I wrote on Tuesday that the A's had claimed Travis Blackley on waivers. The matching 25-man move to make a hole for Blackley to get on the active roster was to send down Andrew Carignan. The only other real option was Pedro Figueroa. Neither has been good this year (6.03 FIP and 6.98 FRA in eight innings for Figueroa, 5.43 FIP and 8.34 FRA in 6 1/3 for Carignan), so you're just getting into managerial preferences and player development when you choose between them.

Well, you're also getting into handedness issues, as David Wishinsky points out. This move, because Blackley is a lefty, leaves the A's with five lefties and two righties. Asked about this, Bob Melvin indicated that he didn't care whether Blackley is a lefty or righty because he's here to be the long-man. What's amusing about this if you follow the A's blogosphere is that it pits poor Wishinsky against himself -- I've heard him on the Tarp Talk podcast and elsewhere rail many times against the A's refusal to carry a long man because it leaves them vulnerable to early or pre-game starter injuries that result in bullpen games, those times where you use four pitchers for two innings a piece and leave yourself feeling short-handed for the next few days as guys recover from throwing 2-3x as many pitches as they normally do.

Well, now the A's have a long-man, but it's at the expense of Wishinsky's other great bugaboo, the all-lefty bullpen. I've never actually heard Wishinsky explain why a team carrying more than two (or maybe three if you're really pushing things) lefties matters so much. If your entire bullpen's skill-set is such that nobody can pitch to righties, that's one thing, but I'm not sure that's the case in Oakland. Jerry Blevins doesn't really do very well against opposite-hand batters, but Brian Fuentes, owner of a change-up, has a non-giant split, and who knows with Pedro Figueroa, Jordan Norberto, and Blackley. Maybe it's a bullpen with four specialists and Fuentes, or maybe it's just a bunch of pitchers.

In any case, this isn't 2013 or 2014. The A's are a .500 ball-club, sure, but per the Baseball Prospectus adjusted standings, they're lucky to be there. If the way they've actually played indicates their true talent, they'll fall back. And even if they don't fall back, are they any better than a .500 club? Would a four-righty/three-lefty pen make them a .550 team going forward such that they could challenge Tampa or Toronto for the Wild Card? (Or even Boston, who, for all their struggles, still came into today just 1 1/2 games back of the A's.)

Assuming the A's don't really consider themselves to be in contention, they're still doing what they've been doing since basically Day 1 of this off-season: building toward the future while putting a respectable club on the field. The respectability of the club doesn't take a hit by having five lefties, and if anyone outside the A's front office has any insight regarding the developmental benefits of sending down Carignan and/or keeping Figueroa in the big leagues, then I'd be interested in hearing about it. (Or, hell, if you're inside the A's front office and you want to share, drop me an email. I won't tell anyone.)

Then there's third base, where the A's have lost Brandon Inge to his groin injury. Adam Rosales comes up to do Adam Rosales things, which seem likely to be "approximate the offense that Inge was likely to provide going forward, which isn't anywhere near the offense that Inge has provided so far because neither Inge nor Rosales can slug .545 for long, but play worse defense because Rosales is so jittery and weird that he can't just sit back and make the play and also he doesn't have massive tattoos of his children's names on his forearms."

Of course, he's starting at first base today, with Josh Donaldson at third, which is really just Bob Melvin trolling us. I cannot pretend to like this move, to say "well, there's probably a good reason for it," etc. I mean, sure, Melvin didn't just put Rosales in a hat and pull him out and stick him at first because he's playing randomness games, so there is a reason buried deep in this somewhere. But what I mean is that I can't imagine any possible reason being given that would satisfy me instead of making me just shake my head in sadness. Rosales has not been good enough to be on the team until May 17th despite Beane flipping through about 13 third basemen in that time, and yet the day he comes up, first base it is. Sure. Ok.

Travis Blackley, an Australian pitcher (yep) who has hurled five innings for the Giants this year but who was designated for assignment to make room for the return of Jeremy Affeldt, was claimed by the A's today. Here are some facts, in bullet form, about Mr. Blackley:

1. He is from Melbourne.

2. This is his second go-around with the A's. His time with the Giants was his second stint with them as well.

3. He is left-handed.

4. He was once a Baseball America Top 100 prospect.

5. He messed up his shoulder.

6. He pitched in Australian League Baseball and also Korea.

7. He last appeared in the Baseball Prospectus annual in 2010.

8. He has no PECOTA projection.

9. There is no ZiPS projection either.

10. He married a Kansan.

11. I assume that he'll have to be on the 25-man roster or else get cut because otherwise the Giants would have kept him, but I don't really know, and unless I missed something, the A's haven't made a 25-man move yet.

That's all I got. I mean, he's Travis Blackley.

Reader mail! I like reader mail. Sam Coatham from Hampshire (not the place I went to college, but the England one) writes:

Tyson Ross doesn't appear to be good enough for the majors at the moment, is that just a couple of bad starts, or is he simply not good enough?

If he is demoted, who would you replace him with? Is Peacock ready?

Ross's turn in the rotation is up tomorrow (Monday), as he's due to face Dan Haren in Anaheim. The matchup wouldn't favor Ross on his best day, although one should note that the Angels have scored even fewer runs than the A's on the season, so it's not like Ross is heading out to get knocked around by Texas.

Let's start with the basic number first: Ross has thrown 25 2/3 innings over five starts (not an impressive number of innings per start), facing 120 batters. He's struck out 13 of them, handed out 12 free passes (11 walks and one HBP), and allowed two homers. The hits have been falling in, as he's given up a .366 BABIP. All of this adds up to a terrible 22 runs allowed.

