Joe Sheehan Newsletter

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"The Royals’ biggest move this winter was hiring Mike Matheny. It’s a peculiar choice; in addition to being one of the worst tactical managers of his era, Matheny struggled to show patience with young players during his time in St. Louis. The Royals are betting a significant part of their rebuilding plan on the idea that Matheny can bring along a young core. I can more easily believe he’ll be a better dugout manager -- the Royals’ front office dragged Ned Yost up from laughably bad to almost adequate -- than that he’ll have the personality change necessary to get young players through their growing pains. This will be the most important story to watch in Kansas City this year."

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"The Tigers have two of the top pitching prospects in the game, righties Casey Mize and Matt Manning, and both are on track to reach Comerica Park this year. Both were successful at Double-A last year, although the Tigers were cautious with Mize, shutting him down early to manage his workload. Behind those two, maybe by half a season, is lefty Tarik Skubal. Building around young pitchers can be fraught; the 2015 Mets are the only pennant winner this decade to really do so. The upside, though, of having a rotation of controllable, effective pitchers, is enticing. The 2021-23 Tigers shape up as one of the more interesting, high-variance teams in baseball."

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"We can look back and see how remarkable it seems that a player of Ruth’s stature would be sold, but in its time, it wasn’t strange at all. Connie Mack famously sold off the core of his back-to-back-pennant-winning A’s teams, including Hall of Famers Eddie Collins ($50,000) and Frank Baker ($37,500), after they lost the 1914 World Series. The Red Sox, prior to Frazee buying the team, had sold Tris Speaker to the Indians for $55,000 and a couple of players (one of whom, Sad Sam Jones, went on to a long career). Branch Rickey would later become known for controlling large numbers of prospects largely for the purposes of selling them -- and taking a cut of the proceeds."

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"In the AL in particular, you have this very strange dynamic, though, where the teams that have had the most success of late have largely taken the winter off, leaving an opportunity for the rest of the field to make up ground. The Twins showed what was possible last year, signing Nelson Cruz and turning over their on-field staff while the Indians and Larry Dolan took four months off. The White Sox, the Rangers, the Angels, the Blue Jays may be looking at last year’s AL Central champs and saying, 'Why not us?'"

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"The Phillies never tanked, but they may be a cautionary tale of a different kind. Under Ruben Amaro Jr., they tried to squeeze one more deep run from the 2008 champions well into the next decade, and failed. That may be costing them now, as they try to build out the roster in the free-agent market. The core of young players they might have projected to build around, the core that the Astros, Cubs, Yankees, and Dodgers have had, has never really materialized."

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"There are many reasons to be excited about the Padres, who should at the very least be in the deep mix for the NL’s two wild-card slots. They have two glaring challenges, though; one is 100 miles up I-5, a Dodgers team that even missing out on a big free-agent splash projects to win at least 95 games. Their floor is 90, something we saw two years ago when the Rockies were able to tie them for the NL West lead. The Dodgers set a bar the Padres may not be ready to clear."

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"This should be such a triumphant period of time for the Cleveland Indians. Their front office built a championship-caliber starting rotation almost entirely through its trade wits. They drafted a fun, watchable player who is on track to be a Hall of Famer in Lindor. They developed players like Shane Bieber and Jose Ramirez, middling prospects who became superstars. The game’s rules are bent in their favor, limiting competition for amateur talent, assigning them extra draft picks and extra budget for signing international players, and even giving them a healthy cut of the money generated in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, just to balance things out a bit.

"What should be a dynasty in Cleveland isn’t bying because of structural unfairness, or bad luck, or even bad baseball. It’s dying because the owner is killing it."

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"The math is real. The Angels added Anthony Rendon, and the Astros lost Gerrit Cole That 12-win swing, though, is barely a third of the gap between the two teams last year. The AL had just seven .500 teams last year, remember, so the bar for success is low. Signing Rendon was a good move; it just comes with a question: What’s next?"

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"The error bars around the two pitchers are wide enough that it’s hard to say which of them is likely to be better in the medium or long term. Cole’s transformation in Houston, and his monster 2019, positioned him ahead of Strasburg in the market, and rightly so. It wasn’t that long ago, however, that you’d have taken Strasburg ahead of Cole and not looked back. If the Nationals had to pay for Strasburg’s October, the Yankees are paying for all of Cole’s 2019."

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"That’s the point, though, isn’t it? Miller is safe now. He’s dead. He can’t step to the microphone on a hot summer Sunday and excoriate the league, the whining owners, even the MLBPA and its craven leadership. He can’t use this moment to educate the players as to their importance to the game, their rights to the spoils. Baseball can honor a whitewashed memory of Marvin Miller without ever engaging with the ideas he fought for."

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"There were just 2280 stolen bases in 2019, the lowest figure in a non-strike season since 1973, when there were 20% fewer teams. There were 776 sacrifices, the fewest in recorded history (since 1894). Over the course of the 2010s, baseball lost half its sacrifices, a quarter of its steals, and 10% of its singles. That’s strategic progress on one hand, and a sharp decline in action, in movement, in things to watch from Section 312, on the other."

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"The urgency to dump Villar, though, becomes easier to explain when you consider the biggest story of the Orioles’ offseason: The regional sports network they control, MASN, has to pay the Nationals nearly $100 million in old rights fees. The Orioles are appealing, but this judgment seems likely to stand."

