Friday, April 29, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 29, 2022 -- "20 R/G"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"The free-runner rule is worth a tenth of a run per game to the overall stats. A full 2% of the runs in MLB this season have been scored in extra innings, despite those extras accounting for about half of one percent of all innings played."

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 27, 2022 -- "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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"With all that, the Jays are third in the AL in runs scored and fifth in wRC+ because they can score with a single swing of the bat. For all the backlash over home runs, for all the complaints about how hitters swing the bat now, no one’s been able to articulate an argument for team scoring that’s better than “hit the ball hard and far.” Power -- and yes, strikeouts -- is the fastest way to score runs, to hang crooked numbers, and to win games. When that changes, whether by putting oil-soaked balls into play or mandating that batters hit with tennis rackets or whatever else MLB chooses other than “throttling back the pitchers,” we can talk. Until then, #ballgofarteamgofar."

Monday, April 25, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 25, 2022 -- "Black and Blue Sox"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 question of what happens now hovers over this group. The next starter up is Johnny Cueto, a 36-year-old whose decent 2021 season -- a 4.08 ERA and 4.05 FIP in 115 innings -- was his first good work since 2016. Jimmy Lambert took Giolito’s place for two starts and didn’t get out of the fourth inning either time. For his career, the 27-year-old righty doesn’t have an ERA below 4.00 at any level above A ball."

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 24, 2022 -- "Fun With Numbers: 3000"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"Whether any of these guys, or Ramirez and Bogaerts behind them, or Juan Soto and Wander Franco behind them, reach 3,000 hits depends on factors outside of the players’ control. Remember, the problem is getting worse. The league batting average during Soto’s career is .247. During Franco’s career, it’s .243. Good luck, fellas."

Friday, April 22, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 22, 2022 -- "Another Intentional Walk Story"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Yesterday in Detroit, the Yankees were trying to win, and that meant going after Miguel Cabrera with strikes in the first, the fourth, and the sixth, and it meant ducking him in the eighth to get a matchup between a tough lefty reliever and a lefty batter who struggles with lefties. To face Cabrera would have been to place spectacle, to place Cabrera himself, ahead of the game. No one is bigger than the game. What Aaron Boone did yesterday wasn’t offensive, wasn’t an insult, wasn’t all that big a deal. He was trying to win a baseball game, which is the only thing we can ask from everyone involved when we buy a ticket."

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 19, 2022 -- "Baseball's New Baseballs"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Pitchers miss bats better than they ever have. When they don’t, the new baseball keeps them safe from harm. The lost home runs are just becoming flyball outs. In 2021, batters hit .225 on flyballs and slugged .914. Those numbers are .194 and .562 this year. No, I don’t think that’s just April or small sample size or a shortened spring. Statcast is reading the same things. It projects an expected slugging of .969 on flyballs this season. The actual number is .721. It projects a wOBA of .504. The actual figure is 100 points lower.

"It’s the baseballs."

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Newsletter Excerpt, April 14, 2022 -- "Culture War"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"The decision to take Kershaw out or leave him in is neither easy nor obvious, and turning one side of a 55/45 call into black and the other side white is a waste of time and effort. This wasn’t about analytics, it was about health, and navigating gray areas, and dealing with people, all the things a manager is hired to do. Get off Roberts’s back."
 
 

 

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Season Preview 2022: #1, Los Angeles Dodgers

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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1. Los Angeles Dodgers (101-61, 811 RS, 601 RA, first in NL West)

A reader asked me if we would be on #117Watch again this year. I pegged the Dodgers for 113 wins last year, a figure that put the all-time record for wins within reach. Alas, the Dodgers lost a lot of one-run and Calvinball games early in the season, costing them a shot at history. They ended up tying the franchise record for wins with 106 despite a 6-13 mark in extras and being swept in their only seven-inning doubleheader of the season.

We may have seen the peak of this Dodger era. Their best team was the 2020 version, the one that only got to play 60 games (and won 72% of them) and then went on to win a neutral-site World Series. Last year’s team was a continuation of that group, and it went 106-56. The teams combined won more than 2/3 of their games over two years, a wild standard.

