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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Third Third Previews, Pt. 5
Vol. 18, No. 75
August 10, 2026
We cap the Third Thirds with the teams that will take up a lot of room in the Newsletter over the next eight to ten weeks. I projected all six as playoff teams in March, and I do the same today. Yes, even the Mariners, I can’t believe it myself.
Within each segment of this series, teams will be listed in reverse order of my preseason rank. It’s a small measure of accountability on my part, so you can see which squads I missed on by the most. Today’s issue includes my top six teams from the preseason, all but one of which have met expectations.
Records and run differentials through Sunday.
6. Milwaukee Brewers (74-44, first in NL Central, first in MLB, +141 run differential). When Tarik Skubal was traded to the Dodgers, many people wondered why the Brewers hadn’t topped the Dodgers’ offer. While they could have traded a better hitting prospect than Zyhir Hope, or combined a couple with high value, there was little argument for using the best prospect in baseball, Jesus Made, to bring in Skubal for nine starts plus another five in the playoffs. Maybe. It also made little sense for them to include Logan Henderson in a trade for Skubal; then you haven’t added, but rather just upgraded from Henderson to Skubal, and at the cost of the next few years of Henderson plus the other prospects you’d put in the deal.
The other issue is that the Brewers need a bat more than they do an arm. A playoff top three of Jacob Misiorowski, Kyle Harrison, and Logan Henderson will be excellent, and the Brewers will tandem out or use bullpen games for the three playoff games that group won’t cover. On the other hand, the Brewers are getting nothing from the DH slot and third base. Had there been a Skubal-equivalent for those roles, then perhaps going all-in for one would have made sense. There just weren’t many impact hitters available, and even the best ones traded probably fall short of “impact.”
So you can arrive at a conclusion for why the Brewers don’t have Tarik Skubal today without resorting to conspiracy theories about MLB putting its thumb on the scale to make Skubal a Dodger and therefore [insert many steps here] impose a payroll cap. The baseball reasons more than suffice.
The Brewers did make some smaller moves, adding a fourth starter in Dustin May, who seems an excellent candidate to make three four-inning starts in the playoffs. They added Antonio Senzatela and JoJo Romero to a bullpen that has been worked very hard, giving Pat Murphy some options to take weight off Aaron Ashby and Chad Patrick. It’s not that Matt Arnold sat on his hands at the deadline, it’s just that he didn’t make a big move. I don’t think it was prospect-hugging. It was the market not fitting his team.
One Stat: The Brewers are hitting .262 with runners in scoring position, their worst mark since 2022.
Reason to Watch: They have the best record in baseball...but remain at risk of playing in the wild-card round. They still have seven games left with the Cubs, 5 1/2 back, all of which happen in a ten-day stretch at the start of September.
5. Seattle Mariners (56-63, third in AL West, 23rd in MLB, -19 run differential). There just wasn’t much for Jerry Dipoto to do. His best players, ones on long-term contracts, the core of the team, just haven’t shown up this year. You can’t make a trade that causes you to bench Cal Raleigh, or Josh Naylor, or Julio Rodriguez. The injury to Luke Raley opened up space to acquire Taylor Ward, but everywhere else the team had solutions who were playing well enough to make them hard to upgrade. If the Mariners miss the playoffs this year, it won’t be on the front office and it won’t even be on Dan Wilson, it will be on three guys falling a combined 10 WAR short of expectations.
Dipoto did solve the team’s “too many starters” challenge, at least for the moment, by trading Luis Castillo for the right to not pay Luis Castillo. Castillo’s underlying numbers were always better than his up-top ones, yet still sixth on his own team. I am curious to see how Dipoto spends the savings this winter, because the Mariners have a pretty inexpensive roster for 2027.
In the short term, I think we have to see Kade Anderson and Ryan Sloan pretty soon. The Mariners’ pen is a mess, and those two are just wasting bullets in the Texas League. They’re far too good for the competition, with a combined 209/25 K/BB -- not a typo! -- at Arkansas. The Mariners need power arms who can go multiple innings. It’s not like the downshift to relieving will be much of a change for the two pitchers. Sloan has yet to go 80 pitches in a game, and Anderson has thrown 80 exactly once. Likely as not, the two would be slowed down at the end of the year anyway. If they each have 25 innings left, they should be throwing those innings in relief of Emerson Hancock. (Jerry Dipoto told MLB.com that Anderson would only be used as a starter, for what it’s worth.)
