Stick to baseball, 2/27/21.

Nothing new for subscribers to the Athletic this week now that my entire offseason prospects package has run. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Canvas, a new card-drafting and card-crafting game with some of the best artwork I’ve ever seen on a board game. It’s so visually appealing that you’ll want to play it more.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Blue Jays VP of International Scouting Andrew Tinnish about their loaded farm system and what it’s like to scout players in Latin America, including ones as young as 13. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 2/20/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, all of my prospect ranking content is now on the site, from the top 100 to the org rankings to every team’s top 20 & org report:

ArizonaHoustonOakland
AtlantaKansas CityPittsburgh
BaltimoreLA AngelsSt. Louis
BostonLA DodgersSan Diego
Chicago CubsMiamiSan Francisco
Chicago White SoxMilwaukeeSeattle
CincinnatiMinnesotaTampa Bay
ClevelandNY MetsTexas
ColoradoNY YankeesToronto
DetroitPhiladelphiaWashington

Podcasts: I was remiss in omitting these from my newsletter this week, but I appeared on several podcasts to talk prospects and rankings, including the Sox Machine podcast, the East Village Times podcast, and the Eutaw Street Report (Apple/Spotify). I’ve also recorded a spot on The Update with Adam Copeland, our Bay Area sports podcast at the Athletic, that should be available next week.

On my own podcast this week, I did a mailbag episode and ripped through as many of your questions as I could in about 35 minutes. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I finally sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, talking a little bit about the anxiety and joy of releasing all of this content into the world. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 2/13/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, my ranking of all 30 organizations ran this week on Wednesday, followed by my team-by-team reports and top 20s for the AL East and AL Central:

The remaining four divisions will run on Monday through Thursday of this week. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Bobby Heck, Special Assistant to the GM of the Tampa Bay Rays and one of the architects of the Rays’ 2020 AL champs and the multiple pennant-winning Astros teams of a few years ago. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

At Paste, I reviewed the press-your-luck game 7 Summits, co-designed by the designer of Sagrada.

My last edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials; I’m overdue for another issue because I’ve been writing the team reports and top 20s. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: New Republic looks at QAnon and the cultification of the American right, which will continue without Trump and without the nonexistent Q. The same publication argued that the Democratic Party does not understand the QAnon phenomenon, which has enraptured more educated, well-off people than the Democrats think.
  • Also from the New Republic – this is a coincidence – the alt-right problem in standup comedy, where people like Gavin McInnes have tried to use comedy to legitimize their racist beliefs.
  • The Republican Party has willingly allied itself with armed self-styled militias.
  • Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, has sued a reporter for filing a FOIA request. The only way you could more directly assault freedom of the press would be to arrest the reporter – which I assume is next.
  • Donald Trump’s incompetence and science denial has helped the U.S. have the highest case and death rates from COVID-19 in the developed world. A new panel estimates that 40% of the deaths were attributable to federal government policies – not just our late response, but structural problems like reduced access to health insurance and growing income inequality. Trump inherited a bad public health situation and made it much worse.
  • Governors across the U.S. are allowing more and more indoor dining before enough people are vaccinated to control the pandemic, which could lead to greater spread of the more infectious variants already present in the country. Delaware has been among the best states in testing and in vaccinations, but we’re already moving to 50% occupancy in restaurants, which seems contrary to scientist’s recommendations.
  • “The only truly clean energy is less energy.” So-called “clean” energy requires a lot of dirty infrastructure.
  • Phoenix police may have specifically targeted Black activist Bruce Franks, Jr., when they arrested him and hit him with a variety of serious charges after his arrest during an August 2020 protest. The grand jury that indicted him didn’t see any video from the event, but were only given police testimony, which this ABC15 investigation found included multiple false statements.
  • Earwig and the Witch, the first 3-D animated film from Studio Ghibli, is a disaster across the board. It’s directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
  • Instagram has banned anti-vaxxer and COVID-19 denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for spreading disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. All platforms should do the same. He’s a menace to public health, and his words will lead to more deaths.
  • If you’ve been to a baseball game in Arizona, you likely have heard vendor Derrick Moore and his signature “Lemonade, lemonade, like grandma made!” call. He’s facing some sort of serious medical issue and doesn’t have health insurance – nice country we have here, folks – so there’s a GoFundMe to try to help him.
  • My daughter and I have been watching The Mandalorian, which is entertaining but hasn’t quite lived up to the hype for us – nearly every problem the main character faces is solved by shooting everyone in sight. Anyway, Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune, will not be returning for season 3 after months of tweets that ranged from transphobia to COVID-19 denial to false claims about the election, with a recent post comparing the negative consequences she’s facing to the Nazi genocide against Jews. My best guess is that Disney had warned her they wouldn’t renew her contract if she didn’t knock it off, and she did it anyway.
  • TikTok might be good for the music industry, but it’s not good for good music, as the recent soporific “Drivers License,” which has spent four weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, demonstrates.
  • President Biden promised to fire any of his subordinates who harassed colleagues or otherwise treated them inappropriately, but the first major test of that came this week when a Deputy Press Secretary threatened to “destroy” a Politico reporter for writing about a relationship he had with an Axios writer. As of Friday night, the Deputy Press Secretary had only been suspended for a week. It’s not acceptable.
  • France has arrested five people so far for making online death threats against a teenager known as Mila, who posted several Islamophobic statements on social media.
  • Board game news: Renegade announced pre-orders for the June release of the second edition of Gravwell.
  • Asmodee’s years-long acquisition spree went in a new direction this week with the purchase of BoardGameArena, one of the most popular online board gaming sites. W. Eric Martin has some analysis of what this means over at BoardGameGeek.

