Friday, May 28, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 28, 2021 -- "AL Central 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. 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 nearly 25 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.

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"Well, Baddoo isn’t going to be Chris Shelton. He’s drawn walks in five straight games, and in May has 15 strikeouts against 11 unintentional walks, a very good ratio for the modern game. Baddoo isn’t hitting for the crazy power he did in April, but the tradeoff has made him a much more productive player, with a .431 OBP this month and four steals without being caught."

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 27, 2021 -- "AL East 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. 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 nearly 25 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.

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"I can’t see the Red Sox getting through six months leaning on the likes of Garrett Richards and Nathan Eovaldi for 28-32 starts, and there’s just nothing behind the current rotation, save the possibility of ten starts and 50 innings from Chris Sale. I don’t think it will be enough.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

On Pete Rose, Again

MLB’s embrace of legalized gambling has once again provided an opening for Pete Rose dead-enders to clamor for their hero’s reinstatement and argue his Hall case. Leaving aside the well-covered reasons why the shift in gambling mores doesn’t retroactively make Rose right, the new landscape makes it more, not less, important for Rose’s lifetime ban to remain as such.

Current players, and in fact all baseball employees, need to see that violating Rule 21(d) results in the end of your baseball life, no exceptions. Now, more than ever, we need Rose -- a serial violator of that most critical clause -- to be the example of what happens when you bet on baseball, even if you’re the Hit King.

Pete Rose will do more for the game as a pariah than he could ever do pardoned. In his absence from the game, he serves as a warning to those who now live and play in this more lax environment: Don’t bet on baseball. Ever. You’ll end up like Pete Rose.

Newsletter Excerpt, May 25, 2021 -- "Trading Jacob deGrom"

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 nearly 25 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Trading deGrom wouldn’t be about the money, especially with so much deferred. It’s a baseball decision, and as long as deGrom can be placated to waive his no-trade rights -- no mean feat given his fairly light contract and the leverage a trade would give him to change that -- it seems like one the Mets can justify. A year and a half of deGrom would instantly convert some teams into contenders and elevate the top teams to greatness."
 

Monday, May 24, 2021

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, May 4, 2021 -- "The Giants"

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 nearly 25 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.

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--
 

The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 13, No. 29
May 4, 2021

When you plan to write about a player or team or really anything in advance, there’s always that fear that the story will change before you get to it. I have a hard drive full of column fragments that will never see the light of day because I never wrote them up before the four-game losing streak or 0-for-19 stretch. So when you allude to the next day’s piece in a tagline, you sweat a bit...at least until the team in question has its game postponed. 

There is no team in baseball further from its projected preseason performance than the San Francisco Giants. I pegged them at 70-92, a pace that would make them 12-16 today. Instead they’re 17-11 and just ahead of the Dodgers and Padres in the NL West. It’s real in any number of ways: the Giants have outscored their opponents by nearly a full run per game, and they have just a 6-4 record in one-run contests. They’re just 1-3 in extra innings. None of the usual “fluke” markers are in place a month into the season.

The single biggest reason for their success is defense. No team in baseball is turning balls in play into outs at a higher rate than the Giants are.

Giant Vacuums (Best Defensive Efficiency, 2021)

Giants      .741
Nationals   .735
Indians     .729
Mariners    .723
Astros      .721

I will always circle back to DER because of its simplicity. When a ball is put in play, how often are you turning it into an out? That’s not entirely a credit to the defense -- the pitchers and the park play a role -- but it gets you most of the way there. It’s not trying to measure skill, but performance.

The Giants have strong run prevention (3.2 runs allowed per game, lowest in baseball) with an average strikeout rate because they have been catching everything, especially everything in the air.

Giant Butterfly Nets (Lowest BABIP allowed on fly balls, 2021)

Giants      .044
Orioles     .059
Dodgers     .071
Brewers     .074
White Sox   .074 

This one surprises me a bit because coming into the season, I would not have pegged this as a particularly strong defensive outfield. Mike Yastrzemski can go get it in right, but the Giants have “guys who can play center” more than they have a center fielder. Mauricio Dubon, 26, has speed and some good small-sample numbers in the outfield as a converted infielder, and everyone else is really more a corner guy.

