Joe Sheehan Newsletter

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"This brings us to today. DSG decided to stop paying the Padres and forfeit Bally Sports San Diego’s broadcast rights. They’ll save $60 million a year and probably end the network. While the Padres play in Miami this evening, the network will be showing “Breaking Par,” “Sports Stars of Tomorrow” and “Destination Polaris,” any one of which I might be making up. RSNs often have contracts with NBA and NHL teams in their market, but San Diego doesn’t have any of those. It’s hard to see BSSD as a going concern without the Padres on its air."

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Contending Cubs?
Vol. 15, No. 42
May 30, 2023

Chiming in as a selfish Cubs fan to say that I would love a higher share of coverage to the popular teams. I've been craving to hear your perspective on Justin Steele/Christopher Morel/the Cubs’ awful one-run record, etc.!

-- Mark W.

I had a snarky lede all ready to go for this one, but yesterday’s result -- a one-hit shutout against the best team in baseball -- makes it seem petty. Marcus Stroman dropped one of the Cubs’ best starts of the century on the Rays.

Stro, the Man (best Cubs starts, by Game Score, 2001-2023)

Jake Arrieta        8/30/15    98
Jake Arrieta        9/16/15    97
Kerry Wood          5/25/01    97
Carlos Zambrano     9/14/08    96
Marcus Stroman      5/29/23    92
Rich Hill           9/16/06    92
Mark Prior          9/30/04    92


This was the Stroman from the catalogue. He threw 105 pitches, 72 of them for strikes, not a single one above 93 mph. Working mostly sinker/slurve -- Statcast pegs his slider as a separate pitch from the latter -- he didn’t allow a single ball hit above 102 mph, and just three with a hit probability above 31%. It’s the kind of performance that’s hard to pull off in today’s game, all weak contact and ground balls, but it’s what Stroman did at his peak with the Blue Jays and what he’s tapped into so far in 2023. He leads the NL in innings pitched and WHIP, and among pitchers with at least 100 batted balls allowed, only Joe Ryan is allowing fewer balls to be barreled.

Perhaps most importantly, he finished the game, allowing David Ross to avoid turning the game over to the grab bag of line drives that is his bullpen. Cubs relievers have a 4.65 ERA, 27th in MLB, and the Cubs have lost four games they led heading into the seventh, two they led heading into the ninth. Yesterday’s 1-0 victory was just the Cubs’ third one-run win, and they’re 3-10 in one-run games as a whole. The results are a bit worse than the quality -- the bullpen’s FIP, 3.97, is above average -- but only journeyman Mark Leiter Jr. and failed starter prospect Adbert Alzolay being consistently effective. The team has just six saves, and no pitcher has more than two. I like a role-less bullpen, but what the Cubs have had is more a situation in which pitchers just haven’t been good enough to claim jobs.

Mark’s underlying point, that I hadn’t written about the Cubs, isn’t an unfair one. As I have said a number of times, teams that get my attention are the ones surprising me, one way or another, early in the season. Even at the Cubs’ peak, when they were 12-7 totally because they were eating dinner together, I never saw it as more than a middling team playing at the top of its range. We’ve seen the bottom of the range since then, and the end result -- 23-30 -- has them slightly underperforming my expectations two months ago (75-87). I’m not sure there’s a team in baseball about which my preseason analysis leaves me more satisfied. The Cubs are paying a lot of money for a team with no superstars. Stroman and Dansby Swanson are on pace for eight- and seven-win seasons, to be sure, but I’ll take the under on both.

The Cubs had a team of good, not great players, and so they needed everything to go right in order to contend. It hasn’t. The bullpen has cost them games. Cody Bellinger, a good pickup, got hurt and exposed the team’s lack of a second center fielder in or anywhere near the majors. The winter’s shopping spree has mostly been a disaster -- Jameson Taillon, Trey Mancini, Eric Hosmer, Tucker Barnhart, Michael Fulmer. Only Swanson, Bellinger, and Drew Smyly are playing well.

I saw some consternation over the weekend when the Cubs briefly had the worst record in the NL. That’s not meaningful; the entire NL is separated by less than ten games, and the bottom six teams by less than two. To some extent, the Cubs are victims of that offseason shopping spree and that 12-7 start, which set unreasonable expectations for a roster heavy on “average.”