This year’s is a step down from that group. The core is aging out of its prime, with 32-year-old Freddie Freeman joining the team. Mookie Betts and Trea Turner are 29, Chris Taylor and Max Muncy are 32, Justin Turner is 37. The younger players are question marks, beginning with 26-year-old Cody Bellinger. This isn’t “the Dodgers are over” by any means -- they are the best team in baseball -- but it is an acknowledgement that their upside is a bit lower than it was in recent years.

Their depth has taken a bit of a hit as well. They traded Josiah Gray and Keibert Ruiz for two months of Max Scherzer and a year-plus of Trea Turner. Trevor Bauer has been on mock suspension for nine months and a real one is likely coming soon. Corey Seager, Enrique Hernandez, Joc Pederson, and Kenley Jansen have all left in free agency, to varying impacts. Clayton Kershaw is still effective, but basically day-to-day for 180 days.

None of this is the difference between making the playoffs and not, between winning the division and not. It’s just the difference between being the greatest team ever and not. The rotation may be shaky, especially at the back end, at least until the Dodgers are comfortable promoting Bobby Miller and Ryan Pepiot. Julio Urias’s start in Denver over the weekend was scary for his lack of velocity; we’re wired at this point to worry over that sort of thing, though it could also just be a dead arm.

I’m not at all sure adding Craig Kimbrel to the bullpen makes it better. Since winning the World Series with the Red Sox in 2018, he has a 3.67 ERA and a 3.88 FIP, well below average for a high-leverage relief pitcher. He’s walked 11% of the batters he’s faced, and his 40% strikeout rate no longer stands out the way it did when he was a Brave. Having Kimbrel around serves Dave Roberts’s desire to have a binky for the ninth inning; we’ll have to see if Roberts is willing to set aside that binky should Kimbrel continue to pitch poorly.

The Dodgers, like the Rays in the AL, have set the bar so high that criticism is almost unfair. The two teams are competing as much with themselves and their track record as they are with the Giants and Padres, with the Red Sox and Blue Jays. These last five or six grafs are grading the Dodgers on a curve they set. Relative to the other 29 teams, they’re the best.

Random Player Comment
: There’s a short list of players on whom the 2022 season will pivot. Jacob deGrom is one. Mike Trout is another. Christian Yelich and, pick one, Aaron Nola or Zack Wheeler. Jose Berrios. Cody Bellinger is part of that group. The 2019 NL MVP was one of the worst players in baseball last season before turning in a big playoff run. Still just 26, Bellinger’s inability to handle fastballs last year made him look 46. Bellinger’s good defense means the Dodgers can play him in center if he's average or even a little below average at the plate. It’s not yet clear whether he can even get back to that level.

Season Preview 2022: #12, Boston Red Sox

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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12. Boston Red Sox (84-78, 832 RS, 780 RA, fourth in AL East)

It’s the Red Sox, not the Blue Jays or Dodgers, who I have leading MLB in runs scored. The addition of Trevor Story and the expected emergence of Bobby Dalbec lengthen a lineup that already had an excellent core of peak and pre-peak talent. The Sox are going to print runs, with Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts likely to be among the ten most valuable position players in the league. The Sox may even get an in-season boost from first-baseman Triston Casas, one of the game’s top prospects.

All this offense may be needed, because the Red Sox are going to allow close to five runs a game. The rotation is cobbled together and short an ace, with Chris Sale two years removed from Tommy John surgery and out for two months at the start of the season with a broken rib. The Sox will lean heavily on Nathan Eovaldi, the oft-injured righty who was quietly one of the best starters in the AL a year ago. Behind Eovaldi, though, are nothing but question marks. Can Tanner Houck hold up for a full season of starts? Was Michael Wacha’s late-season effectiveness a sign that he can return to being a full-time starter? How many innings will Rich Hill pitch, and will any of them be the sixth inning of a give game? Is James Paxton going to be late-season option?

Remember that these pitchers work in front of a shaky infield defense. No team in baseball allowed a higher batting average on ground balls last year, and it wasn’t all that close.