If we can find a positive, it's that his ground-ball rate, per Baseball Prospectus is at 58%, which is even higher than his 2010 rate of 55%.

The immediate concern with Ross's numbers is that it looks like he's doing two things, rooted in one problem: he's failing to throw strikes, and he's failing to throw quality strikes when he does throw strikes. If you can't hit the zone, you give up walks, and if your pitches are grooved when you do hit the zone, you give up hard-hit balls and you don't miss bats, leading to few strikeouts.

We can look at some PITCHf/x data to see how much of this result-stats stuff bears out. First, compare how Ross pitches lefties and righties vs. the league averages:

Ross pitches v. LHB	League v. LHB

Ross pitches v. RHB	League v. RHB

The alarming thing is how many of Ross's pitches are ending up in the middle of the zone to righties. He's trying to get to that outer half of the plate, the way all pitchers do, but he does not appear to be succeeding. That said, lefties are the ones doing the damage against him, hitting .383/.473/.532 so far.

I'm not going to post image after image here, because as I click around the TruMedia site, filtering on pitch type, batter handedness, etc. etc., I don't see any single problem. What I do see is everything Ross throws being contacted: his whiff percentage (misses divided by swings) of 15.8% is just right around the cutoff for the bottom 10% in the league (>=200 pitches thrown). Neither his changeup nor his slider has induced whiffs at a higher rate than average, although the slider, at least, is close.

After staring at this data for a long time, I came to realize that I'm probably making this harder than I need to. Ross was drafted in 2008 in the second round and given just under $700,000 to sign. Baseball America immediately rated him the 15th-best prospect in the A's system, and bumped him to 6th and 4th in its 2010 and 2011 books. They said he had the best slider in the system in each of those years as well. You may be surprised to hear, then, that in Ross's nine stops in professional baseball (not counting a rehab stint last year), he's pitched well in exactly three of them.

PECOTA took all this data and spat out a replacement-level projection for him: zero WARP in 81 2/3 innings. ZiPS was even less optimistic, seeing an ERA over half a run higher, down in Fabio Castro territory.

What about Ross's mechanics? Here's a picture of Tyson Ross's release points for each of his fastballs in order for 2012:

That doesn't look terribly consistent. It's hard to know without having a full PITCHf/x database whether it really is bad, though. The standard deviation on Ross's horizontal release point is about 2.2 inches, while on the vertical it's about 1.6 inches. Looking at this article by Mike Fast, you can see lists of high and low standard deviations for pitcher fastballs. The problem for me is that Fast just uses one number, and I don't understand what that number is, so I don't know how to compare these results to the tables in that article. Further, that's the only article I've found that has any lists of data on release point consistency, so I don't know where else to compare these Ross findings.

Has any of this led to any conclusion yet? I'm not sure, but I will say that none of it is terribly positive. Ross has velocity and his sinker has good movement, with occasional Cahill-like flashes, but it isn't clear to me that he's a major-league starter if he can't manage his arm and his body to the point where he can throw the ball where he wants to throw it, or at least within a reasonable radius of that spot.

The second half of Sam's question is harder, if that's possible, because all I have on the A's minor-league pitchers are stats and the opinions/reports of all the same people that you, dear readers, have access to -- the Kevin Goldsteins and Keith Laws of the world, that is. It does not appear that the former has written about Peacock since the season started, so we're left with what we already know (mid-rotation type with plus velocity, but known as a control type) combined with his Sacramento line: 39 1/3 innings, 37 strikeouts, 14 walks, 2 homers.

When you look at that line and you examine the alternatives (Graham Godfrey on the 40-man, Travis Banwart, Fabio Castro, or Bruce Billings (yes, he's working as a starter in AAA) off of it), I wouldn't be surprised to see Peacock up by mid-year if Ross continues to struggle and Dallas Braden isn't ready to come back by the time the A's are ready for a demotion. That said, as fun as this team has been so far, the question for Billy Beane is almost certainly about Peacock's development first and foremost, not about which pitcher gives the A's the best chance to win in 2012. If Peacock reaches the point where it's time for him to face new challenges, then I think he'll come up whether Ross is pitching mediocre or poorly. (If he's pitching quite well, which I doubt he'll do, then it creates a stickier problem, but let no fan complain about having too many good players.)

I joked in the last post about transactions never dying, but then the A's went and proved me wrong: the A's placed Yoenis Cespedes on the Disabled List today (retroactive to May 7th) shortly after scratching him from the lineup. His hand soreness hasn't abated as much as the A's would have liked, so he'll leave day-to-day limbo and actually be on the shelf for at least another ten days.

The callup to replace Cespedes is, of course, Michael Taylor. There could be room for him to be involved in a left-field platoon with Seth Smith while Jonny Gomes and Kila Ka'aihue (also scratched from tonight's lineup, though I haven't yet heard why) split DH duties, but Bob Melvin hasn't been shy about using Ka'aihue against lefties, so maybe we're back to the old Gomes/Smith platoon, except in left-field instead of at DH.

That said, tonight's original lineup, with a righty on the mound for Detroit, had Daric Barton taking a seat, not Gomes. Perhaps the real answer is the old "it's complicated." Has anyone checked Bob Melvin's pockets for index cards full of matchup stats?

UPDATE: Reader and Twitter friend Raj Dhillon writes:

@jlwoj Joe Stiglich said it was a "lower hamstring, upper calf" injury for Kila Ka'aihue, and that's why he was also scratched tonight.

