After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

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There’s always the sense, given the organization’s record of innovation and willingness to reconstruct its roster, that the A’s are likely to succeed then most when mediocrity appears to be the only possible outcome. If that sense is correct, then Oakland is likely to succeed very hard in 2016 — because the club, as presently constructed, is not well-acquitted by the projections.

Consider the following table, a version of which appears in the glossary entry for WAR and which provides a rough characterization for various WAR ranges:

WAR Figures in Context

Category	WAR
Scrub	0-1
Role Player	1-2
Solid Starter	2-3
Good Player	3-4
All-Star	4-5
Superstar	5-6
MVP	6+

By this rough taxonomy, Oakland currently employs only two batters classified as “solid starters” (Josh Reddick, Marcus Semien) and a third (Billy Burns) who profiles as precisely average. That triumvirate represents the exact sort of cost-controlled core a team like Oakland requires to win. Unfortunately, they’re surrounded not by stars, but role players.

It’s difficult, while examining the modest projections here, not also to consider for a moment the distinctly less modest one produced by ZiPS for Josh Donaldson. Last year’s American League MVP is expected to record more than six wins in 2016, at the cost of about $11.5 million. One needn’t be employed — or even have any training — as a rocket scientist to recognize what a benefit Donaldson would be to this club.

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It might seem easy to envy the life of a major league baseball player: even the least famous of them make a lot of money, have a bunch of Twitter followers, and get to play a game for a living. But it’s always been a little tougher for me to envy the life of a relief pitcher, who seems to experience the worst drawbacks of the job with little of the upside. As opposed to starting pitching — where one’s mistakes can be more easily made up for by logging good innings — relief pitching is simply less forgiving, with every mistake massively amplified. And no pitcher has embodied that more in the past two seasons than Evan Scribner.

You might know about Scribner, as he was just traded from the A’s to the Mariners last month. There’s more than that to him, of course, and one of the big things is the number of strikeouts he’s recorded compared to the number of walks he’s issued. That’s important, because we like the K-BB% stat a lot for pitchers: it’s been shown to be the best ultra-simple ERA estimator we currently have. It’s not perfect, but it can be a handy way to get an idea of how a pitcher could perform in the future. There’s even some work that shows it performed better than xFIP, FIP, and SIERA at predicting second-half ERA after a first half was in the books. All of this is just a set up, really, for this table, which shows the 15 best K-BB% marks for relievers with at least 70 innings pitched between 2014-2015:

The list is pretty much a who’s who of dominant relievers, as every guy in the top 10 is closing or has closed for their respective teams sometime during the past two years. Then there’s Scribner, who sticks out like a sore thumb mostly because of his ERA and the fact that he walks no one. Well, not no one, but in major league terms, he walks no one. He has the lowest walk rate among relievers who have pitched meaningful innings in the past two years (20+ innings), and it’s not particularly close; in raw numbers, he’s walked four batters in 71.2 innings.

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At the winter meetings, I asked a small collection of managers about the evolution of the role, and all of them — save perhaps Mike Scioscia — spoke to the importance of communicating with the media and with their players.

But that story had a longer scope, and a more universal one. I also asked them about a smaller more immediate thing — I asked many of them what they had learned this year, on the job. And for those just coming to the job, what they have tried to learn before they first manage a game.

Of particular note was what former position players did to learn about pitching, and vice versa. Managers have to communicate with all sorts of different players, and yet they came from one tradition within the game. And each has spent time developing themselves in their present role.

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When the top 100 prospects in the game were ranked by Baseball America during the summer of 2010, Brett Lawrie was 26 spots ahead of Mike Trout. Both received a large cup of coffee in the majors during 2011 – Lawrie produced 2.6 WAR in just 46 games, while Trout put up 0.7 WAR in 40 – and there was a lot of optimism that we were witnessing two stars in the making: these were the athletic, ultra-talented position players of the future for two franchises.

