A Little More on Shortstop Batting

When Ha-Seong Kim hit a home run on Wednesday it was the first homer hit by a Braves shortstop this season. With that homer, the Braves will not become the second team in the 21st century not to have their shortstop hit a home run. (The only other one is the 2010 Texas Rangers.) Nor will they be one of the 55 teams since 1961 with a banjo-hitter at position #6.

But I was counting homers just because it was easy to do. The number of homers hit is not a particularly good gauge of hitting prowess. So wilh a littl more time and access to Stathead, I looked at OPS for the shortstop position for every team since 1961. And the result is pretty ugly. The tabulation covers 1746 team-seasons, and the 2025 Braves, with a month to go in the season, are ensconced at position #1696 with a 0.535 OPS. That, my friends, is 3rd percentile performance.

I was unsurprised to discover that this was not the worst offensive year from Braves shortstops. The 1978 Braves were just above them at 0.536 and I suspect this year’s Braves will pass them before the end of the season, But even worse were the 1974 Braves (0.533, 1699th place) and the 1980 Braves (0.518, 1721st place). The culprits here are

Of course, the answer any manager will give for this is that shortstop is too critical defensively to trade hitting prowess for defensive chops. If Craig Robinson was ever compared to Mark Belanger, I missed it. And there’s no question that Nick Allen is an elite defender and is fun to watch. But 3rd percentile performance tells you that baseball teams do not allow someone as bad a hitter as him very often, even for elite defense.

To be fair, the 1974 and 1980 Braves weren’t terrible teams, so a bad-hitting shortstop doesn’t consign you to oblivion. (The 1978 team was really bad in a lot of ways, not just shortstop. Indeed it was a team of 10 WAR Phil Niekro, 4.6 WAR Jeff Burroughs and nobody else over 3. Niekro OPSed 0.506, much better than Rockett’s 0.366 in just about the same number of plate appearances.)

Ha-Seong Kim — chal oh-sha-sumnida

The Braves Record for Players Used

If no other players are used in a game this year, the Braves will have employed 68 players. This leads MLB in 2025 (Baltimore is only 1 behind) and is easily the Braves record, and is tied for 3rd place all time with the 2022 Pirates. Second place is the 2021 Cubs with 69 and the all-time leader is last year’s Marlins with 70.

It is unsurprising that these records are all pretty recent. The fragility of pitchers is the clear reason here. But there’s quite a range: the Cardinals have used only 43 players. The correlation between players used and winning percentage is a modest -0.21. Every additional 4 players used lowers your expected winning percentage by about 0.010. But it’s a very weak relationship: Colorado has only used one more player than Milwaukee. If you don’t believe me, here’s a graph:

The Game

Grudge Night, but I don’t hold any sort of grudge against Seattl… wait, what? Oh, never mind. (I will try to make that the last grunge reference tonight, though it was really an Emily Litella reference.) Seattle is of course the only current franchise never to have reached the World Series. Blowing up the Kingdome (above) didn’t help, though it might have sold a few copies of the classic song Kingdome by Lenny Randle and Ballplayers, although some prefer the B-Side I’m a Ballplayer, which has clearly superior lyrics. Even winning 116 regular season games didn’t help. I have to say I don’t like their chances this year either, but the Joaquin Andujar Proviso always apples.

And just to show Seattle isn’t all about grunge, there’s Macklemore’s fabulous paean to Seattle baseball and Dave Niehaus: My Oh My.

Chris Sale made his second post-costal (yeah… that’s an ‘s’, not an ‘i’… I try to work clean) start against a team that is currently favored to be playoff-bound despite being 8 games under 0.500 on the road. The Braves loaded the bases with no outs against Logan Gilbert in the first but let him wriggle away giving up only one run on a Ha-Seong Kim sac fly. And that was pretty much it for threats by either team through six innings. Sale worked 6 2/3, giving up 4 hits, striking out 9 and walking none, though he did hit a batter.

He left with a man on first, and that man was allowed to score by Dylan Lee, tying the game. Chris Sale has 143 wins. I’m pretty sure, barring some change in the game, that nobody’s ever going to get to 300 again. But even 200 is going to be pretty rare, and it’ll be even rarer if Sale can pitch like this to a no decision. There are three guys (Verlander, Kershaw and Scherzer) who are already there, and Gerrit Cole will probably make it. Sale, Sonny Gray and Zack Wheeler have outside chances. But the leader of players under 30 is Freddy Peralta with 69 wins.

Tyler Kinley pitched a perfect 8th and Seattle brought out Gabe Speier, Bad choice. Jurickson Profar led off the bottom of the 8th with a hustle double. Olson knocked him in. Ozzie Albies then tripled him in and Drake Baldwin followed up with a single through the drawn-in infield to make it 4-1. Speier’s 0.873 WHIP got whipped up to 0.949.

Raisel Iglesias finished it off.

Third takes the mound tomorrow against Bryce Miller, whose season stats are very similar to Bryce Elder‘s. Maybe it’s the name.