Joe Sheehan Newsletter, January 16, 2026 -- "Kyle Tucker and the Dodgers"

 

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Of course, the baseball of it isn’t why people are talking about this contract today. The upgrade in left field, the fit in the lineup, even Tucker’s injury history and slow bat aren’t driving the conversation. No, it’s mostly about the Dodgers signing a player to a contract with the highest average annual value ever, after signing a reliever to the highest average annual value ever for a reliever, after signing a player to the highest total contract ever, after signing a pitcher to the biggest contract a pitcher ever got, after, after, after...

I don’t have anything for you that you haven’t already heard from me. I’m just never going to be mad about a team trying to win. MLB should be competitive, not collaborative. Teams should have to fight for the best players, not have the players fight among themselves for a limited pile of available money. Teams should value wins more than they do money, championships more than they do profits, while noting that the former will always drive the latter.

Do the Dodgers have an advantage? Yes. They have well-capitalized ownership and, playing in a big city, access to more fans and more television homes. They, like the teams in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Houston, have structural advantages. That should be the case. When teams in those places succeed, more people are happy and more money is made. Some advantage is reasonable. Milwaukee and Chicago are not equal. New York and Kansas City are not equal.

(Before you send me an email with the letters “NFL,” let me remind you that the NFL doesn’t have local markets. There’s no local TV and you need to sell about 600,000 tickets a year, which is less than the Rays and A’s sold in minor-league parks this year. The season is 1/9th as long. The business models are not comparable, and that’s before we get into the labor relations.)

MLB has put massive systems in place to account for those differences in potential revenue, while making sure the details are kept quiet and, frankly, welcoming the ignorance of fans about these systems. If net local revenue-sharing transfers were public knowledge the way the details of Kyle Tucker’s pay package are, we’d have much different conversations. We have estimates, coming up on a decade old, that the top teams put in maybe $80 million a year, the bottom teams collect about that much. Those extremes have surely grown due to the collapse of the RSN system. 

The Dodgers probably share about $100 million a year, every year, with other teams. The Dodgers paid $169 million in tax -- just tax -- on last year’s payroll. Eighty million of that goes into a slush fund that gets kicked back to teams that get revenue sharing. So the Dodgers paid $180 million last year to the teams they’re trying to beat. It was about $140-150 million in 2024. How much is enough? The Yankees, the Mets, the Cubs are all sending around $100 million or more a season to the Pirates, the Marlins, the Royals, the Reds, the Brewers, but we don’t have the hard numbers. That’s to MLB’s advantage.

If we had hard information on this, if we could see that since 2016, the Pirates have collected more just in local revenue sharing and luxury-tax kickbacks than they have spent on players, it would change the conversation. If we could see that the Dodgers have shared a billion dollars in revenue since 2018, it would change the conversation. MLB guards that information jealously because it knows that making it publicly available would shift the focus from the teams that spend to the teams that don’t. They benefit from fan and media ignorance when it comes time to press for favorable terms in the next CBA.

As I wrote a few years back, there’s also hidden revenue sharing. Those teams with the biggest fan bases, the ones on TV for much of October, get the same 1/30th slice of the national-TV money that the teams who never appear in those games do. Who is driving the $900 million a year in those deals? Who collects $30 million a year just for existing?

So no, the Dodgers aren’t a problem. The Dodgers are doing what 30 teams should be doing, trying to win. They’re doing it while sending $180 million to teams that, in many cases, aren’t. Don’t let MLB’s success at keeping the latter part a secret fool you.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 15, 2026 -- "Potpourri"

 

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The only thing I can figure is that the Tigers forgot about the clause in arbitration that lets players with at least five years of service time compare themselves to free agents. So Skubal’s team can comp him to pitchers like Zack Wheeler ($42 million a year), Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($27 million a year) and Max Fried ($27 million a year), who have combined for no Cy Young Awards. 

The other possibility is the Tigers tanked the process. I truly don’t know how you can walk into a room and tell a panel that Tarik Skubal, short of free agency by about ten weeks, winner of the last two AL Cy Young Awards, should get a little more than Jameson Taillon, or a little less than Luis Severino. My guess is it never gets to that, but this is the first hearing in a while that I’d pay to watch. “On three occasions, the player in question left a wet towel on the floor rather than toss it in the laundry cart. Moreover, he forgot to leave a tip on one of those awful touchscreens twice. Finally, he was tied for last in the majors in RBI. In conclusion, arbitration is a land of contrasts.”

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 13, 2026 -- "Sam Kennedy and the Red Sox"

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The Red Sox seem pretty happy to have neither Devers nor Bregman. Speaking at Fenway Fest over the weekend, team president Sam Kennedy defended the team’s offseason. “If you go back a year ago [to] this date last year, I believe our organization has taken on close to $500 million in contractual commitments. ... We’ve added $40 million in payroll through trades.”

