Newsletter Excerpt, August 31, 2020 -- "Deadline 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. 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.

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"There is some other stuff at work, though. Playoff rosters are going to be 28 men deep, and teams have just 40 men to play with. I’ve noted in some recent seasons that teams would sometimes have unreasonable pitcher/hitter splits in part because they couldn’t find 13 or 14 MLB-caliber hitters on their 40-man roster."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 27, 2020 -- "AL 1, Chaos 0"

 

 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.

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"The expanded playoffs did not do the league any favors, not that the Covid Round was invented with the regular season in mind. Without the expansion, you would have a fantastic three team race in the AL Central, with good AL East and West races, and the very real possibility that those injury-plagued powers in Houston and the Bronx would miss the playoffs entirely."

 

Newsletter Excerpt, August 25, 2020 -- "The Angels"

 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.

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"My question is, where is this all going? The 2021 Angels look a lot like the 2020 Angels. Simmons can leave as a free agent, and Fletcher looks like a reasonable replacement for him. La Stella and Castro are also eligible to walk. The Angels will still owe Pujols and Upton $54 million between them, and are committed to $120 million to four guys before anyone else gets paid. Jo Adell will clearly be better than this, maybe Luis Rengifo takes the second-base job. I have no idea what Shohei Ohtani will be, but I would blindly bet 'injured' at this point and feel pretty good about my money. Their projected 2020 payroll was $184 million, and after a shortened season with no fans in the stands, that number isn’t going to rise."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 24, 2020 -- "Fun With Numbers: Calvinball!"

 

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.

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"Back-of-the-envelope math tells me that eventually around 20% of the 2020 baseball season will be played under Calvinball rules, maybe more. The Blue Jays have played 26 games, and nearly 40% of them have been non-standard. For the Phillies, it’s seven of 24; the Marlins, six of 22. The A’s are 5-0 in extra innings; the Jays are 3-5 -- eight ghost-runner-on-second games out of 26 total!  Just five National League teams are over .500 in games played under normal rules."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 20, 2020 -- "More Pitch, Less Payoff"

 

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.

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'Machado’s heroics notwithstanding, MLB hitters are hitting worse on 3-2 than in any season for which we have data, and the three worst seasons on record are the last three. Contrast that to the first years of the data set, when hitter performance in 3-2 counts was as good as it would ever be again. 1988, 1989, and 1990 rank 3-4-5 in tOPS+ by hitters in 3-2 counts for the 33 seasons under discussion."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 18, 2020 -- "Tarik Skubal 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. 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.

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"As I keep saying, this isn’t the season to call the sample-size police. The Tigers are a game out of a playoff berth with 40 games left, and that’s the time to make the team as good as you possibly can and hope to get a little lucky. Maybe Isaac Paredes -- called up with Skubal and Mize -- can provide a desperately needed OBP boost. Maybe the much-improved defense is for real, with Jones in center every day, Jonathan Schoop at second, and Nicholas Castellanos in Cincinnati. There are reasons to believe, and in 2020, isn’t that enough for a fan base?"

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, August 14, 2020 -- "The Brewers' Lost Moment"

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.

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"Ten months past that moment, the Brewers are 7-10, and they look every bit of it. The MVP is still around, if starting slowly. The star center fielder, the defensive anchor, has opted not to play through the pandemic any more. Hader is still doing what he does, but he’s pitched just four innings in 17 games, a testament to the Brewers’ lack of important moments thus far."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 10, 2020 -- "Thinking Inside the Box"

 

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.

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 "If there’s a player in this era who might go on to be a Hall of Famer and still be underrated, it’s Acuña. He arrived during Peak Trout, and he may already be getting passed from behind by Fernando Tatis, Jr. He does just about everything on the field, although he’s more a right fielder than a center fielder defensively, and he may need to cut down his swing-and-miss at some point. He’ll play this whole season at 22 -- he’s about five months younger than Luis Robert -- and will start populating the lower reaches of those 'most WAR by age X' lists we spent the last decade making for Trout. In a baseball moment loaded with fun players, Acuña shouldn’t be overlooked."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 6, 2020 -- "8.1 Seconds"

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.

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"From the moment Kenley Jansen started his motion, to the moment Will Smith swept a tag onto the back of Trent Grisham, the clock ticked 8.1 seconds. That’s a few sneezes. It’s the time it takes to remember where you left your water bottle. It’s the time it takes to have a fleeting thought about that one ex who never quite left your mind.

"It’s the time it takes to remind you that this is the greatest sport ever invented."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 5, 2020 -- "Shohei Ohtani"

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.

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"Shohei Ohtani isn’t a two-way player. He hasn’t been since 2016, no matter how much he wants to be or how much fans want him to be. The effort to become a two-way player is ruining a career that could be so much more than it has been so far. There’s a MLB superstar within Ohtani, whose incredible athleticism is wasted in a bat-only role, but he’ll only ever realize it if he picks one side of the ball and sticks with it."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 4, 2020 -- "A 2020 Perspective"

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.

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"We have to detach from our usual thinking. There is no small-sample-size police in 2020. Ten games? That’s 17% of the season, and more importantly, it leaves just 50 games to go. So much of the framing coming into the 60-game schedule looked at it as the first 60 games of a season. (Did you know the Nationals started 19-31 last year?) We’re in it now, though, and once you’re in it, it looks a lot more like the last 60 games of the season. Everyone started 51-51, go play ball."

Newsletter Excerpt, August 2, 2020 -- "How Long?"

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.

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"Here’s the thing, though: MLB doesn’t care about the legitimacy of the 2020 season. The 2020 regular season can be anything so long as it runs long enough for MLB to put on a postseason tournament. That’s where the money is. Given what we’ve seen over the last week, it’s clear that the strategy is to hang on with both hands to whatever games can be played, set teams aside when they need to be set aside, and get to September 27 with 16 teams that can be broadcast on ESPN and Fox and TBS for the next month. The things that might tick off hardcore fans, traditionalist fans, baseball fans are rarely front of mind for MLB, and they don’t exist at all right now. Extra-inning fake doubles, big rosters, seven-inning games, letting stars walk away, making the schedule up in pencil every morning...MLB will do anything to just get through the next eight weeks."