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→ June 30, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/18.

I’m back from a European vacation that took us to Dublin, southern France, Monaco (my daughter really wanted to see it), Genoa (to visit my cousins there), and Milan. I ate a lot of gelato, which is the most important part, isn’t it? Before I left I did file one Insider piece, the annual top 25 players under 25 list, and please read the intro because as usual many people didn’t.

Over at Paste, my review of Merlin, the really awful new game from Stefan Feld, also went up while I was gone. Feld has designed several games I love, including The Castles of Burgundy, so this point-salad mess was a huge disappointment.

Book signings! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington DC, with my friend Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball and both of our books on July 14th at 6 pm, and will be at Paul Swydan’s new bookstore The Silver Unicorn in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm (waiting for the link but it is confirmed). I will also be at the Futures Game in DC on the 15th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian profiles art forgery detective James Martin, who now works for Sotheby’s and has advised museums and government agencies on dozens of cases of suspected counterfeit art pieces.
WIRED has a very long read on the scandal around the cryptocurrency Tezos, which appears to have attracted several scam artists, shockingly, to a real bit of technological promise. Most of these so-called currencies are Ponzi schemes; Bitcoin itself is down 70% since November after a brief bubble over the winter. And the SEC is now clamping down on them by (correctly) identifying them as securities bought and sold as investments.
Forbes examines the ongoing mystery of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s missing wealth, which appears to be tied up in companies that he’s charged with regulating, or companies caught up in various other scandals, including one that is now enmeshed in Robert Mueller’s investigation.
James Bridle’s medium post last year on algorithmically-generated Youtube videos that were totally inappropriate for the children they targeted went viral and led to promised changes in Youtube’s policies, but he writes now for the Guardian that things haven’t really changed much at all.
Rebecca Traister’s much-shared Summer of Rage editorial covers a ton of ground in a brief space, but the main takeaway is that we are still governed by a small minority of white, Christian men, who seem increasingly uncomfortable when anyone from outside their circle of members and sycophants tries to share in their power.
George Will wrote an op ed urging voters to vote against the Republican Party this November. Will is one of the very few leading conservative voices to take a pragmatic hard line against the current GOP.
Russian buyers have been buying Trump properties, often at inflated prices via shell companies, which at least appears to be a mechanism for money laundering.
The New York Times‘ opinion page had a massive editorial breakdown last week, as it ran a very good editorial decrying this bullshit ‘civility’ debate. I can only assume the page’s editor, James Bennet, was out sick that day.
California put noted anti-vaccine crank Dr. Bob Sears on probation, rather than revoking his license outright, for writing a bogus letter exempting a toddler from all mandatory vaccinations. Of course, he’s denying wrongdoing even though he settled the case, and says he’ll continue to fight public health laws that require vaccinations for schoolchildren.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that Dr. Diane Harper has claimed that the HPV vaccine is harmful, but she made it very clear in a statement earlier in June that the vaccine is safe and she supports its use across the population to help lower the rates of cervical and other HPV-related cancers.
A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that an old tuberculosis vaccine may permanently lower blood sugar levels in diabetics, although the effect can take a few years to kick in.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist active on social media, has provoked the ire of cancer researchers by calling out the bogus hype around ‘precision’ treatments that claim to use the patient’s genes to create more targeted anti-cancer medications. The data, he argues, do not show anywhere near the benefit that precision treatment’s proponents promise.
The FDA just approved its first marijuana-derived prescription drug, which uses cannabidiol (CBD) to reduce seizures in two severe forms of epilepsy. The DEA still has to remove CBD from its list of Schedule I drugs before the medication can hit the market.
Unfortunately, the FDA is also rubber-stamping approval of many drugs of dubious safety and/or efficacy as it caters to the pharmaceutical firms that fund it.
BuzzFeed looks at the unlikely comeback of Twitter, which I was told even by people within ESPN was a dying medium and not worth the time writers were spending on it.
The Royals floated a trial balloon around their plans to sign convicted child molester Luke Heimlich, and it went over about as well as you’d expect. The Kansas City Star‘s Vahe Gregorian wrote a great piece on why they shouldn’t do it. Here’s my take in two sentences: If you believe Heimlich deserves a “second chance,” then you have to explain why you’re giving him one even though he’s denying he ever committed the crimes to which he confessed. If you believe that he’s telling the truth now and didn’t commit those acts, then you have to explain why you think a 6-year-old girl fabricated these stories about her abuse and why you’re taking the word of someone with everything to gain over the word of a child victim.
Q-Tip once again teased the solo album he’s been promising for five years in a tweet two weeks ago.
No, Mr. President, crime in Germany is not way up, it’s way down, at its lowest level in decades.
The Representative from my hometown of Smithtown, New York, held a campaign rally featuring Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka this week.
Maine Senator Susan Collins has somehow acquired the label of a “moderate” Republican, but wrote a letter to constituents defending Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families. Her term is up in 2020.
Walgreens faced a backlash last week when an Arizona pharmacist refused to do his job when a woman came in with a prescription for a drug to terminate her non-viable pregnancy. Walgreens claimed the employee acted “within company guidelines.”
A family of Syrian refugees whose Damascus chocolate factory was destroyed in the civil war have restarted their business in Nova Scotia (article in French). Their products include a limited edition line of pride-themed packaged chocolate bars. As our President and his myrmidons continue to attack immigrants as criminals and leeches, it’s worth remembering that many refugees had lives and careers that were destroyed by war – they were doctors or lawyers or craftspersons and want little more than a safe place to live and work.
Tweet of the week:

