David Schoenfield over at ESPN examines if the Oakland A’s are for real and can repeat what they did this past season again in 2013. What I found interesting is the approach he took into examining this. Schoenfield writes,
“I went back through the wild-card era and initially looked for all teams that improved by at least 15 wins and finished above .500, and then further cut that list to teams that did so after suffering at least three straight non-winning seasons. I “losing seasons” since the A’s were 81-81 in 2010.
This provided the list below of 14 teams. One thing I was curious to see is if the A’s registered as a young team and to see if there is any correlation with age and future success. The teams are sorted from youngest to oldest, based on the average weighted age of the position players and pitching staff, from Baseball-Reference.com.”
Click here to read the results of his examination.
5 comments
Stick
12/30/2012-5:31pm at 5:31 pm (UTC -4)
interesting post. Looks like only 2 of the 14 actually won more in year 2. And the teams that sustained really were the young ones.
Hope the Mets appear on this soon!
srt
12/30/2012-9:42pm at 9:42 pm (UTC -4)
Interesting indeed….
‘ Most teams that win 94 games do so in part because of a superstar or two.’
‘But I don’t believe that is necessarily a strike against the A’s. It does put more pressure on Billy Beane to continue adding valuable secondary parts and spare players, to ensure the 25-man roster remains as deep as 2012′s.’
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That’s where Omar made his mistake. He had the core, but not much else. He supplemented it with aging and sometimes injury prone stars, with too many of them being SPs.
SA seems to be doing the exact opposite.
- Rebuild that bottom feeder farm system we had 2 years ago.
- Distribute the payroll whereas it’s not just a couple of players = 75% of it.
- Trade for prospects where it makes sense:
- Beltran (who was as good as gone) = Wheeler
- Dickey netted the Jays #1 and #3 prospect and a promising younger one.
Is it the keys to sustained success? Time will tell.
Goes without saying that all of this came about though b/c the Wilpons probably had 1 foot in bankruptcy court with the Mets. Certainly doesn’t make this rebuild straight forward or easier.
gategem
12/30/2012-11:33pm at 11:33 pm (UTC -4)
But what people keep on conveniently forgetting is that the Omar years were not a total washout. How many years will it be before the Mets win 97 games once more? And we don’t know if the A’s record last year was just an aberration. In their previous run in the early 2000’s they did develop players that were stars and if memory serves me right didn’t Art Howe manage some of those teams?
srt
12/30/2012-11:54pm at 11:54 pm (UTC -4)
I wasn’t implying Omar was a total bust. I like the plan he outlined for success when he first came here. After the 2006 season though, I think he got off track.
Stick
12/31/2012-12:05am at 12:05 am (UTC -4)
TRS likes to say that 2006 happened too fast, and it is what led Omar (or jeff, or whoever was making the big call) to think the team was all set, and it was time to go all-in on the older FAs to cement things.
but, if 2006 had not been quite so magical (the pen helped a lot) and they had considered it another building year, they may have approached 2007 differently.