For some players the coaching advice is “be more talented” or “send resumes to these IHOPs that are seeking weekend help”. But for others the talent is there, with room to grow in specific and essential areas.
Enter the Blogfather and his checklist of important specifics for key contributors to focus on as the Cactus League exits the “airing it out”/”getting my timing back” phase and enters the phase of turning weaknesses into former achilles heels.
Shea Langeliers
We know Langeliers can hit the ball hard and far (when he hits it) and his arm controls the running game as well as his pitchers allow. And it’s fair to say Shea is never going to hit .300 — there is some swing and miss in his game and he could stand to lay off a few more chase sliders, but his K rate has dropped a little each season and you can live with your primary catcher not being an offensive juggernaut.
What Langeliers should be focusing on all spring is his technique with regard to blocking balls in the dirt, as it’s an essential skill and also one for which the A’s catcher has all the athletic tools to succeed.
Most catchers are bulky and slow, but Langeliers is an exception. His sprint speed is good and he moves well in general. So it’s really not necessary for him to be so “lazy” with regard to moving laterally for errant pitches.
Langeliers tends to keep his body fixed when tracking errant pitches, stabbing at them with the glove without his body positioned to get in the way of pitches that are seeking the backstop.
One of my main gripes about Shea’s poor form is that he has the athleticism many catchers lack in order to block balls effectively. Langeliers should be working hardest on quickly moving laterally to match a dirt-bound pitch’s location, getting in front of as many as possible rather than relying on only his glove to serve as a barrier.
If Langeliers just improved this one aspect of his game from “terrible” to “average” he would be a significantly better starting catcher for the A’s — and it’s well within his grasp, so get to it!
Lawrence Butler
A Hall of Famer in spring training, Butler is at it again, opening up the Cactus League going 7 for 12 with 2 HRs. This time, though, it’s just “picking up where he left off” in the regular season when his second half put him amongst MLB’s elite.
Really the only thing that has gone wrong so far is that he told the Chronicle he is “a star,” conjuring up the angry ghost of Jemile Weeks’ career. Hopefully Butler can walk the walk better than Weeks did following his ill fated proclamation.
But by all accounts “Law” can really hit, as well as run — his career 18 SB without being caught to start his career is an ongoing franchise record. It seems increasingly likely the only question with Butler’s hitting is whether it will be good or great.
The area where he can improve is on defense, where manager Mark Kotsay notes Butler has good closing speed but is inconsistent in his initial jumps and reads. Same as with Langeliers there is no physical limitation to overcoming the weakness — nothing in Butler’s skill set profile suggests he is incapable of learning to read a ball better off the bat or to track fly balls more efficiently. He certainly has a terrific role model in his manager.
Butler can be a force just with his bat, but if he wants to be a true “star” he should be focusing on bringing his defense to above average in RF. It’s doable but he’s not yet there.
Zack Gelof
It’s no secret what plagued Gelof in his unsavory 2024 regression: he struck out a ton. (A ton used to be measured as 2,000 pounds but has been redefined to be 34.4% and can be termed “a Gelofian ton”.)
No doubt copious video has been viewed and endless conversations dedicated to the issue of bringing the K rate into the 20s where it can frightening fewer children. The question is how to achieve this important and worthy goal.
In Gelof’s struggles to make contact, two patterns emerge: whiffing on fastballs that are in the strike zone, and chasing the dreaded chase slider away. Swing mechanics are so subtle and tricky that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why a batter is late to a pitch he used to drive, and slider spin is easier to recognize in hindsight from your couch than in real time from the batter’s box.
But here’s a pretty reliable hunch. If a batter is missing high velocity strikes and is committing too early to sliders to confirm its location, most likely the swing is a touch too long.
So while it’s true Gelof does his best hitting when he thinks “right-center field,” it’s also true that first and foremost the swing itself has to work. Gelof’s first priority should be whatever slight tweak in his mechanics or timing can shorten the swing path just enough that he can see pitches a tick longer and still get to the fastball.
From there everything can fall into place, and 2023 showed us how high the ceiling is when Gelof is right. The mantra I recommend for Gelof this spring: “Speak softly and carry a short swing.”
Now I have some astute recommendations for some other players, such as advising Joey Estes to stop giving up so many booming homeruns, but I’ll pause here and let the community comment on these suggested priorities and others you may want to throw out for some other players.
And I have several accompanying ideas for Kotsay to improve his tactical decisions for 2025 but they will be in their own article coming later in spring training. Stay tuned…