And salb mentioned this a while back on FK (IIRC, basically that it may not just be statistical noise).

Anyways using Fangraphs data, we can see that Cust is swinging at far more pitches in the zone (71.3% 2009, 62.8% 2008), outside the zone (20.1 2009 15.3 2008) etc, basically far more pitches overall this season than he usually does. Obviously this leads to his walks being down. This isn’t a good thing folks, regardless of what Trainman tells you. Finally, it should be noted that one of Jack Cust’s most important attributes is his OBP, which is currently sitting at a middling (and that’s being nice) .321. Without it, he’d be about as good as Mike Jacobs, who’s not that good. Oh but hey! His strikeouts are down! I guess all the I-hate-strickouts people got their wish.

So what’s causing this crappy performance? It’s hard to say at this point, and perhaps premature to pin it all on Skaalen/Geren. Maybe the back issues is causing Cust so much pain that he just wants to swing at anything to get his at bats over with. Maybe he’ll rebound back to career norms in the second half (hence, a more detailed and conclusive analysis can be done after this season).

Regardless though, I agree with Nate. Changing Jack Cust’s approach, when he was by far the best hitter on the 2008 A’s (in other words, THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM), when previous teams have tried it and gotten bad results, was both stupid, unnecessarily, and a major mistake that this organization shouldn’t/usually doesn’t make.

The first thing, IMHO, that a batting coach should ask himself before trying to change a 30-year-old ballplayer is “Is it likely that I’m the first one to make these suggestions? If not, why does he do it this way anyway?”

In Cust’s case, you don’t have to have been in the clubhouses to know that he’s been hearing this message his entire playing life. Everyone hates strikeouts, especially strikeouts looking, especially with men on base. They look so passive. Managers hate them, players hate them, announcers hate them, fans hate them, sportswriters hate them. I hate them too, for that matter; they’re painful to watch and very frustrating, even though intellectually I’ve long since concluded that they’re not that bad and you just have to learn to accept them sometimes. You absolutely know that people have been trying to change (or at least modify) his approach his entire career. (And Cust did talk about how Baltimore had tried to get him to make these kinds of changes, but it just messed him up so he had to go back to doing what he knew how to do.)

At least early in his career, that effort to see if he could make adjustments was entirely justified. Strikeouts are not the worst thing in the world, but they’re obviously not a positive in themselves. The inability to modify your approach to get a runner in from 3B with one out is a real limitation to your game. So is allowing the pitcher to get easy 0-1 counts because you’re not comfortable swinging too early in the count. Taking a lot of third strikes because you aren’t good at defending the zone is a true liability. If he can fix his shortcomings without sacrificing his strengths, he becomes that much better a player.

At some point, though, if it doesn’t work you have to step back and say, “OK, we’ve tried, but this particular player can’t make these adjustments. His skill-set just isn’t that flexible, at least not without compromising his strengths. So the question now becomes, Is he good enough as is? Or do we give up and get rid of him?”

Cust’s MLB career was nearly stillborn because most baseball people thought that no, he was not good enough as is. Baseball people tend to discount players – and you can understand why they do this, it’s perfectly natural – who strike out too much, who have “holes in their swing,” who are “guess hitters” or “mistake hitters,” who “can be pitched to.” He was on the verge of giving up and going to Japan when the A’s gave him one final window of opportunity.

The point of this whole screed is this: With every possible incentive to change, with his career hanging in the balance over whether he could make himself the player people wanted him to be (the kind of player they’d give a major league job) instead of the kind of player he actually was, HE WOULD HAVE DONE SO BY NOW.

He can’t do that. So you either accept the bad with the good, or you send him off to someone who is willing to accept that package. Or of course, you try once again to change him, and make things worse instead.

What his is, or has been the past couple years, is a good hitter. Not a great one, but a good one, and those don’t just grow on trees. Especially not in Oakland.

After all that, to be fair, I have to mention one other possibility. Here are Cust’s slash lines since arriving in Oakland:

2007: .256/.408/.504/.912
2008: .231/.375/.478/.851
2009: .230/.320/.434/.754

It’s possible – it’s way too early to say with any conviction, but it’s certainly possible – that he is already into a relatively swift decline phase. He’s only 30, but the slow low-average power guys like him (also called guys with “old player skills”) are exactly the kind of guys that tend to age earlier than others and sometimes drop off a cliff not far past 30. I don’t really think he’ll have a major league job when he’s 35; his margin for error just isn’t that great.

That said, let’s hope he rips the cover off the ball – and draws loads of walks – all summer long.

What if it’s not the coaches trying to change him? It’s quite possible that Cust is just trying to do too much and swinging at more pitches. With as horrible as this offense has been all year, he could be trying to carry the team with his bat.

It’s not just Cust.

Holliday, Giambi, Ellis (before the injury), and Cabrera are all substantially below either their career norms, their recent performance levels, or both. And it’s not just the ballpark. Kennedy is the only veteran hitter outperforming or matching his past.

I touched on this a little while back, and basically it seems he has changed his entire approach and is swinging more frequently, and earlier in counts. It astounds me that a major league baseball team could think that it is possible to make such a major change without screwing up the rest of the legend that is (was?) Jack Cust. It’s incredibly idealistic to think that you can just cut down on strikeouts with nothing else changing, and I hope Custs reverts to his old form, and the A’s never ever do something like this again.

Just don’t expect so much from him and you’ll be fine with his crappy performance

One of the great things about Jack Cust’s story was that he was an example of a guy who did things that other teams didn’t appreciate. The A’s were smart and lucky enough to grab him, because they appreciated the things he did well (hit home runs, walk) and could live with his limitations (strikeouts).

What’s frustrating is that the A’s seem to have fallen into the same trap as those other teams.

— Cust, based on the Chronicle story, was asked to cut down on strikeouts and has been trying to do so.

— Cust, based on my observation, is much less patient at the plate this year.

— Cust’s results, thus far, are demonstrably worse. Perhaps he will improve in the second half, as he did last season.

— As Faust said above, there’s no reason to think a 30-year-old slugger is going to be able to transform himself all that much. Cust is what he is.

— I don’t think he’s on a steep downward career path. I think he’s received, and is listening to, bad advice.

…….. with the saberbabble already. Put simply, Cust is simply a lousy ballplayer.

Do you ever watch games or do you spend the time trying to make numbers fit pre-conceived notions? Cust can’t hit, he can’t run, he can’t field, he can’t throw. He can catch – most of the time, but so can my ten year old nephew – most of the time.

As a hitter he belongs on top of the Altamont Pass with all the other windmills. So occasionally he whacks a long ball, and rarely in a meaningful situation. And that’s a ballplayer? In a beer league maybe.

This team will never win with him in the lineup. He’s bad. In the world of tools, he’s a half – tool. He’s one of those special players that makes everyone else around him worse. Getting rid of him would be a classic case of addition by subtraction.

Sure, its a nice story – career minor leaguer makes it to the bigs. And I’m sure that personally Jack Cust is a great guy. Just a lousy MLB ballplayer is all and all the ratios in the world can’t change that.

I was wrong. Cust clearly is a superior major league baseball player. He walks quite a bit. Which accounts for his very high OBP which as we all know is extremely important unless you haven’t read Moneyball, a book which explains why the A’s win most of their games. You cannot hope to understand baseball and practice saberbabble or understand why Jack Cust is such a good baseball player unless you have read Moneyball. .
And…………. he would be a much better major league baseball player if he hadn’t changed his approach which adversely affected his OBP and his other very important numbers, which would also be better if he could field and run faster, although he is already a “very valuable fielder”. I can see that. Anyone can see that.
There it is then. No need to watch the game.