There is No A in Slide.
(And, as an aside here, I fully expect Derek Jeter to be back and playing shortstop for the New York Yankees next season, if only because his insufferable grand farewell tour was the only thing relevant about the Yankees all season, and the Yankees aren’t one to miss a marketing opportunity as great as the Derek Jeter Reunion Tour.)
And I’ll start this entry by admitting, right from the get-go, that I pretty much can’t stand the Oakland A’s. You cannot grow up in the Pacific Northwest, following the Seattle Mariners, and like the A’s. You cannot spend a lifetime following the San Francisco Giants and have any respect for their cross-bay neighbours. You just can’t do it. I’ve been loathing the Oakland A’s for decades, and the only time I ever actually wanted them to win was in the 1988 World Series, as I was in college in Southern California at the time, which meant I was surrounded by the enemy:
Apparently there was no A in Save that night. The A’s really are useless.
But just because I may loathe a team, it doesn’t mean that I’m averse to giving them credit when credit is due. I despise Duke’s basketball team, yet if I could spend any amount of money to hire a basketball coach, I’d drive up to Coach K’s house and spill a dump truck full of money in his driveway. Likewise, I have a true sense of admiration for the way that Billy Beane has run the Oakland A’s. His use of advanced statistical analysis and modeling, and then the systematic approach to implementing such models throughout the entire organization, has helped lead to results which exceed the expectations of a club which is saddled with a low payroll. As such, he has revolutionized the way the game is managed on an administrative level. He’s also been ahead of the curve when it comes to recognizing trends and predicting how the game will change over time. This approach was born out of necessity, as the A’s have always found themselves struggling to compete with bigger, richer clubs in the world of Wild West capitalism that is Major League Baseball. Beane had to think differently. Franchises in other sports have then copied his approach – examine the success of clubs such as the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA and Olympique Lyon in European football and you can see a similarity in approach.
And for all of that, the Oakland Athletics have won exactly zero World Series titles during Billy Beane’s tenure as General Manager.
And there was no A in World Series this year. There is also no A in Choke, but there probably should be. And there is certainly an A in Atrocious, which is precisely what the Oakland A’s were in the last two months of the season. Their 9-8 loss in 12 innings to the Kansas City Royals in the AL Wild Card game this past week – in which the A’s blew a 4-run lead and then blew an 8-7 lead in extras – capped off one of the more stunning collapses in the history of Major League Baseball. The A’s had the best record in baseball as recently as late July, only to go into a full-on meltdown, watching the
To understand just how awful the A’s were, consider that the Mariners made up all but a game of that deficit without even playing well – the M’s went 13-13 in September and had a 5-game losing streak in their last road trip of the year, and they still almost caught the A’s. Oakland were downright wretched, going 15-30 in their last 45 games. During this tailspin, the A’s previously potent offense, which had been leading the league in runs scored, completely disintegrated – which, as it happened, coincided with the boldest trade Billy Beane has ever made in Oakland, in which he swapped all-star left fielder Yoenis Céspedes to Boston for Red Sox ace Jon Lester. A move which was subject to a fair amount of scrutiny at the time, and which failed about as spectacularly as any deadline deal in history.
What’s been somewhat amusing to me, however, is to peruse a variety of online spaces in which baseball bloggers act as apologists and defend what was, in hindsight, a pretty stupid trade. This speaks more to the nature of the modern baseball pundit than it does to anything that takes place on the field. For the stat geek set, Billy Beane sprouts wings and shits marble. He is the hero of the sabermetric world. There is an annoying subset of baseball fans who seem to think that you play the game with a laptop instead of a bat and a glove. It is unthinkable that the great mastermind of saber-cyber baseball could possibly – gasp! – make a terrible trade. Which he did, and which likely contributed far more to the A’s failings than any other single factor. And it’s fair to point the finger squarely at the GM in this case, he being one who exudes far more influence over the day-to-day lineup of his club than any GM does or probably should, and he being one who as much as said, in Michael Lewis’ what-a-fawning-kissass-but-it’s-definitely-worth-reading book Moneyball, that the field manager was a step above irrelevant. This was his baby. It was his and his alone.
