Monday, April 22, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, April 22, 2024 -- "Offense Check-In"

 

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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It’s still early enough that much of the drop in performance on contact could be noise related to weather and the mix of players in and out of lineups and which parks have seen more games played in them. What I think we’re seeing, though, is the effect of the most hittable pitches in baseball being phased out in favor of more difficult ones. Pitchers figured out how to miss bats in the 2010s. It may be they’re figuring out how to induce less valuable contact in the 2020s. The pitchers are still far ahead of the hitters, and that is what’s showing up in the early-season statistics.