Who’s right QB for Niners? Our columnist will tell you

Hey, Dieter is a weekly wrap-up of the questions that I receive via email, Twitter, radio call-ins, and my morning rooms on the Locker Room app. Also, questions I receive in more analog ways.

What a concept!

Ifyouwantto get in on this action, you can email me at dkurtenbach@bayareanewsgroup.com, tweet me @dieter, text me at 510.479.0932, or yell at me on the street.

Hey Dieter, who are the 49ers going to pick? — Everyone and their mother

Your guess is as good as mine. And, again, my belief is that Justin Fields is the second-best quarterback prospect in his class. Talking to people I trust — who admit they’re just as much in the lurch as I am — I get the sense that they’re leaning that way. Perhaps that’s just people telling me what I want to hear.

The truth is that there are two good options for the 49ers — Fields and North Dakota State’s Trey Lance. I can buy into the Lance hype. He might have the highest ceiling of any quarterback in this draft. (I would argue that Fields boasts that as well, but again, it’s not my call.)

What I can’t jive with is Mac Jones. And, remember, I like Mac Jones as a prospect. I was the one advocating for him to go at No. 12 when the Niners had that pick. Of course, at No. 12, Fields and Lance are off the board.

If the pick is Jones — and it very well could be — I would have two big problems:

• Jones lacks the dualthreat nature that I believe to be requisite to success with this new generation of quarterbacks. Find me a quarterback who can win a Super Bowl who lacks without broken-play ability. OK, now find me one that won’t be 44 years old next year.

• The 49ers traded three first-round picks (two and a swap) for this No. 3 overall pick. This is a decade-defining trade. Is Mac Jones a quarterback who will have value in a decade? Obviously, I believe he will not be. Regardless, such a big move begs a ton of questions. Is he better than fellow pocket-passing quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo right now? If not, will he ever be? Congrats, Niners, you might have just traded three first-round picks for a backup.

Also, is Jones better than Kirk Cousins? If not, why wouldn’t the Niners have traded for Cousins (we know he’s available for a first-round pick)?

So, yeah, I’d take a quarterback who can run.

Hey Dieter, are the A’s forreal?—Bobviaemail

I can understand some skepticism about this team. I was fairly convinced by their lifeless performances at the beginning of the year that the team’s run of luck had run out, but this incredible bounce-back tells a more true story.

This team has three important things going for it:

• It can hit, led by MVP candidate Matt Olson

• It can field (boy, can this team flash the leather)

• It has solid if not excellent starting pitching

These were all things we expected from the A’s at the beginning of the season, so for them to look so lifeless in all three areas was surprising. Compound that with the bad vibes of an offseason

where far more talent left than arrived, it foretold problems.

But now that they have regressed to the mean, my only issue with the A’s — and the thing that I do think will hold them back from serious World Series contention — is their bullpen.

I wasn’t a big Joakim Soria fan, but Sergio Romo isn’t filling his shoes. I doubt he will. And those were size 7s. And while it’s nice that Lou Trivino is performing well after backto-back “meh” seasons (and that’s me being nice about 2019), I’m skeptical about him being this team’s closer.

The same goes for Jake Diekman. Those guys can be seventh and eighth inning guys, no doubt, but this squad is lacking a ninth-inning stopper and the kind of depth in the ’pen it boasted in recent years.

As someone who believes bullpens win divisions, it’s not an awesome position.

That said, so long as the starters continue to get the job done and the A’s avoid serious injury to their starting lineup, they should be one of the better teams in the American League.

Hey Dieter, are there too many strikeouts in baseball? — Merlin via email

First off, cool name. Second: Absolutely. Last season marked the first campaign where there wasn’t a new strikeouts per game record since 2007. Of course, the rate was the second-highest of all time.

This season, to date, baseball is going to shatter that record. We’re on pace for each team to make one-third of their outs per game via strikeout.

Strikeouts are an important part of baseball, but right now their influence on the sport writ large is overwhelming. Combine this with shifts taking away well-hit balls to places where there used to not be defenders and a steady increase in walks, and you have less of a sport and more of a rote exercise of power versus power.

I take solace in the fact that baseball is cyclical and it has proven that no trend is permanent, but I don’t care to wait to find out if that applies to these trends. The average MLB park is nearly three acres large. The plurality of the action should not be happening over a narrow stretch in the middle.

I think the solutions are simple: lower the mound from 10 inches to 7.5 and create uniform infield sizes around baseball while making rules that only two players can stand on each side of second base and infielders must stand on the dirt (or, in stadiums without full infield dirt, like Toronto, inside the infield lines).

And to make sure the pitchers don’t complain too much, we’re going to expand the strike zone. Technically, the strike zone should be the “midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the belt” but we’ve seen it effectively become the belt in recent years.

So now it’s the elbows to the knees, over the plate. Pretty simple. And I think it’ll encourage more swinging. And if you want to keep your elbows low and make your strike zone smaller, more power to you — but good luck catching up to a fastball.

A sport should be played on all of the space available to it, not only for television audiences but also for the folks paying big bucks to show up to the game.