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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"Thinking Inside the Box" is an occasional Newsletter feature that pulls topics from a reading of the box scores. The lines in fixed-width are the player's box score line for his game.
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Editor Scott is on vacation, so for the next couple of weeks I’ll ask you to follow the advice in the Little River Band’s best song.
Marlins 4. Rangers 2
AB R H BI
Lopez 2B 3 2 2 1 HR
I definitely wasn’t on Otto Lopez coming into this year. The most notable thing about him, to me, was that the Marlins had used him to get Xavier Edwards off shortstop in the middle of last season, flipping the two in the middle infield. Lopez isn’t a shortstop any more than Edwards is, but the alignment worked better as Edwards took well to second base. (This year, the two are around average at their new positions.)
Lopez came into this season off two years of a .257/.308/.372 (89 OPS+) line, with his best feature being a 15% strikeout rate. His batted-ball data indicated there was a bit more in there, with his expected wOBA running 26 points ahead of actual, and his expected slugging nearly 50 points ahead.
So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see a 27-year-old with that kind of profile take a big step forward. After yesterday’s strong day in a win, Lopez is hitting .340/.374/.483, leading the NL in batting average and base hits. Lopez is getting some of the good fortune denied him the last two seasons, with a .380 BABIP that’s fifth in MLB, helping him out-hit his expected average by 55 points, and run more than 30 points ahead of his expected wOBA. If you look at that last figure, you see that Lopez hasn’t broken out so much as improved just a bit each year.
You Otto Know (selected stats, 2024-26)
wOBA xwOBA
2026 .372 .339
2025 .295 .330
2024 .302 .317
(wOBA is a measure of batting output that maps roughly to the scale of OBP. xwOBA is that same figure as calculated using Statcast’s batted-ball metrics, and gets us a bit closer to a player’s true performance.)
Regardless of how he’s getting there, Lopez has been one of the best players in the NL, a key part of the best Marlins’ offense since 2017, when Giancarlo Stanton was still here. The Marlins are 42-39, with a 44-37 third-order record. They’re seven games back of a stumbling Braves squad in the NL East, just 1 1/2 games out of the last NL wild-card berth. (Nine teams are separated by four games for three spots, it’s a mess.) They also have some fairly clear holes they can try to fill in center field and at third base. The Marlins will be a fun watch for the rest of the year.
Cubs 10, Mets 3 (G1)
AB R H BI
Swanson SS 4 2 2 7 2 HR
Cubs 10, Mets 5 (G2)
AB R H BI
Swanson SS 5 1 3 4 3B
They are absolutely going to have to drag Dansby Swanson kicking and screaming out of New York. While he did have a three-game hitting streak when the Cubs landed in the city Sunday night, that came with just a .183/.292/.325 line and serious concerns that, at 32, he was another early-thirties hitter aging out of the league.
In three games at Citi Field, all Cubs wins, Swanson is 7-for-12 with a double, a triple, and three home runs. He’s added 70 points to his OPS in three days, which isn’t something you’re supposed to be able to do this deep into the season. With his average-plus defense at shortstop, Swanson is now on pace for another four-win campaign.
Swanson has been remarkably consistent since signing with the Cubs in 2023, posting between a 96 and 104 OPS+ in every year, playing at least 147 games in every season, hitting 16 to 24 homers a year, accumulating 4.0 to 5.2 bWAR a year. He won’t hit like Babe Ruth’s big brother for much longer, but a league-average bat and 1300 good defensive innings at shortstop makes for a valuable player.
I’m just not sure he can be even that, though. Swanson’s batted-ball quality, even after these last few days, is awful. He’s not hitting the ball as hard as he did at 30 and 31, and as bad as his .305 wOBA is, it’s running ahead of his expected .294 mark. The Cubs don’t have much choice but to play a healthy Swanson, and they do have the luxury of batting him ninth. I just think the collapse risk that seemed to be being realized a week ago is still very much in play.
The Cubs sit seven games behind the Brewers in the NL Central, unable to gain ground as the Brew Crew kept squeaking by the anemic Reds. They hold the last wild-card spot in the NL, part of that scrum I mentioned above, but the news just keeps getting worse. Just in the last few days. Edward Cabrera and Ben Brown hit the IL, and the team announced that Justin Steele would not be re-joining the rotation in 2026. Cabrera and Brown join Jameson Taillon and Matthew Boyd and Cade Horton on the IL; of the team’s projected rotation, only Shota Imanaga is currently healthy.
The Cubs traded for the Mets’ David Peterson early today just to get through the coming weekend, and it’s hard to see how they get through the next three months with a starting rotation that already didn’t have much upside, and now has no depth.
Guardians 4, White Sox 3
IP H R ER BB K
C. Smith (BS, 3) 0.2 3 2 2 1 1 2 HR
Cade Smith blew the save yesterday on the heels of blowing a ninth-inning lead Monday. The Guardians did rally to win this one, but it was an indication of how fragile all this is for the Guardians. Across the last few years under Stephen Vogt, their plan was to score just enough and get just enough from their starters to turn the game over to a lockdown pen. The locks are getting picked.
Lead Guardians No More (Guardians bullpen, 2024-26)
ERA Rk FIP Rk fWAR Rk
2026 3.88 14 3.82 11 2.6 11
2025 3.44 3 3.49 1 6.6 3
2024 2.57 1 3.30 1 7.8 1
Guardians relievers ate 12 losses, total, in 2024. They have racked up 14 already this year. The Guardians’ model for winning games with a bad offense required their bullpen to be perfect. That’s how they got into the 2024 and 2025 postseasons, and the lack of that elite pen may keep them out this time around.