1) No they don’t.
2) No they don’t.
3) Yes they can.
4) No, they reduce SIDS by 50%.
5) No they don’t.
6) No they fucking don’t.
7) No they don’t except for fleetingly rare anaphylaxis.
8) No they don’t.
9) No they don’t.

Vaccines cause adults. pic.twitter.com/pcAeClyuYW

— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) June 19, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art, baseball, chocolate, cryptocurrencies, links, maine, new york, rap, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ August 13, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/13/16.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, on the decline and fall of Yasiel Puig as a hitter, not as a clubhouse problem or social media superstar. I also held a long Klawchat on Thursday.

I attended GenCon for the first time last week and wrote three pieces about it for Paste, including the top ten new games I saw, the summary of every other interesting title, and an essay on the experience of attending for the first time.

And now, the links:

This piece on Twitter’s ongoing failure to deal with harassment sheds much light on how and why the site has allowed abuse to flourish. Lack of diversity in company leadership has been one major problem.
Vox advances the thesis that NBC’s coverage of the Olympics is terrible because they view the games as entertainment, not sports. I find their broadcasts unwatchable; we record them and fast-forward through maybe 90% of the content, including every recorded feature they’ve prepared on the athletes, because all I’m interested in is certain events.
Deadly bacteria, like the one that causes cholera, are spreading as ocean temperatures rise. Climate-change deniers tend to focus on air temperatures, but I’ve yet to find one who can rationalize away our warming and increasingly acidic oceans.
A woman who was sexually assaulted while a student at Harvard Law School explains why the school needs to apologize, part of the “just say sorry” campaign for schools to at least accept that modicum of responsibility. I’m ashamed to read the details of how HLS mishandled her case, including the subsequent readmission of her rapist and the actions of 19 professors who have defended him and participated in shaming her.
Anita Hill spoke to NPR about progress in workplace since her sexual harassment claim, which became a story in 1991 but never really threatened the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. If a nominee today were accused of doing what Hill said Thomas did – and I see no reason to disbelieve her – would he sail through to the bench as Thomas did?
Amazon is quietly eliminating list prices in response to a number of complaints, including lawsuits over misleading discounts off prices that never really existed.
Three student-scientists at Stanford believe they’ve developed proteins that will kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They’re seeking investors and aren’t disclosing the details – which I hope isn’t too similar to Elizabeth Holmes’ history – but this could be very good news in what is about to become a huge public-health crisis.
Clay Shirky explains why there’s no such thing as a protest vote. I happen to agree, and I have in fact cast such a vote in the past – but won’t this year.
On the other hand, Reason has an op ed on why Republicans voting for Trump would be wasting their votes, although the author is really just arguing that Trump is not a conservative and that he’d be a disastrous president … but I believe he’s arguing conservatives should vote for Gary Johnson instead.
Texas, which has executed more prisoners since 1976 than 45 other states combined, is about to execute a convict who didn’t kill anybody. He was in the getaway car when his partner in the planned robbery killed the store employee.
So far, the Rio Olympics have not led to any of the disasters predicted for them. That doesn’t mean giving Brazil the Olympics was a good idea; the economic harm done to the country could be long-lasting, such as wasting $62 million on Olympic posters to hide a favela from public view.
The pseudonymous surgeon and scientist Orac weighs in on the latest Medscape survey on vaccine-refusing or hesitant patients, with some prescriptions for the best strategies in dealing with them. He also notes that the media (hi!) have become less tolerant of anti-vax bullshit over the last few years.
The DoJ report excoriating the Baltimore police department included a note where a prosecutor called a woman who reported a rape a “conniving little whore.” Much of the coverage has focused on the department’s problems with racial bias, but the BPD has an abysmal record at investigating rapes, too.
Vanity Fair has a longread on the Bill Cosby rape case(s), explaining how this one particular incident reached a courtroom and opened the gates for fifty-nine other victims to come forward.
A judge in Louisville, Kentucky, has gotten some positive attention on social media for two cases where she showed some human decency. The first case, of a female defendant who appeared to have been seriously mistreated by jailers, is about much more than just a judge showing compassion.
Australia has a large detention center for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – a functionally insolvent island state that depends on the center and foreign aid for its economic survival – and a Guardian investigative report found widespread abuse of children in the camp.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, olympics, rape culture, twitter, vaccines