Four years have passed since those brief debuts, and we know the history of both players has been quite different: Trout has produced a stunning 37.8 WAR, establishing himself as a perennial candidate for best player in baseball, while Lawrie has produced 6.2 WAR in a series of injury-interrupted, slightly above average seasons.

Being compared to Trout is unfair for basically every player in the game, but the point is this: early success doesn’t always mean continued success, mostly because baseball is about how well you adjust, not necessarily how much raw talent you have. A lot can change in the course of four seasons, especially when we’re trying to evaluate young players.

Because of the content of the four years since his debut, we view Lawrie through a certain lens: he was a top prospect, but he’s not a top major-leaguer. He’s had his chance, the thinking goes, and this is what he’s done with it. Major-league baseball is a boiling hot cauldron into which young men are thrown, and they either develop sufficiently thick skin to handle the heat or they don’t. It’s been over four seasons, and this is who he is.

Something complicates that viewpoint, however, and it’s that Lawrie will have just turned 26 when Opening Day rolls around in 2016. It might seem like he’s been around a long time, but he’s still young, and youthful players who were once top prospects are given a longer leash to figure things out. Now, after two separate opportunities to put everything together, Lawrie is headed from Oakland to the south side of Chicago in return for two relief pitchers, Zack Erwin and J.B. Wendelken.

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Are you tired of reading about reliever signings yet? If you are, well then I’m sorry for this post, but at least it’s almost over. There’s only a couple good relievers left now, because they’ve seemingly all signed in the last 24 hours. The Athletics did some work on their bullpen when they acquired Liam Hendriks from Toronto for Jesse Chavez a few weeks back, and last night they did some more work by signing Ryan Madson to a three-year deal worth $22 million guaranteed.

Now, the thing about signing Ryan Madson to a three-year deal is, that’s three times as many years as he’s pitched since 2011. By the end of that 2011 season, Madson was seen as one of the best relief pitchers in the game, but then he needed Tommy John surgery, and he was seen as a hopeful comeback story. He missed 2012, of course, but experienced some setbacks in 2013 and was seen as a less-hopeful comeback story. After having not pitched in 2014, either, Madson was seen as retired.

And then suddenly, Madson was pitching in the World Series for the Kansas City Royals, and suddenly Madson could again be viewed as one of the best relief pitchers in the game, and suddenly Madson signed his name on a piece of paper that said he’d make at least $22 million dollars over the next three seasons, no matter what.

Maybe it’s a risky move. It’s definitely a risky move, but maybe it’s a risky move that doesn’t work out, too. Even the non-risky moves have a chance of not working out. Maybe you think this one is especially risky, given the 35 years of life that Madson has lived and the three years in a row of wanting to pitch but not being able to. Alternatively, you could take the stance that Madson last year proved he was finally able to get over that arm injury, and if that’s the case, what difference is missing three years to missing one year, given he’s truly over the injury? A couple years extra rest for the arm could be viewed as a good thing, if you wanted it to be.

After all, Madson couldn’t have been more similar to his previous self, which was, again, considered one of the best relievers in the game the last time we saw him, prior to this year. Consider that, during Madson’s peak years in 2010-11, his fastball sat 94, and that last year it sat 94.3. Consider that, in those previous two years, Madson struck out 27% of batters and walked 6%, and that last year, he struck out 23% of batters and walked 6%. The ERA was in the mid-2’s, and then it was in the low-2’s. The ground ball rate went up. The arsenal is, more or less, the same. Madson had previously established an elite level of performance, and this year, he simply returned to it. If you took away the years in front of the stat lines, you wouldn’t realize he took any time off at all, let alone three years.

So while the three years and tens of millions of dollars may seem risky — and they still probably are — look at Madson then, and look at Madson now. We’ve no reason to believe that a healthy Madson won’t be effective, and, for now, we’ve no reason to believe Madson is anything but healthy.

