Newsletter Excerpt, October 1, 2022 -- "21 Trident Salute"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 Mariners went Felix Hernandez’s whole career with reaching the playoffs. They went Kyle Seager’s whole career without reaching the playoffs. They went Hisashi Iwakuma’s whole MLB career without making the playoffs."

 

 

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, September 30, 2022 -- "Mets/Braves"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 14, No. 95
September 30, 2022

Back in April, the Mets were down 2-0 in the ninth to the Cardinals and scored five to win 5-2. A few weeks later, they pulled off a ridiculous comeback win over the Phillies, scoring seven runs in the ninth inning to win 8-7. On August 21, they did it to the Phillies again, winning after trailing 4-0, 7-4, and 8-7 in the ninth, while the Braves were losing a game in which they were tied in the eighth inning.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times -- every game counts the same. The way September performances get characterized as meaning more has always grated at me, because they simply do not. Play well enough in April and May, and you can turn September into a second spring training.

A night like Wednesday, though, rattles that belief. The Mets trailed the Marlins 4-0 as they came to bat in the seventh, their win expectancy down around 6%. Marlins gonna Marlin, though, and the Metropolitans scored two in the seventh, two in the eighth, and the game-winner in the tenth. At the same time, the Braves were once again losing a game they might have won after being tied late, dropping a 3-2 contest in D.C.

A swing like that counts the same as it would in April and May and August, but it feels different in September. Those two games Wednesday significantly flipped the leverage between the two teams heading into this weekend’s penultimate series in Atlanta. The Mets are now up one game on the Braves, and they hold the tiebreaker with a 9-7 lead in the season series. This weekend...

...the Mets can clinch the NL East by sweeping the Braves;

...the Mets can leave Atlanta with an effective magic number of 1 by taking two of three, going up two games in the standings and clinching the tiebreaker;

...the Mets can leave Atlanta tied in the standings, but holding the tiebreaker, by losing two of three.

The only scenario in which the Mets lose control of their destiny this weekend is by getting swept. That’s the importance of Wednesday’s comeback win.

The Mets used Thursday’s off day to set up their rotation for this series. Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Chris Bassitt will start. That’s probably their playoff rotation as well, as Bassitt has separated himself from Taijuan Walker and Carlos Carrasco in the second half. As much as any team, the Mets want to secure the division title and the bye, as they’re looking to navigate October behind two top starters who have combined to miss about half the season (32 starts, 197 2/3 IP, total). The less deGrom and Scherzer have to pitch, the better their chances.

The Braves are missing rookie sensation Spencer Strider, out for the regular season and possibly beyond with an oblique injury. They have more depth than the Mets do, running Max Fried, Kyle Wright, and Charlie Morton to the mound this weekend. Strider, however, was as dominant as any pitcher in baseball this year, striking out 38% of the batters he faced. There’s a gap between him and Morton, and certainly between him and Jake Odorizzi or Bryce Elder. The Braves want the bye so as to not need Strider until October 12, even October 14.

As good as the Braves’ rotation is, they’re behind in the first two games, as almost any team would be. A strange two-inning stretch across five days in which deGrom allowed seven runs is a blip until further notice. Outside of that, he’s been Jacob deGrom, and even including it he has a 1.74 FIP and a 42% strikeout rate in 58 1/3 innings. Fried has quietly become a soft ace, with a 2.50 ERA and 2.73 FIP in 180 1/2 IP.

Saturday’s matchup, again, features a very good pitcher who just isn’t quite as good. Wright will be the only 20-game winner in baseball this year, a credit to the Braves’ bullpen and offense as much as his pitching. His breakout has been at the level of a high #3, and driven by -- prepare to be shocked -- using his four-seamer less and his curve more. Wright has thrown his curve, now a tighter offering, over a third of the time in 2022. He’s good; he’s not Max Scherzer, who has entered the point of his career where 26 starts and 160 innings may be the upper bound. When he pitches, though...2.13 ERA, 2.47 FIP.

deGrom and Scherzer have started consecutive games six times this season. The Mets have never lost both games. If they pull that trick off one more time, they will be no worse than in control of their destiny with three home games left against the Nationals.

If they don’t, Sunday’s game could be for the division, an effective three-game swing with both first place and the tiebreaker in play. It would be the biggest game of Bassitt’s career, and maybe the 21st-biggest of Morton’s. Morton has been homer-plagued this year, with 26 allowed on a 15.8% HR/FB. Morton’s control has gotten away from him, with his highest walk rate in four years and a league-leading 18 batters hit. The Mets have been hit by more pitches this year than any team since the 1890s. So of course, Morton has only hit one of the 75 Mets he faced this year. (Cue the legend Jayson Stark -- “Baseball!”)

