stick to baseball

→ March 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/20/21.

I had one new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week, looking at some breakout candidates for 2021. A reader suggested Gavin Lux in the comments as well, and I agree with them – he’s also a very good bet to break out, especially since it seems like he’s going to get the playing time to do so.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis looks at people who fake being members of underrepresented by minority groups, calling it “social Munchausen syndrome.”
The American Psychological Association issued a resolution opposing gender identity change efforts (GICE), as the evidence overwhelmingly shows that GICE – which, in lay terms, is trying to convince a trans person via bogus ‘therapy’ that they aren’t transgender but are suffering from some mental disorder – is harmful to patients.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek looks at the bizarre family feud between the owners of the only medical swab manufacturer in the U.S. – a company that has been handed a de facto monopoly by the pandemic.
The Biden Administration is terminating some hires with histories of marijuana use, even after telling them such details wouldn’t affect the. There’s no evidence-based argument to support this, and cannabis use is legal in so many places now that the policy seems even more out of step.
Here in Delaware, New Castle County – where I live, with Black residents making up 26% of the population – released body cam footage of the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of two cops, and the video contradicts the officers’ claims that the man drove his car at them before they fired. The police department didn’t want the video released, but County Executive Matt Meyer did so over their objections. Also of note: “A police officer in Delaware has never been found criminally liable for a shooting.”
Texas Republicans have introduced a slew of bills designed to keep people of color, or just Democrats in general, from voting, even as the state appears to be turning some shade of purple.
A Florida man is facing felony charges for putting up a sham candidate in a 2020 Congressional election, and while he and the candidate might end up doing time, the ploy worked. Frank Artiles is alleged to have paid Alex Rodriguez (not that one) to stand for the election against the incumbent José Javier Rodríguez (D) to confuse voters. Alex Rodriguez took over 6000 votes, and José Javier lost by only 32 votes.
A former anti-vaxxer wrote about his decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and why he’s encouraging others to do so. He doesn’t explain why he was opposed to all sorts of medicine before, although he may have been a Christian Scientist or in another similar cult.
A pair of internal medicine physicians wrote about the need for a unified response to vaccine disinformation.
The National Review decided to offer up a defense of the British monarchy. You know, the one we fought a revolution to escape.
In the ongoing trial of three St. Louis cops who beat a Black protestor who was, in fact, an undercover cop, the defense argument is essentially that the Black cop had it coming.
Board game news: Cheap manufacturing costs have led to a rise in counterfeit copies of popular board games, including Catan, Pandemic, and Clank!
Z-Man Games, now part of the Asmodee empire, announced in a lengthy post why they’re ending reprints of their Euro Classics line, which included updated versions of Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates, while also cancelling a scheduled update of Princes of Florence. It’s disappointing, as these are good games that I think are still finding new audiences, but in the flood of new games every year it’s also easy for games like these to get lost.
There’s a Kickstarter coming next week for a brand-new version of the 2005 game Fjords, with a redesign from one of my favorites, Phil Walker-Harding (Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold, Imhotep).
And there’s an active Kickstarter for a cheeky-looking take-that game called CULTivate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, lgbt rights, longreads, police, stick to baseball, texas

→ March 15, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/21.

I have one new post up for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at prospects I can’t wait to see when minor league games resume. I also held a Klawchat last week.

On the Keith Law Show last week, I spoke with Cleveland right-hander Triston McKenzie about his development as a pitcher and his experiences as a Black ballplayer. On this week’s episode, I spoke with film critic Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Holi: Festival of Colors, played on a 3-D board that’s immediately striking and that lends itself to some novel strategies, with almost no random elements at all.

