stick to baseball

→ January 2, 2021
→ By keith

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…

Longreads first: Is the new mutation of SARS-CoV-2 a ticking time bomb, or merely worrying but not terrifying? It’s more infectious, and that’s going to mean it spreads faster, so our botched vaccine rollout – just 18 more days until the adults take over again – is even more problematic than it already was.
Bookshop.org has positioned itself as the alternative to Amazon for independent booksellers, giving those shops an easy way to set up an online storefront, and consumers a place to buy books that supports local shops, but the calculus is quite different for individual shops, as they earn far less from a sale through bookshop.org than in their own physical stores. I use bookshop.org for affiliate links on the dish, and buy books there now because we have few options here in Wilmington beyond big-box stores.
Cartoon Saloon, whose Wolfwalkers is a likely nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (and is only on apple TV+), offers a different approach to children’s animation from big studios using CGI. Even Studio Ghibli has gone to computer animation for its newest film. I haven’t seen Wolfwalkers, but enjoyed two of their previous films, The Breadwinner and The Secret of Kells.
Grub Street looks at the great bucatini shortage of 2020, and the very weird, surprising cause of it.
The Daily Beast looks at the plan by neo-Nazi groups to stoke anti-vaccine sentiment, especially among white Americans, to create conflict with authorities that these racists can then exploit.
Just as they did in the 2017 GOP tax bill, the top 1% came out the big winners in December’s COVID-19 relief bill too.
The Sackler family, owners of Oxycontin producer Purdue Pharmaceuticals, refused to apologize for their role in creating and spreading America’s opioid crisis.
The BBC has a good primer on the Ethiopian conflict in Tigray and how Eritrea, a repressive dictatorship that fought a border war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s, has become an unexpected ally of its former nemesis.
Also on the BBC: the district attorney in San Francisco has an unusual background, as his parents were members of the terrorist group Weather Underground and went to jail when he was still just a year old.
And one more from the BBC – Spain is going to keep a registry of people who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. At that point, just make the vaccine mandatory. A registry just feeds into the fears of the cranks and conspiracy theorists.
The Washington Post spoke to Steve McQueen about his five Small Axe films, and how his own experiences helped inform them.
A Chesterfield County (Missouri) Councilman was banned from a local Best Buy for refusing to wear a mask. In December, nine months after the pandemic began, this jackass is still fighting mask mandates, and it sounds like the local police aren’t helping enforce anything.
An interesting opinion column submitted by one of you – we have to let teenagers make mistakes, rather than ruining their lives forever for a bad moment caught on video when they were still children. There’s a limit to this, in my opinion; Madison Cawthorn’s mistakes should have followed him, but the former high school freshman named Mimi whom this writer mentions deserves a chance to move beyond her error.
The KLF is going to rock you again, as their biggest hits are finally available on streaming sites.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, bookstores, coronavirus, links, longreads, pasta, stick to baseball

→ December 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/26/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at six of the players who impressed me or beat my expectations for them in the truncated 2020 season.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Tekhenu and Tawantinsuyu, two heavy, complex games from the publishers Board & Dice. Tekhenu made my top ten games of the year. I also have a post up at Vulture on the best board games of 2020 in various categories.

If you missed it here on the dish, I posted my annual rankings of my top 100 songs and favorite 15 albums of the year.

This link roundup is a bit skewed – I was fully possessed by the Christmas spirit this week and offline a good bit more than usual – but here are the links…

