2006 Oakland A’s

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock these past few years knows, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane was the subject of a best-selling book by author Michael Lewis, entitled Moneyball. However, it might have been more appropriate for Beane to be one of the protagonists of an earlier Lewis work, The New New Thing. Beane, like Jim Clark (the central figure in the earlier book), is always thinking ahead to the next idea – always looking for the next area in which the A’s can steal a march on the rest of MLB and continue to compete under the handicap of limited resources – and if there’s any constant thread to be found in his management of the A’s, it’s that one. To be fair, Lewis recognized this, although he didn’t give it a lot of play. But I don’t think many people realize that Billy Beane isn’t wedded to a specific approach to team-building, but in doing whatever it takes to keep the A’s out in front of the rest of MLB – and if that means changing his apparent approach, or abandoning his “principles”, that’s exactly what he’ll do.

In the 2005 Rule 4 draft, the A’s “shocked” the community of statistical analysts by (horror of horrors) drafting four (yes, four) High School Pitchers in the first five rounds of the draft. Everyone in the community “knows” that High School Pitchers are a bad risk, and Beane’s decision to invest many of his high picks in HSPs was interpreted by a number of people as an indication that Beane had somehow abandoned a central tenet of Moneyball.

I’d argue differently. Craig Italiano (picked #53) and Jared Lansford (#69) were considered to be potential top-40 picks, and Vince Mazzaro (#101) was considered to be a solid second-rounder. All three have sufficient talent where, under different circumstances, they might very well have been drafted significantly higher. The 2005 draft was heavy in college pitching – indeed, only Chris Volstad and Aaron Thompson among HS pitchers went in the top 30, and both were considered to be overdrafts by the Marlins – and that left a number of HS pitchers available who had higher-pick talent but who could be drafted – and signed – at lesser rates. Beane got Italiano for $725K, Lansford for $525K, and Mazzaro for $380K – three pitchers with front-end-of-the-rotation talent for about $1.65 million combined, or about half of what the Mets gave Mike Pelfrey.

And as anyone who looks at the recent history of the A’s should realize, the A’s have been successful in large part because they have been able to maintain a fairly steady flow of front-line pitching talent at relatively low cost (the recent offseason excepted). Lose a Tim Hudson and a Mark Mulder – add a Rich Harden, a Danny Haren, a Joe Blanton. Lose a closer – add Huston Street. A few years from now, when Harden and Blanton might be too expensive to keep, some combination of Italiano/Lansford/Mazzaro might be ready to step in. With Billy Beane, it’s always about sustaining success – and the best way to sustain success is to remain ahead of the competition.

Not to Belabor a Point, But…

The Oakland A’s are not really built around OBP, although there’s an argument to be made that the offense is. Indeed, the Oakland A’s are not built around offense at all. Since Jason Giambi’s departure following the 2001 season, the A’s have been a pitching-and-defense team. Oakland, despite playing in a ballpark that is slightly favorable to hitters overall, has been in the top three in fewest runs allowed per game four times in the past six years, finishing fourth in each of the other two seasons. And in each of the five seasons from 2001 through 2005, the A’s have finished in the top three in the AL in Defensive Efficiency Rating (DER) – which while not a perfect indicator of team defensive quality still correlates fairly well with other measures of team defense.

Meanwhile, the team’s offense has been essentially league-average since Jason Giambi departed as a free agent following the 2001 season. The A’s posted adjusted OPS values of 101, 102, 101, and 93 from 2002-2005. In addition, much of the decline has come in the power categories; the A’s are hitting fewer HRs as a team, and they have also been falling down the ranks in terms of their overall isolated power. In 2002, the first year after Giambi departed, the team ranked fourth overall in the AL in isolated power. By 2005, they had dropped to ninth. While the team has consistently been at the top of the league in isolated OBP (second, tied for second, fourth, and third from 2002-2005), the team’s ability to move those runners around the bases quickly has been in decline. And since the A’s don’t bunt or steal bases, they need to rely on getting long offensive sequences together in order to score runs.

There is some reason to believe that a long-sequence offense – one which is primarily driven by offense other than power – is not particularly efficient. I haven’t done a controlled study yet, but several years ago, in looking at the 1992 Milwaukee Brewers, a definite long-sequence offense (albeit one that played little ball more often than the A’s), one thing that struck me was that their offense was very inefficient game-to-game. They scored virtually the same number of runs as did the Yankees, but the Yankees had a much more even pattern of run scoring than did the Brewers. The Brewers finished 4 games worse than their Pythagorean estimate that year, and my estimate was  that, with the Yankees’ distribution of run scoring, they’d have won enough games to overtake Toronto for the division title.