These teams both want to win games from the front, with two of the best rotations in baseball. The Braves are fourth in SP innings and sixth in SP FIP; the Mets are seventh in IP and second in FIP. The Braves don’t have a brass section heralding the pen, but their group is third in baseball in ERA, second in FIP. They just don’t have any bad relievers; their top six by innings all have ERAs and FIPs of 3.45 and below. That doesn’t include Raisel Iglesias, who has been untouchable since coming over from the Angels (0.40 ERA, 1.64 FIP).

The Mets...have Edwin Diaz. Adam Ottavino has emerged as the second-best option, with a 1.65 ERA and 2.27 FIP in the second half, driven by a 35/3 K/UIBB. Over the summer he began leaning on his two-seamer more, chucking his four-seamer and going mostly sinker/slider. We’ve seen Ottavino play at this level before, and if he sustains it, he’s the critical second guy the Mets have been looking for all year.

Both teams had Thursday off, of course, and will almost certainly lean on their best guys in what amounts to a playoff series.

Similar to the rotations, these are two of the best offenses in the game, though shaped very differently. The Braves have the third-highest strikeout rate in baseball, the Mets the third-lowest. The Braves lead MLB in isolated power, at 190, the Mets are 17th at 152. Barrels and exit velocity all tell the same story. If we try to put our thumb on the scale and evaluate the Braves just since the Michael Harris call-up, we find the teams tied with a 116 wRC+ since May 28. The Mets have had one of the game’s best offenses in the second half and the very best (125 wRC+) in September. Eduardo Escobar came off the IL earlier this month to find Brett Baty in his spot; Baty blew out his thumb and Escobar turned into George Brett for four weeks. OBP is Life: the top seven Mets by playing time this month have OBPs of at least .342.

It is a top-heavy group. The Mets have tried to help out the bench by promoting Baty (.184/.244/.342) and Mark Vientos (.143/.273/.286), and trading for Darin Ruf (.152/.216/.197) and Tyler Naquin (.231/.278/.444). Only the deal for Daniel Vogelbach (.244/.389/.422) has worked. The latest patch is top prospect Francisco Alvarez, who will join the team in Atlanta after hitting .234/.382/.443 at Syracuse. The Mets, who passed on Willson Contreras at the trade deadline, are likely to stick with their all-glove duo of James McCann and Tomas Nido behind the plate, and use Alvarez as the DH, at least in the game against Max Fried. The Mets miss Starling Marte, whose broken right middle finger has kept him out for three weeks and likely will keep him out for the weekend.

The Braves’ offense has leaned on the rookies in September. Harris and William Contreras have been the team’s two best hitters, as the top of the order -- Ronald Acuña Jr., Dansby Swanson, Matt Olson, and Austin Riley -- has slumped badly. Even at that, the Braves lead MLB in homers this month with 40, and against deGrom and Scherzer, it’s like in the playoffs -- short-sequence offense wins. Ball go far, team go far. The Mets have held the Braves to a .235/.294/.405 line and a 29% strikeout rate. The Braves have still averaged 4.75 runs a game thanks to 21 homers.

At one point this series looked to be threatened by Hurricane Ian, but the current forecast for Atlanta is dry straight through the weekend.

We really see the effect here of the new tiebreaker rules, put in place to accommodate the 12-team playoff field. In the standings, the Braves winning two of three will tie them with the Mets with three games left, able to control their own destiny to get, at worst, a Game 163. Now, that same result leaves them behind the Mets by dint of losing the season series 10-9.

Me, I think tiebreakers are for lesser sports, and losing the long and storied tradition of breaking ties on the field is another step in baseball’s march to becoming one. If the first use of a tiebreaker is to separate two 102-win teams, well, it will only underline the point in thick black ink. 

"Failing Three Classes"

Last night, Aaron Judge hit his 61st home run, tying the American League record for home runs in a season. It's an incredible achievement and one that should stand on its own. Unfortunately, Judge's individual accomplishment has become cause to re-litigate the issue of the single-season home-run record, set by Mark McGwire in 1998 and broken by Barry Bonds three years later.

