Joe Sheehan Newsletter, June 22, 2026 -- "Parity"

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Parity

Vol. 18, No. 49

June 22, 2026

We’re about a week away from the exact midpoint of the 2026 season, 1215 games played, and the overarching theme is mediocrity:

-- Just ten teams have outscored their opponents.

-- 13 teams, almost half the league, are separated by four games from 40-37 down to 37-42.

-- 11 teams, more than a third of the league, have exactly 37, 38, or 39 losses.

Even some of the best teams don’t feel like it. The Braves, who have the best record in baseball, are loaded with waiver bait like Rowdy Tellez, Joey Bart, and Ha-Seong Kim, and have a bottom-ten starting rotation in June. The Dodgers are on a 100-win pace and, as is their wont come summertime, seem bored. The Rays have the fifth-best record in baseball with a +8 run differential and three MLB-caliber hitters. (Chandler Simpson has a .333 OBP...no, excuse me, that’s a 333 OPS, in June.)

At the other end, after a number of seasons in which the worst teams in baseball made runs at being the worst teams ever, the bad teams are competitive. Just one team, the Rockies, is playing less than .400 ball. Teams that recently lost 107 (Nationals), 112 (A’s), and 121 games (White Sox) are all in the wild-card mix.

Today, the gap between the best and worst teams is 247 percentage points. How does that stack up to recent June 22nds?

The Spread (range of records on this date in recent years)

         Pct.    GB

2026    .247    19.0

2025    .394    30.5

2024    .394    30.5

2023    .425    32.5

2022    .402    27.5

 

The change is mostly happening at the low end. The five worst teams in baseball have a combined .403 winning percentage. That’s miles ahead of where they were at the same point in recent years.

Closing the Gap (worst five teams through June 21, recent years)

         Pct.

2026    .403

2025    .345

2024    .353

2023    .339

2022    .354

Those gains are coming at the expense of teams at both the top and middle of the league. Things aren’t quite as dire as they were a month or so ago, as we now have 16 teams at .500 or better, but as noted above, there’s a logjam right around .500. There is still some chance the American League’s last playoff spot, currently held by the 38-39 Blue Jays, is taken by a sub-.500 team.

The NL’s advantage in interleague play, currently a .551 winning percentage that equates to an 89-73 full-season record, means their middle consists of teams a bit above .500, and a whole lot of them. No second-place NL team is within five games of the division leader, but the NL wild-card chase includes nine teams separated by 4 1/2 games for three spots. Just three NL teams are more than 2 1/2 games out of a postseason berth. (Two of those have payrolls of more than $200 million.)

This is the future MLB has been trying to create for decades. Expand the playoffs. Punish teams for getting too good. Expand the playoffs again. Change the draft rules, change the international amateur rules, change how money gets distributed. Expand the playoffs again. Chase the standings-pileup the NFL achieves simply by playing one-ninth the number of games. Eliminate pennant races of thoroughbreds and replace them with playoff races of mutts. The standings on June 21, 2026, whatever I think of them, are the product of 30 years of concerted effort by MLB.

I don’t want to get sidetracked on the way these changes affect labor relations. What I will say is that these standings reflect what MLB owners want, which is less competition -- for wins, for money, for players. They want rules that guarantee profit irrespective of team performance, that lessen the need to invest in a team both on and off the field, that remove the need for greatness, that lead to a tournament in which the title hopes of the top seed and the last seed aren’t that far apart.

More than 30 years since he exercised a coup to become acting commissioner, more than a decade since he left that role, Bud Selig’s vision for baseball has finally come true.

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Newsletter Excerpt, June 19, 2026 -- "What the Buc?"

 

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So what does this all mean? I thought, writing this, the answer might lie in walk rate. Last year, though, the Pirates walked 9% of the time, and this year it’s 10%. They ranked exactly eighth in both years. They’re striking out at about the same rate as they did last year. Their team barrel rate is slightly higher, less than half of 1%, and it’s not in the underlying swing data; they’re chasing more while also swinging at pitches in the zone more. Statcast agrees they’ve had a better quality of batted balls this year ( +.011 xBA, +.025 xSLG), but that doesn’t explain being up 30 points of average and 50 points of slugging on the field.

