The book that inspired and spawned the Brad Pitt picture Moneyball laid out the successes of the 2002 Oakland Athletics team that won 20 consecutive games, 103 games overall and captured an AL West division banner even though GM Billy Beane kind of dismantled the squad by letting 2000 AL MVP Jason Giambi and starting center fielder Johnny Damon walk in free agency that same season.
The A’s have perennially ranked in the bottom quarter of the league for annual payrolls. In 2002, the A’s ranked third last in payroll. Over a decade later, Oakland ranks 27th league-wide and in the process has been generally free of monster contracts in favor of players who feed Beane’s appetite for sabermetrics at a reasonable salary. Since 2002, the Athletics have qualified for the postseason an additional five times, have never won less than 74 games in a season and have scored more runs than they have allowed eight times.
2014 was special even though the Athletics faded down the stretch. They were baseball’s best team in the first half and still finished with an MLB high +157 run differential. 2015 has been a slower start, but the organization is still competing right in the thick of a talented pool of AL West rosters. They’re doing so with only a single player on the 25-man roster set to make more than $8.5 million in salary this year, which is starting pitcher Scott Kazmir ($13 M). The Texas Rangers have five, the Los Angeles Angels four and the Mariners three.
The Athletics currently rank inside the top four of team rankings for batting average and earned run averages. A few of the more notable bargains the club is getting great production from offensively is catcher Stephen Vogt and first baseman Mark Canha.
Vogt has replaced the departed Derek Norris as the first string backstop and is hitting .368 with three home runs and nine RBI. At 30, Vogt still showed up in 2014 amidst limited at-bats (269) with a .279/.321/.431 slash line and nine home runs. He is being paid a salary of only $512,500 this season.
Canha, meanwhile, is a 26-year-old career minor leaguer who was acquired from the Colorado Rockies in the offseason. While he may not be the A’s next Giambi at first base, his .295-1-7 start to the season cannot be overlooked. If Canha can maintain a level of play strong enough to warrant him 300-plus ABs in 2015, he’ll be more than worth his league-minimum salary.
Even castaways like DH Billy Butler and 1B Ike Davis are finding success in Oakland. Davis is more so a castaway than Butler after under-performing in the past with the Mets and Pirates after being a first round selection in the 2008 draft. Their loss has so far been the Athletics’ gain, as he’s hitting .342 with a home run and six RBI in platoon duties with Canha for a cool price tag of $3.8 million this season.
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Butler was a career .295 hitter coming of a down 2014 campaign with the Royals. Only 29, he averaged a .299-18-85 line from 2008-13 with Kansas City. A hitter with those numbers would typically fetch a lot of attention on free agency, but the A’s saw that he would be undervalued coming off a cold season. When the Royals bought out his 2015 option for $1 million, it only further decreased his attractiveness. Beane offered Country Breakfast an appetizing three-year deal for $30 million, and Butler accepted. So far, it looks like Butler is bouncing back with a .347-1-7 line through 13 games, making his $6.66 million salary very easy to stomach.
On the pitching side of things, Beane has been renowned for drafting and/or developing young talent and then parting with it once it becomes too expensive in favor of younger, cheaper, but still talented arms. Barry Zito was drafted in 1999 by the A’s and made three All-Star Games and won a Cy young in 2002 with the club.
Other starting pitchers brought up through the organization since Beane became GM in 1998 who went on to play in All-Star Games as Athletics are Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, Gio Gonzalez and almost inevitably, Sonny Gray can be added to the list in the future.
Even bargains like Bartolo Colon at age 40 going 18-6 with a 2.65 in 2013 for a $3 million salary or Scott Kazmir resurrecting his career in 2014 and being named an All-Star pitcher are notable challenges taken on by Beane and the Athletics that have paid big dividends for the club.
The Oakland Athletics are off to a 6-7 start and begin week three of the MLB regular season with a series on the road against the rivals Angels followed by hosting the Astros over the weekend. There’s a good chance they could start week four with more wins than any other AL West club.
It only takes a brief scan of their results over the last decade and their statistics so far in 2015 to know that bargain baseball in Oaktown is alive and well. Though it has been a trend often imitated, rarely has it been duplicated to the same degree of success as the green and gold.