→ September 12, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 9/12/15.

My one Insider piece from this week included my own scouting notes on prospects Jeff Hoffman, Spencer Adams, Gleyber Torres, and Brad Markey.

Klawchats have returned! They’ll be here on the dish from now on, as ESPN has ended all Sportsnation chats. The first one was on Thursday.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • Marlins beat writer Juan Rodriguez is fighting brain cancer, and some of his friends have set up a fund to help support his family.
  • Every Day Should Be Saturday says pay the players, dammit, through a personal essay about what it’s like to be broke.
  • Hand-pulled oyster with activated artichoke, anyone? The man behind the Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator talked to the Village Voice about his creation.
  • The passing of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has led to some touching tributes, including Atul Gawande’s in memoriam piece, which also mentions their shared love of the excellent dystopian short story “The Machine Stops,” available for a buck for your Kindle through that link. It’s never mentioned in discussions of E.M. Forster’s works, but I’d take that over A Passage to India any day.
  • BBC’s Assignment radio program looks at Paraguay’s preteen pregnancy problem, exploring why schoolgirls there are so vulnerable to abuse.
  • Digg interviewed the Food Lab’s Kenji Lopez-Alt ahead of the release of his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, later this month.
  • I haven’t tried this recipe but I was intrigued enough to share it: Sichuan-spiced dry-brined turkey. Dry brining doesn’t require a giant bucket as a wet brine does, and the recipe calls for spatchcocking (stop laughing) the bird for more even cooking of the white and dark meats.
  • New York has a rare positive story on climate change, arguing that we’ve finally gotten serious about slowing it. One major reason, in the author’s opinion, is the threat of a Republican candidate winning in 2016, as that party steadfastly denies the science on climate change in embarrassing fashion.
  • How did lobster become so commoditized that it’s now on the McDonald’s menu? The New Yorker provides an “unnatural” history of the McLobster, looking at advances in lobster fishery that resemble other types of animal husbandry.
  • If you want to know why baseball is becoming whiter, there’s a simple explanation: youth sports are too damn expensive.
  • Celebrity chef Kerry Simon died this week at age 60 of multiple system atrophy. I first saw Simon on TV maybe fifteen years ago, on a Food Network show where he went to some off-Strip places in Vegas where he said the real chefs would go to eat. One of those places: Firefly, now one of my favorite restaurants in Las Vegas.
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→ September 5, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 9/5/15.

I had two Insider pieces this week, one on hypothetical postseason award ballots and one on notable September callups, and then someone else I didn’t expect to see came up after the latter was posted so why do I even do anything.

Klawchats at ESPN.com are indeed dead, as are all chats there, but I think I’ve found a solution that will let me resume the chats here after Labor Day. I’m looking for a little help with a script to clean up the transcripts so I can post them after the fact for everyone to read, so if you’re handy with perl, Python, or the like, please let me know. I’ll keep doing Periscopes, but they don’t work for everyone, including my deaf readers, so I want to make sure I use both media going forward.

My review of the second edition of the boardgame Evolution plus its Flight expansion is up at Paste. You can buy the game for $48 on amazon.

And now, the links…

  • How “Big Egg” has used underhanded and possibly illegal tactics, with the help of the USDA, to try to sabotage Hampton Creek’s vegan mayonnaise. It’s incredibly sleazy.
  • Andrew Zimmern talks about the future of food, from synthetic food replacements to insects as a sustainable protein source.
  • Scientists have discovered a naturally-occurring protein that would help slow the melting of ice cream. I see a problem with this, though: Ice cream tastes better when it’s at the brink of melting, because our taste buds don’t detect flavors in cold or frozen foods that well. That’s why ice cream has to be high in sugar – otherwise it wouldn’t taste sweet.
  • A Chinese writer talks about how the “gross” immigrant food of her upbringing has been culturally appropriated as “trendy.”
  • The programmer adapting the board game Brass into app form has started a blog about the process.
  • Chef Rick Bayless – yep, that’s Skip’s brother – writes about his dismay over the unbanning of GMO corn in Mexico, using culinary and cultural arguments rather than (un)scientific ones.
  • An experiment among Israeli schoolteachers found unconscious gender bias in math grading, bias that affected those kids’ choices as they advanced to higher grades. I know some of you get on me for discussing bias (racism, sexism, etc.) where it isn’t immediately evident, but these issues still exist, especially racism within the white-dominated baseball industry, even though it’s rarely explicit any more.
  • Alton Brown talks to the New York Times about his attitudes about our attitudes about food.
  • A paid anti-GMO shill for the organic agriculture industry was “severed” from Washington State University. Particularly notable are the undisclosed conflicts of interest, the same violation of which the anti-GMO side is accusing Kevin Folta.
  • Why is Missouri executing one death-row prisoner a month?
  • Vaccine denier Dr. Bob Sears – whose license to practice medicine still hasn’t been stripped, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom – is continuing to push his looney-toon, law-breaking agenda on gullible parents.
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→ August 29, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/29/15.

