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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"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 his game.
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Circling back to this format today so I can clear the decks for a busy day of media spots. OK, and one last football draft.
Braves 5, Phillies 2
IP H R ER BB K
Luzardo (W, 14-5) 9.0 2 0 0 1 12
Here’s a thesis: Jesus Luzardo, not Cristopher Sanchez, is the Phillies’ #1 starter. After yesterday, when he threw the season’s tenth shutout, Luzardo is still behind Sanchez in all the ways we measure pitchers, but that bakes in Sanchez’s early-season scoreless streak. Since the beginning of June, Luzardo has a 2.01 ERA, 2.77 FIP, 111 2/3 innings pitched and 3.5 FanGraphs WAR, all of which lead the Phillies. (Sanchez has a 3.44 ERA, 3.18 FIP, 102 IP and 2.5 fWAR.) He’s striking out 32% of the batters he’s faced since then, and his 25% K-BB is sixth in baseball.
Luzardo’s leap forward parallels a change in his mix, as he’s de-emphasized his sinker in favor of a four-seam fastball that he delivers at 96 and misses bats with. Luzardo throws that and a sweeper about 70% of the time. (Charlotte Varnes of The Athletic has more on that sweeper, which the Phillies added to his repertoire last year.) Yesterday, the sweeper got 12 whiffs and a silly 55% swing-and-miss rate.
The Phillies were only able to split at home with the Braves over the weekend. They’re still four back of the Braves, and they lose ties, so they are probably playing for the #4 seed to host the Cubs in the wild-card round. Even with that, though, I came out of the weekend thinking about how much they look like a recent champion:
-- Exceptional starting rotation, especially at the front
-- Top-heavy lineup, with a leadoff-hitting DH who hits dingers
-- Very old group of position players
-- A Hall of Fame first baseman in the #3 spot
-- A shortstop in his decline phase
-- A bullpen that has been unreliable at times, and could be reinforced in October by a rookie SP
Am I crazy or are the 2026 Phillies shaped almost exactly like the 2025 Dodgers?
Orioles 6, Guardians 4
AB R H BI
Mayo 3B 5 2 2 3 2 HR
Coby Mayo may not reach the expectations placed on him as a top-25 prospect a few years back, but he has, at 24, established himself as a lefty-mashing power threat. His third-inning homer off Joey Cantillo was his league-leading 16th off a lefty this year, and he ended the day batting .323/.384/.752 against southpaws. He’s just an out against righties, and he is somewhere between below-average and unplayable at third base, so it’s a limited skill set at the moment.
Mayo’s homer put the Orioles up 2-0 in a game they had to have. They have to have the next two as well. They trail the Guardians by three games in the wild-card race, and the Guards are up 3-1 in the season series. If the Orioles win the next two, they are still in this thing at one back of Cleveland and 3-3 head-to-head. Lose one of the next two, though, and they’d be three back, effectively 3 1/2, with 15 to play. Given that they sold at the deadline, maybe “playing relevant games in the second week of September” is the best they could hope for. They do have six games left with the Blue Jays.
Diamondbacks 5, Royals 4 (10 inn.)
Diamondbacks 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 -- 5 10 1
Royals 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 -- 4 8 1
Please tell me more how we should mix the stats generated in extra innings with the stats generated while playing actual baseball. I’m listening. This very good scoreless game through nine saw the free runners in the tenth frame lead to nine runs. To update statistics that I haven’t posted in a while:
2026, first nine innings: 8.94 R/9
2026, everything after: 21.66 R/9
It’s not just that the stupid runner will often score. It’s that starting an inning with a runner on second creates the conditions for a big inning. The extra-inning environment has one parallel in baseball history, the very first season of the very first professional league, in 1871, when the game resembled softball more than what we know today as baseball.
Tonight, the Snakes get Corbin Burnes, out for the last 15 months, back after one very brief rehab start at Triple-A in which he threw 17 pitches and sat 92-93 with his fastball. Burnes had Tommy John surgery last June and then was waylaid by a strained shoulder this June. It’s very hard to know what he has to offer, though his return now may be as much about lining him up for a potential playoff run as helping the Diamondbacks win now.
The Diamondbacks have a half-game lead over the Padres for the final NL playoff spot. The two teams are tied 5-5 against each other and meet for three in San Diego on the season’s final weekend. Let’s hope these two keep contact, because that appears to be the only series on that final weekend with direct postseason implications for both teams. For playoff-race purposes, it’s a brutal slate with five interleague series.
