Stick to baseball, 5/20/23.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – a minor league scouting notebook on prospects with the Brewers, Pirates, and Phillies; and a draft scouting notebook looking at Max Clark, Dillon Head, Mac Horvath, and more.

My guests on the Keith Law Show the last two weeks have been Max Bazerman, discussing his new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop; and Russell Carleton, talking about his upcoming second book The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a reminder you can also find me on Spoutible and Bluesky as @keithlaw.

And now, the links…

  • The science behind reverse osmosis filtering was unclear, until a paper published in April upended the previous model and opened up the possibility of new membranes that make filtration, including desalination, more energy-efficient.
  • A conservative “foundation” recruited fifteen men at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to pretend they were veterans kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants coming up from New York City. The plan fooled state Assemblyman Brian Maher (R), who fed the outrage machine until he had to admit he’d been had.
  • Bryan Slaton has resigned his post in the Texas legislature after it emerged that he’d behaved inappropriately with an intern. The Republican once introduced legislation to ban children from attending drag shows, claiming it was some form of grooming.
  • I agree with everything in this Mary Sue post about the disappointing S3 of Ted Lasso, which has none of the things that made the show good in its first two seasons. But at least the episodes are longer!
  • The Arab League has quietly reinstated Syria, more than a decade after the nation and its murderous dictator President Bashad al-Assad were expelled for violent reprisals against protestors leading up to the country’s 12-year civil war.

Stick to baseball, 1/21/23.

No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.
  • The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.
  • The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.
  • Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.
  • Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.
  • A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)

Fleishman is in Trouble.

Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It’s bad. In fact, it’s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn’t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.

Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time – and the next day, she’s not only still AWOL, she’s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby’s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.

Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She’s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.

The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby’s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she’s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he’s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.

Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he’s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5’7”. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends … a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It’s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn’t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can’t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as “mid-cench.”

Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it’s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel’s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don’t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It’s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can’t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It’s a midlife crisis. It shouldn’t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level – she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn’t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby’s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that’s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that’s telling (the freezer) there’s one that’s absurd (the pancakes).

The cinematography in Fleishman is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn’t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series’ crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character’s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I’ve seen action and sci-fi films/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can’t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.

The ultimate failure of Fleishman, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society – a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don’t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn’t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it’s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.

Stick to baseball, 6/25/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my second mock draft for 2022, with a change right at the top – and a key note on what we don’t know about Baltimore’s plans; and scouting reports on five draft-eligible players in the CWS finals, which pits Oklahoma (which hasn’t won since 1994) against Ole Miss (which has never won the whole shebang).

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Sarah Langs of MLB.com about several rookies’ performances so far this season, with a deeper dive into some of the Statcast data. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter will return in a day or two once I gather my thoughts and can translate my anger into words. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

  • “The American Medical Association is deeply disturbed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nearly a half-century of precedent protecting patients’ right to critical reproductive health care.” Read the AMA’s full statement here.
  • A new Indian film inadvertently highlights the growing racial/religious tensions in the country, which is ruled by a Hindu nationalist Prime Minister. The Kashmir Files is an unsubtly pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim, and its director parrots dubious claims about terrorism by the minority Muslim population in this interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker.
  • Amy Kaufman, the ex-wife of convicted abuser Jonah Keri, spoke to the LA Times’ Bill Shaikin about her ordeal with Keri, including his pattern of manipulative & controlling behavior as well as graphic descriptions of domestic abuse.
  • Writing for Andscape (formerly The Undefeated), Clinton Yates writes about the side of Omaha you don’t see during the College World series – the city’s Black neighborhoods, overlooked in a city that is 75% white.
  • The FX/Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven seems likely to win a few Emmys in the next awards cycle, especially for Andrew Garfield as the series’ star, but the sister of Brenda Lafferty, whose murder forms the basis of the series and the Jon Krakauer book from which it’s adapted, says the seven-part show does not represent her sister fairly.
  • The owners of Prince Street Pizza in New York City have stepped down as managers – but not as owners – after their own racist comments to customers resurfaced online this week. There are plenty of great pizzerias in New York City that are owned by people who do not have a history of racist behavior.
  • Texas AG Ken Paxton said of the massacre in Uvalde that “God always has a plan.” Ignoring, for a moment, the question of God’s existence, does anyone truly believe that a benevolent God’s plan involved the parents of 19 children burying the partial remains of their kids?
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Gangs of Night City certainly looks like a Warriors/Escape from New York sort of board game, which isn’t a bad thing, and CMON has a great reputation for high-quality components and heavier games. This new title is already funded on Kickstarter.

