Stick to baseball, 1/26/24.

The top 100 prospects ranking will run on The Athletic on Monday, February 5th, followed by the farm system rankings later that week, and the team top 20s start running on February 12th.

My friend and one-time colleague Chris Crawford has had a tough year, losing his mother and just last week his stepfather while a site for which he was writing & producing podcasts decided to just not pay its people. He started a GoFundMe last week to help cover the mortgage on his parents’ house.

I’ve got a newsletter about 80% written and just need to finish it up this weekend. It’s free and you can sign up here.

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

  • Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.
  • The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.
  • Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.
  • Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.
  • Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.
  • Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

Stick to baseball, 3/18/23.

I’m running around Florida this week and will have a draft blog post up Sunday or Monday, but for now you’ll have to just make do with my ramblings here. It’s been a fairly unproductive week on the minor-league scouting side, but better for draft scouting, which I’ll write up before Monday.

In the meantime, the links:

  • An online influencer who pushed ivermectin to his followers FAFO’d – he took a daily dose of the antiparasitic, which causes severe heart damage if taken for too long or in large doses, and died of a massively enlarged heart. Now his followers are worried about their own health. Maybe they should have listened to doctors and scientists instead of one fucking moron with an internet connection?
  • Meanwhile, some parents of autistic kids are torturing their children by giving them ivermectin despite its horrible side effects. Where are all the people who claim their main goal is protecting kids when they campaign against drag shows and LGBT+ themed books?
  • Comedian Russell Brand’s turn towards conspiracy theories and anti-science views is a harbinger of a grim future where those with huge digital platforms misinform their large, often younger audiences.
  • Trump has once again called on his supporters to riot if he’s indicted, which I think is probably an attempt to deter state prosecutors from doing so. Let’s hope the relevant authorities are prepared this time around.
  • He’s also targeting Wall Street firms that use ESG (environmental & social goals) as part of their investment or other strategies, and while everyone agrees this is performative on his part, there’s a stunning lack of rejoinders from his targets.

Stick to baseball, 10/16/21.

My first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League is up now for subscribers to the Athletic. I’ll have probably one more post, a longer one that covers everything else I saw.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Riftforce, a great new two-player game that sort of combines Battle Line and Magic: the Gathering, if you can imagine that. It has a very high replay value as well, which is key in a two-player game.

With some more content out, I’ll get on my email newsletter as soon as I’m back from Arizona. 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, with a shorter list this week as I’ve been reading less while on the road…

Stick to baseball, 8/8/21.

My one new post this week for subscribers to The Athletic is a long scouting notebook with my observations on players from the Nats, Rays, Orioles, and Tigers’ systems, including five former first-round picks. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to Dr. Katy Milkman, author of the new book How to Change, about we can use psychology and knowledge of how our brains work to enact real, lasting behavior change in ourselves. You can subscribe via iTunes or Spotify. And on the Athletic Baseball Show, I got back together with my old Baseball Today partner in crime Eric Karabell (also on Spotify).

My email newsletter will return this week, and I’m going to give away a copy of a new board game (the publisher sent me two copies, so I offered to do a giveaway and they were on board, get it?) to one random subscriber.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/24/20.

My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawchttps://klaw.me/3ogZKgthat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,
is now available for pre-order on the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/10/18.

I didn’t have any new ESPN+ posts this week, with my free agent rankings going up on November 2nd and my trade market overview due to run this upcoming Monday. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and did a Periscope video chat on Wednesday (and even played a little something on guitar).

My latest board game review for Paste covers the cute, competitive, asymmetric game Root, where cuddly forest creatures fight battles for control of the forest, and each player has unique pieces, abilities, and paths to victory. It’s quite clever.