Red Sieve (AVG, hits on groundballs, 2021)

            AVG      H
Red Sox    .273    482
Orioles    .260    453
Royals     .255    448
Phillies   .254    459
A’s        .254    430 

The bullpen behind this group can be effective, led by 2021 rookie sensation Garrett Whitlock. The concern, and this was on display Opening Day, is that Alex Cora has to lean too much on his pen, especially Whitlock. Sox starters, as a group, won’t work deep into games, which increases the load on Whitlock, Jake Diekman, and Matt Barnes at the back end, but also on Matt Strahm (a longtime Newsletter favorite), Hirokazu Sawamura, and Ryan Brasier in the fifth and sixth. It’s a high-maintenance pitching staff, with a bullpen that will throw as many innings as that of any good team in baseball.

Fortunately, Alex Cora is good at what he does. Cora was one of the few managers whose presence caused me to adjust a record upward, if just by a game. That game might be critical for a Sox team trying to fend off improved squads in Minnesota, Seattle, and Anaheim, all vying for those new playoff berths. It says here they will, if just barely.

Random Player Comment: I haven’t counted, but I would be surprised if the player I have on the most fantasy teams this year isn’t Bobby Dalbec. Influenced in part by the research of John Laghezza, I pushed Dalbec up my ranks -- and the Sox projection accordingly. Dalbec seemed to find something in the second half, improving his walk rate and plate discipline, which allowed him to get to his great power in games. He hit .268/.344/.611 after the break. I like him for .250/.320/.520 and 35 homers this year.

Friday, April 8, 2022

Season Preview 2022: #13, St. Louis Cardinals

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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13. St. Louis Cardinals (84-78, 708 RS, 694 RA, second in NL Central)

The Cardinals’ Opening Day lineup threw me for a loop, with two switch-hitters wrapped around seven straight righties against Pirates righty J.T. Brubaker. It may have just been a fan-service thing, starting Albert Pujols and batting him fifth so the Cards fans could welcome him home.

Since a few people asked me... The Pujols signing is fine. He can platoon at DH with Corey Dickerson or Lars Nootbaar, pinch-hit for the catchers and shortstops, play first base once every couple of weeks. Paul Goldschmidt doesn’t miss much time, so having a below-average backup first baseman isn’t a big deal. Pujols did hit lefty pitching last year, and has done so even in his dotage. He may not be the best use of a roster spot, but he’s not too far from it and there are some reasonable soft factors in play.

The risk is that this goes the way of Ken Griffey Jr.’s return to Seattle, where the player is clearly done and an awkward conversation must ensue. As uncomfortable as Pujols’s end in Anaheim was, it will be worse if the Cardinals need his roster spot in June because Nolan Gorman is hitting .370 in Triple-A.

The Cardinals snuck into the playoffs last year on homers and defense, and they’re running back pretty much that entire team. Steven Matz is here to take Kwang Hyun Kim’s innings, and Dickerson will be the lefty bat Matt Carpenter no longer was. Their top nine players by 2021 playing time all return, a group that was worth 27 WAR in total. They get anything like that from these nine guys again, and they’re most of the way back to the playoffs.

The pitching staff is a bit less stable. The Cardinals are leaning heavily on broken pitchers getting healthy, with Dakota Hudson and Jordan Hicks taking up two rotation spots. Most importantly, the team needs Jack Flaherty to get back to where he was in 2019. He pitched poorly in 2020, missed three months last year with an oblique strain, and starts this one with shoulder inflammation. The Cardinals have the opposite of a stars-and-scrubs roster, so losing one guy isn’t fatal. Flaherty, though, is the one starter they have who can be a six-win pitcher, an ace. They need him on the mound to reach their peak.

Random Player Comment: At some point during the offseason I landed on Paul Goldschmidt and was floored to see that he’s over 50 bWAR through age 33. That’s 70% of a Hall of Fame career, and at 33 he was worth six wins for a playoff team. I have never, for a second, thought of Goldschmidt as a Hall of Famer, but two good years is going to push him close to 60 WAR, and that’s where your Hall case comes down to how much the voters like you.
 
 

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Opening Day

There was a prompt going around yesterday, from the mind of the great Joe Posnanski, asking people to post the lineup of the first baseball team they ever truly loved. It was a fun exercise in remembering some guys, and I learned that most of the Newsletter Slack was born into some really good baseball teams.

