Newsletter Excerpt, December 12, 2024 -- "Red Sox/White Sox Trade"

 

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Whatever the Sox get from Crochet is profit. Of the four players they traded, none were likely to be a big part of the 2025 team, and only Kyle Teel and Chase Meidroth had reached Triple-A. They didn’t give up anything they will miss in the short term. Crochet was a four-win pitcher last year and projects as being worth five to six wins in 2025. He makes this team five wins better, five wins that would have put last year’s team in the playoffs. With the Yankees down Juan Soto and the Orioles running in place, this deal elevates the Sox to AL East contenders, and failing that a likely wild-card team.

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 11, 2024 -- "Max Years"

 

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That four-pitch mix also makes him unusually effective when working deep into games. Fried’s career .255/.315/.361 line allowed the third time through is 12th-best in baseball over his eight-season career, and he loses less effectiveness as he pitches deeper in games than his peers do:

               AVG   OBP   SLG   K/BB    K%   OPS+  LgOPS+

First time    .230  .282  .348    4.0   25%    94      96

Second time   .235  .291  .343    3.5   23%    96     104

Third time    .255  .315  .361    3.5   24%   109     113

All pitchers lose effectiveness the third time through, but Fried is the rare pitcher who is often better the third time through than the available relief options are when they enter the game. That’s a big reason why, since the start of 2021, he leads MLB with four shutouts and is third with five complete games. CGSHOs are hard to come by now, of course. Fried is tied for fourth among starters the last four years with 12 starts of at least seven innings and no runs allowed. (Remaining free-agent ace Burnes leads with 16.) 

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 10, 2024 -- "The TV Gap, In Practice"

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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If you take a step back from the details, you can divide MLB teams into two categories: Stable TV situations and unstable ones. Even the Diamond teams only have deals in the short term, and Diamond has proven itself to be a poor partner over any time frame. There are eleven teams I would describe as having stable, profitable TV situations: the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Orioles, Mets, Nationals, Cubs, and Dodgers are on networks built around those teams. Three other teams -- the A’s, Giants, and Phillies -- are partnered with Comcast and seem to be stable. The A’s made Sacramento their temporary home in no small part so as to retain their local-TV deal.

Now, we’re just a few weeks into the 2024-25 offseason, so what follows is a snapshot, but I think it may be an illustrative one. So far, there have been a dozen contract commitments of at least $15 million. Those break down as follows:

11 stable teams: nine signings, $1.365 billion
19 unstable teams: three signings, $156 million

 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 9, 2024 -- "Juan Soto Signs"

 

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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Forget the money -- it doesn’t affect you. Forget the years -- they don’t affect you. It is very rare that that a team can make itself this much better in free agency, and signing a 26-year-old Juan Soto is one of those times. Soto’s combination of skill and youth is incredibly rare on the market, and by signing him, Steve Cohen made the Mets a lot better in one single move. That’s all you can ask from the owner of a baseball team. 

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, November 27, 2024 -- "Blake Snell to the Dodgers"

 

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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You may not want to hear this, but I am impressed by the way Guggenheim Partners is doubling down on putting the best team on the field. Over the last ten non-pandemic years, the Dodgers have averaged 3.8 million tickets sold a year, an absurd run of success at the gate. The Dodgers are trying to give those fans, who pay some of the highest ticket prices in baseball, another championship team. They’re putting the fans’ money on the field. 

The best owner is the one who cares more about the next win than the next dollar, and paying $76 million next year for Blake Snell shows that is exactly where Mark Walter and Guggenheim stand.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, November 26, 2024 -- "NL West Notes"

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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Los Angeles Dodgers

With Japanese righty Roki Sasaki’s eventual bonus coming out of the 2025 international free-agent budget, pretty much every team can pay him the same amount of money. The actual rules governing the pools are complicated, tied to Bud’s Bonus draft picks, but the long story short is the difference in available bonus money is unlikely to be a factor in Sasaki’s decision. He’s going to pick based on where he wants to play and who he wants to play with.

The Dodgers would seem to have a lot of advantages, then. They’re already lining up a six-man rotation for next year with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani. With two Japanese stars on the roster, there’s an infrastructure in place for integrating another one, and organizational experience with how to best make Sasaki’s transition an easy one. The Dodgers are the best team in baseball and the closest thing to a guaranteed playoff team. Sasaki would be asked to be an ace for a lot of other teams; here, he could be the #3 or even #4 starter.

After last year’s outcry over Shohei Ohtani’s contract, in which the player deferred most of his salary for ten years to ease the burden on the team’s payroll, it would be hilarious to see the Dodgers now add a potential frontline starter for $5 million in bonus money and the minimum salary. Ohtani made $1.9 million in his first three seasons in the majors, then $8.5 million for his next two combined. Ohtani’s elbow surgery in 2018 and poor pandemic season in 2020 tamped down his pay, but Sasaki’s compensation will likely follow a similar path. The Dodger wouldn’t be buying talent in this case, but they would be leveraging their success, and their investments in Yamamoto and Ohtani, to add another potential superstar.

I’m sure they’ll try to make a rule stopping that soon, too.