Not Coug related, but I have to say I heard Bill Krueger on KJR Friday afternoon. There was actual anticipation for an M’s series for the first time in a while, and even talk of how if they swept the A’s, they’d only be .5 games back!?!
Well, Krueger is quite knowledgable, as we know, but he really laid it on Friday and left one very strong impression. He warned, flat-out, that the M’s are in trouble in this series and why this is such a nightmare of a match-up of these teams.
The difference, he said, is that the A’s are a team with a “clue” up at the plate, meaning they have a true game plan. Moneyball laid out what Billy Beane looks for in position players. Not big-time power, not speed, but disciplined guys at the plate that work counts and get on base. He said that matches up really well with the M’s, one of the big issues with M’s starting pitching, in that overall they just aren’t that strong and some could argue their rotation is actually a weakness. As a group they are in the upper-half in the league in regards to the AL ERA, but in reality they are regarded by a bunch of scouts of nothing more than #3-#5 starters at best. Not only do they lack a true ace, but you could argue they don’t even have a true #2. As much as we love the idea of who Felix CAN be, right now he’s nothing but a .500 power pitcher prone to long stretches of losing his command.
So, as a group, the A’s strategy is to make a pitching staff work. Make them rack up a lot of pitches early, and try to get into the middle of a team’s bullpen, which is the white underbelly of ALL AL teams, including the M’s (their mid-long relief isn’t very good, their back-end of Lowe, Sherrill and Soriano is tremendous leading up to Putz, but their mid-long guys like Mateo? Soft white underbelly!).
Anyway, that’s exactly what we’ve seen the first two games of this series. The A’s have made the M’s starters with their mediocre stuff, Washburn and Pineiro, work like crazy early in the game and run out of steam by the 6th for Wash, and by the 4th for Jo-EL. TEXTBOOK.
Krueger went on to say how this is why Oakland isn’t a great team, far from it, but they are successful against teams with average to below-average starting pitching. But go against a team with really strong starting pitching, like the White Sox or the Red Sox or a team like the Tigers? They get eaten alive, and is one of the biggest reasons that they cannot win a playoff series.
Krueger went on to make his best point yet. He compared the A’s offense to the M’s offense, and he’d take the A’s any day of the week. The M’s biggest problem? Not only are they just 9 guys up there with their own agendas, trying to put up numbers but no real game plan, strategy or otherwise, but did you know they are the LEAST-walked team in baseball?? Krueger said you see that with youth overall, you get young players that just let it fly at the first pitch that looks good. And, you also have to realize that literally half the lineup the M’s put out there wasn’t even in the big leagues about a year ago. Lopez, Betancourt, and Jones were all in the minors until midseason last year or this year. Johjima was overseas. Ichiro, Beltre, Sexson and Ibanez and whoever they start at DH are the vets, but even Beltre and Sexson, two key vets new to the clubhouse and struggling this year, are making everyone wonder if they’ll ever be what the M’s thought they were getting when they spent $100+ MILLION on them.
When half your lineup has no plan but to hack, and some other big-ticket parts of your lineup is right-handed power that hits about 100 points less at home than on the road in the worst park for right-handed power, I guess it’s no wonder this team leads the majors in being shut out, and they just can’t get over .500.
Finally, Krueger said the A’s coming in 9-1 vs. the M’s is just not a fluke. He said “the A’s might as well have packed their home whites, because they OWN the M’s in every way imaginable. On half the payroll.” Ouch.
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