Me, I was just a little too young for the 1977-78 Yankees. I remember pieces of the ’78 season -- the first game I can specifically remember attending, and missing the Bucky Dent homer -- but not much more than that. The 1979 season, though...that was my first. The Cliff Johnson/Rich Gossage fight. The announcement of Billy Martin’s return. The death of Thurman Munson. A fourth-place team buried in controversy. I wrote the lineups and linescores for most games in a black-and-white notebook, fell asleep listening to Bill White and Frank Messer calling west coast games, went to my first doubleheader.*

(*Technically. We left during a long rain delay between games, walking into my uncle’s apartment only to find him watching Game Two. I am still a little mad.)

That was my first, 1979, so this is my 44th Opening Day as a fan. I’m 51 now, and well aware that I have more baseball seasons, more Opening Days, behind me than ahead of me. So I try to appreciate each one a little more, try to take time away from the work to be a fan on this day.

See, it’s a fractious moment for our game, for baseball fans. We disagree on a lot, and not just in the old “Willie, Mickey or the Duke” way. Some people like the strikeouts, some don’t. Some like pitch framing, some don’t. Some miss smallball, some don’t. Some want the business to look more like the NFL, some don’t. Some like Rob Manfred, some d.... OK, too far.

Expanded playoffs, defensive positioning, the DH, extra-inning runners on second, ticket prices, game times, pace of play.... We spend a lot of time fighting, emphasis on the pronoun. I’m part of that culture, for better and worse, pushing and pressing to impress my own preferences on the game in a moment I feel that slipping away.

Not today, though. Today is the day we come together over what we have, what we missed for six months, what we’ll have for the next six: baseball games. Great young players. Vets on their farewell tours. Playoff chases. Dingers. Whiffs. Diving catches. Plays at the plate. Fifteen games on a Tuesday night, then 15 more all day Wednesday, 2,430 ballgames stretched out across the calendar like so many flowers in a field.

We don’t agree on anything...except this day. Opening Day is what brings us together, Yankees and Mets, Cubs and Cardinals, Dodgers and Giants. Statheads and scouts. Tastes great and less filling. Box seats and bleachers. D train and 4 train. Brats and Boog’s. This is the one thing everybody who loves this amazing game can agree on: Opening Day is sacred, a national holiday, a celebration of the national pastime.

In a few hours, Corbin Burnes is going to throw that ridiculous cutter. Seiya Suzuki is going to play at Wrigley Field. Bobby Witt Jr. is going to play where his dad once threw an 11-strikeout, 129-pitch complete game win. Shohei Ohtani, who you’d think was out of firsts, will become the first player to throw his team’s first pitch of the season and face his team’s first pitch of the season. Juan Soto will shuffle and Francisco Lindor will smile and Yu Darvish will spin.

Our game is back. Let’s revel in it. Happy Opening Day.

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Season Preview 2022: #19, Detroit Tigers

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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19. Detroit Tigers (79-83, 716 RS, 744 RA, third in AL Central)

The Tigers started to come out of their rebuild a year ago, with their best season since 2016, with Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal getting established, with Rule 5 pick Akil Baddoo putting up a strong season. That laid the groundwork for an offseason in which they delved into the free-agent market, and not the generic aisle, adding Javier Baez to upgrade the defense and Eduardo Rodriguez to give Baez grounders to scoop.

This spring, the Tigers have taken the reins off top prospect Spencer Torkelson, and might well have done so with Riley Greene had Greene not suffered a broken foot late in spring training. They’re behaving as a team that is ready to compete for a spot in the expanded playoffs.

So why do I have them at 79-83? Losing Greene dinged them a little just before I set the standings (and the acquisition of Austin Meadows happened after I did so). Concerns about the team OBP are real -- it was .308 last year and only the addition of Torkelson is an upgrade to that figure. The catchers, Jonathan Schoop, Miguel Cabrera, even Meadows project to below-average OBP figures. (Platooning Meadows would help in this regard.) I have them scoring 716 runs, 19 more than a year ago, but I think there’s more downside in that figure than upside.

