacist to its school board. Be better, North Dakota.
Chef and charcutier Matt Hinckley writes for Food & Wine about getting sober after years of drinking, which he had justified as part of his job working in busy restaurant kitchens and brewing/distilling at home.
A junk study in a predatory journal pushes, again, the bullshit claim that vaccines cause autism, as Skeptical Raptor breaks down on his site.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional an Indiana law restricting abortion rights. The law would have prohibited abortions based on potential disabilities in the fetus – so, if genetic testing found that the fetus had Tay-Sachs disorder, the woman would not have been able to abort the pregnancy even though infantile Tay-Sachs kills most victims before age 4.
Wisconsin’s Attorney General told a radio host last week that Trump carried the state because of its voter ID law, which primarily disenfranchised voters in heavily Democratic areas.
Eagle-Gryphon announced a Kickstarter for Fleet! The Dice Game, a spinoff of their popular 2012 game Fleet! (which I have not played)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, football, harvard, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ March 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/17.

I had one piece for Insiders this week, covering four players who look different in the early going this spring – Jason Heyward, Tyler Glasnow, Taijuan Walker, and Tim Anderson – although it’s not all positive news. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book now has two positive reviews out, one from Kirkus Reviews and one from Publishers Weekly.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Ryan Leaf might be the biggest bust in NFL draft history, but he’s made a second act for himself after serving a prison term, and told the LA Times his story in his own words.
An ophthalmologist in Oklahoma posted an anti-vaccine screed to his Facebook page, but SkepticalRaptor is here to dissect and debunk this bullshit. If you live in Oklahoma, contact the state medical licensing board and ask them to investigate the doctor, James Meehan (license #21256), for posting these dangerous, false claims, which happen to be outside of any area of medicine for which he’s licensed.
A reader sent along this National Geographic article on science’s evolving understanding of sex, gender, and identity. It led me into a series of clicks and searches that got me to this 2014 piece on sex ‘testing’ by the IOC, arguing that if you say you’re a woman, that should be enough for athletics officials.
Another week, another article on why we fall for fake news, this one giving some cognitive-science explanations.
Georgia Republicans are trying to further gerrymander the state to protect their majority. Full disclosure: I have donated to the campaign of Democrat Jon Ossoff, who is running in the April 18th special election to fill GA-6, the House seat vacated by new HHS Secretary Tom Price.
Former (and maybe still?) Trump advisor Roger Stone went on a tirade of sexist, harassing tweets, but Twitter never suspended or deleted his account, so their claims about clamping down on this kind of hostile environment are so much bullshit. Meanwhile, the director of the Netflix documentary on Stone has said on Twitter that it’s a critical expose of the cretin, and that Stone isn’t getting paid for his participation. Should he even get this sort of publicity?
On February 2nd, forty-eight US university and college presidents wrote this letter urging President Trump to rescind the Muslim ban, citing its threat to higher education. My undergraduate alma mater’s president is on there. I’ve reached out to Carnegie Mellon but haven’t had a response.
Charles Blow of the New York Times called on Trump to pause this presidency, but he’s tilting at windmills, I think. I believe the Repulicans are going to try to slam through as much legislation and as many executive orders as they can, fearing a blowback in 2018 or more likely 2020.
Ben Carson may have developed a method of separating conjoined twins, but he doesn’t seem to know how memory storage in the brain works.
Also, Carson called slaves “immigrants,” as if they all left Ghana in search of a better life being worked, starved, and beaten to death in the American south. That linked piece, from the New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb, puts Carson’s gaffe in the broader context of the misuse of American history to further political agendas.
One likely candidate to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is a Republican Sikh trial lawyer, born to Indian immigrants, who once worked for the ACLU. The article says she’s hard to “pigeonhole,” although I left with the distinct impression that she’s further to the right than the head of the CRD ought to be.
ProPublica has compiled over 400 Trump appointees across the country, which includes a recent high school graduate, many Trump supports, some alt-right figures, and the former massage therapist who got fired from his Department of Energy on Friday when Buzzfeed ‘uncovered’ his tweets calling for the extermination of Muslims. If they can’t even vet their own employees properly, why do we think their so-called “extreme vetting” will be worth anything at all?
The Washington Post says Trumpism is a monumental fraud. Is it, though? I think he’s doing pretty much what he promised. The fraud was in the minds of people who thought he’d say one thing and do another.
Former NSA analyst John Schindler says that Trump’s claims that he was wiretapped are a “kooky fantasy,” and that the Jeff Sessions-Russia link creates even more awkward questions for 45. Stephen Hayes summarized the wiretapping nonsense for the Weekly Standard, although he’s a bit kinder to the President than the circumstances appear to warrant.
Trump signed an executive order that will help his own golf courses. All hail the kleptocracy.
The same Missouri legislature who praised overdoses from “removing (victims) from the gene pool” has repeatedly blocked attempts to set up a statewide prescription database to help track patients who abuse prescription drugs and use multiple doctors to obtain them. Missouri is the only state without such a program. I think I’m supposed to say “#BFIB” here.
Right-wing nutjobs love to claim that the debunking site snopes is some sort of left-wing blog, which I find puzzling because they’re about as rational as it gets. CNN did a great profile of the site, one of its founders, and its growth plans, including the desire to get into more first-person news reporting, which I don’t quite see as part of their core competency.
Alex Jones, the batshit-crazy conspiracy theorist who claims those twenty kids killed at Sandy Hook weren’t really killed, is really just comedian Bill Hicks, who faked his own death and returned as the hero to the delusional and gullible masses.
The defense attorneys for two San Antonio cops accused of sexually assaulting multiple women claimed it wasn’t a crime because the women were sexually experienced, and that the victims were wrong to have sex outside of marriage. Slut-shaming in 2016? God bless Texas!
This Harvard Business Review article explains that how consumers view prices may matter more than the actual prices. For example, everyone thinks Whole Foods is expensive. If they lower their prices on some items, it may not actually boost sales, because consumers may still perceive Whole Foods as more expensive than competitors.
HBR also weighed in on blockchains, bitcoin, and the future of currency, with a cautionary note about the venture capital being poured into startups that probably don’t offer anything new.
I loved the subtitle on this ThinkProgress piece on the House GOP’s Trumpcare proposal: “These guys have no idea what they’re doing.”
Should junk food be sold in plain packages to discourage their purchase? I find their claims a bit hard to believe – are adults truly that susceptible to brightly colored wrappers? – but would also characterize this proposed regulation as an overreach. I’m much more concerned with ensuring that packaging is clear and accurate.
This BBC editorial comments on how women are treated differently if they have big breasts. This is another of those “I can’t believe we’re still doing this in 2017” topics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: football, gender issues, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 5, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/5/17.