— Raj Dhillon (@runscreatedplus) May 12, 2012

SECOND UPDATE: Reinstate everything I said here because it's Josh Donaldson coming up to Oakland, not Michael Taylor. The A's already have two third basemen who are probably better than him (Eric Sogard, Brandon Inge), so one wonders whether he's coming up as a catcher because of Kurt Suzuki's hand.

THIRD UPDATE: Apparently the reason Josh Donaldson is coming up instead of Michael Taylor has nothing to do with the major-league roster. You know how you can't recall a player if you've optiond them within the last ten days? But how you can bring them back up if they're replacing a player who went on the DL? Well, it turns out that you either can't backdate that DL'd player, or you can't backdate them to a date before you sent down the player who you're recalling. This is an entirely sensible rule that I'd never come across before.

So Taylor went down just yesterday, but the A's want to backdate Cespedes's DL trip to May 7th, so they can't bring Taylor back. That leaves the decision down to other dudes on the 40-man roster, so, eh, why not Donaldson to sit on the bench and maybe get some garbage time at some point.

I'm a day late on this call-up/send-down pair of moves, and I'm well more than a dollar short in life in general, but transactions never die, they just fade away. So before this one fades:

The reported reason for Collin Cowgill coming up and Michael Taylor going back to Sacramento was that Bob Melvin wanted a more legit center-fielder on the roster than he had with Reddick-Smith-Gomes-Taylor as his healthy pasture-men. Josh Reddick can probably play a semi-competent center overall -- if I had to guess,¹ I'd figure he's at least as good as Cespedes up the middle. Their arms are comparable, their outfield speed seems similar, and, if anything, Reddick seems to get better jumps. That said, I think it's no coincidence that Melvin asked for this move to be made on the day after Reddick was victimized by a knuckling line drive to center that dove a different direction than he expected, leading to extra bases for the Tigers.

What's interesting is that instead of calling up Jermaine Mitchell, who is arguably the most legit center-fielder on the 40-man roster outside of Coco Crisp, Billy Beane reached for Cowgill, a guy who has carried the "tweener" label for a while: he'll hit enough for center, but it's not clear whether his glove can handle it.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that the A's are seeing what they have in Cowgill, having long ago decided that Josh Reddick, while perhaps being able to handle center in a pinch, is a right-fielder in the short, middle, and long terms. The other is that the A's have already made the determination that Cowgill can play center, and Melvin's "I want a center-fielder" is the 100% face-value reason for calling him up. I'm not sure I can cite any facts pointing one way or the other. I suppose we could give the A's the benefit of the doubt, in a sense, and take them at their word when they say things, but, c'mon, this is professional sports. Forget about figuring out when management is telling the truth -- I don't even know what truth is.

You're allowed to feel bad for Michael Taylor, who got exactly sixteen plate appearances. He looked alternately solid and terrible in them -- he hit the ball hard a few times, but he also appeared completely baffled by off-speed stuff, particularly change-ups, helping him end up with seven strikeouts in those sixteen trips. That the A's were willing to send him down in order to get a "real" center-fielder on the roster might be the clearest sign yet that they've given up hope that he's anything other than a 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th outfielder. It's a sad fall for Taylor, given his stellar hitting from 2008-2010 at A through AAA levels. But hey, a Stanford kid who's apparently never going to live up to his promise? The A's might do well to keep him around as long as they can -- if he's on their roster when he decides to hang 'em up, maybe they can get first crack at turning him into the next Billy Beane.

Jim Miller for Andrew Carignan is just resource alignment in the depths of the bullpen. Miller threw 59 pitches combined on May 9th and 10th while Carginan's been striking dudes out in stints lasting from three to eight hitters for the last three weeks in Sacramento -- 17 strikeouts in 39 batters faced is a hell of a lot, especially when it's paired with one walk and no homers. He showed what he needed to show to come back up, in other words, and with Miller likely needing at least a day, and maybe two, to recover, well, why not let him do it in Sacramento. This is the 8, 9, 10, or even 11-man bullpen that has developed as the rosters of the AAA and major-league teams have effectively fused in the last N years (determination of N being left as an exercise for the reader). No point wasting a spot in the majors on a guy who can't help you tonight.

Of course, Carignan promptly walked two and gave up two hits against the Tigers yesterday, so maybe there's something about his wildness that works against the 35-year-olds hanging on for dear life in the PCL that doesn't in the majors. Or maybe it was just a game.

Did you guys know that if you email me questions, I might answer them on the site? Do you want to be famous? Email me questions! (Or Facebook me questions or Tweet me questions. Or carrier pigeon them. I can't read smoke signals or semaphore, though. Sorry.)

Dave from Saratoga, New York writes

Big East Coast A's fan here; I have a question about Jemile Weeks. Is it possible he'll be sent down to AAA to get his swing back on track? He's killing us this year.

And what are the chances last year was a fluke? Are we looking at another Bobby Crosby/Kurt Suzuki/Daric Barton/Travis Buck kind of player, a guy whose numbers diminish every year?

These aren't easy questions. The first isn't easy because even to the extent I have any connections in the A's front office,¹ they wouldn't tell me what they were thinking about Jemile Weeks anyway. At least not on the record. That said, I think we can grapple with the kinds of considerations and factors the A's would presumably take into account in making a decision whether to demote Weeks.

The first question is: what are the alternatives to sending him to AAA? Weeks's .188/.260/.304 batting line won't play anywhere in the lineup, but if you can reduce his effect on any given game from five plate appearances to four by hitting him 8th or 9th instead of first, then maybe you let him work out his issues at the bottom of the order.

