Newsletter Excerpt, December 16, 2024 -- "Winter Meetings Catch-All, Pt. 2 -- Signings"

 

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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I don’t do a ton of reporting, so it was an honor to be there for these negotiations. Buster Posey sat across from Adames, and just stared at him, locking eyes the way a winner does. Then, he pulled out a copy of Baseball Prospectus 1999 and a lighter, setting the book on fire, the room filling with the smoke of burning snark and statistics. Finally, Posey took out a portrait of Bill James, said “fight the real enemy,” and tore it in half, right down the middle, casting the pieces on the floor.

That’s how Buster Posey somehow got Willy Adames and his zero All-Star appearances to agree to one of the 50 most lucrative contracts in baseball history. The man’s a mystic.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, December 15, 2024 -- "Winter Meetings Catch-All, Pt. 1 -- Trades"

 

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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They also didn’t make a good trade. This is a trade you make when you’re not actually serious about winning championships, when you’ve decided to be ordinary. You win titles with players like Tucker, superstars who can be the best player on a great team. This trade, instead, is designed to win a WAR/$ battle, and they don’t hang flags for that. The Astros may have a more efficient roster today, and they’re still a contender to win the AL West. They traded their best player, though, and they’ll feel that every day. Maybe you look at the team’s TV situation -- the Astros have lost as much as any team in recent years -- and justify it, but the way you make up a loss of TV money isn’t to make the team worse, it’s to make the team better so you can generate more revenue at the ballpark. This trade makes the Astros worse, at least in 2025.

To me, this trade signals the end of the Astros as a championship franchise, a moment that’s been coming since Jim Crane ran off James Click after the 2022 World Series. The Astros are just Crane’s plaything now, and he’ll soon learn there are worse things that not being given enough credit for winning the World Series. 

 

 

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

 

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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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"

 

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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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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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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.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

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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.