This is where the interaction between the pitchers and the defense is coming into play. Giants pitchers are doing an excellent job of giving up low-quality contact. Giants hurlers are allowing the lowest rate of batted balls at good launch angles, and in fact, the lowest average launch angle (and highest groundball rate) in the majors. When they do allow fly balls, those fly balls have the third-lowest exit velocity and travel the shortest distance of any team’s. Giants outfielders have had, by and large, the easiest job in baseball this year. Overall, Giants opponents’ rate of barrels -- Statcast for “oh, wow!” -- are bottom five in the league.

How are they doing this? There’s no one path here. Alex Fast did a great deep dive into Kevin Gausman’s strong start and how he’s achieving it with more or less a two-pitch mix. Jake McGee has taken over the closer role with one pitch fewer than that, throwing a four-seamer 86% of the time. Three offseason signings -- Anthony DeSclafani, Aaron Sanchez, and Alex Wood -- have combined for a 2.62 ERA in 14 starts, with a 73/21 K/BB, while throwing fewer than 50% four-seam fastballs each.

As great as the run prevention has been, the best story on the Giants carries a bat. Buster Posey opted out of the 2020 season over concerns about exposing himself to the coronavirus with twins at home. Posey had been in a steep decline prior to 2020, hitting just .257/.320/.368 in 2019 at 32, opening the door to the possibility that 8400 innings of crouching had ended his productive career. The year off, however, seems to have rejuvenated him. Posey is hitting .359/.423/.688, and it’s not like he’s getting lucky. Per Statcast, his expected batting average, expected slugging, and expected wOBA are all top 20 among qualified hitters. (For more on Posey, read Jay Jaffe’s excellent analysis.)

Posey’s return has been critical because the preseason concerns about whether the Giants’ jerry-rigged offense would continue being productive have been warranted. 2020 heroes Alex Dickerson, Wilmer Flores, Mauricio Dubon, and Austin Slater have gone pumpkin. Import Tommy La Stella has hit .235/.297/.353. Donovan Solano and Mike Yastrzemski have slipped from their lofty 2020 numbers and suffered injuries. The Giants traded for Mike Tauchman to patch these issues, a move I think might pay off very well. Tauchman got caught in a roster crunch with the Yankees, but I’d take him to be the Giants’ third-best hitter the rest of the season behind Posey and Yaz if they keep him in the lineup. Still, this is going to be an average offense at best.

The Giants deserve their 17-11 mark to date. I’m less convinced they can stay in this race for six months. Playing about as well as they can play for a month has given them just a half-game lead over a Dodger team riddled with injuries and a bunch of Calvinball losses, and a Padres team seriously looking at bringing back Joey Hamilton as a fifth starter. As good as the rotation has been so far, it’s hard to see the Giants getting even 850 innings from the six starters they’ve used. The bullpen is average, and the Giants don’t have a lot of internal depth at the plate or on the mound. They might actually keep this interesting for a little longer; over the next two weeks they play the Rockies, Rangers and Pirates. Their first game against the Dodgers isn’t until May 21, and they will be close enough to the Dodgers for that series to draw a lot of attention.

Two years ago, in Farhan Zaidi’s first season running the Giants, the team was expected to be an in-season seller. Zaidi was, theoretically, hired to put the Giants into a long-awaited rebuild. That summer, the team ripped off an 18-4 stretch wrapped around the All-Star break, pushing them into the wild-card chase in July. Zaidi made a few minor sell-offs at the deadline -- Sam Dyson, Mark Melancon, Derek Holland -- but retained his biggest-ticket items in Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith. The Giants quickly fell out of the wild-card race in August and finished 77-85.

There’s a real chance of a similar story developing here. The Giants simply aren’t going to beat out the Dodgers, so again their path to the playoffs is through the wild-card slots. If anything, this roster is even more ripe for a sell-off; four of the current five starting pitchers are free agents after 2021, as are Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt. Johnny Cueto has an option unlikely to be picked up. The Giants have an improving farm system and extremely low projected payrolls beginning in 2023. Are they better off chasing a playoff berth with this roster, which however well it’s playing doesn’t have much of a baseball future, or cashing in everything to bolster those future teams? 

