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.
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"Mostly, though, it’s because the war has been won. When I first started writing about the importance of short-sequence offense in the playoffs, back in Sports Illustrated in 2013, the dominant analysis was that you had to play small ball to win in the postseason. This was gospel, the value of productive outs, one-run strategies, going base to base. The research showed that, no, you had to play to score as many runs as possible on as few swings as possible. Hitting homers was more important, not less important, in the playoffs. The percentage of runs that score on homers goes up in October. The winning percentage of the team that hits more homers goes up in October. "