→ August 30, 2013
→ By keith

Glossary of inside jokes.

When we start in with inside jokes on Twitter or in chats, I’m often asked by newer readers what some of the hashtags and terms mean, but it’s hard to stop everything else to explain myself – especially in 140 characters. So with that in mind, here’s a far-from-complete list of those various jokes

#andrelted: When Andrelton Simmons does something amazing in the field, which is pretty much every night. See also #belted.

#arbitraryendpoints: Also known as cherry-picking, this means choosing one or both endpoints on a series of games to try to analyze a player. I’ve argued that it’s not arbitrary if the endpoint is tied to something specific, like a change in mechanics, an injury, or a recall from the minors, but even so, it’s always dangerous to throw out any data when you want to draw a conclusion.

#belted: When Brandon Belt homers. Actually originated with #poseyed the year before, but Posey hit too many homers and it got old fast. Even the #belted thing is probably nearing the end of its useful life.

#bowlofjello: That would be Clint Hurdle, who is probably the worst thing going for the Pirates right now, and whom I referred to by this moniker in a July 2012 tweet.

I wonder how much better the Pirates' record would be if they weren't managed by a bowl of Jell-o

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) August 22, 2012

#classy (with or without the #): Refers to Michael Young, and the seeming blindness of some local writers in Dallas to the erosion of his on-field value, after which they would defend him by referring to him as “classy.” Classy is great but it doesn’t turn all those outs into hits. I should point out that use of the term isn’t actually a shot at Young, but how members of the media treat him.

#GUY: From my April 2013 podcast with Chris Sprow, where he brought up the difference between calling a player a “guy” (as in, “he’s just a guy”) and calling him a “GUY” (e.g., Byron Buxton). It turns out that football and baseball people both use the word in the same way.

#heathbellexperience: Possibly invented by Steve Berthiaume, now used to describe Heath Bell doing Heath Bell things, mostly giving up massive home runs. Antecedent of the less-common #jimjohnsonexperience.

#holtzmansfolly: The save rule, which has done more damage to the game on the field and to roster construction than any other statistic in the history of the game. Of course, the BBWAA gave the nitwit who invented this stat the Spink Award, because if that organization is good at one thing, it’s self-congratulation.

#idito: From an angry and not very bright Cardinals fan in 2009 who was mad that I didn’t include Chris Carpenter on my NL Cy Young ballot that year. Related to the now obsolete term #obsurd, from another equally angry and equally not very bright Cardinals fan that same day.

My favorite #stlcards email of the day so far, letter for letter: "you're an idito"

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) November 20, 2009

#meow: Every time a reader accuses me of bias, God kills a kitten. From the defunct Baseball Today podcast. RIP Bias Cat.

