The Oakland Athletics want a new ballpark. The team’s current home, the O.co Coliseum, is the only multi-sport stadium in use in Major League Baseball. The A’s share the Coliseum with the Oakland Raiders; in August, September and October, that often means football lines across the baseball field and diamond dirt on the gridiron. The conditions aren’t optimum for either team.

The Coliseum is also the fifth-oldest ballpark in the majors: only Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium and Angels Stadium are older. It opened for football in 1966 and for baseball in 1968, when the A’s moved west from Kansas City. Renovations in 1995 — when the Raiders moved back to Oakland from Los Angeles — favored football conditions at the expense of baseball. The most egregious example, of course, was the erection of Mt. Davis where the open outfield vistas once stood. Click here for photos of the Coliseum before and after Mt. Davis.

A’s owner Lew Wolff says the team needs a new ballpark to stay financially competitive with other teams in the league. Wolff has said the Coliseum simply lacks the kind of technology, amenities and corporate sponsorships common in most — if not all — other major-league ballparks. Earlier this month, Wolff told CNBC that a new ballpark could generate $100 million in additional revenue for the A’s. The details behind that figure aren’t clear; in particular, we don’t know how much of that additional revenue is expected to come from ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise sales, advertising and corporate sponsorships.

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Justin Verlander was pretty amazing Thursday night in his complete game shutout victory over the Athletics in game five. If you boil it down far enough, that start was the best postseason start ever. Boil it down, as in: he collected eleven strikeouts against five baserunners with no runs in a complete-game deciding win in American League playoff game. He was the first person to hit all of those benchmarks at the same time. He set the strikeout record for complete-game-shut-out winner-take-all-wins.

The crazy thing, though, is how well his game five performance stacks up even if you relax each of those determining factors.

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If just for the sake of my writing, I set up a narrative for this series. The Tigers’ star power against the Athletics’ depth, speed, defense and bullpen. There have been a few asterisks so far, but surprisingly, the narrative has held. On Thursday, that narrative will meet Justin Verlander.

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On September 18th, Max Scherzer was removed from his start after two innings because of shoulder woes. There might not be a more troubling word in the world of pitching than ‘shoulder.’ Once it goes, with it goes your velocity, which is much worse than the risk of temporary loss of playing time and control that the elbow offers. We had so much success predicting a low-scoring game for Anibal Sanchez yesterday, let’s wash off the template and start again. Did something happen in mid-September that fundamentally changed Scherzer’s game?

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Tonight’s game three between the Tigers and Athletics features two starters that weren’t on their team’s active roster when the season began. But since Brett Anderson’s absence was due to injury, it was Anibal Sanchez that has given us a full season’s worth of stats to digest and so he’ll be the subject of our inquiry.

The fact that he’s given us stats all year isn’t to say Sanchez has been the same guy all year. If August Anibal shows up, the Athletics might be able to take advantage of their depth, defense and speed. If September’s version of the Tigers’ pitcher takes the mound, it will instead be the story of Detroit’s depth in the rotation that will end the series.

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Episode 257
First, imagine FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron. Next, imagine all baseball. Now, imagine Dave Cameron analyzing all baseball. That’s precisely what follows in this episode of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 34 min. play time.)

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A series between two teams full of unique individuals doesn’t really fit into a nice plot with themes, characters and nemeses. But when in setting up this series, it still made sense to highlight the depth and undervalued skills on the Athletics and the top-heavy, star-driven status of the Tigers team. Two plate appearances from Sunday’s game two between these two teams seemed to encapsulate the overall matchup well, and highlight many of those same themes.

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If you hadn’t been paying close attention to the Athletics and the Tigers, you might have a couple preconceptions about the matchup. Maybe “old, slow sluggers” vs “speedy upstart youngsters.” Or maybe “tradition” vs “moneyball two.” Or maybe even “offense and an ace” vs “pitching and defense.” Delve further into the numbers, though, and this matchup between the elephants and the tigers isn’t so easily monikered.

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Let’s all go ahead and agree right now that the worst day of Josh Hamilton’s life probably had nothing to do with baseball. I’m not going to go into any detail, and you shouldn’t need for me to go into any detail. Who knows where Hamilton would even be were it not for having baseball in his life? Baseball, for Josh Hamilton, is a blessing, that which helps to save him from what he could otherwise become.

But in terms of just on-field baseball performance, Josh Hamilton on Wednesday might have had the worst day of his career. Hamilton, of course, has been through more devastating games, such as the last two in last year’s World Series, but those were devastating on a team level. On Wednesday, individually, Hamilton sucked, and as such he’s one of the players responsible for the Rangers still having to win another game before they can think about the ALDS.

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Remember when the Texas Rangers were running away with everything and were on course to be the the Greatest Team in the History of Whatever? Well, this afternoon the As might just take the 2012 American League West title from them. Certainly the biggest factor in the Oakland’s success this year was the incredibly boring Moneyball movie (if only they had used the alternate script), but there are many other storylines to follow, from injured pitchers to rookie pitchers to Yoenis Cespedes‘ video to San Jose. Bu for all the wondering about what New Inefficiency the As may or may not have found, one thing worth investigating is how the As have maximized their runs scoring by turning back the clock to a strategy more common fifty years ago than it is now: platoons. How much of a difference has successful platooning made for Oakland?

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