Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/11/20.

I didn’t publish anything this week at the Athletic, but hope to have two pieces up next week, as well as a new review at Paste and possibly new pieces at Ars Technica and Vulture as well. I did hold a short Persicope video chat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold.

My publisher is holding a contest where one winner will get a 30-minute chat with me before the baseball season starts, and several other entrants will win free copies of The Inside Game. You can enter for free here.

Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I appeared on the Big Fly Baseball podcast this week and spoke with WHB’s Soren Petro about the shutdown, the draft, and the Royals for almost a half an hour.

And now, the links…

The Queen.

If you’d like to win a free, signed copy of this book, sign up for my free email newsletter by this Friday, October 25, at 12 pm ET. I’ll choose one subscriber at random to win the prize, graciously donated by Josh and Little, Brown & Co.

Josh Levin has been writing for Slate since 2003 and has co-hosted their podcast Hang Up and Listen for a decade now. (I appeared on the show way back in 2013.) His first book, The Queen, has nothing whatsoever to do with sports, however; it is an engrossing profile and history of Linda Taylor, the woman tabbed by Chicago newspapers and made infamous by Ronald Reagan as a “welfare queen,” whose fraudulent activities were widely embellished by the media and conservative politicians … and who also probably committed other, far worse crimes during her long life of malfeasance.

Linda Taylor was a welfare cheat, and got caught multiple times doing so, although attempts to prosecute her weren’t always successful, and authorities didn’t always follow through even when she was caught because the laws didn’t adequately address this type of public assistance fraud. She used different identities to apply more than once for aid, and used the names of children who weren’t hers, or didn’t exist at all, to ask for more. It’s possible that she was among the most financially successful people exploiting the public aid system in the 1970s, and that that alone would have been enough to make her story newsworthy.

Levin does way more than tell the story of Taylor’s misdeeds around welfare, however. For one thing, he gives readers a detailed biography of Taylor, from birth to death, giving much-needed balance to her story. He explains the roles that uncertain parentage and mixed-race status in a time when that could leave someone ostracized from white and black circles had in shaping her life, while also using interviews and public records to show that Taylor was more than just a con artist, with credible accusations of kidnapping and even murder following in her wake. One of the more interesting threads in Taylor’s biography is her false claim that she was the daughter of a man in Chicago who died and left behind a maybe-illegal fortune, leading to a trial that hinged as much on her own history of lying as anything else.

That alone would make for a pretty good, if short, book, but Levin adds a second and more substantial layer to Taylor’s story by explaining how she became the front-page welfare queen whose thimblerigging became fodder for politicians and activist journalists in Illinois and, eventually, across the country. Levin details much of the life of George Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, whom Levin credits with putting Taylor in the spotlight and helping create the image of her as both an extensive welfare cheat and a symbol of wrongdoing around the public aid system, both by recipients and by people working within the government. That was then picked up by members of the Illinois state legislature, who at one point managed to create their own extrajudicial investigative team to go after welfare frauds, and subsequently by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign.

Reagan, who had left office as California’s governor after two terms in 1974, was a primary challenger to Gerald Ford, who of course was the first unelected official to ascend to the Presidency and was seen as vulnerable for that reason and his tie to the disgraced President Nixon. Reagan began using the story of the “Chicago woman” who used dozens of aliases and the names of hundreds of children to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeserved welfare checks. He was referring to Taylor, but overstated the extent of her crimes and her takings, and continued to embellish the story as the campaign continued – even over objections of some of his own campaign staffers. Levin spins this into a larger point about Reagan’s penchant for dissembling, misrepresenting, or outright lying – and the lack of accountability even from the media covering his campaign at the time – and while Levin never draws the direct parallel to our current President or the contemporary environment of “alternative facts,” I found it impossible to read The Queen without thinking that even Trump’s original campaign was a direct descendant of Reagan’s. Trump is just more blatant about his lies, and perhaps more unrepentant about it, but he was hardly the first – especially when it comes to demonizing people of color.

And that’s the other significant theme of Levin’s book: This is very much a story about race. Taylor’s precise ethnicity is unclear, and she passed for white, black, Latina, and Filipina at different points in her life, but at a time when the “one-drop rule” still existed through the American south, she was generally seen as black. That made her the ideal target for politicians courting white voters angry over the stagnant American economy of the post-oil crisis 1970s and the societal changes that resulted from the civil rights movement. Race-baiting is hardly new in American politics, but Taylor’s race and the breadth of her actual or presumed crimes made her the perfect talking point for candidates looking to appeal to the “economically anxious” non-Latinx white voters who, in 1976, constituted 89% of the U.S. electorate. As I write this, we’re dealing with the current President accusing Democrats pursuing an impeachment inquiry of a “lynching,” invoking a term used almost exclusively to refer to the murders of black men across the American south between the civil war and 1981, when Michael Donald was lynched in Alabama by multiple members of the Ku Klux Klan. Levin makes the case that this sort of coded language is hardly new, and was widely used by a candidate who would go on to serve two terms as President, winning re-election by a historic landslide in 1984.

