Joe Sheehan Newsletter, January 22, 2026 -- "Queens Night Market"

 

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It was the second Mets trade that caused a lot of chatter, and they weren’t even the main character in it. As had been anticipated for a while, the Brewers traded Freddy Peralta in the final year of his deal. They got infielder -- probably -- Jett Williams and right-hander Brandon Sproat. The two enter the Brewers’ system at #3 and #6 per Pipeline, and they will rank #46 and #71 on the upcoming Baseball Prospectus Top 101. These are real prospects, if ones with a bit less shine than they had a year ago.

In Peralta, the Mets get a starter who by the ridiculous standards of 2026 is a workhorse. Over the last three seasons, Peralta is tied for fifth in starts (95) and is 15th in innings pitched (516). He hasn’t missed a start in three years. That kind of availability is valuable to a Mets team that lacks it. They will be breaking in young arms, leaning on converted relievers, and hoping the healthy Kodai Senga returns from war. Peralta, with the usual caveats about pitchers, should stabilize that situation. The Mets needed what he brings to the table.

So why wouldn’t the Brewers, also contenders, coming off a season in which they had the best record in baseball, hold him? Peralta will make just $8 million this year, chump change by baseball standards, so it can’t be a payroll concern. What it is, rather, is the same thing that motivated them to trade Corbin Burnes two years ago: to get something for a player likely to leave in free agency. Burnes brought back a similar package, in fact, shortstop Joey Ortiz and lefty DL Hall.

Peralta, though, is no Burnes.

More Like Ace-Jack Suited (Burnes and Peralta, trade year and three-year stats)

                   GS     IP     ERA    FIP   xERA   bWAR   fWAR

Burnes 2023        32  193.2    3.39   3.81   3.38    3.5    3.4

Peralta 2025       33  176.2    2.70   3.64   3.47    5.5    3.6

                   GS     IP     ERA    FIP   xERA   bWAR   fWAR

Burnes 2021-23     93  562.2    2.94   2.92   ----*  13.1   15.5

Peralta 2023-25    95  516.0    3.40   3.88   ----*  10.0    8.9

*I can’t figure out how to get xERA over multiple seasons. Surely user error.

Burnes was a superstar when the Brewers traded him, with a Cy Young in his pocket and votes in four straight seasons. Peralta has gotten votes in one year, last year, finishing fifth. Peralta does throw a fair amount of innings, but in that time he’s tenth in ERA (min. 400 IP), 30th in FIP, 12th in bWAR, 19th in fWAR. That’s a good pitcher. It’s not an ace. This isn’t the Burnes trade.

I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth a little bit here, saying Peralta is what the Mets need while downplaying his importance to the Brewers. The Brewers’ projected rotation, down through the #8 spot or so, includes two pitchers who threw 150 innings last year, just three who have ever done so. It’s not like 150 innings of Freddy Peralta would hurt them. Pick your projection system: They all say the Brewers have to replace about three wins now. 

I just think they’re capable of doing that. Even throwing Tobias Myers into this deal, the Brewers have enviable pitching depth. They’ll get more from Jacob Misiorowski this year, more from Logan Henderson, probably more from Brandon Woodruff. Sproat, who reached the majors late in 2025 and had a 2.80 FIP in four starts, will be part of the mix. A top-50 prospect a year ago, Sproat was a mess at Triple-A for two months before he got straightened out.

The other prospect in the deal, Jett Williams, is in a tough spot, jammed between a good infield ahead of him in Milwaukee and some of the game’s best infield prospects in Jesus Made and Luis Peña behind him in Double-A and high-A. Like Carson Benge, Williams raked at Double-A before hitting the wall after a promotion to Triple-A. That’s probably where he starts 2026, and he needs to play well to avoid getting lapped by Made and Peña by the end of the season.

