Monday, July 15, 2019

Newsletter Excerpt, July 15, 2019 -- "A Year of Yelich"


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 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 me 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.

--

"One year ago today, Christian Yelich was having the same season he’d had the previous two. He was hitting for average, drawing walks, hitting the ball pretty hard but on the ground a lot. He was providing value on the bases and in the field. He also wasn’t the best player in his own team’s outfield, being outplayed by Lorenzo Cain, who had the best MVP case on the Brewers deep into August. I would argue that a year ago today, we had as good a read on what Christian Yelich was, and would continue to be, as we did on any player in baseball. Yelich was exactly the same hitter in the first half as he’d been the previous two seasons, and in the period just prior to the break he’d doubled down on his worst traits, hitting the ball on the ground as much as anyone in the game.

"That guy has hit 57 homers in the last year."