It’s become fashionable to insist that every team with any chance at all try to win in the current season. Surely we’d like to see more competitiveness around the league, but you can take that thinking to an extreme. Zaidi did that in 2019, keeping the best trade chips on a team that wasn’t very good, then landing in third place with a below-.500 team. Now in 2021, he may be faced with the same choice thanks to this early-season run, a choice made more complicated by what is likely the final season Posey, Belt, and Crawford will play together.

That core, though, hasn’t been good enough since 2016, and in the end will not be good enough in 2021. The Giants’ future is Marco Luciano and Heliot Ramos and Patrick Bailey, and the free-agent market of 2023-24, and some high draft picks in the next few years. Zaidi can’t let another opportunity to improve that future go by. Those three may not be tradable for various reasons -- each has or is about to have ten-and-five rights, to start -- but the short-term Giants, especially the pitchers, have more value to the 2024 team than the 2021 one. 

 

Friday, May 21, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 21, 2021 -- "Fun (?) With Numbers, the Sub- (.200) Mariners"

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 nearly 25 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"Those no-hitters are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is that in a league hitting .236 some teams are going to come in far below that. As the league is making history, some teams are chasing it -- and tons of breaking balls in  the dirt -- as well."
 
 

 

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 19, 2021 -- "Leadership"

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 nearly 25 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.

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"Let’s put all that together. La Russa makes a big speech about how Mercedes shouldn’t have done what he did, repeatedly using the word “consequence,” and then says he apologized to the Twins. La Russa could have had his player’s back and been in the right; he chose this ridiculous code over his player. He made it clear to the Twins that he was with them on this if they wanted to take offense."
 

Monday, May 17, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 17, 2021 -- "Twin Trouble"

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 nearly 25 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.

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"Alex Colome has been bludgeoned -- a 60.5% hard-hit rate, a 14% barrel rate. The average non-grounder off Colome has left the bat at 98.3 mph, or almost as hard as Aaron Judge hits the ball."

Friday, May 14, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 14, 2021 -- "Riffing"

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 nearly 25 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.

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"The Angels must have hit the 85% vaccinated threshold, because they can’t catch anything. Individually, only David Fletcher has been a plus defender by Defensive Runs Saved, while Jose Iglesias, Jared Walsh, and Justin Upton are all four runs to the bad. Even Mike Trout has cost the Angels runs in center."

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 13, 2021 -- "Big Night in Seattle"

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 nearly 25 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.

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"Kelenic’s arrival should be a boost to an offense that is last in the AL in batting average and OBP, and 13th of 15 in slugging. Mariners left fielders have hit .188/.286/.325, with Sam Haggerty taking the plurality of at-bats."

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 12, 2021 -- "It Takes a Village"

 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 nearly 25 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.

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--
 
"What I think was new today was the commissioner’s full-throated support of this notion. It is no longer the position of MLB that getting a ballpark built in Oakland is the priority, if that ballpark doesn’t come with the rest of the package. Today, MLB made explicit the league’s policy that the ballpark is a secondary concern, that public access to that ballpark is a tertiary concern."

Monday, May 10, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 10, 2021 -- "The Stable Red Sox"

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 nearly 25 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.

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"If you make me pick a single reason for the success, it’s stability. The Sox have used just 13 position players all season, the fewest in baseball. One of those, Michael Chavis, has just six plate appearances. Recent injuries to Enrique Hernandez and Christian Arroyo will push that number up. (Jonathan Arauz is on the roster now.) For the 12 hitters on the Opening Day roster to have accounted for all but ten plate appearances this deep into the season is remarkable."

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, May 6, 2021 -- ["Means" Pun Here]

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 nearly 25 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.

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--
 

The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 13, No. 30
May 6, 2021

John Means’s first career no-hitter, by the numbers:

99

Means’s start, with no hits or walks allowed and 12 strikeouts, had a Game Score of 99, making it the 13th nine-inning start this century to reach that threshold, and the first since Lucas Giolito’s no-hitter last August. It goes in the books as one of the top 25 nine-inning starts ever. There are many ways to grade starts now -- we’ll get to another below -- but the ease of Game Score, which can be calculated quickly from a box score, remains my favorite.


