Happy New Year, Terry. I do think that Singer’s lack of a 3rd pitch is stubbornness. I think he tries, but can’t get comfortable and then abandons the project. It’s on him to figure out a way to make it happen. I did consider McMillon but think with the new additions he gets squeezed to open the year. If these moves work, there will be a lot less traffic between the minors and majors this year, but he’s a guy who will get his chances.
Craig, love your work but have to disagree with you about Substack. Obviously, everyone hates Nazis, but this is a manufactured controversy that is ultimately based on The Atlantic resenting that independent writers like you have a platform on Substack to make a living without the mainstream media controlling it. Every single platform has a Nazi problem, including Ghost and others. Freddie DeBoer has an excellent post on his Substack about this.
Thanks, zdebman. I get that every platform has a Nazi problem, but I’ll point back to the Nazi bar analogy. Content moderation already happens here. They may not be able to completely remove the issue entirely, but they can certainly curtail it. Thanks for pointing me to the DeBoer post. I’ll definitely check it out.
You pretty much summed up exactly how I feel about the current Substack situation. It doesn't seem that difficult to me. The first amendment says you can't be arrested for spouting Nazi crap, but that doesn't mean anyone has to publish it.
My fear is that all the big names will abandon the site and it will crater, and those of us who have carved out smaller, but not insignificant audiences will get hurt the worst. I guess I will take the blame though. As soon as I started making headway promoting my newsletter on Twitter, Musk came along and ruined it, so I guess it only makes sense now that I'm getting real traction with my newsletter that Substack will fall off a cliff.
Craig, thanks as always for your comments on the Royals. I've been a season ticket holder since 1969 and share the joy and frustration. Your insights are miles ahead of any mainstream commentators (low bar I know.
That said, I've already had the Substack conversation on JoPo's site, but I'll repeat my position here.
It's important to acknowledge that free speech only means protecting ideas you abhor. Anyone can support free speech for motherhood, apple pie and baseball. That's trivial. It's free speech for ideas you hate that are the true test. If your position is "free speech but..." please don't pretend you're in favor of free speech. When I was growing up, censorship was considered so bad no one would even consider it. Today it's mainstream. I hope you will change your position and acknowledge the bravery and principle behind Substack and their leader.
Censorship is bad; and in fact worse than the ideas anyone wants to censor. It leads to narrower discussion of everything, leading to a lesser understanding of truth. Crazy ideas published are rarely harmful. I'll bet most people on this site didn't even know about the Substack controversy until you brought it up (unless of course they read JoPo, in which case they didn't know about it until he brought it up). And I'll also bet not a single person read a pro-Nazi Substack article. So no need for outrage.
There is also a trickle effect. If you censor Nazis, then call Trump a Nazi, you must censor Trump. Then if I support Trump, you must censor me. Elon Musk said negative things about Israel and is now considered pro-Palestinian. Pro-Palestinian = anti Israel, therefore, Musk must be pro-Nazi and therefore censored. I know this is ridiculous, but who decides what is ridiculous and what is evil? If no one does, then we're all free to read or ignore what we want. If someone else decides, we're all held hostage to that person, whether his/her intentions are good or evil.
Please support free speech and stay with a site of principle. Our country will be better for it.
Mike, I’ll point you to the Nazi bar analogy again. I never said Nazis don’t have a right to air their abhorrent and repugnant views. In this country, that’s protected speech. A Nazi can stand on a corner and hold up a sign or use a bullhorn to shout what I think is disgusting slogans and I can’t do anything about it other than perhaps try to shout them down. So I never, ever espoused a position “free speech, but…” Because the issue isn’t free speech. If the same Nazi from the street corner decides to visit a bar I frequent and shout the same crap I can complain to the owner. The owner then has a decision: They can continue to welcome the Nazi and get the reputation of being sympathetic to their hate, or they can tell him to go shout his garbage someplace else. If the bar owner decides to allow the Nazi to keep coming, it’s within my right to stop going. It’s also within my rights to tell my friends that they don’t want to go to that bar anymore, because it’s a Nazi hangout.