And the Madson signing is just another example of an A’s organization that seems to not need much time before buying into a player’s comeback or breakout. The A’s were the team that bought into Scott Kazmir in 2014 after just one season, and the A’s are the team that made a point of acquiring both Liam Hendriks after one good season, and Rich Hill after just four amazing starts. Part of that, surely, is a byproduct of their financial restrictions and the ever-looming necessity to find value at the cheapest cost, but perhaps the A’s have some sort of internal belief in players quickly establishing a new level, or re-establishing a previous level. Anyway, if you think the Madson deal seems over-the-top, it’s the years that surprised you, not the money. The market has been set for what good free agent relievers get paid, and Madson is simply earning along with his peers.

That’s been the Madson angle, but what about the A’s angle? They are the team that will ultimately benefit, or the opposite of benefit, from Madson’s performance or lack thereof, after all. Well, last year, the bullpen ERA was the second-worst in the majors. The bullpen FIP was the third-worst. The bullpen WPA was the first-worst, and couldn’t have imaginably been gotten any lower. And to that last point, there’s some reason for optimism, even in such a negative number. Jeff Sullivan already wrote about how the A’s were perhaps the most unlucky team we’ve seen in the BaseRuns era, due to their bullpen, and for those same reasons, why they might be in line for a rebound season.

The most simple way of looking at it is this: last year, the A’s actual record had them winning 68 games, but their projected record, according to BaseRuns, had them winning 80 games, and that’s a significant difference. Most of that difference is due to their bullpen, and from last year’s bullpen, many of the serial offenders are gone. Dan Otero, Eric O’Flaherty, Edward Mujica, Fernando Abad — all no more. In their place, well that’s where Hendriks and Madson come into play, and those guys were just as good, recently, as the bad group was bad. Sean Doolittle dealt with shoulder injuries throughout last year, and when healthy, Doolittle’s ranked among the game’s elite. Fernando Rodriguez will be back again, and he was one of the few relievers who didn’t kill the A’s last year. Evan Scribner was one of the relievers who killed the A’s last year, but he also posted one of the best K-BB%’s in baseball, and if you squint past the atrocious home run rate, you could see the potential for a relief weapon in Scribner.

What was just arguably the worst relief unit in baseball is currently projected for the sixth-highest bullpen WAR in the majors, and while I did just write about why the bullpen projections can be a bit wonky, it’s better to be near the top than the bottom, especially when you’re coming from the bottom. At the very least, the A’s seem to have improved a major weakness, and that’s all the offseason’s about, anyway.

Let’s be clear about what’s being said here: The A’s aren’t anyone’s division favorites. Not now, and not in March, I’m going to guess. The Astros are no longer up and coming; they’re up and they’ve come. The Rangers are coming off a huge bounce-back season, the Mariners are surrounding their core with more depth, and the Angels have baseball’s best player. The AL West is going to be tough, and the A’s probably have the most to prove.

But the A’s were supposed to be competitive in 2015. Not great, but competitive. That didn’t work out, and they’ve made some moves I’m sure they’d love to undo. Yet there’s a road to being competitive again in 2016. Understanding it requires some understanding of what, exactly, went wrong in the past season. It’s always complicated, for any team, but for the 2015 A’s, the story might be the least complicated possible.

I started thinking about this after receiving an email Thursday that referred to something I wrote in July. At that point, I called the A’s the unluckiest* team of the millennium. The asterisk serves a purpose — I don’t actually like the word “luck” in baseball. What happens happens. There’s just not a great list of alternative terms. Anyway, this relies upon a metric called BaseRuns. I don’t want to get too math-y, but BaseRuns is intended to calculate an expected team winning percentage, based on performance. What gets stripped away is the element of timing. Timing is critical, of course, but it’s not always predictive. Team records tend to follow team BaseRuns records. Deviations are common over the short term, but they’ll mostly balance out given time.

I’ve got team BaseRuns data stretching back to 2002. Which means I have actual team records, and BaseRuns team records. Below, see the teams with the greatest differences between those records, where the actual record was worse than expected:

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On the day of baseball’s non-tender trade deadline, the San Diego Padres traded first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski to Oakland in exchange for left-hander Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres. For those interested, Craig Edwards examined the trade in a general way earlier this morning. The point of this post is to look more closely at one part of the trade: Drew Pomeranz.