It’s also heavy on age. The Stroman start yesterday got me thinking, and while he still feels like a young guy to me, he’s 32 now. With Kyle Hendricks back, in fact, four of the Cubs’ five starters are at least 31 years old. By weighted age, as Baseball Reference calculates it, the Cubs have the ninth-oldest pitching staff and 11th-oldest set of hitters in the game. The Cubs have yet to give any playing time to anyone under 24, one of just five teams that hasn’t done so. Less than a quarter of their PAs, and about 16% of their innings, have been given to players under 27.

That’s an unusual position for a team that is supposed to be coming out of a rebuilding period, having traded off or otherwise lost the core of its World Champion roster from seven years ago. The Cubs, perhaps feeling local pressure, tried to accelerate their process by signing all those free agents this winter, but they hadn’t put a young core in place yet.

In his email, Mark references Justin Steele, who was drafted during the Obama Administration and will turn 28 in six weeks. Steele has been a success story, getting established in the rotation a year ago and posting a 3.18 ERA (3.20 FIP) in 24 starts. He’s built on that in ’23, with a 2.77 ERA (2.86 FIP) and just shy of six innings a start. Like Stroman, Steele isn’t overpowering, and he leans even more on his two best pitches, a four-seamer and a slider that, combined, he’s thrown 95% of the time this year. His fastball is a single pitch on the page, but depending on how he throws it can have cut or ride action that makes it hard for hitters to pick up. Among 390 qualified pitchers in the league, Steele’s fastball is in the bottom five for vertical movement. Like Stroman, Steele is generating a lot of weak contact.

I was skeptical about Steele coming into the season, and I am uncertain how long he’ll be able to pitch this effectively. For the moment, though, as long as he sits 92 and maintains his movement profile, I have to move him from a #4 to a #2/#3 in my thinking. For a franchise that has struggled to produce pitchers since Hendricks reached the majors, Steele is a massive win.

I’m less excited about Morel, whose recent hot streak was the very definition of “unsustainable,” briefly marrying a 9/1 K/BB, .500 BABIP and 50% HR/FB in something out of a Wiffle Ball game. Morel was a good story a year ago and got exposed as the year went on, with a .194/.269/.376 second half that included nearly twice as many strikeouts as hits. He’s still striking out too much -- 31% at Triple-A, 37% in the majors -- to take seriously. There’s power and speed in this package, to be sure, but not enough bat-to-ball.

More worrisome is finding Morel a place to play. There’s no room for him on the dirt, and he cannot play the outfield. In a bit more than 500 innings over the last two years, he’s been among the worst outfielders in baseball by any measure. The Cubs can spot him now and again for Nico Hoerner and Patrick Wisdom, though it’s not clear Morel can handle third base, either. Morel’s future may have to come in another organization. The best unit on the Cubs is their infield defense, which has enabled a staff with a middling strikeout rate to allow the fifth-fewest runs in the NL. They do not want to mess with that group.

That brings us to the big question: What do the Cubs do now? They invested a lot in making 2023 a contending season. While they’re 23-30, their underlying performance is better than that. Even at 23-30, they’re just five games out in a weak NL Central and 4 1/2 behind the final wild-card slot. The offense isn’t the problem; they’re 11th in the majors with a 105 wRC+, thanks to an NL-leading .333 OBP driven by a 9.9% walk rate that’s third in the game. OBP is Life. (Thanks, Gary Huckabay.) They have, as the Morel situation makes clear, at least one too many good hitters.

The pitching, yesterday’s heroics aside, is the weak spot, especially the bullpen. So do you look to trade a Morel, a Nick Madrigal (26 and with no place to play), maybe even an arm like Jordan Wicks, to strengthen the 2023 team’s shot at a best-of-three at home against the Padres or Phillies or Mets? The Cubs spent the winter trying to do something on the field in 2023, and it will be hard to back away from that, no matter the actual record. Relievers are the easiest thing to add at the deadline, and that’s what the Cubs need most.