There's also the old "give him two days off and let him rest his mind" trick. To the extent that we think either of these things will fix Weeks, it's presumably because we're aiming at a psychological issue -- we want to take the pressure off for a few days (in the "get him some rest" solution) or a few weeks (in the "bat him 9th" solution) and let him focus on just getting himself right without worrying about being The Table-Setter in front of the guys who are hitting (Josh Reddick, Jonny Gomes, Yoenis Cespedes).

Maybe, though, the problem isn't psychological, or isn't psychological in the way of putting too much pressure on himself. Maybe the issue is that his hitting mechanics are messed up as he tries to hit for power, self-conscious about hitting just two homers in almost 100 games last season while his brother bopped twenty. In that case, the essential question is which coaches you want him working with to fix the issue. A lot of noise was made this off-season about having Chili Davis around to mentor Weeks and Cliff Pennington in The Ways of the Switch-Hitter. Sending Weeks to AAA puts him instead under the care of Greg Sparks, a guy who only hit left-handed, plus whatever roving instructors the A's can spare to help Weeks out. Presumably the A's have faith in all the coaches on their staff, but that's a different thing from finding the very best fit for a particular struggling hitter.

The A's might also judge that as a matter of developing Jemile Weeks to be the best player he can be so that he peaks at a high level in the next couple of years, when Oakland is hoping to compete, they're better off having him struggle at the major-league level than work on his issues in the minors. This could be because they see positive psychological benefits to working through one's issues against the very top competition or because they don't think he would take a demotion well. Some players are likely to respond to a demotion by making things worse -- pressing, perhaps, or even sulking.

Then there's the question of "how much improvement do we get on the field from demoting Weeks?" The A's would presumably make Eric Sogard the starter at second base and call up Adam Rosales to be the utility man. (There are other alternatives, I suppose, involving Brandon Inge playing second while calling up Josh Donaldson or Wes Timmons, but those are either horrifying or complicated, so let's take the easy route.) I like Eric Sogard. I am a fan. He's not that good, though. His OBP in 142 career PA (a sample just slightly larger than Weeks's 2012) is .248. He's very likely not that bad, but the gain at the major-league level from playing Sogard instead of Weeks isn't going to be huge on offense, and there's a decent chance that Weeks is a better defender at the keystone anyway, reducing any gain you get at the plate.

This also raises the question of how much the A's care about winning as many games as they can in 2012. Bob Melvin certainly cares about winning games with the roster he's given, but that's a different question from the one facing Billy Beane: do you demote a struggling young player to try to push for 85 wins instead of 84?

That was the world's longest "I don't know." What about the second question? Was 2011 a fluke?

Everybody loved Weeks when he was knocking the ball around, batting .303, hitting doubles and triples, but his minor-league performance had been mixed. He hit well at Sacramento, albeit not that well once you adjust for the park and the league, and he was downright poor at Midland. He had a hip injury in 2010 that cost him almost three months of AA time, but he also played in the Texas League for about a month in 2009 and didn't hit at all.

Add all this up and you see why PECOTA and ZiPS projected this:

That's some pretty sharp agreement. The park factor matters, of course, since these are projections into Oakland, not into a neutral ground, but ZiPS figures Weeks for just an 88 OPS+ and PECOTA has him down for a TAv of .254 (with league average being .260). PECOTA also saw the odds that Weeks would repeat his 2011 being less than 10%.

It's an interesting list of names that Dave presents, by the way. Bobby Crosby turned out to be injury-prone, and I can't believe that his list of maladies, which goes on for pages and pages on his Baseball Prospectus player card had nothing to do with the fact that he never hit like 2004-05 again. (Noting, by the way, that his 2005, while just a half-season, was far superior to his 2004 with the bat.) I think it's no coincidence that his FRAA numbers declined just as his hitting did.

I don't know what to think of Kurt Suzuki. His first three years (2.5, really) were very good, as he was an above-average hitter (for the league, not just for his position) each year. He hasn't been that since, though he was close in 2011. The continuing league-wide decline in offense means that the difference between 2009 and 2011 isn't as big as it looks from his raw slash line, but it isn't clear to me that he'll ever be an average hitter again. And speaking of "average," that's where the entire decline comes: it's hard to walk enough to have a respectable OBP when you're batting .240, as Suzuki does. And it's hard to hit above .240 when you hit a pop-up every third at-bat, as it sometimes seems Suzuki does. With Suzuki, maybe his body has just worn down from being a relatively small catcher squatting behind the plate for a lot of games every year.

I'm not through with Daric Barton yet. He's still just 26 and 2011 was a wreck. His approach and swing don't seem any different than they were in 2010. It's possible that the .273 batting average that year that drove his stellar OBP and pushed his SLG to semi-respectable levels can't be repeated given those mechanics. Maybe a .316 BABIP isn't something he's capable of given his body type and swing and the .260 figures he's put up last year and at the start of 2012 are all he's capable of (and thus, he's not a major-leaguer). I'm just not ready to say that.

Travis Buck is one of the great mysteries to me. He hit out of his mind from the day he turned pro all the way up to skipping AAA and coming straight to Oakland, where he kept right on hitting. Until 2008, when he stopped hitting. He's never picked it back up (though he's got a .302/.375/.442 line in 48 PAs for Houston this year), he's hit only o.k. in AAA (again, accounting for park and league), and he's been hurt a lot. I have no idea what to say about Travis Buck.

