Joe Sheehan Newsletter

"Victorino isn't one of those guys, but at least for the moment, he's committed to this plan. Last night, Victorino came up in the bottom of the seventh with the Red Sox down 3-1, with one out and runners on second and third, to face Darren O'Day. O'Day is incredibly tough on right-handed batters: .202/.271/.295 career (and better than that during his time as a healthy, established reliever), .163/.229/.240 this year. If there was ever a time for Victorino to go back to the left side, it was this high-leverage spot against a tough righty. Instead, he fell behind 0-2 and lined softly to second base."

"Let's play it out. If pitcher injuries are, for practical purposes, random, what does this mean for baseball management? Well, for one, I think it can put an end to the hyper-limiting of workloads in the minor leagues. If a pitcher is healthy and effective, you let him pitch, subject to reasonable restrictions on in-game pitch counts tied to a pitcher's age -- ideas that have been around since Craig Wright was promoting them. You advance pitchers more quickly; the practice of taking college starting pitchers in the draft and sending them to A ball has never made sense. If you didn't think Mark Appel could handle the Midwest League you probably wouldn't have taken him first overall. Start these guys at Double-A and stop making them waste pitches at a level that's beneath them. And when they're ready, they're ready; there's no career path with pitchers the way there is with hitters, where you want to hold them back to make sure you get as much of the peak under team control as possible. A pitcher can start the All-Star Game in July and be out for the next season come August -- so if he can help you now, let him help you now. No shutdowns, no Verducci effect, no nothing. Let the best pitchers pitch in the major leagues, because none of us are good enough to know when they'll stop being able to do so."

"Ogando and Davis are the latest victims of a new phenomenon: moving young pitchers from starting roles to one-inning relief roles and back. Up until the last 10-15 years, young starting pitchers could be broken in with long-relief work. It was Earl Weaver who said that the best place for a young pitcher was in the bullpen, and he practiced that. In 1965, a 19-year-old Jim Palmer relieved 21 times for the Orioles, making two six-inning appearances and seven others of at least three innings, with just seven of fewer than two innings. Ogando has made 103 relief appearances in his career and has gone more than two innings four times. Davis made 54 appearances in 2012 and went more than two innings three times. Palmer was pitching out of the bullpen in much the manner he would as a starter, facing hitters multiple times, having to pace himself, getting to throw all his pitches. Ogando and Davis were…not doing that."

"The real keys, though, are the same pitchers who have been effective for Leyland for two years now: Joaquin Benoit and Drew Smyly. Benoit inherited the closer role from Valverde. Since his first post-Valverde save on June 16, Benoit has a 1.17 ERA in 23 innings, with a 25.5% strikeout rate and a 24/7 K/BB. The Tigers are 22-1 in the 23 games he's pitched, the one loss coming when he made a get-work appearance with the Tigers down 3-1 in the ninth on June 27. At 35, Benoit is posting the highest groundball rate (41.6%, per Fangraphs) of his career, which is one reason why his low home-run rate -- just two this year -- isn't entirely a fluke. Benoit's HR/FB of 6.7% isn't out of line with his rates since he moved to the bullpen in 2005. Benoit is example N+1 supporting the idea that a pitcher good enough to pitch the eighth inning is good enough to pitch the ninth."

Last night's Yankees/Red Sox game provided any number of memorable moments, ones that will stick with us for a while. There was Ryan Dempster's repeated attempts to injure Alex Rodriguez. There was Rodriguez's revenge, a monster home run that kicked off the Yankees' game-winning rally. There was Joe Girardi just missing Brian O'Nora with a right hook.

Me, I'll remember the crowd. I'm going to remember more than 30,000 people standing and cheering a man repeatedly throwing a small, hard object at another man. I'll remember how the crowd…a mob, really…egged on Dempster, rewarded his failed efforts with applause, encouraging his violence and imploring him to take another shot at hurting another man. I'll remember the savagery. I'll remember the glee. I'll remember the moment when our inability to properly place "acquired and used substances we don't approve of" in the hierarchy of offenses reached a peak, forever making clear the hypocrisy of the last decade.

