Newsletter Excerpt, April 20, 2026 -- "Step Right Up and Beat the Mets..."

 

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Hoerner has struck out nine times this year in 97 plate appearances. He struck out 8% of the time last year, 10% of the time in 2024. If you need a ball in play -- say, when the winning run is on third with one out -- Hoerner is absolutely the guy you want up there. Only Arraez has a better contact rate since 2024. Behind him was Michael Busch, a good player off to a poor start who, even at his best, has twice Hoerner’s strikeout rate, Even taking into account the platoon advantage Busch would have, the Mets’ best chance of getting out of the inning was to intentionally walk Hoerner and try to strike out Busch. In the event Kimbrel walked Busch, that would bring up Alex Bregman. Bregman is also a good contact hitter, but not as good as Hoerner, and if he were batting, there would be a force available at every base, making some of his contact good for the Mets.

There won’t be two times a year I advocate for an intentional walk, but this is one of them. Mendoza needed to maximize the chance of a strikeout, and instead he minimized it. Hoerner flied out to right, PCA scored, and the Mets lost their 11th straight contest.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 17, 2026 -- "Alex Bregman"

 

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)

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There’s a point at which patience becomes passivity. We don’t talk about it as much as we used to, because we have more granular tools, but back in the day we would discuss how older players’ walk rates would sometimes spike just before the players collapsed entirely. The idea was that hitters who knew they couldn’t quite get to all pitches would hunt the ones they could hit hard. This would produce more walks, but it was often a sign that the players were about to age out of the league.

Bregman may lead the league in this stat I’ve made up, but it’s not like he’s doing much differently than he has in recent seasons. Bregman’s take rate outside of two-strike counts was seventh in the league last year (76.6%), 30th in 2024 (73.1%), 16th in 2023 (75.4%). You can see a trend if you really want to, and I’m curious to see where his 2026 approach goes, but it’s hard to reach a conclusion yet. The catch is Bregman is pairing this passivity with a decline in batted-ball quality. His expected slugging has bled seven points a year and has collapsed to .363 in the early going. His hard-hit rate is actually going up, but the baseball isn’t, as Bregman is posting the highest groundball rate of his career (48%).

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 15, 2026 -- "Potpourri"

 

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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There’s just no way you should be flipping out over any team’s record at this point. The entire league is separated by seven games, and when you take out the Dodgers the gap is just five from #2 through #30. Everyone is pretty much clustered around .500, and pretty much every team in baseball goes 11-7, as the Twins have, or 6-11, as the Red Sox have, at some point during the season. Four words: Let the season breathe.

I was curious, though, so I peaked at Clay Davenport’s Adjusted Standings, just to see if there was anything interesting. As of this morning, there are four teams with at least a two-game difference between their actual record and their third-order record. The Reds (+3) and Cardinals (+2.5) have much better records than their underlying performance indicates. On the flip side, the Mariners (-2) and Cubs (-2) are playing better than their records. Just something to keep an eye on, and maybe a reason not to panic, Cubs fans.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 14, 2026 -- "Thinking Inside the Box -- Game of the Year?"

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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)

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Did they play the Game of the Year last night?

Yankees 11, Angels 10

         1  2  3   4  5  6   7  8  9   R  H  E

Angels   0  0  0   4  0  3   1  2  0  10 12  1

Yankees  2  2  0   0  3  1   0  0  3  11 14  1

Maybe they did, but the year, perhaps, was 2017. With the April weather turning warm, finally, we saw 144 runs scored, all in regulation, across ten MLB games. There were 37 home runs hit. The league OPS jumped eight points in one day, from 693 to 701. 

This was the first contest of 2026 in which both teams reached ten runs in a nine-inning game. It had three ties and two lead changes. The most 2017 thing about it? It lasted three hours and 36 minutes, just the 22nd nine-inning game to run over 3:30 since the pitch clock was introduced in 2023. The Yankees have played two of them in the last two weeks, including a 3:49 game April 4 that is the longest nine-inning game of the pitch clock era.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 13, 2026 -- "The Best-Laid Plans..."

 

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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So what do you do here? Alcantara has seen his two-seamer get rapped for a pair of singles. He’s no doubt seen the numbers that show Dingler has had most of his MLB success against two-seamers and change-ups. On the other hand, Alcantara’s putaway pitch this year has been that changeup, and Dingler just barely nicked it on 0-2.

For all of the advances we’ve made in analyzing baseball, in figuring out the most effective way to get a strike, retire a batter, hang a zero, throw six strong innings, the biggest moments will often come down to the same choice pitchers might have made in 1976: my strength or his weakness? Make that choice, and then it just comes down to, as clichéd as this is now, executing a pitch.

Alcantara went with his change-up, but it was poorly located, up and over the inside corner. Dingler got his hands in, caught the ball out in front and hit it 404 feet for three runs. He broke the game open and broke, 20 minutes in, my plans of writing up a pitcher’s duel.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 9, 2026 -- "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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card. (Zelle users, please email me for details.)

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Cardinals 6, Nationals 1

                 AB  R  H  BI

Walker RF         4  1  1   1 HR

Is this finally happening? Jordan Walker’s fifth homer of the season, to the deepest part of Nats Park, was his fourth in five games. That includes a grand slam over the weekend in Detroit that landed somewhere north of Windsor. Walker is hitting .295/.367/.682, with a 14/5 K/BB and a 29% strikeout rate.

There are mixed signals in the underlying numbers. Walker is finally putting the ball in the air, with the highest flyball rate and lowest groundball rate of his career. What he’s not doing is hitting the best kind of fly balls, with a 3.3% pulled-flyball rate that ranks 247th among 265 qualified hitters. Digging into his swing data, you can see that he’s swinging “up” more, with an 8% attack angle that’s the highest of his career, without sacrificing swing speed to do it. This is what we’ve been hoping to see from Walker for a long time, him getting the ball in the air and letting his strength do the rest.

What you hope is that we’re in the middle of the process. Walker has adjusted his bat path to hit the ball up, and what will come next is catching the ball in front more often so as to hit more of those flies to the pull side. Walker has enough power to center and right to be productive hitting to all fields. It’s a tougher way to make a living, though. You want oppo power to be part of the mix without carrying the profile. 

I think we’re seeing a hot stretch from a hitter who is still a work in progress. The 1050 OPS isn’t real, but the higher flyball rate is. Walker will vary widely around the mean this year but end up hitting .270/.335/.490 or so and finish the season as a completely new hitter compared to 2025, set to enter a extended peak a bit like George Springer’s (.274/.364/.491, 131 OPS+) from 25 to 29, or Derrek Lee’s (.288/.376/.530, 134 OPS+) at the same ages.