Yes, you interpreted that title right. The A's offense is going to get better.

It's not going to score more runs, however. This seemingly counterintuitive fact is explained by the fact that so far this season, the A's have scored a lot of runs with a bad offense. There are a few ways to do this (most of them being variations on "get lucky") but the A's in particular have been doing it by hitting with runners in scoring position. When everybody in your lineup turns into Derek Jeter with a man on second base and Mike Matheny with no one on, you're going to score more runs than you really ought to.

So: the A's have been lucky. Sort of. Except that they've also been UNlucky, in that a whole boatload of position players have had terrible starts to the season. Now, hitting as a whole is definitely a skill-- we can't expect players to regress all the way to the mean, the way we can something like hitting with RISP. But a month and a half is (brace yourselves) a pretty small sample size. And one would suspect that most of the A's lineup will jones up a little over the rest of the season.

I'm going to take a gander at who's performing how well relative to their ZiPS projections. With the team conveniently at the quarter-pole of the season, it seems like a good time for a reality check.

[Editorial note: This was written before part 3 of the A's epic 3-act offensive faceplant in Cleveland... so the numbers are slightly behind the times, but not hugely so.]

How to read the stats: I'm not a genius at editing this, unfortunately. The stats to the left of the slashes are the position, age and ZIPS projection for a given player. The stats to the right of the slashes are that player's actual line to date.

Guys who are eating their Wheaties:

Bobby Crosby             ss  28  .240  .305  .353 // .253 .320 .370

+15 OBP, +17 SLG, +32 OPS

Yes, folks, Crosby's scintillating .690 OPS is actually better than what was expected of him over the offseason. He is a bad, bad player. With multiple teams now facing serious holes at shortstop, I don't really understand why he hasn't been moved yet-- although perhaps the other GMs see the same thing we do.

Mike Sweeney             dh  34  .266  .331  .433 // .318 .378 .443

+47 OBP, +10 SLG, +57 OPS

Sweeney should probably get a little more credit than this-- his projection figured him to be playing in a better hitters' park. Likewise, Ryan Sweeney and Big Frank are probably doing a little better than they seem to be.

Rajai Davis             cf  27  .263  .325  .357 // .292 .308 .417

-17 OBP, + 60 SLG, +43 OPS 

Rajai Davis seems to have heard the phrase "you don't walk off the island" when he got to Oakland and mistakenly thought it was referring to the island in the middle of Hegenberger Road.

Jack Hannahan           3b  28  .258  .362  .375 // .247 .400 .371

+38 OBP, -4 SLG, +34 OPS

Hannahan's component hitting is actually even better than this, as he's hit a lot of unfortunate line drives right at defenders.

Guys who could use some iron in their diets:

Daric Barton            1b  22  .280  .369  .440 // .230 .333 .338

-36 OBP, -102 SLG, -138 OPS

As I mentioned the other day, Barton is rapidly hitting his way into a demotion back to AAA. Perhaps it's all for the best in the long run.

Chris Denorfia           cf  27  .282  .350  .438 // .260 .339 .300

-11 OBP, -138 SLG, -149 OPS

Someone needs to have a chat with Chris, once he's off the DL, and let him know that while hustling and hitting gritty infield singles are fine and whatnot, the team would actually be better off if he just hit like he did in the International League a few years ago. He had over 20 HR one year in his career, but he won't match that when he's hitting like 80% ground balls.

Jack Cust               dh  29  .264  .394  .470 // .252 .434 .417

+40 OBP, -53 SLG, -13 OPS

Say this about Jack, the man gets his walks.

Travis Buck             rf  23  .283  .360  .458 // .154 .197 .277

-163 OBP, -181 SLG, -344 OPS

The Stag has already been sent down to AAA; I'm not entirely sure I understand how this situation works, but if I am correct, he will need to be in AAA until May 29 to "earn" the A's an extra year of club control. See you May 30, Travis.

Mark Ellis               2b  31  .273  .335  .418 // .242 .328 .379

-7 OBP, -39 SLG, -46 OPS

Ellis's power spike from last season may have been a temporary one, but I'm not sure what happened to his batting average.

Frank Thomas             dh  40  .248  .352  .456 // .267 .384 .350

+32 OBP, -106 SLG, -74 OPS

Plus OBP, Minus slugging, and more of the latter. That seems like a pretty accurate description of what the A's have gotten from the Hurt so far. You have to figure he's gone if he doesn't turn things around a little by the 6-game June trip in NL parks.

Rob Bowen               c   27  .255  .349  .397// .200 .250 .200

-99 OBP, -197 SLG, -296 OPS

I have yet to confirm that these numbers are not a forgery, and that Rob Bowen is actually still alive.

Ryan Sweeney            cf  23  .266  .330  .390 // .279 .343 .349

+13 OBP, -41 SLG, -28 OPS

I'll give Sweeney credit-- he's put up respectable-looking numbers and, in particular, improved his walk rate a lot in recent weeks. Still waiting for that mythical 5 o'clock power to show up, though.

Donnie Murphy            ss  25  .252  .305  .413 // .214 .298 .357

-7 OBP, -56 SLG, -63 OPS

I didn't expect Murphy to hit against righties, but I have to say he's been a disappointment as a platoon bat to this point in the season.

Kurt Suzuki              c   24  .248  .325  .369 // .248 .314 .297

-11 OBP, -72 SLG, -83 OPS

When I wrote the first draft of this article, Kurt was solidly in the "above projections" category. Unfortunately, 0 for 22 wastelands will tend to make you look a bit worse.

Emil Brown               lf  33  .268  .332  .392 // .277 .301 .405

-31 OBP, + 13 SLG, -18 OPS

Yes, Brown is actually underperforming his projections, mostly because he's hit like Barry Zito when no one is on base. Most of the reason for this underperformance, though, is not his hitting-- it's the fact that he has apparently taken a blood oath to fight the evils of walks. A .024 IsoOBP is putrescent-- Garrett Anderson has more plate discipline than that.

Conclusion

Holy smokes, this is bad. Of the A's 9 more or less "regulars" at this point, exactly two of them are hitting above their projections. Of the whole group of 15, only four are-- and one of those, Rajai Davis, has the second smallest sample of plate appearances of the entire team.

Let's look at this from another angle. If you add up the cumulative differentials from those 9 regulars' OPS and then average them out, the average A's regular is hitting .037 below his projection.

What does that mean in run terms? Well, over a full season, 5 points of OPS roughly (someone stop me if this is not correct) translates to one run. So over the full season the A's offense is hitting in such a way that we would expect it to lose about 7.5 runs per player*9, or about 67 runs off of the projected offensive output. Since we're only a quarter of the way through the season, we can guess that the team is about 17 runs-- in OPS terms-- below where it ought to be.

However, we can then take a look at Baseball Prospectus's adjusted standings -- and discover that actually, the A's have scored 19 runs MORE than they should have based on their OPS to this point. The key column to look at here is to the mid-right of your screen, "adjusted equivalent runs," which is more or less the number of runs the A's ought to have scored based on how they've hit, adjusted for schedule strength.

So, weirdly enough, it turns out that the offense's runs scored are actually about in line with what we would have predicted before the start of the season-- even though the hitting performance of the individual batters has been terrible.

Take that however you choose to.