Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 26, 2023 -- "Shortstops"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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 "The Orioles need to treat Gunnar Henderson the way the Yankees are treating Anthony Volpe: As their young star shortstop for the next six years."

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 25, 2023 -- "SOS"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"The Phillies, to me, are the most interesting. They have yet to reach .500 even for a day despite playing almost half their schedule, 11 of 23 games, against the Reds and Rockies. Now? They get the Mariners at home and then a road trip to Houston and Los Angeles. Bryce Harper can’t get back fast enough."

 

Monday, April 24, 2023

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, April 20, 2023 -- "Las Vegas Mayb-A's"

 

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
Late last night, the A’s announced the purchase of a plot of land west of the Las Vegas Strip, and their intent to build a $1.5 billion ballpark on the site by 2027. It’s the latest, and most aggressive, tactic in the team’s long fight to get a replacement for the 56-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

The need for a ballpark to replace the Coliseum isn’t in question, but the A’s have persisted in asking not just for a ballpark, but for an entire development around it. From May 11, 2021:

“The Coliseum itself needs to be replaced. The Coliseum site, however, does not. There’s a BART stop there, there is freeway access, there is plenty of space for parking and even some space for development. The conditions are more or less the same as what the Mets faced in the 2000s, out at Willets Point in Queens. The Mets built a new ballpark next door and turned the old one into a parking lot. The Yankees, in an urban residential neighborhood and hemmed in by a river, did much the same. If it’s just about building a new ballpark, then the model is there for the A’s.

“A’s owner John Fisher doesn’t want that. He wants what Liberty Media has in Cobb County, what Sam Ricketts has commandeered in Wrigleyville. He wants a new stadium, to be sure, but he wants it as a secondary piece to a larger real-estate development that will print money no matter what the baseball team does. Fisher’s position isn’t new. This is the dream now: Turn the baseball team not into a champion, but into the center of a development.”


The size of the lot in Las Vegas relative to the footprint of a 35,000-seat stadium makes clear that Fisher can get the development he wants in Nevada. Yankee Stadium sits on about 12 acres. The newest ballpark in baseball, Globe Life Field in Arlington, Tex., sits on 13. The A’s just bought 49 acres. This isn’t about Oakland, the larger market, the fans, the baseball team...this isn’t a baseball story at all. It’s about a rich guy who wants to get richer by getting some government to build him a concrete-and-steel ATM using taxpayer money.

That’s not new, of course. What’s new is Fisher’s insistence on moving to a place much smaller than the one he’s leaving. As of 2021, Las Vegas was the 25th-largest city in America. In a baseball context, that doesn’t seem too bad -- it’s wedged between Boston and Detroit. It’s larger than Oakland by about 50%, larger than Tampa and Cleveland. It’s growing, too, up from 31st in 2011.

The size of a city, though, isn’t as important as the size of an overall market, defined by how many people from the region you can get to come to games or reach on television. Oakland, as judged by Nielsen, is part of a three-city market that’s the tenth-largest in the country, with more than 2.5 million TV homes. We’ve come to think of Oakland as a “small market” team, but even MLB stopped doing that for a while -- the A’s were briefly phased out as a revenue-sharing recipient because they don’t play in a small market. They share a very large one, certainly larger than Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is the 40th-largest media market in the country. For baseball purposes, Las Vegas is Hot Milwaukee.

Smallest Baseball Markets

               TV Homes
Baltimore     1,149,000
San Diego     1,107,000
Kansas City   1,020,000
Cincinnati      954,000
Milwaukee       900,000
Las Vegas       870,000


Source: Sports Media Watch


I’ve written many times about the paradox of San Diego, which is one of the ten biggest cities in America while also being one of the smallest sports markets. The Padres have a foreign country to the south, an ocean to the west, a desert to the east and two baseball teams to the north. They make it work because the city is big and, of late, they’re the only game in town.

Las Vegas is about 80% the size of San Diego and is surrounded by a desert to the south, a desert to the west, a desert to the east, and a desert to the north. The secondary and tertiary markets for the Las Vegas A’s consist of nine armadillos and the population of Baker, Calif. (602).

With the caveat that local television revenue is a fraught topic at the moment, we can estimate that a Las Vegas baseball team would have, under the current model, some of the lowest local-TV revenues in the sport. Even when that model changes, a Las Vegas franchise would be yet another small-market team demanding revenue-sharing payouts from the true drivers of baseball’s overall revenue. There is no math that makes a Las Vegas baseball franchise a big TV revenue generator.