The other path is to recognize that there’s no need to be all-in this year. The Cubs’ core isn’t all locked up for 2024, but much of it is. Stroman can opt out. Bellinger has a mutual option. Hendricks has an inexpensive team option. If you keep your prospects, Wicks could be up in September and in the rotation next Opening Day. Big righty Ben Brown, acquired from the Phillies last summer, could be up next month. Pete Crow-Armstrong will be an option in center field next year, playing plus-plus defense, though still developing as a hitter. If you focus on 2024 and beyond, you have a lot of trade chips -- Morel, Stroman, Wisdom, Leiter, Yan Gomes -- to use to make those teams better.

The Cubs being a very good team in 2023 was always wishcasting. The talent base was never there to win 90 games, and their offseason moves seemed less aimed at winning games than winning the press conferences. Recognizing this team’s limitations and reversing that process, taking the focus off the 2023 team to make the 2024-27 ones better, is the way for Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins to go.

 

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"The Rangers aren’t a fluke. Their record to date is backed up by their underlying performance, with the second-best third-order record in the AL. They’ve seen some real improvement from prime-age hitters, and their main weakness, starting depth, hasn’t been exposed yet. That expected one-run regression has happened -- they’re 4-5 in one-run games -- but it’s the small total that is notable. Good teams don’t play one-run games; they blow their opponents out. That’s what the Rangers have done, with 16 blowout wins (+5 runs or more) accounting for a third of their games. The offense is going to have to carry this show for four more months for the Rangers to get back to the playoffs for the first time since 2016."

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"I’d bet on Mike Elías to make several notable acquisitions by trade this season, primarily because I suspect that’s the only exercise of his talents that ownership will allow him. That abundance of talent will undoubtedly contain some, I don’t know how many, worthy players who will clog the 40-man roster if they aren’t moved.

-- Wes M.

"The hard part of this is figuring out who to acquire. The expanded playoffs put so many teams in position to not sell at the deadline, and the others often don’t have controllable quality starters to move. Corbin Burnes has come up a lot, but I cannot see an NL Central scenario where the Brewers are in position to sell. Eduardo Rodriguez would be a rental. Lucas Giolito, too. Tough pool.

--J."

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"If there’s one thing the A’s can do to avoid all of this history, it’s throw more strikes. They’ve walked 12% of the batters they’ve faced so far this season, the highest mark of any team since 1971 and, outside of those outlier -dians, the highest mark since the post-war peak-walks era, when bonus rules filled rosters with unready pitchers. The A’s are walking more batters than the famed 1986-87 Rangers, with Bobby Witt’s dad, did. Just eight teams in recorded history have had a 12% walk rate."

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"Nobody in baseball has both a higher slugging percentage and lower strikeout rate than [Acuña] does, and again, that’s without getting full value for his batted balls. It’s an incredible leap forward for a player who was already on an early Hall of Fame track before the pandemic and a knee injury stalled him."

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"This year’s A’s and Marlins could be the final nails in the 'knows how to win' myth."

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"Kirby, who last year was a key part of the Mariners’ first trip to the playoffs since 2001, has expanded on his extreme control approach in 2023. He’s walked four batters in 51 1/3 innings over eight starts. To put that in some perspective, four pitchers walked more than four batters last night alone. Brad Keller, in 3 2/3 innings, walked eight."

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"In fact, Keller is keeping the Pirates afloat. Their last win in a game he didn’t start came back on April 29. Since then, they’re 2-1 behind Keller and 0-10 when anyone else starts. The Pirates remain a good story, and they’re laying the groundwork for some very good baseball teams."

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"Getting to 31-9 is a separator. Of the 12 teams to start the season playing .775 ball or better through 40 games, seven won the World Series, including the ’84 Tigers and ’98 Yankees. That 58% hit rate drops to 33% for the 30-10 teams and 28% for the 29-11 teams. This is trivia more than anything else -- there’s no meaningful difference in those three records -- but the gap is wide enough that you can see some signal there if you want."

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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Beat the Mets
Vol. 15, No. 35
May 10, 2023

With Max Scherzer scratched with a neck injury, the Mets started David Peterson last night and fell behind 7-1 in an eventual 7-6 loss, their 12th in 15 games. A team that started 14-7 is now 17-19 and eight games behind the Braves in the NL East.

