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. Joe Sheehan is a
founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.
Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.
--
"What we know without a doubt, though, is that the system is going to call the pitch based on where it is when it crosses the plate. It’s not going to be influenced by what the catcher does after the fact. For that reason alone, the system is better than human umpires out of the box. For many, the measurement of what we call 'pitch framing' quantified the importance of catchers. For me, it quantified the inability of human umpires to do their job. Those numbers, which have driven the careers of many people on and off the field, should not exist in a fair game. The batter doesn’t get the information of 'framing' to decide whether to swing or to take. Batters have been woefully underrepresented in this conversation."