This Draft Twist Could Give the A’s a Huge 2026 Advantage

The Athletics have had a big turnaround this season, and with a good final series of the season, they could end up fairly close to the .500 mark, which has been the team's goal. A 1-20 stretch from May and into June tanked their season, so for the club to be sitting with a 75-84 record with three to play is pretty impressive.

With the season dwindling down, we have a decent idea of where teams will finish, which means we can look ahead to the MLB Draft just a little bit. At 75-84, the A's are tied with both the Atlanta Braves and Baltimore Orioles, two clubs that the A's won the season series against.

But below this trio sit the Colorado Rockies (43-116), Chicago White Sox (58-101), Washington Nationals (65-94), Pittsburgh Pirates (69-90), Minnesota Twins (69-90), and the Los Angeles Angels (71-88).

The Wrinkle

Three of those teams—the Angels, Rockies, and Nationals—held three of the first four picks in the 2025 MLB Draft, and per the draft rules, a team that pays into revenue sharing cannot pick in the lottery (picks 1-6) in consecutive seasons. The highest they'll be able to select is the No. 10 pick, which will go to the Rockies, followed by the White Sox at 11, and the Angels at 12.

That means that the depending on how the rest of the season goes, the A's could have as high as a 9.24% chance of winning the first overall pick, which isn't terrible by any means. Especially when you consider how far they've come this season, and where they expect to be next season.

If the three teams were added in and the draft lottery odds were just being done straight up, the A's, depending on where they end up at the end of the weekend, would finish with somewhere between a 2.7% and 5.5% chance of the top pick.

While this bit of fortune doesn't guarantee that the Athletics will be picking at the top of the draft, it should ensure that they'll be in a good spot after the lottery. The A's have had plenty of success picking in the lottery in recent seasons, selecting Jacob Wilson sixth overall in 2023, and then Nick Kurtz with the fourth pick in 2024.

Kurtz is expected to run away as the unanimous AL Rookie of the Year, while Wilson could finish right behind him. The top of the 2026 draft class appears to be shortstop heavy heading into the college season, though things can change quite a bit in the coming months.

If the A's can end up with a top-3 pick—something they were unable to secure when they finished with the second-worst record in baseball in 2022 and the worst in 2023—that would be a huge stroke of good fortune, and it may not have been possible without the Angels, Nationals, and Rockies.