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Originally Posted by Paulie123
Hi all, first time poster here. I live in England and have only got into baseball the last year or two and discovered this wonderful game a few months ago. It's now the only game I play!
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Welcome to the end of your social life.
Good to see someone else from the UK!
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I'm currently playing as the Oakland A's.
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Well, there's your problem. ¬_¬ ¬_¬
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In the 2020 season we finished 94-68 but lost the AL wildcard game. With pretty much the same core squad we opened the 2021 season 56-44 and looked well set. But this previously decent team has now suddenly hit a wall, going 4-20 since then. We aren't getting battered but several guys in the lineup and bullpen have hit cold spells at the same time, and we've basically lost every close game during the run.
I would really appreciate any advice on how to deal with a team's sudden slump like that. When the losses started to stack up I made some roster moves to put some of the strugglers into the minors (it's past the trade deadline) but that hasn't helped and I'm wondering if shaking up the squad a bit was, if anything counterproductive. Is this just one of those things that happens to any team sometimes and I should have ridden the slump out with the guys that had previously done well for me? Should I have been more proactive at making roster moves or changing round the lineup?
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It's definitely one of those things that happens sometimes in baseball. Sometimes you'll be doing better than your team's talent level suggests via luck and poor opposition performances, but the very purpose of a long 162 game season is to make sure it catches up with you eventually.
It might just be the opposite however - an unlucky spell where things haven't been going right. Bloopers get caught instead of falling, home runs slip to the other side of the foul pole, well located pitches get dug out and hit for miles.
While replacing your 'cold' batters seems a good option, make sure your replacements are at least decent enough to make a fist of it in the majors. Replacing a good batter in a slump with a crap batter doesn't really fix much.
Also, as pgjocki said, check your Left/Right splits. If a guy is doing ok against lefties but sucking against righties (or vice versa), consider 'platooning' him with someone who plays the same position (putting him in the lineup against the pitchers he's good against, and someone else in the lineup for the other handed pitchers). Clearly you don't have room on the roster to do this for everyone (until September!) but you can do it for a few if there are some whose splits are very different.