If Pomeranz is just a good reliever, then the deal amounts mostly to this: three years of control for a good reliever in exchange for two years of a first baseman who can be league average two-thirds of the time. Maybe, to make a trade like that even, you’d have to add a piece or two to get Alonso, but that’s when the deal makes the most sense for the Athletics.

The deal makes better sense for the Padres if Pomeranz is a starter. And it looks like the team is considering him a starting pitcher for the time being.

The question of whether or not Pomeranz can be a good starting pitcher for the Padres hinges on three things, most likely: his health, his changeup, and his curveball. Earlier this season, I talked to the pitcher about all three.

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With the non-tender deadline approaching on Wednesday, deals for arbitration-eligible players were going to be much more likely than the big free-agent contract we saw the Boston Red Sox hand David Price on Tuesday. Teams, especially small-market teams like the San Diego Padres and Oakland Athletics, have a tendency to move around players whose production on the field is becoming less valuable relative to the increasing expense (due to arbitration) of employing those players. The A’s and Padres completed a four-player deal on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, three of the four players were arbitration-eligible. The Padres will receive starter-turned-reliever Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres while the A’s will receive first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski.

The motivations for both clubs are fairly transparent. Last season, the Padres attempted an experiment that involved putting Wil Myers in center field and putting Matt Kemp and Justin Upton alongside him. The experiment did not go well. Myers, who had been a right fielder, was ill-equipped to handle center field. Placing the poor defense of Matt Kemp next to him did not help matters. The Padres have apparently seen the error of their ways and will not attempt a similar alignment next season. Myers recently said he would prefer to play first base, and this trade will allow him to do so and leave the Padres open to pursuing a new center fielder while they spend a few years waiting for Manuel Margot.

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Major League Baseball interrupts this Thanksgiving holiday week to announce that Jed Lowrie has been traded from the Astros to the A’s in exchange for minor-league reliever Brendan McCurry. Perhaps it’s a move you find a little strange — Lowrie is in his 30s, and he’s due real money for at least another couple years. He’s going from one team with a very low payroll to another, and last year, the team adding Lowrie won 18 fewer games than the team shedding Lowrie. Typically you see trades like this in the other direction, but for the Astros, Lowrie was no longer a necessary piece. And the A’s are forever on the bubble, trying to avoid any kind of major tear-down. The A’s want to try to contend again. Having Liam Hendriks and a hopefully healthy Sean Doolittle addresses what last year was a catastrophic problem.

That’s the whole idea, in short. The Astros didn’t need Lowrie, and they’ll take the financial flexibility and the interesting young reliever. McCurry could have a real future, and he could have it soon. The A’s, meanwhile, are happy to have Lowrie back at a modest cost, and they like his flexibility. From one perspective, he gives them depth; from another perspective, he gives them trade options. A healthier A’s team could be a .500 ballclub, and a .500 ballclub is always close to the hunt. Okay, everything checks out.

The thing I find most interesting isn’t the Astros’ position, nor is it the A’s position. It isn’t McCurry, either. It’s Lowrie himself. Just how good is Jed Lowrie, really? There’s room for very reasonable disagreement.

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When you come up through the ranks as a young lefty starter, you learn about the importance of the changeup. By breaking away from the right-handed batter, that pitch offers the best way to neutralize the natural platoon advantage those hitters have against you. By the time you get to the big leagues, it’s part of your approach, like it or not. That’s why lefty starters throw changeups 65% more often than righty starters in major league baseball.

If you look at Jon Lester’s career, though, his best years have come when he’s thrown his changeup the least. The flippant reason for that truth might be because his changeup isn’t that great, and his other pitches are better. The long version is much more interesting, though, as it gets to the theory of changeups, and a new concept called tunneling.

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