The baseball season is a month old, yet I don’t seem to have commented on it yet. I guess I’ve been thinking about other stuff, or maybe it’s because of all the Food Network stuff that we have on the DVR. Admittedly, being able to pause games is nice, except that it’s really depressing to watch the rest of the game after dinner because the A’s can’t hit worth crap.
I’m sorry, am I shouting? For the first few weeks, I just kept on saying to myself “small sample size”, “small sample size”. And then the A’s managed to get back over .500. And then, well, they dropped a couple of series, and got shut out for a couple of games in a row. They’ve already gotten shut out more times this year than all of last year, and they were certainly no offensive powerhouse last year.
I was cautiously optimistic going into the season. Their bullpen was really depressing last year, and they seemed to have done a lot of work to improve there. I thought the offense would probably get a slight boost; signing Jason Kendall sounded like a nice move. I wasn’t thrilled about their starting pitching after the trades, but if Baseball Prospectus claimed that the trades wouldn’t hurt their starting pitching, who was I to quibble?
And, indeed, the pitching has been respectable; some of the starters have been pretty iffy, but Joe Blanton and, especially, Rich Harden have been awesome. And their relief pitching has been quite respectable. But the offense has finally slipped past Kansas City to the very bottom of the AL. (With my other favorite team, the Native Americans, keeping them company.) What is going on here? Each year, I think that this is the year where Eric Chavez will turn from one of the better third basemen in the league into a real star; each year, I am wrong. And it’s not just him: nobody, nobody is hitting on the A’s: the team leader in OPS is Mark Kotsay; while .753 is decent for a center fielder, it’s abysmal for your best player. (Fun stat: Mike Hampton is third on the Braves in OPS, at .900.)
Ah well; let me repeat again: small sample size. Plus, the Yankees suck, too. Speaking of which, one article on the Yankees (at a time when they were 11-18) mentioned that, in 2001, the A’s started off 11-18; the rest of the season, they won more than two-thirds of their games, including 20 in a row. Let’s hope the A’s pick it up like that again this year…
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The A’s are about as likely to keep hitting this badly as the Orioles are to keep hitting this well, which is to say, there’s no chance.
5/10/2005 @ 6:59 am
Yes, that’s true. I have been wondering for the last year or so, though, if the A’s aren’t doing as good a job with their hitting as they could be, though. Their pitching always surprises: given how difficult pitching is to project, it can’t be an accident that the A’s keep on churning out top-notch prospects, so I suspect they have a really good coaching system in place. The flip side, though, is that I wonder if their hitting coaching might be sub-par, that they might be experimenting with coaching techniques that aren’t so great in practice. Hard to say; it might all just be a fluke.
The O’s signing of Miguel Tejada certainly looks good, at any rate.
5/11/2005 @ 8:43 pm
What’s interesting about the 2005 Orioles is how quickly they’ve gone from a terribly operated team to a rather well-operated team. Where they shine especially is not in free-agent acquisitions (despite Tejada and Lopez and the absence of any real albatrosses) or player development (despite Roberts) but in picking up valuable players other teams just didn’t want: Rodrigo Lopez, Melvin Mora, Bruce Chen and Jay Gibbons is a pretty nice group to get off the scrap heap. What we don’t have is depth; with Sosa and Matos injured, and our next two outfielders on the depth chart (Val Majewski and Midre Cummings) out for the year, the Orioles are faced with the prospect of putting David Newhan and B.J. Surhoff out there every single day. Apparently they’re calling up Fiorentino, who is just finishing up his first month above A ball (though he did massively crush the ball there…)
5/12/2005 @ 7:06 am
It’s been a while since I’ve heard Midre Cummings mentioned…
5/13/2005 @ 7:20 pm