 I do not want to be having this conversation, but it's not me using Judge's 61 home runs to drag these issues -- and the bitter opinions of offspring -- back out into the public square. If the conversation is going to happen, then let's have it happen with facts, not the ill-considered suppositions and drunk-at-the-bar "analysis" that drove it the first time through.

Below is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in 2013, in the context of Hall of Fame voting. I think it stands on its own as my explanation for why we got it wrong 20 years ago, and we're still getting it wrong today.

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We're failing three classes at once:

-- History. "Cheating," in all its forms, has not only never been a reason to deny someone a place in the Hall of Fame, it's largely been celebrated. Whether it's Gaylord Perry writing a book about his spitball, tales of other pitchers doctoring the ball with objects hard and soft, or players such as John McGraw, who played a game that we would barely recognize with a moral code we would not care to, cheating has never been cause to withhold a vote. Even the use of illegal drugs, mostly amphetamines, wasn't cause to do so. There are undoubtedly players who used illegal substances for one purpose or another who have been inducted, and at no time was that use an issue in Hall elections. Drawing a line at the most recent generation of drug users and labeling them "cheaters" apart from all who came before them is inconsistent and unfair.

-- Math. It was Bob Costas who said, "When Roger Maris goes from 39 home runs to 61, I know that's legitimate. When Barry Bonds goes from 49 to 73, I know that it is not." Well, subtraction and long division are your friends, and using either would tell you that the two are pretty much the same. This kind of bad math is a fundamental principle of people who withhold their votes from players tarred with the PED brush, because they have failed to look at the underlying conditions -- ones having nothing to do with drugs -- that made record-breaking home-run totals likely in 1998 or 2001 -- or 1961. When the math has been done, whether my look at power-on-contact or Nate Silver's work in Baseball Between the Numbers or anything that relies on more than "I know that it is not," it's been clear that the elevated offensive levels that began in 1993, and which laid the groundwork for all that followed, have very little to do with some mass use of illegal substances.

-- Chemistry. The players who have been caught by the testing system, who we can say with certainty were using these drugs, are quite the cross-section of the game. Despite the image of steroid-addled hulks terrorizing pitchers, it's pitchers who make up a significant number of the players caught by testing. The position players, well, many of them look a lot more like speedy singles hitters than they do middle linebackers. The evidence -- not the anecdotes, but the data -- shows that the relationship between using sports drugs and being good at hitting for power is nonexistent. "But Barry Bonds!" isn't an argument -- yet that's the general level at which these important issues have been discussed. Using that same level of sophistication, you can make a strong case for an "amphetamine era" in which pitchers' innings and starts, player steals and endurance marks were all in play. The connection between chemicals ingested and baseball played is inconclusive at best, and more likely nonexistent.

There's no precedent for barring cheaters from the Hall of Fame. There's no precedent for barring drug users from the Hall of Fame. There's no fact-based case for connecting "sports drugs" to league-level performance or individual outliers in the last two decades. 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 28, 2022 -- "Re-Reset"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 Padres, at least, have taken control of late by winning eight of their last ten, allowing just 25 runs over that period, even with a three-game trip to Coors Field mixed in."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 27, 2022 -- "Guardians Clinch"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"A few weeks back I wrote about how the final wild card slot in the AL might become a “do not want” for a team with a choice between playing the Rays/Jays/Mariners by finishing with the #5 seed and playing the Guardians by finishing with the #6 seed. I’d still prefer the latter, but the gap is less than it seemed at the time, and at least in the first round, playing the Guardians means facing Bieber and McKenzie, a tall task."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 26, 2022 -- "Races"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 only thing expanding the playoffs does for September is guarantee a lower bar for entry. That’s a bug for some, a feature for others, but it’s a certainty for all. Because of the nature of the baseball playoffs, adding teams also sharply decreases the chance that the best team will win the World Series, that the best teams will even get there."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 24, 2022 -- "700"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"That homer off Heaney, career #699, was just the appetizer. An inning after that homer, Pujols came up again, this time against righty Phil Bickford. On 1-1, Bickford threw an 81-mph hanging slider, and Pujols crushed the cookie like a four-year-old who got into the secret Oreo stash."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 22, 2022 -- "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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"My concern is that in building this schedule, MLB has left itself no wiggle room at all. Any rainout is going to disrupt the calendar, and multiple ones could create scheduling and travel challenges. As it stands, you could have teams making cross-country flights in the Division Series and LCS rounds without a day off -- Seattle/New York and Los Angeles/New York are both possible matchups. While I think we want to make playoff baseball more like regular-season baseball, we also don’t want bad baseball caused by unrealistic travel demands."

