Jay M. Nunez: Team Offense, Oakland Athletics

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Team Offense, Oakland Athletics

The 2016 series on team offense continues with the Oakland Athletics. The Atheltics finished fourteenth in the majors and ninth in the American League in 2015 with 4.28 runs scored per game.

Once again I am using a combination of RotoChamp and USA Today as a source of default lineups. The two lineups agree in this case. That Bob Melvin lineup is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.70
Probable lineup: 4.65
Worst lineup: 4.53
Regressed lineup: 4.31

As I typed in the lineup, the first thing I thought was that the Athletics should switch Yonder Alonso and Marcus Semien at the bottom of the order, putting Alonso’s higher OBP ninth. The LAT agrees. The bigger take away from this is that the Athletics are made up a group of okay hitters. No one is terrible, no one is great. Some slug better than others, some get on base better than others, but there is no superstar that does both well. Due to that uniformity throughout the lineup, the batting order matters little for this team. Of the teams analyzed so far, the Athletics tie the Yankees for smallest spread between the best and worst possible batting orders, 0.17 runs per game.

The default lineup and the LAT agree on the one and four hitters, probably the two most important in the lineup. The lead-off slot has the highest coefficient for OBP, the fourth slot the highest coefficient for slugging percentage. That makes Billy Burns and Khris Davis excellent choices. The rest doesn’t matter that much given the makeup of the players.

If most of the players can meet these projections, and a couple of hitters have career years, the Athletics will have a good season at the plate.

Jay M. Nunez

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Team Offense, Oakland Athletics

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