A few key storylines to monitor for the first month of the season
The A’s have finished up their first week of the 2025 season, taking 2 of 4 from the Mariners in Seattle before getting swept by the Chicago Cubs on their home turf, Sutter Health Park in Sacramento. Still doesn’t feel right to type that.
For the team on the field, there are a few early questions that the early stages of the season should provide answers to. Such as…
- How does Sutter Health Park play with major leaguers?
The Oakland Coliseum was known as one of the most pitcher-friendly environments in all of professional baseball. Not only did the stadium exist close to the water and the marine layer that comes with it, the old home of the Athletics also had an insane amount of foul territory. Summer’s in Oakland could get warm here and there but in general, night games were freezing, not exactly conducive to a hitter. Add on top of that a playing field that ranked as one of the largest by square feet and two massive walls in left center and right center, and it’s easy to see why pitchers thrived in the Coliseum. How many reclamation projects succeeded with the help of a pitcher-friendly park?
Now that the team has changed locations to Sacramento the expectation was that things were about to do a 180. Sutter Health Park is much smaller than the Coliseum, but more than that it’s also in one of the hottest places in the country. The foul territory is more in line with what most parks have, giving hitters more chances to foul off a pitch and stay alive in their at-bats. We’ve seen how the ballpark played in recent years as minor league hitters have loved playing at the stadium. The PCL is known as an extremely hitter-friendly environment and a lot of that had to do with the Athletics’ new home.
We’ve already gotten our first taste of what playing in Sacramento will look like. Competing in a minor league ballpark for the first time, the Chicago Cubs looked right at home as they scored 35 runs and hit eight home runs over just three games. The A’s didn’t have quite that success but also hit four home runs themselves, including two from Brent Rooker. If this ballpark plays like how fans think it will, Rook could approach 50 home runs this year.
The early results look like the Athletics are going to be playing in a bandbox that rivals Yankee Stadium. And the summer heat hasn’t even arrived yet. Get ready to bring your gloves to the ballpark.
2. How does the team handle Zack Gelof’s absence?
The late-spring injury to second baseman Zack Gelof really threw a wrench in the A’s plans at the position. Entering his second-full season, expectations were much more tempered during camp compared to last year. It feels like a long time ago but it was just a season and a half ago that Gelof took the team by storm and was the team’s best hitter during the final months of the 2023 campaign, slashing .267/.337/.503 with 14 long balls and 14 stolen bases in just 69 games. If you extrapolate that over an entire season Gelof would have been a 30/30 player as a rookie.
Jumping onto the scene like that, A’s fans were hoping they’d found a franchise cornerstone at one of the more important positions on the field. Instead Gelof suffered from the dreaded sophomore slump, appearing much more like a rookie than the budding star that he looked like six months prior. He still put up 17 home runs and chipped in 24 stolen bases but he also led the league in strikeouts with 188 K’s while walking only 38 times. The then-24-year old’s slash line dropped all the way to .211/.270/.362, grading out as 18% worse than the league average at his position. Pitchers clearly figured the right-handed Gelof out.
Even with that sudden drop in performance, the team entered the offseason with zero plans to replace the young second baseman. The club did sign veteran infielder Luis Urias but mainly more so to act as the backup shortstop to Jacob Wilson. Well with the injury to Gelof many began to expect Urias to be the everyday second baseman with Gelof on the shelf. After all, he was the most experienced player at the position when the injury occurred. And the other options in camp were, let’s say, a bit on the younger side.
Well in another surprise that baseball continues to provide, the club has turned away from Urias as the starter and instead elected to give former 1st-round pick Max Muncy plenty of run at the keystone. And it doesn’t seem to be a quick experiment either as Muncy has played in all seven games up to this point. The early results from Muncy haven’t been there as he’s hitting just .130 to start his big league career, but the team is giving him lots of playing time over Urias. In fact, the only other player to start a game this season at second base instead of Muncy was Max Schuemann.
How the team divides up playing time at second base will be worth monitoring if Muncy doesn’t start hitting soon. With Urias as the backup shortstop the club may turn to someone like Schuemann instead if they think Muncy still isn’t ready for The Show. Gelof can’t come back soon enough.
3. Will Joey Estes earn a permanent rotation job?
There was a surprise to many A’s fans when they announced the season-opening starting rotation. Since the coaching staff was talking up right-hander Osvaldo Bido all spring, it became more and more obvious that he would win a job in the starting rotation. The surprise came from another pitcher however when the club announced that Joey Estes would be the #5 starter to open the season, sending last year’s Rule 5 pick Mitch Spence to the bullpen to serve in a long relief role.
Well we are officially one start into the Estes 2025 experiment and the results from his first test did not go well at all. Estes got the first game for the Athletics’ Sacramento home opener on Monday evening against the Cubbies and got hammered. Chicago scored four times in the very first inning and the 23-year old would ultimately yield six earned runs, including three long balls.
Maybe it was first start of the season nerves, and maybe it was also pitching in a minor league ballpark again. Maybe starting the first game in Sacramento felt like a big deal to him. The club won’t yank the righty immediately after a blowup outing like Monday’s, but the club would surely like to see improvement next time out. He’s lined up to start next against the Rockies on Sunday in Colorado, which can be just as hard to pitch in as Sutter Health Park. That’ll likely be followed by a game against the New York Mets, who have star power up and down their lineup. So how long of a leash does Estes get if another young arm like JT Ginn is thriving down in the minors? Are the A’s determined to find out one way or another if Estes has what it takes? Discuss below!