Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 28, 2023 -- "Manny Machado and the Padres"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"For all the attention on the huge contracts and the trades for the likes of Juan Soto, the Padres are a run-prevention team. They have a very deep pitching staff with a strong rotation, a shutdown bullpen, and they go 16 or 17 deep in credible major-league pitchers."

Monday, February 27, 2023

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, February 27, 2023 -- "The New Rules: Epilogue"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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One of the challenges in looking at the 2023 season is that MLB announced a series of changes at once, which will make it harder to suss out the impact of any one change. As I wrote yesterday, the larger bases and the pickoff restrictions work in tandem to affect basestealing. The restrictions on defensive positioning should add a thousand or more singles, which makes stealing second more valuable. Those same restrictions should make turning double plays a bit easier, again giving teams reason to steal. If the pitch clock hampers the effectiveness of pitchers, that will add baserunners and, presumably, more singles and stolen base opportunities.

I don’t know that any of these changes, by themselves, is major. I can, though, without working too hard, tell a story that is a win for MLB: batting averages up, steals up, movement up, run scoring up. Everyone will fundamentally be the same players they were a year ago, but by hamstringing defenses and pitchers, the outcomes will be different. If MLB rolls the clock back to 2012 -- .255 batting average, more hits than strikeouts, 3200 stolen bases -- they’ll declare victory and get the hell out.

That’s a lot to ask with the same set of players. The hitters are all going to be trying to hit the ball hard and up, because that’s where the runs are. They will still be trading off contact to hit those hard line drives and fly balls. Pitchers, in turn, will still be trying to miss bats and, at least for one more season, exploiting umpires’ reliance on guesswork to get strikes on pitches outside the zone. They’ll be going at maximum effort because that’s how they have been trained. They’ll be returning from Driveline with three extra ticks on their fastball, and using Trackman and Rapsodo to craft ever more evil breaking stuff.

The 2023 changes are baseball trying to do everything in its power to change the game without without addressing the main issue: Pitchers are witches. We’re going to learn this year whether fiddling around the edges of the game is enough to even things out.

Hovering over all of this is the baseball. We had a rabbit ball in 2019, then perhaps a different one that postseason. We had two baseballs with different characteristics in play in 2021. We had at least two, maybe three, in use in 2022. It’s an article of faith to some that MLB will use a livelier ball in 2023 in an effort to juice offense and make it seem as if the changes are having an effect. The league has lost all credibility on the matter, so in addition to watching how gameplay changes in 2023, we’ll need to see how the performance of the baseball interacts with the rules changes.

Stepping back, there are three things I am going to be focused on once the season begins. Unlike many, I don’t think exhibition games will provide actionable information, so this experiment starts March 30.

1. Will pitchers stay healthy? I don’t care about violations and game times and soul-reading fan engagement from the press box. The pitch clock will live or die on whether MLB pitchers working at max effort to get MLB batters out and win MLB games can pitch at the required pace and stay upright. What happens when relievers start going three days out of four, or starters begin throwing 30-pitch innings? I won’t pretend to know the answer to that, beyond a general, “When pitchers pitch tired, they are more likely to get hurt.” It’s the single biggest factor in the future of the pitch clock.

That, by the way, is the last thing I’ll say about the pitch clock for a while. It’s clearly a fetish for some. Me, I don’t think anything matters until the games do.

2. How many hits are coming back? There were just shy of 28,000 singles in 2012, and 25,877 last year. (That was up from 2021’s floor of 25,006.) The rules restricting defensive positioning create an entitlement zone in short right field that should give back maybe half of those to left-handed batters. Singles are still going to be rare relative to the game’s history, but rolling their rate back to that of 2017-18 -- mid-26,000s -- could push the league batting average back over .250. Where the total number of singles fall in that range -- 25,000 to 28,000 -- will determine the success of the shift ban.

