2024 Team Previews: Oakland Athletics
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Athletics Intro
A lot of men flea to Las Vegas when their lives have hit rock bottom, and that appears to be what the Oakland Athletics have done as well. It has been just an abysmal time for them since 2020 when they were coming off of back-to-back 97 win seasons. Since 2019, they are 232-314 (.425 winning percentage), and they have won just 110 games combined in the last two seasons.
The move to Vegas isn’t happening now, and the stadium apparently won’t be completed until at least the 2028 season - so we have plenty of time left for this squad.
They certainly don’t figure to be competitive in 2024, and unsurprisingly there’s not much to like from a fantasy perspective here either. That does give us a pretty low-pressure situation here in opening up this long series (I go in reverse-order of the standings when releasing these).
Below, you will find my mostly-full thoughts on each player I believe to be fantasy-relevant for 2024, and this year I’m even going a bit more into the minor leagues to find some potential fliers for very deep or dynasty leagues. I try to use plenty of data visualizations as we go to not bog everybody down with too many words, and I’m even including my [very rough and early at this point] JA mode projection for each player.
If you’re a free subscriber, you’re going to run into a paywall after two or three players for each team. I am absolutely going to try to bait and tease you to pay me even during these offseason months. So just subscribe now for $7/month and save yourself the agony! Or hey, take the year-long discount for $75 and you get everything I do all of next season - that’s probably your best bet!
Nothing left but to get started, so away we go!
Hitters
Zack Gelof
Age: 24
Pos: 2B
There were very few bright spots on this team, but Gelof was one of them. He got the call-up to the Majors on July 14th after doing this in the AAA PCL:
308 PA, .304/.401/.529, .929 OPS, 27.9% K%, 12 HR, 25.5 PA/HR, 20 SB
It’s always important to note that the Pacific Coast League is an uber-hitter-friendly environment with hot weather, high elevations, and small ballparks. The league OPS there was .822 this year (MLB = .734), so you have to adjust expectations even more when a prospect goes PCL → MLB.
Personally, I didn’t expect much from Gelof in Oakland coming up to face the best pitching he’d ever faced, especially because he had that high K% in the minors. But he found a way to put together a really nice campaign in the Majors. In 300 PA:
.267/.337/.504, .840 OPS, 27.3% K%, 8.7% BB%, 14 HR, 21.4 PA/HR, 14 SB
We really want to lean into homers and steals in fantasy baseball. Those are pretty predictable categories and they’re very important in the rotisserie game. Batting average, runs, and RBI are just as important mathematically, of course, but they are much more random, so we can’t really count on the projections nearly as much in those categories. So, with that said, here is our first plot. It plots Stolen Base Attempt Rate against Home Run Rate. These calculations:
SB Att% = (SB+CS)/(1B+BB+HBP)
HR% = PA/HR
The black dots are all of the qualified hitters in the league, and the red dot will show you the player at hand.
So that’s a pretty good spot for a dot, he’s above average in both places, and that alone probably makes him someone to draft in standard leagues.
We want to dive a little bit further into the home run rate stuff because you can have some randomness in there.
Second plot! Launch Angle vs. Exit Velocity:
This is a little bit of a red flag on Gelof’s good home run rate. Neither the EV nor the LA are bad, but they’re well short of remarkable, that wouldn’t really predict a high home run rate like Gelof had (especially not in Oakland), but he’s a young hitter so it’s hard to say this is what he’ll do again next year.
The problem we have with Gelof is the swing-and-miss. His barrel rate was good, but he whiffed a ton. Here’s another plot, Contact% vs. Barrel%:
A 66% contact rate is not good and that will keep his K% in the high-twenties (at best) if it continues.
The final (for now) plot I’ll show is all of my favorite stats for a hitter plotted using percentiles for quick and easy context.
So a lot of strikeouts but a good amount of barrels to make up for some of that. He’s above average on contact, so that’s good to see.
With Gelof, I think it’s pretty clear. He’s not someone you want as your starting second baseman. The Athletics are going to massively hold down his counting stats (they scored 22% fewer runs than the league average team last year…), but Gelof should project for close to a 25/20 season - which is certainly worthy of a spot in most leagues.
JA Projection: 622 PA, 82 R, 25 HR, 71 RBI, 25 SB, .249/.319/.453, .772 OPS
Esteury Ruiz
Age: 25
Pos: OF
Ruiz is a very simple player to evaluate for the fantasy game. I don’t really have to show much besides just his basic stat line:
490 PA, .254/.309/.345, 5 HR, 47 R, 47 RBI, 67 SB
So he was elite in steals, a push in batting average, and an absolute disaster in runs, RBI, and home runs.
There are no home runs coming, so don’t get fooled on that.
One of the league’s worst barrel rates, and that’s without an elite contact rate to boot - so this isn’t even a guy you can rely on for batting average either. A true one-category player we’re looking at here.
If you’re in a 5x5 league, those 67 steals go a long way, and that alone keeps him in the conversation. He stole as many bases as the #9 and #10 guy in steals did combined.
Stolen bases just are not distributed like other stats. Let’s take a look at those distributions among hitters with at least 400 ABs.
and then here’s stolen bases:
What this means is that a guy at the top of the league in steals separates himself a whole lot more from the pack than he does if he leads the league in the other fantasy categories.
On my player rater, Ruiz ended up as a top sixty hitter, but full disclosure I’m not sure I really calculated it all exactly correctly. On Razzball’s player rater he’s at #74, so yeah he’s a top 100 guy pretty comfortably with those steals.
I think it’s a fine idea to draft the guy later on if you start the draft with very few steals, but he’s probably someone you want to plan for ahead of time. If you make the conscious decision to load up on those HR+R+RBI guys early in the draft that fall a bit because of the lack of steals (maybe if you start your offense with Yordan Alvarez and Corey Seager or something like that) and take Ruiz to catch up quickly - that makes a lot of sense.
But all of this is assuming that he’s close to everyday player again next year, which isn’t a guarantee at this point. Ruiz was a -0.2 WAR player (baseball-reference), so in real-life this is, at best, a very replaceable player.
I prefer to evenly distribute steals throughout my team so I can be competitive in that category without putting all my eggs in one basket - but yeah, Ruiz deserves attention nonetheless.
JA Projection: 479 PA, 57 R, 7 HR, 50 RBI, 45 SB, .250/.306/.358, .664 OPS
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