Stick to baseball, 5/13/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted a minor league scouting notebook, with comments on players from the Red Sox, Orioles, Rays, and Nats systems. My first mock draft for 2022 will go up on Thursday, May 19th, and I’ll do some sort of chat or Q&A around it that afternoon.

At Polygon, I reviewed Ark Nova, the best new game I’ve played so far this year, a more complex title that draws heavily on Terraforming Mars but with streamlined rules and better art.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter yesterday, and I have to thank all of you who’ve sent such kind replies. I mentioned the possibility of an in-person event in London in August, and it looks like we’re going to be able to make that happen, with the help of a reader who works at a bookshop there. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

On The Keith Law Show, I got the band back together with Eric Karabell for a show last week. I was on the move most of this week (and then traveled again Thursday night) and didn’t have a recording window until Thursday morning morning, so I recorded next week’s episode with guest Jonathan Higgs of Everything Everything.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 3/19/22.

I had a surprisingly busy week, writing five pieces for The Athletic about some of the big trades and signings since the lockout ended

My podcast guest this week was old friend Joe Sheehan, talking about the CBA and what transactions had already taken place at the time we spoke on Monday afternoon. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over at Paste, I reviewed MicroMacro Crime City, the Spiel des Jahres winner for 2021, a mystery game that asks you to solve a series of 16 cases by examining a giant map and answering a set of questions. It’s fun and novel, but it’s one-and-done – once you finish the 16 cases, you’ve completed the game.

And now, the links:

Stick to baseball, 9/24/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I named my Prospect of the Year for 2021, going through a number of the top candidates this year (and there were too many to include), and two weeks ago I profiled Austin Riley’s transformation from a low-OBP hitter with exploitable holes to a downballot MVP candidate. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I spoke to Joe Posnanski on my podcast this week, talking about his new book, The Baseball 100, which comes out on Tuesday. You can buy it here. And you can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games that are currently out of print, and my Gen Con wrapup should be up today or maybe on Monday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

Stick to baseball, 9/11/21.

My latest column for subscribers to the Athletic covered the transformation of Austin Riley from replacement-level hacker to Atlanta’s best player.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about this year’s award races, although it looks like our AL Rookie of the Year favorite might be heading to the injured list. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show again on Friday.

We’ve cleared over $800 raised to help Afghan refugees resettle in this area, money I will donate to Jewish Family Services of Delaware when I receive it. You can buy your “I’m just here for the #umpshow” T-shirt here to support the cause.

I brought back my email newsletter this week, talking about our family’s experience with COVID-19 last month. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links..

The Queen’s Gambit.

The Queen’s Gambit, adapted from the 1983 book of the same name by Walter Tevis, is ostensibly about chess, but it’s really a coming-of-age story about a chess prodigy who overcomes multiple family tragedies and drug addiction to become one of the absolute best players in the world. The story is somewhat flawed, and perhaps ties up too neatly at the end, but it’s a compelling ride from start to finish with a very strong cast.

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy, who is certainly a star now if she wasn’t already) ends up in an orphanage when the series opens after her mother dies in a car accident from which Beth walks away physically unscathed. While in the orphanage, which is strict but not quite Dickensian, she spots the gruff custodian (Bill Camp) in front of a chess board and demands that he teach her to play. He’s a strict teacher, explaining the game and chess etiquette, but realizes how incredible her mind is and introduces her to a teacher at a local high school who runs a chess club. She’s off to the races … except that she’s also hooked on the tranquilizers that the orphanage feeds to the kids to keep them docile, which presages a long battle with substance abuse even as Beth continues to stun male players and rise up the ranks in the chess world, eventually facing the Soviet champions in Moscow.

