What if the Norfolk Tides replaced the Oakland A's?
Will Hailey uses Out of the Park Baseball 25 to simulate a season with the Tides in MLB and the A's in AAA
In case you missed it, last week on No Dowd About It! we discussed early season overreactions. On Baseball Twitter, one of the most popular overreactions to week one of the Major League season was that the red-hot Norfolk Tides are better than the Oakland-Sacramento-Las Vegas Athletics. The Tides, led by since called up Jackson Holliday and a host of top 100 prospects, won seven of their first eight games while averaging over 12 runs a game. This included a 26-11 rout of the Charlotte Knights where the top five Tides hitters combined to go for 20 for 32 with six home runs and 23 RBIs. Truist Field in Charlotte is one of the most hitter-friendly parks in professional baseball, but friendly cannot account for 26 runs. Simply put, this team RAKES.
Photo Credit: Billy Shuerman/The Virginian-Pilot
The A’s, however, do not. They are off to a pedestrian start at the bottom of the AL West with very little positive on the horizon. The A’s won just 50 games last year after a similarly abysmal 60 wins in 2022 which are leading many to wonder, “Are the A’s better than a AAA baseball team?” Usually, we would be left to ponder and argue over how this Tides team would fare in MLB and how the A’s would do in AAA, but luckily for our readers we have the answer!
Jon Dowd’s Burner has one rule: No Free Ads. But a wise man once said, “That’s the rule you’ll have to break to know the truth.” To know the truth about the Tides, we needed Out of the Park Baseball 25. Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) has spent 25 years perfecting the best strategic sports game in the world and it only gets better every year. Moving a few teams around and running a season-long simulation like this is just the tip of the iceberg for what you can do with OOTP and we highly recommend you explore the endless possibilities of OOTP (Hi OOTP please sponsor us).
For this experiment, we moved the Norfolk Tides to the AL West and moved the Oakland A’s to the Eastern Division of the International League in AAA. To control a few variables we turned off injuries and any in-season transactions for both leagues. We simulated the 2024 season, and here are the results:
Norfolk Tides
We’ll start with the Tides who managed an AL-worst 60-102 record. Luckily for the Tides, the Rockies matched their pace with 60 wins and the Nats were the worst team in baseball with 56 wins. Pitching and hitting were equally rough for the Tides. They finished 27th in ERA, tied for last in WHIP, and were second to last in strikeouts while leading the league in walks. The Pirates were the only worse offense with Norfolk only edging them slightly in OPS. The Tides had the third fewest home runs and second most strikeouts, but did manage to end the season in the top half of the majors in walks.
Jackson Holliday, Heston Kjerstad, and Coby Mayo were the lone bright spots on the roster. Holliday was terrific, finishing the season with a .303/.391/.453 slash line and 4.4 WAR. Unfortunately, his 18 homers and 22 steals were not enough to surpass 5-WAR Evan Carter in Rookie of the Year voting. Kjerstad slashed .291/.347/.455 with nearly 4 WAR himself, and Coby Mayo went yard 30 times on his way to a .772 OPS and 109 OPS+. Kyle Stowers and Connor Norby were disappointed in their rookie campaigns with an OPS of .700 and .643, respectively, and combined for just .6 WAR.
Oakland Athletics
If you expected a major league baseball team to dominate in AAA, you would be correct. Oakland went 94-56 in the International League, nine games better than the next best team. The offense ranked top five in the league in nearly every category, led by J.D. Davis, Brent Rooker, and Ryan Noda, who all had an OPS over .900. Esteury Ruiz was not far behind, hitting .304/.405/.476 with 79 steals. The pitching is what carried the A’s, however, as Paul Blackburn and company led Oakland to a league-leading ERA and WHIP and the third-best K%-BB%. Only one pitcher was not a positive contributor by ERA+, and Blackburn, Alex Wood, and Ross Stripling all produced 4+ WAR.
OOTP projects the A’s to win 64 games this year so you could say the Tides are the worse team after just 60 wins in the simulation, but that is 10 more wins than last year’s A’s. So what would happen if the two teams just played each other for 162 games? I’m glad you asked. The Tides only won 41% of the games, and Oakland won a seven-game playoff series as well. Out of the Park Baseball seems to think the A’s are far superior to this Tides team, but that Norfolk would not look out of place in the Bigs. What do you think?
-WH
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