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 8, No. 1
February 16, 2016

Josh Donaldson, 2015 AL MVP, will make $11.65 million in 2016 after settling with the Blue Jays on a two-year deal in advance of his arbitration hearing.

Brandon McCarthy, who made four starts and threw 23 innings in 2015, will make $11 million in 2016.

Angel Pagan, who was by one measure the third-worst position player in baseball last year, will make $10 million in 2016.

You can do this all day. The relationship between how a baseball player played in 2015 and how he will be compensated in 2016 isn't random, but it can appear that way at times. Bryce Harper was the best player in baseball last year, and he will make $5 million in 2016. Mike Trout was second-best, and he'll make $15.25 million. You can have some fun with the data on position players at baseball-reference and Cot's…

Life Is Not A Meritocracy

                2015 bWAR      2016 Pay

Top Five             44.5        $57.7M
Bottom Five          -9.3        $51.2M

Top Ten              80.0        $89.4M       
Bottom Ten          -16.1       $102.1M

There are many reasons for the disparity above, but the most critical one for the MLBPA is this: the pay structure in baseball is more closely tied to service time than to performance in an era where teams value service time -- experience -- less than they ever have. You see what teams truly value in the hoarding of prospects, in the…we're not supposed to say "tanking," apparently, so we'll say "aggressive pursuit of draft budget," in the struggles second- and third-tier free agents have in finding a market for their services, in the willingness teams have to tie themselves financially to players with limited service time but significant talent.

From its first fitful days in the 1950s, scraping for pensions and better health care, the MLBPA and its predecessors have always made service time, not performance or age, the currency by which its members earned benefits. The first pension plan offered a pension to players with five years' experience, later reduced to four (and now, just a few weeks). You needed three years' service time to be eligible for salary arbitration in 1974. You needed six years' service time to eligible for free agency starting in 1976. The ability to block a trade was granted to players with ten years in the league and five with their current team. At every turn, the MLBPA has acted as a traditional union in valuing time-served above all other factors. That's shaped the compensation structure we have now, in which no matter a player's performance, he has almost no control over his compensation until he's played as much as three-and-a-half seasons, and limited control through as much as six-plus seasons.

I remember in the early days of Prospectus, and even before that to online discussions in the run-up to the 1994 strike, making the point that while many online voices, younger voices, outside voices lined up behind the MLBPA's positions, a baseball industry run by stathead principles would not be a pleasant one for players. Twenty years on, that's what we have, an industry that evaluates players based on their expected hitting, fielding and pitching value, and cares far less -- though not zero -- about the value of experience in the major leagues.

The compensation structure isn't the only challenge. The actual distribution of player value is changing. In the 1980s, Bill James discovered that the career path for position players was a bell curve centered on age 27, with a broad peak from 25 to 29. This challenged the established idea, which was a motivator for the experience-centric MLBPA mindset, that players peaked later, in their early thirties. More recent research by Fangraphs' Jeff Zimmerman has modified even that notion, showing that the "bell curve" James discovered has been replaced by a path that sees players entering the league more or less at their peak, and declining from there.

This isn't a minor point for the MLBPA. Performance and compensation aren't just out of sync, but set in opposition to one another. As currently constituted, teams have every incentive to pass on the six-year player, in his late twenties or early thirties, in favor of the player with little to no experience at age 23 or 24. Statheads have always argued that buying free agents was a mug's game where teams paid for past performance. Teams are now signing on to this idea, backed not by the aging "curve" per James, but the aging "ski slope" per Zimmerman. There will always be a market for the top 1%, 2% of players in the pool, your David Prices, your Zack Greinkes, but more and more, enough teams are rejecting the players even at the level below that in favor of trying to produce and lock up 22-year-olds. The contracts signed by Jason Heyward, Justin Upton and Alex Gordon certainly seem lucrative on their faces, and the money will spend nicely. Relative to industry revenues, relative to the top of the market, relative to the expected value of their performances, those players were all underpaid to some degree.

We can focus on issues that affect free-agent compensation, such as the current incentives bad teams have to be as bad as possible (and the way revenue sharing mitigates the risks of doing so) and the punishments for signing free agents. Those are issues that should be addressed in the next CBA not only for their impact on player income, but their impact on competitive integrity. However, the fundamental challenge the MLBPA faces goes to the heart of what they value and have valued for nearly 70 years: experience. If the MLBPA is going to reclaim its rightful percentage of industry revenues, it may have to, for the first time, trade off the interests of veterans in favor of the interests of younger, less experienced players, because those are the players producing.

There are a number of ways to do this. The first, and probably easiest, is to push for a far higher minimum wage: double or more the current $507,000. This would not only pay new major leaguers -- who as Zimmerman notes, are performing at or near their peak -- better, but, by doing so, lessen the leverage teams have in getting those players to sign long-term contracts that buy the players out of their upside. Not all of the John Hart deals have worked out for the teams -- hi, Jon Singleton -- but on balance they have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in value from players to teams. A higher minimum salary, especially one that increased as a player gained service time, would give players a stronger negotiating position.

A higher minimum salary could be part of a package of reforms that traded off arbitration for a quicker path to free agency. Arbitration is often held up as a bugaboo by the media, but it's been a wildly successful process that eliminated holdouts and forced teams to negotiate salaries in good faith. Ignore the innumerate "Joe Outfielder got an 866% raise in arbitration" headlines and focus on the number of cases that are settled after figures are exchanged and how all your favorite players will be in camp next month.