Stick to baseball, 1/23/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the George Springer signing and the Joe Musgrove trade. My top 100 prospects ranking will appear on Thursday, January 28th, with the org rankings and team top 20s running the week of February 8th.

For Paste, I reviewed New York Zoo, a light tile-placement game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Patchwork, Cottage Garden, and Agricola.

I’ll send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend, with some exciting personal news. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Harvard magazine looks at the loneliness pandemic, which predated the COVID-19 one but has been exacerbated by the last ten months of shutdowns and isolation.
  • California’s public utilities regulator fired an employee who found $200 million due to disadvantaged state residents had gone missing.
  • A vaccine-hesitant mom rushed to vaccinate her kids when the pandemic hit, and she talked to NPR about how she ended up hesitant based on bad information she found onilne.
  • One of Delaware’s Senators, Chris Coons (D), argued in the New York Times that we need to hold Trump accountable for encouraging the terrorists through his words and tweets.
  • Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has stayed in power for 35 years, despite frequent claims of oppression, malfeasance, even spending international debt relief on a private jet. He appears to have won re-election this week, although his main opponent claims there was voter fraud.
  • I really liked the documentary Boys State, which is only available on Apple TV+, and one of the main participants wrote about attending the event in a New York Times editorial.
  • Quined restarted its Kickstarter for the new game Carnegie, which looks like a heavy economic and routebuilding game from the designer of Troyes.
  • Casual Game Revolution is holding voting for the best casual game of 2020, with the candidates My City, Calico, and Back to the Future: Back in Time.

Stick to baseball, 1/2/21.

I had three pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: breaking down the Yu Darvish trade, breaking down the Blake Snell trade, and one piece on both the Josh Bell trade and Kohei Arihara signing. I revealed my Hall of Fame ballot in another post that included several other Athletic writers’ ballots, with each of us explaining one particular vote for a player. I also held a video chat via Periscope on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game for younger kids Dragomino, a reimagining of the Spiel-winning game Kingdomino, and ranked the five best games I’ve played for kids in the 3-6 range.

At Ars Technica, I ranked the best new board game apps of 2020. I didn’t include Spirit Island, which is a gorgeous app, but the tutorial is so inscrutable that I just couldn’t figure out how to play the game at a reasonable level.

A new edition of my free email newsletter is on my to-do list for the weekend. My thanks to all of you who bought – or asked for – either of my books this holiday season. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/12/20.

I wrote one piece this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Lance Lynn and Carlos Santana signings and the Angels’ trades for two guys named Iglesias.

For Paste, I ranked the top fifteen new board games of 2020, which range from a game suitable for kids as young as 4-5 to a crunchy two-hour dice-drafter.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Tony Paul, who’s covered the Tigers for ages for the Detroit News, talking about the Tigers, what it’s like to cover a bad team, and how baseball can improve its efforts on diversity.

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

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for more essays from me and summaries of everything I’ve written between issues of the newsletter.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/29/20.

I had one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the Reds-Rockies trade and Atlanta’s two free agent signings, as well as a piece last week on what we can learn from the various pro leagues’ approaches to the pandemic. I held a Periscope video chat on Thanksgiving day while I spatchcocked the turkey.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best deduction board games, including Coup and this year’s The Search for Planet X.

I held off on sending the next issue of my free email newsletter until after the holiday so I could write up the trade and signings, but I’ll get one out in the next 48 hours. You can sign up for free here.

My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/22/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to The Athletic, about what lessons we can learn from MLB, the NBA, and the NHL (and other pro leagues) after they completed seasons during the pandemic. I spoke to numerous epidemiologists about the leagues’ approaches, from the full bubble of the NBA to MLB’s more open approach with all US-based teams playing at home, and of course the hoaxers were in the comments before the electrons were dry on the article.

Over at Vulture, I wrote about eleven board games you can play over Zoom while you can’t (or shouldn’t) see your friends and family, which seems more relevant with potential lockdowns looming in most of the country.

My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Bill Baer, talking with me about the state of baseball and what he hopes the Phillies will do with their front office openings. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, and hope to send another one before the holiday.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/14/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote about the major rule changes in MLB in 2020 that might stick around, and which ones might be worth keeping. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Search for Planet X, a deduction game that is one of the best board games I’ve played all year.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Fangraphs managing editor Meg Rowley, talking with me about the state of baseball, free agency, and some recent managerial hires. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due for another edition of my free email newsletter, this weekend, I hope.

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…