3. Can MLB thread the needle on stolen bases? The bases are less than five inches closer to each other, and pitchers can still make two pickoff throws per plate appearance, and pitcher/catcher combinations are still faster than ever at moving the ball from the mound to second base. Still, the combination of bigger bases and pickoff limits in the minors had a large effect. From Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com:

In 2022, with the mound disengagement limits, pitch timer and bigger bases imposed across the full-season Minor Leagues, the uptick in action on the basepaths continued:

Year SBA/G SB%


2022 2.81 78.0
2021 2.52 75.7
2019 2.23 68.2


MLB would like to generate more stolen bases, as they see that as something the fans want. Stolen bases are exciting when there’s drama as to whether the baserunner will beat the throw to the bag. Once we close in on an 80% success rate, that drama diminishes. There is a fine line between adding excitement and creating automatic doubles. The changes to the basestealing dynamic are the most interesting ones, because the range of possible outcomes is wide.

I can’t think of a parallel in the game’s history for what we’re seeing in 2023. There have been changes -- to the baseball, the strike zone, to the balk rule, to which players get to bat -- but never so many, all at once, out in the open. I disagree with some of the moves, not just on their merits but because it’s all a means of avoiding the real problem, the one between the mound and home plate. It’s my hope that whatever happens this year, success or failure, this willingness to change will be put to better use in years to come.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 26, 2023 -- "The New Rules: Basestealing"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 25 years.

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"As with the pitch clock and limiting pickoffs, making the bases bigger is a change made for one reason -- to reduce injuries on plays around the bag -- with the potential for a secondary effect that increases basestealing. Moving first and second base just a little closer together could change the timing math that has been disrupted by increased velocity over the last 40 years, leveling the battle between the baserunner and the defense."

Saturday, February 25, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 25, 2023 -- "The New Rules: The Pitch Clock"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"My prediction is that the average nine-inning game will run 2:56 this year, the pitch clock shaving seven minutes off the average year over year, rather than 20 or so in the minors."
 
 

 

Friday, February 24, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 24, 2023 -- "The New Rules: Defensive Positioning"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 fig leaf is that the new rule will bring athleticism back to the game by forcing infielders to run more. I don’t think that will be the case. I watch as much baseball as any three people you know, and I didn’t notice a dearth of highlight plays, a struggle for MLBN or ESPN to fill sizzle reels, in the shift era."

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 22, 2023 -- "LABR Report"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"13. Bo Bichette

...who I thought might not be there for me at 1.13. This is a bet on Bichette being a durable five-category star at shortstop after two seasons in which he missed just six games total, averaged a .294 BA with 106 runs, 98 RBI, 26 homers and 19 steals. He’ll be 25 in 2023, and the Blue Jays have made changes to the fences at Rogers Centre that should make it even more hitter-friendly. I was very, very happy to get him here."

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 21, 2023 -- "LABR Day"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"Note that in this specific format -- 32 players, no free agents or trading, small lineups each week picked retroactively by the computer to give you your best score -- certain traits have more value, like positional flexibility. I do like Varsho and MJ Melendez a lot, but maybe not as much in other formats."

Monday, February 20, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 20, 2023 -- "Mailbag"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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Who would be a good non-traditional manager hire for an MLB team in 2023? Are there any candidates that come to mind?

-- Mike C.


This is where baseball is really missing a bit. “Baseball player exceptionalism,” Charlie Pierce once called it, this idea that baseball players are some special breed of human being. NFL and NBA teams are coached, often very well, by people who didn’t play the game. There’s just so much resistance in MLB to the idea that a non-player could do the job; it's a non-starter. It was a big deal when teams started hiring guys who hadn’t even played in the majors. I don’t think we have a MLB version of Gregg Popovich or Bill Belichick on the horizon.

Who would be the guy? I truly don’t know. Maybe some stat guy who has spent a while liaising with the team, has some athleticism, played in college. It’s just so hard for me to imagine it. The best chance is probably a woman, to be honest. The Rachel Balkovec path.

--J.
 
 

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 15, 2023 -- "Major League 4, and the A's"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 A’s playing 162 games is merely what has to happen to keep the franchise going until Fisher gets the cash cow of his dreams. It’s a miserable situation. A sport with real leadership would do more than just point to Las Vegas with one hand while pointing a gun at the city of Oakland with the other. Alas, baseball hasn’t had that since Walter O’Malley died."

