Graney: Is Las Vegas ready for the 112-loss A’s?
It is over. Thankfully. A terrible season from the Oakland Athletics has come to an end.
The A’s finished with a 50-112 record, a stout 40 games behind American League West champion Houston. Heck, the A’s finished 23 behind the Angels for fourth place. Twenty-three.
It’s the most losses for the A’s since moving to Oakland in 1968 and there wasn’t much good, no matter in which area of the field you glanced.
Ready for Major League Baseball, Las Vegas?
Rob Manfred is a commissioner who hopes owners will vote on the relocation of the A’s at their meetings Nov. 14-16 in Texas. Already, the Nevada State Legislature has approved providing up to $380 million in public financing for a proposed ballpark on the Tropicana hotel site.
Things are moving fast off the field.
Not so much on it.
Tearing things down
Think about it: This is an organization that made the playoffs as recently as 2020, losing in a divisional round of a shortened season. It made the playoffs in 2018 and ’19 as well.
But it has gone 110-214 the past two years, in large part due to the A’s jettisoning many of the best players who helped lead the team to those postseason appearances. They’ve gone (really) young.
Baseball teams that lose this much historically don’t turn things around quickly. This isn’t the NBA, where a move or two can raise a club’s standing dramatically. These things take time in baseball.
You see, this is what the A’s do — tear things down, rebuild into a playoff team, fall short and tear things down again. This current reality is the tearing things down in the most massive of manners.
The A’s were dead last in batting average and runs this season. They were second-to-last in earned-run average.
In all, 24 players at one time or another were promoted from the Triple-A Aviators to Oakland, defining the big club’s youth movement even more. There were a total of 261 transactions between the teams.
“We need to be patient in certain things,” Mark Kotsay said on his manager’s show via A’s Cast Live. “I understand the process that we need to go through to get to be successful with this group, yet when there’s mistakes made that we should have learned from, that’s when I lose my patience.”
He likely lost it a lot this season.
It’s a long and taxing and difficult rebuilding process, but one championed by owner John Fisher, despite his frugal ways. The A’s need development to come in waves. They need promising pitching prospects to quickly mature. They need some of the Aviators’ better position players to also take the leap and succeed.
This is where the A’s sit for next season, a team void of star power and merely hoping that with time comes experience and better production.
Future is cloudy
It’s impossible to forecast how things might change in the coming years, how such a team might look when it would arrive to Las Vegas and that new ballpark. It’s impossible to forecast because of Fisher and his refusal to spend on the product.
This part hasn’t changed: Be it in Oakland or Las Vegas, until a time comes when the owner stops having baseball’s lowest payroll (it was around $60 million this season), believing a consistent winner can be built is folly.
Fisher’s company line has been that with a new ballpark will come new revenues, which will mean more money spent toward players and improving the on-field product. Sorry. Believe-it-when-we-see-it.
“There’s a quote on top of the wall saying champions aren’t born, they’re built and they can use defeat to learn more than what they would when things are easy,” Kotsay said.
The A’s know all about defeat. Record setting, even.
Champions, though, that’s another matter entirely.
Ed Graney, a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing, can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com. He can be heard on “The Press Box,” ESPN Radio 100.9 FM and 1100 AM, from 7 to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on X.