Newsletter Excerpt, July 6, 2026 -- "Eury Perez"

 

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The people mad about McCullough’s decision are wrong about the specifics. They do, however, point us to a very real change in how we appreciate baseball now. Baseball, all sports really, are now solely about reaching the playoffs and winning rings. All actions, all decisions, are subsumed to those goals. If letting Eury Perez go 120 pitches in a perfect game makes the Marlins 0.3% less likely to make the playoffs, it’s a bad decision. 

That wasn’t always the case. Until the playoff expansion of the 1990s, success for a baseball team was defined in any number of ways. Just four teams made the playoffs in my youth, and while you always wanted your team to be one of them, and to go on to win the World Series, there were other markers of success. Did you contend? If you weren’t expected to be good, were you surprisingly so? Did you bring along exciting rookies, or have a player chase a batting title? Did you provide that one particular memory to build the season around?

Newsletter Excerpt, July 4, 2026 -- "Thinking Inside the Box"

 

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Guardians 4, White Sox 3 (10 inn.)

RISP: 5-8

The Guardians, like their Ohio counterparts, also can’t hit. Last night. they had six singles and five walks, but they had great “cluster luck,” as the great Joe Peta would put it. Five of those six singles came with runners in scoring position, and the last two, off Sean Newcomb in the tenth, advanced and then scored the stupid runner to give the Guardians a second straight one-run with over the White Sox, and sole possession of first place in the AL Central.

Lest we start turning the Guardians into the AL Brewers...well, the Brewers used to be the AL Brewers...note that even after last night, they’re hitting .229/.323/.363 with runners in scoring position. The average and slugging are both 28th in MLB with RISP. They can’t hit, and they don’t have any special ability to hit in leverage. They just happened to stack their hits perfectly last night. The standings don’t care how you got there. 

Newsletter Excerpt, July 3, 2026 -- "Central Time"

 

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I put the Cards under the microscope May 16 and concluded:

So separate the two ideas. The Cardinals are 26-18, but it’s a bit of a mirage built on close games falling their way and the healthiest roster in the league. They’ve used just 14 position players, six starting pitchers (with just one off-rotation start) and 11 relief pitchers (seven accounting for 89% of the relief innings), and the odds say they’ll have to reach into their depth soon enough.

That hasn’t happened. They made some elective changes, with Nootbaar returning and Scott and Gorman losing their jobs, but the position player group has remained healthy. They’ve had one additional off-rotation start, making a total of two. The top seven relievers still account for 84% of the team’s relief innings. I would say that most of the Cardinals’ success, the biggest reason they’re in contention, is that their depth has not been tested at all. Almost any MLB team that only has to use its top 28 or so players is going to have a puncher’s chance to make the playoffs. If that somehow holds up for three more months, the Cardinals can stay in the wild-card mix.  

 

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Newsletter Excerpt, July 1, 2026 -- "Mailbag"

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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The Unhappy Fans

Reds fan here. Local media is driving me crazy. Terry Francona has transformed the team's philosophy into what they call "The Art of Hitting," essentially eschewing pulling the ball into the air, instead encouraging players to hit the ball the other way. Sacrifice bunting in now in vogue.They refer to it as situational hitting. Playing to the scoreboard. The Reds seem to be drifting away from analytics for what they see as a more holistic approach. This seems to be a function of ownership's refusal to spend big money. What say you? 

-- Richard F.

I actually had not heard tell of this. I went and looked, and the Reds are middle of the pack in sac bunts with a bottom-five OBP, indicative of a high rate of use. They’re 23rd in pulled fly balls, eighth in hitting to the opposite field. Last year, they were 12th in pulled fly balls and 26th in oppo rate. So the numbers back up your story that this is an intentional thing.

Here’s the rest of the story: The Reds are 24th in wOBA, 29th in wRC+, 23rd in runs scored, all worse than they were a year ago. By Clay Davenport’s estimates, they’re scoring eight fewer runs than you’d expect from their run elements, so it’s not like these approaches are finding more runs than they might otherwise score.

I can understand why this is driving you crazy. The Reds are preaching a style of play that will produce fewer runs. There’s real passion in many quarters of baseball to disprove what is true: That hitting the ball hard and up is the way to win, that pulled fly balls are the most productive batted balls, that you can’t string singles and bunts together to win a championship. The Reds, and disappointingly Francona, seem more concerned about making a point than winning games. This could well explain why so many of their young hitters have gone backward in recent years.

I don’t know what more you can do than point to the results. It’s not working.

--J.

  

Newsletter Excerpt, June 30, 2026 -- "Texas Five-Step"

 

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Skip Schumaker has settled on Latz as the closer but not a specialist, with Latz entering in the eighth inning six times in 11 June appearances, and racking up six saves of four outs or more. It’s the kind of usage guys like me have been begging for for years. Latz, developed as a starter, actually opened his year starting against the Phillies and going four no-hit innings. He is a three-pitch pitcher who also mixes in a curve on occasion, and perhaps most important to his current usage, has allowed just a .212/.302/.359 slash line to right-handed batted in his five-year career. This year, he’s posted a 30/6 K/UIBB against right-handed batters, with a .098/.167/.195 line. The .118 BABIP allowed is unquestionably doing a lot of work there, but the 33% strikeout rate and 5:1 K/BB show that it’s not just luck.

Latz may have the endurance to be a unicorn who can go multiple innings and also work back-to-back games. As it stands, with nine multi-inning saves, Latz is in position to be the first pitcher since 2019 with at least ten of those (Josh Hader, 15), and has a shot at the 21st-century mark of 16, set by John Smoltz in 2004. Dan Quisenberry had the most with 35 in 1983, and no one has been over 20 since 1990. 

 

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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.)

 

Newsletter Excerpt, June 29, 2026 -- "Swee...wait!...OK, Sweep."

 

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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We are, as we have so often been this year, trapped between the standings and the metrics. One says the Sox are 36-46, in last place, miles out of first and ninth in a 12-team wild-card stack. The other says they’ve outscored their opponents and are a top-five team in the AL with a starting rotation to match. As the Sox head into a very soft portion of the schedule -- home to the Nationals and then a road trip to play the Angels, White Sox, and Mets -- they have a chance to further define themselves as a playoff contender built around starting pitching.

 

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