Stick to baseball, 6/1/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I have a top 50 pro prospect rankings update slated for Monday the 3rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game French Quarter, from the designers of Three Sisters and Fleet: the Dice Game. I think it’s fantastic, although it’s harder than any of their previous games to play well.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and somewhere in the 2:30 pm show Unpacked for one more segment. We’ll discuss some of my new rankings on the first show and have an interview with Colt Emerson lined up.

A million bonus points if you know what today is, by the way. I’ll accept two answers, although one is more obvious than the other.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: You’ve probably seen this Guardian longread on the so-called “pro-natalist” family who, among other things, think nothing of physically abusing their children in the name of “discipline.” My issue with the piece is this: The parents claim that their parenting is “evidence-based,” yet they then do many things, including smacking their children, that are unequivocally contrary to all available evidence – and the piece’s author does not push back in any way. That is your job as a journalist.
  • WIRED has the story of Jane Willenbring, the victim of sexual harassment by disgraced Professor David Marchant while they worked in Antarctica, whose willingness to come forward led to Marchant’s firing and the renaming of the glacier that once bore his name.
  • A nurse at NYU’s Langone Health hospital mentioned the genocide in Gaza during her speech accepting an award for her compassion in caring for mothers who’d lost their babies. The hospital fired her. They’ve said she was warned before “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” The hospital took its name from Republican billionaire donor Kenneth Langone, who has previously compared critics of rising income inequality to Nazis.
  • UC-Irvine law professor David Kaye writes in the New York Times that we should allow the International Criminal Court to do its job after the Court announced charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The U.S. has remained outside of the ICC for twenty years, even though we could do the most good by accepting its tenets and supporting its efforts to pursue war-crimes charges – as we have asked the ICC to do against Vladimir Putin.
  • Even before Friday’s verdict, Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric had turned more dangerous with the convicted felon’s apparent endorsement of a rant about how he’ll “get rid of all you fucking liberals.”
  • The Washington Post sat on the story of Samuel Alito hanging pro-insurrection and pro-nationalist flags at his house for several years. The New York Times has been reporting on the story now, including this very measured piece on what seems to have happened, including disputes over the order of some of the events in the neighborhood dispute.
  • A passenger on a United flight into Fresno this week has tested positive for measles. This should be a criminal offense – they put many, many other people at risk through their actions, like driving drunk.
  • Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that now Democrats are just as bad at Republicans in putting political concerns over science, as Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) continues his sham hearings promoting the debunked lab-leak hypothesis.
  • Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian equivalent of the f-slur and saying there was too much of that in the priesthood when arguing against allowing celibate gay men to take orders. I think there’s too much emphasis here on the word choice and nowhere near enough on pretty much everything that lies behind it.
  • Luthier is the latest complex game from Paverson Games, publisher of last year’s excellent heavy game Distilled. There’s a full site up for the game but the crowdfunding link isn’t open yet. I saw Luthier at PAX Unplugged; it’s gorgeous and huge, but my guess is it’s too long a game for my personal tastes and attention span.

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

  • Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”
  • Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.
  • Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.
  • Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.
  • A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.
  • I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.
  • Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

  • Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.
  • Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.
  • Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.

Stick to baseball, 12/9/23.

Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.

At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.

My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/14/23.

