‘It’s not a one-man show’: Here’s how the young Oakland A’s are already finding wins

Roughly an hour before the beginning of the Oakland A’s home opener against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday evening, the team’s quality control coach Mike Aldrete stood in the home dugout.

Having traded four of their best players from recent years since mid-March, this hasn’t had the look of being any kind of competitive A’s season. But somehow, Oakland won five of its first 10 games this year heading into Monday. And Aldrete, who is in his eighth year as an A’s coach and played for the team from 1993-95, another rebuilding stretch, had cautious optimism before the first pitch.

“One week does not make a season,” Aldrete said. “That’s a good start. Guys are going to go through ups and downs. We’re going to have to see how guys deal with those types of adversities. But … with the veteran leadership, with our coaching staff, and their willingness to learn, I think those are all really good ingredients to giving us a chance.”

The A’s are not supposed to have much of a chance. After finishing 86-76 last season, the team traded any relatively expensive veteran and let other quality players leave via free agency.

This is only the latest time the A’s have rebuilt. They’re following a well-worn strategy honed by vice president of baseball operations Billy Beane and others organization leaders. They deal up-and-coming players before they accumulate six years of major league service time and become eligible for free agency.

Still, even with a roster currently filled with unknowns and some questions about the franchise’s future in Oakland, there are glimmers of hope for this team.

Young A’s step up

To call the current A’s team untested would be an understatement. A review of Baseball-Reference.com data showed that as of Monday morning, A’s 40-man roster members had an average of 1.92 years of service time and 2.1 lifetime wins above replacement.

This isn’t last year’s team, nor the 2020 club that won the team’s first postseason series in 14 years. But manager Mark Kotsay, in his first season succeeding longtime A’s skipper Bob Melvin, balked at the idea his team is filled with young unknowns.

“We do have some young players, but I think we have a good mix,” Kotsay told The Bee during his postgame media availability Monday. “We’ve got some veteran guys on this team. Elvis Andrus, Jed Lowrie, Chad Pinder. Tony Kemp, I consider a veteran. He’s been here for awhile and he gets us going.”

Only five players on the A’s 40-man roster have at least six years’ service time: Lowrie, Andrus, Stephen Vogt, Stephen Piscotty and Justin Grimm. Andrus, Vogt, Lowrie are also the team’s only former All-Stars, with the team boasting one of the lowest payrolls in the majors.

A handful of other well-known players are still in the fold, such as: closer Lou Trivino; center fielder Ramón Laureano, who is suspended for the first 27 games of this season after testing positive for a banned substance last year; staff ace Frankie Montas, who allowed just one run Monday against the Orioles and got the win.

“It’s a great energy,” Montas said in response to a Bee question about his teammates, following their 5-1 victory. “Guys are hungry, they’re hungry, man. And when you have a team that’s hungry out there, it’s dangerous.”

Gone from Oakland are past standouts Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, Sean Manaea, and Chris Bassitt, who were all dealt in recent weeks for packages of young players. Pinder, Lowrie, and four others also went on the COVID-19 list Monday, joining Piscotty.

Promising early returns

Early prognoses for the patchwork of veterans and young prospects in Oakland this season haven’t been overly encouraging, with FanGraphs projecting a 71-91 finish, while Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA Standings had the A’s finishing 66-96 as of Monday.

Looking over the roster, there are definitely a lot of new names. They include utility man Drew Jackson, a Stanford product who signed with Oakland as a minor league free agent in the offseason after spending last year in the New York Mets farm system. He joined the A’s big league club last Friday.

“Immediately, I could tell how much the team is gelling together,” Jackson said prior to Monday’s game. “It’s like a next-man-up mentality. Everyone’s fighting every at-bat and just every guy making the most of the opportunity whether he has 10, 12 years in the big leagues or a few days. It’s just cool to see the fight in these guys.”

What’s fun about the A’s, going back to at least Sandy Alderson’s general managerial tenure in the 1980s and carried through to the Moneyball teams of the late ‘90s and beyond, is that obscure players and aging stars can resurrect their careers in Oakland while talented prospects come out of seeming nowhere.

There’s often a potential young star or two waiting in the wings for Oakland, with the organization long boasting a reliable farm system. But it’s not yet known who could emerge among the current team.

“In general, these are all unprovens and not all of ‘em are highly, highly ranked prospects,” Aldrete said. “But, you know what, our job as a coaching staff is to get the best out of them. It’s a lot easier to work with guys when they’re willing and hungry and they want to learn.”

Billy McKinney, an outfielder and former first-round A’s draft pick who returned to the organization this season, couldn’t pick out one new player who stuck out to him in response to a Bee question following Monday’s game.

“It’s not a one-man show or anything like that,” McKinney said. “Everybody’s just trying to just do their part to help the team win and just do their job.”

Young Athletics players

Still, there are certainly some promising young players on the A’s roster, including:

▪ Catcher Sean Murphy, a third-round draft choice for the A’s in 2016, who finished fourth in American League Rookie of the Year voting in 2020, won a Gold Glove last season and hit third Monday.

▪ Infielder Kevin Smith, one of four players acquired from the Blue Jays for Chapman, who was ranked No. 91 among prospects by Baseball America before 2019, started at third base and hit eighth Monday, and “looks very promising,” as Aldrete said.

▪ Dominican outfielder Cristian Pache, among four players acquired from the Braves for Olson, who came into this season ranked as the No. 84 prospect by Baseball America and the No. 71 prospect by Baseball Prospectus and started in center Monday evening.

“Before he came to us, he was a highly, highly touted defensive outfielder,” Aldrete said of Pache. “In the week, the 10 days that we’ve seen him, he is as advertised. And he’s young, 23 years old, but the potential with the bat is there. He’s got all the ingredients of a long-time star in this league.”

The A’s unknowns helped break Monday’s game open in the sixth inning, with a throwing error by Orioles third baseman Ramón Urías leading to four unearned runs. The following inning, right fielder Seth Brown caught a fly and then threw out Trey Mancini at home for a double play, drawing raucous cheers from the crowd.

Even before gametime, Orioles bench coach Fredi González wasn’t taking anything for granted about that night’s match up for his team, a fellow young club and one that’s struggled mightily in recent years, going 52-110 in 2021.

“This is the major leagues,” Gonzalez said. “Billy Beane seems to put up a good roster every year.”

Not surprisingly for a home opener held on a Monday evening, fan response was underwhelming, with announced attendance of 17,503. The team has struggled to draw crowds much of its time in Oakland, with it remaining uncertain if the A’s can get a new ballpark built in Howard Terminal and the team flirting with cities such as Las Vegas in recent years.

Regardless, players like Brown expect this team to be competitive.

“That’s never crossed any of our minds that we wouldn’t be,” Brown said in response to a Bee question following Monday’s game. “We’ve got a team full of talent here. Yeah, you know, we’ve got some young guys, but the effort level, the energy, and the grit that is in every one of these guys is special. So it’s gonna be a fun season for us.”

This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.