Newsletter Excerpt, October 13, 2025 -- "Postseason 2025: Miller Time in Labatt’s Land"

 

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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Even in winning, Miller’s box score line wasn’t that impressive: three walks and three strikeouts in those six frames. Watching the game, though, you could see him executing a plan. Miller’s four-seam fastball has a lot of what your grandma would have called “rise,” followed by someone like me wagging their finger and saying “you can’t make a baseball rise, old lady.” What you can do, though, is make it drop less than a ball thrown overhand from a mound 60 feet away should. This illusion of rise is now called “induced vertical break.” A good IVB on a fastball is 17 inches. Miller’s last night averaged 18 inches and touched 20, which is elite. As was your grandma. 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 12, 2025 -- "Postseason 2025: ALCS Preview"

 

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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At the start of the playoffs, I had the Mariners winning the AL pennant. One of the hardest things about covering the postseason is not overweighting the thing you just saw. The Blue Jays erased a team that was of 100-win quality by underlying metrics, while the Mariners struggled to put away one that squeaked into the playoffs and was the worst of the eight left in the tournament. That’s additional information; it’s just important to remember all the information that was already there. I think the Mariners will be able to hold down the Jays with their right-handed pitching -- or maybe just the absence of lefties -- and revert to their in-season home-run rate against the Jays’ staff. At least one of these games will turn on the Jays’ pen, which is its weakest unit. Mariners in five. 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 11, 2025 -- "Postseason 2025: Here We Are Now, Entertain Us"

 

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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Some games are won. This one was lost.

The Tigers and Mariners both blew a lead. They each left a Homecoming Court on base. The Tigers went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position, the Mariners 2-for-11. The two teams combined to strike out 37 times against a meager 16 hits. I can frame that as a pitching accomplishment, but the 11 walks, four hit batsmen, and a throwing error weaken the argument. It was a fairly crisp pitchers’ duel for six innings, and a mess for the nine that followed. Four players went 0-for-6, four others went 0-for-5.  

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 10, 2025 -- "Postseason 2025: No Tomorrow"

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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Kerkering booted the ball, threw to the wrong base, then tried to hit Sandy Koufax on the fly. He did all this in the time it took you to read that sentence. 

 

Ballplayers make mistakes, even silly ones, even ones that cost ballgames, turn wins into losses. They play 162 games, though, so there’s always tomorrow. That’s the whole culture of baseball, go get ‘em tomorrow. We do this every day. For Kerkering, though, as it was for that sunburned teenager in the summer of ’84, there is no tomorrow. That was the final play of the season, his stacked errors finishing off the 2025 Phillies, maybe even finishing off this era of Phillies baseball. He doesn’t get to go get ‘em tomorrow. He doesn’t get to go get ‘em for six months.  

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 9, 2025 -- "Postseason 2025: Jay Day"

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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Leverage Index is a stat that measures the importance of a given situation to winning a game. It’s pretty intuitive; two on, two out, down one in the ninth is very important, while two outs in the bottom of the fifth of a 7-1 game isn’t. The average leverage of all PAs is 1, and the higher the number, the bigger the spot. Well, Yankees came to the plate last night seven times in spots with a Leverage Index of at least 1.5 -- 50% more important than usual. In all seven, the Blue Jays retired the batter. Twice, they got Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Austin Wells out with the game hanging in the balance. 

The Jays had every reason to believe they would put up runs, and to have real uncertainty about their pen. On a night that Cam Schlittler held them down into the seventh, though, it was the bullpen that won the game for them.  

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 8, 2025 -- "Momentum Isn't Real"

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. This is the best time to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it shines for 15 years!

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This won’t happen, but I would like yesterday’s game to serve as the final nail in the coffin in the concept of “momentum” in baseball. The Blue Jays won their final four games of the regular season, needing every one of them, to win the AL East. They won the first game of this series 10-1, the second 13-7. They led the third 6-1 in the third inning. If momentum in baseball actually existed, the Blue Jays would have gone on to another blowout win and be setting their ALCS rotation this morning.

The momentum didn’t “shift.” That’s not what momentum does. (Seriously, man, open the schools.) Momentum is a physical property related to mass and velocity that, in sports, has simply come to mean “the property possessed by a team that is currently doing well.” It’s word-shaped air, spouted in lieu of an original idea. Momentum, in sports, isn’t real, and if Yankees 9, Blue Jays 6 can’t convince you of that, nothing can help you.