Baseball Nation - Oakland A's In Middle Of Complete Overhaul

The A's And The Chaos Of The Second Wild Card

2012-07-17T18:42:14Z

A brief recap of the A's offseason in two acts:

The first act was the dismantling. The rebuilding. The stereotype of the low-budget, small-market team. The A's traded their young pitchers for younger pitchers, who they'd trade in three years for younger pitchers. If the rate of exchange held up, we were all going to look up in 2018 and see Billy Beane trading infants on the black market for Ziploc baggies filled with sperm. We're talking five-tool sperm, of course.

The second act was the mystery teaming. The Marlins were spending money like GM Richard Pryor was trying to get a bigger inheritance, yet the A's still outbid them for Yoenis Cespedes. Everyone was wondering where Coco Crisp was going to sign, and the A's swooped in and retained him. Bartolo Colon, useful pitcher, was signed for a few million. Manny Ramirez was being courted by a couple of teams, and it was the A's who came away with him.

The two acts seemed contradictory, as if the A's had an identity crisis or a change of heart midway through the offseason. But now that we have the benefit of a little hindsight, it doesn't seem that strange. The A's strategy was to a) shift the best-case scenario for contending back a couple of years, when the Rangers and Angels might be older and less stable, and b) build a team that was still interesting in the interim.

And here we are in the middle of July, and the A's are interesting. Really interesting. They're a half-game back of the Tigers for the second Wild Card spot, and they're one of the hottest teams in baseball, winning 10 of their last 11.

What they've become, then, is the perfect example of Second Wild Card Chaos.

Remember July 1? Yeah, that was a trip back there, man. People all driving cars around. Smartphones and stuff. Everyone always on computers, right? "Hey, I'll send you an e-mail?" While that seems like a lifetime ago, it was only two weeks ago. Seriously, look it up. And way back on July 1, the A's were 37-42, behind seven different teams for the two Wild Card spots -- 4½ back from the second spot.

If you figured that was about the true talent level of the A's, you weren't alone. Not awful. Not really that bad. Within spitting distance of average if a few things broke right. And, as such, their trade-deadline strategy seemed obvious. Anyone who was a short-term player might be on the block. Bartolo Colon could help more than a few contenders. A lefty-masher like Jonny Gomes would have been highly prized, and don't underestimate what a desperate team might have done for Grant Balfour or Jerry Blevins at the last second.

Instead, a crazy-hot two-week stretch changes everything. If you were interested in Colon, you have to back the heck off now. Whatever C+ prospect he could have garnered isn't worth giving up on the chance that the 2012 A's really are a contending team. Same goes with Gomes, with Blevins, with Balfour … the A's have no choice but to keep them. It's the right play all around.

And with that, one fewer team is offering its wares at the deadline. More importantly? There's one more team that's looking for players. I know you're going to be stunned to find this out, but it turns out that Brandon Inge couldn't keep up with his hot start, and he's hitting .152/.200/.174 over the last 25 games. Considering that he's 35, and that he had a miserable year last season as well, the A's might want to upgrade. They'll have options, from Placido Polanco to Chase Headley; they can go stopgap or go big.

Or they can stand still. Which would also be a smart idea. The window was supposed to be 2014 or 2015 -- a hot two weeks shouldn't change that.

Or should it? Flags fly forever, and other clichés. I'm still a member of the Church of Jeff Weaver, whose main tenets include believing that any team can win 11 games out of its last 19 once they're in the playoffs. Even a division series appearance would do wonders to replace the A's reputation locally. They've been so focused on getting out of Oakland -- and broadcasting as much -- the casual fan around the Bay Area probably figures they're in Astros/Royals territory. It's not like a playoff spot would lead to three million fans in 2013, but it would make a difference.

Or should they even sell? If the Pirates stopped believing they were for real before last trade deadline, they could have picked something up for Paul Maholm that might have helped their surge in 2012. Sometimes you have to be honest with your evaluation of your team and stick to your timetables.

Or, or, or. There's no right answer. No wrong answer. We'll have answers in November. Until then, meet the A's, the Most Second Wild Card Team to Ever Exist. They're the first example of Second Wild Card Chaos. They won't be the last example. But they might be the best example.