A higher minimum salary, especially a stepped one, will raise salaries for players with four or fewer years of service time. Perhaps players would accede to eliminating salary arbitration in exchange for the higher minimums and the time to free agency being reduced to five years. Just eyeballing some of the salaries for arbitration-eligible players, it seems as if most MLB players would do no worse, and some better, under a system that guaranteed them, just pulling a number, $12.5 million in their first five years, rather than one in which they could be paid as little as $2 million total in their first three-plus seasons and then hope to make it up over the next two. The players who would not do as well -- the very best players -- would gain by reaching free agency a year earlier.

I don't want to minimize how radical a change this would be. It's not just the MLBPA that values experience. When I talked about this in December with a veteran writer I respect, he objected, noting that experience isn't just the coin of the realm for the MLBPA, but for the entire baseball industry. He's right. Even in our era of hiring statheads off the street and the game's front offices populated by MBAs rather than MLBs, the culture of baseball is one that respects, even prizes, longevity. To alter the compensation structure to better pay youth at the expense of experience goes against not just 50 years of MLBPA history, but 140 years of baseball history.

The thing is, though, that is already happening. Teams are making that choice for the players, pushing their money into young players and the development of young players and even the purchase of what amounts to baseball player embryos, because that's more cost-effective than paying 30-year-olds $40 million over three years. The MLBPA is no longer choosing between getting youth paid and getting veterans paid. Its choice is either standing in the way of industry trends or going to the owners with a plan that acknowledges those trends and rebuilds the compensation structure accordingly. This has to be the central battle in the upcoming CBA negotiations.

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 "Players, and the MLBPA, may be frustrated today, but I’m not sure this is something that can be repaired. The distribution of baseball talent at the MLB level is the very far right edge of a bell curve. Superstars are rare, very good players somewhat less rare, but you don’t get too far from the edge of the curve before you find a large pool of similar players. That’s not something you can fix in collective bargaining; it’s an immutable fact of the talent pool."

C: Yadier Molina

1B: Miguel Cabrera

2B: Robinson Cano

SS: Andrelton Simmons

3B: Adrian Beltre

OF: Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen, Mookie Betts

SP: Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, Zack Greinke

RP: Craig Kimbrel, Aroldis Chapman

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 11, No. 83
September 26, 2019

The Tigers, of course, are just one of a number of teams racking up losses this season. Four teams have lost 100 games. At the other end of the standings, three teams already have 100 wins, and two, the Braves and Twins, can still get there.

This kind of bifurcation breaks, and could potentially shatter, a record tied just last year, when six teams finished with at least 100 wins or losses. Since expansion pushed the schedule to 162 games in 1961 (1962 in the NL), there have been five seasons in which at least five teams posted numbers that big. Two were expansion years, 1962 and 1967 (five); one was 2002 (six); and the other two are the last two years. If we do get to nine, that’s a 50% leap over the previous record.

Have you heard a peep about this from the league office? From Rob Manfred? From an owner or six? Mind you, competitive balance is supposed to be the reason why hundreds of millions of dollars get transferred from big-city teams to small-city ones. It’s why there are rules in place that penalize teams that invest heavily in putting a great team on the field. It’s why there are rules in place that forbid teams from spending freely on international amateurs and greatly restrain their spending on domestic ones.

Competitive balance was the rationale behind free-agent compensation, the issue that spurred the owners to strike in 1981. It was the nominal reason why teams forced a strike in 1994, when they were pursuing a radical rollback of free agency via a payroll cap. It was never far from the lips of Bud Selig, who coined the phrase “hope and faith” to convince fans and media that his only goal was providing good baseball to fans of all 30 teams.

It was always a lie. “Competitive balance” has always been code for “the players make too much money.” Ever notice how the rules and contraptions and limitations deemed essential for competitive balance always, coincidentally, transfer wealth from labor to management? That there was never a plan, not once, to improve competitive balance by forcing the teams to, you know, compete more, rather than less?

This has always been true, but the 2018-19 seasons hopefully put the fallacy to rest forever. Baseball had the best competitive balance in its entire history from the dawn of free agency through 1993, the last full season before the strike. Of the 26 teams that played through that period, 17 seasons, 22 won a division title, and the Expos sort of did in 1981. Eighteen of 26 teams played in the World Series. Thirteen teams, half the league, won the World Series.

The owners, led by Bud Selig, looked at that landscape and decided that baseball had a competitive balance problem.

Nearly every change the league has made since then, clawing its way to wins in CBA negotiation after CBA negotiation, has chipped away at competitive balance. That process accelerated in the last two CBAs, which all but eliminated competition for international talent and sharply reduced competition for major-league talent. Parallel to great gains in revenue from a variety of sources, those CBAs made “winning baseball games” a smaller and smaller part of “making money.”

Bud Selig looked at the best competitive balance in baseball history and lied about it to make more money for him and his pals. Rob Manfred? In February, coming off a season in which six teams won or lost 100 games, said, “There has been no meaningful change in the distribution of winning percentages in major league baseball.” Why? Because the teams are making money hand over fist. (Rob Arthur, take it away.) There are draconian penalties for spending too much money on your product, and none at all for spending too little.