There’s quite a bit more detail in The Queen, including side threads on the officers who first brought Taylor to some measure of justice (and led to her infamy), Taylor’s daughter and her role in some of the ongoing scams, and comments from people whose lives were affected, almost all adversely, by Taylor’s involvement. The possible murder committed by Taylor for a modest financial gain is an appalling enough story, although Levin can only go so far with that subplot because Taylor was never even arrested for that crime, and the same goes for the accusations that she kidnapped children and either sold them or used their identities to gain more public aid while neglecting the kids. There’s a lot of misery in The Queen, some of it belonging to Taylor herself, but it’s also very much a story of the modern United States – of race and class divides, of lying and self-serving politicians, and of a media culture that still is learning the importance of holding people accountable for their words.

Next up: Just about done with the second book in Paul Theroux’s Riding the Rails trilogy.

Stick to baseball, 7/27/19.

My two ESPN+ posts this week covered a slew of low-A and short-season prospects for the Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox, and Orioles, including Roansy Contreras and a third look at Grayson Rodriguez; and my wrapup of this year’s Under Armour game, full of high school prospects for the 2020 draft. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At the moment, it looks like I’ll be in Bristol on Wednesday for ESPN’s Trade Deadline special, driving home that night and flying out to Gen Con the following morning. That probably spikes a chat for this week, but I’ll return for one on the 7th or 8th.

You can still subscribe to my free email newsletter to get additional writing, typically of a more personal nature than what you find elsewhere. My deepest thanks to all of you who sent such kind replies to my most recent newsletter, and a seriously-fuck-off to the one guy who decided it was a good time to be an ass to me.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/21/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, although that will change next week after I get to a few more minor league games. I did hold a Klawchat on Friday.

On the board game front, I had two pieces up at Paste this week. One is a straight review of Corinth, a new roll-and-write game from Days of Wonder that is sort of Yspahan: the Dice Game, but with a new theme and much altered rules. The other recaps the day and a half I spent at the Origins Game Fair, running through all the new games I saw or played.

On July 8th, the night after the Futures Game, I’ll be at the Hudson Library and Historical Society in Hudson, Ohio, talking baseball, taking questions, and signing copies of my book Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

So You Want to Talk About Race.

When a TV channel decided to put together a panel on the Atlanta Braves’ 1990 teams on Hall of Fame weekend last month, they chose a set of criteria – members of the organization from that time period who were also inducted or selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame by the writers or one of the Hall’s committees – that produced a panel of six men, all of whom are white. The 1990s Braves were a typically diverse MLB team for the era; about 20-24% of their roster in any given year comprised players of color, some of whom were crucial to the team’s success. Fred McGriff’s arrival in a mid-1993 trade spurred one of the most furious second half runs we’ve ever seen, where Atlanta overtook San Francisco to win the division after falling nine games back in mid-July. David Justice’s home run accounted for the only run in Game 6 of the 1995 World Series, the only championship won by Atlanta in the 1990s. Andruw Jones became the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game in 1996, then became the second player ever to homer in his first two World Series at bats, and his defense was a big part of Atlanta’s run of division titles for the rest of that decade. Given that those Atlanta teams depended on the contributions of players of color, and that diversity improves outcomes in education, workplace productivity, and decision-making, the choice of criteria that excluded all persons of color harmed the end product.

This panel took place right after I had finished listening to the audio version of Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race, which is part polemic, part plea, and part guide for people of all political and philosophical beliefs who want to talk or even think about issues of race and diversity. She’s talking about racism, yes, but more broadly, she’s talking about race and how we can have better, more productive conversations about race, and racial bias, and similar types of bias like those around gender, place of origin, or sexual orientation. Ojuo is a queer black woman whose father is Nigerian, so she is able to fill the book with personal anecdotes, but she also draws substantially on others’ stories and on scholarship in the areas of racism and diversity.

The book’s chapters are provocative, by design, even though the subject matter within each often veers significantly from the initial questions. Chapters include “Why can’t I say the N-word?,” “Is police brutality really about race?,” and “Why can’t I touch your hair?,” all of which contain stories that range from appalling to horrifying, and grab the reader’s attention from the outset by the shocking nature of the titles. (The hair thing really flabbergasted me, but I asked two African-American women I know well enough to ask about the subject, and both said yes, they are frequently asked by strangers if someone can touch their hair – or have strangers touch their hair without asking.) I’m sure most people inclined to pick this book up would have the same reaction to such chapter titles as I did – because you’re not black, yes it is, and because it’s not your body – but Oluo uses those as departure points for broader questions of how society others people of color and ignores systemic or structural forces that continue to hold back nonwhite members of society on both social and economic fronts.

Other chapters get right to the meat of the subject, such as those on intersectionality and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the one titled “Why am I always being told to ‘check my privilege?'” Oluo is comfortable making the reader uncomfortable; she even acknowledges this by telling how often she’s been criticized for talking too much or too vocally about race and racial bias. Some people want to believe we live in a post-racial society or that we are raising our children to be “blind to color.” The systemic issues behind police brutality against citizens of color or the high discipline and incarceration rates of young black men are not gone, or going away any time soon, and Oluo explains just how pervasive they are (that black students are far more likely to be suspended than white students, three times as likely for boys and six times as likely for girls).

