Oakland Athletics’ Inactive Offseason Leading to Disappointing Start
May 3, 2019, 9:02 AM | Updated: 9:04 am
(Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)
(Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)
The 2018 season for the Oakland Athletics was the ride of a lifetime. A team of young-guns with nothing to lose approached the batters box the same way they did the season; swinging for the fences. The A’s, not expected to make much noise in a stacked American League West division, won 97 games while hitting a monstrous 227 home runs. After a brief taste of the postseason, being eliminated by the New York Yankees in the AL Wild Card game, Oakland had high expectations heading into 2019.
Those expectations are still there. But, instead of using the offseason to fill the major holes that the Athletics have, especially with their pitching rotation, the organization elected to sit on their hands and hope that lightning would strike twice.
The game of baseball in 2019 is very different from what it was just a few years ago; where power and home runs are the name of the game and launch angle is at the peak of analytics. There aren’t too many teams that can hit it out of the yard better than the A’s, who feature sluggers like Khris Davis, Matt Chapman and Matt Olson on their daily lineup card. While scoring runs is essential to winning games, being able to keep your opponent from scoring more is still just as important.
Oakland’s pitching rotation, already suspect as a whole, is plagued with injuries. Sean Manaea, Daniel Gossett, Jharel Cotton, Marco Estrada, Jesus Luzardo and A.J. Puk are all currently on in Injured List, and most of them have been out for quite some time.
The A’s front office ended last season knowing that many of the names above wouldn’t be available for a large portion of the season. While fans shouldn’t have expected the team to throw big money or trade offers at superstar arms, it was fair to expect some kind of move to, if nothing else, put together a rotation that can go a minimum of five innings consistently.
Instead, not only did Oakland not try to fix the problem, they added to it by allowing veteran catcher Jonathan Lucroy, who was largely responsible for what little success A’s pitching had in 2018, to go to the Los Angeles Angels for a more than reasonable price.
We have heard a lot of praise from the A’s about the talented young pitchers in their minor league system. When it comes to talent development, Oakland’s track record is second to none. However, those exciting prospects have had little opportunity to show what they can do at the MLB level due to the amount of time they have spent on the shelf.
It’s understandable that the A’s wouldn’t want to give up on those prospects so quickly, but sticking with them at the risk of hurting your MLB roster’s chances at winning a World Series is nothing short of foolish.
The A’s plan is simple; try and say afloat for as long as possible, hovering around the .500 mark for the first few months of the season, until pitchers are healthy enough to work their way back into the rotation. But that plansimply isn’t working. Already 33 games into what was supposed to be the season that the A’s dethroned the Houston Astros in the AL West, Oakland finds themselves at the bottom of their division, 4.5 games back of Houston, with a 14-19 overall record.
Of course there’s still plenty of time to turn things around, but Oakland’s “cheap” reputation has already got the most loyal of fans saying, “here we go again”. Offensively the roster is still loaded with talent, ready to compete at the highest level and make a deep postseason run. But if the A’s were looking to avoid wasting the few precious years of peak run production, not doing anything during the winter was not the right course of action.
The Khris Davis extension was a start, but maintaining a winning team in Oakland has always been the biggest problem. It’s one thing to go all-in and things not work out (like the Jon Lester trade in 2014), but to sit idle while bad pitching takes away all the hope and progress from 2018 is about as bad as it gets.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The A’s, right now, are definitely “broke”.