I don’t know what MLB's next argument will be. Maybe it will remain “competitive balance,” even though the current state of the game is the product of the league setting the rules with minimal opposition. No matter what it is, though, let the history of management’s approach to competitive balance be the context in which you hear their arguments. In 1993, they said black was white. In 2019, they’re saying white is black. They’ll say anything to keep the lion’s share of the green.

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"We laugh at Ellsbury for having the gall to get paid what the market would bear, but just accept that Judge, a superstar at the core of the Yankees’ and MLB’s marketing efforts, makes 5% of his market value year after year.

"Ellsbury and Judge are two sides of the same coin, each part of a system designed two generations ago. Last week, NBC Sports reported that Rob Manfred said, 'maybe Marvin Miller’s economic system doesn’t work any more.' It read as a threat, but Manfred was more right than wrong."

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"If I had a ballot, I would vote for these nine players:

"Barry Bonds
Roger Clemens
Derek Jeter
Andy Pettitte
Manny Ramirez
Scott Rolen
Curt Schilling
Sammy Sosa
Larry Walker

"That’s seven holdovers from last year, plus Derek Jeter, newly eligible.

[...]

"As with Martinez, however, the recent induction of Trevor Hoffman puts Walker’s 'low' PA total in context. Hoffman faced 4,388 batters in his career, and even giving him some leverage credit doesn’t make up nearly 4,000 PAs. If we’re going to put low-volume relievers in, then the standard for hitters, especially hitters who were Hall of Famers on a rate basis, has to move accordingly. The easy election of Vladimir Guerrero, a lesser player and a contemporary of Walker’s, is a factor in this choice as well. I waited a long time to call Walker a Hall of Famer, as I did with Martinez, but this year I move him over the line."

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"With that in mind, his contract, four years for $73 million, seems to undervalue his skills. Even if you zero out framing, Grandal is a switch-hitting high-OBP catcher who has been durable and is worth two to three wins a season. Grandal has never been a below-average hitter in the majors. He’ll play next year at 31, and even if you project some decline from his 2018-19 peak, he represents an enormous upgrade for the White Sox in every facet of the game. He’s a perfect fit for a team that needed OBP and some lefty balance."

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"It seems an unassailable point that MLB teams don’t need all of the minor-league teams and all of the minor-league players that they are currently supporting. Under the current proposal, the low-A and short-season levels would be eliminated, the draft would be shortened to 20-25 rounds and pushed into the summer, and teams would be restricted to 150-200 minor leaguers, as opposed to the uncapped number today. All of these changes fit the way players are developed in the early 21st century."

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"For a larger sample, let’s look at 3-1. Eighty percent of 3-1 pitches are fastballs, and a bit less than half are two-seamers. Batters hit .363 with a .713 SLG. The more confidence you have in what’s coming, the more confident you can be in your swing. Remember, too, that many pitchers throw just one variety of fastball, so at the individual level, just knowing “fastball or not” is a powerful bit of information. Think of all the two-pitch relievers in the modern game. Now eliminate the coin flip when facing them."

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From today's Newsletter. For comments on all 30 teams, subscribe today!

1. Red Sox
2. Cubs
3. White Sox
4. Dodgers
5. Reds
6. Angels
7. Padres
8. Phillies
9. Nationals
10. Indians

11. Astros
12. Mets
13. Yankees
14. Braves
15. Twins
16. Brewers
17. Cardinals
18. Blue Jays
19. Athletics
20. Rockies

21. Rays
22. Rangers
23. Giants
24. Diamondbacks
25. Pirates
26. Mariners
27. Marlins
28. Tigers
29. Royals
30. Orioles

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"As someone who believe Torres should be left alone to play shortstop, I approve of the Yankees not making the qualifying offer to Gregorius. It’s a boon for Didi as well, who would be the kind of tweener free agent most likely to be hurt by QO compensation. There are more than a few good places he could land on some kind of 2/20 deal -- Milwaukee, Cincinnati -- and failing that, he’d be one of the best players on the league’s bad teams. His days as a three-win player are probably over, though."

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"The only person you could plausibly target here is A.J. Hinch. Hinch was in the dugout. It is highly unlikely that he would not have known what was going on. It is reasonable to hold a manager responsible for his player’s actions. Hinch, a team and thus an MLB employee, may be in the worst spot here, forced to choose between protecting his players or losing his clubhouse."

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"The back of the book is, as always, a treasure. Park effects, baserunning data, manager charts, leaderboards, projections. I’m writing this on Tuesday afternoon, and I find myself wanting to get this Newsletter done so I can dig into the book for more Newsletter ideas. The leaderboards alone, running from your basic baseball card stats to esoteric ones, will keep you occupied for a day. (Longest Average Home Run, AL, is a hoot.) In all of MLB, there were just 14 120-pitch starts last year. Why, Nolan Ryan alone had 14 120-pitch starts in June of 1976."

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"It’s funny...we’re having this conversation in the run-up to the 100-year anniversary of the trade that defined this franchise for most of its history. On December 26, 1919, Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000, largely for non-baseball reasons. That transaction changed the history of the two franchises, the history of baseball, in a small way the history of America.