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica’s look at some of the mental health costs borne by teenagers during the pandemic is a long, grueling read, and while it might go a little too far in blaming the lockdown for teen suicides, it’s as balanced a look at this as I’ve seen. The piece pairs well with the New York Times’ stunning gallery of artwork from teenagers using multiple media to show how the pandemic and lockdown have affected them.
Ann Patchett has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about letting go of one’s stuff, which she refers to by the euphemism of ‘practice.’
The Atlantic profiles Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), now the front-runner for the Senate seat coming open in 2022, including a look at an incident that took place while he was mayor of Braddock that will probably become a major issue in the campaign.
Bloomberg takes aim at racial inequity in the property tax system, where Black-owned properties are overvalued in tax assessments in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.
Jelani Cobb asks if the Republican Party is destroying itself by focusing so heavily on white men, a declining portion of the electorate, to the point that “voter suppression becomes the only viable strategic option.” I wouldn’t underestimate the role that dark money can play in keeping them in power, whether through voter suppression or by targeting Latinx populations as they did in 2020.
“In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections.” Why do Republicans hate Christians?
Related: At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to make it harder for people to vote. It’s about gaining and clinging to power at all costs. Stacey Abrams detailed some of those bills in a Twitter thread.
Facebook is finally, belatedly cracking down on anti-vaccine content, but it’s having a very hard time because it started so late and makes it too easy for users to share false information. One thing they could do, however, is focus on the small group of users having the greatest impact on others’ vaccine doubts. Meanwhile, those anti-vaxxers are pushing the lie that the vaccines cause cancer.
Also in “what took you so long,” the FDA warned quack Joseph Mercola to stop hawking fake COVID-19 treatments. He’s been pushing pseudoscience and outright anti-science for at least 25 years, all in the service of selling his supplements.
A new research study, published in Nature, found evidence of higher mortality rates from the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, which is now the predominant strain in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why he thinks the NFT bubble is destined to pop.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s editor wrote a column defending the paper’s decision not to cover a fringe Republican candidate’s outlandish statements, calling him a “nobody begging for people to notice his tweets.”
In a victory for people who remember the First Amendment, Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri was acquitted of bogus charges stemming from her coverage of police activity during a BLM protest.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a bill protecting drivers who hit protestors from prosecution, as long as they say it was an accident.
Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the problem of child marriages involving kidnapped Christian, Sikh, and Hindu girls, forced to convert to Islam and marry under threats of violence to them or family members.
A writer with autism watched Sia’s execrable movie Music and wrote about its awfulness for Slate.
This Irish Times editorial on the Meghan-and-Harry interview is a marvel of excoriating humor.
Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died last week at age 91.
Board game news: Asmodee acquired Plan B games, yet another notch in the former company’s acquisition spree, but also notable because Plan B was founded by Sophie Gravel, who sold her last company, F2Z (which included Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat), to Asmodee in 2016, then left and starter Plan B, which also includes the imprints Next Move and eggertspiele.
Some Kickstarters of note include the dice-game version of Baseball Highlights 2045; the new roll-and-write game Three Sisters, from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game; and two new expansions for Everdell.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, georgia, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/27/21.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: BuzzFeed has the inside story of how Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs enable and encourage right-wing demagogues who push misinformation and hate on their site. Facebook is really trash.
Texas regulators served electricity providers rather than Texas, leaving the state’s grid vulnerable to the type of disaster that left most of the state in darkness and freezing temperatures last week.
An LA Times investigation reveals corruption and self-dealing inside the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that runs and votes for the Golden Globes (coming up tomorrow night). Of note is that more than half of the electorate was flown to visit the set of Emily in Paris at the studio’s expense, and the frivolous show ended up with two nominations. Speaking of which, my friend Tim Grierson, whose new book This is How You Make a Movie comes out on March 9^th, listed the worst Golden Globe nomination in each of the last twenty years.
Sports Illustrated‘s Steph Apstein examines whether the baseball was juiced in 2020.
Also from BuzzFeed, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has a long history of sexually and verbally harassing women. Here’s my prediction: It won’t matter. His party will close ranks around him.
This 2009 piece from author Simon Winchester, “Take Nothing, Leave Nothing,” the story of how and why he has been banned for life from returning to the island of Tristan da Cunha, is weird and lovely and speaks to a certain type of wanderlust that I feel like I truly understand.
I discussed optimism bias in The Inside Game, and ProPublica has a piece on why it impeded pandemic response plans.
If you live in Delaware, please consider signing this petition asking our state government to enact paid medical and family leave.
The Washington Post profiles the doctors and nurses who spend their limited non-work time fighting coronavirus and anti-vaccine disinformation online.
The Republican Party has started a fresh round of voter suppression efforts across the country.
The opposition leader in Georgia was arrested in a “violent raid” on his party’s headquarters. I’m referring to the small nation in the Caucasus, but would you be surprised if Gov. Brian Kemp authorized this?
Judas and the Black Messiah is getting some well-deserved Oscar buzz. The film adheres to the true story of how the FBI and the Chicago Police assassinated Fred Hampton, including how Hampton rallied a group of white southerners who carried the Confederate flag to work with the Black Panthers.
A Pennsylvania bird-watcher snapped a now-viral photo of a cardinal that is intersex, meaning that it has physical characteristics of both male and female birds. The condition, called bilateral gynandromorphism, means that the cardinal is male on one side of its body, from red feathers to one testis, and female on the other. I wonder which bathroom Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it should use.
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, ranked the five best episodes of the Muppet Show. I’d agree with three (Moreno, Martin, and Burnett), and don’t remember the other two that well, but would include John Cleese and Zero Mostel.
I linked to this in chat this week but it’s worth reposting: The reopening of a detention center for migrant children is not a return to Trump’s xenophobic, inhuman immigration policies. We still shouldn’t be bombing in the Middle East, though.
The IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica picked up a neutrino from a star that was destroyed 700 million years ago.
Illinois became the first state to eliminate cash bail.
CPAC, with a slate full of voter-fraud charlatans and seditionists, cancelled a scheduled appearance by the anti-Semitic QAnon adherent Young Pharaoh. The convention’s actual theme this year is “America Uncancelled.”
Smith College found itself embroiled in a conservative-fueled nontroversy last week, but they issued a scathing, evidence-based response that their critics, like Bari Weiss, have ignored.
George Will wrote of the tough choices facing Pres. Biden as he tries to hold a hard line with China, including continuing the policy that began under Trump of labeling the Chinese genocide of Uighur Muslims as such.
Board game news: Cryptozoic has a Kickstarter up for a board game based on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
Another Kickstarter is up for a second edition of Orconomics, itself a reimplementation of an earlier, self-published game called Economicus.
I don’t know much about the game itself but Brew, coming in June from Pandasaurus, looks amazing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, science, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ February 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/20/21.

