Over the last three seasons, DJ LeMahieu’s 9.9 WAR ranks fifth among all free agents. Just ahead of him is George Springer (11.3), Trevor Bauer (11.6), and J.T. Realmuto (12.3), who comes in second place. But topping all current free agents over the past three seasons is Marcus Semien, with 12.6 WAR. Semien isn’t some older free agent, either; at 30, he’s younger than Springer and LeMahieu and within a handful of months of Bauer and Realmuto. If we looked at just the past two seasons, the production gap between Semien and his peers is even greater. But for a whole host of reasons, Semien doesn’t look like he’ll come close to earning as much as those peers in free agency, and that could make him the biggest bargain.

When examining the various free agent lists, it becomes clear that my fourth-place rank when it comes to Semien is the high-water mark. Keith Law and Kiley McDaniel both have him sixth. MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince placed him seventh, CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson put him 11th, and MLB Trade Rumors slotted him all the way down at 15th. I either need to justify my ranking with a little more explanation or admit that I might have had Semien too high. This article will probably be one of those things.

Let’s start with the negatives. Semien wasn’t a particularly good player until 2018 and has had exactly one above-average hitting season in his career (’19), and his production in ’20 wasn’t very good. Add in questions about his defense at shortstop and a very crowded market at the position over the next few seasons, and we have a recipe for someone whose value certainly seems down. Semien’s market was helped slightly by the lack of a qualifying offer from Oakland, but compared to the other factors working against him, it’s a small gain. It isn’t really production or age that is keeping Semien from landing a big contract, though; it’s uncertainty. The error bars surrounding his performance would seem to be significantly higher than many other players due to defensive questions and the truncated 2020 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Batters

Marcus Semien’s BABIP-aided regression to the mean was unwelcome, but Oakland received surprising production elsewhere from sources such as Robbie Grossman. That being said, the loss of Semien to free agency does create a bit of a vacuum, as a fair amount of the team’s depth at shortstop from the last few years (Franklin Barreto, Jorge Mateo, Jurickson Profar theoretically) has moved on to other organizations. Chad Pinder is likely the de facto shortstop if the season started today, but there’s a good chance that Oakland’s starter in 2021 is not in this set of projections, unless Semien returns. Normally I’d think a player of his caliber would be loath to sign a one-year deal, but given the circumstances of baseball in 2020, who knows if a multi-year deal is in his future. Suffice it to say, it would have been highly useful for the minor leagues to exist last season so that the A’s could have seen more of Vimael Machín or Nick Allen.

Oakland’s offense will go as far as their current Big Three — Matt Chapman, Ramón Laureano, and Matt Olson — take them. Second base and right field do show up as weaknesses in the projections, and this is another place where the lack of a minor league season hurts the A’s; they don’t sign free agents to big contracts, so getting to look at some of that Quadruple-A talent is a valuable exercise. ZiPS is sort of optimistic about Khris Davis, but after a second down season, the ceiling has been lowered farther than that early scene in the Wonka factory. Oakland’s top-level talent still keeps it in the high-80s in wins without a single move, but I’m quite uneasy about the team’s overall depth. Read the rest of this entry »

For a little while there, everything was going the way the A’s drew it up. Thanks to — you guessed it — a homer, they had a 3-0 lead entering the bottom of the fourth. Zack Greinke, though generally effective, had allowed consecutive singles to Matt Olson and Mark Canha in the top of third; he hung a 3-2 slider to Ramón Laureano, and the A’s jumped out ahead. Meanwhile, Frankie Montas had managed to face the minimum through his three frames, outside of Yuli Gurriel reaching base on an Olson error. After the Laureano homer, the A’s win expectancy jumped to 76.4%. It wasn’t just that they had a chance to win, to stay alive and push this ALDS to a winner-take-all fifth game; they had a good chance.

It was all the more astonishing, then, how quickly the wheels fell off for Oakland, how quickly the Astros swung the game in their favor, taking it to a point of no return. Though the A’s offense did their best to rally, the scale of the thumping the Astros lineup put on Montas and a desperate, ineffective succession of A’s relievers was, in the end, too much for them to overcome. With a final score of 11-6, the Astros make their way into their fourth consecutive ALCS, while the A’s make their way home after yet another postseason heartbreak.

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After their regular season dustup — not to mention Houston’s jawing leading into the ALDS — it seemed as if the Astros and the Athletics might come to postseason blows. Instead, they’ve settled for a barrage of long balls. Wednesday’s Game 3 featured seven more home runs, including five from the eventually triumphant Oakland, tying a postseason franchise record set during the Jose Canseco era. The A’s avoided a sweep and pushed the series to a fourth game while the combined home run count in the series climbed to 18.

