Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Newsletter Excerpt, May 1, 2019, "Thinking Outside 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. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $39.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"What Gallo is doing this year is taking that skill set and pairing it with a bit more contact, a bit more patience. He’s swinging less than he ever had before, a tick more than 40% of the time. He’s swinging and missing less than he ever has before, continuing a career-long trend. Pair those two, and you have a player with the highest walk rate and lowest strikeout rate of his career. Gallo never had to be Jeff McNeil; he just needed to get the bat to the ball a little more often to become one of the scariest monsters in the game. He’s doing that now. Aaron Judge’s 2017 season -- 52 homers, 171 OPS+, second in the MVP race -- is absolutely in play here."