Scherzer’s sore neck is just the latest problem the Mets have had with their $128-million starting rotation. Mad Max, Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, Carlos Carrasco, and Jose Quintana have combined for 16 starts, 71 1/3 innings, a 5.17 ERA, a FIP above 6.00, and 0.0 bWAR. Investors in Theranos got a better return than Steve Cohen has for his money so far. Verlander and Senga are now taking regular turns, and we’ll see what happens with Scherzer’s neck -- a problem he’s had before, most famously during the 2019 World Series. Carrasco, sidelined with a bone chip in his pitching elbow, could return next week, and Quintana in July. “Injury optimism is not your friend,” says Scott Pianowski, but if you’re a Mets fan, you can at least hope the worst of this is behind you.

The replacements are killing this team. Peterson had pitched his way off the roster before being tapped last night. He now has a 7.68 ERA. Joey Lucchesi has a 4.43 ERA and a 5.24 FIP. The Mets have used nine starting pitchers, and none of them has a FIP below 5.00. Which brings us to one of those charts you don’t want to be in...

Extremely Expensive and Incredibly Bad (Worst starters FIP, 2023)

Athletics   6.41
Mets        5.85
Rockies     5.65
Royals      5.22
Red Sox     5.17


Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why a team isn’t winning. This isn’t one of those times.

Mets starters have thrown fewer innings than all but the Rays and Reds starters, and the Rays do that by plan with openers and tandem starts. Just two starting rotations have produced negative value by FanGraphs’ WAR calculations -- the Mets and the A’s. Remember, the Mets are paying five starting pitchers more than eight teams are paying their entire Opening Day rosters. They’re supposed to be winning by getting good starting pitching, and instead their rotation is better than only the Rachel Phelps A’s.

While the Mets relief corps, down Edwin Diaz, hasn’t been great -- 18th in ERA, 18th in FIP -- the leverage guys have been fine and the Mets aren’t blowing games. They’re 14-1 when they lead starting the seventh inning, and undefeated when winning starting the ninth. The loss of Diaz hasn’t changed their fate at all late in games. David Robertson has a 0.63 ERA and a 2.06 FIP. Drew Smith has moved into higher-leverage work thanks to a 1.93 ERA and 2.96 FIP. Adam Ottavino, the shakiest of the group, has a 3.46 ERA and 4.32 FIP.

The Mets don’t do the modern thing of making pitchers out of nothing at all. Fifteen actual pitchers have made at least one relief appearance for the Mets, and 11 of them have a FIP of at least 4.00. (In addition to Robertson and Smith, two pitchers with fewer than five IP ring the bell.) The Mets don’t have any young arms at all. Every pitcher to appear in a game for them this year is at least 25, and every pitcher with at least ten innings pitched is at least 27. This isn’t a one-off, either; last year’s Mets got just 27 2/3 innings from pitchers 25 and under. Megill and Peterson bolstered the class in 2021, throwing a combined 156 innings of bad ball.

The Mets, who went to the World Series in 2015 with a mostly homegrown starting rotation, haven’t had any success developing pitching since that Matt Harvey/Jacob deGrom group came through in the middle of the last decade. That’s how you end up with a $128-million rotation with an average age of “watches CBS” and less reliability than the 4 train on the weekend.

The offense hasn’t been good enough to make up for the pitching. The Mets are in the middle of the pack in runs and wRC+. The moves they made two offseasons ago that mostly paid off in 2022, signing Starling Marte and Mark Canha and Eduardo Escobar, have gone south in a hurry.

How The Turntables... (Marte, Canha, Escobar lines)

        PA   AVG   OBP   SLG   bWAR
2022  1589  .266  .336  .434    7.5
2023   322  .206  .278  .332   -0.2


Canha and Escobar have club options for 2024 that can be cheaply bought out. Marte, though is signed through 2025 for about $21 million a year, and he’s showing signs of collapse: He’s stopped hitting the ball hard, he’s losing speed, and he’s not getting to much in the field. Marte, now 34, is rapidly becoming a problem.