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 14, 2023 -- "Extra Innings"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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"In the online era, long games have helped build the baseball community. How many of you kept ice cream in the freezer to celebrate #weirdbaseball with Kevin Goldstein and friends? How many of you hear 'Let’s Go Pirates!' and twitch a little bit? Remember when Chris Davis and Darnell McDonald faced off on a May afternoon at Fenway Park, when position players pitching was still rare enough to be fun?"

Monday, February 13, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 13, 2023 -- "Andrew Chafin and the Diamondbacks"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 Diamondbacks have been bringing forward a crop of hitter prospects that should form the core of a contender through the middle of the 2020s. Corbin Carroll is already here, and with recent first-round picks Jordan Lawlar and Druw Jones he gives the Diamondbacks three of the top 20 prospects in baseball. Gabriel Moreno, acquired from the Blue Jays in December, would make it four if not for barely exhausting his rookie eligibility last year. Throw in a group of pitchers who rate a bit below the hitters, and the Diamondbacks are poised to be young and good for a while."

Super Hold

 I guess once a year now I write about football. The last time was a little more than a year ago, when the Chargers lost to the Raiders and were eliminated from the playoffs in a strange game-ending sequence that came to be blamed on coach Brandon Staley and the boogeyman “analytics,” when the real culprit was bad run defense.

Super Bowl 57 didn’t have a moment like that. In fact, the Eagles’ success on fourth downs meant that the issue of analytical thinking in football never really came up. It’s only when a team doesn’t convert a fourth down that the topic becomes fodder for discussion.

No, what we had at the end of this game was history unlike the kind anyone had ever seen before. The Eagles had played a near-perfect game for 59 minutes, running up a 35-0 lead on the Chiefs, who were overmatched in all phases of the game. The Chiefs were driving, having gotten into the red zone, when on third down, Eagles defensive back James Bradberry tugged Juju Smith-Schuster’s jersey as the receiver went into his break, preventing Smith-Schuster from getting into his route. As Patrick Mahomes’s pass landed incomplete in the end zone, referee Carl Cheffers threw his flag and called defensive holding, giving the Chiefs a new set of downs with 1:50 to play and the Eagles down to one time out. After a series of kneeldowns, Harrison Butker came on and kicked a 38-point field goal to give the Chiefs a 38-35 lead with just seconds to play. The penalty call by Cheffers opened the door to the most important kick in football history, and could rightly be said to have cost the Eagles the game.

That’s not quite how it happened, but you would be excused if you thought so given the reaction to that play. At the point of the penalty, the Chiefs had scored 35 points, including six on a fumble recovered for a touchdown and six more set up by a punt return inside the ten-yard line. In the second half, the Chiefs had had three possessions and scored three touchdowns prior to this one. Just seconds prior, the Eagles had let the gimpy Mahomes run 26 yards straight up the middle of the field to set up the final sequence.

So no, whatever you think of the call itself, it most definitely did not cost the Eagles the game. They’d allowed 35 points, a defensive touchdown, a massive special teams play, and three straight touchdown drives. They’d blown a 13-point second-half lead. Any number of plays in the first 97% of the contest “cost them the game” more than a holding penalty did.

Where this conversation goes awry is in making the referee the central actor. The central actor was James Bradberry, who grabbed Smith-Schuster’s jersey to prevent Smith-Schuster from beating him off the line. It looked like a hold on the screen; I’d argue that the most effective way to draw a defensive holding penalty is to pull the receiver’s jersey away from his body, which is exactly what Bradberry did. After the game, Bradberry said, “It was a holding. I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.” They did not.

It looked like a hold in the moment. The referee made a quick and decisive call. The offending player concedes he held. If we put instances of defensive holding on a scale of 1-10, this wasn’t a 1 and it wasn’t a 10. You might see a 2 where I see a 5. At first I thought it was a bad call, but the more I looked at it, the pull on the jersey just makes it easy. It interrupted Smith-Schuster’s route pretty severely. It was defensive holding de jure and de facto.