Rodriguez, Skubal, and Mize will be the best top three the Tigers have had in quite some time. Skubal, in particular, seems ready to take a big step forward, maybe even be the best of this trio in 2022. The pitching thins out after that, though. Matt Manning has struggled to establish himself around injuries and the lost year, and the Tigers don’t have very much behind him at all. The bullpen is similarly thin -- you’re sick of hearing this, I know -- with most of the group that had the highest walk rate in the AL (11%) back for another year. The Tigers were also a bit fortunate last year, going 77-85 with the run differential of a 75-87 team, so the projection above reflects more improvement than it seems.

As with the Royals, you can paint a pretty picture. The top three starters pitch at the tops of their ranges, Torkelson slugs .520, the bullpen doesn’t blow the whole thing up. I think the Tigers have a narrower range on both ends than do the Royals, though, and I expect them to have a fairly quiet season. Come 2024, maybe even 2023, these two teams could be putting on quite a show.

Random Player CommentMiguel Cabrera will get his 3000th hit sometime in the next few weeks, making him the seventh player to produce 3000 hits and 500 homers, As some players have done, he’s limped to both milestones, being basically a replacement-level player since 2017. At some point after he gets that hit, around the time Greene returns, the Tigers are going to have a decision to make. Cabrera will simply not deserve playing time over the players around him. Here’s hoping it doesn’t get ugly; Miggy is one of the greatest hitters we’ve ever seen, one of the best players of this century, and deserves a clean ending.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Season Preview 2022: #29, Pittsburgh Pirates

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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29. Pittsburgh Pirates (58-104, 583 RS, 812 RA, fifth in NL Central)

With the decision to start Oneil Cruz in the minors, the Pirates may have less MLB talent on their Opening Day roster than any team in baseball. I’d rather have Ke’Bryan Hayes and probably Bryan Reynolds than any individual Oriole, but man, who is the third-best Pirate? David Bednar? Yoshi Tsutsugo, cut twice last summer? Mitch Keller I Swear It’s Real This Time Honest? Diego Castillo and his zero MLB plate appearances?

I’ve admittedly been dismissive of the Pirates in recent seasons, arguing that if the team’s owner doesn’t care, why should I? The problem with that attitude is between Nutting and the nut lay millions of people who are invested in one of baseball’s oldest franchises, who go to PNC Park, who tune into Greg Brown and Bob Walk, who sweat those late-inning Bednar appearances. All these bad owners, Nutting and John Fisher and Paul Dolan and their ilk, are engaged in a fraud against these fans who pay for the tickets and the hot dogs and the cable packages, who walk across the Clemente Bridge and hope to raise the Jolly Roger.

Nutting isn’t my reader, though. Those fans are. The answer to the question above is, “Because Pirates fans read the Newsletter, too.”

Taking the Pirates seriously, you look for the core, and if Cruz comes back by summer, that’s Hayes, Cruz, Reynolds if he’s still here...maybe Keller...the issue facing the Pirates isn’t just that they’re bad, but that they are old and largely made up of waiver bait. Six of the team’s nine projected starters are free-talent pickups. Just four projected position players on the roster were developed by the Pirates, counting Reynolds, who was acquired as a prospect. What is a rebuilding team doing with Daniel Vogelbach and Ben Gamel and Greg Allen, all 29 or 30 with neither a past nor a future?

The pitching staff isn’t much better. JT Brubaker got the Opening Day nod at 28 with 171 MLB innings behind him. Keller is 26 with a 6.02 career ERA, and he’s the big hope at the moment. He really has shown out this spring, touching 100 mph. Bryse Wilson is the youth movement, at 24. The bullpen isn’t very good and doesn’t include much in the way of breakout candidates, just more of the pitching versions of Gamel and Allen and Vogelbach.

Over the winter, the Pirates were the core of some people's argument for a payroll floor. But to me, they show just how toothless one would be. If I give the Pirates Kris Bryant, Michael Conforto and Marcus Stroman, now they’re a 70-win team with a $100 million payroll. I can’t defend how Bob Nutting manages this franchise, especially when I look at what he did when the Pirates had a strong team in the middle of the last decade. However, the Pirates don’t need a higher payroll to win -- though they will, eventually. Instead, they need to develop a new core. That’s Hayes, and Cruz, and Henry Davis, and Nick Gonzales, and Liover Peguero, and Roansy Contreras, and high draft picks in 2022 and 2023.

