As those few who read my earlier fan post know, armed with a tool at B-Ref to which Alex Hall put me hip, I studied the A's versus all the other AL playoff contenders and came to the conclusion that there was nothing unusual about the A's' results in games where they scored fewer than 4 runs. They had almost the fewest such games of all playoff contenders at 50 (at the time), second only to the Tigers and slegnA, and the second best record in those games to Baltimore. Since I wrote that article, they have added two more low-offense games to their record, and lost both of them.
That's not what I'm here to write about. Even after finding out that the offense had far more blowout wins than any of the other contenders, and pretty normal low scoring results, I myself still felt like the offense was 'feast or famine'. Maybe I was missing something. When even Farhad Zaidi calls our offense "a little bipolar" it isn't an unusual perception. So, back to B-Ref I went, but this time, I looked at the number of hits in games, again ranking all the contenders from lowest hits to highest.
And, guess what, I found a facet of the offense where the A's do much worse than most of their competition for the post-season, to provide the 'famine' that offsets the 'feast' the A's have produced in having had lots of blowout wins.
In the chart below, the W-L records of each contender are shown when the team got 0-2 hits, 3-4 hits, the total W-L record with 4 or fewer hits, and 5-6 hits. I used 6 hits as the cutoff because, with the minor exception of games where the A's got 9 hits and went 4-5, their W-L record at each hit total above 6 is positive. Finally, there is a column showing the total RUNS scored by each offense, as a proxy for the relative offensive feastiness of the offenses.
TEAMS |
0-2 HITS |
3-4 HITS |
0-4 HITS TOTAL |
5-6 HITS |
TOTAL RUNS |
ATHLETICS |
1-2 |
0-13 |
1-15 |
8-13 |
594 |
ANGELS |
0-1 |
2-8 |
2-9 |
2-13 |
572 |
MARINERS |
1-5 |
0-5 |
1-10 |
5-20 |
482 |
ROYALS |
0-0 |
2-7 |
2-7 |
5-17 |
495 |
TIGERS |
0-1 |
1-5 |
1-6 |
10-16 |
555 |
INDIANS |
0-2 |
1-7 |
1-9 |
9-13 |
533 |
ORIOLES |
0-2 |
0-5 |
0-7 |
11-11 |
519 |
BLUE JAYS |
0-0 |
2-8 |
2-8 |
6-14 |
553 |
YANKEES |
0-0 |
1-9 |
1-9 |
7-14 |
477 |
RAYS |
0-1 |
3-6 |
3-7 |
7-16 |
490 |
What struck me, looking at this data, was how relatively more often the league's top run scorer, the A's, had been held to 4 or fewer hits. In round numbers, the A's had half again more games with 4 or fewer hits than any other contender! This is roughly the same margin that the A's lead all other contenders in wins by 6 or more runs, or blowouts.So, the A's are outside the box in both blowouts and low-hit games, with results to match. sure looks Jekyll & Hyde to me...
In those 16 games with fewer than 3 hits, the A's lost 15. Only Seattle amongst the other contenders has lost even 10, and only Seattle has played in more than 10 such games. Seattle also did pretty terribly in games with 5 or 6 hits. But Seattle has also scored the second fewest runs of the group. Baltimore has done the best when only getting 5 or 6 hits, going .500 in those games, and Baltimore has also hit the most home runs in baseball, which probably helps to explain that.
I hope this helps to locate the cause of the persistent feeling among so many observers that the A's do have a 'feat or famine' offense.