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

Arizona	Houston	Oakland
Atlanta	Kansas City	Pittsburgh
Baltimore	LA Angels	St. Louis
Boston	LA Dodgers	San Diego
Chicago Cubs	Miami	San Francisco
Chicago White Sox	Milwaukee	Seattle
Cincinnati	Minnesota	Tampa Bay
Cleveland	NY Mets	Texas
Colorado	NY Yankees	Toronto
Detroit	Philadelphia	Washington

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

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

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: At the Ringer, David Hill writes about a “beach bum” day trader who made millions with a long position on GameStop he’d started buying long before this year’s run-up.
The expanding ocean habitats of mackerel have led to a new debate over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
A new Malayalam-language film called The Great Indian Kitchen explores gender inequality in the Indian home.
The Huffington Post’s obituary of Rush Limbaugh just tells it like it is.
Critical thinking skills, already in short supply, may not be the most effective counter to disinformation. The SIFT method – Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to original context – may be a better approach.
Denmark has invested in tracking the different variants of COVID-19 spreading in its population, and the data so far on B.1.1.7, the UK variant, are not promising. This Science piece looks at some of the policy options ahead of them, and, potentially us.
An immunocompromised patient who died after a 154-day infection with COVID-19 may hold a clue to how the variants have emerged and spread.
Why are cases dropping so fast in the United States? Four reasons: distancing, seasonality, seroprevalence (partial immunity), and vaccines.
New data have shown that the pandemic has hit academic mothers especially hard.
Rational people in Connecticut are trying to eliminate the religious exemption to schoolchild vaccination requirements and the Republican Party is lining up with the loonies.
An Ohio State wrestler testified that Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked him to help cover up allegations of sexual abuse by the team doctor while Jordan was assistant coach.
There was a big social media kerfuffle this week when various gynecologists took aim at Vagisil for deceptive ads targeting teen girls. Led by Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible and sometime New York Times columnist, they argued that the company was preaching products that could be harmful while also shaming girls for things that are natural.
ERCOT officials said that Texas was mere minutes away from a catastrophic system failure that could have left Texans without power for months. The Huffington Post looks at why the storm knocked out so much of the power and how right-wing grifters and charlatans blamed it all falsely on green energy.
A tiny town in Iowa – Armstrong, population 840 – saw its mayor, police chief, city clerk, and former city clerk all arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and “the deployment of a Taser against a civilian in exchange for cash.”
I can’t seem to muster any sympathy for the investor who gave $2.5 million for a “voter fraud” investigation and now wants his money back.
The Reply All podcast was starting a new series on the toxic workplace environment at Bon Appetit that led to the ouster of longtime EIC Adam Rapoport in 2020 when a similar scandal took down Reply All’s co-host and the senior reporter leading this story.
Nicole Hazen, the wife of Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen, has been fighting a brain tumor for the last year, and the two of them chose to discuss it publicly.
Many prominent British actors are urging the UK government to renegotiate visa rules so they can continue to work in the EU.
Literary Hub’s list of 50 classic novels under 200 pages is pretty good, at least based on the half I’ve read and the others I know about.
I greatly enjoyed McSweeney’s Valentine’s Day gifts from famous fictional men.
But nothing made me laugher harder this week than this twitter thread about a Texas survivalist nut who isn’t very good at the survival part.
Board game news: I don’t know much about this game but folks are very excited for the Kickstarter for Stroganov.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, Humor, iowa, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/6/21.

