Is There Really a Plan?

I liked the post and agree with most of the points. I disagree though that they had no overall plan. I would describe the plan as increasing roster depth and future payroll flexibility.

What if there was one coherent plan, to compete in 2012? Could the A’s have competed?

The lineup really doesn’t look that different.

I agree with this as far as just this year goes. Oakland has more depth for the future considering that they replaced Dejesus and Willingham with Reddick, Seth Smith and Cespedes who are under control for 3, 6 and 4 years. Oakland has gained a few bats with potential that aren’t just one year rentals (even though this is difficult to do with free agent signings like the competitors did with Beltre and Pujols).

Certainly a lot more (pitching) depth than what we have right now. Not much for the future

The notion that we can just develop pitchers from nowhere has some merit but remember that since the original big three many of the best pitchers on the A’s were from trades (Haren, Gio, Anderson for starters). I believe that the A’s front office believed that to have a full rotation they needed guys like Parker, Peacock, Cole and Milone.

When comparing the players acquired there even seems to be a notion of a plan. The pitchers the A’s acquired have more upside but also more risk due to very small amounts of major league experience (except Cespedes but it’s very hard to get free agent hitters as noted above). Having the risk in the pitchers is good since Oakland has been good at developing them. The hitters are what they are and I would guess the lineup is similar to what it has been. Hopefully some of these guys develop into solid regulars and maybe a star or two. The next few years Oakland has to use top draft picks and whatever other means necessary to acquire some real hitting and have at least an average lineup to go with the great pitching.

Reload the system for a hopeful peak somewhere around 2015-16 THEN spend enough to keep Bud happy so he makes your desperately needed ballpark happen.

But I think that’s because after trading away the pitching they went for opportunistic trades to not suck while waiting for the new batch of prospects. Either way I feel meh about the whole off-season. Call me disaffected after the last few seasons.

He plays the A’s kind of like a fantasy baseball GM would. Knowing you don’t have the guns to be top in the division he reloads but still try to be competive on a outside chance. For the A’s to contend everything must go right which is about a 3% chance. Keeping what they had was about a 10% chance but the future chance would be very much less than with the trades. The Angels and Rangers must win now because of age and up coming free agents their window of opportunity is now.

But I have a bad feeling about the direction the A’s are headed.

Where you play for better position over and over over and over again and let an end game develop, instead of trying to follow a specific script the whole way through. Restocking the farm definitely put us in a better place to compete in future seasons. So we make those deals, looking fo better position, not a specific lineup we have in mind.

The Cespedes move is, I agree, an outlier in that it doesnt seem to have the exact same timeframe as the other moves. And in retrospect it makes it seem like we could have competed this year. (I still dont think we could have, but thats another story) But there was no way to know that trade would go through before it did, so there was no way to “save up” the talent we would have had to hold on to in order to go for it now.

Okay. Let’s suppose the 13 position players are:
1. Cespedes, 2. Crisp, 3. Reddick, 4. Smith, 5. Gomes, 6. Allen, 7. Manny, 8. Weeks, 9. Pennington, 10. Sizemore, 11. Suzuki, 12. Recker/Powell, 13. Sogard/Rosales --

What happens if Weeks or Pennington or Sizemore is out for a couple of days, and is replaced by Sogard/Rosales, who plays the infield if someone else is forced to leave the game? NONE of these other guys - Cespedes, Crisp, Reddic, Smith, Gomes, Allen or Manny - can play 3B, or 2B or SS,

The A’s reloaded in a serious way for the future. They also signed a bunch of guys so that they could be decent this year. They have correctly realized that the only way to actually gain any benefit from losing is to lose a LOT. Like, basically guarantee yourself the #1 pick in the draft multiple years in a row. That’s not in any way an attractive proposition.

Much better to take this route. You’re semi-decent while rebuilding, giving you the opportunity to take advantage of openings like a 5th playoff spot or Texas and Anaheim unexpectedly having shitty seasons. If you suck abysmally, you have zero chance of sneaking into the playoffs. If this is, as I believe, an above .500 team, then you have something like a 20-30% chance of making the playoffs. What’s the point of watching baseball? You want to see your team get into the playoffs. I’m not willing to see my team take 5+ years off for the possibility of being a playoff contender at some nebulous future time. The Rays truly, truly sucked for 10 years, and now they’re good. The Pirates, Royals, and Orioles, and have sucked for even longer, and still suck. Want to go down that road? Not me.

Getting into specific critique of your article: I really don’t get why you are comparing the salaries of the players traded away to the salaries of all players added to the roster. This tells us nothing. $16 million out of the $22 million in salary (more than 70%) you list under 2012 is for players that were signed as free agents! The A’s were going to sign free agents no matter what, if only to get over the salary floor! If anything, the trades actually granted the A’s the flexibility to resign Crisp and get Cespedes, both of whom should help with the above stated goal of making this team decent enough in 2012 and 2013 to take advantage of opportunities if they arise. They’ll also help make the team watchable, for which I am grateful.

I think Beane has done an unbelievable job this offseason, and I can clearly see the plan and direction this team is taking. And I’m not a blind Beane fanboy; for the second half of the 2011 season I was very, very pessimistic about the future of this franchise and very angry about the state of major and minor league talent. The Pujols signing just made it worse. Everything that’s happened since then has been cause for optimism, and I’m more jazzed up about the 2012 season than I have been in a while. They’ve performed a somewhat incredible feat – overhauling the minor league talent, bringing it from bottom 5 to top 10, while simultaneously improving the MLB squad. Give even the richest teams in the league multiple years to accomplish this task, and it is still ridiculously difficult. For the A’s to have pulled it off in one offseason is nothing short of incredible.

Here is something to point out. We got rid of pitchers who would become expensive to gain offense that is/will become expensive. You can see the shift. It doesn’t matter what our payroll is, we are putting more money into the offense and allocating that away from the pitching. This is something we needed to do and we are finally doing it. Our offense has been struggling for way too long. Beane saw an opportunity to lower his payroll on pitchers without decreasing his talent by that much and increase his payroll in the offense and increase the talent a lot.

I believe there are many reasons he’s doing this. Here is what I think: 1. The fans like offense. More HRs get more fans than good pitching. As you see, we had GREAT pitching and still no fans. 2. A contending team is a balanced team with both good pitching and hitting. 3. We already have the coliseum working in our favor since it is such a pitchers park. So Beane feels comfortable to lower his pitching talent by a little because we have the “armor” of the coliseum to protect and allow our pitchers to do that much better. 4. The new SJ stadium is not going to be a pitchers park. I see it being a pretty neutral stadium. Therefore Beane has to play to his strengths and add more hitting. In the Coliseum Beane saw that pitching is dominant and hitting can’t do well, so he played to his strengths and focused on mastering the pitching. Now with a new stadium that isn’t going to be pitcher friendly necessarily, he has to master both the pitching and offense evenly so both perform well. He’s getting a head start on that now instead of last minute.