Oakland’s Team Effort Collapse

The Oakland Athletics, universally lauded back in July after making a pair of trades that netted them Jon Lester, Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, are in the midst of one of the biggest late-season collapses in recent history. At one point up by six games in the AL West, the A’s are now down by 10 games to the surging Los Angeles Angels, and after having lost 21 of their past 30 games, they’re suddenly in danger of not even earning a wild-card spot.

What happened here, and why? Well, there are plenty of reasons for the collapse, and we’ll detail them in a second. But were you to ask the general population or certain members of the local media, you’d likely hear that the loss of Yoenis Cespedes, who was traded to Boston for Lester and Jonny Gomes, from the lineup (and outfield) is the main reason, and it’s easy to see why. In the 39 games since the trade, they’ve scored four or more runs just 14 times, 35.9 percent of the time. In the previous 107 games, they did so 67 times, 62.6 percent of the time. That’s an enormous downturn, and since the removal of Cespedes was the major change, it has understandably been the focal point when trying to understand Oakland’s disintegration.

That’s overly simplistic, though, because it’s about so much more than Cespedes. Here’s how the A’s have managed to go from a World Series favorite to a playoff uncertainty.

The rest of the offense has fallen apart

If the other Oakland hitters had performed the same way they had prior to the trade, and Cespedes’ direct replacements had been awful, then maybe that would be a fair argument. That’s not quite what has happened, though. Instead, the A’s dealt with three injuries to starters (Jed Lowrie‘s Aug. 5 broken finger, John Jaso‘s Aug. 24 concussion and Coco Crisp’s ongoing neck problem, costing him 17 games since Aug. 1), which changed the face of their lineup.

At the same time, several other mainstays entered into horrific (and poorly timed) slumps.Brandon Moss, who had a 137 wRC+ on the day of the trade, has had only a 61 wRC+ since, without a single homer since July 24. Derek Norris (153 before to 67 since) and Alberto Callaspo (a mediocre 78 to an atrocious 47) suddenly stopped hitting as well. Trading Cespedes certainly didn’t help, but having six regular players either injured or slumping has hurt them even more. Add in to that mix the fact that the A’s have had a total black hole at second base all season long, with Callaspo, Nick Punto and Eric Sogard combining for a mere 74 wRC+, and all of a sudden the Oakland offense turned into a worst-case scenario around Josh Donaldson.

Having Cespedes might have alleviated that somewhat, though it should be remembered that he had the third-lowest OBP of the 12 Athletics with at least 250 plate appearances, so it’s not like he was above reproach when he was in town anyway. While he has performed about the same in Boston as he did in Oakland, the August Red Sox were the worst hitting team in the American League even with him. Both teams, as it turns out, saw an offensive decline after the deal. One man doesn’t make an offense, and Cespedes neither ruined Oakland when he left nor saved Boston when he arrived.

Bad luck in big spots

Despite everything that has gone wrong, despite blowing the division lead and going 15-24 since the Cespedes trade, there’s still this: Since the deal, the A’s have scored 141 runs. They’ve allowed 144. As such, they should be close to .500 since, and they aren’t. If you include the entire second half, they’ve outscored opponents by 14 runs, yet they’re still seven games under. What that means is that it’s not that they have suddenly forgotten how to play baseball, because they aren’t getting blown out, it’s just that they’ve run into an atrocious run of luck.

That starts in the bullpen, where injured closer Sean Doolittle hasn’t pitched since Aug. 23 and his replacements have struggled to pick up the slack. Ryan Cook, for example, had put up 21 consecutive scoreless outings from mid-June through mid-August. Since then, he has allowed runs in five of his past nine outings, including all but single-handedly giving away a game Sunday when he took a one-run ninth-inning lead and proceeded to walk the bases loaded. The next day, Eric O’Flaherty allowed a game-tying ninth-inning homer to Tyler Flowers; three innings later, Flowers took Jesse Chavez deep for the game-winner.

It has been an issue on offense, too. FanGraphs has a “Clutch” stat, which essentially compares a team (or player) to itself by measuring how well they performed in high-leverage situations to how they did in neutral spots. In the first half, the A’s were slightly below middle of the pack in this metric, at 18th. In August, it was dead last, and not by a small amount. That’s not so much about the absence of Cespedes — as an A, he was slightly below-average himself, and has just fueled the narrative by being well above-average in Boston — so much as it was about injury replacements or slumping starters being asked to perform in big situations. They didn’t, on both sides of the ball, and the A’s have paid for it. It’s difficult to see that continuing indefinitely, and the good news is that Doolittle is expected back this week, and that the team’s “Clutch” number has improved in September.

A trade still worth making?

Remember, also, why A’s GM Billy Beane felt it was necessary to remake his starting rotation in the first place. Though the group mainly comprised of Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir, Chavez and Tommy Milone had pitched admirably in the first half of the season, there were compelling reasons to wonder if any of them would be able to keep it up. You know the reasons by now: Chavez had two major league starts entering the season, Kazmir had thrown just 160 innings since 2007, Gray had made his big league debut barely more than a year earlier, etc.

Beane’s concerns proved accurate. Since the trade, Kazmir has made eight starts, winning just two of them and allowing 30 earned runs in 44 1/3 innings. Gray has stumbled to a 4.76 ERA (4.49 FIP) since the start of August. Chavez, who had struggled throughout July, was pushed to the bullpen as his innings began to mount. Hammel has been a disappointment, and Doolittle, the closer, has been injured.

Lester, meanwhile, has been outstanding with Oakland, allowing just 16 earned runs in 56 2/3 innings. If the A’s hadn’t made this trade, they might have had some better offensive output with Cespedes still around, but they also wouldn’t have gotten eight strong outings from Lester.

This has all been magnified by the fact that their competition in the AL West has been playing out of their minds. Since July 31, the Angels have gone 28-12; the Mariners are 24-14. That this has come at the same time as the A’s slide has only magnified Oakland’s problems, and it hasn’t helped that the A’s have played these two surging teams a combined 10 times, with three more big games in Seattle coming up this weekend.

Don’t count them out of the playoff race just yet, though. It’s tenuous, but they’re still in line for a wild-card spot, and some of those injured players are close to (or already have) returned to action. The A’s have certainly made it harder on themselves, and it’s on them to turn it around. But it’s on all of them, because it was all of them (except for Lester and Donaldson) who put the team in this spot. Simply put, it has been a team-wide collapse, and likely will take a team-wide effort to turn things around.