There’s an idea sports fans hold that players, not referees, should decide games, that officials should avoid making calls in high-leverage situations. It’s silly, because officials affect the game constantly throughout the contest. This idea is based on the fallacy that calling violations is the only way officials can affect the game. Officials -- hockey fans, where you at? -- can also impact a game by not calling fouls in key moments. (That doesn’t make people happy, either.) To say that Cheffers should not have called the hold is to say that he should have influenced the game, just in a way more palatable to everyone not a Chiefs fan. That’s the last thing I want from officials; I want them calling what’s in front of them without respect to the game state. They’re arbiters, not dramatists. I don’t want them making or not making calls to produce a better TV show.

The call gave the Chiefs a full set of downs inside the ten, and with the Eagles down to one timeout, allowed the Chiefs to all but run out the clock and kick a game-winning field goal. To their credit, the Eagles tried to let Jerick McKinnon walk into the end zone with about 1:40 left, which would have left them time for a tying drive. McKinnon slid down at the one-yard line to foil the strategy and set up the final sequence. The penalty changed the endgame, but 1) it didn’t decide the game and 2) not calling the penalty would have been just as impactful.

MLB is trying to fix its umpiring, if a bit too slowly for my tastes. Baseball, though, is an easier sport to officiate using technology. The calls are binary -- did the foot hit the bag before the ball hit the glove? The worst part of baseball umpiring, pitch calling, may soon give way to technology that may not be perfect but is better, certainly better for identifying the location in an imaginary box of an object moving at 95 mph and turning unpredictably. You can fix baseball officiating with automation.

I’m not sure that solution is out there for the NFL, where the decisions are judgment calls. I’m not the first person to observe that offensive holding occurs on far more plays than those on which it is called. Defensive pass interference is entirely judgment, and offensive pass interference seems to be called at random, like a DUI check on the highway, just to keep players honest. The job of an NFL referee may well exceed the ability of human eyes, even eight pairs, to do it, but unlike baseball, the shape of football just won’t lend itself to a technological solution. We’re a long way from Ref-GPT.

Whereas as a baseball fan I have demanded better because I believe better is out there, I don’t know that that is the case in the NFL. There were any number of judgment calls last night, some of which went to the replay system, and none of which any three fans agreed upon. There was a bang-bang “offsides or false start” call on the Eagles’ first drive that gave the Eagles a first down and seemed like a coin flip. The Eagles seemed to wait too long to get a play off on a number of occasions. Some of these you could handle with expanded replay, a solution no one wants, but most of them are going to come down to judgment in a way “safe or out” doesn’t. Football has too many gray areas. The NFL allowed coaches to challenge pass interference calls a couple of years ago; it was a mess and they don’t do that any more.

I think Cheffers made the right call. Even if you don’t, though, you have to admit there’s no binary here, only a range, and that within that range there is room for disagreement. MLB umpiring can be improved. NFL refereeing may just have to be accepted.


Friday, February 10, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 10, 2023 -- "Andrew Benintendi and the White 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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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"The White Sox have done nothing to bolster that depth despite a payroll one star short of the first tax threshold and a market that, when the winter started, was filled with players who could help them. The Sox swapped out Jose Abreu, who went to the Astros in free agency, for Andrew Benintendi. That is a downgrade offensively but a big upgrade defensively, getting Andrew Vaughn out of the outfield and over to first base."

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 8, 2023 -- "Leftovers"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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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--
 
"Wacha is a hard player to sign because he’s not part of the “great or unavailable” group, and he’s also not an innings guy -- almost exactly 125 innings in each of the last three full seasons. What are you really buying, especially given he was meh -- 4.11 ERA, 4.36 FIP -- after the shoulder injury?"

Joe Sheehan Newsletter, May 31, 2022 -- "The Double-Bank-Shot Theory"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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. 14, No. 43
May 31, 2022

You’ve talked a lot about how batters have sold out for the long ball as their only defense against the warlocks on the mound. While I agree that the chicanery with the baseballs is beyond dumb, do you think there’s a possible long game here where batters have to revert more to line drives than fly balls? It would obviously be a 20-year or so cycle but is there any merit to coupling deader balls with the other changes you propose (move the mound back, etc.) to eventually get to a more aesthetically pleasing style of play? 