 

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, August 31, 2022 -- "Aaron Judge"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 14, No. 81
August 31, 2022

Aaron Judge hit homers #50 and #51 the last two nights in Anaheim, placing him on this list:

Good Company (50+ homers prior to September 1)

Barry Bonds   2001   57
Mark McGwire  1998   55
Sammy Sosa    1998   55
Sammy Sosa    1999   52
Six tied with        51


This is Judge’s second 50-homer season, making him the tenth player to hit 50 at least twice and the first since Alex Rodriguez had his third 50-homer campaign in 2007.

Judge’s homer last night, a fourth-inning, three-run blast off Mike Mayers that just about ended the contest, came off the bat at 107.5 mph, another in a long line of Judge rockets in his seven-season career. Since Judge’s debut season in 2016, just one player has hit more balls with an EV of 110 mph or higher. The two know each other.

Rocket Launcher (Batted balls with 110+ mph EV, 2016-22)
 
Giancarlo Stanton      296
Aaron Judge            253
Nelson Cruz            208
Vladimir Guerrero Jr.  179
Manny Machado          154


You can argue Judge versus Stanton, Stanton versus Judge. What you can’t argue is that these are the two most powerful hitters of their era, two of the most powerful hitters ever.

Because Judge has done this before, hitting 52 homers in 2017, his monster season isn’t entirely a surprise. What 2017 and 2022 have in common is volume. This is just the third time Judge has qualified for the batting title (502 PA for most players in most years), having been plagued by nagging injuries from 2018 through 2020. While playing more, he’s making the best contact of his career -- the best power hitter in baseball has a slightly above-average strikeout rate (25%). He’s also hitting more balls in the air; his groundball rate of 39% is his lowest since that 2017 season. Judge hits the ball so hard, so often, that elevating it is more valuable to him than to almost any other player in the game. This year, Judge’s fly balls have gone for homers 34.2% of the time, the sixth-highest full-season rate on record (since 2002, ex. 2020). That’s shy of his 2017 mark of 35.6%, second-best ever.

More plate appearances, more contact, more fly balls...more homers.

Judge’s great season has gone mostly unmentioned here, and that’s not an accident. I have largely shied away from his accomplishments, saying at one point I wanted Judge to hit 59 homers or 74. All the numbers in between, as was made very clear last night by one national writer (I’m not linking to him), would just open the door to turning what should be a great story for baseball into yet another opportunity to get turn of the century baseball wrong, to bash the declared villains, to go through the looking glass on what is “real” and what is not.

I don’t want to write about that. It’s a religion at this point, the Church of Steroids, and you either believe or you don’t. If you want to separate Judge out, give him special credit for what he’s doing, you can do it without reheating 20-year-old meals.

Records are most often broken when talent, opportunity, and context come together. For the clutch of players who have hit the most homers in a season, they all had talent, and they all played a lot in seasons when home runs were cheap. Go back to that chart above; ten players have gone into September with at least 50 homers, but in just six seasons. Giancarlo Stanton, the last player to do it, did so in 2017, when the league HR/PA was 3.3%, the highest in MLB history. Barry Bonds, who in 2001 had the most homers ever at this point in the season, did it in a league that hit homers 2.9% of the time, to that point the second-highest figure ever.

In 2022, with no pitchers batting, MLB is hitting homers 2.8% of the time. Judge isn’t benefiting from the rising tide of the double expansion of the 1990s or even the single expansion that helped Roger Maris. He’s hitting a baseball that is two-thirds lead and still chasing a 60-homer season.

Let’s put Judge’s performance in a different context. He has 51 homers, and no one else in baseball has 40. That just isn’t done, not since Babe Ruth was out-homering entire teams a hundred years ago. From 1919 to 1928, Ruth hit at least 13 homers more than the next guy did seven times. Twice, in 1920 and 1921, he hit 35 homers more than the second-place slugger. You’re paying money for a baseball newsletter: I can probably stop telling you Babe Ruth was good.

Outside of Ruth, the biggest lead any player ever had in the home-run race was 17, by Jimmie Foxx in 1932, when he hit 58 homers and...well, this is awkward...Babe Ruth hit 41. A year later, Foxx hit 48 and...yeesh...Ruth hit 34. That gap, 14, is the second-largest ever.