Look, I think teams should spend more money on players than they do, and the Brewers are going backward in this area. However, there has to be room to consider a bigger picture. Peralta isn’t an ace, and trading one year of his three-win work in return for potentially 12 years of Williams and Sproat is a good deal. Not everything maps to the money wars. The Brewers can replace Peralta’s work with the players they have on hand. Would I like to see them now sign Framber Valdez, especially with their infield defense? Absolutely. I’m OK with them stopping here, though. Forget the money -- the Brewers took a small short-term hit, and maybe not even that, for a big medium-term return.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 22, 2026 -- "Cody Bellinger and the Yankees"

 

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Bellinger, 30, has had one of the strangest careers of the century. For seven seasons out of nine, he’s been a productive hitter from the left side with good power with a strong idea of the strike zone, playing plus defense at multiple positions, and showing baserunning savvy. In the middle of that, in 2021 and 2022, he hit .193/.256/.355 over 900 plate appearances, two seasons of replacement-level play that got him non-tendered by the Dodgers after the ’22 campaign. Since then, from 27 through 29, he’s been the player you would have projected him to be after his age-24 season. Simply bizarre, and most likely the result of an injury stack (shoulder, fibula, hamstring, ribs) that wrecked his mechanics for more than a year.

Like a lot of free-agent deals this winter, there’s not much to say. The Yankees get a three-win player for a three-win price, and they avoid retaining him too deep into his thirties. Bellinger will, as he did last year, give Aaron Boone some Team Pretzel options and help the Yankees’ lineup depth when Giancarlo Stanton, who hasn’t batted 500 times since 2021, is unavailable. 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 20, 2026 -- "The Honorees"

 

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Beltran then tacked on a coda to his career that will be discussed for as long as there is baseball. As he aged, he leaned into being a power hitter, becoming a have-bat, will-travel right fielder and DH. From 2012 through 2016, Beltran hit 119 homers and posted nine bWAR for the Cardinals, Yankees and Rangers, pushing three of those teams to the playoffs and one to the World Series. 

Had it ended there, had Beltran retired with 71 bWAR and 421 home runs, with one of the all-time great postseason lines (.323/.432/.646, 16 homers, 11/0 SB/CS), he’d have been in the Hall of Fame a few years ago. Beltran, though, signed with the Astros, at 40, looking for the one thing left to cap his career, a World Series ring. He got the ring, but he’ll count the cost for years. Beltran was one of the architects of the Astros’ sign-stealing system, which used a TV screen in the dugout to decode catchers’ signs and a primitive signaling system to let batters know what pitch was coming. 

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, January 20, 2026 -- "Bo Bichette and the Mets"

 

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The Mets have spent the last few years trying to sort out a number of homegrown, or close enough to it, infielders. Mark Vientos broke out in 2024 before slipping a bit in ’25. Brett Baty executed the reverse play, posting a three-win season last year and even showing some ability to play second base as well as third. Ronnie Mauricio returned from a year lost to a knee injury to play reasonably well in a bench role without a path to a regular one. Across two seasons, Luisangel Acuña’s numbers are similar to Mauricio’s and he was 16-for-17 stealing bases last year. It was hardly difficult to see the Mets going into 2026 with some combination of these players around Francisco Lindor on the dirt.

Instead, Stearns has gone out and blocked those guys as if they stole his girl. The Mets traded Nimmo for Marcus Semien, a player who in most years plays 99% of his team’s innings at second base. The Mets signed Jorge Polanco, who has spent his entire career, save a wretched 200 innings at third base, at shortstop and second. Now they’ve added Bichette, who given the presence of Semien and Lindor has no place to play but third base. The Mets, strong in the infield and weak in the outfield, have traded 1400 innings of outfielder and added none, while adding 3000 innings of infielder while dealing 575. Their two free-agent signings, paid $62 million in 2026, are redundant.

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, January 16, 2026 -- "Kyle Tucker and the Dodgers"

 

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Of course, the baseball of it isn’t why people are talking about this contract today. The upgrade in left field, the fit in the lineup, even Tucker’s injury history and slow bat aren’t driving the conversation. No, it’s mostly about the Dodgers signing a player to a contract with the highest average annual value ever, after signing a reliever to the highest average annual value ever for a reliever, after signing a player to the highest total contract ever, after signing a pitcher to the biggest contract a pitcher ever got, after, after, after...