For the first time in the postseason, the grind of a five-game series without an off day had a clear impact on which pitchers were deployed and how they performed. With electric rookie reliever Enoli Paredes unavailable after pitching in the first two games, and the other Astros starters unavailable to piggyback due to the Division Series schedule and the smoldering questions surrounding Zack Greinke’s health, the soft underbelly of the Astros bullpen was exposed late in the game as the Athletics scored five combined runs to take the lead.

Most of Oakland’s damage, as well as both the most significant narrative and literal swing in the game, came against reliever Josh James, who entered the game with a two-run lead. After pitching a scoreless, double play-aided sixth inning, James returned for the seventh and surrendered singles to Marcus Semien and Tommy La Stella before Chad Pinder, who had been in a strict left/right platoon with Jake Lamb leading up to the game, was left in to face the same-handed James. He sent a first-pitch breaking ball over the right field wall, tying the game at seven. Read the rest of this entry »

I, personally, have never hit a home run in Dodgers Stadium. After the past two days, however, I might be one of the few baseball-adjacent people who can’t say that. The A’s and Astros engaged in another slugfest in the early innings today, launching five home runs in the first five frames of Game 2 of the ALDS. Combine those with the six they hit yesterday, and it’s a bad time to be a cardboard cutout in the Chavez Ravine outfield.

Khris Davis got the party started in the second by pouncing on a hanging curveball. He got under it a bit, and George Springer camped where he expected the ball to land. That worked out like this:

He needn’t have worried, however, because Dodgers Stadium gave to both sides today. With a runner aboard in the top of the next inning, Springer got a belt-high curveball of his own and didn’t miss:

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If you’d been asked, before this postseason, to name as many Astros relievers as you could, how many would you have rattled off before you had to stop? Many fans could probably recall Ryan Pressly, the closer with the high-spin curveball who’s been an integral part of Houston’s bullpen the last three seasons. Maybe Josh James is a familiar face if you’d paid enough attention, a young right-hander with a powerful fastball and questionable command who’s bounced between the rotation and bullpen.

After that, though, it’s likely a lot of blank stares and silence. The relief corps that the Astros turned to throughout the 2020 season was as anonymous as it was unexceptional. Houston’s bullpen ranked 16th in the majors in WAR and ERA and 18th in strikeout rate. By Win Probability Added, they were a miserable 26th. The only stat they were near the top of the league in was walk rate — 12.4%, second-highest in the league. None of that should have come as a surprise: The Astros lost two of their better relievers from 2019 in Will Harris and Joe Smith to free agency, then they saw closer Roberto Osuna throw all of 4.1 innings this year before blowing out his elbow.

The bullpen then became a carousel, spinning constantly as new bodies jumped on seemingly every day. Twenty-two different pitchers trotted out in relief for the Astros, most of them rookies, trying their best to fill what increasingly looked like a bottomless hole. Some of the names cycled through were downright Pynchon-esque: Cy Sneed, Nivaldo Rodriguez, Humberto Castellanos. Some players were barely there for a few days before disappearing while others stuck. And although the bullpen on the whole was never anything more than average, a few of those pitchers managed to secure a spot in Dusty Baker’s circle of trust. Read the rest of this entry »

All four Division Series matchups pit division rivals against each other, but none have the same kind of recent history as the one between the Athletics and the Astros, their first ever meeting in the playoffs. These two teams have battled for the AL West crown the last three seasons, with Houston coming out on top in the two seasons prior before stumbling in this year’s shorter slate. That kind of familiarity and competition is a breeding ground for animosity. Tempers flared in early August when, after being hit by a pitch for the second time and a subsequent shouting match with Astros hitting coach Alex Cintron, Ramón Laureano charged the Astros dugout. On the other side, former Astro and current A’s starter Mike Fiers, the whistleblower who revealed the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing scheme during the offseason, has become a popular villain in Houston. There’s no love lost between these two clubs.

Houston dominated this matchup in 2018 and 2019, going a combined 23-15 against Oakland during those two seasons, the A’s worst record against an American League opponent during that period. They just couldn’t compete with the Astros’ high powered offense and elite pitching staff. But the A’s took advantage of Houston’s recent struggles to score and slew of diminished and injured arms to win seven of the 10 games these two teams played this year:

The Astros haven’t done much to put the concerns about their ability to score runs in the playoffs to rest. They scored just 3.8 runs per game in September and only pushed seven runs across against the Twins in their two game sweep in the Wild Card round; three of those runs came in the ninth inning of Game 1 after an inning ending ground out was botched on a bad throw to second by Jorge Polanco. Read the rest of this entry »

OAKLAND — Major league baseball is a game played by some of the best athletes on the planet, bankrolled by billionaires and broadcast by megacorporations worldwide. This year, despite the global shuttering of the economy, the show went on; it’s a big business, for players and ownership alike. It’s still a game though, and in today’s elimination game between the White Sox and A’s, that mattered more than anything else.