Lapping the Field (Biggest home-run race victories, non-Babe division)

                       HR   Lead
Jimmie Foxx     1932   58     17
Jimmie Foxx     1933   48     14
Willie Mays     1965   52     13
Buck Freeman    1899   25     13
Jose Bautista   2010   53     12
Cecil Fielder   1990   51     11
Kevin Mitchell  1989   47     11
George Foster   1977   52     11
Ralph Kiner     1949   54     11


When Barry Bonds hit 73, Sammy Sosa hit 64 and two other guys hit 50. When Mark McGwire hit 70, Sosa hit 66 and two other guys hit 50. Roger Maris’s 61 was chased by Mickey Mantle (54), and four other guys hit at least 45 homers.

Aaron Judge has 15 homers more than the next guy, Kyle Schwarber, does with a month to play. No one has won the home-run race by that much since Jimmie Foxx, and if Judge stretches the lead, he could do what no hitter has done since Babe Ruth.

Yes, records are usually set when talent, opportunity, and context come together. Judge is operating outside that formula, though, hitting bombs in a context that is punishing hitters for hitting the ball hard and up. Let’s spend this next month tracking him, enjoying him, marveling at him, centering him. Judge’s power in a league drained of it is the story.

Newsletter Excerpt, September 20, 2022 -- "Tiebreakers"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"If we get any kind of three-way tie, and I say this with love, ask someone else what happens. Those scenarios, which held the potential for so much fun for 120 years, are now just annoying."

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 19, 2022 -- "Thinking Inside the Box"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Alvarez did that damage yesterday hitting third. I’d like to see Dusty Baker move him up to second to start the lineup Jose Altuve/Alvarez/Alex Bregman/Kyle Tucker. Jeremy Peña, who has mostly batted second in September, is a strong defensive shortstop who started the season hitting well. Now, though, he has a .285 OBP, .274 against righties with a 94/13 K/BB. He’s at .231/.254/.345 in the second half. Peña is overmatched at the plate. The Astros dearly miss Michael Brantley, out for the year with a shoulder injury. They have to get their best hitters as many at-bats as possible."

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 17, 2022 -- "Watching the Sho"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

"So to my eyes, Ohtani doubling down this year, actually getting better as a pitcher -- more strikeouts, fewer walks -- while sustaining his greatness at the plate, is more impressive to me than his 2021 was. Last year wasn’t a fluke. This is who he is, one of the best hitters in baseball and one of the best pitchers in baseball."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 15, 2022 -- "Kansas City"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 Royals are just lousy with guys like this, players who are really interesting with a wide range of possible outcomes and possible defensive issues. I love MJ Melendez, who may or may not be a catcher but is most definitely a power-and-walks guy who can run. Vinnie Pasquantino has 28 strikeouts against 23 unintentional walks, unheard of for a Royals hitter."

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, September 13, 2022 -- "Fun With Numbers: Mookie Betts"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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Last night, Mookie Betts hit a three-run homer to cap a 6-0 Dodgers win that clinched the NL West. It’s the team's ninth division title in ten years, a streak broken only by the 107-win 2021 Giants. The Dodgers, after some postseason troubles early in the run, have won three of the last five NL pennants and are the favorites to win a fourth in six years. They’ve won nine of their last 13 postseason series, a mark that would have gotten you nine championships up to 1969 and at least five in the years after that through 1993.

The Dodgers’ postseason track record, and how we judge baseball teams in general, will be a big topic in October. Today, I want to go back to that three-run homer and the player who hit it. Mookie Betts has an MVP award and two rings, and I’m not entirely sure the average fan knows how great he is. I’m not sure I did until I went digging.

Consider this list of active bWAR leaders:

Simply The Best (most bWAR, active players)

                   bWAR   Age
Albert Pujols     100.9    42
Mike Trout         81.4    30
Justin Verlander   77.0    39
Clayton Kershaw    71.6    34
Zack Greinke       70.9    38
Max Scherzer       70.2    37
Robinson Cano      68.1    39
Miguel Cabrera     67.9    39
Joey Votto         64.3    38
Evan Longoria      58.3    36
Paul Goldschmidt   58.0    34
Mookie Betts       56.3    29
Nolan Arenado      51.4    31
Manny Machado      51.0    29

Betts is three months younger than Manny Machado, making him the youngest player in baseball with at least 50 bWAR. All these players lost wins to the pandemic season, but Betts, Machado, Mike Trout and Nolan Arenado lost prime years. They’re short two to four wins of what they might otherwise have. Keep that in mind as you read this next list.