The supporters of a Las Vegas baseball team will point to the Las Vegas Knights, an NHL expansion franchise that opened play in 2016. The Knights have consistently maxed out T-Mobile Arena, just behind the Park MGM hotel on the Strip, averaging about 750,000 tickets sold a year. That figure would place them last in MLB for total attendance, of course, and their average of 18,000 or so a game would be in the bottom ten. The Knights do draw beyond T-Mobile’s listed capacity, so you can perhaps infer some demand they’re not capturing that an A’s team in a 35,000-seat ballpark would. Let’s be generous and say it’s 25% more. That gets a baseball team to 22,500 a game, and about 1.8 million a year. Now you’re into the top 20, but below the top half, around where the Twins and Diamondbacks live.

Mind you, the Knights have advantages that will be hard, even impossible, to replicate. They were the first major sports team in town, one the city embraced fully for that reason. They were an expansion team, and not another town’s leftovers. They were the most successful expansion franchise ever, in fact, reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in their first season. No one is smart enough to know for sure how good the 2027 A’s will be, but I’ll take “not in the World Series” for the limit. The success of the Las Vegas Knights just isn’t a good model for what the Las Vegas A’s will experience.

With any Vegas franchise, there’s an idea that attendance will be propped up by tourists building trips around their team. The Knights do get their share of this, largely Canadians coming down in the winter. Can you spot the key words in that sentence? Las Vegas makes for a lovely vacation when it’s -11 degrees in Moosejaw in January. It’s less attractive in August, when it’s 110 degrees in Nevada. Twenty percent of the Knights’ home slate this season came against Canadian teams between October 10 and March 28.

This isn’t to say that literally no one will go to Las Vegas to see their team play. It is to say that it won’t happen in large enough numbers to be a serious factor in the success of the franchise, and it’s something that will fade quickly as an attraction. I’d add that unlike the Raiders, who some Californians still support enough to travel to Las Vegas to watch, the A’s have well chased off any vestiges of fan support that might follow them across state lines.

For those who do attend, it’s going to be a sterile ballpark experience because any retractable roof will have to be closed for most of the season. It’s 78 degrees in Vegas today, three weeks into the baseball season, and it will be 88 next weekend. Per this video from Fox, the four warm-weather parks with retractable roofs (Miami, Houston, Texas, Arizona) had them closed 86% of the time in 2021. That would mean 11 home games a year with outdoor baseball. If I live in Pittsburgh, in Chicago, in Baltimore, and I want to watch baseball, the experience is going to be a lot more enjoyable at home than in Las Vegas. If I live in Los Angeles or Orange County or San Diego and I want to head to Vegas for the weekend, I’m not using three hours of it to see the Dodgers or Angels or Padres. If I want to plan a ballpark road trip in the summer, I’m avoiding domes, not targeting them.

Finally, there is the long-term problem: water. California, Arizona, and Nevada are already fighting over draws from the Colorado River, and there’s no chance those fights die down in the near term. Las Vegas is considering capping water usage -- the word they are avoiding is “rationing” -- for its residents. It’s not certain that the desert Southwest, including Las Vegas, is going to be able to support its population growth for the next 30 years.

In the Newsletter Slack today, the conversation about the A’s announcement eventually morphed into one about poker. I thought that was appropriate, because the A’s buying this land is a semi-bluff on the turn. The A’s are making a big bet with what may or may not be the best hand, and they can win either if their opponent folds now -- giving the A’s what they want in Oakland -- or later when the hand is complete. The hand, though, isn’t over. Oakland will respond now, and then we’ll have another round of betting. If the A’s do end up in Las Vegas, that’s a loss, not a win, for everyone but John Fisher.

In the short term, this is another blow to a fan base that has been beaten up for a decade. The A’s have done everything short of placing snipers on the roof to keep fans away, and they may finally have succeeded in running attendance and interest down to nothing. The A’s were in the playoffs three years ago and in a battle for a playoff spot 19 months ago. Today, they’re a ghost franchise, non-competitive and drawing nobody to the park. What happens when they officially sign the papers to leave Oakland? What’s the reason for anyone there to support the team? Craig Calcaterra raised a good point today:

“As it stands now the team is supposed to finish this season in Oakland and play there three more seasons before heading to the desert. One can only hope that everyone realizes how awkward that is and that they just pick up and move now and play in some temporary location to save everyone the indignities of more bad baseball in a vermin-ridden stadium with empty seats.”


