→ November 4, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.

After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.

And now, the links…

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→ September 9, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 9/9/23.

Nothing new this week other than two contributions to headlines on the callups of Jordan Lawlar and Evan Carter, but I’ll be back next week with the players I got wrong column. I did hold my first Klawchat in ages, though.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Jonathan Abrams, New York Times reported and author of the 2022 book The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, which comes out in paperback on October 3rd. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Vulture exposes the corruption behind Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithm as studios and publicists have paid small-time reviewers, who are often inexplicably included in the site’s calculations, to post positive reviews or withhold negative ones. I’m not included in RT’s metrics and I’m not paid by any studios or publicists, so you can always trust my reviews, even if they’re not any good!
  • Parents of trans kids who spoke to the New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi spoke out against the reporter and how they felt used and misled by her actions. Ghorayshi wrote a fairly uncritical piece about the so-called whistleblower at a St. Louis clinic for trans kids, but didn’t accurately reflect the sentiments of the parents she spoke to, while the whistleblower appears to have fabricated or inflated most of her claims.
  • The Florida town of Mount Dora established a program where businesses can declare themselves safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people and display a decal in their window to that effect. Several Florida Republicans are vowing to stop the program, because they are apparently opposed to the First Amendment, or too stupid to understand why it applies here.
  • Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh, who doesn’t understand the biology of gender, decided to dunk on a single woman for a Tiktok video about her Saturday routines, and even the National Review said it was a bit much. Walsh’s view is that women exist solely for procreation, so it’s unsurprising that Julia Mazur’s unmarried, childless lifestyle would be so confusing to him.
  • The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t about protecting kids, at least not for its Republican backers – it’s about blocking LGBTQ+ content online, according to sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R). It has broad bipartisan support, however, and I contacted both of Delaware’s Senators to voice my opposition, even though both are sponsors of the bill as well.
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→ June 24, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)
  • Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.
  • NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.
  • The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.
  • Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.
  • The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.
  • Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.
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→ December 10, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 12/10/22.

I’ve written a lot for the Athletic over the last two weeks, reacting to:

Over at Paste, I wrapped up everything I played or saw at PAX Unplugged last weekend. That board game convention is why I didn’t run this post last week, of course. I’ll have my best new games of 2022 post up this upcoming week.

On my podcast, I spoke to Prof. Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, about his book and some of the big themes in it. You can buy the book here, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

  • Esquire has the story of Robert Telles, former Clark County Public Administrator, now charged with murdering the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter who exposed his misdeeds in public office.
  • Mississippi, a backwater region in the American South that ranks 50th among all states for health care, 43rd in education, and 49th for its economy, took funds from a federal program aimed at helping poor families with children and used them to pay for volleyball practice facility at Southern Miss that Brett Favre had promised to pay for. They also paid $1.1 million from the same program to pay Favre for services never performed. In a functioning democracy, there’d be at least an investigation in the legislature into current Gov. Tate Reeves (R), but Mississippi is gerrymandered into oblivion and has disenfranchised 15% of Black residents, giving Republicans a supermajority in both houses, so nothing will happen.
  • ProPublica normally does great work, but they ran a garbage story about the debunked lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins, and it was rife with obvious mistakes.
  • There’s a ridiculous anti-vax film circulating online, called Died Suddenly, which is so shoddy that it claims that people who are indisputably alive actually died from the COVID-19 vaccine. Other anti-vaxxers are attacking it, saying it’s hurting their (bogus) cause. If you want more information on the various lies of Died Suddenly, much of which focuses on false claims of blood clots, you can find a lengthy takedown here on Science-Based Medicine.
  • Grant Wahl, an acclaimed and respected soccer writer who has been an outspoken critic of the World Cup and the human rights abuses taking place in Qatar, died last night at a World Cup game. He was 48.
  • A lobbyist for a Saudi alfalfa company that has been has been elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he would have influence over a dispute about water usage in the state. Thomas Galvin’s employer grows alfalfa with scarce water in Arizona and ships it to Saudi Arabia to feed livestock there.
  • Michael Harriot dismantled the defenses of Jerry Jones after a photo emerged of the Cowboys’ owner, who has never hired a Black coach, at the door of a school in 1957 where white students blocked Black kids from integrating.
  • Why does the media continue to take billionaires at their word? Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried … they promise things that the media just accepts without question, and then don’t deliver, or it turns out they were lying.
  • Speaking of which, the forces trying to get public funding for a new stadium for the Titans have made a lot of big promises of economic returns. Turns out they’re probably exaggerating.  
  • Back in high school, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State (R), “willed” a classmate “a rope and a tree” as part of a series of racist jokes he and friends made in the class yearbook.
  • Shake that City!, a sort of roll-and-place puzzle game from Alderac, is also fully funded with four days to go. You shake a device with nine cubes in it and they come out in a random pattern that tells you how to place the related tiles on your board.
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→ November 25, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 11/25/22.