(As I’ve mentioned before, I like using 1961 as a cutoff because it is a reasonable approximation of when the leagues were fully integrated. All the following charts and analysis do so. Your mileage may vary.)

Another Hero (bWAR through age-29 season, since 1961)

                   bWAR
Alex Rodriguez     80.6
Mike Trout         76.1
Albert Pujols      73.8
Ken Griffey Jr.    70.7
Barry Bonds        66.5
Roger Clemens      62.6
Rickey Henderson   61.4
Johnny Bench       59.5
Bert Blyleven      59.3
Clayton Kershaw    58.8
Tom Seaver         58.0
Andruw Jones       58.0
Cal Ripken Jr.     57.8
Pedro Martinez     57.3
Ron Santo          56.6
Mookie Betts       56.3


Betts is 16th on this list, at the tail end of a large cluster of players. In 2020, Betts put up 3.6 bWAR in a 60-game campaign, on pace for nearly a ten-win season. bWAR doesn’t always work that way, but you don’t have to be a family member to think that Betts would have racked up another four wins in 2020, leapfrogging that cluster to become just the eighth player in the expansion era with at least 60 bWAR before he turned 30.

That shortened campaign sticks out on his b-r page, the only “full” season in which he’s had fewer than four bWAR. Mookie Betts doesn’t have bad years. He was worth 2.3 wins in 52 games as a rookie. His “down year” in 2021 was a four-win season that most players would die to have -- .264/.367/.487 (126 OPS+), ten steals -- all while playing 122 games despite injuries to his back, forearm, and hip. Drafted out of a Nashville high school at 18, Betts did nothing but hit in the Sox system while being promoted slowly. He might reasonably have been called up sooner in 2014 and had a four-win season.

If we put our thumb on the scale and just look at players from ages 22 through 29, we find six who have been worth at least four wins in all eight years. Betts is at seven plus 3.6 bWAR in 60 games in 2020 -- I think we should give it to him.

The list of highest WAR totals by young players is dominated by ones who reached the majors at 20 and younger. That’s as it should be -- playing well in the majors at that age is a sign, in and of itself, of greatness. If we use that same thumb on that same scale to limit ourselves to players across Betts’ eight full campaigns...

Atypical Male (most bWAR, ages 22-29, since 1961)

Albert Pujols      67.3
Alex Rodriguez     66.1
Barry Bonds        62.9
Roger Clemens      60.8
Tom Seaver         58.0
Mike Trout         56.2
Ken Griffey Jr.    55.2
Mookie Betts       54.1
Pedro Martinez     54.0


Mookie Betts, since becoming a full-time player, has played like an inner-circle Hall of Famer, like some of the best players in baseball history.

Betts hit last night’s homer in a game he started and in which played all nine innings at second base. It’s not terribly unusual -- Betts was primarily a second baseman in the minors, moved off the position in deference to Dustin Pedroia. The Dodgers gave him one start at second in 2020 and five each in 2021 and 2022, looking to establish their Team Pretzel bona fides and allow Dave Roberts to get all his outfielders into the lineup.

When Betts reached the majors in 2014, he had played just 415 career innings in the outfield, all in ’14, so it’s incredible that he’s become one of the best outfielders of his era. But for coming up alongside Jackie Bradley Jr., Betts probably would have been a center fielder, though playing right field at Fenway Park is as close as a right fielder gets to having a center fielder’s defensive responsibilities. He took to the position well enough to have won five Gold Glove awards in an era when those awards have better tracked defensive performance.

There are just three active players who have at least five seasons of four offensive bWAR and one defensive bWAR. (We’ll call them “two-way seasons.”) Betts is one of them, along with Nolan Arenado and Carlos Correa. Take off the “active” tag and return to our earlier criteria, and...

Show Some Respect (4+ oWAR and 1+ dWAR seasons, by age 29, since 1961)

Johnny Bench     8
Cal Ripken Jr.   7
Alex Rodriguez   6
George Brett     6
Mike Schmidt     6
nine tied with   5


Betts is in the last group, with five two-way seasons by age 29. I hate to keep harping on this, but Betts’s 2020 season (2.6 oWAR, .09 dWAR) was certainly headed for this as well, elevating him to a tie with some of the best two-way players ever. The 2020 season will be poisoning our stats for a generation.

Running at this from a different direction, Betts’s combination of offensive and defensive value in his twenties marks him as one of the all-time two-way players.

