Newsletter Excerpt, April 22, 2025 -- "Tottering Twins"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

The Twins had a notable late-season collapse, didn’t do anything to improve a .500 team or get the fans invested, and are starting this year injured and playing in football weather. I expect the offense to be better and the team to convert more winnable games into wins. Lopez and Wallner will return, and probably Lewis too for a little while. We’ve seen the Twins promote Luke Keaschall and they have promising hitters behind him in Emmanuel Rodriguez and Walker Jenkins. Homegrown talent isn’t going to be the problem. The schedule presents a gift this week, six home games with the White Sox and Angels that will go a long way to getting the Twins on track.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 18, 2025 -- "Third Base Stathead"

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

Third-base coaches, more than anyone else on the field at a given moment, have to be statheads. Beasley made his choice to send Higashioka based on the relative positions of the baseball, Trout, and Higashioka. He made his choice the way third-base coaches have long made those choices, considering the outfielder’s arm and the runner’s speed, perhaps with some vague, instinctive notion of game state baked in. That’s not good enough. Every single decision a third-base coach makes absolutely has to be informed by run expectation charts and game state. Beasley, more than any player and even more than Bruce Bochy, has to understand the risk-reward, the actual math, behind his choice. He needs to consider not just the physical aspects, the ball and the fielder and the runner, but take into account who is coming up next. 

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 14, 2025 -- "Cubs Getting Dubs"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

A team can carry one guy like this. The Cubs also have Matt Shaw, the well-regarded prospect who is off to a .164/.292/.236 start. Shaw is handling the transition to third base reasonably well; he’s just not doing anything at the plate. With Turner and Workman not playing any better, though, Craig Counsell has to stick with Shaw. To Shaw’s credit, he has drawn ten walks against just 17 strikeouts, and he is pulling the ball in the air (24% of his batted balls, well above the league average), both signs of good process. Despite recent events, I am more confident in Shaw’s next 24 weeks than I am in PCA’s.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 9, 2025 -- "Hits"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

The sport of baseball is in desperate need of more hits, though. The league is hitting .238 in the early going, and let’s go out on a limb and suggest that while that number will rise with the temperature, it’s in no danger of climbing above .250 no matter how many games the A’s play in Sacramento or what weird bats the Yankees bring to the plate. If so, this would the the fifth straight season in which the league batting average is under .250. (Actually the sixth, but 2020 never counts.) It would be the third time that’s ever happened.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 7, 2025 -- "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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

Royals 4, Orioles 1

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K

Bubic (W, 2-0)      6.2  5  1  1  1  8

The hardest thing in sports isn’t hitting a round ball with a round bat squarely. The hardest thing in sports is resisting the temptation to do a victory lap on your offseason calls 15 minutes into the new season. 

I loved Kris Bubic, who had Tommy John surgery after three starts in 2023 and looked great out of the pen for the Royals late last year, to make a leap this season. Yesterday, he shut down the Orioles in his second start, pushing his ERA up to 0.71 in the process. He’s whiffed just shy of a third of the batters he’s faced while walking just three of the 49. Batters aren’t squaring him up at all, with just two barrels and an anemic average exit velocity of 85 mph. The change that has always been his out pitch has been untouchable, with a 53% whiff rate, and he’s now using both a sweeper and a true slider, with great results.

The concern with Bubic is just going to be volume. His pro high in innings pitched is 149 1/3, and he threw 16 two years ago, 70 2/3 last year. The Royals have had a lot of success in recent seasons getting maximum volume from pitchers with similar backgrounds such as Seth Lugo and Cole Ragans. Bubic could be their second-best starter behind Ragans, it’s just a question of for how long.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 6, 2025 -- "Fun With Numbers: Juiced?"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

To the extent that I have a concern about the 2025 season, it’s in that big drop in BABIP (.291 to .281) and the ongoing loss of hits on balls in play. It matches my observation, which is that the ongoing evolution of pitchers into witches, and the more recent trends of teams both optimizing defensive positioning and selecting for fielding skill over batting, are all choking off routes to scoring that aren’t home runs.

So far this year, 42% of runs have been scored on home runs. I can’t chop that down for the first ten days of a season, but I can tell you that figure was 37% last March and April, and 39% in March and April of 2023. I can tell you that there have been just three seasons in history in which that number has gone above 42%, all of which were much higher scoring (2017, 2019, and 2021) than the early days of 2025 are.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 4, 2025 -- "Undefeated"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

That has not been the case down in San Diego, where the Padres rarely trailed in the first week of play. Their 7-0 start comes with the best run differential and best run prevention in baseball. Five teams have allowed more runs in a game than the Padres have allowed all season (11). (The Brewers have done it twice.) The Cubs’ Justin Steele has allowed more runs than the entire Padres staff has allowed. Michael King and Dylan Cease had rough debuts, but in the last five starts, one turn through the rotation, Pads starters allowed three runs in 29 1/3 innings. The Padres have been behind at the end of just two innings during that run. The leads those starters have handed over have been well-protected. Padres relievers have allowed two runs in 26 2/3 innings, fewest in baseball. They’ve stranded every one of the nine baserunners they’ve inherited. 

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 1, 2025 -- "Catching Up"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

 

In my ongoing effort to become rich and famous, here’s a fiery take on the bat: It’s just another step along the way. Given the restrictions in place -- and occasionally going outside of them -- batters have been trying to get the best performance out of bats since the game was called rounders. Bats used to be enormous pieces of wood, without much taper towards the handle. Players experimented with flat-sided bats for bunting, ones eventually banned. The weight of bats has steadily dwindled, as players trade off mass for bat speed. 

 

[...]

 

This isn’t a problem. I’m open to the idea that it could become one, though I doubt anything that helps hitters right now is something we should be attacking. It’s a welcome shift, honestly, to be talking about a way in which hitters might possibly even the field against pitches, these sweepers and deathballs and kick-changes, optimized to within an inch of their lives. Let the hitters fight back a bit.