Just a quick note from me this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Angels’ trade for Hunter Renfroe in exchange for three fringy reliever types, with notes from Sam Blum as well. I did do my annual livestream where I take your questions while I spatchcock a turkey, although the video quality appears to be terrible. I blame Twitter.

For Paste, I reviewed Splendor Duel and Botanik, two new small-box two-player games from the publisher Space Cowboys. Splendor Duel is a strictly two-player spinoff of the wonderful game Splendor, adding direct player interaction and special powers on the cards that make it more than two-player solitaire, which can be true of the original.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter last week. I’m on a bunch of wannabe Twitter replacement sites, including Post.news, Hive (keithlaw), and Counter Social, plus the usual Facebook and Instagram links. 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.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: ProPublica leads the way again, with a story on how a woman’s 911 call when her baby died was used to convict her of killing him, thanks to the police’s use of an evidence-free technique called “911 call analysis.”
  • The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has issued a lengthy rebuttal to a recent New York Times article that claimed harm from puberty blockers that isn’t supported by available research. The report also questions whether the authors of the Times article misquoted some sources.
  • They’re also pushing a bullshit documentary called Died Suddenly that claims many people died suddenly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine – some of who are, in fact, not dead – and are harassing those people’s loved ones online, claiming they’re part of some sort of cover-up.
  • This spike in militant anti-vaccine activity is leading to rises in measles cases, as measles is extremely contagious but depends on a pool of unvaccinated hosts, since the MMR vaccine is one of the most effective we have.
  • A Christian (Baptist) preacher in Washington state said the massacre of five LGBTQ+ people at a club in Colorado Springs was “a good thing.”
  • The same far-right is now attacking the hero who stopped the Club Q shooter, calling him a “groomer” and a slur for gay men, led by the same troll who started the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy.
  • Board game news: Z-Man Games announced Mists over Carcassonne, a new cooperative spinoff of Carcassonne, due out in January.
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→ October 29, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 10/29/22.

One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week – a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club, notably their offense. I’m about ¾ of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the trick-taking game Cat in the Box, which takes the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment as its inspiration. Cards have numbers but no suits until they’re played – as in, when they’re observed. Apparently my review was so positive the game has sold out everywhere!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Joe Posnanski, who helped me preview the World Series, talk a little about the highs and lows of the playoffs so far, and talk a little about free agency. 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 at some point I’ll send another one out. 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.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the best story yet on how the couplpe that owns the shipping materials behemoth U-Line uses their profits to fund all kinds of extreme right-wing causes, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ+ laws to anti-abortion laws and more. They oppose anything that might improve workers’ rights or raise taxes on the ultra-rich, too. If you get a box made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else. I’ve done this many times and only once have I gotten a negative reply – and I won’t do business with that company again.

