How Much Has To “Break Right” For A’s To Compete?

Given the vast amount of variance in baseball, most teams enter spring training with at least the gift of hope, along with the spectre that fortunes could fall apart quickly. Sure if you’re the Astros, mostly you just have to show up and stay somewhat healthy and if you’re the Marlins you’re saying, “Well, you know if...yeah, no.”

Then there are the rest of us, hoping this is the year “everything breaks right” and wondering how far that can get us. Realistically, not everything will. In the case of the rebuilding A’s, with much raw talent in Oakland and on the way, how much has to fall into place for Oakland to be competitive. Let’s set the bar at “over .500,” which translates in this day and age to contending for a wild card spot right down to the finish line.

My goal here to be realistic and fair, not to allow every young player to breakout at the same time or for the team to enjoy uninterrupted health all season. Here’s what I would suggest is the blueprint for a competitive season with the group currently assembled:

Overall, this team has a chance to be pretty good on offense and defense, which would allow them to compete with just a decent and stable rotation top to bottom. That’s probably the best the A’s can hope for and it may be attainable.

Sean Manaea & Kendall Graveman

I think the A’s just need these two to stay healthy and anchor the rotation throughout the season. Manaea may not be an ace, and Graveman will likely start Opening Day only because he’s the senior partner, and this is not the 1-2 punch you ideally want to see at the very front of your rotation. But if both can provide 30 starts, they are both good enough pitchers that their presence in the rotation can provide essential stability that allows the younger pitchers to slot in where they belong.

Andrew Triggs, Daniel Mengden, Jharel Cotton, Jesse Hahn: One breakout

All four of these pitchers have shown flashes of brilliance as big league SPs and all four have much to prove. For the A’s to compete in 2018, I think one of these four has to step up and pitch like a legitimate #3 SP and given that there are four candidates all with plenty of intrigue to offer, I do believe the odds are fair that one will emerge.

If Manaea and Graveman can just stay healthy, and one of the above four emerges in 2018, then you have from the rest of this group, and the high-floor-low-ceiling Paul Blackburn, to cobble together a rotation good enough to support the lineup Oakland can put out there to score and prevent runs behind them.

I do think the A’s probably have sufficient depth, because they only need injuries to crop up slower than the progress of the next wave of young SPs. If Grant Holmes and Heath Fillmyer open the season at AAA, with A.J. Puk close behind, likely Oakland will always have a more talented rookie ready to replace any injured or ineffective SP.

Right now, you would probably be looking at an opening rotation of Graveman-Manaea-Triggs-Mengden-Hahn with a AAA rotation of Cotton-Blackburn-Gossett-Holmes-Fillmyer. Frankie Montas and Chris Bassitt fit in somewhere, along with Raul Alcantara in the A’s bullpen. I think we can avoid the dreaded Smiths this year.

Matts Ahoy

Like it or not, a lot is riding on the continued greatness of Matts Chapman and Olson. Why? Oakland has several fairly predictable complementary pieces who will give you “reliably solid but not spectacular” results: Jed Lowrie (who bordered on spectacular in 2017 but can’t be relied on to repeat that good a season), Matt Joyce, Marcus Semien.

To be better than mediocre or bad overall, you need a couple pieces that are special and in Chapman/Olson Oakland has that hope. The good news is that the A’s don’t need Olson to repeat his 2017 performance, which is good because neither he nor any other hitter in the league will. But they do need for him to prove to be ‘the real deal’ and not another Kevin Maas, the former Cal Bear who launched 10 HRs in his first 72 at bats on his way to a thoroughly mediocre 4-year career. (Following his magical debut, Maas never slugged over .411 in a season.)

I think it’s fair to say that no matter how many pleasant surprises there are, from possibly Dustin Fowler’s health to maybe Stephen Piscotty’s resurgence, unless the infield corner Matts continue to be impact players Oakland isn’t going anywhere in 2018.

Midseason shots in the arm

Likely, the April roster isn’t good enough to sustain .500+ ball for 6 months. It doesn’t have to be. You just have to have the depth, and talent, to keep getting better or at least to avoid getting worse as injuries and slumps hit.

Where Oakland is strong is that some legitimate talent is at AA/AAA. Some of it will probably not impact the 2018 season: Sean Murphy is at least a year away and Jorge Mateo likely a year away as well.

However, three players likely to appear in Oakland sometime in 2018 are Franklin Barreto, Grant Holmes, and A.J. Puk, all of whom have more pure talent and upside than the players they would be replacing upon call-up.

Looking at the rotation in particular, the biggest problem with the Graveman-Manaea led crew is that there isn’t enough front of the rotation talent in the mix. However, Holmes and Puk could conceivably tip that after the All-Star break, just as Chapman and Olson did for the infield in 2017.

Bullpens are volatile and difficult to predict, but I would submit that Oakland’s pen is poised to be solid, probably above average overall, unlikely to contribute wildly to either the team’s demise or great success.

Notice I haven’t addressed catcher, where I do think the A’s should upgrade and still hope they will before April. But a team can struggle at one position and still be good. It can be disappointed by performance at a couple positions — who knows how Lowrie, Fowler, Piscotty will fare? — and still be ok. I am allowing for imperfection, so long as their are enough pluses, and sufficient depth, to get by.

Basically my contention about contention is this: Give me healthy seasons from Manaea and Graveman, one breakout from a talented young SP, legitimate first full season performances from Chapman and Olson, and a successful mid-season debut from Holmes or Puk, and I think just that, alongside a gaggle of complementary ‘2.5 WAR type players’ at 2B (Lowrie), SS (Semien), LF (Joyce/Pinder), Piscotty (RF), CF (Fowler/Powell), and DH (K. Davis), proffers you a .500 team with a chance to get better as the season progresses.

Is that realistic and fair? Have I hit upon the right ‘musts’ for this 2018 team? Time will tell — or you can just go ahead and tell me right now in the comments...