Newsletter Excerpt, December 30, 2024 -- "Corbin Burnes to the Diamondbacks"

 

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I have written many times about my respect for the management team of GM Mike Hazen and manager Torey Lovullo. I’ve never really considered D’backs owner Ken Kendrick on that same level. Kendrick has mostly been on my radar as the guy arguing for public money to upgrade Chase Field and lightly threatening to relocate the team if he doesn’t get it. Kendrick has, however, mostly kept his team’s payroll ranking at or above the level of his team’s market score (18th in the current CBA). He authorized a top-15 payroll last year, including those Rodriguez and Montgomery contracts, even knowing his team wouldn’t have a local-TV deal, and has followed up now with the Burnes signing. The Burnes contract is the largest commitment made this winter by any team with an uncertain local-TV situation. In a moment when so many owners are sitting on their hands, and many have at least some argument for doing so, Kendrick is writing big checks.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 27, 2024 -- "Downsizing and the Astros"

 

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The Astros have just six non-right-handed batters on their 40-man roster, and four of them are older players or non-prospects who have never shown they can hit in the majors. Victor Caratini is probably their second-best hitter from the left side. This plan worked when it involved the Killer Bs, but the level of talent among this team’s right-handed hitters isn’t quite there. With Tucker missing half the year, Alvarez drew a career high 16 intentional walks, and he will double that figure with Walker or Paredes or Yainer Diaz behind him all year. 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 26, 2024 -- "Opportunity"

 

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Applied to baseball, lowering payroll to account for the loss of RSN money just creates a vicious cycle. Teams need to get fans excited in the offseason so that they’ll buy tickets, Teams need to win games in the season to keep them buying tickets. The constant is “buying tickets,” and for a third of the league -- and maybe two-thirds soon enough -- buying subscriptions. We’re about to learn whether these teams understand that paying good baseball players is an investment in the business that returns revenue, rather than merely a cost. To make money, they’re going to have to earn it by being good and getting people to buy the product, just like the Giants had to in 1911 and the Cardinals had to in 1936 and the Braves had to in 1961. It’s the return of competition, of re-connecting winning to profits, of making these teams eat what they kill. It’s the end of baseball as programming, the return of baseball as product.

If we’re lucky, it will mean the death of “markets” and a return to “cities,” where what matters isn’t getting a cable distributor two states away to buy the rights to air FanDuel Whatever, but getting the family two blocks away to come to the yard on Sunday, and have enough fun to do it again next Sunday.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 24, 2024 -- "Rising Rangers"

 

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Atop the list, as expected, are the Texas Rangers. The 2023 champions had an injury- and underperformance-plagued year. After a 22-16 start, they lost 12 of 14 in late May and slipped under .500 for good on May 21. A 12-15 August ended their hopes of winning a weak AL West. Corey Seager, Evan Carter, and Wyatt Langford, projected to be the core of the offense, missed 184 games among them. Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer combined for 12 starts and 54 innings. The Rangers ended up in the bottom ten in wRC+, starters’ FIP, and relievers’ FIP. Sometimes, you just have a year.

The Rangers, though, still have the core of that title team from ’24. They can reasonably project more innings and possibly a full healthy season from deGrom. That alone could be worth six or seven wins above 2024.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 21, 2024 -- "Finding the Risers"

 

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The Nationals’ young talent makes their ongoing unwillingness to go into the free-agent market frustrating. They had a 74-win roster last year, one that has a core of five players 26 and under (Wood, Crews, CJ Abrams, Luis Garcia, and MacKenzie Gore) and one of the lowest payrolls in the game. This is the moment to spend money to get better, and whether a Lerner family decision or a Mike Rizzo one, they have simply stopped trying. Signing Mike Soroka, a fifth starter, for $9 million has been their only move this winter.

If they had shown any life at all, I’d have been all over the Nationals as next year’s surprise team. As it stands, I have a hard time caring more about the team’s playoff chances than its owners do.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 19, 2024 -- "Mailbag"

 

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Now that the Cubs have finally acquired a five-WAR player, what should Jed Hoyer do next?

