Zack Adams's Oakland Athletics fan blog

Monday is the deadline for all MLB teams to offer their free agents arbitration.  The A's have two players they need to make decisions about; Frank Thomas and Alan Embree.  Both are type-B free agents.  This means that if the A's offer either player arbitration, they decline and sign elsewhere, the A's will receive a compensatory pick between the first and second rounds of next year's amateur draft.  Generally, teams should offer arbitration to their free agents (if they're rated as either type A or B) unless there is a chance that the player will accept arbitration and he has no role on the team (and the team doesn't want to pay his salary).  Both Thomas and Embree might fall into this category.

Frank Thomas is probably toast.  He hit .240/.349/.374 last season, which is completely unacceptable for a DH, especially one with negative value as a baserunner.  There's no reason to think he'll be any better in 2009 at the age of 41.  If he is offered arbitration, he may very well accept.  First, he has indicated that he'd like to stay with the A's.  Secondly, if the A's offer him arbitration, his salary can be no lower than 80% of his 2008 salary of $8 million.  No team is going to offer him anywhere near that amount of money ($6.4 million).  Because there's a high likelihood that the A's will be stuck with an aging DH with no power and no roster spot for more than $6 million, they should NOT offer Thomas arbitration.

Continue reading "A's Face Arbitration Decisions"

Baseball Prospectus' Marc Normandin has a great write-up on what to expect from Mark Ellis and Daric Barton for 2009. Correctly estimating what these two might do in 2009 is essential to determining what the A's need to do to increase their offensive output this season.  While the A's are committed to Ellis (which is fine because of his excellent defense), they may need to consider finding ways to increase their offense at other positions if they presume Ellis won't be productive at the plate.

Barton's situation is a bit more complicated.  Reports indicate that the A's are interested in several options at first base, including the Nationals' Nick Johnson and former Athletic (does simply "A" work?) Jason Giambi.   If the A's predict that Barton will significantly improve next season then there's little reason to go after somewhat risky (even if cheap) veterans to play first base.  But, if they think he'll put up the same putrid numbers as last year, then they must make some changes.

Continue reading "Notes on Mark Ellis and Daric Barton"

Rafael Furcal is rumored to be headed to a new team soon, with the A's, Giants, and a mystery team being the supposed bidders.  Furcal would be a great fit for the A's, replacing Bobby Crosby's anemic bat in the lineup and giving the A's a true leadoff hitter with both on base skills and speed. 

To see how much of an improvement, I'll use the quick and dirty method I wrote about last week for estimating a lineup's run producing ability.   Baseball Musings has a tool where you can plug in the OBP and SLG of a lineup and it will spit out a run/game estimate for the lineup.  Replacing Crosby's career .306 OBP and .380 SLG with Furcal's career averages of .352 and .412 increases the A's estimated runs per game by about a quarter of a run per game.  Add in the half a run a game improvement the Holliday trade brought and the A's are looking at an above average offense, though still one that would need to be carried into the playoffs by a strong pitching staff.  

Continue reading "Furcal Bidding Wars - How High Should the A's Go?"

The A's pitching staff was the key to the team being not horrible in 2008.  They were essentially tied with Boston for the fourth best staff in the league, giving up 4.29 runs a game.  There's good news and bad news in these numbers and what they mean for the 2009 season.  First, the good news: every returning pitcher will be 31 or under next season and at least five will be under 25.  What this means is that there's likely to be some intermal improvement, without much decline.  The bad news from last year's numbers is that it includes the numbers of Rich Harden, Chad Gaudin, Joe "I Homered in the World Series" Blanton, Greg Smith, and Huston Street.  This means the A's will have to replace over 500 innings of dominant (Harden) to mediocre (Smith, Blanton) pitching.

Continue reading "A's Pitching - Where it stands now"

In my post yesterday I presumed that the A's would need to make some improvements to their team in order to compete in 2009.  What did I base that on?  Well, nothing, or more accurately it just seems like they'll need to do more than just add Holliday.  That's not good enough for me so I'm going to try to see if my assumption was correct.

The A's biggest problem last year was their inability to score runs.  They were last in the AL scoring 4.01 runs a game (the average AL team scored 4.78 runs a game).  Here's a position by position breakdown of who the primary player or players were in 2008 and if the A's can expect improvment in 2009. By "expect improvement" I don't mean "hope for" improvement.  Because they will most likely only have Holliday for this season (despite what I wrote a few days ago), it would be foolish for the A's to waste the season by hoping that mixing Holliday with a bunch of gambles pays off...unless the gambles are worthwhile bets.

Continue reading "The A's Cannot Compete for a Playoff Spot with their Current Roster...Or can they? (No, They can't)"

The Royals acquired Coco Crisp today for Ramon Ramirez, a deal the A's should have made (acquiring Crisp, that is).  The A's have basically the same player as Ramirez in Santiago Casilla, who is probably the A's third best right handed reliever.  Casilla is a little more than a year older than Ramirez and has virtually the same amount of service time (a little over two years).  Ramirez has been a little better over his major league career, with an ERA of 3.62 compared to Casilla's ERA of 4.74, but Casilla had better minor league numbers with awesome peripherals.  Regardless, if the A's could have had Crisp for a decent reliever they should have made the deal.

With the A's trading for Matt Holliday it looks like they're trying to win this year and though they have a handful of decent outfield options already, none of them are too appealing.  With Crisp you can pretty much bank on him hitting .280/.330/.410 (roughly his career numbers) while playing great defense in center field and providing good speed.  The A's best options right now for center are Ryan Sweeney and Aaron Cunningham. 

Continue reading "Oakland should have been coo coo for CoCo (Puffs)"

Most people presume that the A's won't re-sign Matt Holliday after this season and will only have his services for one season at most.  This is consistent with the A's behavior in the past as they've allowed almost all of their free agents walk at the end of the year or traded them before they reached free agency.  The only players they've signed to long term deals that went more than a year or two past their arbitration eligible years were Jermaine Dye and Eric Chavez.

So why might this time be different?  Well, the A's have a grand total of $17.5 million committed to their 2010 roster and $0 committed to the 2011 team.  That's right, ZERO dollars (or more accurately, a half million dollars - the A's have a $6 million club option on Mark Ellis for 2011 with a $0.5 buyout) to their 2011 club. Their only long term (past this season) committments as of now are to Eric Chavez and Mark Ellis.  Bobby Crosby will be a free agent after this season and Chavez and Ellis come off the books after 2010.

Continue reading "Can the A's re-sign Holliday?"

One of the underrated benefits of the Holliday deal is the flexibility the A's now have.  As I see it, there are four distinct options the A's now have.  From worst case to best case scenario, they are:

1) The A's don't compete for a playoff spot, don't trade Holliday at the deadline, and don't resign him.  This is by far the worst case scenario, but the A's will still definitely get two compensatory draft picks for Holliday, though it's unlikely the players they ultimately draft will be as valuable as the package they gave up to get him.

2)  The A's aren't in contention in July and trade Holliday in a deadline deal.  It's too far out to guess what kind of return can be had for Holliday eight months from now, but I'd say the Sabathia trade (one top A- prospect (LaPorta)) and the Harden trade (several young players with varying levels of upside (Gallagher, Patterson, Murton, Donaldson)) can be used as benchmarks.  So if the A's aren't in contention and are able to deal Holliday in July, the trade still may be a net positive if they can flip him for more than the Street, Gonzalez, Smith package.

Continue reading "After Holliday, What's Next?"