A’s Starting Rotation Shows Concerning Home and Road Performance Gap

In breaking down the A's season recently, we suggested that the A's pitching staff wasn't quite as terrible as people seemed to think. This is still true, given the team's success in the second half of the season and the club having the second-best bullpen since the Trade Deadline, holding a cumulative 2.99 ERA.

However, some on social media pushed back against the hype train we were running, so today we're going to look a little deeper into how the starting pitchers fared both at home and on the road. First, let's take a look at the home stats, since that is where the staff tended to struggle.

We should note that the way these are split up, arms like Osvaldo Bido and Mitch Spence who held roles in both the rotation and the bullpen didn't have their stats split between those roles in their home/road splits. The stats provided are just how they fared at Sutter Health Park overall.

	Home IP	Home ERA	Home WHIP
Severino	82.1	6.01	1.53
Springs	82.1	4.81	1.28
Lopez	44.1	2.64	1.13
Morales	28.1	3.81	1.27
Perkins	16.1	6.61	1.47
Ginn	47.1	6.85	1.63
Barnett	13.1	7.43	1.58
Bido	44.1	5.89	1.69
Spence	37.2	6.93	1.67
Hoglund	15	6.00	1.40

If you watched A's baseball in 2025, you're familiar with the home struggles of Luis Severino. His ERA at home became bloated early on in the season, but after his final start against the Houston Astros on September 24, he mentioned that he found himself again when facing the Blue Jays back in July.

From that date (July 11) on, he focused more on using his fastball, and his ERA at home in his subsequent four starts to finish out the year was a 3.00 in 21 innings of work. Are we buying into that performance, coupled with his work on the road all year, or is he still a big question mark heading into 2026? It's a tough question to answer, and it's going to be a key to the A's offseason.

Jacob Lopez thrived at home with a 2.64 ERA, and he's arguably the member of the rotation to keep an eye on heading into next year. His strikeout rate of 28.3% ranked 12th among pitchers with at least 80 innings of work this past season, in the same league as guys like Brewers ace Freddy Peralta (28.2%).

The players that he's in the middle of are all Cy Young contenders like Paul Skenes (29.5), Jacob deGrom (27.7), Hunter Brown (28.3) and Yoshinobu Yamamoto (29.4). The key for him will be limiting the free passes in 2026 in order to be more like some of the other names around him on the leaderboard.

Springs, who held a 4.81 ERA at Sutter Health, talked with us about some of the struggles for both himself and the team playing at home when the season began.

He said that in talking to some of the guys that have been playing for awhile that it was about, "trying to create that feeling of running onto a big league field." He also mentioned that getting that adrenaline going was a little tough initially in Sacramento. "You're in a Major League stadium, you're facing Major League hitters. Like, it's go time for first pitch.

"Early on, I felt like it was—I hadn't been in Triple-A for a few years other than like rehabbing—last year I was rehabbing so it was more like 'how do I feel? how's my stuff?' more so than results. Kind of need to trick the brain a bit from Opening Day. That was hard to do the first month or so...You kind of go from Spring Training and this almost kind of felt like a continuation of that, so to speak."

We'll post the whole conversation with Springs talking about his season later this week.

Jul 25, 2025; Houston, Texas, USA; Athletics starting pitcher Jeffrey Springs (59) delivers a pitch during the first inning against the Houston Astros at Daikin Park. Mandatory Credit: Troy Taormina-Imagn Images | Troy Taormina-Imagn Images

But given that this is how some of the veterans were feeling when they arrived at their home ballpark in 2025, you can see why the home stats weren't quite on par with how a number of them performed on the road. You also throw in the fact that there was no data on SHP with big league batters going into the year, and there are reasons for optimism that this trend will turn around a bit next season.

Severino, Lopez and Springs figure to be the three arms that can be counted on to be in the A's rotation to begin the 2026 season, while the final two spots are somewhat open at this point in time.

Luis Morales would be the one name you'd likely put closer to the sure thing category than trying to work his way into the mix, but his sample size was fairly small this year overall, so it's hard to draw grand conclusions.

Here is how those same guys performed on the road this season.

	Road IP	Road ERA	Road WHIP
Severino	80.1	3.02	1.07
Springs	88.2	3.45	1.15
Lopez	48.1	5.40	1.41
Morales	20.1	2.21	0.98
Perkins	22.1	2.42	0.94
Ginn	43	3.14	1.07
Barnett	9	6.00	1.78
Bido	35.1	5.86	1.50
Spence	47	3.64	1.26
Hoglund	17.1	6.75	1.62

The one stat that jumps out here is that Ginn, much like Severino, was a completely different pitcher on the road than at home. Ginn finished with a 3.14 ERA and a 1.07 WHIP away from Sacramento, while Severino held a 3.02 ERA with a 1.07 WHIP. They both also struggled at home, putting up ERAs over six.

Does that make him someone the A's roll with while working on his approach at home, or does he become an intriguing trade piece for the club?

The youngest pitcher of the group, Morales, was also the most even keeled, holding a 3.81 ERA at home, while sporting a 2.21 ERA on the road. Granted, the sample size we're working with is fairly small in both circumstances, but it's something small like that which could lead to him being a prime candidate for a rotation spot (on top of his obvious talent).

In terms of how good the A's starting staff is as a whole, the guys that started a game for them in the second half ended up with a 4.62 ERA, which ranked 21st in MLB after the break. There were a few outings over the last week of the season that hurt that final tally, as they'd been closer to a top-15 club before some lopsided losses.

There are pieces of this rotation that should give the A's at least five guys that they can count on in the rotation, but as we've seen plenty of times, you need more than just five starting pitchers to get through an entire 162 game schedule.

The A's could look to add a frontline starter (but at what cost?), but will presumably be more focused on adding quality depth pieces this winter. Given the splits that their starters had at home and on the road this season, it may be worth it to build up the depth options rather than putting all of their eggs in one basket, especially since we won't have a good idea of how they'll perform at Sutter Health.