Newsletter Excerpt, September 28, 2024 -- "Clarity"

 

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 Tigers did the thing. Sellers at the trade deadline, under .500 as recently as August 25, out of playoff position as recently as last Sunday morning, the Detroit Tigers are going to the postseason. They won their sixth in a row, 4-1 over the White Sox, to clinch their first trip to October since 2014. It was their 15th win in 18 games, capping a 31-11 run stretching to mid-August. We haven’t had a baseball story like this in a long time, maybe since the 2007 Rockies.

The Tigers have lit up this September with youth and defense and pitching. Six of their nine starters last night are no older than 24. They’ve allowed just 65 runs this month, fewer than any team other than the Padres. Once again, A.J. Hinch assembled 27 outs from a group of unheralded pitchers, not a single one making even $800,000 this year.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 27, 2024 -- "The Minnesota Tlosses"

 

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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No, this collapse is about the lineup. The Twins have more than enough good hitters, but they don’t stay on the field. This year, key absences and injury-related slumps happened at the same time that many of the support players hit a wall. Parallel to that, two rotation spots went kablooey (as did, occasionally, Lopez and Ober), increasing the need for runs at the exact time the hitters stopped providing them.

Newsletter Excerpt, September 26, 2024 -- "The Coliseum"

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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Like many of you, I have wonderful memories of watching baseball at the Coliseum. I didn’t go often, but my days and nights there produced some of my favorite ballpark stories. In 1992, I road-tripped up from USC with some other members of the street-hockey crowd for a day game pre-Mt. Davis. It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and we sat out in left field and watched the A’s ruin Mike Fetters’s Strat card and eliminate the Brewers from AL East contention. I watched a couple of Hall of Famers hit homers, saw Rickey and Hendu patrol the outfield, caught some of Paul Molitor’s last moments as a Brewer. The Coliseum was just the fifth park I’d ever been to, and it felt like an adventure.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 25, 2024 -- "Today's Key Games"

 

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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6:40 ET: Rays (Littell) at Tigers (Montero)

Tarik Skubal pretty much ended the AL Cy Young conversation with seven shutout innings yesterday in the biggest game of his life. The Tigers, 28-11 since August 11, are now a favorite to grab an AL wild-card berth. They’re tied with the Royals for the second slot, two up on the Twins and 2 1/2 up on the Mariners. Detroit loses tiebreakers to the first two of those, though, so they’re not locked in yet. Their trump card is three games this weekend against the White Sox. They might not allow ten runs the rest of the season.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, September 24, 2024 -- "Shotember"

 

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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In six seasons with the Angels, Ohtani had two (2) plate appearances in the second half that rank among his top 200 by cLI, both last season, one on July 16, one on August 4. His most important September PA, by this measure, comes out at .63 on a scale where 1 is average. It was also in 2020, which doesn’t count. Outside of 2020 and its 60-game season, Shohei Ohtani had never had a single September plate appearance with a cLI above zero. This September, all but three of his PAs have had some positive cLI, and 21 have been high-leverage by this measure.

Newsletter Excerpt, September 23, 2024 -- "120 and Counting"

 

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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Sometime this week, the 2024 version of the White Sox will lose their 121st game, a figure no team has reached since the turn of the twentieth century. The 1962 Mets, the only team since 1899 to lose 120 games, will be surpassed not by an expansion team like they were, but a team that was popping champagne just three seasons prior. It’s a collapse with few parallels in baseball history, and none where owner intent -- the 1910s A’s, the 2000s Marlins -- wasn’t part of the equation.