Monday, November 18, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, November 18, 2024 -- "AL Central Notes"

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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Detroit Tigers

So...what now?

The theme today, and with 20-odd MLB teams, is “payrolls nowhere near the tax threshold.” The Tigers were 28th in payroll last year, just over $100 million after benefits, and are under $100 million heading into the winter. Their late-season run bumped their attendance 15% year-over-year and got them a couple of home playoff games, and they should be able to break two million tickets sold next year for the first time since 2017. They are staying with Diamond Sports Group at a negotiated lower rate, so they avoided their local TV money dropping to near zero.

The penalties for investing in your product, the ones that restrict the movements of teams like the Cubs and Red Sox, or cost the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees big money, are intended in part to spread talent around. Signing Juan Soto to a $50 million salary will cost the Yankees $100 million a year, at least for the next few years. The Tigers don’t have that problem. The economic idea is that teams faced with paying these penalties won’t be able to justify the investment -- no player is worth $100 million a year -- and will pass on signing the player, allowing teams below the threshold to be more competitive for stars. We’ve seen some teams be cowed by that, but a handful at the top have not.

The Tigers do not have these problems, with a payroll three or four superstars shy of the penalty thresholds. Moreover, because they have so much room to grow their attendance, they can gain directly by spending money in free agency. The Padres and Phillies provide great recent examples of how teams can make money just by the act of signing free agents. The Padres sold 10% more tickets after signing Manny Machado in 2019, and their attendance has jumped 57% over six years. After the Phillies signed Bryce Harper, their attendance jumped 27% in 2019 and, like the Padres, 57% over six years.

Teams used to understand that some of the value in signing free agents was in the act itself, of getting your fans excited in the offseason, excited enough to buy tickets. During the RSN era, though, so much of a team’s money was guaranteed that many teams neglected to bother with generating excitement. That’s obviously changing, and if attendance becomes a bigger part of a team’s business model, the payoff for being active in the offseason increases.

The Tigers have a low payroll, a young team, and a city excited about its ballclub again. This is exactly the moment to spend money. They made the playoffs with a .300 OBP, and should just target anyone who can bump that up. Alex Bregman is a fit. Tyler O’Neill is a fit. If they want to move on from Spencer Torkelson, Carlos Santana is a fit. Yes, Soto is a fit. (Juan Soto fits 30 MLB teams and probably a handful of NFL and NBA ones.) A.J. Hinch’s “bullpen chaos” was, like Stephen Vogt’s, an adaptation to the talent on hand, and the Tigers have more pitching than the Guards do. Still, the Tigers can absolutely afford to play at the top of the market to bring in Burnes or Fried, to give Skubal a teammate on his level.

The 2024 Tigers were a great story. Now we see if Chris Ilitch is willing to make them a great team.

 
 
 

 

Friday, November 15, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, November 15, 2024 -- "AL East Notes"

 

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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Toronto Blue Jays

The Blue Jays have made the playoffs in three of the last five seasons, and in that time have the tenth-best record in baseball. 

The Blue Jays have not won a playoff game in eight years. 

You can frame the Blue Jays, coming off a last-place finish with the worst bullpen in baseball, any way you like. What you can’t do is deny that the 2025 season feels like end of a cycle for them, one way or another. Those playoff runs, one in the pandemic season, all produced quick first-round exits. A failed attempt to sign Shohei Ohtani last winter left a pall over the offseason, one that wasn’t lifted when the Jays then declined to sign anyone else of note. (Justin Turner produced 0.4 bWAR and was traded at the deadline.) The core of homegrown players took big steps backward, with only Vladimir Guerrero Jr. meeting expectations. The Jays ended up with middling starting pitching, middling offense, and a bullpen collapse that turned them into deadline sellers.

This has become an old team, whose pitchers had the fifth-highest weighted age last year, the hitters the 12th-highest. Guerrero is a free agent at the end of ’25, as are Bo Bichette and Chris Bassitt. Kevin Gausman, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, and Alejandro Kirk are free agents after 2026. Kiley McDaniel pegged the Jays as a bottom-ten farm system in midsummer, so if the Jays can’t win now, it may be a while before they can win again. It’s really now or never.

