2022 ZiPS Projections: Oakland Athletics

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

The departures of Mark Canha and Starling Marte are a real setback for Oakland, but the lineup’s core remains intact. This starts with bullishness on the Matts.

Five-win projections from a first baseman are kind of rare in ZiPS — I started building WAR projections into ZiPS in 2014, and this will be only the sixth time it’s happened — but Matt Olson is at the likely height of his powers. As terrific as he was in 2021, with a .271/.341/.540 line and 5.0 WAR, ZiPS isn’t projecting a dropoff, thanks both to regression and because it thinks he was somewhat unlucky in BABIP the last two years relative to his hit data. Vladito versus Olson for supremacy in the AL should be a fun battle the next few years, though the former is likely to vanquish the latter for good in a few years given their respective ages.

ZiPS isn’t projecting Matt Chapman to set any new personal bests, as his offense has fallen off enough that he’s probably left his 2018–19 MVP-ish peak for good. Getting back to the four-win threshold would still make him All-Star level, though. Chapman seems to come up in trade talks reasonably regularly, but I’m not sure the A’s actually move him this year unless the playoff race is an uphill battle in July.

Sean Murphy is arguably the AL’s second-best catcher right now, so ZiPS has no complaints there, especially with Austin Allen on-hand as well. Ramón Laureano is well above average in center, though his value will naturally take a hit with 27 games remaining to serve on a suspension. Oakland’s multi-player second base combo looks adequate, though unexciting.

Where ZiPS is rather unimpressed is at DH and the corner outfield. The A’s have a lot of versatile players at these three positions, but few are really up to the offensive requirements of the position. It’s not surprising that two-thirds of the outfield looks weak given the losses of Canha and Marte, the latter acquired to fill a similar hole himself. With the A’s not actually doing anything pre-lockout other than deal with options and acquire Brent Honeywell Jr., it’s not surprising that these positions look weak. They’re also unlikely to be filled from within; all the players projected with an OPS+ of at least 100 are already on the team.

Pitchers

There’s less uncertainty around who is going to be in the rotation in 2022 (at least right now) than in the previous season, when it looked like the A’s went into the year with seven or eight interesting possibilities, all of whom came with significant questions. Whether in the positive or negative, most of these questions have been answered: Chris Bassitt and Frankie Montas are actually good, Sean Manaea has upped his strikeout rate into the healthy range, A.J. Puk appears likely to remain in the bullpen now, and Jesús Luzardo is gone. A top three of Bassitt-Montas-Manaea probably won’t up-end the Cy Young race, but it’s a solid trio.

The back of the rotation looks weaker, with ZiPS not sold on either Cole Irvin or James Kaprielian. And the downside of answering all those pitching questions is that Oakland doesn’t have much in the way of depth at the moment. Scrolling down the projections of the pitchers still actually in the organization, nobody stands out as the protagonist in yet another story of the team getting a couple WAR out of journeyman starter with no name recognition. This probably won’t be the case by the start of the season; I can’t imagine the A’s go an entire offseason without fulfilling their full quota of under-the-radar signings on the cheap. But it’s where the roster stands now. I do like the addition of Honeywell, but he’s a pure gamble at this point. After basically missing three entire seasons due to injury, he returned in 2021 and didn’t pitch particularly well in the minors. I’ll always root for a screwball pitcher, but he has a ways to go.

That issue stretches into the bullpen, which Steamer currently ranks as the worst in baseball, and while ZiPS is more optimistic, it’s not by all that much. This analysis shouldn’t be all that surprising, given that the A’s have lost Andrew Chafin, Jake Diekman, and more from a unit that only ranked 19th in ERA- in 2021. ZiPS sees Domingo Acevedo and minor-league signing Dany Jiménez as average, with the line forming behind them.

All told, Oakland looks like a mid-80s team in terms of wins. But if they’re successful in making bargain pickups at the outfield corners and strike it rich with a cheap pitcher or two, the A’s may once again play the scrappy underdog annoying the living heck out of the Astros.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. ZiPS is assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.