A's Draft Situation Could Have Been Avoided

After 30 MLB owners voted unanimously to approve the Oakland A's relocation to Las Vegas, it was honestly a little surprising that there wasn't some funny business to get the team a top draft pick in the 2024 Draft, setting them up for their proposed move. Nobody would have batted an eye with the A's going 50-112 during the 2023 season, the worst record in baseball. Yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Oakland now holds the #4 pick in next year's Draft. 

After the lottery process, A's GM David Forst told Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle, "yeah the old system was better." This, after the A's dropped three spots for the '24 Draft due to the newly implemented lottery, and fell from pick number two to six for the '23 Draft. With back-to-back lottery selections, the A's will now pick no higher than 10^th in the 2025 Draft thanks to the team's reliance on revenue sharing. 

The new system is functioning exactly as it's supposed to. The goal is to get tanking out of the game in order to land the top pick in the Draft. The Cleveland Guardians, who held a 2% chance at landing the top pick ended up with the first selection for 2024. 

The lottery agreement is part of the new CBA, which led to the owner's lockout after the 2021 season. The A's decided to trade away Sean Manaea, Matt Chapman, Chris Bassitt, and Matt Olson before the 2022 season, Frankie Montas during the campaign, and then Cole Irvin and A.J. Puk ahead of the 2023 season. What the new system is doing is making is so that the A's can't operate the way they have under John Fisher's ownership, i.e. not spend money on any facet of the game. 

Here's the thing though: This could have all been avoided, or at the very least delayed. The A's didn't have to trade away Olson, Chapman, Montas, Irvin, or Puk when they did. They still had multiple years of team control on each, and it's not like the return packages in any of those trades was astounding. With the new CBA, Oakland should have been in wait-and-see mode to get a look at the new lottery system, especially with the club already on parallel paths to Las Vegas. The team could have tested the waters and made adjustments to what they were looking for in return packages for the trades they'd inevitably make. 

They could have gone for younger talent with more upside and still been bad, but instead they stockpiled Double-A pitchers with command issues and they just haven't worked out. They also didn't have to trade both Olson and Murphy to the Braves. With Freddie Freeman hitting free agency when he did, adding Olson before the '22 season made sense for Atlanta. They likely would have gone a different route to fill their own need if Olson wasn't available at that time, and the A's would have had a different return for the star first baseman. 

Instead, ownership demanded that these players be moved immediately to save money, went full Major League, jacking up ticket prices and limiting their own revenue streams, and now the team has been awful for two seasons, losing 100+ in each, and the Draft isn't going to be offering them any salvation. Free agents currently don't want to sign multi-year deals with so much in flux with the franchise. The farm system still isn't ranked highly, despite trading away numerous All Stars. 

There is no path back to contention as the A's inch closer to Las Vegas. The timeline for contention is the 2028 season when the new ballpark would open, which is still many years away. There is no guarantee that the group of players that is currently on the big-league roster will still be on the team once the move happens, given that even the players that debuted in 2023 will be ready for arbitration by the time '28 rolls around.

That's when the A's typically like to make their moves, trade away their stars, and build for the future. John Fisher is not only going to have to come up with more than a billion dollars for a new ballpark, but he's going to have to invest in this roster at some point soon in order to have a winner on the field by the time he hopes to arrive in Nevada. 

If he doesn't, there's a pretty good chance that his move to Vegas will be an absolute dud. 

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