I’m working on ideas for a new television series. One stars Hogan Harris as a pitcher who throws shutouts despite his erratic control. It’s called Hogan’s Zeroes.
But I’m also partial to the one where Brady Basso leads a rotation of misfits into the postseason. Known as The Brady Bunch, it co-stars Seth Brown as Alice, the crazy housekeeper who has smelled the same change for 7 years.
Surprisingly, these A’s who seem to have a blast scoring runs have cobbled together the top of a lineup that is actually quite a bit better than league average. In a way they have had to work hard not to score more.
Abraham Toro has cemented himself in first place despite lacking speed or a strong BB rate (currently on pace at a career-low 4.4%). Toro’s .288/.332/.429 line is good for a solid 122 wRC+ and has given the A’s some needed bat-to-ball skills.
JJ Bleday has shed his platoon status by finding his power stroke against LHP and continuing to dominate RHP. Best suited to the corner outfield, Bleday has become the everyday CFer with an overall slash line of .248/.329/.476 (131 wRC+).
Despite a miserable start in which he struck out in seemingly every at-bat with the same 3 sliders, Brent Rooker has been one of the best hitters in the American League. He enters June with a solid .280/.363/.542 line, good for a wRC+ of 161 and is on pace to match his 30-homer season from a year ago.
And then there is Miguel Andújar, who has been a revelation. Unfortunately, his one bad plate appearance cost the A’s a complete game, but you can’t argue with him going 9-for-24 with 2 doubles and a big 3-run homer. Andújar’s ability to reach pitches from the plate and still serve them in the infield is as impressive as the way the ball explodes off his bat when he receives a pitch to drive. He hasn’t walked yet (no surprise), but his K rate is also only 8%.
Heck, if you wanted to lengthen the heart of the lineup, you could give everyday playing time to Kyle McCann, who can only get part-time work despite hitting .322/.412/.525 (171 wRC+). You would think that a team struggling to score runs could find room for a player like that, at least until he calms down. But you wouldn’t think Seth Brown would be batting fifth either.
Even the flawed Shea Langeliers (.211/.277/.491) and Max Schuemann (.229/.305/.352) have contributed, and playing “defense first” positions is certainly not the cause of the team’s offensive woes. Athletics. .
So why are the A’s still struggling to put enough runs on the board? Certainly the bottom half of the order is responsible, with the RF (Brown) and 1B (Soderstrom/Davis) black holes, and Zack Gelof has disappointed.
But much of the problem lies in two areas, one presumably based a bit on “luck” and the other undoubtedly based on a lack of skill. Both involve the “get them out, get them in” part of scoring.
RISP Business
The A’s are not hitting with runners in scoring position. At one point they were hitting what appeared to be a very poor .207, but at that time their team’s batting average was .217, so it wasn’t so much that they were hitting much worse at key moments, but that they were simply hitting . Doesn’t hit.
But lately, Oakland has reserved its most useless at-bats for the toughest situations, hitting around .150 with RISP. After Friday night’s 1-for-10 failure, they are 10 of their last 70 with RISP during a stretch of games where often a key hit, or lack thereof, has taken the game from a win to a defeat.
In general, hitting with RISP is not considered a sustainable skill. Most of the time, hot or cold stretches, whether individual or team, regress and even out over time. So hopefully, in the future, some of the A’s RISP-y futility will even out. I mean, they should start hitting more like… the .222 they hit as a team.
smelly city
The other big problem is that the A’s strike out a lot. Strikeouts don’t advance runners or get them home, another reason the A’s are better at stranding runners than scoring them.
The A’s have failed no less than 578 times in 59 games, which is an average of 9.8 times per game. Only the Seattle Mariners (599 Ks) have swung more frequently. and it’s no coincidence that they’re the only team to score fewer than the A’s’ 219 runs, having scored 216. Oh wait, the Chicago White Sox are in a league of their own. They have scored only 166 runs in the entire season. How is that possible?
So the A’s rank 13th in the league in runs scored and 14th in “no strikeouts.” They pitch more than once per inning, usually bailing out pitchers who try to strand runners. The main offenders have been Soderstrom (40.4%), Brown (33.8%), Rooker (33.7%), Gelof (34.3%), the currently ill Esteury Ruiz (30.8%) and the currently demoted Lawrence Butler (29.8%). Notably, Langeliers has reduced his K rate by 5% each season, from 34.6% in 2022 to 29.2% in 2023 to a very manageable 24.6% in 2024.
Where are the solutions? The A’s already have some pillars in place, with Toro and Bleday leading K’ing less than 20% of the time, and Andujar now making it a “contact trio.”
The first obvious adjustment is to simply stop playing Brown, as he adds no value despite his occasional propensity to “join one.” An average outfielder with a noodle arm, Brown’s .201/.242/.329 line is unplayable and when he turns 32 next month he’s not going to get any better. He is a .229 hitter with a .289 OBP and is in the wrong side of 30.
Then there’s the issue of Soderstrom, that “can’t miss” hitter who seems to miss a lot of pitches. For Soderstrom the key is simple: he needs to swing at the right pitches. The swing is fine, even potentially lethal, but his decisions are worse than the proverbial coin toss. If he can find a way to stop chasing bad balls, but also attack hitable strikes, instead of seemingly deciding to do the opposite, the K’s will drop, the average will rise, and the A’s will have a 1B man.
As for Gelof, the swing path is strange, more like a topspin ping pong backhand than a level path through the zone you want to see. In 2023, Gelof appeared to hit the center of the ball, while in 2024 he appears to hit the top of the ball or often not hit it at all.
Bottom line: This isn’t a high-tech analysis, but the A’s need to hit the ball more and they need to do it sometimes when there are runners in scoring position. The good news is that they play a lot of games where one key hit is all they need to win. The bad news is… they are between 23 and 36 years old.
Brooks against Sale today. That reminds me: I need to go shopping.
Keynote USA
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