Longreads first: Actor Leonard Roberts detailed explicit and implicit racism from his time on the NBC series Heroes.
Ed Yong’s superb writing on the pandemic continued for the Atlantic with his latest column on how science defeated the virus, going from zero scientists studying the virus 13 months ago to multiple effective vaccines already delivered to first responders.
ProPublica detailed the misdeeds of a family court judge in Ohio who brought his own denialism of COVID-19 into the courtroom, including threatening to jail a mother for contempt of court if she got one her sons tested for the virus. He’s also collecting a salary and a pension by exploiting a loophole in Ohio laws, claiming he intended to retire but also running for re-election (which he won, running unopposed).
A new study out by two LSE economists shows that cutting taxes on the rich does not, in fact, create jobs for anyone. This had been a long-argued point by classical economists; I was taught it in college and business school. The evidence says otherwise.
A CNN/Bellingcat investigation identified the specific Russian agents who poisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
The New York Times had a wonderful history of Chartreuse liqueur and how the spirit is surviving when most bars are closed.
Monopoly accounts for about 30% of mass-market board game sales – which excludes the hobby channel – and it got there in large part due to monopolistic behavior by Hasbro. Competition from new publishers, including the acquisitive, PE-owned Asmodee, might dent that stranglehold on the niche.
Denver’s Tattered Cover is now the country’s largest Black-owned bookstore.
Philly’s independent, listener-supported radio station WXPN counted down the top 2020 songs of all time, and the ranking reflected the eclectic nature of their audience. (If you just want the list, it’s here.)
NME ranked every Arctic Monkeys song ever.I’m not nearly as high on their #1 choice, and would put “R U Mine” in that spot, with “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” “Arabella,” “Flourescent Adolescent,” “Do I Wanna Know,” and “From the Ritz to the Rubble” also in the top ten.
Two of the surviving members of the Waitresses told the Guardian about the making of their song “Christmas Wrapping.”
Megachurch leader and entrepreneur Joel Osteen received a $4.4 million PPP payment, from funds primarily intended for small businesses. Neither Osteen nor his wife, who also works for the church, received any of the payout.
New research shows that COVID-19 is much deadlier for younger people than previously believed.
Delaware’s New Castle County bought a local hotel and is turning it into a shelter for unstably housed persons.
The BBC has a video on the growing hole in the earth in Siberia, the result of the interaction between permafrost and the environment.
The new diplomatic agreement between Israel and Sudan, one of several trumpeted by the Trump Administration as a foreign-policy victory, threatens the status of Sudanese migrants in Israel.
Sen. Mitch McConnell bragged about being the “grim reaper” of Congress; the pandemic has made that nickname a reality.
One of the local leaders of the protests in Louisville in response to the police murder of Breonna Taylor was himself shot and killed on Friday.
From my colleagues at the Athletic ($), Omar Vizquel’s wife has accused him of domestic violence.
There’s just four days left in this Kickstarter for the Vindication board game’s new edition and its Chronicles expansion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, coronavirus, delaware, links, liquor, stick to baseball

→ December 12, 2020
→ By keith

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…

Before I get to the longreads, two stories relevant to the Georgia runoffs: Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband bought stock in companies likely to benefit from the CARES bill while she was working on it, while Sen. David Purdue took $1.8 million from a board member of FINRA while they lobbied the Senate on a bill relevant to their industry by selling his house to her privately for above its market value. Both have a history of profiteering from their positions, in levels of corruption that should lead to criminal charges, not re-elections.
Now the longreads: The Hollywood Reporter‘s chronicle of Johnny Depp’s fall from grace is shocking in just how much Depp was the architect of his own demise.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein needs to resign if this article on her cognitive decline is even remotely accurate.
A new journal article in Science shows how fast COVID-19 spread in an unmitigated setting in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s not good.
The science supports that face coverings are saving lives during the pandemic, as this Nature article states, so why are people, like this half-witted Texas congressman, still fighting them?
A community in South Dakota that ignored the pandemic is now getting destroyed by it … and they couldn’t do more than pass a defanged mask mandate because of the idiotic opposition.
“What kind of country is this?” asked a woman looking at a lengthy food bank line in Orlando, one devastating line of many from this Washington Post look at theme park employees laid off by Disney, Universal, and other operators. Of note: Disney restored pay cuts to its senior executives just a few weeks before laying off 28,000 low-wage workers.
The scientist who came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction technique was also a serial harasser of women, making any attempts to grapple with his legacy complicated.
The Oregon Medical Board finally suspended the license of a Portland anti-vaxxer pediatrician who had thousands of patients (and whose antics I’ve highlighted here before).
What comes next for evangelicals who sold their souls to make a deal with the devil in the White House?
We need better advice than telling people not to see family at the holidays, because it’s not working.
Now we finally know who funds the Federalist. It’s the Uihleins, major conservative donors in Wisconsin who run the shipping and business supply company Uline and who contracted COVID-19 while attending a Trump party in November; and DonorsTrust, a fund that allows donors to give anonymously to conservative candidates and causes – like the $1.5 million they gave the white nationalist, anti-immigrant group VDARE.
An investigation by an independent government watchdog group found that Rep. Dan Crenshaw smeared a fellow veteran who alleged she was sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The Texas Congressman, who backed the failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to nullify the 2020 Presidential election, also refused to cooperate with the OIG’s investigation.
Florida whistleblower Rebakah Jones found herself the subject of a warrant and early-morning raid, as the state accused her of unauthorized access to an internal emergency alert system. Several legal experts have said the evidence to support the warrant was flimsy, and the warrant was the judge’s first act since he was sworn in by Gov. De Santis.
WIRED looks at the strange case of Google firing a researcher for her work on an uncontroversial paper about bias in AI algorithms.
Speaking of Florida, the Orlando Sentinel apologized for endorsing Rep. Michael Waltz, who also signed on to that abortive effort to subvert our democracy. Apparently his efforts to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive sales tax wasn’t enough reason not to endorse him before the election.
This New York Times article on Wilmington, Delaware, having a ‘moment’ because of Biden is actually pretty good except for the top photo of the Charcoal Pit, which is like a poor man’s Friendly’s.
A writer who has autism writes about the harm of Sia casting a neurotypical actor as a character with autism in her new movie.
Cris Collinsworth put his foot in his mouth by acting surprised that women might actually like and know about football, and later issued a half-assed apology.
The photos of the new underwater tunnel in the Faroe Islands are quite stunning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 5, 2020
→ By keith