I had two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week: a breakdown of the Nolan Arenado trade, and a look at a dozen prospects who just missed my top 100 ranking. That ranking ran the previous Thursday. I did a video chat via the Athletic’s Twitter account on Tuesday. Org rankings will run on February 10^th, and team by team reports begin the next day.

I’ve had two podcasts since my show returned from my holiday break last month, with guests Britt Ghiroli, national baseball writer for the Athletic; and Seattle Mariners prospect Adam Macko, who was born in Slovakia and first learned to play baseball in Bratislava. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Cloud City, by one of my favorite designers (Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold), but it was a huge disappointment.

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the worst and most generally underreported aspects of Trump’s reign of error was the spate of executions of federal inmates while Trump was a lame duck. ProPublica has the inside story of their rush to kill as many people as possible.
Jeff Passan has the incredible story of outfielder Drew Robinson, his improbable survival from a suicide attempt, and his ongoing effort to come back to baseball despite losing an eye. My colleague Levi Weaver shared his own story of depression in the wake of Robinson’s story.
“We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” This editorial is deeply philosophical but ties into multiple issues of our day, including the erosion of privacy and the velocity of misinformation.
The Guardian looks at the power of Big Lens, the duopoly that controls most of the world’s eyeglasses market.
Josh Miller, a spring training announcer for the Giants, has resigned after an Arizona state Senator revealed that he was sending her vulgar, misogynistic tweets.
Tanzania’s government has rejected the COVID-19 vaccine as part of their ongoing denial that the virus even exists in their country, which appears to be run by MAGA people (MATA?).
Dungeons & Dragons has an anti-Semitism problem, derived from its use of JRR Tolkien’s mythology and non-human races – the dwarves were, by his own admission, a mythical representation of some awful Jewish stereotypes.
Anti-vaccine terrorists put a temporary halt to a mass vaccination setup at Dodgers Stadium. I have no sympathy for these people. This is terrorism and they should be charged as such, and Facebook should be held responsible for their tacit aid in promoting it.
Those same anti-vaxxer nuts are also misusing the federal VAERS database to spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. If someone uses VAERS to claim the vaccines are unsafe, just ignore them. That data is not clean or reliable enough to use for that purpose.
That misinformation, combined with systemic inequalities in our health-care system, means that the mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spell disaster for our Black communities.
Speaking of terrorists, one of the people who has been charged with storming the Capitol on January 6^th has asked a judge to allow her to travel to Mexico for a “work retreat.” I’ve seen a lot of articles saying permission was granted, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Erik Malinowski was right: Never tweet.
Fifty years of cuts to the top marginal tax rates did not result in “trickle-down” benefits for people in lower income strata, according to a recent study out of LSE (which I may have linked previously, but it came up recently when my daughter asked about JFK and Reagan as Presidents).
St. Louis is now paying a $5 million settlement to a (Black) protester beaten by four (white) cops who turned out to be an undercover cop himself. Great use of tax funds, guys.
Rochester police officers pepper-sprayed a suicidal 9-year-old girl, renewing scrutiny of the department’s use of a hood on a Black man who suffocated as a result.
Did a supermassive black hole influence the evolution of life on earth? Something to muse about, at least.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump continued to enrich themselves as a result of their unappointed, unelected positions in the Administration in 2020, with combined income of at least $23.8 million. The grift worked, folks.
Copper and Cotton, one of the most acclaimed new restaurant in the Phoenix area of the last few years, is closing as its head chef is moving to Utah.
Board game news: Jamey Stegmaier, designer and owner of Stonemaier games, asks if the Kickstarter mindset is increasing consumer confusion around things like ‘deluxe’ components and special versions of new games.
Japanese publisher Oink Games has a Kickstarter up for three new titles, one of which is a reimplementation of three previous game Deep Sea Adventure.
Tweet of the week:

pic.twitter.com/Etccw1hPdp
— Jon Adams™ (@citycyclops) February 1, 2021

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coronavirus, death penalty, Economics, links, mental health, rochester, social media, st. louis, stick to baseball, suicide, tanzania, the swamp, vaccines

→ January 31, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/31/21.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this Thursday for subscribers to the Athletic; the column of guys who just missed the list will run on Monday. Subscribers can also read my breakdown of the Jameson Taillon trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday afternoon.