The A’s are set up to be a laughingstock for the next few years, and it’s entirely the doing of owner John Fisher. A’s fans, and baseball as a whole, deserve better than this.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 19, 2023 -- "Clayton Kershaw"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Over the last five years, I backed off the idea that Kershaw was the third man in the conversation that included Clemens and Martinez. With every quality start he makes, though, Kershaw puts himself back into it. He may still be the best pitcher ever."

 

Monday, April 17, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 17, 2023 -- "Future Guardians, Now"

 

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"What we know, though, with reasonable confidence, is that Bibee and Williams are among the five best starters in the organization right now, and that the Guardians need every win they can get. The expanded playoffs don’t help them much, as their access to a wild-card spot is likely limited given the quality of the teams in the AL East and AL West. They probably have to win the AL Central to get into the tournament, and every Hunter Gaddis blowup makes it less likely they do so."

Friday, April 14, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 14, 2023 -- "What I'm Watching"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"It’s not that everything has gone right for the Rays. Siri, the best defensive outfielder on the team, played in just six games before getting hurt. Zach Eflin is on the IL with a back injury, and Jeffrey Springs with a nerve issue in his left elbow."

 

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 13, 2023 -- "A Brutal Comparison"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Shortstop

Athletics: Nick Allen
Rays: Wander Franco

Aledmys Diaz has actually gotten more starts and played more innings at short so far than Allen, who has yet to successfully reach base this season. I don’t think it matters who we slot here for the A’s, though."

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

The NBA's Playoff Problem

 
Last Friday, the Dallas Mavericks were 38-42 and sat in the 11th spot in the NBA’s Western Conference with two games to play, both at home against comparable or worse teams. They were a half-game behind the Oklahoma City Thunder, who had one game left against the Memphis Grizzlies, one of the stronger teams in the league. The Mavericks didn’t control their own destiny -- they needed help from the Grizzlies to grab that tenth and final playoff berth -- but they could win their final two games and give themselves a chance.

This wasn’t a tanking team that had gotten lucky to be in this spot. The Mavericks came into the 2022-23 season trying to win and made a huge deadline deal for Nets star Kyrie Irving. Things hadn’t worked out -- the Mavs went 8-12 when Irving played, shocking zero Nets fans -- but with a couple of days left in the season, they still had a shot to make the tournament.

On Friday, the Mavs benched Irving, along with three more of their top rotation players, for that penultimate contest against the Bulls. In addition, they played superstar Luka Doncic for just one quarter. The Mavs lost the game 115-112 and were eliminated from playoff contention. By being eliminated, the Mavericks increased the likelihood that they will keep their 2023 first-round pick, which they have to give to the Knicks to complete an earlier trade unless it falls in the top ten. (Losing to the Bulls, who also entered the game 38-42, was an added benefit in this process.)

The Mavericks, a professional basketball franchise that charges money for tickets, and that held a reasonable chance at a playoff berth with two games to go, threw away that chance to protect a draft pick.

What are we even doing here? The NBA, which invented tanking and has spent 40 years trying to repair the damage, now has a team quitting not in November, but in April, expressly preferring to miss the playoffs rather than make them. This isn’t tanking; this is something far worse.

What are playoffs, anyway? Why do we have these bloated, months-long tournaments? To make money, for one. Teams can sell playoff tickets at higher prices, and television networks pay top dollar for the excitement of best-of series. To determine a champion, for two. American audiences have been raised on this model, where the regular season cuts out maybe 60% of the league, maybe less, and then you get to the important games. You couldn’t sell the European model, with a round-robin and no playoffs, over here.

Playoffs sell the idea that anyone can win a championship if they can just get in the door. We just watched an NCAA tournament won by a #4 seed, with a #9 seed nearly playing for the title. Last year’s Phillies were the #11 seed in the MLB playoffs and got to within two wins of a championship. In 2019, the Nationals went from the #9 spot (of ten teams) to winning the World Series. In 2014, two wild-card teams played in the World Series. Take 2020 with a grain of salt, but over in the NFL, the Buccaneers won that season's Super Bowl from the #9 (of 14) seed. The Stanley Cup is regularly won by teams seeded sixth and below in their conference.