Oakland's Bizarre Interest In Manny Ramirez And Magglio Ordonez

2012-02-10T18:24:49Z

There are paragraphs that make sense in February. There are paragraphs that don't. Here is one that doesn't, from Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle:

I’m hearing that the A’s are continuing to pursue Manny Ramirez, and that they’re much more interested in Ramirez than Magglio Ordonez at this point; Ordonez’s health is more of a concern.

The A's and Manny Ramirez. More ridiculous than the A's and Magglio Ordonez, or more sensible? I go back and forth. The A's signing Manny is crazy like emptying a bottle of ketchup down your pants and dancing on a table during a first date. There's a one-percent chance that the date has a weird sense of humor, I guess. Might work out. The A's signing Magglio is more like eating unwrapped packets of Splenda when the date's head is turned. It's a deeper, darker kind of crazy.

To recap: The A's are rebuilding. Oh, it's not a pure rebuild. It's not like they've razed the earth like the Astros have, bringing up whatever they could find in AA in a search for warm bodies. The A's signed Bartolo Colon and Coco Crisp, legitimate big-league players who will allow the A's to avoid forcing someone into the majors who isn't ready.

It's also not a horrible collection of talent that the A's have going -- every player in their projected lineup deserves to be in the majors, which isn't a small feat for a rebuilding club. Of course, every hitter on the roster is expected to be below average, so a little more offense might not be a bad thing.

But if they're going to spend money on Magglio or Manny, that means that they're counting on one of three things:

1. Fan Interest
As in, the signing of one of these two will generate ticket sales and goodwill, possibly allowing the team to turn the 2013 FanFest into a FansFest, even if Jake was excited that he didn't have to wait in line for the bathroom this year. This is a hard thing to quantify, but while you could make an argument that Manny could do it over his 112 games, I'm pretty sure no one in Oakland cares about Ordonez at this point, other than to throw things at him for the 2006 ALCS.

2. Trade Deadline Flippin'
This is where the A's use the player for a couple of months before exchanging him for shiny prospects. But that's a risky proposition with a DH, as only a select few teams will be able to use Manny or Magglio at the deadline. And even then, would either of them do so well that a team would give a prospect back that was more valuable than the money the A's paid for the three months? Probably not.

3. Contending
In this scenario, the A's are battling with the Rangers and Angels, and the key addition of Magglio or Manny has provided a surprising jolt to the middle of the lineup. Also providing a surprising jolt in this scenario: the time that Billy Beane thinks he saved Mary Jane after the Green Goblin dropped her, only to find out that she died from shock during the fall. Because as long as we're making crap up, why not pretend that Billy Beane is Spider-Man?

Based on any of those three things, I'm not sure why the A's would want to mess around with either of the aging sluggers. While I mentioned the cost of their respective salaries up there, that's not really the important part. The important part is the opportunity cost that the A's would give up. They should have the following players at their disposal:

Brandon Allen
Chris Carter
Daric Barton
Kila Ka'aihue

Signing Magglio or Manny means that the A's will figure out if one of those players can hit enough to stick as a first baseman. The others? To the bench or to Sacramento, where another year will pass without the A's having a good idea who can or can't hit major-league pitching. In the meantime, the A's will mess around with the remains of a guy who used to be a top slugger, and they'll do it in true underwear-gnome fashion.

Maybe they'll squeeze an extra win out of it. Not sure what good that would do anyone. For some teams, a flyer like this can make sense, but for the A's, this is more Brad Pitt from True Romance than Brad Pitt from Moneyball.

What In The Heck Are The A's Doing?

2012-01-17T15:30:13Z

The Oakland A's are in full rebuilding mode. They traded two young, cheap, and cost-controlled pitchers for baskets of prospects. The calendar they are planning to give away at the ballpark is filled with players who are gone.

The Oakland A's are signing and trading for veterans. They're acquiring worthwhile players to fill out their lineup and rotation.

Both are true. It seems oxymoronic, but both descriptions make a good amount of sense. While we were chuckling about their faceless outfield from a couple of months ago, the A's went and got a bunch of name-brand players. Well, maybe not name brand. But to put it in designer clothing terms, the A's are at least shopping at Target instead of stealing from the donation boxes outside of the local church. Seth Smith, Bartolo Colon, Coco Crisp … these are all players that other teams would want.