There’s a lot to recommend in The Queen’s Gambit, not least of which is the dedication to getting the chess scenes right. I’m not a chess expert, or even much more than a beginner, but I never felt like they were faking the ‘action’ on the chess boards – there were no obvious mistakes like moving a bishop straight up a row or column, or claiming a player was checkmated when it was visibly false. The series spends a lot of time on the chess itself, a difficult creative choice given how hard it is to make what is essentially an intellectual activity exciting on screen. The director emphasizes the tension inherent in chess (and most great two-player games of any sort), where you must figure out your opponent’s likely responses to any move you might make, and they use a gimmick to demonstrate Beth’s prodigious chess mind where she visualizes the board on the ceiling upside-down. The gimmick is cute, maybe a bit overused, but the way they parse the moves on the board with shots of the players – and some help from music and editing – makes the matches seem as tense as the end of any close athletic event.

Taylor-Joy has been on a steady ascent over the last few years, from The Witch to Thoroughbreds to this year’s adaptation of Emma, but The Queen’s Gambit is probably going to be the role that makes her a star. She’s especially good here when she’s not speaking – she’s good at expressing a broad range of emotions just with her face and body language, and handles the transition from awkward teenager to fashion plate (someone had a lot of fun dressing her in mod clothes highly evocative of the mid-60s) with aplomb. Her speech can come across a bit affected, although that’s a minor quibble. This series doesn’t work without her nailing the lead role.

There are a lot of very strong supporting performances, including Camp, Marielle Heller as Beth’s adoptive mother, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Beth’s obnoxious rival Benny Watts, but none made a stronger impression than Harry Melling, whose transformation into a series and versatile actor has been a remarkable surprise. Melling plays Harry Beltik, an early competitor whom Beth defeats on the board and enraptures off it, turning him into both a suitor and a friend whose loyalty she doesn’t always deserve. He shows up as an arrogant, overconfident local chess champ, but softens as he grows up, and eventually becomes a voice of maturity and reason that Beth needs, even if she’s not always willing to heed it, and Melling plays that second version of Beltik with compassion and a very amiable nerdiness that makes him the most compelling character in the retinue of men orbiting Beth’s star. Melling was good in The Old Guard as the villain and excellent in a small role in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but this is the best thing I’ve seen him in since he finished up his run as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.

The Queen’s Gambit has a couple of problems that didn’t detract from its entertainment value but did keep it from becoming a truly great series (that might, say, win all the awards). One is that its depiction of drug addiction and alcoholism is facile, and there have already been many thinkpieces accusing the series of glorifying substance abuse by depicting it as essential to Beth’s chess genius. That isn’t the ultimate lesson of the series, but she’s probably far too functional as a chess player for someone who is constantly shown drinking and taking benzodiazepines. A second is the use of Jolene, a Black girl whom Beth meets in the orphanage, as a Magical stereotype that ends up coming across as racist even though Jolene’s inclusion was probably an attempt to make the cast more diverse.

The one flaw in the show that did detract from the entertainment value is that Beth’s story arc is just too smooth in its upward trajectory, so there isn’t as much drama at the chess tables as there might have been. Some of this is unavoidable: she’s not going to bomb out in the first or second round of a chess tournament, playing some junior player, because chess has absolutely no luck or randomness in game play. But much of the potential fodder for drama away from the chess board is frittered away by the script, including multiple tragedies after she’s adopted, where potential difficulties are just resolved by good fortune or exceptional foresight. By the time we get to Moscow in the final episode, it’s all seemed a bit too easy for Beth to go from the orphanage basement to a match against the best player in the world.

That wasn’t enough for me to dislike the show; I was still hooked, and my partner and I watched the whole thing inside of three days. It’s paced so well that my attention never flagged, and several of the episodes ended sooner than I expected. I could have used more balance in the story, and the way Jolene returns in the last episode is borderline cringey – a shame, as the actress, Moses Ingram, does the best with what she’s given – but I completely understand the hype. The Queen’s Gambit is worth the binge.

Stick to baseball, 8/15/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the demotion calculus in a short season with no minor leagues, plus notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, discussing concepts from her book and how baseball scouts and executives might apply them – and how to avoid the pitfalls of using “intangibles” as a cover for more insidious biases. You can buy Grit here via bookshop.org.

You can also buy my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us about Ourselves, which came out this April, via the same site. I’ll send out the next issue of my free email newsletter as soon as my fall board game preview comes out over at Paste.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Carina Chocano spent hours taking MasterClass sessions and wrote about the product for The Atlantic, asking what it is they’re really selling since they’re not selling actual education.
  • Novelist Chimamanda Adichie suffered a concussion earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, including the introspection that came with the temporary loss of part of her brain function.