26

Means threw first-pitch strikes to 26 of the 27 batters he faced, getting ahead 0-1 on 23 of them. That’s a fast track to a no-hitter. This season, when a pitcher starts 1-0, batters hit .242 in the at-bat; when he starts 0-1, they hit .204. The vig is paid when the batter puts that first pitch in play. They hit .341 in those spots, but yesterday the Mariners put just three first pitches in play, including J.P. Crawford’s final out, going 0-for-3.

As an aside, that .242 number is on an island. With the caveat that it’s early and we haven’t played in warm weather yet...

Lowest league BA after getting ahead 1-0

2021   .242
2020   .257
2018   .262
1988   .265
1989   .265


I’ve written in other contexts about the way in which pitchers control the game to a greater extent than they ever have before. This adds to that pile; even when they spot the hitter a ball, they’re holding the league to a batting average that would be in the bottom five in baseball history overall.


93.2

Two years ago today Means, who had just begun taking regular turns in the Orioles’ rotation, held the Red Sox to three hits and a run over seven innings. That day he averaged 91.9 mph on his four-seam fastball, topping out at 93.8 mph. Yesterday, he threw that four-seamer at 93.2 mph on average, and he reached 94.6 in the eighth inning. He made the All-Star team as a rookie mostly because some Oriole had to go. He’s set to make it this year because he’s one of the best pitchers in the AL, and that increased velocity is a big part of why.


.530

Every no-hitter is stressful in its own way, but this one was as close to a rocking-chair one as you’ll find. The Mariners put 14 balls in play, and of those, just two had a better-than-average chance of becoming a hit, based on how they left the bat. The best chance came off the bat of Kyle Lewis in the second, an 86-mph line drive that was hit almost right at Maikel Franco at third base. Per Baseball Savant, it had an expected batting average of .530. Lewis also hit a ball in the eighth that looked dangerous off the bat, but was hauled in easily by Austin Hays.


4

This was the fourth* no-hitter of the 2021 season in just 35 days, putting the league on pace to shatter the record of seven, set four times, most recently in 2015. I’m a jaded stathead in some ways, but not when it comes to no-hitters. I think they’re cool accomplishments no matter what, and like many fans I hold my breath a little when I’m at a game until both teams have their first base knock. I have never seen one in person, coming closest on this frigid afternoon at Wrigley Field.

(*I’m counting Madison Bumgarner’s. He got credit for a complete game and a shutout. You can’t give him credit for those and not give him credit for a no-hitter.)

With that said, no-hitters need to be somewhat rare to maintain their charm. We had 14 in a two-season stretch in the early 1990s, including four in June 1990, and they lost their luster a bit. I know I personally roll my eyes a bit when the red “no-hitter” flag pops up in the sixth inning on the MLB app, as it seems like we get those a few times a week now. We’ve never seen a hitting environment like this, with the highest strikeout rate ever, and the rate of hits on contact reduced by the deadened baseball. Taking nothing away from Means, Bumgarner, Carlos Rodon, and Joe Musgrove, I am curious to see what the context for their no-hitters will be five months from now.

 

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 4, 2021 -- "The Giants"

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 nearly 25 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"There is no team in baseball further from its projected preseason performance than the San Francisco Giants. I pegged them at 70-92, a pace that would make them 12-16 today. Instead they’re 17-11 and just ahead of the Dodgers and Padres in the NL West. It’s real in any number of ways: the Giants have outscored their opponents by nearly a full run per game, and they have just a 6-4 record in one-run contests. They’re just 1-3 in extra innings. None of the usual “fluke” markers are in place a month into the season."

Monday, May 3, 2021

Newsletter Excerpt, May 3, 2021 -- "Early Outliers"

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 nearly 25 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 $59.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"This manifests itself most visibly in April, where the small sample is the only sample, and the standings can look really strange because of that. Even within April, though, you see the issue. Red Sox fans went from apoplectic (swept by the Orioles at home!) to preening (nine-game winning streak!). I mentioned the Yankees in that email above; they started 5-10 and have gone 9-4 since. There was talk about the Nationals as sellers when they were 5-9; they’re tied for first place in the NL this morning. You have to let the season breathe."