What You Get Is What You See (40+ oWAR and 10+ dWAR before age 30, since 1961)

                   oWAR   dWAR
Alex Rodriguez     77.5   11.6
Ken Griffey Jr.    64.1   10.3
Barry Bonds        49.9   11.7
Johnny Bench       50.3   17.7
Cal Ripken Jr.     48.5   19.9
Mookie Betts       41.2   12.9
Robin Yount        51.0   12.1
Manny Machado      41.9   13.5
Mike Schmidt       40.3   12.7
Alan Trammell      41.2   14.8
Jim Fregosi        44.3   11.6


Again, this is with Betts being shorted by the 2020 season. (Manny Machado, who also lost WAR to the pandemic, is perhaps even more underrated than Mookie Betts is.)

Look, we live in the age of Mike Trout, who was so incredible in his twenties that he broke the curve. He’s the best player of his era and, if you acknowledge that baseball players are always getting better, the best player ever. Betts, though, now looks very much like the clear #2 from this era, and he has some markers Trout doesn’t have: More two-way value, more postseason performance, two rings, better durability. Over the last five years, Betts is five WAR clear of the field, even with that injury-plagued 2021 season.

The best may be yet to come. Betts, to me, is most reminiscent of a player we haven’t mentioned yet.

Two People

             PA   AVG  OBP  SLG  OPS+   SB   oWAR  dWAR
Betts      4984  .294 .370 .523  135   158   41.2  12.9
Player X   5298  .270 .384 .414  129   320   47.5   1.4


Player X played in a total dead zone for offense, and he stayed at second base rather than being moved to the outfield. He stole more bases because everyone did and, while not shown above, struck out less because everyone did.

Joe Morgan was on a Hall of Fame trajectory in his twenties. Then he put together one of the best stretches of my lifetime, a three-year run in which he hit .313/.446/.525 (171 OPS+), stole 62 bases a year with an 86% success rate, won two NL MVP awards and helped his team to two championships. He was one of the best percentage players of all time, one of the smartest players of all time, and was eventually elected to the Hall of Fame on his first ballot.

Now, baseball is played differently today, so I doubt Mookie Betts has that kind of running in his future. The rest of it, though, is within his grasp. Morgan’s 1975 season is one of just nine 11-win seasons in my lifetime, ninth-best of that group. You know who just missed? Mookie Betts in 2018, with 10.7.

Mookie Betts is the second-best player of his era, which makes him one of the very best players ever. His combination of offense and defense puts him in a rare category among players in the last 60 years, as complete a player as has played the game. His baseball intellect calls to mind that of Joe Morgan, who combined talent and experience and that intellect to play an all-time stretch of baseball in his early thirties. The best may be yet to come for Betts. 

-

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Newsletter Excerpt, September 12, 2022 -- "Reset"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"There’s a 97% chance that the three AL teams in wild-card position today will be the three AL wild-card teams. The Orioles still have six games with the Blue Jays, including three in Toronto next weekend, so you have to acknowledge their shot. The White Sox are about 20 times more likely to win the AL Central than to end up as a wild card."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 9, 2022 -- "Yadier Molina"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Even with the big day, Molina is having one of the worst seasons of his career: .224/.245/.313 (60 OPS+) in just 65 games. He remains a deterrent to basestealers, gunning down 42% of them, with just 24 even trying against him all season."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 8, 2022 -- "Pretty Good Day"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 NL Central race is over. Last night’s win put the Cardinals up 9 1/2 games over the Brewers, nine in the loss column. Their magic number is 17. The Cardinals are 25-12 since Jose Quintana made his debut for the team August 2."

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, September 6, 2022 -- "Design Flaw"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 14, No. 84
September 6, 2022

A couple weeks back at Prospectus, Rob Mains pointed out flaws in the new playoff format that, at the time, seemed like a problem but not a crisis. The way MLB has set it up, it will often be better for a team to be the #6 seed than the #5 seed, and occasionally better to be the #2 seed than the #1 seed. With a couple weeks of games in the books since the piece, the issue Rob raised is, at least in the AL, emerging as a very big one.
                          
Astros       87-48   .644
Yankees      81-54   .600   
Guardians    69-64   .519   


The Astros are very likely to be the overall #1 seed. They are six games up on the Yankees, effectively 6 1/2 with the tiebreaker. The Yankees, similarly, are going to get the second bye, 11 games up on the current AL Central leaders, the Guardians. For the sake of today’s Newsletter, we’ll assume these seeds hold.