I will say this about Jemile Weeks, though: I think he's distinguishable from all four of those players. Bobby Crosby was the 25th pick of the draft in 2001, and none of the other three were picked higher than that. Barton went 28th, Buck was a sandwich pick, and Suzuki was a second-rounder. Jemile Weeks went 12th overall. The guys above him were Tim Beckham (tools monster who could still make it), Pedro Alvarez, Eric Hosmer, Brian Matusz, Buster Posey, Kyle Skipworth (oops), Yonder Alonso, Gordon Beckham (stagnated, but he hit once upon a time), Aaron Crow, Jason Castro (reach!), and Justin Smoak. Weeks was taken ahead of Ike Davis, Brett Lawrie, and the high school version of Gerrit Cole.

Weeks, in other words, was supposed to be as good as he was in 2011. There are any number of pieces showing how expected performance falls off after the top picks. Here's one, for example, by Sky Andrecheck, complete with a graph showing how steep the curve is at the very top. 25th picks are supposed to have value. 12th picks are supposed to be good.

Obviously, 12th picks bust, and performance in the pros matters, at this point, more than draft position four years ago, but that draft position serves as a proxy for a judgment of where Weeks's tools and skills are supposed to go as he enters his prime. Maybe the scouts were wrong, but I think it's too early to say that.

In terms of data that's more in my purview, I just don't see many alarming things about Weeks so far. Check out his FanGraphs player card and scroll down to "PITCHf/x Plate Discipline" (and promise me to never ever use the one just labeled "plate discipline"). He's swinging about the same amount as last year, and he's done that by swinging less at pitches out of the zone and more at pitches in it. He's making the same amount of contact, and he's being pitched in the zone at the same rate. He's almost doubled his walk rate from last year, and his Isolated Slugging is unchanged.

There is one difference that I see: Weeks had a BABIP of .350 last year and is at .204 this season. Now, .350 is quite high in the major leagues. The list of guys around a .350 BABIP last year includes names like Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Alex Gordon, and Mike Napoli. Among players with 350 or more PAs, Weeks ranked 17th in all of baseball in BABIP. You're just never going to ask that to repeat.

But you're also not going to ask .204 to continue forward. Nobody, not even Vernon Wells, posted a .204 BABIP in 350 or more PAs last season. (Wells was the lowest at .214. Just to put a point on this: Alex Rios was next at .237.) So that's going to come up. It has to. Jemile Weeks is a big-league player. The question is how far it will come up, and whether it will come up enough that he'll be really good or just o.k.

The thing is, though, that "just o.k." is still a better hitter than most of the guys Dave is worried about.

Oh, one other note. Shame on me for this, perhaps, but Weeks isn't actually hitting any more balls in the air, per FanGraphs, than he did in 2011. I have a perception that he's just flying out and flying out and flying out, but apparently that's not been the case.

There's fuzziness in there, of course, since perhaps some things have been called liners that would be called grounders in other situations, but there does not appear to be any massive change in the air/ground distribution of Weeks's balls in play so far. He has hit more infield flies than in 2011, but not so many more that they can explain a 150-point drop in BABIP by themselves.

To sum up:

1. I don't know whether Weeks should be sent down. My inclination is not to, but I don't know the player at all, and even if I did, I wouldn't know him well enough to make the judgments necessary in balancing the psychological and mechanical issues that the A's have to deal with.

2. I don't think Weeks is Travis Buck. It looks like he may be suffering from a massive case of bad luck so far, as his strike-zone indicators are flat at worst, and may be improved, his batted-ball distribution, to the extent we can tell such things, isn't anything new, all while his BABIP, oh his BABIP, has plummeted. I'd expect things to reverse course shortly, while at the same time not expect him to repeat his 2011, because that was a really good (and/or quite lucky) season.

Narrative

This game mostly just cruised right along without much action until the bullpens got involved. Jarrod Parker gave up a two-run Kelly Johnson homer (that looked to me like a fly-out to left off the bat) in the third, but other than that, didn't give up much of anything. He wasn't super sharp (see below), but he wasn't getting in and out of jams all day either.

The A's offense, meanwhile, didn't have a single three-up-three-down inning against Ricky Romero, but they also saw their scoring limited to a two-run homer, Josh Reddick's shot into the seats in right-center in the fifth. A second-and-third situation with two outs in the sixth was the next-closest the A's came to scoring off of the Blue Jays' reputed ace.

But then the ninth! Eric Thames hit a triple a pitch after Grant Balfour thought he had a strikeout looking, and Kelly Johnson eventually knocked pinch-runner Rajai Davis (our old friend!) in with a single to right, giving the Blue Jays a 3-2 lead and letting Francisco Cordero, saving games in place of Sergio Santos, on the DL with shoulder inflammation, shut the door. Except the door wouldn't shut. Michael Taylor, who's hit the ball hard the last couple of games, led things off with a double, Jemile Weeks sacrificed him to third, and Cliff Pennington hit a hard grounder through the drawn-in infield to tie the game up again.

Then the real comedy began: Pennington stole second on a pitch that put Josh Reddick in a 3-0 count, so the Blue Jays put him on intentionally. Then Jeff Mathis let a pitch get past him (not sure how -- he just missed it), letting the runners move up to second and third and also taking the count to 3-0. Thus another intentional pass was issued. Then Brandon Inge happened:

Walk-off grandmother! A's win! A's win!

Hitter review

• Jemile Weeks, about whom I am going to answer a reader email on this very blog a bit later, had his fifth multi-hit game of the year. Given that the A's have played 30 games (and Weeks has played 27), you can see why he's not hitting .300 so far like he did last season.

  Weeks was aggressive early, swinging at the first pitch in each of his two PAs, hitting the ball hard both times, though he only got one hit out of it. He was later gifted a four-pitch walk by Romero, with the first three pitches elevated and not particularly close to the zone, and he smacked a line-drive double to left-center in the sixth on a fastball around his knees.