Every year there’s one team that changes its status pretty sharply between when I start the Third Thirds and when I end them. This year, we have both the Tigers and the Mariners, the latter of which were swept at home by the Rays over the weekend, scoring four runs in the process. I still think they can win the division, but it may be that they just can’t overcome the kind of inexplicable decline Raleigh has suffered this year.
One Stat: Cole Young, not Julio Rodriguez, leads the Mariners in WAR. Young is on his way to a five-win campaign. After taking some time to adjust to second base, he leads the AL in Defensive Runs Saved at second. (Statcast hates his defense, though.)
Reason to Watch: Five starting pitchers with FIPs below 3.85 mean they’re in every game they play. They might call up two of the best pitching prospects in the game, too.
4. New York Yankees (66-52, second in AL East, sixth in MLB, +82 run differential). I’d stopped joking about Aaron and the Judgettes right before the joke hit. Since Judge last played May 31, the Yankees are 26th in runs scored, last in batting average, last in OBP, 25th in SLG, 29th in wOBA, last in wRC+. There is no clearer story for a team this year than “their one superstar hitter got hurt and it all fell apart.”
Adding Luis Garcia Jr. and Heliot Ramos are patches more than solutions, especially since the natural use of the two players is in a platoon. Ramos, a career .247/.305/.388 hitter against righties, has batted in the top four spots in the lineup against righties in four of his first five games as a Yankee. That’s going backwards. Garcia has hit .233/.258/.333 against lefties, and .200/.238/.358 against them in his breakout year. If Judge and Cody Bellinger make it back for the playoffs, Garcia and Ramos will be great additions to a postseason bench. They are stretched in everyday roles, though Garcia is at least the strong side of any platoon.
It’s a bit much for today, but there’s a story to be written about the Yankees’ handling these last few years of Anthony Volpe and Jasson Dominguez, both demoted last week. I don’t think the organization has done well by either player. It’s never easy to suss out how much poor performance is attributable to the player versus how the team handled him. I’m confident saying some part of what we’ve seen from the two young Yankees is an effect, rather than a cause.
The Yankees still have the sixth-best record in baseball and a near-lock on a playoff berth because the pitching is just that good. Also dating to the Judge injury, Yankees starters are third in ERA, third in FIP, third in FanGraphs WAR. The team’s relievers are second in ERA, fifth in FIP, seventh in fWAR. If the team’s hitters haven’t picked up Judge, the pitchers certainly have, and mostly without Carlos Rodon, and with waiver bait like Brent Headrick and Paul Blackburn pitching all too often in leverage. The Yankees’ ability to take random arms off the street and get 60 good innings from them continues unabated.
One Stat: Yankees starters have already racked up 13.4 fWAR, on pace for 18.4. Even getting to 17 would make this their strongest rotation since 2003, which was the best in franchise history at 23.8 fWAR.
Reason to Watch: Everything I wrote about the Phillies applies here. The Yankees just aren’t a very good watch right now, and may not be until Judge returns, if he returns this season at all.
3. Chicago Cubs (69-50, second in NL Central, fifth in MLB, +107 run differential). If the Brewers weren’t made of magic and wonder, would we regard the Cubs differently? They won 92 games last year, the sixth-best record in baseball, but finished five games behind the Brewers (it wasn’t really that close) and lost to them in five games in the Division Series. This year, the Cubs have the fifth-best record in baseball, on pace for 94 wins despite an epic run of pitcher injuries...and they’re again chasing a Brewers team with the best record in baseball.
The Cubs even won the trade deadline. No contending team, not even the Dodgers, made as big an improvement to its roster as the Cubs did by adding Kevin Gausman, Clay Holmes, and Ryan Zeferjahn to their staff. Even Tyrone Taylor, who came from the Mets with Holmes, is a great fit, a true center fielder who can back up Pete Crow-Armstrong. The Cubs needed some actual major-league pitchers as they wait for some of their injury cases to return, and they got them.
