Are the A's a Playoff Team?

Are A’s a Playoff Team?

            When the season began the general consensus was that the Oakland A’s were the favorite to win the AL West.  The team won it last year after a tragic collapse by the Texas Rangers, who later was knocked out of the playoffs in the wildcard game, and this year the A’s looked just as strong.  The team didn’t disappoint in the first half having some of the best stats in the league offensively and pitching.  The second half though has been a different story all together.  So lets take a look at see what the major changes have been for the A’s from the first to second half of the season and see if they really are a playoff team anymore.

            First Half: Batting

	BB%	K%	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	ISO	BABIP	wOBA	wRC+	WAR
A’s	9.6%	17.9%	.251	.328	.400	.729	.149	.286	.323	109	17.1
AL	7.8%	20.3%	.252	.316	.391	.707	.139	.299	.313	97	11.9

            The one thing this offense did very well was the ability to take a walk and limit the number of strikeouts they had.  Having a BB% just under 2% higher than the league obviously shows this and it would also accounts for the above average OBP for a team.   The team only swung at 27.1% of pitches outside the zone in the first half, a very impressively low number.  Even more impressive is the team was able to make contact with those same pitches 68.8% of the time.  Almost 70% of the time the team was able to make contact outside the zone allowing them to prolong at-bats and draw more pitches.

            The team was also a fairly solid power team having a strong ISO and SLG.  The A’s were hitting a XBH roughly every 13.4 plate appearances while the rest of baseball was getting one roughly 14 PA’s so the A’s did slightly better than the rest of the MLB.  Dissecting this further we see the A’s hit a double every 23.3 PA and a HR every 38.  The A’s had a grand total of 160 doubles and 98 HR’s during the first half of the season which is strong total for a team that plays in a very pitcher oriented field.  The stadium is well known for having a spacious OF and that makes gap hitters more effective than pure power hitters since it takes more effort to hit a HR.

            The team had a very strong first half offensively but there is one area that raises an eyebrow and that’s the team’s BABIP.  For a team that was hitting so well it’s a little odd to see a BABIP below the league average when everything else was above.  There could be a few different reasons for the lower BABIP like the team just getting unlucky, after all BABIP is the “luck” stat.  It could also be that the team actually wasn’t hitting as well as we thought they were and the success was coming from walks and timely XBH which we already seen was a plus area for the team.  All of these could be a reason for the drop but nothing is guaranteed and it may become more clear when we take a look at the second half stats.

Pitching

	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BAA	WHIP	BABIP	ERA	FIP	ERA-	FIP-	WAR
A’s	7.54	2.66	0.83	.229	1.16	.271	3.09	3.63	83	98	10.4
AL	7.72	2.92	0.88	.247	1.28	.295	3.76	3.76	100	100	8.6

            The A’s have always been known for their pitching, even as a kid growing up I knew the A’s were the pitching team, and in the first half the team didn’t disappoint.  The most impressive thing to note is the low batting average against the team’s pitching.  .229 is one of the lower totals in the league, if not the lowest, but it also shows the teams defense was able to back up the pitching’s since as we can see they’re not a major strikeout team.  While only slightly below league average the team still has a strong K/9 and a very strong BB/9 kept runners off the base path.

            Once again we see a red flag in a very similar stat to the one problem area we discussed in the teams hitting.  FIP basically asks if the defense was at league average what the ERA would be and according to the numbers the team would be very average.  I mentioned that FIP is similar to BABIP but that’s not 100% accurate since FIP takes into account things that the pitcher has direct control over and having a big difference between ERA and FIP can mean more than a difference between AVG and BABIP.  A 60-point difference may not seem like much and you do expect to see a higher FIP than ERA but you don’t tend to see a difference larger than 30 points on average this means the team may be getting luckier than other teams.

            So that is the A’s in the first half of the season and in the end they were very strong overall.  There were some red flags but nothing to serious at the time.  So know we look at how the team has fared in the second half of the season and see if those same trends we saw in the first half continue.