--Brandon Z.

Readers send me this question more than any other, whether it’s to my inbox or on Slack or in my Twitter feed. What I have dubbed the “double-bank-shot theory” is an incredibly popular one among baseball fans, as well as some writers and analysts.

By putting a baseball in play that flies less well, MLB has reduced the value of fly balls. In the first two months of 2019, batters hit .300 with a .954 slugging on fly balls, as classified by Baseball Reference. So far in 2022, batters are hitting .254 with a .767 slugging on fly balls. It’s not a classification problem -- the number of plate appearances in both data sets is nearly identical. There have been 500 fewer homers hit on fly balls in roughly the same number of plate appearances ending in a fly ball.

The double-bank-shot theory proposes that by making fly balls less valuable, MLB will dissuade hitters from hitting the ball up and far, and instead encourage them to hit in a more contact-oriented style that produces more balls in play and fewer strikeouts. The new ball has also reduced the value of line drives, but not by nearly as much: Over the same periods as discussed above, batting average on line drives is the same, although slugging has dropped by 60 points. To the extent the double-bank-shot theory has merit, it’s in these numbers. Line drives are much more valuable, relative to fly balls, than they were three years ago.

Unfortunately, that’s the only point in its favor. 

Let’s start from first principles. Batters have been trying to hit the ball hard and far since the game was called “town ball” and played for recreation, mostly by kids. The idea that hitters just discovered, maybe six years ago, the value of hitting the ball over everybody is silly. You can’t read three pages of baseball history without coming across the phrase “mighty wallop.” We’ve been celebrating power hitters since being one meant swinging a log at a ball of wet socks held together by wishes.

We have, of course, put numbers to the idea in recent years. Early statheads quantified the value of slugging. Later ones showed that the most valuable thing a player can do is pull a fly ball. Batters aren’t trying to maximize contact rate or batting average, they’re trying to maximize the number of runs their team scores. They do this by being judicious about when to swing and then trying to hit the ball hard and far when they do.

In today’s baseball, there is already a massive incentive for hitters to try something different. Data-driven defensive positioning -- your people call it “the shift” -- has a built-in reward for contact hitting and spray hitting. Most hitters today...this is why I don’t like calling it a “shift”...bat against a defense aligned to field batted balls to the pull side. Rangers prospect Josh Smith made his MLB debut last night, and in the lefty batter’s first career plate appearance, the Rays had shortstop Wander Franco positioned behind shortstop and second baseman Vidal Brujan playing short right field. Against Shohei Ohtani on Sunday, the Blue Jays played no infielders to the left of second base, with five of their seven defenders on the outfield grass.

Teams can do this because they know what the batters know: You score more runs hitting up. You score more runs hitting to the pull side. You score more runs hitting over the defense. The defense can concede one base, especially with the bases empty and at least one out, if it means the batter will forego the chance to hit the ball hard and far. They’re not trying to prevent hits, they’re trying to prevent runs. Batters have the opportunity, to varying degrees and projected success rates, to hit singles by changing their approach. They turn them down because in most cases, overall run production is lowered by doing so. 

Batters are not doing this in a vacuum, of course. One reason this approach is run-maximizing is that modern pitchers are throwing the nastiest pitches ever devised. It’s become a joke online, one I’ve made myself, to snark “just go the other way” when Pitching Ninja drops a clip of a Bugs Bunny breaking ball delivered by some anonymous 26-year-old who spent the winter sleeping on Kyle Boddy’s couch. These pitchers are asked to do less individually than any pitchers in baseball history, they almost never pitch tired, they are the primary beneficiaries of modern technology and analysis. There has been a scientific takeover of pitching that has no parallel on the other side of the ball.

As pitchers became harder to hit, batters doubled down on trying to make sure that the contact they made was the most valuable kind: up, pulled, and hard.