Feel free to sign up for that free email newsletter I keep talking about and occasionally remember to send out.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Undark exposes the conservative groups fighting climate chance education in Florida classrooms, as well as how they wage this war and their efforts to bring it to other states. The irony of failing to teach the reality of anthropogenic climate change in a state that might be the most adversely affected by it should not be lost on you.
  • Working conditions in the Tesla factory would make Upton Sinclair blush; medical staff are “forbidden from calling 911 without permission,” and five former clinic employees told The Center for Investigative Reporting’s writers that the on-site clinic’s practices are “unsafe and unethical.” One source was fired in August by the clinic, which she says is because she raised concerns about the clinic’s treatment of workers. Tesla’s pricing starts around $35,000 for its model 3 sedan to over $140,000 for its Model X P100D SUV.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still working in a Manhattan Taqueria when she began her campaign for Congress, and Bon Appetit spoke to her there about the intersection between food and politics. She points out that food is intertwined with climate change, minimum wage laws, immigration, health care, education, and more (I’d add trade policy/protectionism, other environmental regulations, and water rights to the list.)
  • Anti-vaccine PACs helped shape this week’s midterm ballots, as those groups fought to defeat Republicans who weren’t sufficiently anti-vax during primary races. Dr. Paul Offit, who helped develop the rotavirus vaccine, wrote about how he’d like to answer anti-vax loons who still argue that vaccines cause autism.
  • Ninety-eight year old Roger Angell penned this wonderfully angry essay on the power of voting for the New Yorker, which ran it the day before Election Day.
  • The deputy editorial page editor for the Washington Post writes that new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is a crackpot.
  • Wisconsin Republicans are trying to strip the incoming Democratic governor of much of the office’s power right now, which is particularly sad given the mess the outgoing Scott Walker leaves in the state’s education budget. Most notable is that he gave Taiwanese company Foxconn up to $4 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, a deal that would have resulted in the state paying about $230,000 per job created … if it had even created the number of jobs promised, which it hasn’t. That money would have filled the education budget gap and then some.
  • If Brian Kemp wins the gubernatorial race in Georgia, his victory would need an asterisk, according to Prof. Carol Anderson, who has written a book on voter suppression called One Person, No Vote. I said in my Periscope chat this week that when leaders in less-developed countries steal elections, the citizens take to the streets in peaceful protests and workers strike. I never thought we’d need that here, but that may be the only response Georgians have here.
  • The Kansas City Star exposes the overconfidence and disorganization that sank Kris Kobach’s campaign and gave Kansas its first Democratic win for a statewide office in 12 years.
  • The Houston Chronicle has had to retract eight stories written by Austin bureau chief Mike Ward after discovering that he’d fabricated dozens of people he quoted in those articles.
  • Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic that America’s problem is not tribalism, but base racism, given how one of our two major parties seems to rely on race-baiting and trafficking in stereotypes to rally its base. And it works.
  • Trump mouthed off last week about making the Federal Reserve less independent; Venezuela’s experience demonstrates why that’s a foolish notion. Of course, Trump also blamed the three eastern Baltic nations for starting the war in Yugoslavia, so I don’t think we’re dealing with the brightest bulb in the chandelier here.
  • A giant supernova named Cow appeared without warning in June and has given scientists a rare look at the birth of either a black hole or a neutron star.
  • Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell, whose restaurant Pizzaiolo I visited and really enjoyed, is trying to come back to his old life after more than a dozen women came forward to say he sexually harassed them. He’s facing some backlash, but also getting frankly unwarranted support from other men in the business who seem to gloss over his behavior. The landlord for his newest restaurant, Western Pacific in Berkeley, is Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who pled guilty to human trafficking, bringing underage girls from India to the United States so he could have sex with them.
  • A mob of protesters gathered outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house and threatened his safety. Reason argues it’s not just wrong, but actively harmful to the cause. I have zero sympathy for Carlson, who has chosen this life of fomenting bigotry for profit, but I agree with the column. Don’t threaten him or his family. You want to make him stop? Go after his advertisers. Cut your cable subscription. Ask public places you frequent to stop showing Fox News. But threatening journalist won’t help … although one protester says the reports of threats are highly embellished.
  • Dr. Christine Blasey Ford continues to face death threats, moving four times this year, while the man who assaulted her gets to sit on the Supreme Court and decide how the rest of us can live our lives.
  • A fake doctor in California who promises a “miracle cure” for cancer using baking soda was sued by a patient and hit with a $105 million judgment. The money seems tangential – the point here is that these charlatans prey on the desperate, and the law seems too slow or simply unequipped to stop them.
  • Dr. Devah Pager died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer at age 46. Her work helped demonstrate that being black in the job market was, in effect, as big of a negative as having a felony conviction was
  • Comedian Patrick Monahan (no, not the Train guy) wrote about Louise Mensch’s legendary tweet about Steve Bannon possibly getting the death penalty for New York magazine’s The Cut. I take no pleasure in reposting this.
  • New York beverage director, author, and bitters expert Sother Teague writes about how he uses his role to espouse important causes, as with his NYC bar Coup, where proceeds go to groups fighting the worst policies of this administration. I appreciated this quote in particular: “Diminishing language such as ‘stick to sports’ holds no place and only serves to display the ignorance of those who say it.”
  • In the last two years, two mental health professionals in Monterey County have taken their own lives, including David Soskin, who drove off Highway 1 at Hurricane Point in June. Less than two years previously, a colleague with whom Soskin had clashed, Robert Jackson, took his own life, having left his job with the county after accusing Soskin of creating a hostile work environment.
  • This (unrolled) Twitter thread shows the bonkers elections in Alaska from Tuesday, with ties going back 40-plus years. Don Young won re-election yet again; he’s been Alaska’s at-large Representative since 1972, before I was born, after losing the election but taking the seat because his opponent died before election day. Young is still just the fourth Representative in the state’s history, even though he refuses to hold town halls and holds many views best left in the 19th century.
  • My employer did a nice thing for longtime employees, shutting down the Magic Kingdom for a night to allow Disney cast members of 40-plus years of service to enjoy the park for themselves.
  • Finally, this magic trick won for the best close-up trick at the International Federation of Magic Societies’ 2018 World Championship of Magic, and it’s dazzling:

The Doxing of Elena Ferrante.

It was a bad weekend for American journalism, by which I mean it was kind of an atrocious weekend because the standard is already fairly low, with a TIME Inc. division firing its editor-in-chief for, apparently, hiring an adult film actress to write about sports, creating a fake columnist to argue with her, and then lying about the whole thing; and now a New York Post columnist saying Derrick Rose has made a bad first impression on Knicks fans with the “noise of a rape trial.” But all of that is sort of par for the course, especially in our little corner of the journalism world.

The real atrocity, however, was the soi-disant “premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language,” the New York Review of Books, choosing to out pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante (whose best-selling novel My Brilliant Friend I reviewed this summer) by, among other things, combing through financial and real estate records. It was a malicious, tawdry exercise in placing money over integrity, the sort of yellow journalism we might expect from the Drudge Report or an alt-right site, doxing a woman who’d make it clear she wanted to remain out of the public eye.

The column, written by an Italian journalist, claims that Ferrante, by writing a quartet of bestselling novels, “has in a way relinquished her right to disappear,” while making no actual argument to support this claim, probably because the author – and the NYRB editors who must have died on the way to work that morning, given their abdication of their responsibilities by letting the piece run – can’t do so. There was simply no public need to know at work here. Ferrante is not a public figure, not a politician, not a businessperson seeking tax breaks or handouts, not claiming to be anything at all that she’s not. She’s a successful author who sought to speak through her writing, and to barely speak at all through any other medium.

Outing an author who sought anonymity for its own sake would be bad enough, but here a male reporter has chosen to reveal the identity of a female author who may have (or have had, I suppose) motivations for her secrecy that should, if nothing else, have kept this article from seeing the light of day. What if Ferrante is a victim of domestic abuse, hiding from her former partner? Or a rape or sexual assault victim doing the same? Whatever her reason(s) for choosing to write and remain behind a pseudonym, it is not for any of us to choose to unmask her, to decide that this reason isn’t good enough to maintain the veil … but a woman may choose to hide her identity out of fear of physical harm. This muckraker, with the help of a periodical that aspires to intellectual superiority, has put this woman on blast for no discernible benefit to anyone but the writer and the publication, with no apparent concern whatsoever for whatever physical or emotional consequences Ferrante herself might suffer. Ferrante appears to have been simply too successful for this man or the New York Review of Books to allow her to succeed in peace.