What is working for these Mets, what has been working for a long time now, is their homegrown hitting. Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Jeff McNeil anchor the lineup, each having a typical season. Rookie Brett Baty has a .271/.338/.424 line and is making better contact that that: .293 expected average, .497 expected SLG, with an 11% barrel rate. Francisco Alvarez struggled in April with intermittent playing time. In May, he’s started six of the Mets’ nine games and was coming around at the plate -- .286/.375/.429 -- even before last night’s two-homer outburst. Now he has an 1178 OPS in 20 May PA.

With Baty and Alvarez performing well, it’s fair to wonder why the Mets don’t take the next step and bring up Mark Vientos. The 23-year-old has a .339/.431/.713 line at Syracuse, with a respectable 29/17 K/BB and no platoon split. For that matter, when does Ronny Mauricio -- .336/.371/.582 in his first exposure to Triple-A -- get a call? While it’s just one month of play for all involved, there’s a real case to be made that the Mets aren’t anywhere close to fielding their best roster right now. Their track record in producing major-league position players, which even extends to the double-play combination in Cleveland, should make them more confident about what Vientos and Mauricio can do for them.

We’ve seen Steve Cohen spend money and commit money, but we have yet to see him eat money. Can Billy Eppler get him to take that next step, paying players to not play for him, if it makes the Mets better? Cohen is certainly no stranger to the concept of sunk costs, and his willingness to accept them in baseball could be a real key part of this Mets season.

Realistically, though, it will be hard to turn over everyone. Francisco Lindor is a step down from his peak, yet still a five-win player and signed through the end of the decade. Mauricio, as good as he may be, isn’t moving him. Daniel Vogelbach has a .396 OBP since coming to the Mets last summer. Mark Vientos’s best hope is to platoon with him. Tommy Pham is the team’s only backup outfielder, and the best of a collection of bad options to serve as the backup center fielder. (The one irreplaceable Met right now is Nimmo, who has played 92% of the innings in center so far this year.)

The Mets, through the signings of Scherzer and Verlander, have defined their window as the 2023 and 2024 seasons. This is one of the oldest teams in recent baseball history, and the most expensive one ever built. Vientos and Mauricio are, like Andres Gimenez and Amed Rosario before them, more likely to be used as trade chips than as players. Whatever their future value, they can’t crack the current Mets roster as more than part-timers.

If the Mets can’t stop being chased out of games by the bottom of the fourth, though, none of this will matter. Verlander is back, Carrasco is almost back, Scherzer has served his suspension and we’ll see how his neck feels. The $128-million rotation has to start providing returns, or the only thing we’re going to remember about these Mets is their price tag.

 

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"The smaller the event, the greater the risk. That risk can be legitimate: The more events on offer, the greater the likelihood someone, fairly, has more information than they do, just knows the sport or the players better than the book does. It can also be illegitimate, such as when a participant funnels information to a bettor."

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"The White Sox didn’t spend enough money in the offseason, and the money they spent has produced nothing. Elvis Andrus is one of the worst players in baseball and Andrew Benintendi one of the least-productive left fielders in the game. Mike Clevinger has been a generic back-end starter. I didn’t notice this until recently, but the team’s Opening Day payroll in 2023 is somehow lower than it was in 2022. They’re going backwards at a moment they should be pressing the gas pedal. Never change, Jerry."

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"That young catcher, though, does set the tone. Adley Rutschman has started 136 games in a major-league career nearly one year old. The Orioles are 80-56 in those games, a 95-win pace over a full season. He leads the AL in walks as part of a .313/.423/.464 line, and while his defense has suffered a bit -- he’s middle of the pack by most measures this year -- he’s also the guy quarterbacking that anonymous and effective bullpen. Rutschman is already a superstar."

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"We’re talking about two things here: Why are the Cardinals 10-20, and what will they be going forward? They’re 10-20 because their rotation has been bad, because they have provided too little consistent playing time to their hitters -- affecting the offense and the defense -- and because they’ve lost a disproportionate amount of close games. They’re not a .333 team."

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"The Pirates haven’t just fallen into a 20-9 record. They’ve improved the talent base, especially at the back end of the roster, through trades. They’ve made their own players better in a way we don’t associate with recent versions of the Pirates."

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"One of pitchers’ key defenses against basestealing was varying timing to the plate. That no longer exists. There’s a seven-second window in which something has to happen, and baserunners know that."