Rays         75-58   .564
Mariners     76-59   .563
Blue Jays    75-59   .560   

Orioles      71-64   .526  4.5
Twins        68-65   .511  6.5
White Sox    68-67   .504  7.5


The Blue Jays swept the Orioles in that highly anticipated doubleheader yesterday, creating a lot of separation in what was very recently a tight wild-card race. There are three teams over the line, and they now have almost a week’s lead on the rest of the field. Those three teams, virtually tied today, are fighting as much for the first wild card, which comes with home-field advantage in that best-of-three first round, as for a playoff berth.

There’s no fluke here. Look at run differential, look at expected winning percentage, and you see the same separation between the top three teams and the rest of the field. Again for our purposes today, we’ll assume these seeds hold.

Rob Mains proposed that the #6 seed might be a better landing place than the #5 seed. I’m here to tell you that as it stands today in the American League, not only is it better, it’s better by so much as to be worth acting upon. The #5 seed in the AL will play a best-of-three on the road against a comparable team, and then advance to play the Astros, the best team in the AL. The #6 seed will play a best-of-three on the road at the AL Central champ, at most the sixth-best team in the league. Then, because MLB isn’t re-seeding, that team will play the Yankees.

Those two paths aren’t comparable, and they’re not really all that close. Let’s fast-forward four weeks and make up some entirely plausible numbers.


Mariners     95-64   .594
Rays         91-69   .569
Blue Jays    91-69   .569

White Sox    84-76   .525
Guardians    83-77   .519
Twins        82-78   .513


The Mariners, whose schedule over the season’s last three weeks looks like something John Thompson would have put together in the 1980s for Georgetown, take advantage to lock up the first wild card. The Rays and Jays make a valiant effort to stay with the Yankees, but they lose contact over the last weekend and are eliminated from AL East contention, left to fight for seeding. On the afternoon of October 4, the Rays and Jays are faced with the following situation over their final two games: win, and have to go through the Mariners and Astros; or lose, and have to go through the AL Central champ and then the Yankees.

Fiddle with the numbers and the records all you want, swap the AL wild-card teams around, but there’s no way around the conclusion. The championship-maximizing play in the 2022 American League is to be the #6 seed rather than the #5 seed.

The players, the managers, the front office types, the league will tell you that a team is never going to intentionally lose a game to improve its playoff chances. If I held any of those jobs, I’d say the same. I don’t. Rob Mains warned you that MLB has created a playoff format where it’s better to be a lower seed. I’m here to tell you that, in the first year of the format, it’s so much better that teams will be more likely to advance in the tournament if they play to fall to that lower seed.

There’s a lot of baseball left to be played. MLB could get lucky in a lot of ways. The three AL wild-card teams could all have a chance at the #4 seed in the season’s last days. The AL Central winner could play well enough to seem as much a threat as the top wild card team. There could be enough separation between the #5 and #6 teams to make this a moot point. The Orioles could rebound and create a fight for that last playoff spot. Maybe MLB dodges a bullet this time.

The problem, though, isn’t just going away. As Mains wrote, in many seasons, playing the third division titleist is going to be a better draw than playing the top wild card, and so the incentive to be the last wild card rather than the second one is often going to be in play. Bracketing the playoffs so that the 6/3 winner plays the #2 seed just doubles down on that incentive. For all the problems with playoff expansion in recent years, MLB had never created an incentive to lose. Now it has, and it needs to address that in future seasons.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 5, 2022 -- "Big Day at Camden Yards"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"So today has the potential to be the biggest showing at Camden Yards in quite some time. Owing to an August rainout, the Orioles host the Blue Jays in a single-admission, daytime, holiday doubleheader. Get out your straw hats, folks: For one day it’s 1957 in Bal’mer."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 2, 2022 -- "AL East Drama?"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Coincidentally, it’s one of those one-run wins that looms large right now. On August 17, the Yankees came back from down 4-0 in the sixth and 7-4 in the tenth to win on a Donaldson walkoff grand slam. Their opponents? The Rays. That two-game swing is now a third of the gap between the two teams."

Newsletter Excerpt, September 1, 2023 -- "Sad September 1"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Mostly, it was fun. It was fun to see guys with numbers in the 50s and 60s on the field, to see the first at-bat, first inning pitched, first hit for players who might never have a second. It was fun, as someone just getting into game strategy, to see the additional options Billy Martin or Bob Lemon or Billy Martin or Dick Howser or, Bil...you get it...had in the late innings. I got invested in Brad Gulden and Damaso Garcia and Mike Griffin because they were new and different and potentially great."