Last night happened for a lot of reasons, but one is that we've demonized sports drugs as part of a laughable notion that athletes are responsible for parenting other people's children. "The children" has become a loaded phrase, something of a joke, really, shorthand for nonsense in the nominal protection of the vulnerable. When Congress allowed a grieving father's erroneous beliefs to sidetrack an already ill-conceived hearing into excessive hitting of home runs, it sealed the idea that you could force baseball players to have their behavior tested, monitored, investigated and, if necessary, punished, all for the sake of the children. It was critical that baseball players be shown clean so as to create an example for the young athletes of America, then punished if they broke the rules, to show those same young athletes that cheating in this area would be taken seriously. Baseball gave in to the testing-industrial complex, itself a morass of moral hazard, and sacrificed the privacy rights of its workers for some poorly-reasoned greater good.

We saw how fraudulent that idea was last night, when on national television in a high-visibility game, the children of America were shown that not only was violence the answer to dispute resolution, not only was persisting in violence -- pitch two, pitch three, pitch four -- the path to justice, but that being repeatedly violent would garner you a standing ovation and no discipline. If the point of forcing a prove-your-innocence program, of investigating the behavior of baseball players without bounds, is to establish baseball as a moral force for the good of the children of America, then last night, in its embrace of violence, its encouragement of savagery, set that effort back. I don't care what a man puts in his body or how he defends himself for doing so -- throwing baseballs at him is wrong. Cheering it is disgusting. What did the children at Fenway Park learn last night?

It's never been about the children, of course, They're a red herring. I know this because discussions about the evils of sports drugs are often interrupted by advertisements for beer and Scotch and lottery tickets. We care about the children? Let's ask them. Ask the children of American what is worse for their well-being: beer or synthetic testosterone. I'm serious. Put Gallup in the field to find out whether scratch-offs or HGH have a more deleterious effect on the lives of fourth graders. For that matter, while we're asking, let's see if they're more traumatized by the prevalence of sports drugs or by having things thrown at them by bullies while authority figures stand and watch.

We are completely around the bend on this issue. There's no longer any place in the discussion for facts, for perspective, for placing the issue of sports drugs in the context of other issues that challenge both baseball and society, for placing the issue of sports drugs in the context of the history of both baseball and society. These are complicated issues and they've been reduced to a nonsensical heroes-and-villains narrative because it's easier to talk about the people than the ideas. The ideas are what matter. Ballplayers come and go, chemists comes and go, drugs come and go, ballgames come and go and we're no smarter about the relationships among ballplayers, chemists, drugs and ballgames then we were when this all started.

Thirty thousand people cheered as one man threw a baseball over and over again at another man. What do we tell the children about that?

"If you wanted replay to be a fiasco, this is the system you would implement. It's complicated, it's slow, it shifts responsibility for getting the calls right from the umpires to managers, it may disenfranchise fans at the park. It makes an assumption -- that the number of erroneous calls is evenly distributed -- that is demonstrably false. It grandfathers in, for no earthly reason, the current process of reviewing home-run calls, with the idiocy of all four umps leaving the field.

"It's not enough to say, 'But it's cool that we're getting more replay.' You want your kid to go to college, but if they come home one day and say they're going to clown college or beauty school or UCLA, you don't praise them for getting it half right."

"If the Dodgers win their next four games, they'll have played the best stretch of baseball since World War II. That Cardinals team, which benefited from having Stan Musial in a war-depleted league, closed 42-8 to edge out the Dodgers by two games; they went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series. The other two teams to go 42-8 won their league, and those 1897 Boston Beaneaters (eventually Braves) snapped the old Baltimore Orioles' hold on the NL. Those Orioles' teams are remembered as an 1890s dynasty, while the Beaneaters -- who won the NL four times in seven years in the same decade -- are forgotten."