I’ll expand a bit further. On my site here, Substack has given me the tools to remove comments and the ban users. I have used this only once, when someone stopped by and was just extremely hateful and disrespectful. Was that censorship? Hardly. My site, my rules. That dude was free to copy and paste his comment anywhere he wanted to do so. I made the conscious decision in that case not to allow my newsletter to be a cesspool for this person’s particular brand of hate.
This is not a first amendment issue, nor is it about censorship. Substack is making a business decision. Hey, that’s their right. I don’t happen to like it or agree with it. So it’s my right to call them out and look for another home.
Substack leaders have “bravery and principle” in by allowing Nazis on their site? Please. The only thing I see here is cowardice.
Craig, thank you for the thoughtful reply. To be honest, I wouldn't have even posted my comment if I hadn't seen that you take the time to respond to virtually everyone. You have my respect. And again, I love your baseball commentary and will continue reading no matter how this dialogue turns out. And I apologize for the length of this response, but there's a lot to say. If you want to take this offline, I'm happy to do that as well.
That said, I think your bar analogy is off base. And maybe this isn't a "free speech" issue but an "owner's rights" issue. But either way, you're advocating silencing someone whose views you don't like, or denigrating someone who allows the publication of views you don't like. That's a dangerous path.
In a bar, no matter how large, someone can come in and irritate the primary clientele unless the owner intervenes. Think of the scene in Casablanca where the Germans sing songs and the French (the primary clientele) counter with La Marseillaise. Or imagine Eagles fans in a Chiefs bar. It is in the owner's interests to control the "speech" and decide who can be heard and who must be censored. Completely legal and fair.
But Substack is not a bar. No pro-Nazi Substack site can make its voice heard on Into the Fountains or any other Substack publication unless the content owner makes it happen. No reader will know a pro-Nazi Substack even exists unless that person goes looking for it. And any individual who posts pro-Nazi comments on your site can (and should) be easily and quickly removed and silenced. Unlike in a bar, pro-Nazi existence on Substack has absolutely no impact on the readers of Into the Fountains. Your objection is simply knowing they exist.
I'm struggling to come up with a better analogy than a bar for Substack. The best I can do is a phone network. Lots of bad people use phones to share their evil ideas, but no one asks the Phone Company to shut them down. Substack is a platform like a phone network. Why do you ask them to shut down pro-Nazis but you don't ask AT&T to monitor calls and cut off pro-Nazi phone accounts?
What you're asking for is to prevent pro-Nazis (and by inference other groups whose ideas you abhor) from being able to share their ideas with other people that may be sympathetic to those ideas. Isn't that a basic right, to be able to communicate with like-minded people? Substack allows that, and it doesn't hurt us. Again, it's easy to advocate de-platforming pro-Nazis, but then what about pro-Alex Jones? Then pro-Trump. Then pro-Palestinians? Then pro-Musk? Are you anti-Rumble as well?
It seems like people who want to silence pro-Nazi platforms are afraid of them, otherwise why care? The idea being (I guess) if pro-Nazis talk among themselves, eventually they will convince all the stupid people, take over another country and kill us all. But to be honest, I'm not at all scared of pro-Nazis today (and full disclosure, I'm Jewish). They are largely powerless, dispersed and represent ideas the vast majority of people abhor. They're a long way from being a threat. So let them have their little Substacks and talk among themselves. And by the way, by allowing them to be public, we can see how stupid they are.
Finally, I said I'm not scared of Nazis. Here's a short list of things I am scared of:
-US Presidents, without a declaration of war, fighting a proxy war with a nuclear powered adversary with a "madman" at its head;
-The unelected "security state" hoovering up every tweet, chat, phone conversation and search I do to review if/when I do something that annoys them, regardless of our 4th amendment;
-A global unelected bureaucracy controlling my use of energy in the name of a climate crisis that has been predicted to be unstoppable in five years for the last three decades;
-Bureaucrats and judges removing candidates from ballots;
-Scientists conducting off shore experiments on gain of function viruses;
-Public officials requiring me to inject untested "vaccines" to protect me from such viruses;
-Greedy baseball owners demanding taxpayers fund their unnecessary new stadium (just checking to see if you're still reading).
