September 18, 2014

Oakland’s Fall

Tony Blengino sums up the collapse of the Oakland Athletics:

The A’s have largely built their club around players such as Norris and Moss, and deserve a great deal of credit for doing so. Both possess clear strengths, but also have clear shortcomings. As their careers have progressed, pitchers have begun to pound their weaknesses, and the onus is now on them to make the necessary adjustments. Moss has homered in two of the last three games, and even 70% of the first half version of Norris is valuable because of the dearth of offense at the catching position, so all is far from lost. We should realize, however, that perhaps the A’s and their offense weren’t quite as good as they appeared to be a couple months ago, and that their full season numbers only now represent their true talent level.

The Athletics and Braves seem like very similar teams to me this season. Both suffered major injuries to their main strength, the starting rotation. Both teams received good performances from the injury replacements. The A’s realized they had been lucky and traded for front line starters to keep that part of their game from falling apart. Unfortunately, they had been lucky on the offensive side as well, and that luck reversing hurt them more.

I’m not sure the A’s could have done things differently. In this season of low offense, bats would have been difficult to obtain.

On a side note, the Cubs obtained good young hitters in their deals. I believe Chicago sees bats as the rare resource at this time, so when their young hitters start to mature into major league hitters, they may be ahead of the curve in terms of offense, like the Braves were ahead of the curve in terms of pitching in the 1990s.

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