The NBA? The NBA’s lowest-seeded playoff teams are just wasting everyone’s time. NBA #7 and #8 seeds -- we’ll call the surviving play-in teams by those numbers for today’s purposes -- have not won a playoff series since 2012. That win happened when Bulls superstar Derrick Rose blew out his knee in the first game of the first round, allowing the #8 seed Sixers to advance. Since then, in nine non-bubble tournaments, the #7 and #8 seeds are 0-36. The bottom seeds in the MLB and NFL playoffs have won championships in the last four years. The bottom seeds in the NBA playoffs haven’t won a series since 2012. At the game level, bottom seeds are 46-160 (.223). A bottom NBA seed is less likely to win a game than a bottom MLB seed is likely to win a series.

Just getting into the playoffs has a lot of value in MLB and in the NHL. It has some, though less, value in the NFL. (Those 2020 Bucs are the only NFL wild-card team to play in the Super Bowl since 2010.) In the NBA, just getting into the playoffs is less valuable than protecting the tenth pick in the draft.

The NBA’s problem isn’t what the Mavericks did. The NBA’s problem is that what the Mavericks did is right. In the NBA, just missing the playoffs has more value than just making them does. It’s a league-level issue that the Mavericks, on Friday, shone a huge spotlight on.

Joe Sheehan Newsletter: "Thinking Inside the Box, April 11, 2023"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Thinking Inside the Box" is an occasional Newsletter feature that pulls topics from a reading of the box scores. The lines in fixed-width are the player's box score line for the game in question.

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Being out for an evening -- I was at Citi Field last night -- forces me to lean more on box scores than I normally would. It’s fun, like being a fan as a kid and getting all my information from Baseball Tonight and the next day’s paper. Let’s see what I missed while watching the Mets shut out the Padres.


Mets 5, Padres 0

                   AB  R  H BI
Guillorme 2B        3  1  1  0
Nido C              3  0  1  0


Actually, let’s start here, with one of the all-time “line drive in the boxscore” sequences in baseball history.

Up 2-0 in the seventh, with Mark Canha on second, Luis Guillorme laid a bunt down the third-base line that tried to go foul three times and never quite got there, eventually settling between the chalk and the infield grass about 75 feet up the third-base line for a single. Following a sacrifice fly by Eduardo Escobar, Tomas Nido took a big swing on an 0-1 pitch and topped the ball on the same path as Guillorme’s bunt. This one didn’t get quite as far, but it settled right on the chalk for an infield single. Two hits that didn’t combine for an exit velocity of 100 mph and didn’t even reach a base were key in putting the game away.

I could not have had a better view of the two hits from Section 321, with a perfect, unobstructed angle on the third-base line and two baseballs that damn near expressed free will in staying in the field of play. The first one, you credit Guillorme for a great bunt. The second, you just throw up your hands and laugh.


Rays 1, Red Sox 0

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K
Fleming (W, 1-0)    4.0  1  0  0  0  5


Oh, hey, the Rays won.

This was unlike any of their first nine wins, however. They were scoreless through seven innings, 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position and without a home run. Josh Fleming, though, along with opener Jalen Beeks and two other relievers, held up their end of the bargain long enough for Brandon Lowe to save the day with a solo homer in the eighth.

I was talking about openers with someone recently, about how after being very popular for a bit in 2018-19, they’ve all but disappeared. Despite all the arguments for them, there seemed to be pushback from the pitchers who would otherwise have started the game and were now in the bulk role. There was a sense that not starting the game would potentially cost those pitchers wins. As Fleming’s outing shows, though, the opposite is the case. Freed from the rule that a starter has to go five innings for the win, the bulk pitcher actually has a better chance of being deemed the winner, assuming comparable effectiveness.

As with many new baseball ideas, the use of the opener has gone by the wayside not because of merit, but because of vibes, because of generalized opposition to things that look different. The fewer innings fourth and fifth starters pitch, though, the more sense an opener makes -- both for the team and the pitchers.


Phillies 15, Marlins 3

                   AB  R  H BI
Bohm 3B             5  2  3  6 HR


Alec Bohm was a popular breakout pick over the winter, after a pair of seasons in which he didn’t crack a .320 OBP or .400 SLG. I didn’t get on board at all, perhaps overlooking a strong set of batted-ball measures in 2022: a .290 expected batting average (actual, .280) and a 43% hard-hit rate. So far this season, he’s exceeded those breakout expectations, with a .351/.415/.649 line in the season’s early days.