I still question the process. The team’s two best hitters are 31-year-olds having their best seasons since they were 27. The fifth-best hitter is 32 and matching his career-high wRC+ from last year, with shaky underpinnings. Behind that, though, there are some wins in Horwitz, a low-cost, low-profile trade pickup, and the decision to promote and play Griffin. Oneil Cruz is having what a good Oneil Cruz year will look like.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, June 17, 2026 -- "The Best There Ever Was"

 

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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Tonight in Los Angeles. Shohei Ohtani will walk to the mound to start the game. He’ll throw a 99-mph fastball, mix in a sweeper the league is hitting .078 against, a curve they have one hit off of all season. Soon enough, he’ll walk back to the dugout, grab a bat, and walk to the batter’s box to put his 96th-percentile barrel rate, 96th-percentile hard-hit rate, and 96th-percentile exit velocity to work. He’s the only player to ever be able to do all of those things at all, and he’ll do them all in one game, maybe even in one inning.
 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, June 15, 2026 -- "Things Change"

 

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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It’s been a bit less than two years since the Tigers and Astros squared off in the AL Wild Card Series, the Tigers upsetting the AL West champs by holding them to three runs in two games. The Tigers backed that up by reaching the Division Series a year ago. The Astros, taking one step back, missed the playoffs entirely.

The two teams meet tonight in another one of these AL series where both teams need to sweep to get themselves situated for a second-half run. The Tigers, losing two to the Guardians over the weekend before a rainout Sunday, are 29-42, 9 1/2 games back of the Guards, six back of the last wild-card slot, hovering a half-game ahead of the worst teams in the AL. They’re not quite this bad, having been outscored by just 12 runs and running a 35-36 third-order record that pretty much matches the top two teams in the Central. They’ve gone 7-14 in one-run games, 0-5 in extras.

 

 

 

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, June 13, 2026 -- "Nobody Touches The Miz"

 

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Nobody Touches The Miz

Vol. 18, No. 45

June 13, 2026

A few weeks back, I did a riff on signature significance in a Lifetime piece:

Does one incredible performance carry so much meaning it can change your view of the player? What [Reid] Detmers did last night is more common than it was for most of baseball history -- twice this year, 17 times this decade, 73 this century...after just 54 occurrences prior to 2001. More teams, more games, and many more strikeouts.

Does it have signature significance any more? Emerson Hancock did in earlier this month. Triston McKenzie did it once, Andrew Heaney, Dan Straily, Brad Penny. It’s not unheard of for a good pitcher at his peak to have a day like this. Work your way down the list, though, and there are a lot of bold-faced names. deGrom, Cole, Strasburg, Scherzer, Verlander. Even the next tier down is Burnes, Bieber, Glasnow, Sale. Sandy Alcantara and Spencer Strider and Walker Buehler all did it at their peaks.

Raising the bar to 15 strikeouts clears a lot of chaff -- 56 occurrences and a lot of bronze, but still...Chris Archer, Michael Pineda, Sterling Hitchcock. Draw the line at 16, and it’s mostly guys you’ve heard of...and Vince Velasquez, somehow. So Velasquez notwithstanding, I think a start of 16 strikeouts with no walks is where we draw the line for signature significance. If I know nothing other than that about you, I can probably surmise you are a great pitcher.

Maybe 15 isn’t such a bad number after all. Maybe “15 strikeouts, no walks” has signature significance when you pair it with numbers like “104.5” -- the fastest pitch ever recorded by a starter --- and “95” -- the number of pitches thrown. Maybe what Jacob Misiorowski did last night, erasing the Phillies from the map, stands on its own as an indication of true greatness. But for a Kyle Schwarber first-pitch line-drive single in the fourth, we could be talking today about the greatest pitching performance ever.

As is stands, it’s in the picture. Game Score, a Bill James invention, grades a pitcher’s start based on the box-score line.

Best Ever? (Highest Game Score, nine innings or fewer)

Kerry Wood       CHC    5/6/98    105

Max Scherzer     WAS   10/3/15    104

Clayton Kershaw  LAD   6/18/14    102

Matt Cain        SFG   6/13/12    101

Sandy Koufax     LAD    9/9/65    101

Nap Rucker       BRO    9/5/08*   101

Nolan Ryan       TEX    5/1/91    101

Ten tied with                     100

*1908

(The “nine innings” restriction is necessary because the highest Game Scores all come from a time when starters were allowed to pitch forever. Sixty-two pitchers have a Game Score of at least 106, seven hit 120, the record is 153.)