This Atlantic story about a realtor in Michigan who was convinced he’d cracked the state lottery’s algorithm is a great illustration of our innate tendencies to see patterns in randomness – and how we can convince ourselves of almost anything.

Music journalist and author Caryn Rose ranked all 234 U2 songs for Rolling Stone. I found myself agreeing with most of the top of the list, although as someone who first encountered the band through MTV’s heavy rotation of “New Year’s Day,” I think that one is too low.

MLB.com writer Matthew Monaghan wrote a lovely piece for Travel + Leisure on revisiting his late wife’s favorite vacation spot, Bermuda. It’s a tough but beautiful read.

Texas no longer requires a permit for handguns, leading to more spontaneous shootings. It sounds like police – the blue we’re supposed to back – don’t seem to like this new lawless reality.

The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again, a state that decided that anyone can carry a gun without a permit, has made an activist out of one of the 10-year-old survivors.

Why didn’t St. Louis police take the gun from the kid who killed a teacher and another student in a school there last week, since he failed a background check?

At The Verge, Nilay Patel writes how Elon Musk can’t possibly adhere to his stated “free speech” goals and run what was already a “disaster clown car company” profitably. It’s not hard to agree – Twitter hasn’t been growing, its ad revenues lag behind any competitors, it faces a tangle of regulations and pressure from markets where Musk’s Tesla wants to grow, and the site has never figured out how to deal with harassment and abuse. I’m not leaving, but I’ve already been engaging less on the site, and if a viable alternative emerges I’ll gladly check it out.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spreading on the farcical social media app Truth Social have led to actual armed idiots “patrolling” around ballot boxes to try to spot voter fraud.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.” Author John Horgan writes of the beauty of this work and how it seems to defy common sense for Scientific American.

Physicist Peter Fisher gave a talk at my alma mater about the search for dark matter and the theory that WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are what make up this missing mass.

The Washington Post reports on the network of people helping direct pills to terminate pregnancies to people in states where abortion is now illegal.

Disinformation dealer Dinesh D’Souza’s publisher deleted defamatory details after recalling his new book 2000 Mules, even though he’d promised to name names. What a ding-dong.

As President, Trump had his hotels charge the Secret Service – and thus, all of us who pay taxes – five times the maximum room rate allowed by federal law, and then he lied about it.

I don’t link to the Federalist, a disinformation-spewing site funded by the owners of U-Line, very often, but this piece arguing that conservatives should fight for stronger government and more intervention in all areas of society certainly seems to remove the mask from the extreme right, because that is not conservatism – it’s fascism.

In good Administration news that seems to be flying under the radar, President Biden is moving to cancel a program to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which wouldn’t have been ready until 2035 and which the administration says is redundant with existing weapons. Some anti-nuclear weapon groups say Biden hasn’t gone far enough. The military, meanwhile, wants all the weapons.

As the parent of a teenager, I often feel like part of my job is try to reduce the stresses she faces in school and life, because we hear so much about how much stress our kids are under and I have a natural instinct to want to protect her. Psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues instead that we should teach our teenagers to embrace stress so they’re better equipped to handle it throughout their lives.

Longtime Philly Inquirer writer Stephanie Farr wrote a fun piece on Philadelphia sports fandom.

Over 250 writers signed a letter to Penguin Random House protesting the publisher’s $2 million book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her pivotal role in removing a fundamental right from tens of millions of Americans.

Board game news: Aegean Sea, the newest game from Glory to Rome co-designer Carl Chudyk, is up on Backerkit with 12 days to go.

Oh My Brain!, a new game from Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, is now up for pre-order at $5 off on 25th Century’s website.

The Queen’s Dilemma, a standalone sequel game to the Spiel-nominated King’s Dilemma, is closing in on $400K raised on Kickstarter.

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→ October 8, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 10/8/22.

