Recalibrating Oakland A's playing time with Coco Crisp healthy and Billy Butler a platoon DH

Twenty games gone, and the Oakland Athletics have made some surprising playing time decisions in this first month.

Right after the Chris Coghlan trade at the start of spring training, I came up with an educated guess of how Oakland's playing time situation could shake out, given a few assumptions based on public statements from the front office. Let's review how things look now that we're 20 games into the season.

I've come up with a simple model that assigns the remaining plate appearances this year based on the proportion of plate appearances each player has gotten against each handedness pitcher, with the assumption that the A's will face a left-hander in 30 percent of plate appearances for the rest of the season, and compared it to my spring training guess (which I've proportionally drawn down from an assumption of 6300 plate appearances to 6100, which is about the AL team average):

You can see some major differences, let's break those out into a separate chart showing the difference between my preseason projection and where things are headed so far with just the 13 players that remained after Andrew Lambo was optioned to Triple-A:

There are some caveats.