My organizational reports for all 30 teams, featuring at least ten prospects ranked for each club (and as many as 25), went up this past week for Insiders. You can find them all here on the landing pages for each division:

• American League East
• National League East
• American League Central
• National League Central
• American League West
• National League West

My list of thirty sleeper prospects, one for each MLB organization, for 2017 went up on Friday, wrapping up the prospect rankings package for the year. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

For Paste, I reviewed the complex strategy game Forged in Steel, a citybuilder with some worker-placement and card management aspects that, once you get the first few moves underway, really gets going and manages to be both smart and fun.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The must-read piece of the week – actually published in early January – comes from British journalist Isabel Hardman, who wrote about how even England’s vaunted NHS doesn’t do justice to people with mental illnesses, although the piece itself also provides a great window into her own difficulties recognizing what was happening to her and getting properly treated.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday! If you wouldn’t let your kids play football because it’s dangerous (and has led to the premature deaths of many players), is it moral to still watch the NFL?
I thought this New Yorker profile of Evan McMullin, who has emerged as a major Trump critic from the center-right was both an excellent piece of balanced journalism and a good window into someone who, even though I disagree with him on a couple of major policy issues, speaks very clearly to my concern that the man in the Oval Office – well, that man, and the one pulling his strings – needs to be stopped.
The batshit insane people who claim Sandy Hook was a hoax believe Trump’s election furthers their cause. I’m just glad these hoaxers are facing legal consequences when they harass relatives of the deceased.
As if Betsy DeVos’ awful answers in her confirmation hearing and embrace of creationism and other anti-science bullshit weren’t enough to disqualify her from running the U.S. Department of Education in everyone’s eyes except, well, our President and 50 Senate Republicans, she’s also a major investor in an utterly useless pseudoscience business of neurofeedback that claims it can use brain waves to diagnose and treat autism, depression, and why are we even talking about this it is such obvious bullshit? If you have a U.S. Senator who is planning to vote for DeVos – that’s every Republican right now except Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Sue Collins (Maine) – get on the phone on Monday morning, or send a fax, or go to their offices and make it clear you want a no vote on DeVos. One more Republican will end her candidacy, and while we aren’t guaranteed that the next nominee will be better, I’m not sure they can find one who’s worse.
You want more about DeVos being delusional in her belief in anti-science folderol? Look at her use of code words for creationism. While her camp has hidden behind the federal law and court rulings that intelligent design can’t be taught in public schools – it’s religion, thinly disguised as pseudoscience – that opens the door for her to push to change such laws, or challenge the court rulings, to suit her own misguided beliefs.
The House Science Committee is something between a joke and a modern-day Spanish Inquisition, thanks to its science-denialist head, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas, where else?), and the new Holman Rule that allows House appropriations bills to target any federal employee and reduce his/her salary to $1. Boys, all you boys, you think you’re so American.
Is the white-supremacist (and possible fascist) Steve Bannon positioning himself to be the de facto President? Fifty Democratic Congresspersons have called for Bannon’s removal from the National Security Council, co-sponsoring a House bill that would ban political strategists from serving on the council. (Reports that the appointment requires Senate approval were false or at least incomplete.) Meanwhile, filings from Bannon’s second divorce include accusations that he failed to pay child support and was abusive toward his daughters.
I think this ProPublica piece has the wrong title. It’s not can the Democrats be as stubborn as Mitch McConnell, but will they? Of course they can, but so far, I see no signs that they well. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is prepared to lead a filibuster of Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorusch, who’s filling a seat that should have been filled last year by Merrick Garland. (By the way, if you saw the claims that Gorusch had created a pro-fascism club while a student, those were false.)
Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay – that is, a trip to benefit the Trump family business, not on U.S. official business – cost the taxpayer over $97K in hotel bills. This is a good example of where the Democrats need to be obstructionist – Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill requiring him to divest, but even the Dems appear to have little interest in this fight.
How about that immigration order, now halted, that served as a de facto Muslim ban? The Archbishop of Chicago spoke out against it. The order stranded a Brooklyn doctor in the Sudan. VICE published a list of doctors and researchers thus barred from returning to the United States. Don’t you feel so much safer now?
Bloomberg published a short op ed that argues that Trump has failed his Wall Street and big business backers twice over, by putting all permanent resident employees at risk of deportation or refused re-entry, and by failing to repeal the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which – get this – which requires financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients in retirement accounts. I don’t know what’s worse: that Trump’s camp wanted to repeal the rule, or that the rule was ever necessary in the first place.