I hate when executives talk about spending on players this way. First, those commitments are spread out over a long period of time, you didn’t just write a $500 million check. Second, locking up Kristian Campbell or Roman Anthony for the bulk of their productive careers at laughably below-market prices isn’t some burden to be carried. Finally, paying good baseball players isn’t a cost, it’s an investment in winning. Given that Kennedy backed the incredibly anti-player idea of a free-agent signing deadline in the same interview, it seems the Red Sox are just the latest baseball team to become more concerned with keeping money and players apart, 1965-style, than with winning a World Series.

 

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, January 12, 2026 -- "From the Archives: The MLB Cup"

 

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Last week, in a live interview on New York’s WFAN, Rob Manfred said he was considering a number of ideas to change the MLB schedule, from a shorter season to split seasons to aggressive realignment. Manfred, who has overseen many changes to gameplay in his time as commissioner, seems to want to put some final stamps on the league before he leaves office in 2029. Manfred has a long history of floating trial balloons in the media, some of which, like the shift ban, eventually came into being, and others, like the Golden At-Bat, that got laughed out of the room. Take anything he says along these lines with a salt lick.

Within the interview, Manfred mentioned an in-season tournament, akin to the NBA Cup, which has livened up the early days of the last few NBA seasons. Before Manfred ever took over as commissioner, before the NBA abused the eyes of fans with its tournament courts, I proposed such a tournament for our game. 

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter

Vol. V, No. 24

March 21, 2013

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've filled out a bracket this week. In a nation splintered by choices and long tails and personal everything, the NCAA men's basketball tournament is one of the few shared experiences, one that crosses over from college basketball and sports to mainstream culture and even a bit beyond it. The satisfaction of ticking off teams in a bracket -- online, it feels like a video game -- and ending up with just one from 64 crosses all our lines: gender, race, age, social status. It unites ballers and nerds, statheads and scouts, your mom and your dad. 

(If you care: Duke, Michigan, Gonzaga, Indiana; Duke 79-72 in the final.)

Brackets, not basketball, drive much of the popularity of the NCAA tournament. Baseball got its own taste of this in the just-completed World Baseball Classic, which used short round-robins to narrow the field to four teams, who played single-game semi-final and final rounds in San Francisco. Baseball's Final Four. In the tradition of the Final Four, we had a Cinderella (The Netherlands) for flavor but in the end, it was a high seed -- the Dominican Republic -- that restored order and took home the title. The WBC's bracket rounds were too short and too March to garner much interest, but the interest shown in them, as well as the games leading up to them, show that the combination of March Madness formatting with the national pastime has potential. Brackets get people who don't care about sports to care about college basketball. Why not use that appeal to get those same people to care about MLB?

I've mentioned that I'm learning more about soccer, particularly the Premier League in England and European soccer more generally. It can be a bit confusing because teams can be playing in four competitions at once -- a home league, a Europe-wide league, and knockout competitions in their home country. It's the last of those that we need to steal. In England, they play a tournament, the FA Cup, that includes more than 700 soccer teams and plays down to one, with teams at the local semi-pro level eventually earning chances to play the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United. Sometimes, they even get to host those teams. Picture the Yankees going to Brooklyn to take on the Cyclones for a spot in the national quarterfinals, and you'll have maybe 10% of the idea. A smaller event places the top four levels of soccer into a national tournament, the League Cup.

Let's steal the idea. Let's set up the MLB Cup, a 30-team, single-game playoff that runs parallel to the MLB season and awards a crown to the team that survives. (Will Carroll of Bleacher Report first proposed the idea earlier this month.) It gives MLB a bracket event that would appeal to casual fans. It would give teams writing off a season an opportunity to compete in a playoff-type atmosphere and those teams' fans something to look forward to other than 100 losses and Dollar Dog Night. It can serve as a stronger midseason attention grab than the All-Star Game, which has been diminished to nothing by changes in both MLB and how fans experience baseball.

MLB has 30 teams, so you take two of them, give them byes to the second round and have 28 teams play 14 games in the first. The bye teams would be, in future MLB Cup tournaments, the finalists from the previous one. The bye teams for the initial one would likely be the previous year's World Series teams, although I'm open to assigning them by random draw. There should be as little connection between the championship season and the MLB Cup as possible. One is not a subset of the other, but a completely independent event.