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.

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…

Longreads first: It’s the 19^th century in Kansas, where debtor’s prison is still a thing. In Coffeyville, a judge without a law degree issues bench warrants for a debt-collecting attorney who gets a cut of bail payments. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
Outside looks at plant-based imitation fish, and why it could be a game-changer for our depleted oceans.
I reviewed the new documentary The Donut King here earlier this week, and the BBC has a longread on the same man, Cambodian refugee turned donut-shop entrepreneur Ted Ngoy.
In 2018, Gatwick Airport had to close for two days after multiple people reported seeing a drone flying in its airspace. Yet a long police investigation has found no evidence any drone was ever there.
This 2018 piece from the Washington Post is a strange sort of apologia for Chevy Chase, a white man who’s said and done some lousy things, and made some bad choices, and doesn’t seem to understand why nobody wants to work with him.
Stereogum explains why an obscure Pavement song became their most-streamed track on Spotify, and how the service is trying to convince artists to take an even lower royalty rate than they already do.
One of Joe Biden’s top advisers lobbied for the 2017 GOP tax cut, which also gave a boon to MLB owners by allowing them to continue to pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage. Cynthia Hogan also lobbied for the NFL while the league was dealing with bad publicity after several domestic violence incidents, and played a pivotal role in Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991.
Anti-vax communities have proliferated on social media for years, despite the evidence harm they cause, but now they’ve become recruiting grounds for people pushing the bullshit conspiracy theory known as QAnon.
A new article published in Microbes and Infection looks at how anti-vaccine activists are courting people thirsty for information on COVID-19, identifying six specific tactics one such show has been using to convince people that the virus is a hoax and the vaccines won’t be safe.
The media needs to stop reporting on people’s intent to get (or not get) a COVID-19 vaccine, because it’s helping erode already shaky public trust.
The English rapper Digga D has to notify police any time he uploads or releases new material, potentially giving them the chance to censor him, as part of the terms of his probation for a conviction for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
The editors at the National Review called Trump’s ongoing attempts to claim widespread election fraud cost him the Presidency a “disgraceful endgame.”
Trump’s ‘vaccine czar’ Moncef Slaoui owns $10 million in stock in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the companies that has worked with the Administration’s Warp Speed effort to develop a vaccine, and refuses to sell it. The Administration’s position is that Slaoui is technically a contractor and thus isn’t bound by the same ethics rules as employees.
Jess Grose, the New York Times‘ parenting editor, writes about why most kids hate to lose and what parents can do about it.
A school superintendent in Weatherford, in North Texas, refuses to enforce a state mask mandate … and nobody is stopping him.
Mental Floss gives us the controversial history of fry bread, sometimes called Indian fry bread, a traditional food borne out of the oppression of Native Americans by white authorities.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about how an obsession with “smart politics” left the press unprepared to do its job when Donald Trump began his run for President.
Tweet of the week:

Cartoon repost. And edited. #CovidVaccine #COVID #covid19 pic.twitter.com/Fpcm8W4xKm
— Michael de Adder (@deAdder) November 29, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: biden, conspiracy theories, fish, food history, food science, kansas, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 29, 2020
→ By keith