--Rich J.

Trade a three-win player for air. That’s definitely the play.

The Kyle Tucker trade looks worse when you add Cody Bellinger to the package traded away. This now goes from a clear win to, in WAR terms, damned near a push. They upgraded from Bellinger to Tucker at a cost of Isaac Paredes and a top prospect. I’d probably still rather have Tucker, but the Cubs just aren’t all that much better today than they were prior to this sequence.

I’ve seen a few defenses of this payroll dump, and they’re terrible. One simply buys into the myth that the Chicago Freaking Cubs “had” to trade Bellinger to “afford” other things. Please just don’t, OK? It’s simply not true. Do you know what happens if the Cubs keep Cody Bellinger? Nothing happens. No one misses a meal. No one loses a home. No one has to drop out of college to work at the farm. It’s a paper loss for a business that’s worth $5 billion. 

Moreover, there’s no viable place for the Cubs to spend that “savings” other than on Corbin Burnes. If they sign Burnes, it was a bad idea to trade Cody Bellinger. If they don’t sign Burnes, it was a hideous idea. There’s nobody else better than a #3 starter on the market.

The other defense is that the Cubs, after acquiring Tucker, had a roster logjam. This is true, they effectively had six players for five spots across the outfield, DH, and first base, with a couple of the team’s best prospects also outfielders. That’s an argument for trading Bellinger for a comparable starting pitcher, or catcher, or third baseman, or even a package of prospects. It’s not an argument for trading him for a 30-year-old with 83 career major-league innings.

Besides, roster logjams of this size are almost always resolved by injuries or underperformance. Seiya Suzuki misses 30 games a year. Kyle Tucker missed half the season in 2024. Pete Crow-Armstrong could easily hit his way back to Triple-A.

Trading Cody Bellinger for nothing isn’t a baseball decision. It’s a decision that made Tom Ricketts $25 million more wealthy. There’s no defense for it.

--J.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 17, 2024 -- "Winter Meetings Catch-All, Pt. 3 -- Left on the Shelf"

 

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There is no player we’ve talked about more on Slack than Pete Alonso (Law #14). We have a lot of Mets fans and specifically Alonso fans in there, so the debates about what the Mets should do with him, and what his actual value is, have been fierce.

Alonso hits all my stathead buttons, as a 30-year-old whose game is built around old players’ skills and who has no room to move down the defensive spectrum. At 28 and 29 he hit .229/.324/.480 for a 123 OPS+ and three wins a year, and he really has no room to decline from there while still being worth a free-agent deal. Alonso is worth more to the Mets than he is to any other team -- he’s incredibly popular -- but the Mets have Mark Vientos ready to slide to first base and a bunch of infielders -- Brett Baty, Ronny Mauricio, Jett Williams, Luisangel Acuña -- pushing for spots on the roster. He’s going to cost a new team a draft pick, and his profile is made up almost entirely of collapse risk. 

If I’m the Mets, I probably see if there’s some 2/50 deal available. There’s value in keeping Alonso, though post-Soto the Mets probably have some goodwill to burn. With only about a third of the league competing for free agents, Alonso might get to March and be the odd man out. My Jake Burger comparison wasn’t an attempt to be mean -- Alonso’s skill set just isn’t very hard to find.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 16, 2024 -- "Winter Meetings Catch-All, Pt. 2 -- Signings"

 

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I don’t do a ton of reporting, so it was an honor to be there for these negotiations. Buster Posey sat across from Adames, and just stared at him, locking eyes the way a winner does. Then, he pulled out a copy of Baseball Prospectus 1999 and a lighter, setting the book on fire, the room filling with the smoke of burning snark and statistics. Finally, Posey took out a portrait of Bill James, said “fight the real enemy,” and tore it in half, right down the middle, casting the pieces on the floor.