The Revolution

         FB%     Pull%     Hard%
2015   33.8%     39.1%     28.8%
2016   34.6%     39.7%     31.4%
2017   35.5%     39.8%     31.8%
2018   35.4%     40.3%     35.3%
2019   35.7%     40.7%     38.0%
2020   35.7%     41.0%     33.3%
2021   36.5%     40.0%     32.1%
2022   36.6%     40.5%     29.7%

(thanks, FanGraphs)


These calculations come from Sports Info Solutions, and you can see that the baseball has changed since 2019 in the decline in what they define as hard contact. Other studies have shown that batters are getting less value from their best-hit balls -- what StatCast calls “barrels” -- than they have in recent seasons. Batters are being punished for hitting the ball hard against the toughest pitchers ever.

Some fans will lament the failure of batters to evolve. The thing is, batters did evolve. People just don’t like the way they did. 

The double-bank-shot theory is wrong because it gets the order of events wrong. It ignores the main driver of recent changes in MLB, namely the evolution of pitchers and pitching. Instead, the theory burdens the hitters even further. Nothing at all has been done to rein in pitchers. The 13-pitcher limit, itself an ineffectual gesture, has been pushed back repeatedly under the guise of “health and safety.” Moving the mound back has been argued, tried, and seems to have been dismissed.

There are a lot of people betting that a pitch clock, almost certainly coming in 2023, will be what throttles back pitching. The idea is that forcing pitchers to work more quickly will lessen their ability to put maximum effort into each pitch. There’s been a very tight clock -- 14 seconds with the bases empty, 18 with runners on -- in place for about six weeks in the minor leagues. This is probably a topic for another day, but I am skeptical that this is a real short-term solution for MLB, for a set of reasons best summarized as “people actually care about MLB results.” Even at that, the clock hasn’t changed the statistics, other than time of game, in the leagues in which it’s been used. 

Deadening the baseball penalized hitters for adapting to modern pitching in a way that puts runs on the board, while making things even easier for a generation of pitchers-turned-witches. The only thing propping up offense, as strikeout rates rocketed from 17% to nearly 25%, was outcomes on batted balls. Making those balls less valuable for hitters showed that the decision-makers fundamentally didn’t understand what they were watching. It’s the pitchers, not the hitters.

The double-bank-shot theory fails because you can’t force hitters to hit in ways that produce fewer runs. The runs are in pulled fly balls, not in sprayed singles. You could, at one time, build an offense in different ways, back when pitchers could only strike out one in six, one in seven batters, when they would pitch tired, when they would face a batter four times a game, when the league hit .260 and the best teams might hit .285. Those days are over and until MLB takes action, they’re not coming back. You’d need to roll strikeout rates back to the mid-teens to make long-sequence offense viable again. The only path to that is moving the mound back or something truly radical like requiring four strikes for a strikeout.

MLB’s effort at behavior modification is misguided because in modern baseball, it’s not the hitters, it’s the pitchers. Until MLB gets serious about addressing the evolution of pitching -- until it shows it even recognizes the problem -- we’re nowhere.

Monday, February 6, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 6, 2023 -- "Missed Opportunities, and the Orioles"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"You have to start with a base of talent developed internally, through the draft, through the international amateur market, through making your players better. Get that core of players worth 20 WAR and making less than $20 million, and then you supplement it with stars at market value. Skip the first step, and you’re the 2022 Rangers."

Friday, February 3, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 3, 2023 -- "Bad Luck, and the Nationals"

 

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"The 2019 Nationals will stand alone in history as the team that never got to build on its championship. The effect of the pandemic on the team’s arc will continue to be felt as it attempts its first rebuild in more than a decade."

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Newsletter Excerpt, February 1, 2023 -- "Gio Urshela and the Angels"

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 has been a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for 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 $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--
 
"There’s absolutely no reason for Minasian to hold back. Trout will be 32 in 2024, Rendon will be 33, and Ohtani will be elsewhere. It’s now or never for this edition of the Angels, and I will be picking them to make the playoffs."