Following an off season that saw many of the Oakland Athletics’ star players traded away for, as always, a host of prospects and players on the decline, the expectation for the A’s power was drastically diminished. Billy Beane traded a lineup filled with power hitters and replaced them with, what many analysts believed, a lineup with virtually no home run potential.
Then spring training came around and the narrative changed from the Oakland Athletics having zero power to having distributed power meaning that instead of four 30 home run hitters, the team now had 10 12+ home run hitters.