It feels like the Athletics are on the precipice of something great. For all the difficulties the organization has had with its ugly breakup with the city of Oakland and the will-they-won’t-they future in Las Vegas, the actual on-field baseball product looks very promising. There’s a very strong core already established on the position player side of things and the team has done very well to lock up a lot of those young stars to long-term contract extensions.
The pitching staff is definitely a few
steps behind the position player core which is a big reason why they’re not projected to be in the AL Wild Card mix this year. Their temporary home in West Sacramento played a very significant role in boosting offense to the detriment of the home team’s pitchers in 2025 and it’ll continue to be a factor as long as they’re stuck in limbo there. The result is a pretty lopsided roster — it’s very possible the A’s will outslug all of their opponents, but they’ll be fighting an uphill battle with a pitching staff that’s allergic to preventing runs.
The contours of how the Athletics and Mariners lineup against each other are actually pretty interesting. The A’s hold the projected advantage at six of the nine field positions but the M’s are projected to earn 3.6 fWAR more in total from their position players. Such is the advantage of Seattle’s superstars at catcher and center field. And as you can see from each position’s projected fWAR, the Athletics don’t have that caliber of superstar at any position like the Mariners do — each position has an above average projection but no elite contributor. The pitching is the problem. It’s a long shot but if they manage to develop one of their back-end starters into a mid-rotation arm, it would go a long way towards pulling their pitching staff out of the depths of misery.
Just like their stadium situation, the A’s big league roster is in a state of limbo, not yet fully realized but making steady progress towards something tangible. If enough things break their way this year, they could sneak into the AL Wild Card picture, but they’re more likely to play the role of very dangerous spoiler for their rivals in the division. —JM
2026 FanGraphs Depth Charts projections: 78.7-83.3, 4th in AL West, 25.3% playoff odds
2026 PECOTA projections: 76.9-85.1, 4th in AL West, 10.8% playoff odds
If It All Goes Right
Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness. – Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Warner L. Thomas is (finally) alone in the elevator and all he can do is laugh.
At the silly West Sacramento peasants scuttling all over this place.
At the gaudy green and yellow pin affixed to the lapel of his light gray custom suit.
At the way the universe really does continue to cast him in an ever-radiant beam of sunlight.
Seven years ago, his predecessor signed a contract locking in 15 years of naming rights for this dinky little ballpark. The amount wasn’t made public and, frankly, Warner can’t be bothered to learn or care, but it was certainly less than a decade of his salary. Warner can’t be bothered with much of this pomp and circumstance, to be honest. When this place became Sutter Health Park, home of the Lake Rats or whatever the hell they were called, he was down in Louisiana, far too busy orchestrating a steady monopoly on healthcare in the state to think about a b-side city in California, let alone baseball.
But a year after he was hired as President and CEO, a baseball team – one of the real ones, not like the Lake Rats – announced they would be playing their games for the next three years at Sutter Health Park. It was an embarrassment of marketing and PR riches simply thrown into their laps. They’d paid for naming rights to a ballpark for babies, and now they were namechecked constantly on a national level.
Most audacious of all? The team had been good this year. Good enough that an October wind had caused goosebumps to break out uncomfortably across the top of his exposed head as he’d loitered importantly on the field before the game. Everyone around him there had looked young and vibrant, evidence of their vitality clearly displayed beneath garish yellow and green. Warren felt small alongside these men, which he did not like, and confused, which he liked even less. Why was someone talking about churning 50 tubs of butter? How are they yelling for someone named Rook, while also jabbering to a child, who looks nothing like the aforementioned Rook, about an AL Rookie Race? None of that matters to Warner, though. He has done what is required of him, and soon (he hopes; the sounds the elevator makes do not give him confidence) he will be sipping something dark and expensive in the indoor portion of a suite. He’ll be able to see the sell out crowd, the teeming masses of yellow, and green, and teal, but he won’t have to actually be near them. Just as he likes it.
What a time of hope and happiness, indeed. —IM
If It All Goes Wrong
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. – Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
To know a home is to leave it, a thing that can only be understood in its absence. Two years in, it starts to weigh on them. In visible ways: the running list in the group chat of visitor clubhouses, always cramped and small and smelly, that are nicer than their so-called home clubhouse. In less visible ways, too, ways that crawl under their skin and stay there: ATH the only line in the box score, a jarring contrast against the other teams known by their city names. What is a place without a name? What is a team?
It’s hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy, visiting other ballparks packed to the brim with hometown fans. They’d played angry that first year, putting an exclamation point on the fact that it might be a minor-league park but they were still major-league players. In the second year of this, with no promise of it ending soon, they’re still angry, still defiant, but also so tired. Tired of the subpar facilities, tired of the snide remarks, tired of living minor-league lives in West Sacramento. They’ve all worked hard, proven themselves, just as much as any other player in the league; they all know they deserve better. At the same time, they all know that doesn’t change anything, that the decision is made above their heads. They all tell themselves they’re fine with it, because what choice do they have?
Rooker, Butler, and Soderstrom started them off, signing extensions that promised a future, to themselves, to A’s fans everywhere, and to their teammates. Next off-season, Wilson and Kurtz follow. This is a core. This is a future. Everything else might be shifting sands around them but this foundation is ironclad.
The cracks appear in mid-May, during a brutal stretch, 19 games in 20 days. They don’t have to leave California, technically, but it feels like they’ve traveled all over. It starts with two interleague series, always weird, and they manage to sweep the Cardinals but then get demolished by the Giants in a sweep, their orange-and-black fans swarming all over Sutter Health Park. Then a four-game set at Anaheim, objectively a worse team than them, but they struggle towards a split, the big red A looming above like it’s taunting them. From there they go to San Diego, the ballpark jammed full for a weekend series, fans crowded into every available space soaking up the late spring sunshine, and this is what it should be like. They scrape out one win in the series and they’re lucky for that, a ninth-inning two-run go-ahead blast by Kurtz that feels like they could get back on track, at least until they’re steamrolled in Sunday’s finale. A sell-out crowd in San Diego watches the Padres dismantle the A’s pitching staff. They have to bring out a position player to pitch the bottom of the eighth. The San Diego fans are insufferable. The mood on the flight home is poisonous.
They go back home, but it doesn’t feel like it. Mariners fans descend on the ballpark for their first series of the year, teal just as prominent as kelly green in the stands. It’s like they’re back in Mesa at Hohokam. They lose the series, slip further back in the AL West. Then the Yankees come to town, with their media circus and their massive staff and their legions of fans who line the ballpark in stark black and white, chanting MVP every time Judge steps on the field. Soderstrom gets into it with a Judge fan in left field and gets fined. Then in the series finale, Wilson, facing a flamethrowing Yankees reliever with terrible command, takes an inside pitch off his wrist and they can all hear the sick crack of the bone breaking. McNeil, who’s standing in the on-deck circle, charges the mound and they’re brawling, an empty-the-bullpens, highlights-on-ESPN kind of brawl. They get swept.
Sometimes moments like these are turning points, bringing the team together to battle through adversity. That’s not what happens here. Everything has become too much. They have exceeded the angle of repose, the highest things can be piled up before they start to slip apart. When you don’t have a home base, everything is on shifting ground.
They finish fourth in the AL West. The timeline is adjusted on the ballpark, adjusted again. A lockout looms. A cold comfort: they don’t have anywhere to be locked out from. —KP
