The A’s Are Surprisingly Competent

The A’s have been a bummer of a team to follow for a few years now. They’re moving to Vegas. The fans are protesting, but probably fighting a losing battle. They’re going to play in Sacramento, in withering heat, at a (really nice!) minor league stadium. The owner’s a walking punchline. They lost 112 games last year and then made almost no moves over the winter.

Something’s been brewing in the East Bay, though. Not in terms of a surprise playoff contender – they’re 47-68 on the year, and their playoff odds hit 0.0% on June 10. But nonetheless, this is a much better team than last year’s edition, and it’s mostly happened thanks to internal improvements. This version of the A’s looks downright frisky. Last year, playing them was basically a bye series; this year, they’ve almost matched their win total from ’23 and we’re in early August. How’d they do it? In one word, variance. In many words, well, read on and find out.

Embracing the Churn on Offense

The A’s came into the year without an entrenched starting lineup. Their best returning performers were Zack Gelof, Brent Rooker, and Ryan Noda in some order. There were players atop the depth chart at each position, obviously – in our preseason playing time projections, we penciled in nine players to get 350 or more plate appearances – but the A’s leaned into the lack of certainty and are letting surprise performers keep going.

Rooker, Shea Langeliers, and JJ Bleday have run with their starting jobs, but the rest of the lineup looks much different than we expected, because manager Mark Kotsay is playing the guys who have done best this year rather than the ones who came to camp with the job. Nick Allen wasn’t getting it done at shortstop, so the team sent him to the minors and called up Max Schuemann, who hasn’t looked back since. He’s playing like a second-division regular or first-division utilityman; he can play pretty much everywhere on the diamond and isn’t out of place at shortstop. That’s a big development for a team whose shortstops produced an aggregate -0.1 WAR in 2023.

Likewise, when the A’s claimed Miguel Andujar off waivers in the offseason, he wasn’t their first choice in left field by any means. He didn’t even join the big league club until late May. But he’s undoubtedly one of their best offensive options, and the more he hits, the more playing time he earns. Lawrence Butler started the year incredibly slowly and got demoted to the minors, but when the A’s had some injury issues, they gave him another shot. He’s rewarded that faith in spades, with a 167 wRC+ since being recalled, and in exchange the A’s are giving him everyday playing time.

Projection systems can make us feel like we “know” who’s a good hitter and who isn’t, but that’s not really how it works. It’s all a guess, a probability distribution based on how similar players have turned out in the past. The A’s didn’t get too locked in on their preseason depth chart, and that’s to their credit. They knew that they had a ton of similar options, and Kotsay (in conjunction with the front office, presumably) has found plenty of unheralded gems by letting the players speak for themselves with their performances.

Miller Time

Mason Miller was an electric starter last year when he was available. The problem is in that qualifier; his body couldn’t hold up to the rigors of starting, essentially. Miller and the team made a tough-but-wise decision to focus on inning quality instead of quantity by making him the closer. To say that decision has paid off might be the understatement of the year. Miller has been downright surgical, if surgeons used high-velocity baseballs as their preferred tools.

That wasn’t an obvious decision, though it seems that way in hindsight. Relievers are inherently less valuable than starters – they pitch fewer innings. Oakland needs pitching in bulk. But keeping Miller healthy was more important than maximizing the amount of time he’s on the mound, and the team has done just that.

I’m not saying that every team should make this tradeoff. In fact, I think most teams shouldn’t. But combine the health issues and the fact that Miller has an overall reliever-y pitch mix, and the decision starts to make a lot more sense. Yes, the A’s still need a lot of starters, but they also need relievers.

Behind Miller, the A’s have done a good job of doing what teams currently out of the running should be doing: hunting the waiver wire and looking for interesting relievers who are squeezed by roster crunches. Lucas Erceg was a Brewer until Milwaukee needed roster space last year; now he’s a Royal after the A’s traded him away in the midst of his best season yet. Austin Adams looks like a solid contributor who might fetch something in a trade next year. (I’m surprised they didn’t deal him this year.) Mitch Spence was a Rule 5 pick who was so good out of the bullpen that he’s starting now. Tyler Ferguson was a minor league free agent last year; he’s closing while Miller is on the injured list with a broken finger. Miller is the only A’s reliever who started his pro career in the Oakland organization, and yet the A’s have built a pretty good unit that will likely net them some interesting prospects in years to come. In the meantime, these relievers have made Oakland’s games more watchable.