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…

Longreads first: This GQ article, about the author’s parents and a promise each made to never put the other spouse in a nursing home, is just heartbreaking.
The New Yorker details the underground network (with many Korean-Americans) trying to topple the North Korean government.
NiemanLab details the moral and business cases for increasing diversity in the newsroom, although with newspapers dying it may be a bit of a lost cause.
The Justice Department is now looking into the questionable stock trades by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) that I mentioned in a link last week. If you’re still voting for this crook – who still refuses to debate Jon Ossoff, his Democrat opponent – I really don’t know what to tell you.
The logic of COVID-19 restrictions is falling apart, because they’re determined by economic factors, not by science.
SCOTUS’ decision last week on COVID-19 restrictions, written by “scientifically illiterate judges,” will cost Americans’ lives, writes economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.
YouTube finally suspended the feed of the nationalist One American News Network for spreading bogus information on the pandemic – not for spreading bullshit about the election.
A coffee brand that had capitalized on its conservative political leanings ran into trouble when it (rightfully) declined to support accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.
Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, discussed how to make higher education less overtly racist in an online talk with Radcliffe and Harvard College Everywhere.
From 2010, Ed Yong, who has written some essential pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic this year, wrote about a woman whose amygdala was so damaged that she can no longer experience fear.
The Wall Street Journal profiled the conservative social media network Parler, but the real revelation here is that it’s backed by the Mercer family, whose views are about as neo-Nazi and white nationalist as it gets.
Anti-lockdown twits like to point to Sweden as some sort of success story, but so far there’s no evidence herd immunity is working there – and they’re faring much worse than their Nordic neighbors.
Greg Burton writes for the Arizona Republic about how the modern environment has made it more dangerous for journalists to do the most routine tasks for their jobs.
On Tuesday, December 1^st, the Welsh Rugby Union is hosting a free community talk on autism and the autism community in Wales. (I’m friends with one of the scheduled speakers.)
Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff locked students out of remote class sessions if they failed to get required COVID-19 tests. Getting tested isn’t just about you, but it’s a responsibility to your community.
Several board game publishers have Black Friday sales going on right now, including Renegade, Capstone, Floodgate, and Japanime.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, autism, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, longreads, science, stick to baseball, sweden

→ November 22, 2020
→ By keith

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 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…