If you want optimism, take it from a few things. One, the Jays’ third-order record was 78-84, not terrible. Two, a bullpen is the easiest thing to fix on the fly. The team’s top three relievers by talent, Jordan Romano, Chad Green, and Erik Swanson, were never fully healthy last year. They combined for just 105 innings of a 4.37 ERA and a FIP well over 5.00. I would not be surprised to see the Jays get 175 innings of 3.50 ball from that group next year. The A’s, just to pick the most recent example, had the worst bullpen in baseball in ’23, and the ninth-best in ’24. 

The focus has to be on the offense, which lost six points of wRC+ from 2023. Brandon Belt’s 138 wRC+ was simply never replaced, nor was Matt Chapman’s 110 mark. Bo Bichette went from being a superstar to a replacement-level player. The Jays hit 156 home runs, their fewest since 2008, and slugged .389, their lowest mark since 1997. You can’t just blame changes to Rogers Centre, either; the Jays hit their fewest number of road homers since 2008 and had their lowest road slugging since 2005. They just didn’t hit.

The Jays’ projected 2025 lineup features a lot of wishcasting for guys like Spencer Horwitz, Will Wagner, and Nathan Lukes. All three had good numbers in ’25, but all three are older prospects without substantial pedigrees. Building a lineup that’s one-third wishcasts is two-thirds crazy. The Jays are probably headed into a rebuild, anyway, and with the power of Rogers Communications behind them have plenty of access to cash. Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins might be well-served to upend the market by dangling short-term, high-AAV contracts for Alex Bregman, Max Fried, Tyler O’Neill, and Gleyber Torres to make the 2025-26 teams the best they can be, try to put one or two more playoff teams on the field, and perhaps even make the team one Guerrero will commit to past 2025.


 

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, November 12, 2024 -- "The End of the RSN Era"

 

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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My concerns, then, are not about the short term. Everyone is going to find some kind of TV home. It will be better for some fans, especially the ones who have complained for years about what have been deemed “blackouts.” (They’re not, any more than KFC blacks you out of buying a Big Mac.)  It could, and we’ll get to this later this winter, start to reconnect on-field success with profitability. MLB may be able to cobble enough streaming rights together to at least experiment with a full in-market product. It is going to have opportunities to do live tests of pricing and packaging and marketing.

In the long term, though, I’m not sure this is sustainable. That Yankee deal with MSG 35 years ago kicked off three decades of complaining, and even the massive amount of revenue sharing that occurs today has not quieted that. In 2022, the top five teams by TV revenue earned about four times what the bottom five did. In 2025, the top five is going to out-earn the bottom five by a factor of 20. There is no path by which streaming revenue returns a fraction of RSN revenue in the short or medium term, so this problem is going to be persistent and will probably grow. Manfred wants to put MLB on a path to one-stop streaming, all 30 teams with no local blackouts, and he can’t get there when the local TV rights of a third of MLB teams are worth more than $100 million a year, while a third are worth almost nothing. 
 
 

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, October 31, 2024 -- "Game Five"

 

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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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Game Five
Vol. 16, No. 110
October 31, 2024

It’s important not to overreact. The Yankees went 94-68 this season. They ran through the AL side of the bracket with a 7-2 mark. This was a very good baseball team, with an excellent offense and yet another strong bullpen built from spare parts. It had the league MVP and another player who would have been a strong candidate most years. The team’s shortstop is one of the best defensive players in baseball. None of that gets erased in a week, a game, or a half-inning.

Damned if they didn’t try, though. The Yankees’ sloppiness on defense and the bases has been a constant topic this fall, and it finally ended their season. Up 5-0 in Game Five, ace on the mound, they seemed halfway to the greatest comeback in baseball history. 

Then Aaron Judge dropped the ball. 