The farewell message from Tom Countryman (!), Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, who was summarily dismissed along with five other State Department lifers last week, is well worth your time.
Who’s behind the fake-news site CGS Monitor, which uses real experts’ names in bylines on articles they didn’t write? It could be Russia – I mean, of course it’s Russia, right? – although this piece speculates it could also come from Iranian interests.
This post from “The Jester” on Russia’s infiltration of our federal government pissed someone off enough that the site was hit with a DdoS attack a few hours after the article went up. Within it, he points out that the ex-KGB/FSB official suspected of helping MI6 agent Christopher Steele assemble that dossier on Donald Trump was found dead in his car on December 26th, and the the author accuses the Kremlin of orchestrating his murder.
Republicans are further trying to rig the electoral college system in their favor by pushing blue states to adopt “proportional” electoral voting, which, as that FiveThirtyEight piece explains, means that Clinton could have won the popular vote by five percentage points and still lost the election.
A new law in Arkansas allows rapists who impregnate their victims to stop the latter from getting abortions, or a husband to sue to prevent his wife from doing so, and so on. Even setting aside the clear infringement of religious belief into law here, this is as blatantly anti-woman as you can get. I’ve got one state left to visit to be able to say I’ve visited them all, but you know, I think any trips to Arkansas can wait until they start to treat women like actual people. UPDATE: Snopes has more details on the law, such as pointing out that rapists can’t sue for damages, and that the law delays rather than prevents the abortions. The ACLU is still planning lawsuits.
Abortion is an important, sometimes lifesaving medical procedure, and keeping it legal and available reduces deaths from unsafe abortions, while improving access to abortion and contraception reduces abortion rates overall. Again, women are actual people, and the infamous photo of Trump signing an anti-abortion executive order while surrounded by men sort of says it all – and that’s why the photo of the Swedish Prime Minister trolling Trump is such a thing of beauty.
Protesters plan to shadow Trump whenever he travels so he feels their dislike, an extension of the idea that he thrives on public adulation.
The apparently random murder of a woman walking on a Reykjavik street after dark has shaken the city, which is known for its low crime rate and 24-hour party culture.
I tweeted about this earlier in the week, but donors across the country are helping pay students’ lunch debts. It’s such a little thing, and so easy to do if you have any cash to donate. We called our daughter’s school, asked how much it would take to clear any outstanding tabs, and wrote them a check. You’ll make a lot of families’ lives easier, and will reduce the shame these kids feel for something that’s no fault of their own.
The Brits have all the legislative fun: A Labour MP held up a sign saying “He’s lying to you” behind Nigel Farage in a televised address by the far-right UKIP leader.
The University of Nevada joins the growing list of NCAA football programs reneging on scholarship offers weeks or even days before the official signing day. I’m no lawyer, so I’ll ask the crowd: at what point does such an oral agreement become binding on either party?
I’d never heard of the Chinese delicacy fat choy, a bacteria that grows long, noodle-like strands, but it turns out its farming is harmful to the environment, and the Chinese government is now cracking down on its production and sale.
Recode has a long, fascinating interview with my former colleague Bill Simmons on The Ringer, the rise and abrupt end of Grantland, the demise of his HBO TV show Any Given Wednesday, and much more. I’m still not sure I get the mission of The Ringer; they’ve mixed some great sports content with some head-scratchers where they offer advice to the movie or music industry. But it’s early in the site’s history, and I’m 100% behind any site that supports good journalism and pays its writers.
I’m linking here to a piece I saw on Google’s home page (I think) but that I really thought was trash: you could read 200 books a year in the time you waste on social media. There’s a lot wrong with this piece, but let me highlight two things. One, not everyone is wired for the kind of sustained attention required to read a lot of books, and no one should make someone feel bad because s/he isn’t a book reader. I love finding fellow bibliophiles, but if you don’t read books, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Two, his math suchs. He says “typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words,” which is wrong; that’s under 200 pages, and even Smart Baseball, which I did not want to be too long, runs over 80,000 words. He also says he reads 400 words per minute and assumes that most Medium readers will too; I doubt he reads that fast unless he’s speed-reading, which doesn’t work (you don’t retain what you read as well), because reading 400 wpm would mean reading about 80 pages an hour, which I think would put anyone at the far-right end of the scale for reading speed … or means he’s reading books written for children. I read a lot, and I read fast, and I doubt I read 400 wpm unless it’s something simple and incredibly engrossing, like genre fiction or a Wodehouse novel. So, yeah, if you don’t read 200 books a year or 100 or even 20, don’t feel bad. This article was just stupid.
Is the hunt for paid editors tearing Wikipedia apart from the inside? That seems a bit dramatic, but I think the mere existence of paid editors is cause to retain or recover our skepticism about the reliability of information found on the site.
From McSweeney’s: The Rules of This Board Game Are Long, But Also Complicated. I don’t understand why this is supposed to be funny.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, boardgames, chinese cuisine, evolution, football, hoaxes, links, muslim ban, ncaa