Brewers 4, Cubs 3
IP H R ER BB K
Zeferjahn (BS, 4) 0.1 1 1 1 1 1
Ryan Zeferjahn allowed a Jackson Chourio single to score the tying and go-ahead runs in the eighth inning yesterday. The result didn’t matter much -- the Cubs came into the game seven behind the Brewers and would lose a tie with them, so the division had pretty much been decided -- but how Zeferjahn landed in that matchup is interesting to break down. Matthew Trueblood, over at North Side Baseball, took Craig Counsell to task for his path through the inning, and while I had a similar take while watching the game, looking back I think the sequence is a bit harder to parse.
Even though the Cubs came into the game with a pretty fresh pen, Counsell let the efficient Matthew Boyd work through seven innings, taking advantage of a Brewers lineup with three left-handed batters in it. Boyd had retired the last eight men he’d faced on just 29 pitches, and thrown 87 pitches in total, through seven, and left-handed batter Garrett Mitchell was leading off the eighth. Leaving Boyd in to face Mitchell isn’t objectionable.
Mitchell worked a six-pitch walk, creating a decision point for Counsell: bring in Zeferjahn to face Joey Ortiz, or let Boyd face Ortiz. As Counsell said after the game, though, bringing in Zeferjahn probably means facing Jake Bauers, which isn’t an upgrade over Boyd/Ortiz. In addition, Counsell may have anticipated a bunt from Ortiz. The Brewers have laid down 33 sac bunts this year, third in MLB. Ortiz has laid down four, third on the team. Three innings earlier. Cooper Pratt bunted -- possibly for a hit -- with the Brewers down 2-0, a runner on first, and nobody out. This was absolutely a sac-bunt spot, and if Ortiz gets down a successful sacrifice, Counsell can walk Chourio and have a Boyd/Brice Turang matchup.
Counsell’s entire approach to the eighth inning hinged on Boyd getting the left-handed-hitting Mitchell out, and once Mitchell reached, the path through the inning was more complicated. I think Counsell correctly chose to leave Boyd in to face Ortiz, Pat Murphy correctly let Ortiz swing away to keep the bat in Chourio’s hands, and Ortiz did a nice job fouling off two two-strike fastballs before pulling a curve to left for a double. The other guys get paid, too.
Dodgers 6, Reds 3
IP H R ER BB K
Burns 3.0 0 0 0 1 5
Oh, good, another team deciding the Joba Rules are something to be emulated. The Reds, looking to manage Chase Burns’s innings as he comes to the end of a strong second pro season, have done it the dumbest way possible, limiting his starts by length rather than by volume.
There is absolutely no evidence supporting the idea that taking a pitcher who throws 90 to 105 pitches a game and limiting him to 40-50 pitches a game will keep him healthy. If you think Burns has 200 pitches left, or 18 innings left, the way to let him get them is in two or three normal starts, not four to five glorified relief appearances. Keep up his chronic workload, the workload of a starting pitcher, and then shut him down at 28 or 29 starts. This is just a waste of everyone’s time.
Not that we needed any more evidence of this, but the Reds may need to completely start over. They have a lot of young talent; nothing this year shows they know how to turn that talent into wins in a modern MLB environment.
Athletics 6, Blue Jays 5
IP H R ER BB K
Cease 5.0 4 5 4 2 6
After matching Cam Schlitter ace for ace for three months, Dylan Cease double-faulted at deuce last night, allowing five runs in five innings to what’s left of the A’s. He didn’t have much wiggle room, still trying to make up the three starts he lost to a hamstring injury in May. Last night’s outing leaves him further behind Schlittler, who gets to face RoadRockies tonight. The AL Cy Young race may finally be over.
The loss stung the Jays as well, as a win would have tied them for first in the AL wild-card race. Instead they sit under .500 again, a game behind the Guardians, a half-game ahead of the Rangers. Starting Friday, they play nine games in 13 days against the Rangers and Orioles, the last six on the road. Projection systems mostly see the last WC spot as a two-team race between the Jays and Guardians, though there’s no agreement on which team is the favorite.
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Aaron Judge has come off the IL and will play tonight for the Yankees. We’ll watch him closely and write up the AL East race in tomorrow’s Newsletter.
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