One thing that does interest me, though, is that the A’s in 2005 performed worse offensively against good teams than a typical team did. Not a lot worse – in games against teams with a better than .500 record, the A’s scored 4.12 runs per game when an average team would have scored 4.26 – but worse. I didn’t check to see if this pattern repeated in earlier years, but logically, a team dependent on long offensive sequences should fare worse against teams with good pitching, because good pitchers don’t give up that many positive offensive events. This could go part of the way toward explaining why the A’s have had postseason trouble (although their postseason problems, as has been well documented, haven’t entirely been due to an inability to score, their offense has been inefficient in the postseason).

The advantage of a longer-sequence offense, from the perspective of the A’s, is that it’s usually less expensive to find players who can get on base than it is to find players who can hit for power – and it’s also usually cheaper to keep them. It’s not as though the A’s are totally devoid of power threats, either. But the A’s haven’t had enough power at the positions where teams typically have power, and their lone potential power threat elsewhere, Bobby Crosby, was hurt and missed a lot of time last year. For Oakland to move forward, they need to be able to shorten the offensive sequence on occasion. Fortunately for Oakland, it appears as though Billy Beane is aware of that.

The Skipper

Ken Macha resigned following the 2005 season, primarily to pursue the job in Pittsburgh. When Dave Littlefield opted for Jim Tracy instead, Macha went back to Beane, who gladly rehired him.

Macha is a pretty laid-back individual, and there are those who believe that Macha is nothing more than a rubber stamp for Beane. As with Alvin Dark in Oakland when Charlie Finley owned the team, I think this characterization is more than a little bit unfair to Macha. True, Beane is heavily involved in the day-to-day activities on the field, and Macha would not be the manager of this team if he weren’t on-board with Beane’s priorities. But Macha had proven to be a good manager in the minors; he was widely praised for his handling of young players, and I think that he provides a necessary counter for Beane’s volatility. (As a side note: The Finley A’s were at their best in 1974, and Dark deserved a lot of credit for keeping things reasonably under control on the field, if not off the field.) Macha’s not going to be a strategist, and he’s never going to have the A’s bunting and running; his job is to keep the clubhouse calm and keep the players happy and playing, and by and large I think he does that very well.

The Offense

Beane made one off-season move to address the power outage in the A’s offense, signing Frank Thomas to a one-year incentive laden contract to DH. Thomas showed during his brief appearances with the White Sox a year ago that his power stroke was intact, as he hammered 12 home runs in 124 PAs, but two separate injuries to his left ankle kept him on the shelf during most of Chicago’s run to the World Series championship. He is reportedly fully healthy, but the A’s plan to be cautious with him, giving him frequent days off and pinch-running for him late in games. If Thomas gets 450 PAs this season, the A’s will be quite happy. And if he gets 450 PAs, and post something like .275/.380/.550 or so, the A’s will be ecstatic. I think that rate stats like the latter are more likely than the PA total; Thomas is, after all, turning 38, and he’s not called the Big Hurt because he’s Pedro Martinez’s size or anything; he’ll probably miss his share of games with nagging injuries. He’ll certainly be an improvement over Scott Hatteberg and Erubiel Durazo, if he’s healthy.

The A’s made one other major change to the offense, adding Milton Bradley to the outfield mix in place of the revolving carnival in LF of a year ago. Bradley will play right, with Nick Swisher moving to left. Bradley has had just two seasons in his checkered career in which he’s gotten 400 PAs, as a combination of injuries and off-the-field problems have kept his playing time down. In 2005, Bradley was on pace for a career high in home runs before going down with a torn tendon in his left knee, which basically wrecked what was left of the Dodgers’ offense. But Bradley had already had a couple of run-ins with management prior to that, including a celebrated blowup with Jeff Kent, which made him persona non grata in L.A.’s clubhouse, and the Dodgers sent him and Antonio Perez to Oakland for Andre Ethier in the offseason, in a case of addition by subtraction. Bradley is a quality hitter when healthy, and like Thomas the challenge will be for him to remain healthy. He’s also a definite upgrade.

The A’s return their 2005 regulars at the other spots. It’s not a particularly old core group, with C Jason Kendall the oldest player at 32, but it’s not all that young, either. Most of the key players are in the 26-28 YO range which should represent their prime years, but of that 26-28 YO group, only Eric Chavez has more than 2 years of experience in the majors. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – the A’s get prime seasons of their key lineup players while they are still fairly cheap, and then when they have enough experience to start earning the big bucks they’ll be pushing 30 and likely to start declining. But it does mean that the A’s need to maximize their potential now.

