Once upon a time, 12 teams and 15 years ago, Edwin Jackson was a Dodgers phenom who outdueled Randy Johnson in a major-league debut that happened to fall on his 20th birthday. Six trades, one All-Star appearance, one no-hitter, and several free-agency signings — some lucrative, some humbling — later, he’s the co-holder of a record for colorful laundry. Forget the “E Jax” nickname, the 34-year-old righty should be known as “Transaction Jackson.” Suddenly, he’s come back from the brink of professional oblivion to pitching as well as he has in half a decade with a performance that has not only helped the upstart A’s take possession of the second AL Wild Card spot, but has almost exactly coincided with their surge past the Mariners.

Jackson, who tied Octavio Dotel’s major-league record of 13 teams played for when he donned the green and gold for the first time, has been on quite an odyssey since that 2003 debut. He’s been traded in deals involving Danys Baez and Lance Carter (from the Dodgers to the Devil Rays in 2006), Matt Joyce (from the Rays to the Tigers in 2008), Curtis Granderson, Max Scherzer, and Ian Kennedy (from the Tigers to the Diamondbacks in a three-way, seven-player deal in 2009), Daniel Hudson (from the Diamondbacks to the White Sox in 2010), Mark Teahen and Jason Frasor (from the White Sox to the Blue Jays in 2011), and Dotel, Corey Patterson, Marc Rzepczynski, and Colby Rasmus (from the Blue Jays to the Cardinals on that same July 27, 2011 day, without even getting to suit up for Toronto). In his first taste of free agency, he signed a one-year, $11 million deal with the Nationals in February 2012. In his next one, he signed a four-year, $52 million deal with the Cubs in December 2012 — the first big free-agent deal of the Theo Epstein regime — but after a so-so first season (8-18, 4.98 ERA, 3.79 FIP, 2.0 WAR), his performance deteriorated to the point that in mid-2015, having delivered just an additional 0.8 WAR and converted to a relief role, he was released with $15.63 million remaining on his contract.

It’s at that point, on July 27, 2015, where this particular journeyman’s journey through the majors reached the lightning round; since then, Jackson has pitched for the Braves (2015), Marlins and Padres (2016), Orioles and Nationals again (2017). Over that three-season, six-team span (including his final months with the Cubs), he threw 215.2 innings with a 4.92 ERA, 5.24 FIP and -0.6 WAR, the last mark the second-lowest total of any of the 204 pitchers with at least 200 innings in that span. In his three starts for the Orioles and 13 for the Nationals last year, Jackson pitched to a 5.21 ERA and a career-worst 6.14 FIP in 76 innings, “good” for -0.3 WAR.

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While the AL East race appears to have tilted decisively towards the Red Sox over the past five weeks, an even more dramatic turnaround has taken place in the AL wild card race over an even longer timeline, one involving the Mariners and A’s. This one has yet to be decided, which is good news, because it’s practically the last race standing in the Junior Circuit.

Through June 15, the Mariners were running neck-and-neck with the Astros despite a massive disparity in the two teams’ run differentials, a situation that — as I had illustrated a few days earlier — owed a whole lot to their records in one-run games (22-10 for Seattle, 6-12 for Houston). The A’s, though solidly competitive to that point, were something of an afterthought, far overshadowed by the Mike Trout/Shohei Ohtani show in Anaheim:

On June 16, despite placing Matt Chapman on the disabled list with a contusion on his right thumb, the A’s, who had lost to the Angels 8-4 the night before, kicked off a five-game winning streak, taking the two remaining games of the series that weekend, then two from the Padres at Petco Park and the first game of a four-game set against the White Sox in Chicago. Though they merely split a four-gamer on the South Side, they swept four from the Tigers in Detroit, sparking a six-game winning streak that also included two victories at home against the Indians. Remarkably, they’ve strung together two separate six-game winning streaks since then, as well, one against the Giants (a pair of walk-of wins) at home and the Rangers in Arlington from July 21 to 26 and then another from July 30 through August 5 at home against the Blue Jays and Tigers. Alas, that one ended on Tuesday night against the Dodgers.