It seems that the binary set of rebuilding/contending is one that leaves out too many shades of gray, especially when it comes to the A's. The A's are rebuilding, but they're also making an attempt to put an interesting team on the field, without blocking prospects at the same time. Take their lineup, as MLB Depth Charts has it right now:

Jemile Weeks - 2B
Coco Crisp - CF
Josh Reddick - RF
Seth Smith - LF
Brandon Allen - DH
Kurt Suzuki - C
Daric Barton - 1B
Scott Sizemore - 3B
Cliff Pennington - SS

Every single one of those players makes a certain amount of sense for a major league team. It's a mix of unknowns, unprovens, and low-cost veterans, and not one of them makes you wrinkle your nose in disgust. Barton was awful last year, but he had a 120 OPS+ and a .393 OBP the season before. Pennington is a defensive standout (depending on your metric of choice), which makes his bat playable at short. Same with Suzuki at catcher. Allen has the potential to be the DH that the A's have been trying to create in a lab for the past decade.

And so on. Every player in the lineup has some mix of limited upside and short-term potential. That's not exactly the formula with the projected rotation, but there's an interesting mix there too:

Brandon McCarthy
Bartolo Colon
Brad Peacock
Tom Milone
Jarrod Parker

The top two starters were excellent last year. The #3 and #5 slots are ostensibly filled with top prospects. And even if he's a soft-tossing left-hander, Milone has absurd minor-league numbers that could play well in the cavernous O.co Coliseum. Again, it's possible to look at every single player and conclude that they belong on a major-league roster. More than that, they'd belong on a roster of a team looking to win more games than they lose.

Is that to say that the A's will compete for the AL West? No. If Albert Pujols retires tomorrow, he'll still finish with a higher OPS than Barton. The Angels and Rangers are far too talented to both fall prey to a miracle season. One of them could melt into a puddle. Two of them doing it while everything goes right for the A's? That's once-a-decade stuff, if that. The A's aren't delusional.

But they're committed to being interesting, such as it is. Maybe not to the casual fan -- Sizemoremania doesn't exactly provoke StubHub servers to fail -- but in a general, "Say, these guys might not be so bad" kind of way.

Meanwhile, the Astros will pick higher than the A's in the 2013 Rule 4 and Rule 5 Drafts, and if they can unload Wandy Rodriguez and/or any part of Carlos Lee's contract, they'll likely spend less money, too. They're melting the team down to get at the gold fillings. They're going to cycle through all manner of prospects, projects, and rejects. Fernando Martinez is just the start. And they'll probably lose 100 games while doing it.

The A's lineup is filled with interesting names, but it's a lineup that trends far more towards competence than upside. It's not a stretch to think that there isn't a single member of that lineup who will still be around for the next good A's team. And in the interim, they'll win just enough games to futz with their draft position. That doesn't seem like a big deal, but the difference between the top five picks in the amateur draft and the 25 picks that follow is a pretty substantial one.

The Astros are rebuilding, as are the A's, but the two organizations are going about it in very different ways. The A's aren't burning the team to the foundations and playing any guy with a scintilla of promise, hoping to win the surprise-breakout lottery. They're putting together an interesting team. The Astros are looking for raffle tickets until they can rebuild the farm. Both are viable strategies. The A's will be more watchable, but they won't automatically have the quickest path to contention. Whatever they're doing over there, it's sort of fascinating*.

* To baseball nerds. Not to people who buy tickets and merchandise. That's a big, unfortunate difference.

KERI: It's The Ownership, Not Revenue

2012-01-04T18:55:32Z

The Oakland A's are rebuilding. They'll explain their reasons to you personally if you go to a game. They might even let you on the field if you buy a season-ticket package. And if you bring a glove and a fake moustache, well, you could be playing first base at some point.

Billy Beane used to fight the good fight, acknowledging that his team was at a constant disadvantage, but still attempting to build the best team he can within his means. But recently, his message became more dire:

"We've been through this [rebuilding] cycle numerous times, and it gets shorter and shorter because the gap between us and everybody else grows," Beane said. "The fact of the matter is, for us to compete, we're going to have to have a new stadium ...