Chavez, at 28, is the key player in this group. His 2005 season represented a step back from 2004; his walk rate plummeted, his strikeout rate rose, and while he still hit 27 HRs and smacked 40 doubles, he wasn’t nearly as productive as he’d been in 2004 (when healthy). I think he’ll bounce back to something like .350/.525 OBP/SLG.

SS Bobby Crosby needs to get healthy and stay healthy; the offensive and defensive dropoff from Crosby to Marco Scutaro is large enough so that the A’s are hurting whenever Crosby misses significant time. As a rookie in 2004, Crosby hit just .239 and fanned 141 times, but showed power potential, hitting 34 doubles and 22 HRs. He showed substantial improvement across the board in 2005, but played in just 84 games due to injury. He should continue to improve, but he needs to be on the field.

The A’s will likely platoon 1B Dan Johnson with LF Jay Payton, moving Nick Swisher from LF to 1B depending on the handedness of the pitcher. Johnson showed a good eye and a power bat in his ML debut in 2005, and actually hit fairly well against LHP (.283/.395/.404, albeit in just over 100 PAs), far better than did Swisher (.203/.310/.325). Swisher, who is (at this point) the only position player from the Moneyball draft to contribute in the majors, managed 21 HRs last year but struggled to make consistent contact, and hit just .236/.322/.446 overall. Payton is a solid defender, and hits well enough to contribute as a fourth OF.

The rest of the regulars – 2B Mark Ellis, Kendall, and CF Mark Kotsay – have two jobs: get on base on offense, and contribute defensively. Kendall has never been the same since an ugly series of injuries (none of which were directly related to the fact that he is a catcher) robbed him of his developing power stroke, and now he is what he was when a came up, a singles-hitting catcher who adds value by his willingness to take one for the team. Ellis is an OBP machine who is one of the best defensive 2Bs in the game, and who hit .300 last year as a bonus. Kotsay is a solid defender in CF and delivers doubles and the occasional HR, his on-base skills took a hit last year.

The bench – Payton, Scutaro, Bobby Kielty (when he returns), Antonio Perez, and Adam Melhuse – is better than last year’s aggregation, mostly because Keith Ginter and Charles Thomas aren’t on it. With the exception of Payton and maybe Perez, you don’t want to have to rely on any of these guys as regulars, but you’re not hurting yourself too much if they have to play a game or three when someone is nursing an ouchie.

The key for this offense is to keep Thomas and Bradley on the field for as many games as possible. There’s not really an easy out in the lineup when the regulars are out there, although except for Chavez (against RHP) and Thomas there’s really no one that strikes fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers, either. The A’s scored 772 runs a year ago; if they get 130-140 games from Thomas and Bradley, they should be in the range of 825 runs.

The Defense

Oakland has an outstanding team defense. Consider that:

• The team, despite allowing a higher percentage of LDIP than the league norm and a fairly normal GB/FB ratio as a staff, had the lowest BABIP against in the AL in 2005 (.273 – excluding bunts and pitcher hitting).
• The A’s had lower ISO/BIP than the norm (.011 on GB vs .020, .087 on FB vs .091, .184 on LD vs .201)
• Of the nine pitchers who threw 50 or more innings for the A’s, seven had BABIP below .290 (all but Joe Kennedy and Keiichi Yabu). The league average was .292.

Mostly, this was the A’s infield, which converted 77% of GB into outs. The guys who were helped most by this were the three somewhat-flyballers in the A’s rotation: Blanton, Harden, and Zito. As I’ve noted before, flyballers tend to do worse on GBIP than the norm. But the A’s three flyballers, between them, allowed 700 GBIP in 2005, and the A’s got outs on 548 of them: 78.3%, better than the team rate. Largely as a result of the defensive help, all three pitchers posted BABIP below .260, and DER over 72%. Haren and Saarloos, both of whom have GB tendencies, were actually helped less than their counterparts.

It is difficult to understate the importance of having Mark Ellis on the field. Consider that, in 2003, the A’s had a team DER of .712, and .749 on GB. In 2004, with Ellis MIA, the team DER fell to .694, and .727 on GB. With Ellis 100% in 2005, the DER’s were .714 overall, .770 on GB (as noted earlier). That is not a coincidence, in my opinion.

Nick Swisher’s defense has been the source of some controversy, with various systems rating him anywhere from outstanding to average at best. It’s telling, to me, that the A’s shifted Swisher from RF to LF while putting Bradley in RF; I suspect that the rating of him as average at best is far more likely to be appropriate. I’m not sure how good Bradley is going to be in RF, a position that he’s played very little; if Mike Cameron’s experience is any guide, glove skills don’t always translate from CF to a corner. Nonetheless, I think the A’s will be at least as good defensively in 2006 as they were in 2005, perhaps better if Crosby is 100%.