My hypothetical ballots for five of the six major postseason player awards went up for subscribers to the The Athletic this week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Wormholes, a space-themed pickup-and-delivery game that’s very easy to learn. I think it’s great for family play, on the weight and fun level of Ticket to Ride.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein about the postseason awards, playoff predictions, rules changes, and more. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. 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.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: A Colorado state custody evaluator, who happens to be the brother of actor Val Kilmer, has a history of disbelieving abuse allegations and recommended a teenaged victim stay under the control of her abuser, according to an extensive report from ProPublica. Mark Kilmer has also been convicted of harassing his ex-wife, who accused him of assaulting her.
  • Also from ProPublica: Mississippi police departments have taken to hiding search warrants from the public, flouting state laws on making them available at courthouses, which has the result of protecting officers who may have violated residents’ Fourth Amendment rights in no-knock searches. I donated to ProPublica today, as their journalism is incredible and this type of depth becoming more rare in our media landscape.
  • Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) ran a TV ad so racist the Des Moines Register ran an editorial saying it has no place in their community. The ad seeks to distinguish white Iowan society from anything other.
  • Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weighed in on another DeSantis controversy, where the Governor went on Fox News and falsely claimed that no Americans questioned slavery prior to the Revolutionary War. Even I knew the Quakers were abolitionists well before American independence. He also called out Kyrie Irving’s idiocy for spreading nonsense conspiracy theories on his Instagram account.
  • This New York Times story on Russian men fleeing to neighboring countries to avoid being forced to serve in the war against Ukraine has a photo of some of those men playing the board game Splendor.
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→ August 28, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 8/28/22.

I jumped right back into the minor league thing this week, and have a new scouting notebook for subscribers to the Athletic, with notes on Anthony Volpe, Ricky Tiedeman, Orelvis Martinez, Everson Pereira, Quinn Priester, Jackson Holliday, and many more players.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres finalist Lost Ruins of Arnak, a great midweight game that looks like it’s going to be complex but plays simpler than that, combining a lot of common mechanics for a game that’s more than the sum of its parts.

My podcast will return on Monday, and my newsletter will return this week as well.

And now, the links..

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→ June 18, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 6/18/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I also held a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it, in which I was accused of “not doing my homework,” of course. Look for a mock draft this upcoming week, most likely Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Fantastic Factories, a fun engine-builder very similar to the great game Gizmos, but with the added twist of dice-rolling.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, talking about going back to the Cape League for the first time in years, only to have a travel fiasco in multiple parts keep me from getting there. Also, my two 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…

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→ June 11, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 6/11/22.

I had one post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, on Kumar Rocker’s 2022 debut for the independent Tri-City Valley Cats. (I tried to go see Reading/Altoona this week, but got rained out after I parked but before I even got into the stadium.) My current writing schedule has one more draft blog post coming after I see Carson Whisenhunt’s official 2022 debut on Sunday night, and then an updated Big Board on Thursday, June 16th.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was film critic (and Cardinals fan) Tim Grierson, talking about the logistics of film festivals and their similarities to scouting showcases, plus our thoughts on The Godfather trilogy as the first film marks its 50th anniversary. 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. My two 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: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz, author of the wonderful memoir Lost & Found, writes about the world of sunken shipping containers and the detritus that washes up on shore from them. I would guess the occasional meeple shows up among the flotsam and jetsam.
  • Steve Kirsch, one of the inventors of the optical mouse and a serial entrepreneur, has become a massive proponent of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and false cures. McGill University’s Jonathan Jarry looks at how Kirsch got from A to B.
  • A 13-year-old Baltimore middle school student died suddenly on a school field trip in Cecil County, Maryland. There’s still no indication why he died or details on what happened, five days later. What a nightmare for his family.
  • The Washington Post has fired writer Felicia Sonmez. I won’t even attempt to summarize this in a sentence or two – the article (from The New York Times) has the details.
  • The Guardian explains “greenwashing,” when companies contributing to climate change run ads, such as on podcasts that tell stories about climate change and the fight against it, implying that those companies are aligned with the show’s aims.
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