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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After a weird stretch in August and a deadballish September, these playoffs have seen the ball not fly at all. Statcast tells us that the batted balls this month should have produced a .420 slugging percentage. They’ve produced a .351 mark. There are good reasons why that gap would grow in the playoffs. From 2015 to 2023, expected slugging ran behind actual slugging in the postseason by up to 37 points. This year’s gap, though, is double anything we’ve seen in the nine years -- never count 2020 -- for which we have data.