He’s still hitting a lot of balls on the ground, though, and his average launch angle has dropped to 7.3 degrees. What’s enabling him to get around that is hitting the ball very hard: 17 batted balls of at least 95 mph, a top-15 number. Bohm is hitting .385 on ground balls in a league that hits .244 on them. It’s not an unheard-of result -- Billy Hamilton hit .393 on grounders in 2016, and other right-handed batters have been above .360 in recent years -- but it will be hard to sustain. If Bohm is really going to break out, he has to get more balls in the air, as he did against Devin Smeltzer late in last night’s blowout.


Braves 5, Reds 4 (10 inn.)

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K
Ashcraft              6  6  2  2  3  7


I pushed back a bit this spring against what I saw as a premature hyping of Graham Ashcraft, analysts promoting him to a group with Hunter Greene and Nick Lodolo as one of the Reds’ trio of top young starters. Ashcraft didn’t have anything like that pedigree, and his low ERA coming through the system hid a truckload of unearned runs allowed -- more than a quarter of his total. He was intermittently impressive in 19 starts a year ago, but a 15% strikeout rate is unacceptable for a modern starting pitcher.

Still, Ashcraft showed up on breakout lists this offseason, notably that of Eno Sarris, citing his “97-mph cutter” and some numbers from his Stuff+ model. So far in 2023, Ashcraft has two quality starts, and his strikeout rate is up over 25%. After last night’s game, he spoke like a pitching nerd, explaining to MLB.com’s Matthew Leach why he changed his slider:

“It’s just holding that fastball plane a lot longer. And it’s just creating that swing and miss. That was something I needed last year, and I just started to find it, figure it out now. … You can tell by the swings. Guys are swinging like it’s a heater, and then they’re way out front or just missing it by a mile.”


The Reds lost anyway, because they have exactly one (1) good relief pitcher. Still, if Ashcraft’s new pitch mix is for real, the Reds have another piece of their next good team in place.


Rangers 11, Royals 2

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K
Eaton                 1  2  0  0  0  1


That’s not a comeback by Padres hurler Adam, but rather Royals utility player Nate mopping up in an 11-2 loss. The righty got some attention for his impressive velocity and movement, better than some of the actual relievers the Royals have been using this year.

Still, it was the latest in what seems like the daily use of position players as pitchers. What was once a fun little quirk that happened less than once a month is now standard operating procedure in a blowout, this despite teams carrying more pitchers than ever in baseball history. On any given day, there are more pitchers on rosters than position players, with the concomitant lack of bench talent and tactical options for managers. Yet managers will refuse to use those pitchers in a blowout for fear of not being able to use them in some future game.

Having seen teams use position players 132 times last year, highlighted, if you can call it that, by A.J. Hinch using three in a single June blowout, MLB tightened the rules this year. Now, you have to be down eight runs, or up ten in the ninth, to use a position player on the mound. You can also use a position player any time in extras.

The result? The highest rate of position player pitching in baseball history, nine appearances in 12 days. Mind you, this is in April, before pitchers have been overworked and injured and teams are desperate for innings. The Phillies used Josh Harrison to finish off their second game of the season! Hanser Alberto, now with the White Sox, is on pace to better his ten appearances with the Dodgers in 2022.

MLB’s rules aren’t working, and we are all now fans of a sport that is comfortable changing rules in-season, so let’s suggest a new one: A team may only use a position player to pitch if it is carrying fewer than 13 pitchers. If you have eight relievers, nearly a third of your active roster charged with pitching in relief, you shouldn’t be using a position player to pitch. If you want the option, then add a bench player. This would be a soft incentive to lengthen your bench and provide better hitter/pitcher balance, giving teams stronger tactical options and making late-game situations more interesting. I don’t expect a return to 16/9 splits, but surely we can encourage 13/12 and dream about 14/11. If you’re under 30, trust me when I tell you the game was more interesting when teams had as many bench players as they did relievers.

You can only use position players to pitch if you’re carrying fewer than 13 pitchers, Simple, elegant, and a force for good. Make it happen, MLB.