→ April 1, 2009
→ By keith

Breakout players, media, Jay Cutler.

My annual breakouts piece is a photo gallery this year with shorter text from me. And yes, I still love Rickie Weeks, even though he’s not on there.

I’ll be on First Take via phone at 10:20 am on Thursday, and KTAR at 9:24 am Arizona Time. I’ll be on Baltimore 105.7 FM tonight at 9:30 pm.

Yes, there will be a Phoenix food post soon. It’s mostly done, but I’ve got some more preview stuff to hand in to ESPN.com first.

There will be a Klawchat on Thursday at 1 pm.

So can someone explain this Cutler thing to me? I keep hearing how the Broncos have to trade him. Isn’t he under contract? So he wants a trade. I want a million dollars, a night with Ashley Judd, and a pony. If I’m Josh McDaniel, I’m staring at two options:

1. Keep Cutler and make it clear to players and agents that I am in charge.
2. Trade Cutler for 80 cents on the dollar* and show everyone that the lunatics are running the asylum.

*This is my assumption, as someone who doesn’t really know football, because Denver would be seen as somehow unable to keep Cutler, and because I doubt you ever really get full value when trading a top-ten quarterback.

Erik Kuselias was subbing for SVP on the Tirico/VP show today and kept saying how Cutler has “leverage” – but does he? He’s an employee of the Broncos. If they decide to bench him for four games to teach him a lesson, as long as they’re paying him and abiding by the letter of the contract, they are within their rights to do so. I’ve heard no mention of a contractual obligation on the part of the Broncos to avoid hurting Cutler’s feelings, nor does he have a no-trade clause or a no-discussing-a-trade clause or a no-even-thinking-about-a-trade-even-while-you’re-on-the-throne clause. If Cutler doesn’t show up for a required camp or workout, you fine him. You may be able to suspend him without pay, which would be true in MLB. But just like I don’t give in to my daughter when she throws a tantrum, a GM shouldn’t give in to a player (or agent) when he throws one.

Am I wrong?

Filed Under: Appearances, Sports Tagged With: baseball, football

→ January 3, 2009
→ By keith

At least he’s consistent.

Jay Paris screws up a ballot.

Again.

(Hat tip to Jeff from Rotowire.)

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: bbraa, football

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