MESA, Ariz. -It doesn’t take much advanced data mining to uncover a major reason Oakland’s 2016 season went wrong. The team was last in the league in runs, and there was an obvious reason for that: The A’s didn’t get men on base.
Oakland - the “Moneyball” team, with on-base percentage presumably embedded in their DNA - was at the very bottom of the league, with a .304 on-base percentage, the lowest by an A’s team since 1979’s .302 mark. Failing to put runners on is not a recipe for success: that 1979 club lost 108 games. And last year the A’s finished in last place in the AL West for the second year in a row.