The greatest column I will never get to write in this blog of mine is the idea of being “critically acclaimed” in sports. (Grantland beat me to it.) There is no more critically acclaimed club going right now than the Oakland A’s. The A’s are so critically acclaimed, there was a Moneyball movie about the A’s which was nominated for Best Picture. (And, naturally, didn’t win.) The A’s are always the feel good hit of the summer, the quirky bunch of plucky outsiders who band together and rally against extreme odds to triumph, often putting together incomprehensible late season runs to pass bigger, better financed foes and capture AL West division titles. The script practically writes itself. And if I sound cynical, well, the A’s have done little to dispel that narrative. The franchise has been pretty quick to play it up so as to garner some hipster, indie cred while simultaneously crying poor mouth in their attempts to relocate to San Jose, a move routinely blocked by their big, bad neighbours across the Bay in San Francisco who claim the South Bay as part of their territory.
The A’s have now abandoned the San Jose plans, re-upping a short-term lease at the Oakland Coliseum while pursuing new avenues for securing a new ballpark, and one of the best ways to garner the needed public support for such projects – if not the best way – is to win a championship. Everyone wants to be a part of a winner, including a local politician. I witnessed this dynamic first-hand in 1995 in Seattle. The vote in King County on a financing plan failed. It happened to fail on a night when the Mariners rallied in the 9th inning against the Texas Rangers on a 2-run HR by the appropriately named Doug Strange, yet another step on a long strange trip from 13½ GB in mid-August to forcing a 1-game playoff, winning that playoff over the Angels, beating the Yankees in a best-of-5 that’s probably the greatest playoff series in history, and making the entire state of Washington fall in love with that ugly duckling of a franchise along the way. The momentum, at that point, was so great that the State Legislature stepped in and championed the cause of building a new ballpark in Seattle for the Mariners. (Thanks guys. Try building one next time that isn’t a hitters’ graveyard.) And lest you think there wasn’t at least some of that motivation beyond the A’s sudden need to make seismic shifts in their roster at the trade deadline this year, consider that the GM is also a part owner of the franchise.
Now, statheads in sports are quick to dismiss the nature of the short playoff series as being something akin to static. They use the term “small sample size” to describe it – particularly when their team loses, at which point it sounds suspiciously like sour grapes. The A’s have made the playoffs many times over in recent years, only to come up short. The company line in Oakland has always been something along the lines of that the club is set up for sustainable success which provides them the opportunity to possibly compete for championships – a notion which flies in the face of what they did in 2014, when the A’s went all-in at the end of July with their aspirations of winning a World Series, first making an understandable deal in trading one of their better minor league prospects to the Cubs for Jeff Samardzija, and then making the Céspedes for Lester deal after that – a deal which made less sense when it happened, and continues making less and less sense over time.
One of the excuses I’ve heard from Billy Beane apologists is that Céspedes really isn’t that good and that, as proof, he only amassed (fill in the number) WAR in Boston after the deal. Well, considering how badly the A’s offense cratered once the lynchpin in the lineup was removed, I would submit that his true value was considerably higher. WAR is a rather clumsy stat creation that reduces a baseball team to a collection of nine individuals to begin with. But baseball is, and has always been, a symbiotic game. Save for the leadoff batter in the top of the 1st, every single action in the game is based upon what has come before it and what could come after. This isn’t to dismiss the notion of WAR – it’s a useful tool. But it’s only one among many. Too many people seem to think that statistics are foretelling of what’s to come when, in fact, they are simply a record of what’s come before.
Quite honestly, there is no better example in the game than the A’s of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Take a look at that roster, as constructed, and honestly tell me there is a guy that, were you starting a baseball team and had your pick, that you would pick for your team. The team, year-in and year-out, seems to be a collection of spare parts and also-rans which exceed expectations, and any A’s player who goes elsewhere seems to turn into a pumpkin. Name me a former Athletic who was a significant contributor in the game once they left Oakland. Tim Hudson? Two months of Barry Zito in 2012? Now, in fairness, a part of that has to do with the way the A’s are managed – they are the ultimate club when it comes to platoon splits and specialist relievers, thus doing what they can to hide their players’ weaknesses. Some key injuries to A’s hitters, particularly a spate of them at the catching position, exposed a few players’ liabilities down the stretch – most awfully those of Derek Norris as a defensive catcher, as the Royals ran wild on him and stole seven bases in the AL wild card game.