"One-run strategies like the straight sacrifice and the steal are built around the idea that second base and third base are scoring position and first base is not. In our modern minimum-single environment, that premise no longer holds. Among successful hits, singles are still more likely than extra-base hits, but about twice as likely, as opposed to three times as likely for much of baseball history and four times as likely when these strategies were invented. Home runs and extra-base hits make up such a large percentage of safe hits that it's a waste to burn an out to move a runner up anticipating a single."

"Oakland A's (13): It was pretty easy to figure out why the A's were winning last year: they hit a ton of homers. This year's team doesn't have that signature, and most of the guys who drove that team to a division title aren't repeating their success. Josh Reddick and Yoenis Cespedes haven't hit, while Brandon Moss and Seth Smith have been just OK. The pitching isn't as good as it was a year ago, but the A's staff has done a good job of avoiding walks -- tops in the AL -- and letting the best defense in baseball go to work. It looks a bit like the post-Moneyball A's teams that got away from OBP and emphasized defense.The A's outfield defense is excellent; despite the highest flyball rate in the AL, they've allowed the second fewest doubles-plus-triples (179, bested only by the Royals). Have they been a bit lucky? Neither Jed Lowrie nor Coco Crisp has been hurt this year, and they've used just six starters, with no one missing a start other than, if you can believe it, Brett Anderson. We've seen this again and again: a stable rotation has value even if it's not great, simply by keeping a team from digging into its seventh, eighth and deeper starters. I'd have said the Rangers would catch the A's, but with Nelson Cruz out for the season it's a different story. This will be a good race."

"Chicago Cubs (24): Contrast the Mets with the Cubs, who flipped Scott Hairston and Scott Feldman for whatever they could get, and gouged a good price for Matt Garza from a market that gave them an upper hand. They reportedly even dangled their #1 starter, Jeff Samardzija, which reflects a recognition that his being a good pitcher in 2013 may mean more to the 2015 Cubs in trade than in anything else. The Cubs are the first team in their market and the Mets the second, but the Cubs aren't playing in a new park and don't own their own RSN; despite this, I'd take their future over that of the Mets, and it's not all that close. I'm certain that when the Cubs are ready to contend, Tom Ricketts will sign off on the big-ticket items they'll need to get over the top. I have no reason to believe the Wilpons will do the same.

"Even post-deadline, the Cubs can be competitive behind Samardzija, Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson, who's pitched better than his ERA. The young players who were supposed to make the Cubs better haven't really done so this year, as Starlin Castro, Anthony Rizzo and Wellington Castillo have all been various shades of disappointing. How those three play these next two months is maybe the biggest story around this team.

"There's a very real chance that Theo Epstein is going to, over a period of 20 years, be the GM of a World-Series-winning Red Sox team and the President of a World Series-winning Cubs team. Once you do that, don't you have to run for president? At least, you'd have to take a shot at fixing the Cleveland Browns, no?"

"There is no difference in what happens when a bat meets a baseball in a post-steroid-testing world than there was for most of the 'steroid era'. 1995-98 and 2008-11 are indistinguishable from each other in terms of home runs on contact and slugging on contact and isolated power on contact. There's no break in the record between 2003 and 2004, when testing with penalties began. There's no break in the record between 2005 and 2006, when penalties were ramped up. (In fact, in both seasons when the Joint Drug Agreement changed, power on contact rose.) Last season, 2012, had the highest rate of home runs on contact since 2006, and the highest slugging on contact since 2009. The big lie of steroids -- that they caused players to hit for more power in a way that distorted the statistical record -- is put to rest by these numbers."