The Pirates are bottoming out now, with a roster of never-weres and never-will-bes. For the first time since this cycle began, though, you can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Let’s just hope they’ve been sold by then.

Random Player Comment: Man, I believed in Kevin Newman, who I thought would combine contact and speed and just enough glove to be a three-win shortstop. For one glorious year, he was, hitting .308/.353/.446 in 2019 with 16 steals and exactly three bWAR. Since then, he’s hit .226/.268/.302, and probably keeps the shortstop job just long enough for the Pirates to keep Cruz an extra season.

Newman is the cautionary tale to my enthusiasm about Nick Madrigal. There is a bare minimum of hard contact you need to make to survive in the majors, and Newman does not rise to it.
 

Monday, April 4, 2022

2022 Final Standings

Team        W-L   Pct  GB   RS   RA

Rays      100-62 .617  --  795  624
Yankees*   89-73 .549  11  747  668
Blue Jays* 88-74 .543  12  818  759
Red Sox*   84-78 .519  16  832  780    
Orioles   56-106 .346  44  633  921

White Sox  92-70 .568  --  820  715
Twins      80-82 .494  12  768  787
Tigers     79-83 .488  13  716  744
Guardians  78-84 .481  14  670  677   
Royals     78-84 .481  14  731  762

Astros     93-69 .574  --  788  677
Angels     83-79 .512  10  789  755
Mariners   81-81 .500  12  736  722
Rangers    68-94 .420  25  688  807
Athletics  67-95 .414  26  603  754

 

Team        W-L   Pct  GB   RS   RA

Braves     91-71 .562  --  773  665
Marlins*   85-77 .525   6  670  648
Mets       83-79 .512   8  711  686
Phillies   80-82 .494  11  782  777
Nationals  74-88 .457  17  726  803

Brewers    86-76 .531  --  740  682
Cardinals  84-78 .519   2  708  694
Reds       76-86 .469  10  748  800
Cubs       75-87 .463  11  722  782
Pirates   58-104 .358  28  583  812

Dodgers   101-61 .623  --  811  601
Padres*    88-74 .543  13  729  650
Giants*    87-75 .537  14  746  668
D’backs    73-89 .451  28  728  805
Rockies    73-89 .451  28  736  822

Newsletter Excerpt, April 4, 2022 -- "Season Preview 2022: 2021 Report Card"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"I also, once again, crushed the season over/unders.

Dodgers over 102.5 wins (W)
Orioles under 64.5 wins (W)
Rangers under 66.5 wins (W)
Rockies over 63.5 wins (W)


"Of these, only the Dodgers were a sweat, and they ended up clearing the bar with room to spare."
 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 3, 2022 -- "Season Preview 2022: The Era Of Big Tanking Is Over"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"Where things got weird in the 2010s was that it was no longer 65-win teams throwing it into reverse. The Braves won 190 games in 2012 and 2013, and were in first place coming out of the All-Star break in 2014. They did nothing to improve that roster, then traded Jason Heyward, B.J. Upton, and Craig Kimbrel before the start of the 2015 season. The A’s made the playoffs three straight years, winning 88 games in the last, then traded Jeff Samardzija and a controlled Josh Donaldson on their way to three straight last-place finishes. The Red Sox went from a championship in 2013 to consecutive years in the cellar, trading away Mike Napoli and John Lackey while allowing Jon Lester and Jacoby Ellsbury to leave in free agency."
 
 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 2, 2022 -- "Jorge Soler and the Marlins"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"Miami is scorched earth for baseball. In the first year their new park was open, 2012, the Marins sold 2.2 million tickets, their best figure since the first championship in 1997. Since then, they’ve ranked no better than 27th in MLB in tickets sold, and they were last in 2018, 2019, and 2021. The 2018 and 2019 Marlins were the first teams since the 2004 Expos -- a team intentionally wrecked by MLB -- to fail to sell a million tickets to its games."