Longreads first: Cal Newport, the author of the superb book Deep Work, writes in the New Yorker about the problems with personal productivity in the age of the knowledge worker. Our business world is very poorly built for the current environment of remote work and associated challenges like child care and remote schooling.
Also from the New Yorker, Shane Bauer looks at how a violent police force ruled Vallejo, California, killing residents (usually people of color) with impunity.
The Guardian describes how the Colombian army killed thousands of innocent civilians and claimed they were insurgents, a scandal known as falsos positivos (false positives) that have turned a former military hero into a villain.
Rebecca Solnit argues that Democrats should not meet those who advocate racism, misogyny, homophobia, and authoritarianism halfway. When the LA Times turned its editorial page over to letters from Trump supporters – under the disingenuous claim that we hadn’t been “listening” to those voices – Fox News and the Federalist did not and were not pressured to give time to Biden supporters.
Jezebel looks at how the online wellness community, already pushing various forms of woo, has latched on to the hoax conspiracy theory QAnon.
There’s a new study out of Denmark that deniers and other anti-mask loons have been citing as evidence that masks don’t work against COVID-19, but they’re completely – and deliberately – misinterpreting that study’s methods and conclusions. Among other things, the study didn’t even look at whether wearing a mask prevented transmission to other people, which has long been the main reason cited for mask recommendations.
Sen. David Perdue (R), fighting Jon Ossoff for re-election in a January 4^th runoff, made tens of thousands of dollars by helping a defense contractor in which he owned shares via a bill that directed Navy funds to the contractor.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is accused of multiple abuses of power, including an ongoing indictment for securities fraud charges that is now five years old, but impeachment is very rare in the Lone Star State.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State says fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, have been pressuring him to exclude legal ballots. The whole party appears to have gone down the same bottomless pit.
Christian nationalists are becoming a more important voting bloc, backing Donald Trump and Republicans in huge numbers in 2016 and 2020. My own hypothesis is that as overall religiosity continues its decades-long decline, the percentage of religious Americans who identify with these authoritarian beliefs will increase.
Trump’s foreign policy people are reportedly trying to set as many “fires” as possible so that Biden’s Administration is hamstrung the moment they take office, unable to push new initiatives because they’re trying to put those fires out.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs tweeted about death threats she and others in her office have received in the wake of this year’s election, where Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, both Democrats, won the majority of ballots in her state.
Raw Story spoke to a neuroscientist about how Americans can recover from the harm four years of Trump has caused. I think he said something along the lines of “Lock him up.”
Ian Millhiser points out just how undemocratic the United States Senate is, where a minority of the population controls a majority of seats.
LA Times food critic Patricia Escárcega tweeted about how she lost a grievance over the fact that she’s paid less than her male colleague who does the same job that she does. Both were hired in the wake of the death of their legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. UPDATE: she just tweeted another thread in response to the LA Times‘s public statements about the case.
A new marine sanctuary around the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha in the southern Atlantic will be the world’s largest.
A peer in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords referred to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris as “the Indian” in a tweet, but won’t be sanctioned for it.
Defector has the dope on Bill Simmons’s efforts to thwart the Ringer’s union, while the New York Times looks at how the Ringer is using contractors to reduce the importance of full-time employees.
Donald Clarke of The Irish Times asks why all these terrible films are being called classics, citing Hocus Pocus and The Family Stone.
McSweeney’s presents Olivia, the COVID-19 era American Girl doll.
BBC Radio 1 announced they will no longer play the original version of the Pogues’ Christmas song “Fairytale of New York,” which includes a homophobic slur.
Morrissey claims he was dropped from his record label due to “diversity,” not because he’s a racist, Islamophobic asshole.
Zach Hayes explains the case against Curt Schilling for the Hall of Fame on PitcherList.
The Chicago Public Library eliminated fines for overdue books last year, and saw missing materials return while patronage increased.
The BBC has a primer on the brewing civil war in Ethiopia, where Tigrayan and Oromian people have been at odds since the fall of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
A wrongful death lawsuit claims that managers at a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa placed bets on how many workers would contract COVID-19 after those employees were ordered to report for work even in unsafe conditions.
My former employers at Disney have been accused of withholding royalty payments to author Alan Dean Foster for books he’s written in the Star Wars universe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, colombia, coronavirus, disney, ethiopia, georgia, links, longreads, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ November 14, 2020
→ By keith