My main Insider piece this week was on sustainable MLB breakthroughs in 2015. I meant to include Rougned Odor on this list, and somehow just plain forgot him when I sat down to write the piece. Anyway, this is my mea culpa and statement that I believe his improvement at the plate is real, sustainable, and only the beginning for him.

I also covered the Metropolitan Classic high school tournament that’s hosted and organized by the NY Mets, writing about the top 2016 and 2017 draft prospects there.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • The nationwide rise in the popularity of authentic barbecue has left black pitmasters behind, even though that style of cooking has roots in African-American culture.
  • An excellent longread from the BBC on the forced repatriation of Chinese sailors in the UK after World War II, with the story of one woman whose biological father was one of those deported.
  • Baseball is on the rise in Uganda, believe it or not. It’s a sport that requires a long gestation period when it manages to take hold in a new region or country, but it seems to be growing well in the small sub-Saharan African nation, where it’s still against the law to be gay.
  • A chemistry decoder to send to that idiot friend from high school who keeps posting FoodBabe links on Facebook.
  • A personal post from a woman whose son nearly died from the flu. It’s just about flu shot season, too.
  • Another sugar (sucrose) substitute, the natural but uncommon sugar allulose, may be moving toward the marketplace, but like sugar alcohols, it passes right through the upper GI tract and can cause some problems further on down the line.
  • Kevin Folta, a scientist at the University of Florida, is under attack by the tin-foil hat crowd because Monsanto provided $25,000 for an educational outreach program, covering his travel costs. The personal nature of the attacks and the ignorance of how corporate funding actually works in academic research result in a deeply disturbing application of the genetic fallacy.
  • Longtime reader Tom Hitchner has a good post up on why teams keep getting sweetheart government-funded stadium deals. It’s happening in Milwaukee, and it’s happening in disgusting fashion in St. Louis, where a law prohibiting such deals was overturned by a judge as “too vague.”
  • TV critic extraordinaire Alan Sepinwall asks if there’s too much good television right now. I say yes, there is, and I have little to no hope of watching most of it.
  • U.S. tennis pro Mardy Fish had to quit the sport due to anxiety, but he’s back, and he’s talking about his affliction.
  • Mental Floss assembled a group of clever airline safety videos from around the world. The two Delta ones are both funny and effective; the first time I saw each this year I had to put down my book to watch them.
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→ August 22, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/21/15.

My short series on the best tools in baseball continued with my ranking of the players with the best hitting tools and the best fielding tools in the majors. I also had two draft blog posts, one on the Perfect Game All-American Classic and one on the Under Armour game.

I was the guest host of the Baseball Tonight podcast on Wednesday, with guests Tim Kurkjian and Alex Speier.

Chat is still down, so I did another Periscope video chat instead.

And now, this week’s links… saturdayfive

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→ August 15, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/15/15.

My one Insider piece this week covered my opinions on the best pitcher tools in baseball. ESPN’s chat software was inaccessible this week, so my Klawchat has been postponed to next Thursday.