The Pitchers

Before the season started, I picked Rich Harden as my #1 candidate to decline in 2006. I did that largely because (a) Harden gave up a relatively high percentage of LDIP a year ago and (b) he had a huge number of them – 45% - caught. When you consider that he did much worse on FBIP than a flyball pitcher should have with Oakland’s defense behind him, you conclude (or at least I conclude) that Harden was being hit quite a hit harder than his raw numbers suggest, and that he was fortunate to have posted the numbers that he did. I don’t know whether that was because of the injuries (he has had some shoulder issues which actually affected his non-throwing arm) or whether the league was catching up to him, or both. He has enough quality pitches to be an outstanding starter if he’s 100%, so we’ll have to see. I’m not going to back away from the prediction of a decline just yet (his seven innings of one-hit ball against Seattle notwithstanding); I think he’s more likely to wind up in the mid-to-upper-3s than the mid-twos.

Barry Zito chopped nearly 2/3 of a run from his ERA in 2005. The increase in his GO/AO from 2004 to 2005 is deceiving; he was still a flyball pitcher, but the difference is that he got outs on nearly 80% of his grounders in 2005, vs 71% in 2004. The improved infield defense allowed Zito to work down in the zone a bit more, and he took full advantage. His other peripherals were virtually the same, and even with the improvements his ERA was still close to 4. He’s not as good as his reputation, and I’m inclined to expect an ERA in the low-4s this year.

Esteban Loaiza was signed to a much-criticized three-year deal, but I think he has a chance to be the best pitcher in this rotation. Loaiza actually pitched a lot better than his numbers indicated a year ago; he gave up a fairly low percentage of LDIP and was really hurt on fly balls (where the Nationals were not particularly strong). Like Harden, he has mild fly ball tendencies, and moving to the A’s is likely to help him. His first A’s start was discouraging, but I can see Loaiza putting up a low-to-mid-3s ERA.

Dan Haren and Joe Blanton round out the rotation. Neither took particular advantage of the A’s defense last year, and both posted ERAs in the mid-3s. I think that’s a reasonable expectation for them again.

The five primary starters (Zito, Harden, Blanton, Haren, and Kirk Saarloos) posted a 3.63 ERA last year in 934 1/3 innings. I’d estimate that the five starters will pitch around the same number of innings, and I think that Harden’s likely decline and Zito’s regression will be close to offset by the likely improvement from Loaiza as compared to Saarloos and potential improvements from Haren and Blanton. I’d estimate that, on balance, the starters will post something like a 3.80 ERA, which would be about a 20-run decline from a year ago.

The bullpen is excellent. Huston Street was thrown into the closer’s role after a month in the majors when Octavio Dotel was hurt, and was more than up to the task, posting 23 saves in 27 opportunities, fanning 72 in 78 1/3 innings, and going 5-1 with a 1.72 ERA. He could stand a little tightening of his command, but otherwise there’s nothing to dislike. Justin Duchscherer, Kiko Calero, and Jay Witasick handle the sixth through eighth innings as well as any trio of middle/setup relievers. After disposing of Ricardo Rincon in the off-season, the A’s lack a true LOOGY-type reliever (Brad Halsey and Joe Kennedy are out there, but neither is a true reliever), but I don’t know that they really need one. Saarloos, Kennedy and Halsey can pick up the low-leverage innings. Overall this is a quality bullpen.

Summary

On paper, the A’s have the best team in the division. But as Yogi Berra might have said, the games aren’t played on paper.

If everyone stays healthy, the A’s should win this division fairly easily. They are the only team that looks to have done no worse than hold its ground over the offseason, and they were *just that close* to walking away with the division a year ago when they were supposedly rebuilding. A 95-win season is well within reach, although low 90s seems to me to be a more likely option.

But there are some question marks on the health front. Given the track records of Thomas and Bradley, and Bobby Crosby’s recent tendency to get nicked up, and Harden’s problems last year, the A’s can’t be too sanguine about remaining healthy all season. Furthermore, there are two key players – Kendall and (defensively) Ellis – who are nearly irreplaceable; the A’s have no short-term alternatives from within the organization, and outside alternatives are likely to be costly in both the short and long term.

What do I think? I don’t see everything falling into place nicely, and thus I think that they will win no more than 90 games. That might be enough to win the division anyway, but it will put them in the role of postseason underdog rather than favorite. And that might very well be more to Billy Beane’s liking anyway – because then the A’s won’t be expected to win, and he won’t have to explain away a loss with “my #### doesn’t work in the playoffs”.