"A century later, the Red Sox are in almost the exact same spot, plus or minus a couple billion dollars. Let’s hope they don’t make the same mistake twice. "

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"What we know without a doubt, though, is that the system is going to call the pitch based on where it is when it crosses the plate. It’s not going to be influenced by what the catcher does after the fact. For that reason alone, the system is better than human umpires out of the box. For many, the measurement of what we call 'pitch framing' quantified the importance of catchers. For me, it quantified the inability of human umpires to do their job. Those numbers, which have driven the careers of many people on and off the field, should not exist in a fair game. The batter doesn’t get the information of 'framing' to decide whether to swing or to take. Batters have been woefully underrepresented in this conversation."

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"The World Series, as you know, was clinched by the road team, the seventh game of seven won by the visitors. Looking back, that was the theme of the month; just three of nine “rounds,” counting the wild card games as such, were clinched at home: the Nationals in the Coin Flip Round, and the Astros in the Division Series and ALCS. Home teams went just 17-20 in the playoffs all told, 5-12 from the LCS round on. It was an October during which we mostly watched teams celebrate on the field while the crowd walked glumly towards the exits.

"I can’t quantify this, but I am certain that this contributed to how this postseason felt. Sports are theatre, dramatic action set against the background of a crowd gleefully cheering its heroes. We rarely had that this month, and almost not at all in the World Series -- Nationals fans who attended the three middle games in D.C. had nothing to cheer for. There was a strange, muted energy to the Series, and it was due to the absence of home wins."

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"The lasting image of this Series will be a Nationals pitcher working out of the stretch with two on and one out, and getting the critical out to escape the jam. Last night it was Max Scherzer allowing 11 baserunners in five innings, but holding the Astros to 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position, the only hit a ground ball just past Anthony Rendon in the fifth to bring home the Astros’ final run of the World Series. In the Astros’ four losses, they were 4-for-29 with runners in scoring position. They had chance after chance after chance to score, and in almost every spot, the Nationals’ pitchers were just better."

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This has been one of the most peculiar World Series ever played, largely owing to the road team winning all six games. If that continues tonight, the Washington Nationals are going to become a very unlikely champion. If it doesn’t, if we finally get to see an excited home crowd as the game draws to a close, the Houston Astros will win their second Series in three years and further their case as at least a minor dynasty.

At the fulcrum? A 35-year-old man who needed his wife to dress him three days ago.

Max Scherzer has done everything you can do in baseball except win a championship. He’s won awards, set records, been critical to pennant-winning teams. He’s been an All-Star seven times over. He’s respected by his peers and by fans outside of D.C. He’s been exceptionally durable in an era in which that’s the rarest of skills, starting 30 times every year for a decade. And at this moment, the one every kid dreams about, the seventh game of the World Series...no one knows what he has.

Scherzer took a cortisone shot Sunday, and showed enough in a throwing session yesterday to be tabbed the Nationals’ starting pitcher for tonight. He was up in the bullpen yesterday during the seventh inning, apparently healthy enough to relieve if the Nationals hadn’t broken open the game. Again, though, he woke up on Sunday unable to lift himself out of bed, and he faced the media that afternoon needing to turn his entire body to direct answers to questioners.

As of 4:30 p.m., Scherzer is in the starting lineup, and at this point it seems clear that he’ll take the mound in the first inning. Beyond that, though, we just don’t know what will happen. What kind of freedom of movement will Scherzer have, and if anything less than 100%, how will that effect his velocity and his command? Dave Martinez doesn’t get to put Scherzer’s Strat card on the mound; he’s asking a man who couldn’t pitch on Sunday to get outs in the biggest game in franchise history.

If it’s just about Max Scherzer the person or Max Scherzer the legend, you’re happy to be in this spot. It’s not, though. It’s about Max Scherzer the body, the right arm, the neck, all of which have been failing him this year. There aren’t five people who can tell you what Scherzer has in him tonight, facing one of the best offenses in baseball history, in a park built for home runs. There may not be one person.

The story of tonight’s Game Seven could go a lot of ways, but the most likely is that it will be determined by what Max Scherzer’s body allows him to do. Everything else is secondary to Scherzer’s ability to overcome on Wednesday that which was debilitating on Sunday.

If Scherzer can’t work deep, we’ll probably see Anibal Sanchez, the originally-scheduled Game Seven starter, for an inning or two. Depending on the spot in the lineup when Scherzer has to leave, we could see Patrick Corbin before or after Sanchez. Those three pitchers will handle the first 18 outs, and if you’re Dave Martinez, you want those three, Daniel Hudson, and Sean Doolittle to get the final nine. While Martinez has been dabbling with Fernando Rodney and Tanner Rainey in leveraged spots, it seems safe to say that if anyone other than the first five guys pitch tonight, the game has gotten away from the Nationals.

The Astros counter with Zack Greinke, the highest-paid pitcher in baseball, whose acquisition completed the Astros’ excellent top three. The catch is that Greinke hasn’t had anything like his usual command in October. In four postseason starts he’s failed to finish five innings three times. He served up five homers in his first two playoff starts, and then traded homers for walks -- seven in 43 batters -- in his last two. Greinke’s raw stuff isn’t on the same tier as that of Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, and that gap has been evident in these playoffs. He succeeds with exceptional command, with one of the great pitching minds we’ve ever seen, and with a deep repertoire.