  Overall, it was an encouraging game for Weeks, who we've seen hit far too many high flies this year, and not as many line drives and grounders as you'd like someone with his skill-set to hit. He did still hit everything in the air in this game, though, so maybe we're not quite out of the woods yet.

• Cliff Pennington did hit two balls hard in the four trips in which he did not give himself up willingly (he had a sacrifice bunt in the first /chokes to death), though only one went for a hit, as his hard liner in the third inning was tracked down pretty easily by Eric Thames. Ball-in-play location. Sometimes you bite it, sometimes it sends you back to the bench pouting.

• Josh Reddick played center field for the first time this year as Yoenis Cespedes hurt his hand taking batting practice and normal backup CF Coco Crisp is already on the DL. Reddick wasn't really tested on defense, though he did have a ball that he briefly lost in the sky and was forced to make an awkward dive against the momentum of his body to catch. He did catch it, though, so all's well that ends well.

  I'm intrigued by the idea of Reddick in center because if he can handle it, it's looking more and more like Cespedes can't. It's early yet for the stats, even if you believe in them more than I do, but he just looks terrible going back on the ball. If Reddick can manage that, Cespedes in right would be a very natural fit. (I'm keeping Coco Crisp on the bench here in my perfect world.)

  Anyway, a two-walk game for Josh Reddick is always tremendous. The second walk, in the ninth inning, will, I guess, go into the books as intentional, but Reddick earned his 3-0 count all on his own before being given the fourth ball for free. More importantly, his full-count walk on a fastball from Jason Frasor that didn't miss by much was very un-Reddickian in a good way.

  Oh, and he homered, like I said above -- it was a 400-footer to right-center, and he now, in the upset of the early season, has the team lead in homers over Jonny Gomes and Yoenis Cespedes.

• Jonny Gomes, DHing, got himself three walks (one "intentional" in the same fashion as Josh Reddick's) on a total of thirteen pitches, which seems hard to do. I guess his team-leading .377 TAv scared the Blue Jays' pitchers off from giving him anything to hit. He did, after all, also knock a hard one-hop single through the 5-6 hole in the third on a fastball that caught way too much of the plate from Romero.

• Brandon Inge (I do these in batting lineup order. Let's count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 -- fifth spot in the batting order! Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah!) really had a weak game until the ninth, knocking two poor grounders, one for a double play, and striking out on one really good changeup and one o.k. one. But then Cordero gave him a terrible off-speed pitch:

  
  (Image from Brooks Baseball.)

  Whatever Brandon Inge is, he's still more or less a major-leaguer who can do more or less good things with a pitch at thigh height on the inner half traveling in the mid-80s without enough break to fool a giraffe. With just one out in the inning, Inge only need a sac fly, and he had an easy pitch with which to do that. That he knocked it out of the yard entirely was just gravy.

  Delicious delicious gravy.

• Seth Smith had a very anonymous day, winding up 1-4 with a line-drive single to center that just dropped in front of a diving Colby Rasmus. It would've been a much more exciting day had Rasmus's dive let the ball skip past him to center, but alas.

• Kurt Suzuki got destroyed by a Jose Bautista backswing, catching the bat right on the hand. Baseba'al has not been happy with Suzuki lately, apparently, as his hands and forearms have simply been punished. It was nice to see Bautista expressing some sympathy for the A's backstop. He has a really long backswing -- I wonder if he does this a lot?

  Oh yeah, at the plate, Suzuki got a walk and also hit a couple of fly-balls on pitches lower in the zone than you'd maybe like to see fly-balls hit on. He Suzuki'd, in other words.

• Daric Barton worked a walk and reached on a fielders choice + error. It was an uneventful day.

• Michael Taylor found himself in right field due to Cespedes's injury and looked horrific for his first three trips. Three strikeouts on ten pitches is more impressive than three walks on thirteen, I think, especially since he racked up five whiffs in those nine pitches. He must've been happy as a clam to see Ricky Romero out of the game, and he showed it with his leadoff double in the ninth against Cordero. (He still managed to whiff on Cordero's first pitch, though.)

Pitcher review

• Jarrod Parker pitched seven innings and cracked 100 pitches for the first time in the big leagues, and he got a quality start out of it, but I think there are negative ways to look at his outing as well:

  • Just five ground balls out of 21 balls put in play (counting the homer)
  • Five walks
  • 54% strike rate
  • Just five whiffs on 105 pitches
  • Leading to just three strikeouts

  I'm not going to call it a bad game in which all Parker did was get lucky, because some of those fly-balls were lazy flies to outfielders and pops to infielders. There were a number of hard-hit balls to defenders, though, including a line-drive that came out of Jemile Weeks's glove (he picked it up and threw Colby Rasmus out at first, luckily -- Rasmus had done that "oh, damn, he caught it" thing hitters do when they hit liners right to infielders) and some balls driven and lined to the outfield.

  The Blue Jays can hit -- they're tenth in the league in team TAv -- but I'd still prefer to see a different kind of performance from Parker the next time he goes.

• Ryan Cook came very close to giving up a bomb to Jose Bautista, but the Jays' right fielder just missed Cook's fastball and could only lift a very high fly to Seth Smith in left. Cook's pitches looked as nasty as ever, but going 1-0 on each of the three hitters he faced isn't a recipe for success generally.

• I don't even know what to think about Grant Balfour's performance. Here's his strike zone plot:

  
  (Image from Brooks Baseball.)