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The A’s occupy one of the AL’s two wild-card slots, and the other day they picked up Mike Fiers. They’re about to use him out of the rotation. I tried — I promise — to come up with some kind of Mike Fiers article, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t think it would be interesting. The A’s added a below-average starter, but, into the rotation he goes. That might be the real story here, how the A’s have gotten where they are despite a patchwork rotation that no one expected. The A’s have given Brett Anderson nine turns. They’ve given Edwin Jackson — literally Edwin Jackson — eight turns. Fiers probably will help, if only for the fact that he can reliably pitch. The group he’s joining appears paper-thin.

Which isn’t to suggest that I don’t think much of Sean Manaea. Manaea, at least, has been a familiar constant. But there’s a surprise in here, too, a guy without whom the A’s would be struggling. Contact rate measures bat-to-ball contact per swing attempt. The lower the contact rate, the better a pitcher is at generating whiffs. I looked at every starter this year with at least 50 innings. The guy with the lowest contact rate allowed is Chris Sale. In second is Patrick Corbin. In third is Max Scherzer. In fourth is Trevor Cahill. The A’s signed Cahill for $1.5 million in the middle of March, seemingly as a response to losing Jharel Cotton. Cahill’s started 13 times, and he’s ended up an absolute bargain.

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On June 15, the A’s lost to the Angels 8-4. For Oakland, it was their fourth consecutive loss, and it dropped them to a record of 34-36. At that point, the A’s were 11 games back of the Mariners, and while the underlying numbers suggested the standings should’ve been an awful lot closer than that, they weren’t, and there was little the A’s could do. You’ll remember it seemed like the AL playoff picture was already decided. The Mariners had a firm grip on the second wild card.

That race is now officially tied up. The A’s and the Mariners are both 18 games over .500. In the Mariners’ defense, it’s not like they’ve collapsed — since June 16, they’ve gone a mediocre 18-20. The A’s have gone a baseball-best 30-10. The Mariners have spun their wheels, while the A’s have caught fire. It looks like a coin flip the rest of the way. The playoff picture is settled no more.

How is it that the A’s have surprised as much as they have? How is it that baseball’s lowest opening-day payroll is currently tied for a playoff spot? Much credit has to go to the bullpen, led by Blake Treinen, Lou Trivino, and, now, Jeurys Familia. The bullpen has been incredible when it’s had to be. But as is always the case, this has been a team effort. Matt Chapman is a member of that team I’d like to bring to your attention.

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Eugenio Suárez played in the All-Star Game earlier this month, so in some respects he’s not under the radar. But in many ways, he really is. The Cincinnati Reds third baseman is slashing .301/.387/.581, and he leads the National League in both wRC+ and RBIs. Were he playing in a bigger market, those numbers would make him… well, a star. Which he is… in relative anonymity.

Opposing pitchers certainly know who he is, and that’s been especially true this past week. Going into last night, Suárez had homered in five consecutive games, raising his season total to 24. That’s two fewer than last year’s career high, which came in his third season in Cincinnati. Count the Tigers’ former brain trust among those who didn’t see this coming. In December 2014, Detroit traded the then-23-year-old to the Reds for (gulp), Alfredo Simon.

“I don’t think anything has really changed,” Suárez claimed when I asked him about his evolution as a hitter. “I just play baseball like I did before. I’ve always been able to hit, just not for power like last year and this year.”

He attributes the power surge to maturity and hard work in the offseason. Asked to compare his current self to the 17-year-old kid who signed out of Venezuela in 2008, Suárez said the biggest difference is physicality. Read the rest of this entry »

An impromptu conversation will sometimes glean quality interview material, and that was the case earlier this season when I chewed the fat with Scott Emerson in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park. The Oakland pitching coach loves discussing his craft, and that fact came to the fore when an answer to a question about an individual member of the A’s staff segued into what you’re about read here. From the importance of staying closed in a delivery to the value of disrupting timing and attacking weaknesses — with boxing, bullets, and airplane analogies thrown in for good measure — Emerson had a lot to offer.