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…

Longreads first: In Arkansas, tenants who fall behind on their rent can end up in jail, because apparently that state is still operating like the setting of a Dickens novel. The law dates back to the turn of the last century and even prosecutors say it’s probably unconstitutional. ProPublica examines the law and cases where people, often women and people of color, have been further victimized by it. Arkansas voted overwhelmingly red this month, giving Trump, his sycophant Sen. Tom Cotton, and three of their four Representatives at least 60% of the vote, while elections in the two chambers of their state legislature went more than 3 to 1 for Republicans.
An extensive disinformation campaign run by Russian and Syrian intelligence agencies led to the suicide of the founder of Mayday Rescue, best known as the group that helped create Syria’s White Helmets.
Scientists may have solved the information paradox of black holes, which was first described by Stephen Hawking. Black holes appear to be able to ‘shed’ information, rather than simply absorbing (and thus destroying) all information that enter them. This goes against Einstein’s theory of general relativity, instead relying on quantum gravity.
From September of 2019, this Washington Monthly story profiles a far-right Youtube hatemonger whose rise in popularity has been a nightmare for establishment conservatives – yet they have no problem courting that audience’s votes come elections.
Protocol has a brief history of Discord, the popular social media app for gamers (which I’ve used several times to demo board games with publishers), although it’s still not really clear how the company can monetize this large audience.
Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Revolution led to a change in how its democracy works, powered by a new platform called vTaiwan that facilitates discussion of policy matters and encourages consensus rather than the chaos typical of social media.
Rev. Raphael Warnock is a Democrat running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of the two runoff elections in Georgia in January, and Republicans are attacking him for a 2002 arrest for obstruction of justice … which was for objecting to police interrogating minors without a lawyer or guardians present. The investigators later apologized.
Meanwhile, multi-millionaire Sen. David Perdue (R), facing Jon Ossoff (D) in the other runoff, is a climate change denier who owns a beachfront mansion in a neighborhood that has taken extensive steps to protect itself from rising sea levels.
And major GOP donors are pouring money into the state to try to preserve the GOP’s advantage in the Senate.
Several State Senate candidates in Florida were fake candidates funded by dark money to confuse voters into not voting for Democrats – such as an Alex Rodriguez running against the Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez in a district the Republican won by just 31 votes.
This was published the day before the election, but Vox described some activist groups’ plans to fight back when Trump refused to concede the election, some of which we’ve seen already in action.
A Republican firm run by a top aide on Trump’s campaign sent out mass, unmarked tests to Philly supporters urging them to protest vote-counting in the city.
From Nate Silver: Joe Biden won pretty convincingly in the end.
Jennifer Rubin (writing in the Washington Post) writes that changing demographics spell trouble for the Republican Party going forward as their path to the Presidency gets narrower.
The same paper reports on the shift of Latinx voters in the Rio Grande valley towards Trump, even as the state as a whole moved towards Biden, underscoring the diversity of the Latinx population, especially when it comes to what issues and policies matter to each voter, and the Democrats’ messaging failure in that region.
Roxane Gay wrote for the New York Times that the continued support for Trump is a disgrace, but that she’s energized and ready to fight for a better future. I don’t understand how 70 million Americans can see (gestures wildly around self) this and say they want four more years of it.
This Twitter thread undercuts any arguments in favor of the Electoral College, asking whether its defenders even understand what they’re defending.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito went on a steeply partisan rant while speaking at the Federalist Society. Not for nothing, but the house impeached SCOTUS Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 on grounds that he was too partisan.
Public health experts and scientists say Utah’s government is ignoring their calls for action to stop the state’s COVID-19 surge, with an infection rate of 1.17, 81.3 daily new cases per 100,000 residents, and less than 25% of their ICU beds available.
Meanwhile, Florida hired an unqualified, conspiracy theory-touting sports blogger for its COVID-19 task force. He showed up in my mentions one time with some bullshit about masks being ineffective (fun fact – they are, and the CDC just updated their recommendations to say that masks offer the wearer more protection than previously believed).
WHYY’s The Pulse podcast looks at the ongoing efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and the upcoming battle to get people to trust it.
Have you seen the claim that suicides are up 200% due to the lockdown, often cited as an argument against a second closing of the economy? It’s false, and it’s gross to try to use suicide, a very real problem, to fight policies designed to reduce the spread the coronavirus.
The Cut looks at several youngish Americans who are ignoring the pandemic and guidelines for limiting its spread by traveling around the world without regard to the consequences of their selfish actions.
High Street on Market, my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, has closed temporarily but plans to relocate and open again in 2021. Their sibling restaurant Fork is still open, with outdoor seating, as they had a different lease and landlord.
Geneva now has the world’s highest minimum wage, about US$25 an hour, to allow the many service workers in its city to pay their rent and feed themselves without having to rely on public assistance or food pantries. It’s the same problem facing low-wage earners in many U.S. cities like San Francisco – they can’t afford to live in or near the city where they work.
Chris Archer wrote on the Players Coalition site about how absurdly hard it was for him to vote.
Vogue offered a quick appreciation of Stacey Abrams’ role in turning Georgia blue – which may matter even more in those upcoming runoffs. You can volunteer to help the Democrats try to win those seats or donate to Abrams’ Fair Fight.
VICE explores the history of the Great Barrier Hotel, once floating near the reef of that name but now moored and disused on the coast of North Korea.
Sarah McBride became the highest-ranking trans elected official in the U.S. when she won election to the state Senate here in Delaware this month.
This Inside Hook article on The Strand bookstore is the most balanced look I’ve seen at the controversy around the store’s actions this year with its workforce and PPP loan. (The owner’s purchase of shares in Amazon is a red herring, mentioned to get an emotional reaction but logical for any high net worth investor during a pandemic.)
The New York Times‘ nepotista Maggie Haberman has made a career out of normalizing and excusing Donald Trump and many of his supporters; Drew Magary skewers her, the Times, and the paper’s bizarre decision to run a profile of her in its own pages.
The Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas has failed in its response to dozens of claims from women that they were manipulated or sexually abused by men on that certification body, which certifies Sommeliers and Master Sommeliers in the U.S. and Canada. They’re on their second apology already.
Philadelphia was prepared for post-election violence, but street protests turned into dance parties. That was no accident, but was the result of planning efforts by the Working Families Party, a pro-labor, semi-progressive political party mostly active in the northeast.
Board game news: Asmodee introduced Connect and Play, guides for playing some of its games over Zoom or other remote communication services, including Just One and Dixit.
Satish Pillalamarri, one of the co-founders of North Star Games (publishers of Evolution and the Quacks of Quedlinburg), passed away this month at the age of 42 due to cancer.
Quined Games, a European publisher of primarily mid-weight to heavy games like Agra and Keyflower, announced that the new game Carnegie will hit Kickstarter on November 23^rd. It’s from the designer of Carson City and co-designer of Troyes.
Z-Man Games has released Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, the final installment in this trilogy, this one a prequel to the other two games and thus not a continuation of that storyline.
Evolution, which has been out for Steam and tablets since late 2019, is coming to Nintendo Switch in December.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, florida, georgia, links, longreads, philadelphia, physics, social media, stick to baseball, syria, taiwan, utah, voter suppression