You can expect A.J. Hinch to again have a quick hook with Greinke. He said before the game that everyone but Verlander is available, but I don’t necessarily believe that. We have seen pitchers come back in Game Seven after pitching Game Six, perhaps most famously Randy Johnson in 2001. If this game is close, I think Verlander at least goes down to the pen to throw. Gerrit Cole might be available on two days’ rest, with that being determined closer to gametime. Hinch has more and better options, even absent his two starters, than Martinez does. If this becomes some war of attrition, the Astros are better-equipped to win it.

Every World Series game, and more than two-thirds of postseason games this year, have been won by the team that has hit more home runs in the game. Maybe that’s too facile, maybe there should be some deeper analysis, but when teams that are this good at throwing strikes, this good at missing bats, this good at turning balls in play into outs face each other, the difference is going to be home runs, big swings that put runs on the board without needing other actions.

The Nationals’ sequencing in their three wins has been incredible. They’ve scored 24 runs on 43 baserunner events, which is amazing. They have eight homers in their three wins, one in their three losses. We don’t talk about them as a #ballgofar team, perhaps because they were an average one during the regular season -- sixth in the NL in homers, eighth in percentage of runs on homers -- but against the Astros, a team you have to beat by hitting the long ball, they have come through. Their path through tonight is the same as it’s been in their three wins: hit the ball out of the park.

The Astros have had more than enough chances in their three games in Houston, but have failed to capitalize. They’re 3-for-21 at Minute Maid Park with runners in scoring position. In the same games the Nationals have been banking more than half their baserunners, the Astros have been squandering 75% of theirs. They’ve been beaten in the games’ biggest moments by Scherzer, by Stephen Strasburg, by Hudson and Doolittle. That’s baseball. If you’re the Astros, you have to feel like you’ve gotten enough baserunners to win. Their path through tonight is the same as it’s been in their three losses: finally beat the Nationals in the highest-leverage spots.

It’s one game, and I won’t pretend to know exactly how it’s going to go. My hope, and I know I’ve said this before, is that in 12 hours we’re talking about Scherzer or Greinke, about Anthony Rendon or Alex Bregman, or even Robinson Chirinos or Victor Robles. Let’s all hope we’re not talking about Jim Wolf, or Joe Torre, or Rule 27.2(d)(ii)(4)(ç)(™). Let’s let this wild 2019 season be settled, once and for all, by the players.

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 "It’s possible, maybe even probable, that this era of Nationals baseball ends tonight. Bryce Harper is gone, and both Rendon and Strasburg can be free agents tomorrow if they want to be. They would be the second- and third-best players on the market, in some order, and they’ve spent the last month showing that they can be the best players on a championship team.

"Harper, Strasburg, and Rendon were taken either at 1.1 or as 1.1-caliber talents in three straight drafts, and together they pushed the Nationals to three NL East titles. With Harper gone, Strasburg and Rendon have been a part of the most successful Washington team ever. Win or lose tonight, Game Six of the 2019 World Series was a valedictory moment for this team’s core."

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"In this World Series, the team to hit more home runs has won every game. Home runs have accounted for 52% of runs scored in the World Series. In the postseason as a whole now, the team to hit more homers in 24-6, and homers have accounted for 44.7% of all runs scored. That almost matches the regular season number. We have had a couple of huge innings without homers in this postseason, dragging down the overall number. I don’t think I would read too much into that. With those rare exceptions, postseason offense is still about scoring as many runs as you can with as few events as you can."

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"TV ratings are only part of a story, of course, but they do hang a number on what I’ve been sensing watching this Series. There’s no joy. There’s no energy. With the road team winning every single game, there have been precious few moments in which it seemed like you were watching an exciting sporting event. There have been no walkoff wins, obviously, and no ninth-inning moments with the crowd on its feet, clapping in unison, cheering for that last out and a home-team victory."

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"I’m thinking about Lipnicki today because Jose Urquidy just stole the World Series, or at least Game Four, in the same way Lipnicki stole 'Jerry Maguire.' An anonymous young man dropped in among highly-paid superstars, Urquidy blew away his peers with stumpers like his fastball and slider. Like Lipnicki, Urquidy wasn’t in many scenes -- he went just five innings -- but without his performance the show falls apart. Urquidy, forgotten behind baseball’s Cruise, Gooding Jr., and Zellweger in Verlander, Cole, and Greinke, paid a tiny fraction of what those stars make, came up big in the chance he was given."

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"Anibal Sanchez bobbed and weaved his way through four innings last night, allowing just two runs on six hits. He’d thrown just 65 pitches, but in doing so had gone through the lineup twice. As I wrote earlier in the week, the Astros were the second-best team in baseball at taking advantage of seeing a starter a third time. Sanchez struggled badly this year when exposed a third time: .288/.352/.571, a 923 OPS allowed, against a 645 mark the first two times through. Based on pitching alone, letting Sanchez face the Astros a third time was not likely to go well for the Nationals."

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 10, No. 110
October 26, 2018

Their paths had crossed before, you know.

Three years and change ago, Max Muncy stepped in against Nathan Eovaldi. He was “Nate,” then, and Max mostly went by “who?” It was a Saturday night in Oakland, the A’s off to a miserable 19-33 start, searching for offense and failing to find it in the form of Ike Davis. So they found themselves turning to a 24-year-old they’d drafted out of Baylor three years before. This was long before Muncy ever heard the words “launch angle,” long before he was released, long before “Maximum Muncy!” was a baseball-nerd battle cry.