(As of 11 am on Monday, I haven’t heard any response, via email or Twitter, from NYRB. I will update if one appears.)

UPDATE: The woman outed as Ferrante has confirmed the account (in Italian), and has opened a Twitter account (same) to say she will never speak about Ferrante’s books and to call the revelation a “vulgar and dangerous … violation of privacy and norms.”

Spotlight.

I’m not a big movie guy in general, and the Academy’s leanings the last few years in Best Picture nods haven’t done a lot to bring me back to the fold – not that they’re choosing bad movies, but that they’ve favored a lot of movies I wouldn’t even want to watch. (I’m sure 12 Years a Slave was amazing. I just can’t watch that kind of cruelty.) I did watch Birdman, last year’s winner, and thought it was clever but lacked any sort of resolution to the main story, as if the screenwriter had a great idea for a movie script but couldn’t figure out how to finish it.

Spotlight (amazoniTunes), which of course won Best Picture earlier this week, appealed to me more than any recent winner I can think of. The story shows how a small group of reporters at the Boston Globe known as the Spotlight team conducted a months-long investigative effort that uncovered the scope of the abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, including the fact that the Archbishop of the Boston diocese, Cardinal Bernard Law (no relation), knew about it and did nothing beyond moving the pedophile priests around to new parishes. It’s a film that’s going to be talky – big on dialogue, light on action, highly dependent on everything from acting to directing to editing to make it a compelling film. The whole concept of a dramatic film that has no action, no sex, no romance, not even a proper antagonist (in the conventional sense of a ‘villain’), feels very British to me, just because their TV programs and films tend to be more story-driven in my entirely anecdotal experience.

Spotlight is an incredible film in the most old-fashioned sense: It tells a great story and never lets up until the end. The pacing was perfect, the performances were very strong, and no nonsensical subplots interfered with the unfolding of the main story. Only one scene rang a little false, one that felt like it was inserted so that there was a Big Dramatic Conflict to use on awards shows, but otherwise the screenplay was taut and efficient, wasting few words and even less time on irrelevant details.

I thought the performances were almost all excellent, yet none seemed likely to win an award – I was surprised to see the nominations the cast received, because these performances were all so understated. Liev Schreiber plays the new editor of the Globe, perceived as an interloper because he’s not from Boston and because he’s Jewish, with such restraint that it was hard to remember who was behind the glasses and facial hair. Mark Ruffalo, playing reporter Mike Rezendes, was just as unrecognizable with a little change to his hairstyle, a slight accent, and, aside from the one scene where he blows up at Keaton’s character, delivers a similarly spartan portrayal. A mediocre writer could have had him explode at the imperious file clerk who won’t give him access to public records that would prove damning to the Church, and a mediocre actor would have hammed it up, but instead, we get a scene that works because it’s so mundane.

The lesson of Spotlight the movie – as distinct from the scandal, which certainly gets its air time in the film but doesn’t need me to thinkpiece it any further – is that the drama in a good dramatic film doesn’t have to come from the screenplay. This story was inherently compelling: A small team of reporters, given unusual autonomy, discovers and reveals a massive, decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by one of the world’s most powerful and most implicitly trusted authorities through hard work and ingenuity. I could give you a dozen places where someone could have Hollywoodized the script – a screaming confrontation between reporters and church officials would be the most obvious – but instead we get a simple, linear story, where the narrative greed comes from the piecemeal uncovering of the scandal. Even my short attention span was riveted for two solid hours, and when the story was over, the film is over, and if that last scene wasn’t real, well, I am going to pretend that that’s what actually happened the day the story finally ran.

The defunct Phoenix also did some great work on the story and does get a brief mention in the film, although there’s a debate over how much credit they deserve. The Globe certainly pushed the story much farther.

I’m going to watch a few of last year’s highly-rated films now that many of them are available digitally (legally – I won’t Torrent), so if you’ve got a favorite or two, nominated or otherwise, throw them in the comments. I will watch movies in any language, but I draw the line at Room, which I think I will find far too upsetting because I have a young daughter.