Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Newsletter Excerpt, June 4, 2025 -- "AL Central Notes"

 

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

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Chicago White Sox

Last night, Rule 5 pick Shane Smith continued his run at the AL Rookie of the Year award with 5 1/3 shutout innings against the first-place Tigers. Smith struck out six and scattered three hits, lowering his ERA to 2.45 and bumping his bWAR to 1.7, a mark that leads the White Sox.

Smith spent a couple of years at Wake Forest, but one was interrupted by the pandemic and the other by Tommy John surgery. The right-hander went undrafted in 2021 and signed with the Brewers. Last year at Double-A and Triple-A, he had a 3.05 ERA in 94 1/3 innings, not quite good enough for the Brewers to place him on their 40-man roster. The Sox took him with the first pick of the Rule 5 draft and were rewarded when Smith showed up in camp with an extra tick on his fastball and a new changeup that has been nearly unhittable. Batters have just six hits off it all year, and they’re whiffing on it more than a third of the time. The pitch has helped him hold lefties to a .178/.276/.271 line with a 22% strikeout rate.

Smith is part of a Sox team that has leveled up from “historically bad” to “just bad.” They’re on a 50-win pace and, more importantly, they’re finding multi-year solutions. Smith should be a high-floor mid-rotation starter who won’t make much money for a while. Davis Martin, in his eighth season in the Sox org at 28, has established himself as a #4 or #5. Jonathan Cannon, 24, has done the same. These aren’t exciting players, but the White Sox are coming up from a floor no team had hit in 60 years. You take your green shoots where you find them. Along with Sean Burke, these four have given the White Sox a stable starting rotation that’s 21st in MLB in fWAR, with an ERA three-quarters of a run lower than last year’s group despite losing Garrett Crochet and Erick Fedde.

At the plate, Miguel Vargas has bounced back from a miserable start to post a .243/.321/.425 line (Editor Scott notes that he’s hitting .296/.365/.542 since April 20), and since the demotion of Andrew Vaughn has taken over at first base, probably his best position long-term. Chase Meidroth, part of the Crochet deal, has a .373 OBP. Catcher Edgar Quero, who arrived in the Lucas Giolito/Reynaldo Lopez trade, has made his debut with a .341 OBP, though the defense hasn’t quite been there yet. Again, the White Sox aren’t good, but they’re better. They’re better behind the kind of players who should be here a while and, thanks to their lack of service time and concomitant low salaries, will open the door for Chris Getz to put higher-priced vets around them. 
 
 

Monday, June 2, 2025

Newsletter Excerpt, June 2, 2025 -- "Royals Get Jac’d Up"

 

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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The baseline statistics are impressive enough, but it’s how Caglianone has gotten to them that is really exciting. In his short time in Triple-A, he’s posted an average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives of 99.9 mph, seventh among hitters at that level. (Roman Anthony, still in Triple-A, is just behind him at 99.8 mph.) Of his 40 batted balls at Triple-A, five came off the bat at at least 110 mph, and 23 at at least 95 mph. We’re talking about two weeks here, but the combination of contact rate and ability to hit the ball hard paints Caglianone as ready for the majors. His batted-ball numbers look like what players like Pete Alonso and Juan Soto have been doing in MLB this year.
 
 

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Newsletter Excerpt, June 1, 2025 -- "A Re-Opening"

 

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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Ben Brown, who isn’t throwing a complete game or even eight innings under the best of circumstances, gets to throw his six without facing the top of the opponent’s lineup three times. Brown was drafted in 2017 and is in his eighth pro season, 25 years old, and in all that time he has gone seven innings in a game on three occasions. He has never gone past seven. Brown is the typical MLB starter in 2025, engineered to go as long as he can at maximum effort. We know that when Brown gets the ball you are taking it back from him after six innings in almost all cases, so it’s just about which six innings you’re going to get from him.
 
 

Friday, May 30, 2025

Newsletter Excerpt, May 30, 2025 -- "Boffo Box Office"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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Even a team with the financial resources and player-development skill the Dodgers have can only take so much. The Dodgers, right now, simply do not have enough healthy pitchers. In May, the team is 22nd in ERA and 25th in FIP. They’ve gone through 21 pitchers (plus Miguel Rojas) in 25 games over 29 days. That number will go up, as the Dodgers traded for former Reds closer Alexis Diaz, who will now throw 26 fantastic innings and get injured in August. Adding Diaz yesterday means the Dodgers have made a change to their pitching staff on 14 days this month, a level of churn that’s remarkable even in modern baseball. Andrew Friedman has reflected on the injuries to his homegrown pitchers, but much of this is simply the team’s tolerance for risk -- Glasnow, Snell, Sasaki and all the relievers were health cases long before they were Dodgers. The Dodgers are just playing a different game, assuming they can get to the tournament and planning to be at full strength when they do.
 
 
 
 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, May 27, 2025 -- "Mailbag"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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I read your newsletter item about Derek Shelton’s firing the other day, and saw your social posts about Paul Skenes deserving a mercy trade. And it made me wonder: From your perspective, is there any chance, under current ownership, that a different GM could come in and execute a successful rebound/rebuild before Skenes departs? Or is this organization so bad that it wouldn’t be possible?

Regardless of financial constraints… it is shocking to me that a GM of Ben Cherington’s experience could have executed so badly over the past five-plus years, in the draft and in trades and even in free agency, that we would now find ourselves in this position yet again.

-- Mike F.

I do not. This fish stinks from the head. You could put the illicit love child of Billy Beane and Theo Epstein in that role, and it would not matter. I understand the frustration with Cherington, who has squandered a fair amount of draft capital during his time running the Pirates, but he is not the problem here.

Cherington will probably lose his job next, and whoever takes over will inherit a decent core but an ownership unwilling to make investments around that core, limiting the Pirates’ upside. We saw this with the mid-2010s teams, which were very good, filling PNC Park, and which went unsupported by ownership. I believe the largest free-agent contract the Pirates have given out is still Francisco Liriano’s $40 million or so deal. That’s not Ben Cherington’s fault.

There is only one answer here, and that’s for Bob Nutting to sell. I instead think he will stick around and try to help get a payroll cap and increased local revenue sharing in the 2027 CBA negotiations. Until then, Pirates fans will suffer. I’m truly sorry, man. It’s a great baseball city.

--J.
 
 
 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, May 26, 2025 -- "Philadelphia Story"

 

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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Despite losing Aaron Nola to the IL, the Phillies have the best starting rotation in baseball, in fact lapping the field -- a full win, by FanGraphs -- better than the Royals. The Phillies have had a top-five rotation by this measure in each of the last five seasons, and in that time they are simply running away from the rest of the league.

TSOP (The Starters of Philadelphia)* (SP fWAR, 2021-25)

             

             IP    ERA    FIP    fWAR
Phillies   3840   3.97   3.79    75.0
Astros     3890   3.64   3.95    60.7
Dodgers    3550   3.64   3.97    58.7
Braves     3767   3.87   3.85    58.1
Giants     3405   3.85   3.58    57.3


The gap between the Phillies in first and the Astros in second is larger than the gap between those second-best Astros and the 17th-ranked Royals.