We hold these truths to be self evident and yet certain members of the front office, coaching team, and players’ unit don’t appear to grasp them. So here I come, the reluctant hero once again, to impart pearls of deep wisdom to the surely eager green and gold wearing humanoids. And AI bots if any are reading along.
1. LH batters need to embrace hitting to LF in order to succeed.
There’s a reason Tyler Soderstrom and Nick Kurtz are putting up poor numbers against LHP, the same reason Soderstrom took
a pause from being an easy out and raked LHPs the second half of 2025.
Kurtz and Soderstrom are trying to pull most everything, which is a recipe for disaster. You pull sliders that are breaking away from you, resulting in a lot of ground balls, you start your swing earlier and find yourself fooled by more chase sliders, you have to be more cognizant of the outer 1/3 of the plate and become, as a result, far more vulnerable to fastballs in.
Kurtz may be an elite offensive player already, but his troubles against LHP are real, not just relative. This season he is off to a .205/.352/.250 start and while the walks are nice the BA and SLG are both legitimately bad. And he’s now sitting at .199/.285/.381 for his career (207 PA) with a 35.7% K rate.
Soderstrom, who was whacking singles and doubles the other way against lefties after last year’s All-Star break, is back to trying to pull everything and it has resulted in his going 5 for 43 with 15 K against only 3 BB.
The A’s have been particularly vulnerable against LHPs and these two are a big part of why. Both are capable of mastering lefties, as they have shown in spurts, but they need to take a page out their teammate, Carlos Cortes’, book and approach their at bats more prudently.
2. The “hot hand” is worth riding, but enough about Carlos Cortes.
There is much misunderstanding around the concept of a hot hand, kind of along the lines of “Joe Morgan wrote a book about how you should always try to walk.”
When the “hot hand” phenomenon was “debunked” it was on the statistical truth that nothing could accurately predict when a basketball shooter, a baseball hitter, or any other athlete, would turn from hot to cold. That does NOT mean that no one gets “hot” or “cold” or that you aren’t wise to ride them for as long as they are “feeling it” and producing commensurate results. It just means it won’t last forever and you shouldn’t be surprised any day that it might turn. And then you might want to focus on career norms more than recent stats.
It’s utterly ridiculous that the A’s are not starting Cortes each and every game right now. He’s not just “hot” he has hit like the best hitter on the planet all season so far: .387/.452/.640, 200 wRC+ with an 8.3% K rate to be exact. And that’s on the heels of his 99 PA debut in 2025 when he batted .309/.323/.543.
The fact is, we are still in the era where Carlos Cortes has never NOT hit over .300, and his career line now stands at .343/.383/.586, 163 wRC+. And it’s not even as if the platoon matchups have fazed him. Cortes has been given precious few chances to peddle his wares as a left-on-left threat, but when he’s gotten up there all he has done is go 7 for 12. (Precisely because he sprays the ball the other way if the pitch is breaking away from him or on the outer 1/3.)
It’s not about whether Cortes is actually a .343 hitter, it’s about recognizing that he’s been that since last July and that he has been consistently great throughout his time in the big leagues — and he’s doing it with excellent swing decisions, elite knowledge of the strike zone, a smart approach, and a sustainable all-fields approach.
You play that hand until the time comes where Cortes doesn’t look like one of the best hitters in all of MLB. (His career wRC+ right now is a little higher than Shohei Ohtani’s, a little lower than Aaron Judge’s, and a tick better than Nick Kurtz’.) Of course it’s still a small sample, but let him tell you when he’s ready to cool off. Don’t cool him off by sitting him while he’s not just hitting well, he’s hitting everyone.
3. Defense Matters, like a lot
Sometimes you sacrifice a little defense to get a bat in the lineup — Cortes is an example of someone who won’t win any gold gloves but more than offsets it with his hitting. It also helps that Cortes doesn’t play a ‘premium position’ on the diamond; you can hide deficiencies better in the corners than you can up the middle.
Kudos to Zack Gelof for almost instantly putting himself into the “helps your defense” category in CF. Given how he has shown up, the contrast between him in CF, the average CFers around MLB, and Lawrence Butler, is stark.
Now Butler may have his faults one can fairly criticize but his CF play isn’t among them. It’s not his fault that he simply doesn’t have the skill set for the job — he’s a fine RFer. But in CF he is a significant liability because he routinely gets poor reads, doesn’t always take good routes, and lacks the foot/sprint speed to make up for it.
If Butler were mashing like he did at the end of 2024 you could squint and make a case, though still the wiser course would be to play him where he’s actually suited to playing and figure out CF separately. As it is, he shouldn’t be an option in CF just as Max Muncy isn’t really the answer at 3B unless he’s hitting like he did the first 3 weeks of the season — and even then you need better defense at 3B than he has been able to give thus far in his career.
The A’s need to keep prioritizing defense even if it means sticking with Gelof in CF, and eventually Denzel Clarke again, regardless of how they are hitting. A run saved is indeed worth as much as a run scored, and overall this A’s team has far more acumen scoring than preventing.
In sum, all men are not created equal, so deal with it.