What they still don’t have is a true #1, or a #2, and arguably not even a #3. (None of you jerks laughed at my Miranda July joke.) That’s a hard path through the playoffs, when they might go their entire run without having the better starting pitcher in a game. It’s entirely possible the Cubs would have to go through the Phillies, Dodgers, and Brewers in succession, and I don’t know if even this improved rotation will be up to that kind of gantlet. The Cubs need to play well, and they need to catch well come the postseason matchups.
One Stat: I swear I have been working on a PCA piece and will get it out soon. For now, here’s this: With 7.5 bWAR through just about 75% of the season, Crow-Armstrong has a chance to have the first ten-bWAR season by an NL player since Barry Bonds in 2004.
Reason to Watch: Well, that guy, but also the fact that the Cubs are a bit like the opposite of the Yankees and Phillies. They play excellent defense with a lot of athletic players and, clutch-hitting issues aside, are a good watch.
2. Boston Red Sox (64-53, third in AL East, seventh in MLB, +84 run differential). I say it every year in April and even May: Let the season breathe. Whatever you think the internal variance of a team’s performance is, it’s greater than that.
The Red Sox went 27-39, then 37-12, then somehow lost two games at home to what little is left of the Sacramento Athletics. So sure, call it 27-39, then 37-14. You simply cannot, cannot, cannot get your mind around what baseball teams are capable of when playing 162 games over 187 days. We see this every year, and then the next April some team is 7-16 and we all forget.
Let the season breathe.
The Red Sox will fall well short of my projections, though 88 wins while getting nothing from Garrett Crochet, Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, and Triston Casas is pretty good. Caleb Durbin is now about a half-win better than Kyle Harrison. Ceddanne Rafaela is PCA Lite. Four starting pitchers have FIPs of 3.52 or lower, a group that doesn’t include Crochet.
I don’t love the Adley Rutschman trade. He hasn’t been a star since 2023, he is hurt at the moment, and asking any catcher to learn 15, 16, 20 new pitchers in the middle of the season just seems mean. The Sox do get a multi-year solution here, which helps soften the blow of the price paid.
I perceive a pretty wide gap between how I value Rutschman and how the world does, and I will be interested to discover whether the guy with the star reputation or the guy with a 103 OPS+ the last three seasons shows up in Boston.
One Stat: Red Sox catchers are 24th in wRC+ and 25th in fWAR, so it’s not like Rutschman is bumping Yogi Bench Piazza.
Reason to Watch: They’re almost certainly making the playoffs, they have a shot to win the division, and they’re doing it with two Brewers rejects in the middle infield. Chad Tracy might be a genius.
1. Los Angeles Dodgers (70-48, first in NL West, fourth in MLB, +138 run differential). There was some great work about the Dodgers’ issues with velocity, first by Eno Sarris on Rates and Barrels and then by Chad Moriyama at Dodgers Digest. The short version is that as the year has gone on, opposing pitchers have thrown more and more four-seam fastballs at the Dodgers, and they’re not handling the challenge well.
This is the best on-field exploitation of something I’ve written about here, the fact that older hitters are being chased out of the league earlier and earlier because they can’t keep up with rising velocity. The Dodgers and Phillies were at risk this year with their older lineups, though I thought the Dodgers, starting from a higher level of performance, were in better shape. We are still talking about the #2 offense in baseball, okay, but it’s 14th since the start of June and 19th over the last 30 days, as they see more and more four-seamers.
Dave Roberts is a very loyal guy, one of his strongest traits, and I don’t think he’s going to replace Mookie Betts (.202/.256/.286 last 30 days) or Max Muncy (.176/.273/.426). I do wonder, given the team already has one lineup hole at catcher, if the pressure will mount on Tommy Edman (.225/.279/.363) or Teoscar Hernandez (.247/.284/.416). Josue De Paula is hitting .315/.416/.556 at Double-A. Teammate Mike Sirota is hitting .316/.470/.540 since being promoted. The Dodgers need to get younger, and they may need to get younger immediately.
One Stat: The Dodgers got to 22 games over .500 on June 19. They’re just 21-21 since then. I would love to see them play one season, just one, where they had to win as many games as possible.
Reason to Watch: To see if Kyle Tucker, with an 1109 OPS in August, can salvage a credible season after a miserable first four months.
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