→ October 31, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/31/20.

My ranking of the top 40 free agents this offseason went up on Thursday morning for subscribers to the Athletic. I also answered some questions for Kaitlyn McGrath, our Blue Jays beat writer, on the state of the Blue Jays’ farm system.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Taylor Trammell, Mariners outfielder and author of a column on the Players Tribune called “Baseball Is Not Black Enough.” He was an outstanding guest, and I think this is one of the best interviews I’ve had, which is all to Taylor’s credit. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and now Amazon podcasts. I appeared on TSN 1040 in Vancouver on Wednesday to talk about the World Series and the role of analytics in the sport, in which I think I expressed my views on the subject pretty well.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

Here’s my weekly reminder that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life and you should buy lots of copies for everyone you know, like your Secret Santa person, or that annoying guy at work who thinks he knows everything there is to know about sportsball.

And now the links…

Longreads first: “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman.” The Vanity Fair cover story and profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is well worth reading, despite the non-troversy over what she wore in the photos.
The Washington Post explores how several companies issued six- and seven-figure bonuses to executives, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stiffing creditors and laying off thousands of employees.
The New York Times has the story of how the Wall Street Journal‘s news reporters’ debunking of their own editorial page’s claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was some big deal, concluding that Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, thus foiling the Trump campaign’s last-ditch attempt to attach a scandal to their opponent. (The “dossier” in question is fake, and the alleged author doesn’t exist.)
Also from the Grey Lady, the story of Trump’s sketchy relationship with Deutsche Bank, and his avoidance of taxes on $287 million in forgiven debts.
Amy Coney Barrett is the least experienced SCOTUS judge in 30 years – which is what the GOP wanted, since she’s likely to give them decades of loyal service.
Author Mona Eltahawy writes that Barrett is a five-star general in the army of the patriarchy.
QAnon’s predictions – like JFK Jr. coming back on October 17^th at a Trump rally – haven’t come true, so how will the movement survive this failure of prophecy?
This Washington Post investigative report found that during Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties, so I suppose he drained the swamp right into his own coffers.
Many states and countries are moving to eliminate daylight saving(s) time, in line with increasing evidence that the practice does more harm than good.
Travis Roy, the BU hockey player who broke his neck in one of his first games in college and was paralyzed from the neck down, died this week at age 45.
Philly police smashed the windows of an SUV, beat the driver, and then pulled a toddler from the backseat … and the National Fraternal Order of Police claimed that an officer had found the child wandering around barefoot.
A judge in Florida’s Duval County resigned from the county’s voting board after a local paper reported that he’d donated 12 times to Trump’s campaign and had multiple Trump signs in his yard – which the judge’s wife claimed were on “her side” of the property.
A professor at Northeastern wrote an open letter to the school’s students as the university tries to force all professors there to teach classes in person in the spring semester.
Facebook employees say the company manipulated the news that users saw to favor right-wing sites in an effort to appease Republicans.
Easter Island defeated the coronavirus without causing a deep division among its people by invoking their cultural practice of tapu, which gives us the English word taboo.
Côte d’Ivoire has its own presidential election this year, with a current president running for a third term that might not be constitutional, and a rival whose refusal to leave that same office in 2010 led to a civil war and an ongoing trial at the Hague.
A British-Australian academic has been held in Iranian prisons for two years after she was arrested while attending a conference in Tehran. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was moved from a notorious women’s prison, Qarchak, to a secretive ward elsewhere in Tehran.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced that they’re taking pre-orders for Atheneum: Mystic Library.

