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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Season Preview 2025: Eating the Whole Hog
March 17, 2024
As we approach Opening Day, I’ve been buried in projections and player comments and injury updates, working out my 2025 predictions for every team. It’s work, but it’s also fun being consumed by a project like this, wanting to get the best read on the upcoming campaign. A set of projections is necessarily outcome-focused, answering the questions of who is good and bad, who will be in or out of the tournament, and in the end, who is the best.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I follow baseball once the season starts. When I came to the game, just four teams made the playoffs, and any team that did so had had a wildly successful campaign. The other 22, though, didn’t all deem their seasons a failure. We didn’t used to be so postseason-focused. I think that’s changed a lot, and it affects how I follow and cover the game, how we all experience it. There was a time when competing in an exciting playoff race was a successful season, or having a surprising .500 year out of nowhere, or even when a bad team -- say, the 1990 Yankees -- put some interesting young players on the field, even if those players didn’t end up with long careers. The point of the baseball season was the baseball season.
We celebrated so much more of baseball than we do today. Now, 12 teams make the playoffs and missing the postseason is largely cause for disdain. Even teams that make the playoffs can be deemed failures if they don’t advance far enough. The barriers to success are lower than ever, while the barriers to happiness seem higher than ever. We’re accelerating through the season; there will be trade-deadline talk, I guarantee you, before the end of April. We’ll spend July speculating about how trades will affect playoff rosters in October. Teams that fall out of the race early may as well drop into MLS for all we’ll care about them.
I don’t want to do that this year. I describe myself as a fan who enjoys the regular season more than the postseason, which is usually stated in the context of missing true races between good teams. There is more to it than that, though. I just like having baseball around every single day for six months. I like random day games on a Tuesday (hey, Tigers), and the hour leading up the 7 p.m. ET starts, and the way a Saturday can have games from 1 p.m. to midnight. I like Quick Pitch in the morning and Joe Davis at midnight. I like a surprising trade in April, a phenom called up in June, a vet coming off the IL in August.
There’s a great college football podcast called Split Zone Duo, one that is the current iteration of a pod chain dating back a decade with a variety of hosts. The two main ones now are Slate’s Alex Kirshner and CBS Sports’s Richard Johnson. One thing they like to say about their pod is that they “eat the whole hog” by covering everything from teams in the CFP to the ones in CUSA. They cover the games, the coaching carousel, recrui... excuse me, “crootin’”...all of it. They value the whole season and all the teams and all the things that make their game special. They have fun with all of it.
There are baseball writers who are excellent at this. Sam Miller is probably the best right now at noticing something random and making me care about it. Patrick Dubuque at BP has this talent. Davy Andrews at FanGraphs. Meg Rowley on Effectively Wild. I don’t mean swing changes or new pitches or how a manager is making out the lineup card so much as the little things, or even big things, that pop up when we get 2430 games over 186 days. The Cespedes Family BBQ guys have this club in their bag.
I want to do a better job of savoring the games as they are, not as part of the bigger stories. I want to get invested in some Padres/Dodgers matchup in the early going not because of its NL West implications or what early failure might mean to the Padres’ in-season decisions, but because it will be a good ballgame and I like baseball. The same goes for some light day in June when Nationals/Marlins is the only contest at 4 p.m. That’s baseball, too, and there are plenty of reasons to watch. I want to listen to more MLB games on the radio, and dip my toe into the college version a bit, and maybe keep a better eye out for the quirks that Sam and Patrick and Meg are always noticing.
Forget whether any of this will make it into the Newsletter. Maybe some of it will, I don’t know. What I want, for myself and for you, is to enjoy these games as much as possible. We haven’t had real baseball in so long, and we’re about to get six months of it. It’s so much better than it was back in those 26-team days, too, because we can watch every game in high definition, and read so much more about them, and have access to the kind of information about the players 14-year-old Joe couldn’t have dreamed of. I’d have loved to have known Dave Righetti’s IVB, and Don Mattingly’s barrel rate, and Rickey Henderson’s sprint speed.
You know, this could be the last untrammeled baseball season for a while. The 2026 campaign is unquestionably going to be played against the backdrop of a coming labor war, one that could cost us part or even all of 2027. Between the pandemic and the lockout and the rules changes, the 2020s have given us a lot of odd seasons, and that’s likely to continue. This one, though, this 2025 season, is on an island, far enough removed from the early part of the decade that the game has stabilized, and far enough ahead of 2027 to allow it to unfold without the cloud of an expiring CBA hanging over it.
This is the moment to appreciate our game, its players, and all the things we love about baseball, as baseball, without needing more meaning than that. There’s plenty of time to sweat the wild-card races and where Vladimir Guerrero Jr. may end up and whether Shohei Ohtani can win a fourth MVP in five years. Those storylines, and more like them, are going to play out. Let’s appreciate everything that happens behind and around them, though. Let’s eat the whole hog.
