The offseason was pretty gloomy for the A’s, pretty much from Oct. 8 through mid-February. It was filled with departures of key players, questions about when they might trade one or both of the Matts (Chapman and Olson), and very few acquisitions of note. But over the last few weeks, in true A’s fashion, they’ve cobbled together a team that can and probably will contend for an American League pennant.
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That might sound crazy to some of you, and I get it. The A’s have advanced in the postseason once over the last 14 seasons, and they had to win two elimination games in the 2020 wild-card round to do it. They haven’t added any superstars; the most talented acquisition is probably Trevor Rosenthal. He’ll be tasked with replacing Liam Hendriks, only the most valuable reliever in baseball over the previous two seasons.
But let’s take a look at how many things went wrong for the A’s in 2020, when they finished with a .600 winning percentage and won their first AL West title since 2013. They did that despite all of this:
- Their best player, Matt Chapman, only played 37 games before undergoing season-ending hip surgery.
- Their best left-handed hitter, Matt Olson, hit .195 and struck out at a higher rate (31.4 percent) than ever before.
- Frankie Montas and Ramón Laureano were both outstanding over the first couple of weeks before going into mega-slumps the rest of the way.
- There were high hopes for Jesús Luzardo, but he gave up too many home runs during the season and that trend continued in two postseason outings (four homers allowed in 7 2/3 innings).
- According to Baseball-Reference, the A’s finished with a negative WAR as a team at the following positions: starting pitcher, second base, shortstop, right field and designated hitter.
What kept the A’s afloat (actually better than that, since they were a playoff team) was their bullpen, defense, strong play during the stretch run by Sean Murphy and Chris Bassitt’s performance throughout. Other than that, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
The temptation to put much stock in spring training numbers overall should always be ignored, and looking to one Cactus League game as an indicator of what we’ll see during the regular season is especially absurd. But it was difficult to look at what the A’s did on Sunday and not get wistful about what kind of season they might enjoy, especially when Olson and Chapman hit booming home runs in the first inning on consecutive pitches.
Welcome to the Oly-Chappy Show pic.twitter.com/Hiu83sV6OI
— Oakland A's (@Athletics) March 7, 2021
Olson’s power wasn’t a concern last season — he hit 14 home runs and two more in the ALDS. But he also hit a single Sunday (he only hit 22 in 60 games last season, and just one in seven postseason games) and is hitting .500 with three home runs in 10 at-bats. The A’s know that Olson struggled last season with the exaggerated shifts he faced, and his inability to collect base hits with regularity started to wear on him mentally, but those problems don’t seem to have lingered. (Again, the sample size here is very, very small.)
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Chapman’s first home run of the spring was absolutely launched, as you can see in the above video. That’s an even better sign than Olson’s hot start, because the injury was to his right hip — it’s impossible to generate power like that if your back leg isn’t strong. The A’s are going to take things slowly (he was the starting DH on Sunday), but Chapman says he already feels good enough to play third base every day. One might assume that he took the advice of Mark Canha, who missed most of the 2016 season due to surgery on his left hip.
“I remember when I was rehabbing for that, the thing I didn’t realize about rehabbing is you have a lot of downtime,” Canha told the A’s radio crew during Sunday’s game. “I think one of the mistakes I actually made was putting on, like, a lot of weight. Because I was in the weight room so much, lifting and getting bigger and stuff and I thought I was doing myself a service. I think coming back from an injury, it was a little too much for the hip to kind of carry that extra load, so I told him to be wary of that. Just kind of keep your weight (the same).”
Speaking of Canha, it appears that he’ll probably be the guy the A’s use most often in the leadoff spot. Canha isn’t a prototypical leadoff hitter in terms of speed, but he’s actually a fairly effective baserunner and he consistently sees as many pitches per plate appearance as anyone in the game. With Marcus Semien’s struggles last season, Bob Melvin seemed to have difficulty settling on a leadoff hitter, sometimes going with Semien and other times using Tommy La Stella, which continued into the postseason. Canha’s power dipped in 2020, but he led the team in on-base percentage by a wide margin at .387.