  The one marked with a six is the pitch that Balfour thought he had for strike three on Eric Thames. It's not clear to me that that's where pitches normally get called for strikes:

  
  (TruMedia)

  And his next pitch, the one that Thames hit for a triple, that wasn't a good pitch at all. To be fair, Seth Smith probably played a double into a triple by not using the wall well and getting tangled up in things where there's nothing to get tangled up in, but still: the ball was the ball, and Thames ripped it.

  Balfour was also gifted an out when Omar Vizquel hilariously bunted a 3-1 pitch in the air to Brandon Inge. The squeeze play was not on, so it was either a called safety squeeze or Vizquel took it on himself to try to bunt for a hit and bring Davis home. Either way, the execution was atrocious. Balfour still gave up the go-ahead run to Kelly Johnson, but that free out helped him keep the damage to just one run, setting up a situation for the A's where they could play for one and where John Farrell had to have his infield in, issue intentional walks, and so forth. A two-or-more-run lead could have changed the entire tenor of the bottom of the ninth purely through strategy (and theoretically through psychology as well, though let's definitely not get into that).

Manager review

I did not like Cliff Pennington sacrificing in the first inning. That's dead obvious. There's no reason for it. None. Let's just ... let's move on.

The sacrifice in the ninth, when Jemile Weeks bunted Michael Taylor from second to third with nobody out? That one is at least defensible. It's a one-run game, so run-expectancy tables go out the window a little bit. You play to stay alive, and putting a runner on third means he can score on a hit, a sacrifice fly, a wild pitch (and indeed, Taylor very nearly did score on a wild pitch as Cordero's first throw got a ways away from Jeff Mathis, but Taylor didn't read it immediately, so he stayed put), a balk, pretty much anything.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a run probability table anywhere (i.e. not "how many runs does a team typically score given this base-out state" but "how often does a team score at least once given this base-out state"). FanGraphs does have the win expectancy decreasing from that bunt, I should note, from 42.5% to just under 40%, so perhaps the bunt overall is not a good play. The idea, presumably, is that you've advanced the clock 1/3 of the way to the end of the game and also lowered the odds of scoring more than one run and thus ending the game right here on the spot rather than going to extras.

So overall, neither bunt was necessarily a good play, though the ninth-inning one, with a hitter like Jemile Weeks at the plate (both his overall hitting profile and his early-season struggles) raises the question for me whether any manager would have done something different. It brings us around, in other words, to the same question I struggled with a lot: if it's the wrong call, but it's a wrong call that everyone would make, is there any point in calling for Bob Melvin's head over it? If we're going to see managers make this play from now until the Mayan apocalypse, then what's the use getting worked up?

I've seen too many bloggers get burned by writing about transactions before they're actually final, leaving them with pointless posts about non-moves, but I'm going to break my own rule on this one, because it seems all but certain at this point: Coco Crisp will be hitting the Disabled List with a continued problem with his sinuses, and Michael Taylor will be called up to take his spot.

Why Michael Taylor and not Collin Cowgill, who was with the A's early in the year, before they needed a fifth starter? AAA performance probably has a lot to do with it. Cowgill has put up just a .244/.320/.267 line (50 PA) in Sacramento since being sent down there, while Taylor has been stroking the ball: .347/.390/.547 in just over 100 PA. He's also 6/8 on steals. The power has been all doubles so far, with 13 of those to just two homers, but he's making contact (12% strikeout rate) and likely hitting the ball hard (as seen by the doubles and a .378 BABIP).

I haven't heard any recent scouting reports on Taylor (though that's partially my fault -- I'm sure they're out there), so I can't tell you whether the early-season results that are closer to his Phillies performance than anything he's done since being traded to Oakland are real, are the result of a newfound approach or new physical attributes, or are just a fluke, 100 PA of good hitting that would have been lost in the noise of a season had they happened in June.

The major-league question is whether Taylor is up as a warm body or whether Billy Beane will ask Bob Melvin to give the A's a chance to really see what he can do. If it's the former, then I'd expect to see a four-headed 1B/LF/DH situation, with Kila Ka'aihue, Daric Barton, Jonny Gomes, and Seth Smith slotting in appropriate on any given day, with Michael Taylor mainly getting spot starts against lefties, as three of those four hitters are left-handed.

If, on the other hand, it's the latter, then Taylor could get two solid weeks in left field, starting every day against both LHP and RHP, with Smith and Gomes settling back into the DH platoon in which they started the year, and leaving first base as the only spot for Barton and Ka'aihue to fight it out.

I don't see any particular reason not to give Taylor this shot, though Bob Melvin is Bob Melvin, and he's apparently been given the latitude to make whatever decisions he thinks are appropriate to try to win as many baseball games as possible. If that means planting Michael Taylor on the bench as an extra outfielder / platoon starter until Crisp is ready to come back, then, the predictable hue and cry from the bloggerati aside, we'll just have to deal with that.

4-2 wins are the kind that sort of define A's baseball. (Also 4-1 losses.) The A's got an early run on a hard Seth Smith line single after a Yoenis Cespedes double and later, in the sixth inning, had a doubles party, hitting three two-baggers in four batters (the fourth was Kurt Suzuki, who took a pitch off his hand), resulting in three runs and a 4-0 lead that Brandon McCarthy, Ryan Cook, and Brian Fuentes made stand up.

Grant Balfour had the night off completely, so even when a save situation arose in the ninth, he stayed seated. The wisdom of such a course of action is yet another of those "who knows" plays -- Bob Melvin only has limited access to Balfour's psychology, but he's sure as hell got a lot more access than we do. If he thinks that Balfour needed a day (or two, given today's off-day) to clear his head and that such head-clearing would result in better pitching, well, then that's what Bob Melvin thinks.

