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

 

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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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"

 

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.

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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"

 

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.

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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"

 

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.

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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"

 

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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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"

 

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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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.