It’s tempting to stop here and talk about Judge being 6'7", 280, and 32 years old, perhaps unsuited to keep patrolling center field. This play, though, wasn’t about any of that. This play was the kind of mistake ballplayers of all shapes, sizes, and ages have been making for more than a century: He took his eye off the ball. A quick glance to see if he might have a play on Enrique Hernandez was all it took. The ball glanced off Judge’s glove, and an epic collapse had begun.

Five pitches later, Will Smith pulled a ground ball to the left of Anthony Volpe. It wasn’t hit hard enough for a double play, and Volpe likely had a routine play on Smith at first base. Instead, Volpe tried to get the lead man at third base, made a terrible throw, and everyone was safe. The decision to go to third was defensible, a play you’ll see shortstops make when the ball takes them that way in a first-and-second spot. Volpe’s rushed throw was hideous, nowhere near the bag.

Gerrit Cole had gotten two outs with no runs on the board. I could argue that what he did next was his best moment as a Yankee. He struck out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani on eight pitches total, a resounding response to what had happened behind him. Now he had two outs, a five-run lead, a shutout in the World Series. I could argue that what he did next was his worst moment as a Yankee.

Cole shares the blame for Mookie Betts’s RBI single. Most of the time when a pitcher fails to cover first, it’s because of a brain lock. He doesn’t react to the play, gets a late jump, and never arrives there. Cole doesn’t do that last night. He barely finishes his windup before running off the mound. Four steps later, though, he just...trails off, clearly thinking he doesn’t need to cover, that Rizzo has this in the bag. It wasn’t an unreasonable thought. When the ball enters Rizzo’s glove, he is much closer to the base than Betts is. The ball, though, had a lot of spin, and Rizzo was on his heels and moving slightly away from the bag as he played it. Rizzo clearly expected to toss the ball to Cole. Mookie Betts just ran. 

Cole had no business peeling off. The worst-case scenario if you cover the bag is Rizzo doesn’t throw you the ball, taps the bag, and you’ve run 45 feet for nothing. Rizzo, though, should have been able to beat Betts to the base anyway. Both players were wrong, and it was 5-1.

You can argue that Cole had gotten five outs to this point, a flyball, two grounders, and two strikeouts. He should not have still been on the mound. He was, though, the game back on his shoulders, and he dropped it. He got ahead 1-2 on Freddie Freeman, then became the latest Yankee pitcher to try and beat Freeman on the inner half and allowed a two-run single. He got ahead 1-2 on Teoscar Hernandez and left a slider over the plate. The collapse was complete, and Game Five was tied, 5-5.

It took four big mistakes for the Dodgers to get anywhere near this game. Judge dropped a ball. Volpe bounced a throw. Cole didn’t cover. Rizzo didn’t get to the bag. The Yankees, who had spread out their mistakes just well enough over the first 13 playoff games, clustered them here in a way that cost them the Series.

The game wasn’t over, of course, and the Yankees would even take a 6-5 lead in the sixth. It was their turn for RISP follies, though; they went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position on the night, and 0-for-5 after the Dodgers tied the game. They had the bases loaded in the fifth and didn’t score; first and second with one out in the sixth and got one run on a sac fly; first and second with one out in the eighth and didn’t score. Tommy Kahnle gave up two hits and a walk on eight pitches, and Luke Weaver, working a third straight day, couldn’t miss bats to get out of the inning. A pair of sac flies gave the Dodgers the 7-6 lead with which they’d finish the World Series.

For the night, the Yankees made three errors, including a catcher’s interference by Austin Wells. They had the one critical play not made by Cole and Rizzo. They went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position. They had a balk, a disengagement violation, and issued seven walks. Saying one team lost the game always seems like an insult to the team that won it, but you can’t really conclude anything but that the Yankees lost this one. Their sloppiness finally caught up to them.