I could go on, and I'm sure you could respond with some other things that scare you but not me. The point is, pro-Nazi conversations would be about number 97 on that list. Why make an issue over purity of thought? Let them have their platform and let's us focus on baseball.
I look forward to your response and again, sorry for the length.
As a Jew, the fact that some people think that my fundamental rights (to worship, or even to *exist*) should be subject to debate in the public square is frightening.
This is going to be more personal than I usually get on a forum about my beloved baseball team, but I'm hoping you can at least understand my point of view. I grew up Jewish in an area of suburban Omaha that was very much not Jewish. I was often the only Jew in my class in elementary school. In first grade, a bully made a Jewish slur towards me. My response was, "Jesus was a Jew". He punched me. In the Principle's office, I was told it was my fault because I provoked him. I don't think the principle was a horrible antisemite, he was probably just tired of dealing with the nerdy unathletic Jewish kid getting picked on again. But the wheels of power in our (or any) imperfect democracy are oiled by the majority.
Hannah Arendt talked about the "banality of evil". That most German bureaucrats in the 1930s weren't ideological Nazis, they were just Germans with a job who didn't want to rock the boat, and hey the government says these people are a threat, and maybe they are, so I'll stamp the paperwork to build another gas chamber.
Saying that ideologies of extreme hate deserve debate in the public square means that the targets of that hate need to be constantly vigilant, and spend their energy arguing for their right to not be mass murdered, while people who are not targeted have the luxury to just live their lives.
I hope you've never experienced the consequences of Nazi behavior. I have. I've been harassed by neo-Nazis, beaten up by neo-Nazis, had a friend from High School murdered by neo-Nazis. Their rhetoric is dangerous. This isn't about an intellectual discussion about marginal tax rates. It's about people trying to normalize violence against groups of people for just being who they are. That's not democracy.
Dan, I'm not sure how to respond to that. I'm lucky. I was born and raised Jewish in KC and never experienced anything like what you described. If I had, it may have changed my outlook. Not having lived it, I can't imagine nor project how I would feel today.
The good news is that today there are policies and laws against everything you described, and bullying (which was common in my day) is now dealt with aggressively (at least I'm told).
As is the case with so many issues today, what we need to do is enforce existing laws fairly and accurately; we don't need more laws. I think that's the case here. People say and think all sorts of bad things. That's OK. It's when they act that crimes are committed.
I'm not enthusiastic about this response, but I'm passionate about the right of everyone, even Nazis, to be able to speak freely. Once we go down the path of convicting people for speech, no matter how vile, we're on the road to true thought policing.
Great article as always. Sorry you are having difficulties with your platform. I have been under the impression Taylor won't be available until later in the season due to his surgery, so I had Brentz in the opening day bullpen along with your other seven picks.
Man, I kind of hate the idea that we're going to start with Dairon Blanco in AAA. Not because he's so great, but because I think he offers a higher floor than most of the guys in the outfield and I'd like a high floor guy as the fourth or fifth outfielder while one of those guys (preferably Melendez) gets dealt to upgrade the team elsewhere.
Also, interested that you didn't even mention McMillon in the bullpen picture. I've been counting him as something close to a lock. Should I not be?
I'm going to need to reassess my stance on McMillion. Based on your (and other's comments) I may have been hasty in removing him from the equation. At least there's a version 2.0 coming!
Mr. B,
Happy New Year to you and fingers crossed for the Blue Crew in '24.
Is Singer's not coming up with a third pitch just sheer stubbornness? I should think
getting slapped around like he did last year might motivate him to get to work on that.
Also, no McMillon in the 'pen? I thought he performed well as the season wrapped.
Happy New Year, Terry. I do think that Singer’s lack of a 3rd pitch is stubbornness. I think he tries, but can’t get comfortable and then abandons the project. It’s on him to figure out a way to make it happen. I did consider McMillon but think with the new additions he gets squeezed to open the year. If these moves work, there will be a lot less traffic between the minors and majors this year, but he’s a guy who will get his chances.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!! I will continue to follow you as I am once a Royal, always a Royal!! Go Blue in 2024!!!
Thanks, Joe! Appreciate you hanging around.
Are these really Nazis or just Republicans or MAGA Republicans? Just wondering because I kind of like the dope running twitter.
