Newsletter Excerpt, April 23, 2024 -- "Mike Tr-Out"

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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Last night was the first time in his career that Trout had come up in the dream scenario: at home, bases loaded in the ninth, two outs, Angels trailing. If you widen the aperture a bit to situations in which Trout batted in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the Angels trailing by three or fewer runs, you find 30 plate appearances in which he’s hit .217 with four singles and a double, while walking six times (two intentionally) and striking out five times.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 22, 2024 -- "Offense Check-In"

 

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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It’s still early enough that much of the drop in performance on contact could be noise related to weather and the mix of players in and out of lineups and which parks have seen more games played in them. What I think we’re seeing, though, is the effect of the most hittable pitches in baseball being phased out in favor of more difficult ones. Pitchers figured out how to miss bats in the 2010s. It may be they’re figuring out how to induce less valuable contact in the 2020s. The pitchers are still far ahead of the hitters, and that is what’s showing up in the early-season statistics.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 19, 2024 -- "Time Comes For Everyone"

 

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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The flip side of that is older position players are being chased out of a sport that moves too quickly for them. Last year, 12.6% of plate appearances were taken by players 33 and older. Ten years ago, and noting that pitchers were taking some of these, the figure was 16%. Twenty years ago, it was 21%. Before you start yelling at me about steroids, note that in 1983, forty years ago, it was also 21%.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 15, 2024 -- "Fun With Numbers: Roster Resources"

 

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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Running at this from a different direction...from 2017 through 2019, 17 teams won at least 95 games in a season, and of those, nine used fewer than 50 players. From 2021 through 2023, 14 teams won at least 95 games, and just one (the 2022 Astros) used fewer than 50 players.

What we could be seeing is a change in how teams run up player counts. For most of baseball history, you went into the season with your guys and stuck with them until injury or poor performance or a sell-off forced you to change. If you didn’t have to deviate much, if you didn’t have to go off script, it showed up in your win-loss record.

 

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 11, 2024 -- "Thinking Inside 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.

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I wonder if the problem isn’t Judge, but his context. Judge is seeing fewer strikes than he ever has, and fewer first-pitch strikes. Opposing pitchers seem to have decided that they’ll take their chances with Giancarlo Stanton, who has hit .202/.286/.442 the last two seasons. Stanton has been better than that so far this year, .256/.289/.605, albeit with a 36% strikeout rate, but that line isn’t going to change pitchers’ minds.

Protection, as popularly known, is a myth. Hitters do not perform better based on the quality of the batter behind them in the lineup. What is real, though, is weak protection: If the gap between two hitters is wide enough, the first batter will see an uptick in his walk rate. Aaron Judge leads the AL in walks drawn and is top-25 in fewest strikes seen among all qualified hitters. Put all this together, and I wonder if Judge -- whose swing/take decisions are a mess right now -- is struggling to adjust to not seeing enough hittable pitches.

 

Newsletter Excerpt, April 9, 2024 -- "The Demon, Running Wild"

 

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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There is no clean or easy solution. Pitcher injury rate is related to the strikeout problem, but the solutions that could best address the strikeout problem -- rostering fewer pitchers and moving the mound back -- do nothing to change the incentive structure and could possibly put pitchers at more risk. Even if you could modify the game played at the MLB level, it would take decades for those changes to affect behaviors in scouting, in player development, in amateur ball. It took us 40 years to get here. It may take 40 to get back.