Idiots Write About Sports

SI.com’s John Donovan pooh-poohs the A’s chances of making the playoffs. His conclusion — don’t necessarily count on Oakland landing in the postseason — is correct, though the reasoning behind it is flawed.

Donovan’s points can be summarized thusly:

* Mark Mulder is injured;
* Rich Harden is scuffling;
* Barry Zito hasn’t been very dependable;
* The offense has been inconsistent; and
* The A’s have a losing road record.

I can’t argue with point 1; Mulder’s loss is huge. Up until his injury, Mulder was a Cy Young candidate, and it’s hard to see that kind of performance matched by John Halama or Justin Duchscherer or whomever the A’s wind up picking up off of the Discard Pile.

Point 2 is pretty indisputable as well. Harden has looked progressively terrible his last three starts. He’s lost velocity, and he may be tipping pitches. That doesn’t mean Harden’s a flash-in-the-pan, but those proclamations that he was ready to expand the Mulder-Hudson-Zito triumvirate to a four-headed monster now look wildly premature. Tonight’s start against the Orioles will tell a little more of the tale. (UPDATE: Or not — Harden didn’t pitch particularly poorly, but he didn’t pitch particularly well, either. Far too many walks.)

Donovan is also right about Point 3 — Zito’s performance has been inconsistent this year. But, in citing Zito’s record (10-11) and ERA (3.38), he’s wrong about why. In this era of inflated offense, a 3.38 ERA isn’t necessarily gaudy, and as for that 10-11 record, I can think of at least two of those losses where Zito pitched a complete game only to be abandoned by his offense. What’s actually made Zito less consistent this year is he’s throwing a lot more pitches and falling behind in the count a lot more. On July 23 against the Mariners, Zito walked six batters — something he hadn’t done since his rookie year in 2000. So far this season he’s walked 72 batters — only six fewer than he walked for all of 2002. His strikeouts-to-walks ratio is about 1.5 to 1 — during the Cy Young season, he struck out 2.3 batters for every guy he walked.

As for Points 4 and 5, they’re true enough, provided you haven’t been paying much attention to what the A’s have done of late. As noted previously in this space, Miguel Tejada’s offensive performance has jumped dramatically since the All-Star break. His post-Break numbers have seen the biggest jump, but the rest of the A’s — Eric Chavez, in particular, and to some extent, Ramon Hernandez — have also picked things up. Since coming over from the Reds, Jose Guillen has tallied an OPS of .810; that’s only 23 games, sure, but it’s timed with Oakland’s overall offensive resurgence.

Yeah, the A’s are 32-34 on the road. That’s not good. But that’s largely the byproduct of a 3-7 roadtrip through the AL West all the way back in April and a misbegotten 2-4 run through Miami and Philadelphia on the second leg of one of Oakland’s longest road trips of the year. All other road trips, the A’s have either won, pushed, or lost by just a game or two. More important, they haven’t lost a road trip since the All-Star Break. That includes a 6-6 trip that began with the A’s losing four games to the Twins in Minneapolis, and their most recent 5-2 trip, in which they defeated their chief wildcard rival in two out of three games.

Now past performance is no indication of future results. But wouldn’t the A’s more recent performance in road games be a better indicator of how they’re playing than their first road trip of the year back in April? And might it not also be worth noting that the A’s have the most home wins in the American League — especially since they will be playing more games in Oakland than out of town for the remainder of the year? Not to John Donovan apparently.

(Interestingly enough, the Red Sox road record is 32-34. For those of you with short-term memories, this is exactly the same as the A’s record away from home. The Red Sox play 15 of their remaining games away from Fenway Park — the same amount of road games on Oakland’s schedule. Yet, while Oakland’s road woes are apparently a big enough concern for John Donovan to write an entire column, Boston’s identical record on the road rates nary a mention.)

I’m not saying the A’s are a lock for the playoffs. They have a lot of hurdles to overcome, and that was before Mulder went out for the year. The pessimist in me argues that they probably aren’t going to pull it off. But I also don’t believe things are as grim as Donovan paints them. And the fact of the matter is, as of this writing, the A’s are tied for first place in the AL West and a 1/2-game ahead of Boston for the wildcard. They figure to be very much alive for the postseason very deep into September, and as a fan, that’s all you can really ask.