As for privilege, Oluo doesn’t hold back. You can see some of the same ideas that appear in her book in this long essay she wrote in March of 2017, in which she points out that people who ‘woke up’ to the existence of systemic and structural racism after the election of Donald Trump were, in fact, experiencing the result of privilege, because Americans of color deal with it and its residues every day. (Resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks for interviews than those with nonwhite-sound names. Scare quotes may apply.) But Oluo’s message to white readers is clear: We are late, and we have contributed to the backsliding in the rights of minorities, but we can still help if we are willing to accept our own failings and those of society. She wrote in that essay to white readers, “you can help in ways that I cannot,” and the exhortation appears again and again in the book, with countless suggestions and calls to action, questions you can ask at work, at your children’s schools, of your elected representatives, in formal and informal social groups.

There is much work to be done, and it will require the cooperation and effort of populations who are not adversely affected by such biases, conscious or structural. If you have privilege and a platform, which I do, you can use it to speak out when you see active or passive bias – lack of representation, dog-whistling, micro-aggressions, stereotype threat. You can go to school board or PTA meetings and ask about the percentage of faculty members who are persons of color, or whether the curriculum accurately reflects nonwhite cultural experiences, or how students of color are disciplined – and whether that’s different from how white students are. You can push for laws that might reduce incidents of police violence against citizens of color, like requiring body cameras, or to change or repeal laws that do not mention race but have had a disparate impact on black communities, like fighting to decriminalize drug possession and to expunge records of those non-violent crimes. You can push for greater diversity at work, not for ‘tokenism,’ but because it will make you and your company more productive. Most of all, Oluo urges readers, you can’t just pretend this stuff isn’t real. It’s everywhere because it is writ into the fabric of our society, a society that is a mere six generations away from enslaving black people, two generations away from denying them basic civil rights, one generation away from open discrimination in the workplace, and still today in a world where Americans of color, especially those who are black, face insidious, subtle discrimination at the workplace, in church, on the streets, in schools, and anywhere else they might dare to be black.

So yes, I do want to talk about race. I want to try to do something to make the world better when it comes to race, bias, and diversity. I believe that world will make us all better off – we’ll be happier and more productive people. I also believe that I am privileged, and that I’ve benefited from the same kind of structures that Oluo points out have held back people of color, because most of these arenas are a zero-sum game – college admissions, employment, etc. If a black candidate is rejected for his/her race, or is seen as less qualified because s/he grew up in disadvantaged conditions and lacked access to better education or learning resources, the beneficiary will more than likely be a white person. Oluo’s book encouraged me to say something when I saw tweets about that panel – not that it was “racist” per se, but that it excluded persons of color, and thus was not representative – and to think more about how I can make some small difference when it comes to race and bias in my work and in my life.

One aside: There was one section of one chapter in So You Want to Talk About Race that rang false for me – the portion of the chapter on cultural appropriation (an uncomfortable read for me, as someone who consumes a lot of culture without thinking about this question) where Oluo discusses rap music. Rap originated as a black genre of music, just as jazz and the blues did, and was later co-opted by the musical mainstream, which has meant white artists also use the form, and white record executives and promoters and agents all profit from it. Whether a musical form, essentially rhythmic poetry, can truly be appropriated is a worthwhile question to debate; is it comparable to a structure like a fugue or an aria, a template to which the artist must then apply his or her own creative energies? Oluo lost me, however, with claims that this assimilation has led to white rappers finding easy success in the field despite showing less talent than black rappers who struggle to find an audience. The claim itself is entirely subjective; judging what rappers have more talent would probably bog down in an argument over what exactly defines talent in rap, whether it is technical skill or lyrical ingenuity or musical innovation or something else, but even more troubling to me is that the claim appears not to be true. A few white rappers have found enormous commercial and critical success. Eminem is the best example, but he was the protégé of Dr. Dre (who is African-American), and Dre produced Eminem’s biggest albums and released them through his Aftermath imprint. (For example, The Marshall Mathers LP was produced by Dre, The 45 King, Mel-Man, and the Bass Brothers; three of those five men are African-American.) You could count the number of white rappers to have significant commercial success on two hands – the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Macklemore – while African-American rappers, many of whom seem (to my subjective ears) to have had success because of who produced them rather than their own talents, continue to dominate the singles and album charts. I understand what Oluo was trying to say here, but I don’t think the reality of the marketplace bears out her specific criticisms.

Next up: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
  • The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.
  • The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.
  • The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.
  • Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.
  • The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.
  • There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.
  • Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.
  • Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.
  • The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.
  • This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.
  • The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.
  • Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.
  • Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.
  • Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.
  • These QAnon people are batshit insane.
  • The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.
  • The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.
  • An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.
  • There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.
  • An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.
  • Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.
  • And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”
  • Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

    For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

    My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

    I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

    And now, the links…