Over at Grantland, though, Jonah Keri isn't convinced:

But far more often (talk about a team's window to contend is) a bullshit excuse. It's a vague, faraway goal that always seems several years out of reach. It's a cover for cheap, greedy ownership, lousy scouting, drafting, and player development, and myopic trades. It's a weak attempt to placate a fan base screwed over by years of management incompetence and indifference.

The whole thing is a step-by-step takedown of the A's and other teams that cry poor. Keri should know about this sort of thing, as he grew up a huge Montreal Expos fan and wrote a book about the Tampa Bay Rays. Small markets and teams overcoming fiscal Goliaths is sort of his niche. The article is definitely worth a read.

On The Oakland Athletics Rebuilding For The 5,302nd Time

2011-12-30T19:30:58Z

There are words in our language that have lost their luster. The word "epic" suffered from overuse and inflation, and it's now something that can be applied to especially delicious pistachios just as easily as The Iliad. Thanks, Internet.

But "travesty" is still a good one. People don't throw it around lightly. So when you read a headline like "The Oakland A's are a travesty", you have a pretty good idea that the author isn't going to serve a plate of waffles with maybe syrup. And Monte Poole doesn't disappoint. A selection of phrases used in the article:

... stomps all over the ideals of the game

… even Pete Rose, the disgraced hit king, has to scratch his head and wonder, once again, what is the definition of "integrity of the game."

MLB has an ownership team brazenly deciding to "throw" a season

Any high-minded rhetoric about integrity from the commissioner has to be considered disingenuous at best, downright fraudulent at worst

Those are just the first four I read. Every paragraph has a comparable doozy. It's a powerful piece. And while reading it, it's easy to forget the logical reasoning behind the A's rebuild:

The Texas Rangers are a bit of a super-team, with six viable starters, two straight pennants, and a fearsome lineup
The Los Angeles Angels have one of the best rotations in the game, and they added baseball's best hitter right after replacing baseball's worst hitter
Oakland tried to add offense before last season, acquiring David DeJesus, Josh Willingham, and Hideki Matsui, and the plan flopped.
Young pitchers with several years remaining on a cheap contract have a ton of trade value
Rather than attempt to compete with the Rangers and Angels, the A's decided to maximize their assets now to prepare for a time when they can compete

Makes sense in a cold, clinical kind of way, especially in the offseason, when we don't actually have to watch a Taylor/Cowgill/Reddick outfield. And while a dispassionate look at Billy Beane's moves makes sense, it's worth remembering that by definition, being a fan means being anything but dispassionate. Take a look at the Facebook wall for the A's, for example. The poor person in charge of the page will post an innocuous trivia question, and it's quickly followed by ALL-CAPS RAGE in response to how the offseason has gone.

There's more to the story than just a bad team looking towards the future. This isn't just a garden-variety rebuild -- it's not a huge leap of logic to suspect that the Athletics' ownership had nefarious reasons for dismantling the young pitching staff. They want to move to San Jose. Their paid attendance was just over a million fans last season, and if there's any way they can dip under a million, well, that would sure help their case that a baseball team in Oakland is unsustainable. Wink wink.

The conspiracy theory paints the A's as a villain, something directly out of Major League. It's hard for me to buy, mostly because I always thought the Giants were supposed to be the villain. The Giants were supposed to be Devlin McGregor-- the evil super-corporation thwarting the plucky underdog to maintain their profit margin. Also, there's a good chance that the Giants will turn to a one-armed man for their clean-up duties at some point, so the analogy works on a couple of different levels.

More than anything, though, what the A's rebuild reminds us of is that there's a cost of rebuilding. Even if the strategy is sound -- and the A's really did get a lot of prospect value for Gio Gonzalez and Trevor Cahill -- there's going to be guaranteed resentment. And it's hard to write a better blueprint for resentment than how the A's are operating: openly pine for a new city and remove all of the fan favorites from the current city because of financial considerations.

