There Is An ‘A’ In “Almost Scoring”

I’m working on ideas for a new TV series. One stars Hogan Harris as a pitcher who throws shutout ball despite his erratic control. It’s called Hogan’s Zeroes.

But I’m also partial to the one in which Brady Basso leads a rotation of misfits to the post-season. Known as The Brady Bunch, it co-stars Seth Brown as Alice, the wacky housekeeper who whiffs at the same changeup for 7 years.

Remarkably, these A’s who seem to have a heck of a time 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 the lead off spot despite lacking speed or a strong BB rate (currently on pace for 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 master RHP. Best suited to the corner outfield, Bleday has nonetheless become the every day CFer with an overall slash line of .248/.329/.476 (131 wRC+).

Despite a wretched start in which he seemingly struck out every at bat on the same 3 sliders, Brent Rooker has been one of the AL’s best hitters. He enters June with a robust .280/.363/.542 line good for a 161 wRC+ and is right on pace to match his 30 HR season of a year ago.

And then there’s Miguel Andujar, who has been a revelation. Sadly, his one bad plate appearance pretty much cost the A’s an entire game, but you can’t quibble with 9 for 24 with 2 doubles and a big 3-run HR. Andujar’s ability to get to pitches off the plate and still serve them over the infield is as impressive as the way the ball explodes off his bat when he gets a pitch to drive. He hasn’t walked yet — no surprise there — but his K rate is also just 8%.

Heck, if you wanted to lengthen the heart of the lineup you could give every day playing time to Kyle McCann, who can only get part-time work despite batting .322/.412/.525 (171 wRC+). You would think a team struggling to score runs could find room for such a player, at least until he cooled off. But then you wouldn’t think Seth Brown would be batting 5th either.

Even the flawed Shea Langeliers (.211/.277/.491) and Max Schuemann (.229/.305/.352) have been contributors and playing at “defense first” positions they are certainly not the cause of the A’s offensive ills.

So why is it that the A’s are still scuffling to put enough runs on the board? Certainly the bottom half of the order is responsible, with RF (Brown) and 1B (Soderstrom/Davis) black holes, and Zack Gelof having disappointed.

But much of the problem lies in two areas, one presumably a tad ‘luck’ based and one most certainly based in lack of skill. Both involve the “get ‘em over, get ‘em in” part of scoring.

RISP-y Business

The A’s aren’t hitting with runners in scoring position. At one point they were hitting what appeared to be a very low .207 but at that time their team batting average was .217 so it wasn’t so much that they were hitting so much worse at key times — it was that they just weren’t hitting.

But lately, Oakland has saved its most futile at bats for its most clutch situations, batting right around .150 with RISP. Following Friday night’s 1 for 10 fail-fest, they are 10 for their last 70 with RISP during a stretch of games in which often one key hit — or lack thereof — has swung the game from win to loss.

In general, hitting with RISP is not considered to be a sustainable skill. Most often hot or cold stretches, whether individual or team wide, regress and even out over time. So you would expect that moving forward, some of the A’s RISP-y futility should even out. That is, they should start hitting more like...the .222 they bat as a team.

Whiff City

The other big issue is one the A’s own and that is they just strike out an awful lot. Strikeouts don’t advance runners nor do they bring them home, another reason the A’s are better at stranding runners than they are at scoring them.

The A’s have whiffed a startling 578 times in 59 games, which is an average of 9.8 times/game. Only the Seattle Mariners (599 Ks) have fanned more often. and not coincidentally they are the only team to score fewer than the A’s 219 runs, having scored 216. Oh wait, the Chicago White Sox are in a whole league of their own. They have scored only 166 runs all season. How is that even possible?

So the A’s are 13th in the league in runs scored, 14th in “not striking out”. They whiff more than once per inning, customarily bailing out pitchers who are trying to strand runners. Chief offenders have been Soderstrom (40.4%), Brown (33.8%), Rooker (33.7%), Gelof (34.3%), the currently infirm Esteury Ruiz (30.8%), and the currently demoted Lawrence Butler (29.8%). Worth noting is that Langeliers has cut his K rate 5% each season, from 34.6% in 2022 to 29.2% in 2023 to a very manageable 24.6% in 2024.

Where do the solutions lie? The A’s already have some building blocks in place, with Toro and Bleday at the top K’ing less than 20% of the time, and Andujar now making it a “contact trio”.

The first obvious adjustment is simply to stop playing Brown as he adds no value despite his occasional propensity to “tie into one”. An average fielder with a noodle arm, Brown’s .201/.242/.329 line is unplayable and as he turns 32 next month he is not going to get better. He is a career .229 hitter with a career .289 OBP who is on the wrong side of 30.

Then there’s the issue of Soderstrom, that “can’t miss” hitter who sure seems to miss an awful 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 flip. If he can figure out a way to stop chasing bad balls, but also attack hittable strikes — instead of seemingly resolving to do just the opposite — the K’s will fall, the average will rise, and the A’s will have themselves a 1Bman.

As for Gelof, the swing path is odd, more like a ping pong backhand with topspin than the level path through the zone you want to see. In 2023 Gelof appeared to hit the middle of the baseball, while in 2024 he seems to be striking the top of the ball — or often not striking it at all.

Bottom line: this isn’t 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 they playing a lot of games in which one key hit is all they need to win. The bad news is...they’re 23-36.

Brooks vs. Sale today. That reminds me: I need to go shopping.