And now, the links…

  • Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Amelia Rayno
    tells how disgraced former AD Norwood Teague harassed her. There’s no way his superiors were unaware of this activity, right?
  • One of the most famous longreads in history – written before “longreads” was a term or even a concept worth mentioning – is now online, John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker piece on Hiroshima survivors. Hersey had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for A Bell for Adano, which is on my to-be-read shelf right now.
  • Why are we letting infectious diseases make a comeback? This story isn’t about vaccines, but about our lack of preparedness for new diseases creeping up from warmer regions.
  • This isn’t new, but it came in handy with a Facebook argument with a high school classmate who threw out a little climate-change denial: The polar ice caps aren’t “recovering.”
  • The FDA doctor who blocked thalidomide’s rubber-stamp approval died at 101 this week. Frances Oldham Kelsey – yep, a woman doctor, the kind that chauvinist José Mourinho has such a problem with – said “no” in the face of resistance from multiple sides. Only seventeen cases of thalidomide-related deformities were reported in the United States, compared to thousands in Europe.
  • If you’ve seen Going Clear and want to see the IRS revoke Scientology’s bogus tax exemption, former Scientologist Tony Ortega tells you what to do. I sent one; the more of us send it … well, we can only hope we get some response, as a $3 billion for-profit entity shouldn’t have any tax exemption.
  • Miles Teller’s publicist might want to find a new client after this self-immolation in Esquire. I don’t feel great about the writer’s role, either, as she takes a pretty slanted view of him even considering his boorish behavior.
  • Pedro Moura, one of the best beat writers in the country, has a series on Brazilian baseball, looking into why a country that has a baseball tradition and produces tons of athletes for other sports hasn’t become a huge MLB pipeline. Hint: It’s corrupt as hell.
  • The New England Journal of Medicine came out in support of Planned Parenthood, and against the “radical antichoice group whose goal is the destruction of Planned Parenthood” which “continues to twist the facts to achieve its ends.”
  • Tiling the plane – gleaming the cube, but for math majors – is at the heart of a series of unsolved problems in mathematics, but a recent advance found a new solution among convex pentagons, the first such discovery in decades.
  • Via my friend and frequent dining partner Kiley McDaniel, a piece on how restaurants can’t find enough cooks, a phenomenon that’s at least partly the result of a drop in immigration from Mexico to the U.S.

So I finally saw Birdman yesterday, and thought it was full of great performances but the story was hackneyed at many points, while the ending didn’t work for me at all. I’m sure many if not most of you have seen it already; what did you think? Did this deserve the Best Picture win, or was it a combination of a movie about movies that used a cinematography/editing gimmick that won the prize? And what, if anything, happened at the end?

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→ August 8, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/7/15.

This week’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I also reviewed Broom Service, a fun family-strategy boardgame that’s been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award, for Paste.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

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→ August 1, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 8/1/15.

So I was kind of busy this week, writing these pieces for Insiders on the major trades leading up to Friday’s trade deadline.

• Yoenis Cespedes to the Mets
• Mike Leake to San Francisco
• Latos/Olivera/Wood three-team trade
• David Price to Toronto
• Joakim Soria to Pittsburgh
• Carlos Gomez/Mike Fiers to Houston
• Brandon Moss to St. Louis
• Cole Hamels to Texas
• Jonathan Papelbon to Washington
• Ben Zobrist to Kansas City
• Troy Tulowitzki to Toronto
• Tyler Clippard to the Mets
• Johnny Cueto to Kansas City
• Several smaller trades
• The Mets/Carlos Gomez trade that didn’t happen

I also have a scouting post up on some Mets and Yankees AA prospects.