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Freddie Freeman, despite ending the season in a brutal 1-for-7 slump, was given the World Series MVP anyway. That “1” was a two-strike, two-out, two-run single during that five-run fifth inning. Freeman’s Game One grand slam is the defining image from this Series, and his homers in the first four games the defining statistic. During the season, Freeman just about moved over the line for the Hall of Fame, and he sealed his case this week. He’s 34, with 60 WAR, an MVP, six other top-ten finishes, a host of secondary hardware including a World Series MVP, and two rings. He’s in.

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I don’t write about “ball go far, team go far” as much as I used to. Sarah Langs tracks the numbers now, so I don’t have to. It’s no longer really a part of the baseball culture war.

I coined the phrase about a decade ago as a counter to the then-dominant idea that smallball wins in the playoffs. The data made clear, in fact, that it was short-sequence offense -- home runs -- that led to success in October’s lower run environment. It was harder to string together run elements as OBP fell and strikeouts rose, so the path to runs was to score as many as possible on as few swings as possible. While there are still holdouts, by and large, this is now the accepted wisdom.

Even without a dinger yesterday, the Dodgers just won the World Series by scoring 13 of their 24 runs on homers. Across their 16-game run to the championship, they hit 27 homers, scoring 48 of their 95 runs on big flies.

As we saw last night, at the game level, at the inning level, at the play level, the little things can mean a lot. The Dodgers are champs today in large part because the Yankee bollixed a whole bunch of balls in play. In the big picture, though, you can’t count on that for 11 wins the way you can count on power. 

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One small thing that happened quickly was Tommy Edman batting right-handed against the right-handed Tommy Kahnle in the eighth inning. Earlier this October I wrote about platoon splits and how they emerge from pitchers’ arm angles and repertoires. Kahnle spent the month spamming his changeup, and changeups are generally more effective against opposite-handed hitters. Throwing changes to same-side hitters is considered risky. Right-on-right changeups are thrown a third of the time as right-on-left ones, and they result in a slugging percentage 20 points higher.

Edman, a better hitter from the right side, was able to go to the plate with confidence he’d be seeing changeups. He pulled the first one he saw just past a drawn-in Chisholm for an infield single and later scored the Series-winning run.

Kahnle’s decision to throw changeups almost exclusively caught up to him last night. Edman, and Enrique Hernandez before him, were both able to sit changeup for singles. It’s a very effective pitch, for sure, but unless you’re Mariano Rivera, you need a second offering. Twenty-five of the 27 pitches Kahnle threw in the Series were changeups, and the last eight set up the Dodgers’ game-winning rally.

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Back tomorrow with the annual Coda, and to set up the offseason.

 
 
 

Newsletter Excerpt, October 31, 2024 -- "They've Been Here For Years"

 

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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The plans for Games Four and Five, though, were always interconnected, impossible to separate. Roberts didn’t want to lose Tuesday night, but he understood that he had four shots to win one game, and he managed accordingly. Last night, the six relief pitchers he declined to use in Game Four threw 6 2/3 innings of one-run baseball, holding down the Yankee offense long enough for the Yankee defense to help the Dodgers win the baseball game. Keeping his best six relievers fresh enabled him to hook an ineffective Jack Flaherty nine batters into the game and manage aggressively from that point forward. Game Four’s strategy won Game Five. 

Roberts now has two rings in nine seasons, to go with two other NL pennants and eight NL West titles. Teams managed by Dave Roberts have a .627 winning percentage in the regular season and .560 in the postseason. No manager of at least 1000 games has a better winning percentage than Roberts does. For all the criticism of the Dodgers’ postseason record, Roberts’s teams are 12-7 in playoff series of at least five games. It may be, when we look back, that it was Roberts, not Bruce Bochy, not even Dusty Baker, who was the signature manager of his time.
 
 
 

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, October 30, 2024 -- "One Down..."

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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Last night, Volpe pulled two fly balls at 95+, which is as many or more as he pulled in four of the six baseball months of the 2024 season. This was, finally, the hitter he can become. I know this: He’ll never get more positive reinforcement for hitting the ball hard and up than he did in the third inning last night, when he brought Yankee Stadium to full throat.