Rotation Tryouts

The A’s have one of the worst rotations in baseball this year. They have one starter with an ERA below four, one starter with a FIP below four (different guys), and none with an xFIP, xERA, or SIERA below four. They’re 25th in fWAR and 29th in RA9-WAR. Even with a great bullpen headlined by a lockdown closer and a spacious home park, the team is 23rd in runs allowed per game, still miles better than last year’s 5.7 (what the heck!) but unimpressive nonetheless.

While that’s all true, it’s mostly part of the plan. It’s really hard to find enough starting pitching, and the A’s basically looked at the market and decided to sit it out. They signed Alex Wood and traded for Ross Stripling with the plan of having them soak up some innings and potentially getting something back in trades for them at the deadline. Wood is out for the season, but Stripling has made 13 starts. Paul Blackburn also made nine of his own before getting traded to the Mets.

The plan after those guys? If you can throw multiple innings at a time, the A’s will give you a multi-start tryout. The aforementioned Spence has 14 starts already. Joey Estes, who was part of the Matt Olson trade back in 2022, looks like he could be the fifth starter on a good team, with a command-over-stuff profile that already produced a complete game shutout (against the Angels, to be fair). Hogan Harris and Osvaldo Bido have gotten a shot. So have Joe Boyle and the ageless Aaron Brooks. Luis Medina is out with injury or he’d no doubt be in the mix too.

JP Sears is the only A’s starter to make 20 starts so far this year, and he’s chugging along looking like an innings eater in his own right. David Laurila recently spoke to him about how his fastball has changed over the years, and Sears is leaning more on a sweeper than ever before and mixing in a sinker to keep hitters off balance. I wouldn’t say the results have been amazing, but they’ve certainly been reasonable; quality innings are hard to find, and Sears clears that bar.

Both the lineup and the rotation have exceeded expectations. The lineup is on pace to produce 13 WAR this season, roughly double its 2023 mark, and the rotation is headed for seven WAR, miles better than last year’s gruesome 1.8. Sure, some bounceback was expected, but the broad baseball public thought this year’s A’s would be pretty bad; oddsmakers gave them the lowest projected win total in the majors by a full three games “over” the Rockies. Instead, the A’s are on course to blow past their 57.5 win line by the end of the month. The Guardians are probably the most surprisingly good team of the year, but the A’s are the most surprisingly competent one.

This method of audition team-building isn’t for everyone, but Oakland’s situation was perfect for it. The A’s can afford to let people fail at the major league level; there’s not a lot of pressure in the Coliseum at the moment, for better or worse. They’ve spent years trading away their last crop of great players, and they’ve mostly targeted depth in those deals, which means their farm system has few stars but plenty of players who could feasibly make it in the majors. They don’t have any tenured veterans who have their spots locked down; they’ve already traded away everyone who remotely matches that description.

That lets them take advantage of the natural volatility of baseball. Like I mentioned earlier, projection systems aren’t gospel. They guess how good a player will be. None of us knows a player’s true talent right this instant, never mind in a year. Sometimes all it takes is one comment getting through from a hitting instructor, one new drill that really clicks, an offseason training regimen, or an epiphany in the video room; any of those can be the difference between success and failure. Saying that two prospects each project as two-win players doesn’t mean they’re each going to be equally good two years from now; that’s simply our best central-tendency guess.

I looked into the exact math years ago when considering the value of having two similar catching prospects: Andrew Knizner and Carson Kelly. That particular prospect battle didn’t turn out to matter much, but the concept remains. If you take two two-win prospects and give them a few years to develop, a reasonable estimate is that you’ll produce a three-win player. If one of them gets better, they’ll probably end up winning the playing time. If one gets worse, they’ll probably lose the battle. The combination of two players – or three or four – just works out better in the long run, even if all the players start out equal in our estimation.

You can’t churn your way to the playoffs like this, because you’re likely to waste some plate appearances figuring out which of your options is the best. The A’s are starting from a low point, too. It’s not like adding five or six wins to their team will turn them into the class of the AL West. But that doesn’t make what they’re doing less interesting, or less valid. Improving your team and giving more players a chance to succeed is admirable even if the likely end result is the same. Like I said at the top, following the A’s isn’t much fun these days. But despite all the misery off the field, the on-field product has been sneaky fun for months now.