No, on this night, he was just another non-prospect trying to find playing time on a team going nowhere. When he dug in against Eovaldi in the second, with Brett Lawrie on first and no one out, Muncy was hitting .222 with a couple of homers, on a 1-for-14 jag that ruined the first stretch of regular time he’d ever gotten in the majors. Baseball Reference pegs the attendance at a bit more than 25,000, which is just another reason to ignore listed attendance counts. Those actually in their seats paid little mind to the second-inning matchup. Muncy took a fastball for a strike, then fouled off two more before Eovaldi sent a changeup high and away for ball one. On the 1-2 pitch, Eovaldi busted out a hittable slider that locked up Muncy and sent him back to the dugout.

An inning later, they did it again, although by this point Eovaldi had morphed into the frustrating mix of velocity and contact that so frustrated first the Dodgers, then the Marlins, and now the Yankees. The A’s had eight singles in 14 at-bats, but just three runs. Muncy had a chance to make a name for himself, with two on and two out, but the slider once again proved his undoing. He fouled one off, a cookie, on 2-1, then swung over a second on 2-2 to end the inning. In striking out Muncy twice, Eovaldi didn’t throw a single cut fastball. In throwing 4 2/3 innings that night in Oakland, Eovaldi didn’t throw a single cut fastball. In fact, Eovaldi was still a year from playing around with the pitch that would put him in the World Series, that would give him another crack at Muncy.

Eovaldi wouldn’t be around when Muncy’s turn popped up again, chased from the game in the fourth by three more singles. When he gave way to Chasen Shreve, Muncy yielded to Mark Canha. Their paths diverged from there. Eovaldi would lead the American League in winning percentage, with a career-high 14 wins, and help the Yankees get back to the playoffs for the first time since 2012. Muncy was back in the minors a month later, unable to hit, on a path to being released at the end of spring training in 2017.

I doubt either man remembers those strikeouts on a cool spring night at the Oakland Coliseum. Why would they? The two players who battled for ten pitches barely exist any more. Muncy, career at a crossroads, landed in the Dodgers system after being let go by the A’s and became a take-and-rake, flyball hitter, became a bench option, became the best hitter on a division champion. Eovaldi became the owner of a second elbow scar in 2016, undergoing a second Tommy John surgery in August of 2016. The track record of players who need a second Tommy John surgery is poor, and Eovaldi’s career was hanging in the balance. The Rays, betting on the come, signed Eovaldi to a one-plus-one deal in February of 2017, subsidizing the righty’s rehab with an eye towards having a tradeable asset in 2018. Those deals don’t always work out, but when Eovaldi returned this spring with his velocity intact, he’d added a wrinkle: the cut fastball he’d shelved earlier in his career.

No, the two players whose paths crossed briefly are gone, and in their stead are a pair of World Series heroes. When Muncy stepped in against Eovaldi in the 13th inning last night, he was one of the most dangerous men in the building, a Statcast darling with a four-figure OPS against righties. Eovaldi, with quality starts in both the Division Series and ALCS, had morphed into Alex Cora’s favorite relief pitcher, throwing the eighth inning of the first two games of the Series. Cora called on Eovaldi in the 12th inning last night, trying to put a stranglehold on the World Series with the best pitcher available to him, even if it meant holding tryouts for a Game Four starter.

It should have worked. Eovaldi retired the side in the 12th on 17 pitches, the last of them a 101-mph fastball that Justin Turner still hasn’t seen. In the top of the 13th, a Dodgers defense that has been the story of the Series once again got involved. Brock Holt walked and stole second when Scott Alexander bounced a sinker. Austin Barnes got tangled up with Eduardo Nunez trying to make a throw. (Some saw interference by Nunez, who was clipped by Barnes on the play, but I did not.) Nunez then topped a ball to the left of the mound. Muncy ranged out of position to make a play, leaving first base uncovered. Alexander snagged the ball, but flipped it over the head of Enrique Hernandez covering, allowing Holt to score. The Red Sox had the lead without hitting a baseball more than 70 feet.

When Muncy faced Eovaldi in 2015, he didn’t see a single pitch above 95. Leading off the bottom of the 13th, he saw four fastballs, all at 99 and 100. The last of those nearly hit Muncy, but instead sent him to first base with a leadoff walk. Eovaldi went to 3-2 on Manny Machado as well, but Machado isn’t going to walk at this point in October, and flied to left for the first out.

I mentioned that Barnes had clipped Nunez in the top half of the inning. This was no small matter. Nunez has been in and out of the Red Sox lineup with a number of leg ailments, and the contact with Barnes caused him to land hard on his right ankle. Nunez needed to walk it off, and in almost any other situation, would have left the game. This situation, however, was the Red Sox having used 23 of their 25 players, with only starters Chris Sale and Drew Pomeranz left at Cora’s disposal. Nunez was going to have to play until and unless he lost a limb, and even then you’d have to think about it.

This had already cost the Red Sox. With Nunez on first and two outs, Sandy Leon roped a double into the right-field corner. It was a ball on which Nunez, an aggressive baserunner with good speed, would normally score standing up with two outs. Instead, he pulled into third base, never having any chance to score. The Sox would strand him at third. Nunez’s bad wheels would now cost them again. Cody Bellinger fouled a ball off the third-base side, a fairly routine play but for the Sox being in a shift. Nunez, positioned just to the shortstop side of second base, ran 100 feet to make a fantastic play, but -- similar to Derek Jeter in the famous 2004 play -- was unable to stop himself from falling into the stands. It’s impossible to know for sure, but I think a healthy Nunez can throw out the parachute and stay on the field. By falling into the stands, he allowed Muncy to advance to second base.