Empty stadiums don’t exactly invoke a playoff vibe. There were perhaps 100 spectators for today’s game, mostly team personnel and media. The first two games had been dominated, to my ears at least, by a group of boisterous White Sox staffers sitting in the stands behind the visiting dugout. Oakland staffers countered today — 20 or so stood at windows perched above the outfield and cheered on the A’s.

If you’ve ever been to a particularly important Little League game, you can roughly imagine the sounds. “Let’s go Mike!!!” screamed an A’s staffer after leadoff hitter Tim Anderson swung through a changeup to make the count 0-2. “Good eye TA!” countered Chicago’s crew, after Anderson took the next pitch for a ball.

Through the pointed cheering floated incongruous crowd noises, generic bursts of voice and applause that seemed only tangentially related to the action on the field. A swell of noise punctuated a Jake Lamb pop out, roughly the same volume and tempo as the reaction for a Tommy La Stella single (sure) and a Khris Davis foul ball (huh?). That generic roar is the sound of baseball as imagined by a TV executive, but the two dueling groups of team personnel screaming personalized encouragement did far more to emphasize the enormity of the moment.

If the atmosphere felt vaguely like Little League, the actual game did nothing to dispel the feeling. Both the White Sox and A’s go roughly two deep on healthy and effective starters. Astute observers will note that this is the third game of the series, which means both teams went with the tried-and-true “whatever’s left” strategy. Mike Fiers started for the A’s and barely escaped the first inning unscathed, with the Oakland bullpen already stirring in left field. Read the rest of this entry »

OAKLAND — Chris Bassitt spent the month of September on the best streak of his life. In four regular season starts, he allowed exactly one run, a Joey Gallo homer. That works out to a 0.34 ERA, but it was far more than that: it won Bassitt Pitcher of the Month honors and essentially guaranteed him a start in the playoffs.

Why wasn’t more made of Bassitt’s September? Because it looked, well, like Chris Bassitt pitching. He struck out 24.8% of his opponents while walking 4.8%. His 12.4% swinging strike rate barely cracked the top 20 starters on the month. He turned those middling stats into dominance by stranding 100% of the runners he allowed to reach base. He also put up a stellar 3.7% HR/FB mark; hit the ball in the air against Bassitt, and it simply went nowhere.

The A’s know that, but they also knew something else: good luck in September or not, unsustainable sequencing or not, Bassitt is their second-best starting pitcher at the moment. With their backs against the wall, they turned to him to keep their season going — and he put the White Sox to sleep in much the same way he befuddled batters all September.

This wasn’t Lucas Giolito overwhelming the A’s the day before, or Trevor Bauer and Max Fried throwing matching gems today. It was ugly but effective in the same way that Bassitt’s September was: an inch off the barrel here, an escape from a jam there, and pretty soon, baby you’ve got a good start going.
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OAKLAND — As he stood in right field to warm up before the first playoff game of his career, Lucas Giolito looked nervous. One of his first throws off of flat ground went right over the bullpen catcher’s head and into the stands. A few throws later, he spiked one five feet short. He shrugged, bemused. There was no crowd around to heckle him, but who could blame him for feeling a little tight?

If that was a sign of anxiety, the first inning didn’t help matters. He started the game off with a ball low and in to Tommy La Stella, then reached three-ball counts against Robbie Grossman and Marcus Semien. He retired all three — most plate appearances end in an out, after all — but 14 pitches, seven of them balls, didn’t bode well for the White Sox ace going deep in the game.

Fortunately for Giolito, though, past performance isn’t a good indicator of future results. He came out for the second inning, now with a one-run lead, and put his foot on the gas — three up, three down, highlighted by a lovely changeup that turned Matt Olson from a professional hitter into a man fruitlessly attempting to swat a fly. It took another 14 pitches — a deep trip into the game looking less and less likely — but the jitters seemed gone.

This is a game recap, not a teen sports movie, but if it were the latter, this is where the montage would cut in. Giolito powered through the middle innings with increasing confidence, pouring in strikes and daring an overmatched Oakland team to do something about it. The A’s responded appropriately, swinging early and often, but they might as well have kept the bats on their shoulders. Mark Canha and Jake Lamb made good contact in the fifth inning, but both drives were hit in the general direction of Luis Robert, which is another way of saying they were both caught. No one else even troubled the defense. Read the rest of this entry »