I don’t have anything for you that you haven’t already heard from me. I’m just never going to be mad about a team trying to win. MLB should be competitive, not collaborative. Teams should have to fight for the best players, not have the players fight among themselves for a limited pile of available money. Teams should value wins more than they do money, championships more than they do profits, while noting that the former will always drive the latter.

Do the Dodgers have an advantage? Yes. They have well-capitalized ownership and, playing in a big city, access to more fans and more television homes. They, like the teams in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Houston, have structural advantages. That should be the case. When teams in those places succeed, more people are happy and more money is made. Some advantage is reasonable. Milwaukee and Chicago are not equal. New York and Kansas City are not equal.

(Before you send me an email with the letters “NFL,” let me remind you that the NFL doesn’t have local markets. There’s no local TV and you need to sell about 600,000 tickets a year, which is less than the Rays and A’s sold in minor-league parks this year. The season is 1/9th as long. The business models are not comparable, and that’s before we get into the labor relations.)

MLB has put massive systems in place to account for those differences in potential revenue, while making sure the details are kept quiet and, frankly, welcoming the ignorance of fans about these systems. If net local revenue-sharing transfers were public knowledge the way the details of Kyle Tucker’s pay package are, we’d have much different conversations. We have estimates, coming up on a decade old, that the top teams put in maybe $80 million a year, the bottom teams collect about that much. Those extremes have surely grown due to the collapse of the RSN system. 

The Dodgers probably share about $100 million a year, every year, with other teams. The Dodgers paid $169 million in tax -- just tax -- on last year’s payroll. Eighty million of that goes into a slush fund that gets kicked back to teams that get revenue sharing. So the Dodgers paid $180 million last year to the teams they’re trying to beat. It was about $140-150 million in 2024. How much is enough? The Yankees, the Mets, the Cubs are all sending around $100 million or more a season to the Pirates, the Marlins, the Royals, the Reds, the Brewers, but we don’t have the hard numbers. That’s to MLB’s advantage.

If we had hard information on this, if we could see that since 2016, the Pirates have collected more just in local revenue sharing and luxury-tax kickbacks than they have spent on players, it would change the conversation. If we could see that the Dodgers have shared a billion dollars in revenue since 2018, it would change the conversation. MLB guards that information jealously because it knows that making it publicly available would shift the focus from the teams that spend to the teams that don’t. They benefit from fan and media ignorance when it comes time to press for favorable terms in the next CBA.

As I wrote a few years back, there’s also hidden revenue sharing. Those teams with the biggest fan bases, the ones on TV for much of October, get the same 1/30th slice of the national-TV money that the teams who never appear in those games do. Who is driving the $900 million a year in those deals? Who collects $30 million a year just for existing?

So no, the Dodgers aren’t a problem. The Dodgers are doing what 30 teams should be doing, trying to win. They’re doing it while sending $180 million to teams that, in many cases, aren’t. Don’t let MLB’s success at keeping the latter part a secret fool you.

 

 

 

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

 

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The only thing I can figure is that the Tigers forgot about the clause in arbitration that lets players with at least five years of service time compare themselves to free agents. So Skubal’s team can comp him to pitchers like Zack Wheeler ($42 million a year), Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($27 million a year) and Max Fried ($27 million a year), who have combined for no Cy Young Awards. 

The other possibility is the Tigers tanked the process. I truly don’t know how you can walk into a room and tell a panel that Tarik Skubal, short of free agency by about ten weeks, winner of the last two AL Cy Young Awards, should get a little more than Jameson Taillon, or a little less than Luis Severino. My guess is it never gets to that, but this is the first hearing in a while that I’d pay to watch. “On three occasions, the player in question left a wet towel on the floor rather than toss it in the laundry cart. Moreover, he forgot to leave a tip on one of those awful touchscreens twice. Finally, he was tied for last in the majors in RBI. In conclusion, arbitration is a land of contrasts.”