Nationals 6, Angels 4

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K
Corbin (W, 1-2)     5.0  7  4  4  3  3 HR


I mentioned in the season preview that Patrick Corbin has a chance to be the first pitcher since Phil Niekro to lead his league in losses for three straight years. He’s also a real threat to lose 20, and maybe even 25 games, this year. That’s made harder when he allows four runs in the first three innings and not only dodges a loss, but picks up the win. The Nationals got four runs off Jose Suarez, two off the Angels’ bullpen, and four shutout innings from their own bullpen to beat the Halos 6-4.

Corbin is no longer the star who got a $140 million contract or the swingman who was a huge part of a World Series winner. If he takes the ball 30 times, though, he’ll be doing a lot for a Nationals team that’s mostly just trying to get to 2024.

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 9, 2023 -- "Streakin'"

 

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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"We don’t know whether the Rays will get to 26 or 17 or even ten in a row. Like a lot of the teams listed above, they have taken advantage of their schedule, beating up the two worst teams in baseball and three of the six worst, by my accounting. The best starting pitcher they’ve faced is Eduardo Rodriguez, and identifying the second-best is...a challenge. That’s not a mark against them -- good teams beat bad teams -- and the manner in which the Rays have won, outscoring their opponents 75-18, is breathtaking."

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 6, 2023 -- "Seven Days"

 

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"So I’m reluctant to put a lot of weight on week-to-week comparisons of the start of the 2022 season to the start of the 2023 season. Apart from the things we can measure that have changed, hitters were behind the eight-ball starting last season in a way they aren’t starting this one."

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, April 5, 2023 -- "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.

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"If you don’t want to think too hard about lineups, you can remember a couple of very simple things: Get your best hitter the most at-bats, and hit your OBP in front of your SLG. Baker is getting both those things very wrong right now. Flipping Tucker and Peña is the simplest and quickest way to fix the lineup, putting more runners on base for Alvarez and Abreu."

Monday, April 3, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, March 30, 2023 -- "Season Preview, Teams #6 - #1"

 

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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5. Toronto Blue Jays (93-69, 867 RS, 747 RA, first in AL East)

After just missing in 2022, the 2023 Blue Jays are going to crack this list:

           Year     wRC+
Astros     2019     124
Astros     2017     121
Red Sox    2003     120
Dodgers    2022     119
Yankees    2007     119

wRC+: Weighted Runs Created, adjusted for run environment, from FanGraphs


Those are the best offensive teams of the 21st century. The 2022 Jays posted a 117 wRC+ that comes in at sixth. (This list doesn’t count 2020. No lists should.)

The Jays didn’t focus on offense this winter, but rather defense, shipping out Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and replacing him with Daulton Varsho in left, then signing Kevin Kiermaier to push George Springer to right field, where the traded Teoscar Hernandez once roamed. That’s an upgrade defensively at all three spots, and not a small one, and at minimal cost offensively. Adding Varsho, Kiermaier, and Brandon Belt gives the Jays better lineup balance, allowing them to hit with the platoon advantage more often.

The carryover hitters are driving this, though. In Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. Bo Bichette, and Alejandro Kirk, the Jays have three hitters 25 and under who all had at least a 125 OPS+ a year ago. That’s three batters, two that play up-the-middle positions, who could find themselves in the top ten of AL MVP voting. The Jays are going to print runs, and if either Whit Merrifield or Matt Chapman bounces back a bit, they’ll score more than 900 runs.

So why are the Jays just fifth overall? There are real pitching concerns one you get past Alek Manoah, Kevin Gausman, and Jordan Romano. The Jays’ investments in Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi flopped, and Chris Bassitt -- three years, $63 million -- is hardly a rock, coming off his first leader-qualified season at 33. Nate Pearson, who was supposed to be anchoring the rotation right now, is at best a relief prospect at this point. The Jays are going to have to win their share of 7-6 games. (Or 10-9.) The Jays traded for the Mariners’ Erik Swanson, but other than that the line in front of Romano is as wobbly as it was six months ago, with no sure things for three outs in a big spot.

I don’t think it will matter. The Jays are going to score enough runs to be the best team in the AL, and I expect Ross Atkins and The Smart Joe Sheehan to bolster the pitching staff in July. The Jays don’t have to go all-in this year, not with their young core. With the Yankees and Astros down a little, though, the AL is more open than it’s been in a while. Flags fly forever.

