A great guest today for the podcast as I interview Keith Law, who has been with The Athletic as senior baseball writer since January of 2020.

Law spent many years writing and working for ESPN and its various outlets from 2006-2019. Before that he worked in the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays after impressing then general manager J.P. Ricciardi during the 2002 Winter Meetings. He hired Law for the Blue Jays front office. Keith rose to the position of special assistant to the general manager before leaving for that ESPN gig.

I have interviewed Keith many times over many years and always appreciate his solid insights. Some memebers of the previous O’s front office, before Mike Elias was hired, were not fans of some of Law’s opinions and would remind me often when I wrote a story with his takes.

But Keith, who can have strong opinions, has always been worth hearing from in my opinion and this was a wonderful conversation today about the upcoming O’s draft and we also spent some time on the current farm system and had an extended discussion about Triple-A catcher Samuel Basallo.

We ended the podcast discussing the upcoming trade deadline.

Enjoy this edition of the Steve on Baseball podcast.

I am closing in on 1,000 Substack subscribers so please keep signing on and joining us here. There are free and paid subscriptions and paid members have access to the full archive and any articles behind a paywall, as some are. But there is also a free element. So hope you will be here for every O’s analysis piece, minor league feature, video and podcast.

Get full access to Steve Melewski at steveonbaseball.substack.com/subscribe