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Scott Emerson on pitching: “Some guys can create the analytic everybody is looking for with a bad delivery. What I mean by that is they bail out in their delivery and the hitters see the ball better. We can’t quantify the hitters seeing the ball, but the longer they see it — no matter what the spin rates are — the more it takes away from the effectiveness of the pitch. It gives the hitter the advantage.

“Sometimes it’s, ‘Oh, this guy can spin it,’ and people are wondering ‘Why does he have a 6.00 ERA?’ Well, he has a 6.00 ERA because he doesn’t hang onto his mechanics well enough. He exposes the ball to the hitter sooner. It’s like a boxer bailing out on a punch. If we’re boxing and I open up too much, I’m exposed and you can hit me with a left hook. But if I’m driving through you, I’m not exposing myself. I’m not giving you the opportunity to beat me up.

“For instance, when Daniel Mengden is really good, he stays closed longer. He’s down the lane, down the slope, closed, and then he explodes out of it. When he gets himself in trouble is when he wants to overthrow. His front shoulder bails out and he exposes the baseball to the hitter. That gets him in trouble.

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They can’t all be Mike Trout, and this year, with the Millville Meteor posting a career-best 191 wRC+, the rest of the center-field pack has been as unproductive as any time in recent history. The collective 95 wRC+ recorded by all center fielders (including Trout) is the lowest it’s been since 2006, back when Trout was a high-school freshman.

Even with that fairly modest production, only a small handful of contenders — which for this series I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0% (a definition that currently covers 15 teams) — are receiving less than 1.0 WAR from their center fielders, which makes them eligible for a spot among the Replacement-Level Killers.

By the way, since I don’t have anywhere else to put it — this is the last article in the series, since the RLK concept doesn’t work so neatly for pitchers and just one AL team has a DH who could be classified a Killer. Sorry if that was awkward; continue as you were…

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Whereas the first notable reliever acquisition of the trade deadline saw Cleveland receive, in Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, two pitchers who will remain with the club for future seasons, the Athletics this afternoon have performed a swap with a more traditional rent-a-player flavor, getting Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets in exchange for right-handed reliever Bobby Wahl, third baseman William Toffey, and an unspecified pile of international slot money, the 2018 version of a player-to-be-named-later.

There’s an argument to be made that, at this point, Familia may be slightly underrated among relievers. The extra couple of walks per nine that Familia picked up in a 2017 season mostly ruined by surgery to remove a blood clots from his shoulder have disappeared in 2018. Familia’s not relying on his hard, heavy sinker as much as he has in the past — especially against lefties — but given that the A’s have an infield whose four primary players, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, and Jed Lowrie have all been above average by UZR (Lowrie a couple of runs in the negative in DRS), I’d be happy to see him go to that well a bit more often again. Even without relying on the sinker, Familia’s pitching as well as he was in 2016, which was enough to earn him an All-Star appearance and a rather odd MVP vote. Familia is in the top 20 of relievers in WAR and among the top 30 in FIP, so it’s a real upgrade to the A’s bullpen. Blake Treinen will remain the closer, which I believe is absolutely the right tack to take.

Despite Sandy Alderson’s insistence earlier this season that the Mets have no plans to go full-scale rebuild, the team’s at least been listening to offers on pretty much the entire roster. Familia doesn’t necessarily indicate a stronger organizational willingness to go that route, of course, as he was likely to be traded anyway given his contract and the team’s position in the standings.

Bobby Wahl is an interesting flier for the Mets to take. It’s hard to characterize a 26-year-old reliever as some kind of top prospect — and I won’t — but Wahl throws in the upper 90s, has an effective slider (that really feels more like a slurve to me), and can change speeds at least tolerably well. His control’s been an issue at times, though not on the Bobby Witt scale, and one of the reasons he’s not been a bit higher in the pecking order is that he has a long history of injury, losing parts of most years with varying ailments, most recently surgery for a thoracic outlet issue last season. He was fine by spring training and, as far as I know, hasn’t had any significant issues along those lines since.