Moran: If you’re going to insult someone, especially by calling them stupid, you probably should look in the mirror first. Not my joke.

More-singles defense: The no-doubles defense.

#preeminent: I appeared on ESPN’s Philadelphia affiliate right after Ryan Howard signed his five-year extension, only to be ambushed by the host of the show in question, who kept referring to Howard as the “preeminent” power hitter in the game. So, whenever it pays to point out that the contract is as awful today as it appeared to be when the Phillies gave it to him, we trot out this tag.

#robotumpsnow: Creation obscure – seemed like a bunch of us started using it around the same time so I won’t take any credit. Refers mostly to awful ball/strike calls by home plate umps, and the fact that replacing that with currently available technology would be an immediate improvement.

SHANF: I think Crashburn Alley started this one – at least, that’s how I first saw it – which originally referred to Shane Victorino doing something a little dim on the field. Given his 2013 season, and how much I ragged on that contract last offseason, if I drop a “SHANF” now, I’m making fun of myself and my very wrong analysis about him.

#smrtbaseball: A little bit of The Simpsons applied to baseball, this refers to tactical moves that are anything but smart, especially ill-advised bunts or intentional walks, as well as batting a low-OBP guy in the two hole. It appears to have started here:

S-M-R-T “@MastrsOfRdomain: @keithlaw intentionally walking a guy with no hits this season is smart baseball right?”

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) May 20, 2012

Approve “@KarlGAnderson: @keithlaw @MastrsOfRdomain can we use #smrtbaseball from now on to point these things out?”

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) May 21, 2012

#shrimp/#shrimpalert: Refers to a walk-off walk (walking in the winning run because the bases were loaded). Not mine – originated on the walkoffwalk blog here.

should of: That’s all Fan Since 09, a brilliant parody of a Phillies fan who hopped on the bandwagon right after they won the World Series.

#SSS: Small Sample Size. In other words, I’m saying the performance in question is more a function of the randomness inherent in small samples of plate appearances or innings pitched than a change in skill or outlook. Fangraphs has a few pieces on when samples aren’t small any more. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that if we look at 100 players who’ve reached that threshold, we’re still likely to see one or two players whose stats haven’t stabilized or regressed – it would be more surprising if we didn’t see any outliers at all.

#tehfear: As in, The Fear, the thing that Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy said Jim Rice provoked in opposing pitchers, and that thus made Rice worthy of Hall of Fame induction. It’s just the kind of unverifiable, unfalsifiable nonsense that people use when defeated by rational arguments.

TOOTBLAN: Thrown Out On the Bases Like a Nincompoop. Invented by Cubs blogger Tony Jewell for Ryan Theriot. I’m blocked from the original site due to Google saying it’s infected with malware, but you can see the relevant part of the initial post here.

#umpshow: Any time an umpire decides that he wants to make himself the center of attention, especially by attempting to provoke a conflict with a player or coach, it’s an umpshow. Fans don’t watch games to see the umpires ump. We watch to see the players. It would be great if the minority of umpires who think all eyes should be on them could understand that. Not to be confused with basic incompetence, where #robotumpsnow or #thehumanelement might be more accurate.

#veteranpresents: Started in this chat, regarding Garret Anderson, when the Dodgers signed him to provide veteran presence in their lineup. I decided it was more likely he was a veteran who handed out presents to other players and coaches in the locker room, since that seemed like the only way he’d provide any value. It is a mortal lock that any time I drop this hashtag, at least three people will claim I misspelled “presence,” because they were both without a sense of humor.

#weirdbaseball: Refers to any game that goes past midnight local time (that is, where the game is being played), at which point, everyone is supposed to eat ice cream. Invented by my former colleague Kevin Goldstein (RIP).

#YCPB: You Can’t Predict Baseball, so you should follow this Twitter account.

#your: I don’t play grammar police very often, but it is amazing how often people who send me insults on Twitter can’t get “your” and “you’re” straight. I believe it was @ceeangi who first pointed out this phenomenon.

Omissions? Corrections? Fire ’em in the comments. This list really isn’t mine, but ours as a community, so I’ll update accordingly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, Humor, inside jokes, twitter

Stick to baseball, 6/30/18.

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

Stick to baseball, 8/13/16.

Glossary of inside jokes.

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