Injuries provide a reasonable cover especially when they are clustered so dramatically, and the A’s certainly had a double-triple-quadruple whammy when they lost Zack Gelof, Tyler Soderstrom, Jacob Wilson, Nick Kurtz, Joshua Kuroda-Grauer, and Shea Langeliers, in overlapping stretches in which often several have been out at the same time.
Without a doubt these injuries, which came on the heels of already losing Brent Rooker for the season and Denzel Clarke for most of one, have impacted the A’s ability
to score runs and put their best defense out there. It’s also true that when the team was mostly healthy, they were hitting a lot at home and very little on the road. But the impact has been real.
Here’s the thing, though…the A’s big issue all season has been pitching. The team’s ERA of 5.34 beats out only the Colorado Rockies (5.50) and is a full .026 worse even than the team which ranks #28, the Washington Nationals.
Some of this is the Sutter Health Park effect, but on the road the A’s are squarely mediocre at best, ranking 16th in ERA, 18th in HR prevention, 14th in BB allowed. At home they are dead last in ERA (6.36, next closest is 5.82), HR allowed (108, next closest is 90), and BB allowed (250, next closest is 239).
And that’s where the injury excuse goes out the window. Health has not been the barrier for the A’s, flat out performance, and the development which breeds performance, are the clear culprit. I say this because really the A’s have had only one key injury to their entire pitching staff and that was losing Luis Severino after just 12 starts.
No doubt the A’s miss Severino who, for all his inconsistency, tended to get deep into games and whose 4.16 ERA would look pretty good right now. It’s also not any sort of excuse or explanation of struggle, to lose your biggest workhorse and top SP at least in name — in reality, if slotted into the rotation right now Severino would be behind both JT Ginn and Gage Jump in any realistic depth chart.
The A’s simply don’t have the market cornered on losing one of their aces and having to try to compete anyway. The Red Sox have been without Garrett Crochet much of the season, including July when they went 21-4. The Astros just moved into 1st place, albeit just a game over .500, having been with their ace Hunter Brown for all but 10 starts. Gerrit Cole has made only 12 starts for the Yankees, Carlos Rodon only 9.
Sure some of these teams have deep pockets and much more established talent, but the overarching point is that every team has to expect to lose at least as much as one key SP for a long stretch. Why haven’t the A’s been able to weather it at least well enough to win half their games — which, as it turns out, would leave them 0.5 game out of 1st place?
The problem has not been health, it’s been huge steps back by 2 pitchers who were expected to be important contributors: Jacob Lopez and Luis Morales. Jack Perkins, also gifted with plus stuff, has similarly been unable to harness it with enough control and command to thrive. Jeffrey Springs leads all of MLB in HRs allowed and has only been able to “adjust” to the tune of sporting a career high 47.1% fly ball rate.
In reality, with JT Ginn and Gage Jump thankfully progressing, even absent Severino the A’s had the pitching talent to contend in a weak AL West even as they were getting battered by position player injuries. Ginn, Jump, Morales, Perkins, and Lopez may not have the track record of a Mariners, Red Sox, or Yankees rotation, but in terms of their stuff that’s a rotation that could have emerged as a strength not a weakness.
Instead, Lopez continued to struggle to avoid missing his target by 2 feet and throwing an inordinate number of “accidental pitchouts” until he had to be optioned to AAA. He was excused as “having a funky delivery” without regard to the fact that you either need to be able to repeat and harness said delivery or you need to tweak it.
Morales may have “electric stuff” but he alternates missing the strike zone entirely with leaving pitches in the middle of the plate and he gets rocked hard — when he’s not issuing far too many free passes. So far, no one either in the minors or majors seems to have been able to help him throw the ball where he wants to with any frequency.
Perkins may have finally taken a big step forward in his last start, for which he was aptly punished by being yanked after just 69 pitches so the bullpen could immediately blow it for him and tag him with the loss. But like his lefty colleagues, he has long struggled to repeat his delivery and locate consistently leading to high pitch counts and low success rates.
So no, 2026 didn’t go south-and-then-some because of injuries or because of the hitting or fielding, even though all 3 took hits that feel like someone is putting a green and gold sweater on a black cat and rolling them under a ladder at midnight. The issue has been the inability of talented pitchers, who have been healthy, to develop and take steps forward instead of stalling or sliding back down the hill in reverse and into the ravine of irrelevance.
That’s how and why you go a sad 23-32 in May and June combined, only to follow it up with a 5-19 July. Even as the A’s get position players back faster than they lose them, they are going to remain stuck in quicksand until they figure out how to help their most talented young pitchers take steps forward. Let’s hope the recent glimpses from Lopez and Perkins are the beginning of a new beginning. We’ll know just a little bit more tonight when Perkins takes the mound.
