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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.
--
"What connects these two teams is that they complicate the modern criticism of teams for not spending money. Spending money on players isn’t an end in itself, but a means to build a winner. The Rays and Guardians have run low payrolls while routinely winning. Over the last ten years, the Guardians have the fourth-best record in baseball, the Rays the seventh-best. Those ranks are second and fifth in the AL alone. Between them, they’ve accounted for 11 playoff berths in those ten seasons, and the AL hasn’t contested a postseason without at least one of them since 2015."