Brandon McCarthy mostly looked good, despite three walks. So far this year, he's nearly doubled the percentage of batters faced that he's walked (3.6% to 6.6%), but some of that is probably that last year's rate was unsustainable. The 2012 walk rate is still quite acceptable. The more alarming numbers are the strikeouts (13.2%, exactly double the walks, after a ratio closer to 6:1 last year). The ground-balls, per Baseball Prospectus, are also down a tick (48% last year, 45% this year), but I'll wait and see on that one.

When you add all this up, we're still talking about an FIP in the mid-threes and an FRA (Baseball Prospectus's main pitcher rate stat -- glossary entry here) right around league-average, but McCarthy falling from "above to well-above average" to "average to above-average" isn't a terribly hopeful sign if you'd like to see him stay in Oakland a few more years.

That said, we're talking about 1/4 of the starts / innings / batters faced that we're expecting from him, so there's still plenty of time for him to turn it around. It's not quite a "small sample thus it's meaningless" situation, but it's hardly too late for something to re-click with McCarthy and his command.

Other notes:

• Yoenis Cespedes's double in the fourth inning was quite impressive because the pitch was a full-count slider that was away from him and not terribly high. It might've been a strike, but it looked to me like a good pitcher's pitch. Cespedes hit it off the Green Monster. Power sure comes in handy sometimes.

• Bless Bobby Valentine for asking Marlon Byrd to bunt in the fifth inning, with runners on first and second and nobody out. Two foul balls later, Brandon McCarthy had a free 0-2 count.

• Kila Ka'aihue swings hard. Clayton Mortensen victimized him on a changeup late in the game for a swinging strike, but Ka'aihue has been right on top of any mistake pitches pitchers have given him lately. His season OBP is up to .375, though he's still slugging under .400. His scoops at first have looked good, though he's not terribly mobile at the position. I don't know what to think between him and Daric Barton. Ka'aihue is obviously outperforming him right now, but it's 56 plate appearances each. (Weirdly.)

• Ryan Cook still doesn't seem to know where his ball is going all the time (the walk to Dustin Pedroia was not pretty, and David Ortiz's double that would have been a homer in many parks was on a pitch right down the middle that you'd never throw to any hitter, certainly not one of Ortiz's stature, literally and metaphorically), but when it's in the places that you generally want pitches, hitters seem to have a lot of trouble hitting it. The slider he threw to Adrian Gonzalez to strike him out with the bases loaded was a thing of beauty.

The A's designated Luke Hughes for assignment today, moving on to their next possibility at third base, the ex-Tiger Brandon Inge. Hughes didn't earn his release through poor play the way you might say that Josh Donaldson earned his demotion. Sure, Hughes was just one for thirteen and he struck out six times while making some poor defensive plays, but I think the A's knew what they were getting: a player with a .223/.289/.338 line in his only substantial major-league time (317 PAs in 2011), a player with just one good AAA season under his belt. A player, in other words, who you willingly cut the second a new shiny object comes around.

It's possible that Hughes could clear waivers and the A's could keep him in the organization, but do they even want him at AAA? Sacramento already features Josh Donaldson, Stephen Parker, and Wes Timmons. You could, I suppose, push Timmons to AA, because the third baseman of late at Midland has been Leonardo Gil, who is mashing in 31 PA so far, but he's 24 and has no history of hitting, so unless he's a defensive stud, he's probably nobody.

But Hughes is also nobody, so it's a question of which nobody you want to keep around, how much you value letting the organizational soldier (Gil, I mean) keep playing for your team, and so on.

As for the man replacing Hughes, meet Brandon Inge. The long-time Tiger was a legit defender once upon a time, posting FRAA seasons of +17, +24, and +19 in 2005-07, but he's seen his stats there decline of late, as you might expect from someone who cracked the age-30 barrier. He's put up about a +26 in 520 games from 2008 on. Despite that decline, and despite seeing action in just 102 games in 2011, FRAA had him ranked sixth in baseball among third baseman, essentially in a dead heat behind a top three of Jack Hannahan, Alberto Callaspo, and Placido Polanco. The acknowledged margin of error on FRAA is quite large, but I would say that the evidence suggests that Inge is still capable of pickin' it with some of the best in the league at the hot corner.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Inge has exactly one season in his career in which he was substantially above average with the bat, and that was all the way back in 2004 (his age-27 season, natch). As recently as 2009-10, he was basically league average, so it's possible that he could still have something left at the plate. PECOTA doesn't think so, giving him a weighted mean projection of just a .238 TAv, a projection well below that for any of the other four guys who have played / will play third for Oakland this year. To translate the difference between Brandon Inge and Eric Sogard, say, into runs: over 600 PA, Sogard projects to be ten runs better with the bat than Inge. It's possible that Inge is ten runs better on defense than Sogard over that same full season, but it's not like our own Harry Potter is Iron Hands at third.

The choice is only partially "Inge or Sogard," though, because the first question A's management faced was whether they'd rather have Inge or Hughes on the roster. Plugging Hughes into the previous paragraph narrows the offensive gap so far that Inge's defense almost certainly makes him a better overall player.

Thus, while it's hard to say that anything involving Brandon Inge is a good thing, this isn't a move worth getting overly worked up about, either. He's in the starting lineup tonight, batting toward the bottom of the card, and I'd dare say that a lefty pitcher who allows a lot of balls in play like Tom Milone is happier to see Inge in that spot that any of the rest of the options.