Once upon a time, about a billion years ago, life was simple. Everybody lived in the oceans, and everybody had only one cell each. This was quite a fair and egalitarian way to live. Nobody really had significantly more resources than anyone else. Every individual just floated around, and took whatever it needed and could find, and just let the rest be.

This golden equilibrium was how life did business for a couple billion years. There was no such thing as jealousy or envy, and as a result, everyone lived pretty happy lives.

Then, one day about 800 million years ago, a pair of single-celled organisms merged to become the first multi-cellular organism in the history of the earth.

At first, these multi-celled creatures were just kind of like big blobs of single-celled organisms, and didn’t cause a lot of problems. Everybody was still kind of doing the same job as everyone else, even if they had organized themselves into a limited corporation of sorts. Most other single-celled creatures just figured they were harmless weirdos hanging out together, and ignored them.

Image credit to Julian Frost via Creative Commons License

They could not have been more wrong. For once the multi-cell genie was out of the bottle, Pandora’s box could not be closed, and the dominos began to fall. This simple change may have seemed innocent at first, but little did the single-cells know that they were the first creatures on earth to fall victim to the innovator’s dilemma. The single-celled creatures were far too invested in the status quo to change, and consequently ignored the multi-cellulars as irrelevant, and did not realize until it was too late that the game had suddenly shifted.

Continue…

Ok, look, I told y’all with the Cespedes trade that you can’t analyze an A’s trade of a position player without breaking it down by platoon splits across the whole lineup. But did any of y’all listen to me? No. Y’all are still trying to analyze Donaldson vs Lawrie as if they are single players on single teams instead of two players on two platoon teams with other players on the team. So stop that.

Now look, I’m gonna make this simple. I’m going to assume that both Lawrie and Donaldson will be equally healthy, and they’re roughly comparable defensive players. They may not be, but this is a quick and dirty exercise here, so bear with me. And I’m just going to use OPS, so I don’t have to make this story as long as the other Josh Donaldson story that’s coming later today.

Let us begin.

* * *

OPS 2014/career, Josh Donaldson vs. RHP: .727 / .744
OPS 2014/career, Josh Donaldson vs. LHP: 1.007 / .953

OPS, 2014/career Brett Lawrie vs RHP: .760 / .760
OPS, 2014/career Brett Lawrie vs LHP: .595 / .713

See, Brett Lawrie is actually better than Josh Donaldson against RHPs. The difference is that Donaldson crushes LHPs, and Lawrie for whatever reason actually is worse against LHPs than RHPs. He was particularly bad in 2014. I do not know why.

So for the platoon team that plays 2/3s of the A’s games, the one against RHPs, the A’s lineup actually just got better.

* * *

So now we need to fix the 1/3 of the A’s games against LHPs.

Last year, one of the A’s primary 1B/DHs against LHPs was Alberto Callaspo. He was awful. The A’s have signed Billy Butler to replace him.

OPS 2014/career, Alberto Callaspo vs LHP: .518 / .729
OPS 2014/career, Billy Butler vs LHP: .847 / .912

So the A’s are losing about .400 OPS points by downgrading from Donaldson to Lawrie vs LHPs, but they get back about .300 of those OPS points by upgrading from Callaspo to Butler.

So now all Billy Beane has to do find that extra .100 points of OPS against LHPs, and the math works. Maybe it will come just out of the fact that most players don’t have reverse splits last their whole careers, and Lawrie will actually bounce back and hit better against LHPs in the future. If so, QED.

* * *

Disclaimer: the above analysis does not mean I like this trade. I do not like this trade. That (much longer) explanation is here.