Baseball keeps handing teams the same maddening question: which version of a player is the real one?
The A’s are living it right now with Lawrence Butler and Zack Gelof, and the Mariners are feeling it with Cal Raleigh. Raleigh followed a historic 60-HR season in 2025 by opening 2026 with a brutal first half, hitting .169/.271/.310.
Lately, though, he’s looked much more like the hitter from last year, homering at a 2025 clip and posting a .490 slugging percentage since the All-Star break. That kind of swing in performance is exactly what makes projecting the next season such a headache.
Butler is the A’s clearest example. After a huge second half in 2024, when he hit .300/.345/.553 with a 155 wRC+, Oakland locked him up with a 7-year, $65.5 million extension. Then came a rough 2025, when he slipped to a .234 average and a 91 wRC+ in a season that ended early because of knee surgery.
The start of 2026 was even uglier. For the first half, Butler was, by some measures, the worst player in MLB.
His average sat around .160 and his defense fell apart. Even when the batted-ball luck started turning against him less harshly later in the season, there still wasn’t much reason to think the old Butler would show back up.
Then came the rebound. Since the All-Star break, Butler is hitting .284/.366/.488, and he’s been one of the team’s most reliable at-bats. He’s been laying off close pitches off the plate even with two strikes, and he’s put together a career-best 11.9% BB rate for the season.
Gelof has followed a similar path. He burst onto the scene as a rising star in 2023, then slid into a disappointing 2024 and a disastrous 2025.
But now he’s back in the picture, producing 2.0 fWAR in just 93 games in 2026. The twist is that he’s doing it while offering above-average defense at 2B, 3B, LF, CF, and RF, which makes him look like a core piece again.
That’s the part teams have to wrestle with: the range of outcomes can feel absurdly wide. For some players, it looks like the line between All-Star and DFA candidate can disappear from one half-season to the next.
Henry Bolte fits that conversation too, though his volatility is a little more understandable because he’s 23 and still in his first run through the league. His wRC+ numbers month by month in his maiden voyage show the kind of extreme swings that can make evaluation so tricky.
And that’s where the A’s are stuck. With Tyler Soderstrom, Bolte, and soon Devin Taylor in the mix, they have to figure out who the real Lawrence Butler is. With Joshua Kuroda-Grauer, Jacob Wilson, and soon Leo De Vries coming into the picture, they also have to sort out who the real Zack Gelof is.
They’re not the only club trying to answer that question. The Mariners are doing the same with Raleigh, and plenty of other teams are trying to make sense of their own bi-polar players. In baseball, good luck pinning it down.
In Other News...
Bolte Gave The As A Rickey Henderson Feeling Again
A fast, opportunistic night at the ballpark gave the Athletics a reminder of what their speed can look like when it takes over a game. Against the Blue Jays, Bolte was in the middle of everything, swiping three bases in the first three innings and adding a solo home run to help fuel a 6-5 walk-off win that had a little bit of old-school As flavor to it.
The performance fit the kind of game Oakland rarely gets to revisit, with baserunning pressure showing up early and often. Boltes blend of power and speed stood out on its own, but the bigger picture was the way the As kept forcing the issue on the bases, creating an inning-by-inning urgency that has not shown up this dramatically in years. [Read more 🡒]
Athletics Can Still Make Things Miserable For A Desperate Blue Jays Team
The Athletics are long out of the playoff race, but they still have plenty of leverage over teams that are trying to survive it, and Toronto is one of them. Oaklands offense has struggled to put enough balls in play with authority, and the bullpen has been a work in progress, but there is still a little spoiler value left in a team that can make a contender work for everything. Mark Kotsay will have to navigate the series with that in mind, because even a club with little left to play for can alter the mood of a desperate October chase.
The opening game sets up as a test of whether Oakland can scratch together enough early offense to avoid falling behind quickly, especially with Jacob Lopez lined up against Dylan Cease. The As do not need to be perfect to matter here, only stubborn enough to keep Toronto uncomfortable and force the Blue Jays into a game they would rather not play. If Oakland can find a way to get a better start than it has in recent series openers, the rest of the matchup starts to look a lot less routine for a team still trying to hold onto its postseason position. [Read more 🡒]
As Lose Another Young Arm As Pitching Depth Gets Tested
The A's keep leaning on their next wave of arms, and the latest shuffle only deepens the pressure on a pitching staff already being asked to absorb plenty. Oakland is also juggling injuries on the offensive side, which has pushed the club further toward younger players and made every roster move feel a little more consequential than the last.
J.T. Ginn is the newest arm to hit the injured list, creating another opening for a team that has had little margin for error on the mound. To cover the spot, Oakland turned back to Triple-A Las Vegas for Jack Perkins and Seth Johnson, another reminder that the organization is still in evaluation mode even as it tries to stay afloat through the injury pileup. [Read more 🡒]