The 14 matchups would be set by random draw, home team is the first one called. Forget market size, team quality, history…you can have the Nationals heading to Target Field to take on the Twins in this round. First-round games would be played on or around May 1. You would have to build this into the MLB schedule, of course. Teams would have roster flexibility for the game up to a point; you don't want this to be the Hall of Fame Game, contested mostly by minor leaguers, but some ability to swap in pitchers should be allowed. This parallels the soccer model, in which teams often use different rosters for Cup games versus league games. You might see teams like the Twins or the Astros or the Marlins actually focus on the Cup, altering their rotations and making sure they have a full squad rested and ready for the game, knowing it's their best chance at a championship in a rebuilding year.

The 14 winners and the two bye teams would play out the rest of the event during what used to be the All-Star break -- the All-Star Game would be retired. Now, while FA Cup events use random draws on through the structure, the MLB Cup would deviate from this, to allow for…wait for it…brackets! The initial draw would become a bracket and the rest of the tournament played out accordingly, allowing people to pore over the Braves/Angels game and try to figure out whether either team could beat the Blue Jays in the second round.

On the Monday of the break -- during the second week of July -- eight games are played at the fields of the designated home teams. All home teams in the first two rounds are decided by random draw. Ideally, these games would be staggered throughout the day, like the NCAAs or the Division Series. It's July -- MLB will have the stage to itself! A full day of elimination games, broadcast live across MLB's various TV platforms? Perhaps it wouldn't rise to the level of, well, today, but it would be a sight to see.

Tuesday is a travel day, ideally used for whatever All-Star break events survive this process -- preferably the Futures Game and only the Futures Game. On Wednesday, the eight remaining teams advance to a single location for the quarterfinals. Two are played Wednesday, two Thursday. The semis are on Friday and the final on Saturday, preferably during the day, a nod to the game's history. 

The event carves out three additional days in summer, which is likely to be the greatest challenge. Teams won't want to give up the 45 July weekend home dates, especially for an event of unproven popularity. (Moving the WBC to the summer, a screamingly obvious move, is also hindered by this.) I recognize the challenge, but I check back to the point I made earlier this year: At some point, MLB and team owners need to assume some of the investment in these extra-seasonal events. Right now, it's falling on the players and the front offices. If players are expected to sacrifice training time and risk injury for the development of the game, teams should be expected to sacrifice money and risk slightly lowered profits for the same.

The MLB Cup would start slow. New things always do, this one especially given its distinctly European flavor. Then there would be some Bird/Magic moment, when big things happened and the world was watching, and it would jump a level. The event would develop a history and heroes and mythology, its own Jim Valvano, its own Keith Smart, its own Danny and the Miracles. Over time, the MLB Cup would grow to combine the national pastime of baseball and the national passion for brackets in a way that makes it a signature event of the American summer.

Newsletter Excerpt, January 11, 2026 -- "Cubs Sign Alex Bregman"

 

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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I look to Cubs history for the best comparison. In the winter of 2014-15, Theo Epstein went into the market for a highly-rated 31-year-old free agent and paid him $155 million. From December 13, 2014:

The Lester signing is the first step in the next phase, shaping the talent into the form of a championship team. The core of young position players allows the Cubs to pay, even overpay, for starting pitching, something they don't have much of in their system. Lester may not be a #1, but he's a solid #2 with a track record of providing innings and whose skills have not deteriorated as he's reached 30. There's some risk here, but signing Lester -- signing a high-priced starting pitcher -- was the next phase of the plan.

The Jon Lester signing is the Alex Bregman signing, the use of money to back up a strong player-development run. The former led to a November dogpile in Cleveland, and the latter may produce a similar outcome.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 9, 2026 -- "Owen Caissie and the Marlins"

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 Marlins have been trying to build a winner around young pitchers for quite some time. Those efforts produced one of the worst playoff teams in baseball history, a 2023 squad outscored by 57 runs that stayed in the postseason for about 28 hours. Cabrera has been hurt, Max Meyer got hurt, Braxton Garrett got hurt, Eury Perez got hurt, I think Crockett and Tubbs ended up on the IL at one point. Gloria Estefan may have had Tommy John surgery somewhere in there. It’s been a mess, the team unable to keep a rotation together or assemble an offense to support the pitchers who did stay upright.

So I like the shape of this deal for the Marlins, turning a pitcher who finally had a full-ish, healthy-ish season into an outfielder who could become a lineup anchor. We’ve been talking about Owen Caissie for a long time. The Cubs traded for him as part of the Yu Darvish package more than five years ago. when Caissie was a 17-year-old second-round pick out of Canada. He advanced at a level a year -- exactly a level a year, unusual in modern player development -- and got stuck at Triple-A in 2025 when the Cubs had no room at the inn. Even hitting .286/.386/.551 in his second turn at Iowa got Caissie just a quick cup of coffee in the majors and no more.