Prospect-watchers tend to like Will Toffey more than Wahl, and ZiPS agrees that he’s a bit above-average defensively, placing him at about two runs per 150 games better than average based on the rough estimates ZiPS makes from play-by-play data. I’m really not sold on his bat: 23 is just too old for a player not in the middle infield or catching to not be killing the ball in the California League. While there’s obviously more time for Toffey to develop into something more than Wahl, I think the latter is more likely to actually contribute to a major-league team. The Mets’ squadron isn’t that deep in relief pitching and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see him in the back end of the team’s bullpen in April (or even this year!) depending on what other moves the Mets make.

It’s interesting to see Oakland positioning themselves as buyers, at least in the bargain section. To find the last time Oakland was the team trading prospects for a veteran rather than vice-versa, you actually have to go back to the 2014 Jeff Samardzija trade, which saw the team give up Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and Billy McKinney to the Cubs for Samardzija and Jason Hammel. (They picked up Jon Lester later in that month, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe Yoenis Cespedes as a prospect.) While one doesn’t really think of the A’s as front-line, top-tier contenders, the fact is they’re essentially in a two-team race for the second Wild Card with the Mariners, a team that only has a Pythagorean record of right around .500 and likely isn’t as good as their seasonal record when you talk the rest-of-season projections. Even four games back, that it’s a two-team race is quite important: I’d rather be four games behind one team than two games back and fighting with seven other teams. But the 2018 National League is highly competitive one and the American league, the bifurcated stars-and-scrubs league, a flip of the situation a few years ago.

I’m not a believer in going all-in for a Wild Card unless it comes with a significant chance of also capturing the division title, but with what Oakland is giving up, they’re not going all-in, but simply making an incremental addition to enhance their Wild Card odds. Being less risk-averse with Familia is better in this situation than rolling the dice with Wahl would be. In all, the A’s add a significant part of their present without giving up a significant part of their future.

Wins on both sides here, with both teams getting what they need from this trade. I daresay that I’d be happier with Familia at this price than Zach Britton at the price he eventually fetches.

Last Tuesday, the A’s played probably the most frustrating game of their season. Facing the first-place Astros in Houston, the A’s erased a 4-0 deficit in the top of the ninth. In the 11th, they pulled ahead on a two-out home run, getting the chance to hand a lead to Blake Treinen. The tying run scored on a fielder’s choice, with Jonathan Lucroy unable to handle a throw home. The losing run scored on a tapper that went about five feet, after Lucroy threw the ball away. It was a tough inning for Lucroy, and it was a rough game for Oakland to stomach, because they’d had the Astros just where they’d wanted them. While the A’s had been hot, you never know which loss might get under a team’s skin.

The A’s came back and beat the Astros the next day. They beat them again the day after that, and then they took two of three in San Francisco. Where just weeks ago it looked almost impossible, we’ve gotten to the All-Star break and now we have a wild-card race. The A’s are catching up to the Mariners, and while every run is a function of a number of players, Oakland’s two standouts are at the back of the bullpen.

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Monday through Wednesday notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

7/2

Brewer Hicklen, OF, Kansas City Royals (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: HM   FV: 35+
Line: 4-for-6, 2B, HR

Notes
Hicklen has some statistical red flags if you’re unaware of the context with which you should be viewing his performance. He’s a 22-year-old college hitter with a 30% strikeout rate at Low-A. But Hicklen hasn’t been committed to playing baseball for very long, as he sought, late in high school and throughout college, to have a football career. He went to UAB as a baseball walk-on and eventually earned a football scholarship as the school’s defunct program was to be reborn. But Hicklen’s physical tools stood out as he continued to play baseball (plus speed and raw power), so he was drafted and compelled to sign. He hasn’t been focusing on baseball, alone, for very long and has a .300/.350/.525 line in his first full pro season. He’s a toolsy long shot, but so far so good.

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