Thanks, Craig. Agree with you on all parts of your post.
Thank you, Murray. Happy New Year!
I think Angel Zerpa breaks camp with the big boys. And thanks for the article. Happy New Year!
I left him out of the mix because of all the new signings. He could certainly force the issue, though. I would welcome that.
Craig, love your work but have to disagree with you about Substack. Obviously, everyone hates Nazis, but this is a manufactured controversy that is ultimately based on The Atlantic resenting that independent writers like you have a platform on Substack to make a living without the mainstream media controlling it. Every single platform has a Nazi problem, including Ghost and others. Freddie DeBoer has an excellent post on his Substack about this.
Thanks, zdebman. I get that every platform has a Nazi problem, but I’ll point back to the Nazi bar analogy. Content moderation already happens here. They may not be able to completely remove the issue entirely, but they can certainly curtail it. Thanks for pointing me to the DeBoer post. I’ll definitely check it out.
You pretty much summed up exactly how I feel about the current Substack situation. It doesn't seem that difficult to me. The first amendment says you can't be arrested for spouting Nazi crap, but that doesn't mean anyone has to publish it.
My fear is that all the big names will abandon the site and it will crater, and those of us who have carved out smaller, but not insignificant audiences will get hurt the worst. I guess I will take the blame though. As soon as I started making headway promoting my newsletter on Twitter, Musk came along and ruined it, so I guess it only makes sense now that I'm getting real traction with my newsletter that Substack will fall off a cliff.
My hope is the big names will cause Substack to reconsider what they can do. We’ll see. Hang in there, Patrick! I enjoy your work.
Thanks! Right back at you. Fingers crossed!
Craig, thanks as always for your comments on the Royals. I've been a season ticket holder since 1969 and share the joy and frustration. Your insights are miles ahead of any mainstream commentators (low bar I know.
That said, I've already had the Substack conversation on JoPo's site, but I'll repeat my position here.
It's important to acknowledge that free speech only means protecting ideas you abhor. Anyone can support free speech for motherhood, apple pie and baseball. That's trivial. It's free speech for ideas you hate that are the true test. If your position is "free speech but..." please don't pretend you're in favor of free speech. When I was growing up, censorship was considered so bad no one would even consider it. Today it's mainstream. I hope you will change your position and acknowledge the bravery and principle behind Substack and their leader.
Censorship is bad; and in fact worse than the ideas anyone wants to censor. It leads to narrower discussion of everything, leading to a lesser understanding of truth. Crazy ideas published are rarely harmful. I'll bet most people on this site didn't even know about the Substack controversy until you brought it up (unless of course they read JoPo, in which case they didn't know about it until he brought it up). And I'll also bet not a single person read a pro-Nazi Substack article. So no need for outrage.
There is also a trickle effect. If you censor Nazis, then call Trump a Nazi, you must censor Trump. Then if I support Trump, you must censor me. Elon Musk said negative things about Israel and is now considered pro-Palestinian. Pro-Palestinian = anti Israel, therefore, Musk must be pro-Nazi and therefore censored. I know this is ridiculous, but who decides what is ridiculous and what is evil? If no one does, then we're all free to read or ignore what we want. If someone else decides, we're all held hostage to that person, whether his/her intentions are good or evil.
Please support free speech and stay with a site of principle. Our country will be better for it.
MIke
Mike, I’ll point you to the Nazi bar analogy again. I never said Nazis don’t have a right to air their abhorrent and repugnant views. In this country, that’s protected speech. A Nazi can stand on a corner and hold up a sign or use a bullhorn to shout what I think is disgusting slogans and I can’t do anything about it other than perhaps try to shout them down. So I never, ever espoused a position “free speech, but…” Because the issue isn’t free speech. If the same Nazi from the street corner decides to visit a bar I frequent and shout the same crap I can complain to the owner. The owner then has a decision: They can continue to welcome the Nazi and get the reputation of being sympathetic to their hate, or they can tell him to go shout his garbage someplace else. If the bar owner decides to allow the Nazi to keep coming, it’s within my right to stop going. It’s also within my rights to tell my friends that they don’t want to go to that bar anymore, because it’s a Nazi hangout.