That 90 feet would become critical a minute later. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ final hope, ripped a ball up the middle, but right to Ian Kinsler, shifted toward second. Kinsler backhanded the ball, bobbled it, then inexplicably released a leaning, rushed throw that never came close to first base. Kinsler, who has played 15,000 major-league innings at second base, who is a finalist for the AL Gold Glove Award at second base, may never make a worse choice than he did last night. He had more than enough time to set himself, take a crow hop, and throw, and he simply rushed it. A good first baseman might have saved the day, but the various extra-inning maneuvers had left catcher Christian Vazquez to make his MLB debut at first base. (It’s incredibly hard.) Muncy scampered home, and the World Series had life.

Eovaldi and Muncy weren’t done. In the 15th, Muncy again led off, and again pushed the count to 3-2. He then launched a ball down the right-field line that had home-run distance, and home-run height, and, just barely, foul-ball angle. It missed the pole by a foot or two. Given a reprieve, Eovaldi finally put Muncy away with that new trick, the cutter, on the tenth pitch of the at-bat.

Three innings later, Eovaldi was working on one of the longest starts of the postseason, having retired 11 in a row, when Muncy stepped in to lead off the 18th. Eovaldi was leaking a little oil, not that you’d have seen it in the results. It’s understandable, of course. It was approaching 1 a.m. local, 4 a.m. body clock time, for a pitcher pushing 90 pitches working for the third time in four days. He was down a tick with the fastball, a tick-and-a-half with his command. There’s no crime in working at 96-97, but when you started at 99, it’s a sign you’re at least criminal minded.

Eovaldi sprayed his first three pitches to Muncy, then threw a get-me-over fastball for strike one. Muncy fouled off a 3-1 cutter and a 3-2 four-seamer, and the two were pretty much where they’d been an hour ago, and two hours ago, and a million miles from a half-empty Oakland Coliseum on a May night. They were new players, new people, and they were going to go down playing with their new toys.

Cut fastball.

Launch angle.

Bedlam.

No World Series game had ever gone 15 innings before, much less 18. Very few baseball games in history had ever run more than seven hours. It took a remarkable confluence of events -- another Jackie Bradley Jr. home run, more Keystone Kops defense by the Dodgers, a high-school error by a great defensive player -- to push this game into paid-programming hours on your local Fox station. Maybe it wasn’t good baseball. Maybe it wasn’t even entertaining. Anyone who watched it, though, anyone who saw Walker Buehler and Joc Pederson and Craig Kimbrel and Pedro Baez and Mary Hart is going to remember this game for the rest of their lives.

They’re going to remember two players who were on their way out of baseball not so long ago, making history after midnight.

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"On his 114th pitch of the night, his 3,839th of the year, the 19,592nd he’d thrown since watching Drew Storen on that fateful day seven years ago, Stephen Strasburg had reclaimed a word for himself. He’d shown us a real Strasburg shutdown."

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"The Nationals won a one-run game in which the Astros got 50% more baserunners, forced Max Scherzer out of the game after five innings, ate the game’s worst call, and made the game’s worst unforced error. I think if you play last night’s game 100 times, the Astros probably do no worse than 55-45.

"Nothing I saw last night moved me off the Astros winning this series. They laid off a ton of Scherzer’s breaking stuff, forcing him to throw 38 two-strike pitches and consistently getting into deep counts, even after starting from behind. Given one crack at the soft half of the Nationals’ staff, they got a homer and two walks while making one out."

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"The Astros were the second-best team in baseball when facing a starter a third time, racking up a .291/.350/.558 line, second only to what the Rockies did, and of course that’s a park issue. The Nationals were third in MLB to the Mets and Indians in the number of plate appearances their pitchers faced hitters a third and fourth time, and as a group, they were effective relative to the league: .243/.313/.419, fourth-lowest OPS allowed. (The Astros had the best mark: .206/.251/.391. Astros starters were better the third time around than most teams’ starters were the first time around.) The Nationals don’t have the pitching depth to change that strategy in the World Series, so if you’re looking for an early angle, it’s the Astros facing the Nationals’ starters the third time around. The Nationals have to win that battle most nights to win the World Series."

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"From Jose Altuve down through Luis Cessa, Game Six of the 2019 ALCS underlined a running theme in this space: These are the best players who have ever played our game."

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"Beating Verlander is about hitting the ball over the fence. As I wrote in Sports Illustrated last week, he allowed 68% of his runs on homers, the second-highest figure ever. The dead ball helps Verlander as much as any pitcher in this postseason. There just aren’t very many ways to score against him. If the Yankees are going to send this series back to Houston, it will be by hitting at least three homers today."

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"The Nationals have a smaller number of good pitchers than most playoff teams do. The playoff schedule allows the Nationals to use their best pitchers more often. The deadened baseball helps keep those pitchers in games longer. Six pitchers -- six very good pitchers -- have accounted for almost 90% of their innings pitched in ten playoff games. That’s the biggest reason they won the NL pennant."