Then again, maybe not. Heading into today, the American League is 44 games under .500 and being outscored in interleague play by a half a run a game. Just five AL teams are above .500 and just three have outscored their opponents. It’s possible, with the right mix of results, that at some point soon only the Yankees, among 15 AL teams, will have a positive run differential. In the Central, the Guardians are tied with the White Sox in first, 4 1/2 games ahead of the Twins (who have their own issues) and 7 1/2 ahead of the Tigers. The Guardians, in fact, are within percentage points of holding a first-round bye. There’s never been a better time to be a mediocre AL baseball team.
Remember: MLB wants to expand the playoffs.
Yankees 4, Tigers 2
IP H R ER BB K
Skubal (L, 3-4) 6.0 4 4 4 0 9 3 HR
There’s a mixed bag here. In three starts since making a shockingly quick comeback from elbow surgery, Tarik Skubal has a 4.96 ERA and a 5.86 FIP. He’s allowed six homers on 16 hard-hit balls in those three starts, and is now posting his highest hard-hit rate since 2021, long before he became a Cy Young winner.
Parallel to that, though. Skubal has a 21/2 K/BB in 16 1/3 innings, and has steadily become more dominant. Last night, he posted 21 whiffs on 52 swings which, not to get too nerdy, statheads call “really freaking great.” His changeup, the pitch that got him the 2025 Cy Young Award, generated a 50% whiff rate. The ERA and FIP, I think, are hiding information; Skubal’s HR/FB rate in his three starts is 37.5%, which is the kind of number you might see in the Home Run Derby. Skubal is more or less back to being Tarik Skubal, just getting unlucky.
The catch is that the Tigers, who don’t have much margin for error, are 1-2 in Skubal’s last three starts. They’re right on the line as far as viability, 7 1/2 back in the Central, five back in the wild-card race behind a whole bunch of teams. I don’t think Scott Harris wants to trade Skubal, not least because the returns for even the very best trade-deadline rentals are meager. The Tigers are 12 games under .500, but their third-order mark would have them leading the division. It is simply too soon to say with any confidence with which team Skubal will finish the season.
Brewers 6, Reds 5
AB R H BI
McLain 2B 2 0 0 0
Back on April 28, I included the Reds in a “Fraud Watch” piece. They were 18-10 when it was sent, and they are 19-32 since. (The other team in the piece, the Padres, are 19-9/22-28 in the same period. Trust the numbers.)
After being swept by the Brewers in a series in which they scored five runs while playing actual baseball and fell to 37-42, it may be time for the Reds to take a long hard look at themselves. They’re 29th in wRC+ this year, after ranking 24th and 26th the last two years. Matt McLain’s short, quiet night is just the example I picked to illustrate the problem, which is that the Reds squandered a promising class of hitters that came up in 2023. McLain, who lost 2024 to a shoulder injury, has hit .213/.301/.345 since then. Let’s just run a chart.
Bleeding Reds (2023 OPS+, with age that year, and everything after)
2023 24-26
Age OPS+ OPS+
Will Benson 25 128 81
Matt McLain 23 127 76
Noelvi Marte 21 118 79
Spencer Steer 25 117 97
TJ Freidl 27 117 90
C. E’cion-Strand 23 112 52
Elly De La Cruz 21 87 117
The one hitter who hasn’t gone backwards is the true superstar, Elly De La Cruz. Everyone else has regressed, with Christian Encarnacion-Strand not even having played in the majors this year, TJ Friedl and Noelvi Marte both having spent time with the Reds’ Triple-A affiliate this spring, and Will Benson headed down there this week. It’s a near-total loss of a generation of hitters, and it makes you wonder what the future holds for Sal Stewart, running a 115 OPS+ as a 22-year-old rookie. Will the Reds break him, too?
Hunter Greene will be back soon, and that provides some hope, but unless he’s going to be a two-way player again, he just makes the team even more imbalanced. The Reds are in last place in the Central and about as close to a playoff spot as they are to the Rockies for the worst record in baseball. By third-order record, they’re the second-worst team in the game ahead of those Rockies. They’ve ejected from the race, and it may be time to eject the people, Nick Krall and Brad Meador, who led them to this place.
Padres 5, Braves 2
IP H R ER BB K
M. Perez (L, 6-2) 4.0 4 3 3 4 4 HR
Earlier this week, Lifetime subscribers got a bonus piece, and I’m just going to lift from it here.
The pitching is also a problem. Bryce Elder seems to be returning to earth, with 22 hits and 14 runs allowed over his last two starts. Spencer Strider is out until September, if he returns at all. Grant Holmes and Martin Perez are now running 1-2 ahead of Elder in the Getting Away With It Games. The Braves’ starting rotation is bottom ten in June.This is all to say that I see massive collapse risk here. The Braves have bounced back this year because their core hitters have, as a group, been a lot better, Austin Riley excepted. Looking forward, though, there are a lot of nights when this team will have a four-man lineup backing a starter you can’t count on for a quality start. The Phillies have climbed from 10 1/2 back to 6 1/2 back, and while the Braves have the best record in baseball, I don’t think that reflects the team on the field. The NL East is a race.
I wrote that Monday. Tuesday, I went on VSIN and gave out the Phillies to win the NL East at 4-1. The Braves’ lead, two days later and following a sweep at the hands of the Padres, is just 4 1/2 games.
A few weeks back I mentioned that the Mets were in almost the exact same spot as they’d been two years earlier, when they closed the year 60-36 and made the playoffs. The other side of that story is the Braves, who started that year 26-13 -- exactly the same as this year’s team -- before needing a win in Game 162 just to make the playoffs. That team was 44-35 through 79 games, this one is 48-31, but much of the same DNA is still in place -- a lack of depth foremost among them. I don’t think the Braves will hold on in the East, and I’m not at all sure they’ll even make the postseason.
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