Newsletter Excerpt, November 30, 2020 -- "Random Player Comments, 11/30/20"

 

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

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"Ozuna caught pretty unlucky here. He bet on himself by taking the one-year pillow contract, went out and had a monster season in the games that were played, and now is a free agent again in the worst player market since collusion. He is the type of player -- age 30, bat-first, unlikely to ever repeat his last season -- I would normally avoid. Ozuna’s 2020 batting line, though, isn’t as out of context as it looks at baseball-reference. He is likely a .280/.340/.490 hitter in 2021 and maybe for a couple years after that. We talk a lot about pitchers who are either hurt or good, and Ozuna may be the position-player analogue to that. The number of teams that could use a pure bat is unusually high for a high-offense era like this, but when you look at how little teams like the Rangers, Indians, Brewers and Rockies got from their left fielders last year, the market for Ozuna on a three-yearish deal should be strong."

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, November 23, 2020 -- "Non-Tenders"

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

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"Those are all pre-pandemic numbers, based on that cycle above: pay player, win games, raise revenues. You can think the owners are collectively wrong and behave badly most of the time, while also seeing that the 2020-21 cycle is sui generis, and justifies conservative behavior given what could be 20 million fans in attendance, total, over two years."

Newsletter Excerpt, November 20, 2020 -- "Random Player Comments"

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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"Paxton will end up with some kind of 1+1 deal, probably for a team that needs to gamble on less-expensive upside with an eye towards winning in 2021: Blue Jays, White Sox, Astros, Brewers all come to mind, and that’s not an exhaustive list. Me, I think I’d make my pitching investment elsewhere."

 

Newsletter Excerpt, November 18, 2020 -- "My Ballot"

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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"As with award voting, the Hall of Fame conversation is one in which I’ve lost interest in over the years. It became a proxy for how to evaluate players (Bert Blyleven), and then a proxy for an intergenerational war over, well, reality (Jack Morris, Jim Rice), and then a proxy for the war over sports drugs (Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, et al.). I might have survived all of that, but when Bud Selig -- who did more to hurt baseball than anyone since Chick Gandil -- was escorted through the front door a few years back, that broke me. I just can’t care any more. "

Newsletter Excerpt, November 16, 2020 -- "Kim Ng"

 

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

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"A baseball team run by Kim Ng would have been unimaginable in an era when most baseball executives came from the playing ranks, whether major-league or minor-league. The biases in baseball weren’t divided along the lines of man/woman, but rather did/didn’t you play. It was only when that changed, when Brian Cashman and Theo Epstein and Andrew Friedman built championship teams, when the game came to be run not by former players but by the executive class, that the door opened to allow women. When the key question was, 'Did you play?' Ng never would have had a chance. Now the question is, 'Can you think?' and Ng steps in, fully qualified.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, November 13, 2020 -- "Uncle Steve"

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

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"If the 2000s were about Moneyball and its offshoots, the 2010s were about pairing the modern best practices described in that book -- or perhaps more to the point, the type of thinking driving those practices -- with financial might. The Cubs sold to Tom Ricketts, hired Theo Epstein, and won the World Series. The Dodgers sold to Guggenheim Partners, hired Andrew Friedman, and won the World Series. The Mets have now sold to Steve Cohen, will hire a GM, and try to be the next team in this sequence. There is little reason to think, today, that the Mets won’t win a World Series in the 2020s."

Newsletter Excerpt, November 3, 2020 -- "Awards"

 

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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American League MVP: Shane Bieber

National League MVP: Freddie Freeman

 

AL Cy Young Award: Shane Bieber

NL Cy Young Award: Yu Darvish

 

AL Rookie of the Year: Sean Murphy

NL Rookie of the Year: Tony Gonsolin

I declined to pick Managers of the Year this year.

Newsletter Excerpt, November 2, 2020 -- "The New Reality"

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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

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"The cycle of performance to wins to revenue to pay, the one that has driven salary market conversations for decades, is broken, and that changes how players can be paid. Teams can’t do anything about the money they agreed to pay in the Before Times. That $2.2 billion is booked. What they can do, and what they most assuredly will do, is adjust future pay to the realities of the After Times. Those record-low six qualifying offers? That’s in part because the QO salary of $18.9 million is a Before Times number. (At that, teams extended offers to Kevin Gausman and Marcus Stroman, whose After Times market value isn’t close to $18.9 million a year. Both should snap-call the offers.) The declined options are teams rejecting Before Times numbers."