Monday, December 16, 2019

Newsletter Excerpt, December 16, 2019 -- "Rangers/Indians Trade"

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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"This should be such a triumphant period of time for the Cleveland Indians. Their front office built a championship-caliber starting rotation almost entirely through its trade wits. They drafted a fun, watchable player who is on track to be a Hall of Famer in Lindor. They developed players like Shane Bieber and Jose Ramirez, middling prospects who became superstars. The game’s rules are bent in their favor, limiting competition for amateur talent, assigning them extra draft picks and extra budget for signing international players, and even giving them a healthy cut of the money generated in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, just to balance things out a bit.

"What should be a dynasty in Cleveland isn’t bying because of structural unfairness, or bad luck, or even bad baseball. It’s dying because the owner is killing it."