Over at Paste, my review of the game Cloud City, a disappointing game from a designer whose work I really love, is now up.

I joined my friend Eric Longenhagen on the Fangraphs Audio podcast this week to talk top 100s and the process of assembling them, especially in this weird year.

My most recent edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials, and I’ll send another issue at some point this week. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

David Sirota weighs in on the New York Times‘ publication of what amounted to a GOP press release and other media nonsense in the wake of the terror attack on the Capitol.
The Times fired a reporter earlier this month for saying she got “chills” during Biden’s inauguration, but when reporter Don McNeil used the n-word and other offensive terms on a trip with students, they promoted him.
Scientific American looks at the most worrying mutations in five COVID-19 variants.
The BBC looks at the twenty-year search for the billions of dollars stolen by former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha.
A former KGB agent alleges in a new book that the Russian agency cultivated Trump as an asset for nearly 40 years.
A white Ohio state Senator named Stephen Huffman (guess) questioned whether “the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups,” and now he’s leading the Ohio Senate Health Committee.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, wrote that Biden’s new vaccine goal is good, but not ambitious enough.
Sen. Josh Hawley’s “ludicrous clean-up act,” to try to undo the damage done to his reputation earlier this month, is already underway.
A new study showed that some bacteria adapt to antibiotics by changing their shape, which can reduce the surface area for antibiotics to penetrate.
Delaware’s Senate passed our version of the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against people based on their hair or hairstyle. It has to pass the House and be signed by Gov. Carney, but both are extremely likely.
A Magic: the Gathering card sold for over $500,000 at auction last week.
Asmodee and Game in Lab announced a clinical study that showed that playing board games might help Alzheimer’s sufferers.
I haven’t seen or played the game Coffee Talk, but this one-year lookback makes it sound kind of weirdly fun. Then again, I bought Necrobarista two months ago and still haven’t played it, so maybe I won’t.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, links, ohio, science, stick to baseball, the grey lady

→ January 9, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/9/21.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the trade that sent Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets for four players. Just about everything else is on hold as I have started work on the top 100 prospects package, which will run on or around February 1^st.

I will, however, keep writing my free email newsletter this month, with the next issue probably going out by Monday. 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…

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) lost his son to suicide on New Year’s Eve, and then survived the terror attack on the Capitol this week. The Atlantic spoke to him about this awful sequence of events. The Congressman and his wife wrote a beautiful, heartfelt eulogy to their son after his death.
This was a coup, and it should lead to impeachment.
The Kansas City Star called for Sen. Josh Hawley to resign or be removed, as members of his own party condemn his words and actions.
“They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” The Nation‘s Andrew McCormick reports from the scene of the assault.
The woman who was shot and killed while breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby was an Air Force veteran who fell for the QAnon hoax and other right-wing bullshit spread online.
How can we fight the flood of false information that led hundreds of Americans to storm the Capitol and scream nonsense about auditing the vote? The Guardian spoke to multiple experts, but there are no simple answers: Disinformation spreads easily, but combating it is harder.
George Saunders believes social media is killing us. He’s also thinking about writing an epic novel along the lines of the Russian classics.
A lawsuit over a high school punishing a student for her use of foul language on Snapchat could alter free speech rights for students across the country.
Federal disaster aid disproportionately helps affluent communities and exacerbates racial and economic disparities.
The EPA just adopted a new rule making it harder for regulators to use data that aren’t available to the public, yet another way in which the outgoing Administration is making it easier for companies and individuals to despoil the environment with impunity.
There’s a Danish children’s show about a man who can’t control his enormous penis.
Just two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has begun attacks against Tigrayan dissidents in the north of the country and now has fallen out with their neighbors in Sudan.
The BBC has an ode to the alfajor, the most popular cookie in South America.
A clinical social worker tells of the hospice patient who told him of a ghost he saw who changed his view of life.
Board game news: there’s a new Kickstarter for the very intriguing game Darwin’s Journey, co-designed by Simone Luciani, the designer of Tzolk’in and Tekhenu.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, cookies, hoaxes, links, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ 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

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