The Athletics' rebuilding is good for the on-field future of the franchise. The Athletics' rebuilding is horribly discouraging for the rabid fans that have stuck with the team through some lean years. The Athletics' rebuilding is a craven, cynical, last-ditch effort to further ownership's ultimate goal. The Athletics' rebuilding makes perfect baseball sense. All of that can be true at the same time. As far as rebuilding projects go, this one is as unique and fascinating as it gets.

Gio Gonzalez Trade: Digging Out From Under 50 Feet Of Crap

2011-12-23T16:00:24Z

Last season, the A's were a sleeper team. It was a bit of a deep sleep, but it wasn't ludicrous to suggest that they would contend. Most of the moves they made a year ago seemed to indicate that they were planning to contend:

They traded prospects to the Nationals for a year of Josh Willingham.
They traded prospects to the Royals for a year of David DeJesus.
They traded $4.25 million to Hideki Matsui's bank account for a year of Hideki Matsui.

Short-term lineup improvements for a team that already had a plus pitching staff. The top three pitchers were young, talented, and under control for years and years and years. Even if the one-year gambit didn't work out, the A's were going to have those pitchers around for a while.

Unless, well, you know.

And less than a year later, the A's are looking to forge a brand new pitching staff. Brett Anderson went from a pitcher with a sub-3.00 ERA and preternatural walk rate to a Dr. James Andrews patient. Trevor Cahill went from a first-half sensation to a second-half collapse that made the A's think those two birds in the bush might be better after all. And once Cahill went, there wasn't much sense in keeping Gio Gonzalez around, especially when his trade value had a lot to do with the remaining years on his contract.

We get that the A's are low-budget. They don't have concessions; they have a lemonade stand. They don't have a huge cable deal, but they did reach a deal with Game Stop to sprinkle "GAME STOP" ads throughout their in-game telegram updates. They aren't going to be major players on any free-agent market. The last time they were, they spent $10 million on Ben Sheets, who then threw the sack of cash into the San Francisco Bay right in front of them.

But it sure seemed like a good plan at the time. With Willingham, DeJesus, and Matsui, the A's thought they were buying low-cost on-base percentage for one season. Where there had been three lineup holes behind a rotation that should have been contending for a playoff spot, there were now three competent hitters. Better than competent, actually. They had their warts, but getting all three made sense, dang it.

As is, the first domino was Anderson's Tommy John surgery. Then came Cahill's second-half immolation. That was followed by an offseason wherein the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels started stuffing $100 bills down insanity's g-string. Building a patchwork offense between Anderson/Cahill/Gonzalez was a good idea, but when injury and ineffectiveness claimed the first two -- and when the superpowers of the AL West started loading up on the world's best players -- the strategy became untenable.

So the A's held reset and the power button at the same time, saved some of the work they've already done, and started over. One of the hardest things to do in baseball is build a rotation with three or more quality pitchers. The A's had four last year, just not at the same time, and not for the entire season. There's a saving grace for A's fans with the quality of prospects the A's received. This isn't a flotsam-for-Michael-Bourn trade. The Athletics have pillaged the Nationals' system, and they did pretty well to get Jarrod Parker from the Diamondbacks.

Still, I would have loved to see the strategy again. Maybe with Jim Thome and Wilson Betemit; or Johnny Damon and David Ortíz; or Carlos Peña and Ryan Doumit. Some group of could-be-goods that weren't going to come at full price, with a hope that they could finally scavenge a major-league offense to support a top-shelf pitching staff.

But you can understand how they were wary about giving away money while committing to the $30 million that Trevor Cahill had coming to him, hoping that he wasn't as broken as his second half suggested. The good, sound, and rational organizational blueprint had to be abandoned. There isn't a huge competitive-balance problem with baseball -- certainly not the problem some talk about -- but that doesn't mean that the sport is always fair.

Minor League Ball: Prospects In Gio Gonzalez Deal

2011-12-23T08:17:27Z

John Sickels presents scouting reports on all four of the prospects the Washington Nationals are dispatching to Oakland in the Gio Gonzalez trade.

Beyond the Box Score: Gio vs. Prospects, Infographically!

2011-12-22T22:36:16Z

The graphic’s the thing, so you just gotta hit this link.