Friday, September 22, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, September 22, 2023 -- "Big Weekend in Texas"

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.

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"The Mariners’ power rotation is the biggest part of why they lead the majors in ERA and are second in FIP. Only the Braves and Twins get more swinging strikes. They do it with the fastball; Mariners starters throw the highest percentage of fastballs in MLB (45.1%), and their starters’ fastballs have the highest run value in baseball by a wide margin.
 
"The Rangers? They like hitting fastballs: sixth in SLG, seventh in wOBA against heaters. There’s your first key to the series: Can the Mariners’ young guns beat the Rangers’ fastball-loving lineup?"

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, September 21, 2023 -- "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.

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"All three teams in the AL West race won yesterday, and all have Thursday off. All three have 68 losses, with the Astros up a half-game by dint of winning one more than the Mariners and Rangers have.

"With the three teams separated by a half-game, I am going to break format here -- no boxscore line -- to lay out an emerging, if unlikely, nightmare scenario developing. It is possible that we’re headed for a three-team tie in the AL West. The Mariners play their last ten games against the Rangers and Astros, so unless they play very well or very poorly, we’re not likely to get a lot of separation in this group between now and next Sunday. We could wake up on October 2 to the following:

"Team A   91-71   #2 overall seed in the AL, bye to the Division Series
Team B   91-71   last wild card team, off to Minnesota for the Wild Card Series
Team C   91-71   year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni

"Now, I’m opposed to using tiebreakers to determine playoff berths, so I come in with my own biases here. I think what happened between the Braves and the Mets last year should have caused MLB to rethink this process, but it didn’t. If, a year later, one team goes 91-71 and gets the #2 seed, and one team goes 91-71 and gets a boot in the ass, we’re going to be able to heat the Dakotas all winter with fire from the takes.

"Baseball teams play 162 games over 187 days to determine who’s the best. If that’s not enough, one more game -- two if necessary, even -- should be played to make that determination. The AL West may be about to make that point better than I ever could."

 

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, September 19, 2023 -- "A Miracle?"

 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.

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"Turning over the roster to the kids, though, hasn’t worked. The Yankees have given playing time to eight players 25 and younger this year. They’ve hit .202/.281/.340. Only Jasson Dominguez, in 33 PA before his injury, has even a 90 OPS+. Anthony Volpe has been valuable for his defense and speed, putting up a three-win season; of the other seven, though, five have been sub-replacement-level players. The failure of this generation of Yankees prospects to launch is a big part of the team’s disappointing 2023 season."
 

 

Monday, September 18, 2023

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, September 18, 2023 -- "The Orioles' Future is Now"

 

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.

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: The Orioles' Future is Now
Vol. 15, No. 98
September 18, 2023

It just had to be Adley Rutschman.

Sunday afternoon, first place in the balance, 37,000 people on their feet, it had to be Adley Rutschman scoring the winning run, maybe the clinching run, the run that would send the Orioles back to the playoffs, maybe to the AL East title. Rutschman, on third base playing the role of the Manfred Man, trotted home easily on Cedric Mullins’s 11th-inning fly ball to give the Orioles a 5-4 win and a two-game lead, effectively two-and-a-half game lead, over the Rays with two weeks to play.

Rutschman was the reason the game was even in the 11th. With two outs in the tenth, down a run, Rutschman fisted a single just to the right of second base to drive home Aaron Hicks with the tying run. 

It had to be Adley Rutschman. More than anyone else, it’s Rutschman, the first pick of the 2019 draft, the first pick of the Orioles’ long rebuild, who represents this new era of Orioles baseball. He’s a throwback to the Earl Weaver Orioles, who drew walks and hit homers and played defense and didn’t beat themselves. Rutschman has started 245 games in his MLB career, and in those games his Orioles are a .600 team. In the two biggest games of his career to date, Saturday and Sunday, Rutschman went 4-for-8 with a homer and a walk.

It wasn’t just Rutschman, though. In fact, Sunday’s heroics were set up by two losses in which the catcher went 0-for-8 with three strikeouts, the Orioles letting the Rays tie them atop the division, scoring just four runs in two games. That set up a Saturday night battle for first place that went like this:

In the top of the first, Grayson Rodriguez retired three batters on 11 pitches, striking out two.

In the bottom of the first, Gunnar Henderson lined Tyler Glasnow’s first pitch into center field for a single, and then scored the game’s first run a few minutes later.

In the top of the second, Grayson Rodriguez retired three batters on 14 pitches, striking out two.

In the bottom of the second, Gunnar Henderson hit Glasnow’s first pitch way out to center field to give the Orioles a 4-0 lead.

A year ago, Rodriguez was the best pitching prospect in baseball and Henderson the best position player prospect. This weekend, the two combined to fend off the Rays’ challenge, keeping the Orioles in first place and locking up the tiebreaker between the two. Their work Saturday set up Rutschman’s Sunday. Now on Monday, the Orioles have a magic number of ten.

No one’s future is guaranteed. Six years ago, I wrote a piece that declared the Cubs an emergent dynasty, yet their 2016 championship turned out to be their most recent one. The Orioles have Rutschman and Henderson and Rodriguez, and they have Jordan Westburg and Heston Kjerstad, and around the corner there’s Jackson Holliday and Colton Cowser. Their future is as bright as any team’s.

This weekend, over 36 hours at Camden Yards, we saw their present, and it was glorious.

 

Friday, September 15, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, September 15, 2023 -- "Duel in the Desert"

 

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.

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"Losing one reliever should never be devastating, but Alzolay is the Cubs’ best, the key piece in the Jenga tower. His absence pushes Merryweather and Leiter and Michael Fulmer and Jose Cuas up the leverage ladder. Of late, David Ross is leaning on starters Drew Smyly and Hayden Wesneski in relief, to good effect. Ross’s ability to get the most out of this pen, something I praised him for back in June, will be a key element in the Cubs holding on to a playoff berth. The team got to reset the pen with an offday Thursday."
 
 

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, September 14, 2023 -- "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.

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Rangers 10, Blue Jays 0

                     IP  H  R ER BB  K
Montgo’y (W, 9-11)  7.0  4  0  0  1  3


We started the week wondering if the Rangers could do enough to stay in the race. They, uh, did. Last night’s obliteration of the Blue Jays locked up a series win, pushed them into the #2 wild-card slot and kept them within a game of the Astros in the AL West. The Rangers, who lost Max Scherzer for the season Tuesday night, bounced back behind their other big deadline pickup.

For the second straight season, Jordan Montgomery has changed teams at the deadline and shown out. He has a 3.59 ERA and 3.55 FIP for the Rangers in eight starts, averaging six innings a start and walking just nine of 191 batters faced. Depending on how you feel about Nathan Eovaldi’s reliability, Montgomery might be the Rangers’ #1 starter in the postseason, ahead of Eovaldi and Jon Gray.