And now, the links… saturdayfive

  • Earlier this month, a fan at a Brewers game was hit in the face by a line drive, severely injuring her and missing killing her by centimeters. There’s a fundraising page for her medical bills if you’d like to donate.
  • Twitter is now hiding plagiarized jokes and other tweets if the original authors file complaints. It’s a minor issue compared to some of the abuse hurled at women and minorities on Twitter, but I’ll take any step toward greater editorial control on Twitter as a positive.
  • Molly Knight talked to Lasorda’s Lair about her book on the Dodgers and her history of anxiety disorder. If you haven’t yet, you should buy her book.
  • The Shreveport Times has a sharp opinion piece on how the Lafayette massacre won’t change anything. The piece specifically singles out Louisiana’s “weak and non-existent gun control.” It’s on us, though; you vote for candidates who take money from the NRA, this is what you get. If you don’t like it, get out there and campaign for the other side.
  • Is the song “Happy Birthday” still protected by copyright? It appears it may not be, although we’ll need the judge’s ruling to be sure. There’s a big fight coming in 2018 over expiring copyrights, one that puts me (in favor of putting many older works in the public domain) on the opposite side from my employer (Disney, which has a fair concern about Mickey Mouse falling into p.d.).
  • The Fibonacci shelf takes the mathematical sequence and turns it into stackable furniture. I want this.
  • Three “next-level” recipes for rum punch. That first one, a planter’s punch with homemade grenadine, sounds right up my alley; planter’s punch is the first strong (may I say “grown-up?”) cocktail I liked.
  • Go ahead, be sarcastic, at least with people you know well: it can boost creative thinking, according to a new study by three business school professors.
  • A fantastic profile of prodigy turned mathematician Terry Tao, considered (per the piece) “the finest mathematician of his generation,” and more broadly a piece on number theory. I share Tao’s love of the original computer game Civilization and the difficulty in putting it aside; it occupied a huge portion of the fall semester of my junior year of college, unfortunately. That said, it kills me that the article’s author felt that “prime number” required a definition. You shouldn’t be able to get to high school without knowing what that means.
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→ July 25, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 7/25/15.

I ranked the top five farm systems as of right now – well, right then, as I wrote it – for Insiders this week, and broke down the Scott Kazmir trade. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday. I don’t plan to write up the smaller deals of the week, such as the Aramis Ramirez or Steve Cishek trades, because they’re just salary dumps without significant prospects going the other way.

I reviewed the new Splendor app for Paste this week. You can get the app for $6.99 for iOS or Android devices – and you should, as it’s a great game that’s very well done.

And now, the links…

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→ July 18, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 7/18/15.

I posted an updated ranking of the minors’ top 50 prospects this week, and held a Klawchat that afternoon to talk about it. On Sunday night, I posted a briefer-than-normal Futures Game recap, since the talent in the game was somewhat light relative to past years.

Over at Paste, I have a review of the family-friendly boardgame Flea Market up. I’ve been playing the new Splendor iOS app for the last two weeks, and my review of it will be up on Paste within the next few days. It’s excellent.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • A terrifying, critical longread about the inevitable earthquake and tsunami coming to the Pacific Northwest. It’s not just temporal parochialism at work here, but a general distrust of science and a mistaken, possibly hard-wired belief in our invincibility as a species.
  • Another longread worth your time: A child refugee from the Rwandan genocide talks about her time in exile, both on the run in Africa and here in the United States.
  • Germany is trying out a new prevention-oriented approach to child molestation by working with confessed pedophiles, even those who have offended already. It’s a complex subject, especially if this means past victims aren’t getting help, but early results have some promise and it beats simply declaring these people “evil” (when they may be trauma victims themselves) and locking them up forever.
  • North Carolina wants to stop black people from voting, using modern-day versions of the literacy test and the poll tax. This shouldn’t happen in our day and age, but it does in white-run states with large African-American minorities.
  • The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t collapsed the universe into a singularity – yet – but it has verified the existence of sub-subatomic particles called pentaquarks.
  • The Atlantic discusses the world’s smallest language, Toki Pona, a constructed language with just 123 words. This just reminded me that I need to read Babel-17, a short novel that incorporates the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ linguistic determinism.
  • GMO foods are safe. I still think they should be labeled, because consumers do have the right to know and may wish to avoid supporting monoculture farming, but the science on their safety is quite solid.
  • A small Brooklyn yogurt maker has started bottling the whey that’s typically discarded after yogurt is strained to make Greek yogurt. Disposing of that whey has become a major business problem for the big Greek yogurt companies because it can’t just be dumped like water, but it turns out that it’s high in beneficial bacteria and is already consumed as a drink in other countries.
  • Scientists working in China, led by friend of the dish Dr. Steve Brusatte, believe they’ve discovered the remains of the largest winged dinosaur found to date, posing new questions for evolutionary biologists on how and why wings caught on as an adaptation.
  • This post on “Hospital Glam,” photos of people with invisible disabilities in health-care environments, seems like both a way to increase awareness and perhaps help the self-esteem of the subjects.
  • Gawker had a bad week – the piece outing a closeted CFO was salacious and incredibly distasteful – but this piece on growing up in fundamentalist households is well-written and surprisingly balanced.
  • Sticklers, unite: A grammar nut used her knowledge to beat a parking ticket.
  • Top Chef judge and friend of the dish Hugh Acheson demoed several recipes from his latest cookbook for Talks at Google. “If you buy pre-minced garlic, you are dead to me.” This is why we love Hugh. If you haven’t picked up the book, The Broad Fork, you should do so. It’s fantastic, and entirely built around produce; the charred-onion vinaigrette, which he makes in this video, is also a fantastic steak sauce.
  • Alton Brown set the world straight by saying that a hot dog is indeed a sandwich, but more importantly, he showed everyone how to store all of those pesky mustard containers in your fridge:

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→ July 11, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 7/10/15.

No Insider content this week, since I was on vacation in St. Thomas.

We stayed at the Marriott at Frenchman’s Reef, which was fine, not as nice as the Marriott resort on St. Kitts in terms of the hotel itself, the service, or the food. Our main goal was rest and relaxation, and we got plenty of that, along with rum and swimming. We had one meal off campus, at Grande Cru in the Yacht Haven Grande shopping center in eastern Charlotte Amalie, and it was spectacular. The sauteed brussels sprouts with lardons of house-smoked bacon and shaved grana padano was superb, as was the special I ordered, seared duck breast (cooked medium, as promised) with local pumpkin risotto and local collard greens. Even the dessert, a flourless chocolate cake with sea salt, caramel sauce, and espresso ice cream, was better than expected, as the cake itself had a fantastic texture and a deep, dense chocolate flavor. Also, the hostess is a self-proclaimed “Mets girl.”

Also, here’s another reminder that The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, Molly Knight’s fantastic book on the 2013-14 Dodgers, comes out on Tuesday You should buy it and read it and thank me when you’re done. It’s also available for users of Apple’s iBooks.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • The best longread of the week comes from the New York Times, on two pairs of identical twins in Colombia, separated at birth by mistake and raised as two pairs of fraternal twins.
  • The Washington Post’s magazine had this story on people who live in teeny tiny houses. I mostly think they’re insane, although something about the idea of simplifying my life to that extent appeals to me. The IKEA where we shopped in Tempe had a 250 square foot “apartment” set up in the store, and I was riveted by it – but they made the space work. There were even separate areas so that you weren’t always in one “room.” Of course, some folks truly do think tiny house residents are out of their minds, although I might have expressed the same without the emphasis on flatulence.
  • Another tremendous longread on one desperate father’s attempts to treat his son’s epilepsy with marijuana.
  • I loved Inside Out, so of course I loved this chart from Vox.com showing how the five emotions might combine to form 15 more complex ones.
  • This reddit question from a Canadian mom whose daughter got herself vaccinated is amazing – her original question is gone but if you scroll down you can see it. She wanted to know if she might have a right to sue the doctor who did it! Meanwhile, this week in vaccine denial brings us a post that claims that getting the measles is beneficial and that “germ theory itself is dead.” The anonymous (of course) author uses a lot of big words s/he doesn’t understand, an example of the argument by prestigious jargon fallacy. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t click on that link.
  • Oklahoma is dead-set on proving itself to be America’s Backwater, including their unending fight to execute a man despite very shaky evidence of his guilt. The death penalty is a policy disaster (and, in my opinion, morally untenable) anyway, but the case against Richard Glossip is flimsier than the first little pig’s house.
  • Finally, a $1.99 Kindle Single from Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie titled We Should All Be Feminists, a transcript of a TEDx talk she gave that delves into the meaning of that particular F-word and some basic (if perhaps too obvious) advice on how to raise our children to eradicate the gender divide.
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