This is an excerpt from 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 more than 20 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 Joe and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $39.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.
--
"For all of the complaints about the way batters approach their job now, what’s clear is that it works. Trading contact for power is producing the best on-contact results ever, despite what the old guy in the booth, who never in his life saw a 94-mph cutter, says. Five years ago, the league hit .251 and slugged .386 while scoring 4.2 runs a game. The pitchers are even better today, and it’s even harder to get a hit, but slugging is up 34 points and isolated power is up 40. Runs scored are up to 4.7 a game. We can have a debate about the aesthetics of it all, but you can’t argue the value of these approaches."