Misiorowski’s Game Score of 100 is tied for the eighth-highest of all time. You know most of the others. Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game, perfectos by Matt Cain and Sandy Koufax, the last no-hitter Nolan Ryan ever threw. Old friend Marty Lurie might have been at that Nap Rucker game, I’ll have to check.

I’m not sure this list gets at what Misiorowski did last night. There was a ruthlessness to him that called to mind the way Pedro Martinez wiped out lineups at his peak. He struck out the side in the first on 13 pitches, 11 of them four-seam fastballs, none of them at less than 102 mph. Sit with that for a second. There was a time, in the life of this Newsletter, that a 102-mph fastball would have caused us to gasp, to yelp, to post, even. Last night, it was Misiorowski’s let-up pitch. He walked off the mound after one inning, and watching him you had that sense, deep in your baseball brain, that this wasn’t going to be an ordinary night.

It was not. Misiorowski would throw 69 four-seam fastballs, and every single one was tracked at at least 100 mph. He averaged 102.6 mph on his fastball in the ninth inning, which would get our attention if it were Mason Miller or Aroldis Chapman...except Misiorowski started the ninth at 86 pitches rather than zero. On this night, Misiorowski was his own fire-breathing closer. His final pitch of the game, his 95th, was a 103-mph fastball. I can hardly believe my own words. It sounds like I’m trying to slip Sidd Finch 2.0 past you, maybe pitching a Netflix series about Henry Rowengartner’s grandson. 

Misiorowski, though, is real. He leads MLB in ERA and FIP and strikeouts. After last night, he has one of the league’s five shutouts and its eight complete games. Batters are hitting .140/.216/.194 against him. The record for lowest batting average allowed in a season of at least 100 innings pitched is .165, set by Misiorowski’s former teammate, Freddy Peralta, in 2021. The record for a qualified starter is .167, set by Pedro Martinez in 2000. Batters will have to hit about .200 off Misiorowski the rest of the way to push him over that figure, and that just doesn’t seem possible. 

I want to see how the Brewers handle Misiorowski the rest of the way. They’ve been pretty conservative with all their starters in the David Stearns/Matt Arnold era. Misiorowski threw 97 innings in 2024, 141 last year, and my working assumption has been that they would aim for 170 or so this year, which would leave about 85 innings left. The Brewers, though, plan to play for seven months, not six, so they need to be thinking about October already. That 170 is my projection, not theirs, but I just don’t think they’ll want him heading towards and past 200 innings during a playoff run. It’s why, talking to Gill Alexander on VSIN, I said I thought Cristopher Sanchez should be a bigger favorite for the NL Cy Young Award, as he’s just more likely to stay in the rotation all season than Misiorowski or Chase Burns is.

Misiorowski is tempering some of those concerns with his efficiency. He’s cut his walk rate from 11% to 7%, and as we saw last night, has learned he can pour his fastball into the zone without much fear. Just three pitchers have thrown their fastball in the strike zone more than Misiorowski has, and when he does, batters hit .172 and slug .228. Among qualified starters, Misiorowski is eighth in pitches per inning pitched, one of a dozen under 15 P/IP.

Velocity. Control. Efficiency. Unhittability. It all came together on a Friday night in Milwaukee. Jacob Misiorowski gave us a night to remember. I can’t wait to see him do it again.

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Newsletter Excerpt, June 12, 2026 -- "Potpourri"

 

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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Neck-stepping time? (Remix) Braves at Mets. The Mets are in last place, 15 games behind the Braves, and pretty much need to sweep here to have any hope of chasing the Bravos down. They catch the Braves down Ronald Acuña Jr. and Drake Baldwin. Frankly, the Braves have a lot of waiver bait in their lineup most nights, and that’s not counting Austin Riley, declining for a third straight season at age 29. Still, just avoiding a sweep at Citi Field could limit the Mets to a wild-card chase.

Two years ago today, the Mets were also eight games under .500 at 29-37, 17 1/2 games out of first. They closed 60-36 and got to within two wins of the World Series. It’s a very long season.