Canha will probably also be used as a designated hitter on occasion against left-handed pitching, while Mitch Moreland will serve in that role more often as the team’s primary left-handed power hitter behind Olson. Moreland was dominant with the Red Sox over the first half of last season (.328/.430/.746) before getting dealt to the Padres, where he struggled a bit. If returning to the American League puts him anywhere close to the production he had in Boston last season, or in his previous five years when he averaged 20 home runs per season, the A’s will be in a much better position than they were with Khris Davis, who hit .197 against righties in 2019 and .135 against them last season.
The A’s overall offensive performance was fairly disappointing last season, but starting pitching was another supposed strength that never performed that way collectively. Bassitt led the team in WAR, but no other starter finished in the A’s top 10. The next-best pitcher from last season’s rotation, Luzardo, thinks he made the mechanical and mental adjustments necessary to approach the kinds of numbers that many thought he would during his inconsistent 2020.
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“I had some speedbumps last year,” Luzardo said on Feb. 21. “I think that helped me out. I definitely worked on some stuff pitching-wise, mentality-wise as well. I really worked on finding my breaking ball in the offseason.”
A lot of that work came when Luzardo wasn’t on the mound. If he was bored while watching TV, he’d get off the couch and work on his mechanics. If he was sitting outside with nothing to do, he’d stand up and work on his mechanics. Most of that time he spent going through his motion and repeating his arm slot was with a certain goal in mind: getting his slider back.
Luzardo’s slider was brilliant from the moment he was called up in 2019, and it was such a dominant pitch for him that he used it a third of the time that season and over 40 percent of the time during his last regular-season game and three shutout innings in the A’s wild-card loss to the Rays. Luzardo threw his slider only 19.4 percent of the time last season, as he struggled with his feel for the pitch throughout (at one point it even started looking like a curveball). He doesn’t seem to be worried about that problem repeating itself in 2021.
“I was just trying to get it back to what it was when I got called up in 2019,” Luzardo said. “I feel like that breaking ball that I had was the best I’ve ever thrown. It felt really good throughout Double A, through Triple A, and then when I got called up in 2019. Last year, it kind of got away from me. I couldn’t really find a good feel for it throughout the year and then now it’s back to where it was.”
Luzardo was actually called up to the majors a few weeks after A.J. Puk in 2019, and the idea of having both of the A’s top pitching prospects for a full season helped fuel the high expectations the team carried going into 2020. But while Luzardo had his ups and downs, Puk sat out with a shoulder injury. Puk hasn’t pitched in the Cactus League yet (nor have Luzardo or any of the A’s top five starters), but Melvin recently said Puk’s velocity looks good and he seems healthy. Puk’s roommate doesn’t think the big lefty should be overlooked.
“I’ve been living with him since we rehabbed,” Luzardo said. “I was rehabbing my shoulder, he was rehabbing (after) Tommy John (surgery). And we just became really good friends. We have the same goals, do the same things off the field. So we became really tight, and I was lucky enough to see him work out and rehab his shoulder this offseason, see all the work that he put in. He’s a grinder, and he has that dog in him this year to be a breakout candidate and to open a lot of people’s eyes.”
The A’s have their concerns, of course. Puk is the A’s only consensus top-100 prospect (he came in at No. 84 on Keith Law’s list), although Tyler Soderstrom might start creeping up those lists and Nick Allen is already good enough defensively to play in the majors. The delayed stadium timeline has fans worried about how long Chapman and Olson will remain with the club.
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Yet it doesn’t seem to matter — whether it’s a slow start to a season, or an offseason that appeared to be a complete zero up until the days before pitchers and catchers reported, the A’s always seem to find a way to figure out how to contend. And there may not be another team in baseball that would benefit more from a championship run, seeing as the Bay Area has always had sort of a “championship or bust” mentality since the 49ers ruled the 1980s, and the A’s could use some momentum as they work to get city approval for their ballpark project at Howard Terminal.
It looked like their opportunity to do that fizzled when they couldn’t slow the Astros’ bats in last season’s ALDS. But the Astros have lost more key players since then, leaving the A’s as the favorites in a relatively weak AL West. If they could win the division in 2020 while losing Chapman and getting several underwhelming performances from key players, what can they accomplish with a healthy Chapman, a more reliable Olson and a possible breakout candidate or two on the pitching side?
(Photo of Matt Olson and Matt Chapman: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)