There are a lot of reasons to play someone in the field who is below average at the position. If they hit well enough they may be worth giving some of it back defensively. If your team, overall, is not sufficiently robust offensively you may feel the need to give up a little glove in order to maximize the bats. You might stick with defensive issues with a young player who has the ability to improve with time and experience.
So a team does not need to prioritize having a gold glove candidate at every
position — in fact if you have Denzel Clarke in CF you have more capacity to weather a below average COFer whose deficiencies can be masked some by the galloping Denzelope.
But Moneyball taught us that some traits are inherently overvalued and some underappreciated. The OBP emphasis was a recognition that getting hits was not as “front and center essential” as the art of not making an out. Also noted was how “a run saved is as important as a run scored”.
Yet consistently in 2025 the A’s have made roster and in game decisions that belie any deference to this axiom. And not surprisingly they are giving up runs at an ungodly pace. The pitching staff is much to blame, yet pitching and defense are intertwined and the A’s have been, all season, among the very worst teams in “defensive efficiency”.
Here’s how it has happened — and continues to happen.
CF, A 2 Month Hole
Thankfully, Clarke has given the A’s CF defense a 180 degree turn. But back when the A’s were not buried in the division and wild card pictures, they set up failure by ignoring how clearly bad JJ Bleday was as a CFer (-19 DRS, -30 career) and the results were catastrophic.
How did the A’s not address CF in the off season as a top priority? It’s not as if they had no place for Bleday’s bat which, in 2024, looked worth getting in the lineup. LF was to manned by Seth Brown and Miguel Andujar, neither worthy of settling for a terrible defense in LF and CF.
They didn’t even keep a strong defensive CFer on the roster for late innings or secondary options. Drew Avans was banished to AAA for 2 months while Brown became the de facto back up CFer — and he is worse than Bleday, which is not easy to be.
Andujar, A Weird Priority
The A’s have treated Miguel Andujar like he’s such an incredible hitter they have to move mountains to keep his bat in the lineup. Trouble is, his bat isn’t that great and his defense is abominable.
Last season Andujar batted .285/.320/.377, which rated him ever so slightly above average at 103 wRC+. Andujar’s batting average belied his mediocrity, which was driven by his 4.1% BB rate and his .093 ISO.
2025 has been more of the same, with a 4.8% BB rate and .096 ISO, yielding a shrug-worthy line of .284/.316/.381 (89 wRC+). And yet the A’s have sacrificed a ton of defense to squeeze him into places he should not ever venture.
Andujar is at -19 OAA for his career as an outfielder over the equivalent of one full season’s of games out there. If you want a lasting image of his ineptitude, his most recent effort (in RF) saw him chase an eminently catchable fly ball and somehow attack it like he was practicing the “stop, drop and roll” technique. The ball, however, was not on fire.
If there’s anything more self destructive than putting Andujar in the OF it’s putting him at 3B, where he is at a stunning -36 DRS/-16 OAA in the innings equivalent of just 163 games, i.e., one full season.
Andujar’s main problem at 3B isn’t fielding balls or throwing them, it’s how many balls he never gets to that most 3Bmen field. With the range of a statue Andujar can appear, to the untrained eye, like a passable 3Bman as he generally fields cleanly and throws accurately the balls he gets to. He just doesn’t get to very many, which winds up making his pitchers look even worse than they are.
What’s noteworthy to me right now is that the A’s continue to start Andujar at 3B and in LF/RF when they have Max Schuemann on the bench and Schuemann is having an excellent season both at the plate and in the field.
First off, Schuemann is outperforming Andujar at the plate this year and it’s not even that close. Schuemann is at 103 wRC+ on the strength of an outstanding .358 OBP, with a 13.% BB rate and 15.8 % K rate. But hitting isn’t even the issue here.
On a team whose biggest problem is not scoring runs but rather giving up far too many and suffering for defensive inefficiency, they are sitting Schuemann in favor of Andujar and Gio Urshela (-7 DRS in just 308 innings)?
Schuemann has positive ratings at 2B, while Luis Urias has excellent ratings in his career at 3B. Schuemann rates neutrally at 3B. The A’s have options to make their infield defense much, much stronger and yet they continue to emphasize two infielders who are absolutely terrible on defense — and in Urshela’s case not even hitting a whit anyway.
Being showcased for a deadline trade? Every time either of the them plays in the field their value goes down.
The Anti-Moneyball
Essentially the A’s are writing the sequel to Moneyball: How To Lose The Art Of A Winnable Game. If they had prioritized players like Avans in the outfield and Schuemann on the infield, no doubt they could have expected to score fewer runs. (Ironically, as it turned out Schuemann has outhit Andujar and Avans probably could have put up Bleday’s sad slash line, but that’s 20/20 hindsight.)
But the important, crucial, essential fact is that they also could have expected to save far more runs than they lost to offense. They had hitters in “bat first” players elsewhere on the diamond: Tyler Soderstrom, Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, Shea Langeliers, by profile Max Muncy, and by the end of April Nick Kurtz.
How has the front office, in constructing rosters, and the manager, in constructing lineups, kept making defense such a low priority while watching the metrics hammer them as much as the play on the field makes eyeballs want to gouge themselves?
Denzelope is, of course, a step in the right direction and it’s hard to imagine the A’s not sticking with him in CF for the long haul. But defense isn’t played in one spot and a run saved is indeed as important as a run scored.
Or maybe a better way to say it is that a run given away is as important as a run earned.
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