"Saying you want a drug-free game is an abstraction, buying in to an image of sports, of baseball, that has simply never reflected reality. In the same way that there was no such thing as loyalty before free agency, there's no such thing as clean before testing. If you could turn the Bud Squad loose in 1965 or 1982 or 1993, you'd find what reasonable people know to be true: many hypercompetitive athletes will do anything to be the best, ethics and laws be damned. With testing, with witch hunts, with 800-word screeds, we're trying to hold the present to the standards of the past -- standards that never, ever existed except in our sepia-toned fondest wishes."

"Kansas City Royals (17): I never get to talk about the Royals…. They've won 12 of 13 and 14 of 17 since the All-Star break, which makes Dayton Moore -- who said they could win 15 of 20 at any time -- prescient. Credit where due. It's not just the schedule; they went 5-2 on a homestand against the Tigers and Orioles, and going 9-1 even against a weak slate since then exceeds expectations. The decision to release Jeff Francoeur is mitigated by their burial of Johnny Giavotella -- their only real second-base option -- and continued use of Wade Davis as a starter. Their best hitter is a catcher batting .174 and they still don't do anything well on offense but steal bases. Going 14-3 gets them to -- or close to -- what will be a high point this season, but they're not going to catch the Tigers and even at this high point, they're the eighth-best team in a 15-team league.

"Call me in 12 days. Once the Twins leave town, the Red Sox come in, followed by the Marlins. Then the Royals go to Detroit for five games in four days. If the Royals have closed ground on the Tigers when they leave Detroit, if they're not still chasing three teams better than them in the wild-card race, then we can take all of this seriously.

"I suppose, after it all falls apart, the goalposts will be moved again, and staying sort of relevant in August and early September, finishing above .500, will be deemed a success. We'll hear about the challenges of a small market and the unfairness of it all, probably on a radio show while the Rays are preparing for a Division Series game, probably while Wil Myers takes batting practice, probably while votes are counted for Rookie of the Year."

From the latest edition of the Joe Sheehan Newsletter:

"Kansas City Royals (17): I never get to talk about the Royals…. They've won 12 of 13 and 14 of 17 since the All-Star break, which makes Dayton Moore -- who said they could win 15 of 20 at any time -- prescient. Credit where due. It's not just the schedule; they went 5-2 on a homestand against the Tigers and Orioles, and going 9-1 even against a weak slate since then exceeds expectations. The decision to release Jeff Francoeur is mitigated by their burial of Johnny Giavotella -- their only real second-base option -- and continued use of Wade Davis as a starter. Their best hitter is a catcher batting .174 and they still don't do anything well on offense but steal bases. Going 14-3 gets them to -- or close to -- what will be a high point this season, but they're not going to catch the Tigers and even at this high point, they're the eighth-best team in a 15-team league.

"Call me in 12 days. Once the Twins leave town, the Red Sox come in, followed by the Marlins. Then the Royals go to Detroit for five games in four days. If the Royals have closed ground on the Tigers when they leave Detroit, if they're not still chasing three teams better than them in the wild-card race, then we can take all of this seriously.

"I suppose, after it all falls apart, the goalposts will be moved again, and staying sort of relevant in August and early September, finishing above .500, will be deemed a success. We'll hear about the challenges of a small market and the unfairness of it all, probably on a radio show while the Rays are preparing for a Division Series game, probably while Wil Myers takes batting practice, probably while votes are counted for Rookie of the Year."

From the latest edition of the Sheehan Newsletter:

"Saying you want a drug-free game is an abstraction, buying in to an image of sports, of baseball, that has simply never reflected reality. In the same way that there was no such thing as loyalty before free agency, there's no such thing as clean before testing. If you could turn the Bud Squad loose in 1965 or 1982 or 1993, you'd find what reasonable people know to be true: many hypercompetitive athletes will do anything to be the best, ethics and laws be damned. With testing, with witch hunts, with 800-word screeds, we're trying to hold the present to the standards of the past -- standards that never, ever existed except in our sepia-toned fondest wishes."