That’s how Buster Posey somehow got Willy Adames and his zero All-Star appearances to agree to one of the 50 most lucrative contracts in baseball history. The man’s a mystic.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 15, 2024 -- "Winter Meetings Catch-All, Pt. 1 -- Trades"

 

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They also didn’t make a good trade. This is a trade you make when you’re not actually serious about winning championships, when you’ve decided to be ordinary. You win titles with players like Tucker, superstars who can be the best player on a great team. This trade, instead, is designed to win a WAR/$ battle, and they don’t hang flags for that. The Astros may have a more efficient roster today, and they’re still a contender to win the AL West. They traded their best player, though, and they’ll feel that every day. Maybe you look at the team’s TV situation -- the Astros have lost as much as any team in recent years -- and justify it, but the way you make up a loss of TV money isn’t to make the team worse, it’s to make the team better so you can generate more revenue at the ballpark. This trade makes the Astros worse, at least in 2025.

To me, this trade signals the end of the Astros as a championship franchise, a moment that’s been coming since Jim Crane ran off James Click after the 2022 World Series. The Astros are just Crane’s plaything now, and he’ll soon learn there are worse things that not being given enough credit for winning the World Series. 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 12, 2024 -- "Red Sox/White Sox Trade"

 

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Whatever the Sox get from Crochet is profit. Of the four players they traded, none were likely to be a big part of the 2025 team, and only Kyle Teel and Chase Meidroth had reached Triple-A. They didn’t give up anything they will miss in the short term. Crochet was a four-win pitcher last year and projects as being worth five to six wins in 2025. He makes this team five wins better, five wins that would have put last year’s team in the playoffs. With the Yankees down Juan Soto and the Orioles running in place, this deal elevates the Sox to AL East contenders, and failing that a likely wild-card team.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 11, 2024 -- "Max Years"

 

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That four-pitch mix also makes him unusually effective when working deep into games. Fried’s career .255/.315/.361 line allowed the third time through is 12th-best in baseball over his eight-season career, and he loses less effectiveness as he pitches deeper in games than his peers do:

               AVG   OBP   SLG   K/BB    K%   OPS+  LgOPS+

First time    .230  .282  .348    4.0   25%    94      96

Second time   .235  .291  .343    3.5   23%    96     104

Third time    .255  .315  .361    3.5   24%   109     113

All pitchers lose effectiveness the third time through, but Fried is the rare pitcher who is often better the third time through than the available relief options are when they enter the game. That’s a big reason why, since the start of 2021, he leads MLB with four shutouts and is third with five complete games. CGSHOs are hard to come by now, of course. Fried is tied for fourth among starters the last four years with 12 starts of at least seven innings and no runs allowed. (Remaining free-agent ace Burnes leads with 16.) 

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 10, 2024 -- "The TV Gap, In Practice"

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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If you take a step back from the details, you can divide MLB teams into two categories: Stable TV situations and unstable ones. Even the Diamond teams only have deals in the short term, and Diamond has proven itself to be a poor partner over any time frame. There are eleven teams I would describe as having stable, profitable TV situations: the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Orioles, Mets, Nationals, Cubs, and Dodgers are on networks built around those teams. Three other teams -- the A’s, Giants, and Phillies -- are partnered with Comcast and seem to be stable. The A’s made Sacramento their temporary home in no small part so as to retain their local-TV deal.

Now, we’re just a few weeks into the 2024-25 offseason, so what follows is a snapshot, but I think it may be an illustrative one. So far, there have been a dozen contract commitments of at least $15 million. Those break down as follows:

11 stable teams: nine signings, $1.365 billion
19 unstable teams: three signings, $156 million

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 9, 2024 -- "Juan Soto Signs"

 

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Forget the money -- it doesn’t affect you. Forget the years -- they don’t affect you. It is very rare that that a team can make itself this much better in free agency, and signing a 26-year-old Juan Soto is one of those times. Soto’s combination of skill and youth is incredibly rare on the market, and by signing him, Steve Cohen made the Mets a lot better in one single move. That’s all you can ask from the owner of a baseball team.