My one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic this week was my first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Tigers, Cardinals, and Rockies. I’ll have a longer wrap-up once my trip concludes on Saturday evening.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: ProPublica continues to lead the way in exposing the role of Leonard Leo in creating the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court and packing federal courts with right-wing jurists, often of dubious credentials, and how he plans to push the country further towards a Christian theocracy.
  • New York’s Olivia Nuzzi followed the clown car of Republican candidates trying to run against the disgraced former President – and, so far, failing.
  • The richest man in Pennsylvania is spending millions of dollars to support Republican candidates for judicial races, most of it to support Carolyn Carluccio, a right-wing justice running for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.
  • Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin wrote a lovely memoriam to sportswriter Jim Caple, who died last week at age 61 of frontotemporal dementia. I did not know Jim well, and even argued with him at times about matters such as the value of the runs scored statistic for individual hitters, but I believe the outpouring of sadness from people in our industry who did know him well is a testament to his legacy.
  • Several new instant-loan apps in India have targeted borrowers with threats of leaked nudes, harassment, and other forms of coercion that have led to multiple suicides.
  • I have taken a psyllium husk supplement every day for nearly 25 years now to help manage my stomach, as I was diagnosed with the meaningless term “irritable bowel syndrome,” which means that I don’t actually have a GI disease or disorder but the doctors didn’t want me to walk away empty-handed. Psyllium husk works wonders, and it’s probably pretty good for my overall health anyway. Now it’s a fad food and if you fucking hippies and influencers create a shortage I will come for you all.
  • Target closed several Seattle stores, blaming crime for the decisions – but is that really the reason for the failures of these Target mini-stores?
  • Arkansas, befitting its status as a backwater state, gave prisoners with COVID-19 ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, so now the ACLU has filed suit on their behalf. Just a reminder that ivermectin is completely ineffective against COVID-19 and comes with rather unpleasant side effects, no matter what the grifters on the interwebs told you.
  • Mississippi was one of the only two states that disallowed religious exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements until a Republican judge struck down the state’s rule, and this fall over 1800 such exemptions have been issued – even though no major religion bans or forbids vaccines. This is all a con from parents who are ignorant, denialist, or just sheep going along with the Republican party’s anti-science platform. We’re likely to see some sort of outbreak there in the next few months, perhaps measles, as it’s the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases that affect humans.
  • Eric Trump hosted an overt anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust and once killed someone while driving drunk at the Trump Doral Miami resort for a “Reawaken America” event this week.
  • And some prominent Texas Republicans hosted Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at the headquarters of right-wing consulting firm Pale Horse Strategies.
  • Elon Musk is actively promoting false information about the Israel-Hamas war, even sharing a video that falsely claimed a reporter there was actually an actor. (By the way, I’m avoiding any commentary on that conflict. I know I don’t know anywhere near enough to say anything worthwhile beyond condemning any and all attacks on civilians.)
  • Alex Norris is the creator of the web comic known simply as Webcomic Name, but after he signed a deal with Golden Bell Games to publish a board game using his creations, the publisher is trying to claim ownership of his intellectual property. There’s a GoFundMe to support his legal case, but I’m also linking this so people know what Golden Bell – publishers of Unbroken, Dungeon Dice, and other titles – are all about.

Stick to baseball, 4/8/23.

I had two new pieces up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my second minor league scouting notebook from the Cactus League and a draft blog post on a few potential first-rounders I saw in Arizona. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. I’m down with some sort of cold right now, though, so I’ll be away from the stadium for a bit.

My first column for Wirecutter on board games, giving recommendations for five great roll-and-write games for different age/skill levels, ran this week.

My podcast will return this week, now that I’m off the road (and even if I’m still not 100% on Monday). I am about to send out a new issue of my free email newsletter today, though.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Atavist has the story of Lesley Hu, whose ex-husband was so brainwashed by anti-vaxxers whose content he found online that he killed their son rather than allow him to be vaccinated. It’s a horrifying story of misinformation, mental illness, and a court system unprepared to deal with these cases.
  • BMC Infectious Diseases is set to retract a paper published last year that claimed, with insufficient evidence (to put it mildly), that COVID-19 vaccines had caused up to 278,000 deaths. How did such a terrible study get through peer review? The problem is with the process, not just this particular paper.
  • I linked to a story a few months back about a U.S. Marine who used the courts to kidnap an Afghan baby whose parents had been killed but who had living relatives willing to take her in. This past week, a different U.S judge voided the adoption. It’s not over, but this is a step in the right direction. The Marine and his wife used their Christianity as a justification for taking the child, who is now 4 years old.
  • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his handpicked, denialist Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from a flawed COVID vaccine report that claimed that young men should not get these safe, effective immunizations. Infection with COVID-19 carries a much greater risk of cardiac-related deaths than the vaccines do, but the report left out data showing this.
  • Why do so many of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs and business leaders end up in prison?
  • I wasn’t familiar with the Indian metal band Bloodywood, who fuse Western styles from thrash to death metal to rap-metal with Indian folk music, but they’ve become a breakout act in a country that has never embraced the metal genre the way other nations with comparable arts scenes have.
  • Board game news: Klaus Teuber, the designer of the game now known simply as Catan, died this week at age 70. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boardgamegeek all published worthwhile obituaries, honoring the man whose creation has sold over 40 million copies and divided board game history into Before and After. Catan and Ticket to Ride are the two games that did the most to turn me into a board gamer, and in turn into something of a board game writer, too.
  • Inside Up Games has a huge hit on its hands with Earth, which I’ll be reviewing this month or in early May and which I think is the favorite right now to win the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Their next big release, the route-building and resource management game Terminus, is on Kickstarter now.

Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.
  • A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”
  • I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.
  • 25th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.

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.

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.

Stick to baseball, 9/4/22.

One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at some of the more significant or interesting September callups from the last seven days. Some other good names, like Triston Casas, came up after I wrote it.

My podcast returned this week with Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…