2020 Will See if This Group is Manager Bob Melvin's Best Athletics Team
However the 2020 Major League Baseball season plays out, this much is certain – it won’t be anything close to the season the Oakland A’s had envisioned.
The A’s were ready to put what they felt was possibly their best team under Bob Melvin forward for 162 games. They were built for the long run, mostly young and healthy and talented.
“We’ve been waiting for this group to come together,” manager Bob Melvin said this week. “What our front office has been good at is making the adjustments along the way and making us better along the way, and this is where we are.
“We have our best guys here now. Our best young pitching prospects (Jesus Luzardo and A.J. Puk) are here, and our best young position players have had a couple of really good years under their belts now.”
As recently as the 2016 and 2017 season, the A’s were an under-.500 club with some decent veterans. But as the A’s brought in some of the gems of their minor league system, players like Yonder Alonso, Jed Lowrie, Ryon Healy, Josh Reddick, Rich Hill, Sonny Gray and Sean Doolittle.
All of those guys have big league jobs now, just not with Oakland. Doolittle won a World Series ring last year with the Nationals. Reddick won one with the now scandal-plagued Astros in 2017.
Hill didn’t get a ring, but it was hardly his fault – he made three World Series starts for the Dodgers and had a 1.80 ERA in those games 2017 and 2018 Fall Classics. Gray didn’t make it past the American League Championship Series with the Yankees after leaving the A’s, but he emerged last year as an ace with the Reds, winning an All-Star berth.
So the A’s unloaded some talent from teams that weren’t winners. As they were doing that, they began to promote from within, adding to an offensive core that included shortstop Marcus Semien and left fielder/DH Khris Davis with first baseman Matt Olson, third baseman Matt Chapman, center fielder Ramon Laureano and infielder/outfielder Chad Pinder.
And they went outside to add right fielder Stephen Piscotty, left fielder Robbie Grossman. They brought in a veteran starting pitcher, Mike Fiers, who was the ace of the staff last season. Liam Hendriks reinvented himself as the closer, and the additions of Yusmeiro Petit and Joakim Soria helped to solidify the bullpen.
The capper was the second half of the 2019 season, when Luzardo, picked up when Doolittle was dealt to the Nationals, and 2016 first-round draft pick Puk, both of them highly regarded left-handed starting pitchers, made their big-league debuts.
Another young pitcher, Frankie Montas, acquired in the Hill/Reddick traded with the Dodgers, put together All-Star numbers (9-2, 2.70) before being hit with a PED suspension that is in his past. Yet another young pitcher, Sean Manaea, came back from arthroscopic shoulder surgery to go 4-0 with a 1.21 ERA in September.
Entering 2020, these were players who had put together back-to-back 97-win seasons. And these were the players, A’s management felt, that were ready to put the hurt on the rest of the American League.
The trouble was, the window of opportunity probably wasn’t going to last more that one season.
Semien will be eligible for free agency after the season. The same for Hendriks. Ditto Fiers. So, the No. 3 man in the 2019 MVP voting, the most established starting pitcher and the closer all could be gone after this year.
And now that this season is reduced from 162 games to 60 games, no one could blame the A’s if they were to feel time was slipping away.
Melvin isn’t going to obsess about the reduction down to 60 games. He is aware, however, that the A’s of the last two years have been basically .500 teams over the first 60, and then have been as good or better than anyone else the rest of the way.
“We feel like even if we were playing 162, this would be our best chance,” he said. “We know we have to start better, and I believe we will. We don’t have to make adjustments for that, we just have to play up to our abilities.”
Asked if he believe the 2020 squad was his best A’s team yet, Melvin paused.
“We’ll see. It’s very talented,” he said. “Is it better than the 2013 team (96 wins and the AL West champs)? You know, this team has ability. It has the potential to be better than last year’s team, and that team won 97 games.”
As always, as with every other MLB team, Oakland’s future depends on health. The A’s rotation was beaten up by injuries and suspensions last year, but everybody is healthy, even Puk, who was shut down in spring training, but who will come to camp this week healthy. Luzardo, who would have been in the rotation last year had he been healthy, is good to go, too.
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
Click the "follow" button in the top right corner to join the conversation on Inside the Athletics on SI. Access and comment on featured stories and start your own conversations and post external links on our community page.