The Upside: John Schneider gets just enough from the pen each night, the Jays acquire Corbin Burnes on July 22, and they go 101-61 on their way to winning the World Series.

The Downside: The offense is good, not great, and not enough to overcome the weak parts of the staff. The Jays allow 800 runs and end up in the wild-card scrum at 87-75.

Random Player Comment: It’s hard to not pick Shohei Ohtani as the league MVP, given everything he can do on a baseball field. I went with him. If forced to pick someone else, though, I’d go with Bo Bichette. Bichette is a .300 hitter with power and speed. He walks a little more than you think and has missed six games in two years. So he’s not Andrelton Simmons at shortstop. He plays it well enough to stay there. 


 

Newsletter Excerpt, March 30, 2023 -- "Season Preview, Teams #12 - #7"

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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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7. Los Angeles Angels (91-71, 793 RS, 687 RA, second in AL West, second wild card)

This is a bit of a flag plant, given the quality of the teams just below them, but for the first time in a long time, the bottom 24 roster spots look like enough to support the top two. Perry Minasian, with limited young talent to trade and an owner not willing to go The Full Cohen, has red-paper-clipped the Angels into a playoff-caliber team. Adds that aren’t exciting on their own -- Hunter Renfroe, Brandon Drury, Gio Urshela -- combine to raise the Angels’ floor, to get the Andrew Velasquezes and Jo Adells out of the picture.

As much as what Minasian did, however, it’s what he inherited that has me pushing the Halos into October. Patrick Sandoval, Reid Detmers, and Jose Suarez were all in the Angels organization when Minasian took the job. All three have had up-and-down paths to the current starting rotation, with Suarez signed back in 2014, Sandoval running a 5.33 ERA in his first two MLB stints, and Detmers going from a major-league no-hitter to a minor-league rotation in a matter of months.

In the second half of 2022, though, the three backed up Shohei Ohtani to help build one of the strongest rotations in baseball: 34 starts, 17 outs a start, a 187/52 K/UIBB, a 24% strikeout rate. That, along with the Ohtani/Mike Trout tandem, is what is driving this projection. The Angels are going to have one of the best rotations in the AL, no mean feat in a league with the Astros, Mariners, and Guardians. With 2022 breakout Tyler Anderson added in free agency, the Angels’ rotation runs five deep. The need to use a six-man rotation  (Tucker Davidson or Griffin Canning starts the year as the sixth man) to manage Ohtani stings, and it will be an issue until and unless they make a move in-season. Even with that caveat, the Angels look like a playoff team.

The biggest concern is the bullpen, where the Angels invested a lot in Raisel Iglesias only to trade him away -- correctly -- at last year’s deadline. There isn’t a single relief pitcher on this roster who locks down an inning. It’s a group of pitchers who have all had one- or two-year runs of effectiveness, and little more, with free agents Carlos Estevez and Matt Moore added to the mix, as Iglesias and Ryan Tepera were last year, as Aaron Loup was two years ago. The Angels have Rockies’d this up a bit, with similar results.

Adding to that concern is that we have no real idea about Phil Nevin. The Angels fired Joe Maddon last June and gave the job to Nevin because he was there. The Angels didn’t play a meaningful game the rest of the way, so Nevin went largely unevaluated. Minasian saw enough to keep Nevin, but I don’t think we have a great sense of what he is as a manager, and the Angels don’t have a lot of room to lose games from the dugout. If they miss the playoffs, I suspect Nevin being in over his head will be a big reason why.

The Upside: It all finally comes together, with Shohei Ohtani at the peak of his powers, Mike Trout playing 150 games, and a superior rotation allowing the Angels to not just make the playoffs, but edge out the Astros for the division at 98-64.

The Downside: We saw it last night. Shohei Ohtani’s six shutout innings were backed by a single run, which wasn’t enough when the bullpen allowed two. It’s six months of “Tungsten Arm O’Doyle” jokes ending in a 78-84 season and Ohtani’s free agency.

Random Player CommentAnthony Rendon was actually a great player in his first season in Anaheim, hitting .286/.418/.497 in 52 (of 60) games, even getting some MVP votes. I completely forgot that, myself, following two seasons of .235/.328/.381 in just 105 games. The Angels can make the playoffs with a middling Rendon; they can get to another level, though, if he finds that 2020 line again.