            Second Half: Batting

	BB%	K%	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	ISO	BABIP	wOBA	wRC+	WAR
A’s	8.6%	17.6%	.235	.304	.360	.665	.125	.268	.296	90	5.5
AL	7.3%	19.8%	.250	.310	.383	.694	.133	.294	.307	95	5.7

            The team is not fairing very well in the second half of the season offensively and much like I said in the first half the key stat to notice is the BABIP.  The team’s BABIP has dropped a good 20 points from the first half and as we see in the numbers so as every other stat.  The team is still not striking out much, a very good thing for the team, but they’re taking less walks and that has lowered the team OBP.  As I stated before there could be a correlation between the high OBP and SLG combined with the low BABIP that showed how the team was succeeding thus far but when the runners aren’t getting on base as much and the power gets sapped the team struggles.  Granted this is true with every team out there but we saw that the A’s really relied on getting guys on base to do any sort of damage.

            There’s a few ways to look at this and the first is if the players aren’t getting on base and the power hitters aren’t coming up with runners in scoring position.  The team currently is leaving 3.45 runners in scoring position per game putting them at 15^th overall in baseball but in the last 3 games it’s sitting at 4.33 runners.  A small sample size yes but it does show the team is struggling in that area overall.  wRC+ also shows how the team is struggling overall putting them 10% worse in overall offense than league average (in wRC+ 100 is considered league average).

            As I’ve said the power is down but lets take a look on how much it’s changed in rates.  Before we said the team was hitting an XBH every 13.4 PA in the first half; in the second half the team is 14.2 so not much change overall.  Doubles has risen to every 25.3 PA and HR’s have gone up from every 38 PA to one every 46.9 PA.  Having a difference of 1 won’t hurt the team’s double production but an increase of almost 10 PA’s is defiantly going to affect their power numbers.

Pitching

	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BAA	WHIP	BABIP	ERA	ERA-	FIP	FIP-	WAR
A’s	7.59	2.54	1.09	.228	1.14	.263	3.49	93	3.95	107	4.1
AL	7.67	2.74	0.85	.245	1.25	.292	3.66	95	3.68	96	6.5

            At first glance the team seems to be almost identical stats from the first half to the second.  Same K/9 and an even better BB/9, not a lot but an improvement, and are limiting hits show by the low BAA and WHIP.  So why did the ERA balloon over 40 points from first to second half?  Well the first thing we notice is the increased HR/9 rate of 1.09 as compared to the first half’s 0.83.  The rate of fly balls from first to second half really hasn’t changed and for that matter neither has ground ball rates and line drive rates so that doesn’t tell us what’s changed.  What it might come down to the new pitchers pitching in an unfamiliar park and giving up more fly balls than normal or it could just be bad luck.  Whatever the case the team is giving up more HR’s and that’s a problem area.

            This information is all well and good and really does show you how bad the team has struggled so far but we never answered the question on what changed in the pitching to cause the team to take such a down turn.  Well looking at the numbers there are a few contributing factors and these lie with individual players.  Brandon Moss has really struggled during the second half of the season going from a .268/.349/.530 slash line in the first half to a .178/.300/.263 in the second.  Considering Moss was one of the more productive hitters on the team this is a blow.  There are other factors but lets touch on 2 that I feel were the nail in the coffin for the A’s and their world series hopes and luckily they’re one in the same, Yoenis Cespedes and his defense.

            The A’s defense has actually taken a little bit of a down turn since the trade was made and losing Cespedes 12 OF Assists was one reason.  The teams defense overall has fallen off as of late currently having a fielding percentage of .984 to the AL’s .985, the A’s used to be near .990.  Losing Cespedes in LF was one blow since Fauld and Gomes are nowhere near as good defensively as Cespedes is but the loss of his bat perfectly coincides with the teams batting woes.  This could be a coincidence but the numbers don’t lie and the evidence is there.  Overall the A’s aren’t the same team we saw in the first half and at this point it doesn’t seem likely that they will go very far in the playoffs even if they can hold off the Mariners long enough.