Oakland Athletics: Looking ahead to 2018

The Oakland Athletics finished in last place yet again in 2017, making this their third straight trip to the cellar of the AL West. What can fans look for this offseason and what should they expect come 2018?

The Oakland Athletics finished the season at 75-87 this year, 26 games behind the division-winning Houston Astros. Obviously there will be some ground to make up if the A’s are to make a push towards the postseason as a divisional contender, but on the bright side, they are a bit closer to overtaking some of the other members of the West, sitting just three games behind the Rangers and ever-hopeful Mariners, and five back of the Angels, who were actually in the AL Wild Card race during the final week of the regular season.

The A’s have some work to do this winter if they hope to become 2018’s Minnesota Twins or Colorado Rockies, and we’ll get to that in just a minute. But first, a quick recap of the 2017 season.

We all knew that this season would be a rough one, but for a club with little hope of making the postseason and another active trade deadline as sellers on the horizon when the season began, this year actually provided a lot of hope for A’s fans, no matter what you think of their record.

While it may seem like business as usual with the A’s moving on from ace Sonny Gray and fan favorite Sean Doolittle (along with Ryan Madson, Yonder Alonso and others) being traded, this season was different. There is a direction for the franchise, and that direction is towards a new ballpark (FINALLY), building up the farm system and making a run with a youth-filled team, much like their clubs of the early 2000s. The hope in the Bay Area is that with the new ballpark plan in place, the A’s will be able to hold onto their free agents unlike those teams with Zito, Mulder and Hudson.

Before the season began I analyzed the A’s completely backwards, thinking that their pitching staff would be a strength of the club while they would struggle to score runs on a consistent basis.  With Sonny Gray leading the staff and Sean Manaea and Kendall Graveman looking like pitchers with plenty of potential over the course of a full season, the starting rotation was looking solid. Add in Andrew Triggs and Jharel Cotton as two pitchers that showed flashes in 2016, and there was some hope to build upon the A’s having a solid starting five.

The twelve pitchers that ended up making all of Oakland’s starts this season compiled a 4.74 ERA as a group, good for 20th in baseball and just a touch behind the playoff-bound Minnesota Twins who finished at 4.73. Sean Manaea and Sonny Gray led the starters in fWAR at 2.3.

The relief corps wasn’t much better, posting a 4.53 ERA this year, ranking them 25th. Again, the Twins were well within reach here.

The most exciting part as the season came to a close has been the offense of this young club. Matt Olson was hitting them out of the park at an astonishing rate and showed that when he gets hot, there’s no slowing him down. He finished the year with 24 homers and a home run per fly ball rate that was tops of anyone with at least 100 plate appearances at 41.4%. That includes AL MVP nominee Aaron Judge (35.6%) and Giancarlo Stanton (34.3%), who nearly became just the sixth person to hit 60 homers in a season, falling one shy. While that rate will likely slow and fall from elite levels, Olson’s power is for real.

The other huge bright spot, third baseman Matt Chapman, showed that his glove at the hot corner is something to beware of if you’re in the batter’s box. In just 718 innings at third, Chapman accrued a DRS (Defensive Runs Saved) of 21, tying him for fifth-most in baseball over the course of the whole season. Kevin Kiermaier, widely regarded as one of the best defensive centerfielders in the game, saved just one more run while playing a little over 100 more innings in the field. The DRS leader, (no surprise) Andrelton Simmons saved 33 runs in 1,365 innings. The pace that Chapman was on in just over half of a season was truly astonishing.

In trading away Sonny Gray, the A’s landed speedster Jorge Mateo, who may come in handy when the A’s open their new ballpark, depending on the dimensions the club goes with. If they put up something similar to Triples Alley at AT&T Park, Mateo could become lethal. They also landed centerfielder Dustin Fowler and starter James Kaprielian, both of whom were injured and come with big question marks heading into 2018. The goal is to have Fowler starting in center on opening day 2018. Kaprielian is still recovering from Tommy John surgery, but he and A.J. Puk could challenge for a spot on the 25-man roster in 2018, adding to the pitching depth that Oakland already possesses while giving the group a higher ceiling.

From the trade deadline on, once they had moved Doolittle, Gray and Madson, the A’s were 28-28 with a large portion of the roster that will be expected back in 2018. Sorry to keep using the Twins as a reference point, but the Twins were four games below .500 heading into August and went 35-23 from that point on. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that these same A’s could tread water for large portions of 2018, and go on one run that makes the difference.

Should we expect that run? Well, it depends on the moves they make this winter.

Here’s what the Oakland Athletics front office will be busy doing this offseason to keep the team on a winning path while keeping the fans engaged.

Keep the good news comin’

A’s fans have been waiting on a new ballpark for well over a decade at this point, and just a couple of weeks ago the team announced the location that they have chosen to be the next home of the Oakland Athletics. Of course there will still plenty plenty of red tape to cut through, and securing the land is no gimme, but all that the fans ask is to be kept in the loop this winter.

All season there has been tremendous effort to let the fans know that the A’s aren’t leaving Oakland. They started a “Rooted in Oakland” campaign that came complete with a mural of the A’s elephant and some lighthearted ribbing of the cross-Bay Giants. They promised a ballpark announcement, and delivered. There is long term hope for A’s fans for the first time in quite a while.

It’s going to be a time consuming process, getting all the t’s dotted and the i’s crossed to secure the land needed for their ideal ballpark location, but going dark at this point would be a little rough on the fanbase that they’ve been building up all year. It’s also not likely that they’ll stop sharing updates with the A’s faithful altogether, with Dave Kaval and company being very open with their expectations throughout the process to this point.

With the Raiders and Warriors headed out of town in the coming years, the A’s could be positioned quite nicely to reap the rewards of setting their roots in Oakland. With fewer options to choose from, the A’s could become the big ticket in town and start bringing in the fans that have eluded them for many, many years. One way to do that would be to…

Lock someone up

One talking point that gets batted around quite a bit is that it’s hard to know who’s on the A’s at any given time because their roster turns over so much. Name the last big star they had that they kept for more than a couple of years that also stayed healthy. Most of the recent stars have been traded away, and the one that they actually signed, Eric Chavez, couldn’t stay on the field. And no, Daric Barton doesn’t count as a big star.

That said, with a new ballpark in the works and a fanbase starting to believe once again, this is the perfect winter to put some eggs in a basket and show that they are building around someone. Manaea, Olson and Chapman are the candidates that come to mind as players with some time before they hit arbitration, let alone free agency, making it a little more likely that they’d take the immediate bump in salary.

If the A’s were to sign one of their young players through their arbitration years and eat up a year or two of free agency, it would be a sign to the fans that this isn’t the same old song and dance. It would also potentially save them big time in arbitration and allow them to spend more in free agency in a few years when the park is being built and their contracts would be much, much higher (assuming they keep performing).

Of course they could surprise everyone and somehow land Shohei Otani with the promise of letting him be a two-way player and making him the centerpiece of their rebuild. It’s not a terrible offer, but there will likely be better opportunities out there where he could land sponsorships in a big market to recoup some of that money he’ll be missing out on if he decides to come over to the big leagues this offseason.