I’ll expand a bit further. On my site here, Substack has given me the tools to remove comments and the ban users. I have used this only once, when someone stopped by and was just extremely hateful and disrespectful. Was that censorship? Hardly. My site, my rules. That dude was free to copy and paste his comment anywhere he wanted to do so. I made the conscious decision in that case not to allow my newsletter to be a cesspool for this person’s particular brand of hate.
This is not a first amendment issue, nor is it about censorship. Substack is making a business decision. Hey, that’s their right. I don’t happen to like it or agree with it. So it’s my right to call them out and look for another home.
Substack leaders have “bravery and principle” in by allowing Nazis on their site? Please. The only thing I see here is cowardice.
Craig, thank you for the thoughtful reply. To be honest, I wouldn't have even posted my comment if I hadn't seen that you take the time to respond to virtually everyone. You have my respect. And again, I love your baseball commentary and will continue reading no matter how this dialogue turns out. And I apologize for the length of this response, but there's a lot to say. If you want to take this offline, I'm happy to do that as well.
That said, I think your bar analogy is off base. And maybe this isn't a "free speech" issue but an "owner's rights" issue. But either way, you're advocating silencing someone whose views you don't like, or denigrating someone who allows the publication of views you don't like. That's a dangerous path.
In a bar, no matter how large, someone can come in and irritate the primary clientele unless the owner intervenes. Think of the scene in Casablanca where the Germans sing songs and the French (the primary clientele) counter with La Marseillaise. Or imagine Eagles fans in a Chiefs bar. It is in the owner's interests to control the "speech" and decide who can be heard and who must be censored. Completely legal and fair.
But Substack is not a bar. No pro-Nazi Substack site can make its voice heard on Into the Fountains or any other Substack publication unless the content owner makes it happen. No reader will know a pro-Nazi Substack even exists unless that person goes looking for it. And any individual who posts pro-Nazi comments on your site can (and should) be easily and quickly removed and silenced. Unlike in a bar, pro-Nazi existence on Substack has absolutely no impact on the readers of Into the Fountains. Your objection is simply knowing they exist.
I'm struggling to come up with a better analogy than a bar for Substack. The best I can do is a phone network. Lots of bad people use phones to share their evil ideas, but no one asks the Phone Company to shut them down. Substack is a platform like a phone network. Why do you ask them to shut down pro-Nazis but you don't ask AT&T to monitor calls and cut off pro-Nazi phone accounts?
What you're asking for is to prevent pro-Nazis (and by inference other groups whose ideas you abhor) from being able to share their ideas with other people that may be sympathetic to those ideas. Isn't that a basic right, to be able to communicate with like-minded people? Substack allows that, and it doesn't hurt us. Again, it's easy to advocate de-platforming pro-Nazis, but then what about pro-Alex Jones? Then pro-Trump. Then pro-Palestinians? Then pro-Musk? Are you anti-Rumble as well?
It seems like people who want to silence pro-Nazi platforms are afraid of them, otherwise why care? The idea being (I guess) if pro-Nazis talk among themselves, eventually they will convince all the stupid people, take over another country and kill us all. But to be honest, I'm not at all scared of pro-Nazis today (and full disclosure, I'm Jewish). They are largely powerless, dispersed and represent ideas the vast majority of people abhor. They're a long way from being a threat. So let them have their little Substacks and talk among themselves. And by the way, by allowing them to be public, we can see how stupid they are.
Finally, I said I'm not scared of Nazis. Here's a short list of things I am scared of:
-US Presidents, without a declaration of war, fighting a proxy war with a nuclear powered adversary with a "madman" at its head;
-The unelected "security state" hoovering up every tweet, chat, phone conversation and search I do to review if/when I do something that annoys them, regardless of our 4th amendment;
-A global unelected bureaucracy controlling my use of energy in the name of a climate crisis that has been predicted to be unstoppable in five years for the last three decades;
-Bureaucrats and judges removing candidates from ballots;
-Scientists conducting off shore experiments on gain of function viruses;
-Public officials requiring me to inject untested "vaccines" to protect me from such viruses;
-Greedy baseball owners demanding taxpayers fund their unnecessary new stadium (just checking to see if you're still reading).