The trade for Samardzija certainly made some sense, and the price of a prospect wasn’t necessarily all that great while adding someone who was a #1 calibre starter to their pitching staff. Having done that, the Lester trade then made no sense whatsoever, because because they traded for something they no longer needed. The A’s were winning so many games, in this somewhat dead ball era of pitching-dominated baseball, because they had the best offense in the game. Why you would go about deadening your offense, at a time when offense is at a premium, is beyond me. And I’ve also read a few comments along the lines of “there were signs the offense was already starting to slip,” but that’s even more of a reason not to damage your offense. Taking Céspedes out of their lineup, with his assortment of raw talents, seemed to eliminate the only player in the lineup who was truly considered a threat by opponents. The A’s have guys with power, of course, but they’re one-dimensional guys who also tend to hit about .260 and strike out a lot of the time. Ultimately, those guys really don’t strike much fear in opposing pitchers. Sure, they’ll launch one every so often, but they’re far more likely to whiff (and adding another one-note guy in Adam Dunn was a rather curious, if not laughable, idea). And no, there is no way to quantity that sort of effect in a statistic. I don’t need a statistic. I watched it with my own eyes.
And this is not to diminish the value of Lester in any way – he is a legit #1 starter and he pitched like it in Oakland, winning a whole lot of games and probably singlehandedly saving the A’s from the ignoble end to a season in baseball history. It was something of a cruel irony that the hired gun and short-term rental, a #1 starter and playoff ace who will be a free agent in the offseason and command a price far above Oakland’s budget, floundered in the very game – the AL Wild Card – that he was brought in to win. I can certainly applaud the thinking of trying to win in the here and now. Flags do fly forever. Don’t think for a second that the folks in Oakland didn’t watch those downtown parades in San Francisco in 2010 and 2012. The A’s relevance as an organization diminishes drastically any time the club that shares their market wins another championship. I just think Billy Beane miscalculated this year. He considered the A’s biggest threat to be the Detroit Tigers, a logical assumption given the standings in July and given that Detroit has knocked them out the past two years, and he tried to line up a starting staff which could trump theirs – only to be trumped by the Tigers, anyway, when the Motor City Kitties made the David Price trade, acquiring another #1 calibre starter for a laughably small price. (And, as it turned out, the Tigers weren’t much of a threat, but we’ll get to them later in what’s shaping up to be MLB Choking Dog Week here at IN PLAY LOSE.) I think he outsmarted himself, in the end. There is an A in Smart, but the smartest guy in baseball acted far too much instead like the smartest guy in the room.
And The LOSE also wonders if this is a case of regression to the mean. Remember, this team was almost universally picked to finish dead last in the AL West in 2012. The team hadn’t been very good the two years prior, and then the payroll was gutted in what many considered a cynical ploy to make the team purposely terrible and try to force the MLB to permit that pipe dream idea of theirs to move to San Jose. For the first few months of that season, the team looked like a cellar dwellar, only to catch some of that magic mojo the A’s always seem to catch and ascend to a lofty height by the end of the year. Some would look at their results in the playoffs the last three years and say they underachieved. I look at the talent on that team and cannot conclude anything but that they overachieved, which is a compliment and testament to their ability to punch above their own weight. I’ve seen them win a lot of games over the last three years, and wondered how it is that they do it. Well, they stopped doing it, and given the way the AL West is shaping up for the near future, I’m not sure they’re going to continue to do it. Honestly, I think they’re more likely to finish last in 2015 than finish first. It would be a long, hard fall were that to happen, and the A’s would be right back where they were just a few years ago – a team playing in a cesspool of a park, the worst stadium in all of American sports, trying to do more with less and not being very good at it. Take the A’s methodology and add some money, and you have the Boston Red Sox winning three world titles in a decade. Take the A’s clubhouse ethos and sense of collective and add some money, and you have the Giants winning two titles in the past four years. They are definitely a model franchise, in the end – a model for others’ success. The subhed for Moneyball reads “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and it’s still a big money game, to be sure, but it’s also not unfair when you lose because you go about beating yourself.