Please, if you are a U.S. citizen and you haven’t already done so, vote. Vote this anti-science, racist, authoritarian Administration out, so we can get back to arguing over whether Yadier Molina is a Hall of Famer instead.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, coronavirus, florida, links, longreads, police, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ October 24, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/24/20.

My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawc https://klaw.me/3ogZKgt hat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

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…

Longreads first: The Verge has the story of how a deal with Taiwanese company Foxconn, touted by Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker, to generate jobs for Wisconsin workers went completely south and will probably not lead to any new jobs or economic development.
Remember that story a year or two ago about how U.S. agents abroad might have been attacked with some sort of sonic weapon? Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ looks at the increasing number of cases, evidence that Russia is behind it, and the CIA’s reluctance to investigate.
The New Yorker tells how Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin, has spent his year in the Cabinet working to undermine labor protections. The President of the AFL-CIO even sent Scalia a letter in April accusing the Secretary of forsaking the very mission of the department, which was created in 1913 to defend the rights of workers, job seekers, and retirees, not the employers Scalia seeks to protect.
Prevagen is a nutritional supplement – that should set off alarm bells right there – that claims it can improve your memory. The FDA has been receiving consumer complaints and notices of adverse events for over a decade, but lax regulations over the supplement market have helped the manufacturer avoid serious consequences.
Two devastating stories on the decline of local newspapers and how it may harm the towns those papers served: As local news dies out, Republican PR firms are cooking up pay-to-play faux-newspapers that look like the real thing. Meanwhile, a Floyd, Virginia, newspaper fired its only employee, leaving the paper reliant on freelance content and articles from sister publications.
Will Leitch wrote about the lessons from how baseball held its season during the pandemic, navigating early interruptions to the point where we’re about to finish the World Series.
James Wagner wrote about the WhatsApp group for women in baseball that has served as an informal support network, spearheaded by Cleveland’s life skills coordinator Jen Wolf. I’ve known Jen a long time and I am not the least bit surprised that she would be behind something like this.
Stop wiping down your groceries and focus on things that actually reduce the chances of transmission, like washing your hands.
Sinclair Broadcasting aired an interview with a white nationalist last weekend, conducted by anti-vaxxer Sharyl Atkisson.
The editorial board of the Washington Post wrote that the Trump administration kidnapped children, and we shouldn’t mince words about it.
The Atlantic‘s editorial board unequivocally endorsed Joe Biden, imploring readers to vote out Donald Trump.
Amy Coney Barrett overturned a civil court ruling in favor of a woman raped by a prison guard in Wisconsin “because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties,” and the watchdog group Accountable.US said such “unconscionable cruelty” has no place on the high court.
A professor who worked at Notre Dame says her experience as a working mother there was very different from Barrett’s. The Catholic university’s “pro-life” policies don’t extend to reasonable resources or time off for pregnant women or working mothers.
Dr. Craig Spencer was vilified by Trump in 2014 when the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian came home from working with Ebola patients in Guinea with the virus. He hit back at Trump this month over the President’s irresponsible behavior while infected with COVID-19, and called Trump’s lack of empathy “the single greatest threat to the American people.”
Scientific American debunks the myth that COVID-19 death counts are inflated.
The BBC has a useful primer on Bolivia’s presidential election.
BuzzFeed tracked down the “Dunkies” woman who went viral for her emphatic appearance on a local TV station in Boston.
Tony Lewis, lead singer and bassist for The Outfield, died suddenly this week at 62. The band’s guitarist, John Spinks, died in 2014 of cancer.
Harvardmagazine profiles Louisa Thomas of the New Yorker, who wrote that magazine’s essay on the return of baseball in a pandemic this summer.
The diabolical ironclad beetle (Nosoderma diabolicum) can withstand forces of 39,000 times its body weight, which would liquefy almost any other creature.
From late September: MediaMatters’ Matt Gertz explains how Trump rallies overwhelm media members assigned to cover them with so much bullshit that it’s impossible to discuss it all.
From 2017: The New York Review of Books has a longish piece on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Is it an undecipherable code, or just medieval nonsense?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, coronavirus, journalism, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp, white nationalism

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

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…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

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