I could go on, and I'm sure you could respond with some other things that scare you but not me. The point is, pro-Nazi conversations would be about number 97 on that list. Why make an issue over purity of thought? Let them have their platform and let's us focus on baseball.
I look forward to your response and again, sorry for the length.
Mike
As a Jew, the fact that some people think that my fundamental rights (to worship, or even to *exist*) should be subject to debate in the public square is frightening.
This is going to be more personal than I usually get on a forum about my beloved baseball team, but I'm hoping you can at least understand my point of view. I grew up Jewish in an area of suburban Omaha that was very much not Jewish. I was often the only Jew in my class in elementary school. In first grade, a bully made a Jewish slur towards me. My response was, "Jesus was a Jew". He punched me. In the Principle's office, I was told it was my fault because I provoked him. I don't think the principle was a horrible antisemite, he was probably just tired of dealing with the nerdy unathletic Jewish kid getting picked on again. But the wheels of power in our (or any) imperfect democracy are oiled by the majority.
Hannah Arendt talked about the "banality of evil". That most German bureaucrats in the 1930s weren't ideological Nazis, they were just Germans with a job who didn't want to rock the boat, and hey the government says these people are a threat, and maybe they are, so I'll stamp the paperwork to build another gas chamber.
Saying that ideologies of extreme hate deserve debate in the public square means that the targets of that hate need to be constantly vigilant, and spend their energy arguing for their right to not be mass murdered, while people who are not targeted have the luxury to just live their lives.
I hope you've never experienced the consequences of Nazi behavior. I have. I've been harassed by neo-Nazis, beaten up by neo-Nazis, had a friend from High School murdered by neo-Nazis. Their rhetoric is dangerous. This isn't about an intellectual discussion about marginal tax rates. It's about people trying to normalize violence against groups of people for just being who they are. That's not democracy.
Dan, I'm not sure how to respond to that. I'm lucky. I was born and raised Jewish in KC and never experienced anything like what you described. If I had, it may have changed my outlook. Not having lived it, I can't imagine nor project how I would feel today.
The good news is that today there are policies and laws against everything you described, and bullying (which was common in my day) is now dealt with aggressively (at least I'm told).
As is the case with so many issues today, what we need to do is enforce existing laws fairly and accurately; we don't need more laws. I think that's the case here. People say and think all sorts of bad things. That's OK. It's when they act that crimes are committed.
I'm not enthusiastic about this response, but I'm passionate about the right of everyone, even Nazis, to be able to speak freely. Once we go down the path of convicting people for speech, no matter how vile, we're on the road to true thought policing.
Thank you, Dan. Your perspective is important. I appreciate you commenting here.
If you think Mcmillon isn't going to be in this bullpen when healthy you got another think coming
At the expense of who? Maybe Hernández? My point is, it’s a much larger pool for Picollo and Q to choose from.
Mr. B,
My hatred of Nazis and all white supremacists aside, I am a big fan of Into the Fountains.
I depend on this newsletter as an important source of information and analysis as I follow
my favorite team's rise from the ashes.
In addition, I enjoy your writing; your fluid style and ever-present wit make for quick and pleasurable reading.
I'm not going anywhere but Into the Fountains.
Great article as always. Sorry you are having difficulties with your platform. I have been under the impression Taylor won't be available until later in the season due to his surgery, so I had Brentz in the opening day bullpen along with your other seven picks.
Man, I kind of hate the idea that we're going to start with Dairon Blanco in AAA. Not because he's so great, but because I think he offers a higher floor than most of the guys in the outfield and I'd like a high floor guy as the fourth or fifth outfielder while one of those guys (preferably Melendez) gets dealt to upgrade the team elsewhere.
Also, interested that you didn't even mention McMillon in the bullpen picture. I've been counting him as something close to a lock. Should I not be?
I'm going to need to reassess my stance on McMillion. Based on your (and other's comments) I may have been hasty in removing him from the equation. At least there's a version 2.0 coming!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and for your concern about the Nazi problem around here.
Here's a different view of the Nazi problem from another Substack writer:
https://public.substack.com/p/censors-are-trying-to-trick-you-into?r=j9ceb