What A's DFA of Former Los Angeles Dodgers Prospect Tells Us

Somehow, the Athletics trade with the Atlanta Braves (and Milwaukee Brewers) for Sean Murphy keeps getting worse. A couple of weeks ago, Athletics on SI revisited that trade, and determined that the A's would have been better off just releasing Murphy than trading him, since the green and gold received negative WAR back in the deal.

The player that the A's needed to get in the trade was outfielder Esteury Ruiz, who went on to have a record-breaking rookie season in which he collected 67 stolen bases, the most by an American League rookie of all time.

That was 2023. Last season, Ruiz was injured for much of the campaign, and the A's were looking for him to either get on base more often, or find his power stroke. Neither really happened in his 29 games with the A's. That's why this spring he was optioned to Triple-A early on in camp, and on April 2 he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It's funny how one of the best teams in baseball can find room for Ruiz on their 40-man, but the A's couldn't. Granted, the Dodgers are set at so many positions, that they can afford someone that has one pretty good skill, while the A's are trying to find their nucleus for the future. Two years after being the centerpiece of the Murphy trade, Ruiz was no longer part of that nucleus.

In exchange for Ruiz, the A's received Carlos Duran, a hard-throwing righty that lacks command. On Sunday, the Athletics designated Duran for assignment. We'll have to wait to see if another team claims him, but his time in the A's system could be over before it really began.

It's not like he was tremendous for the A's in Triple-A Las Vegas, however. He made 15 appearances spanning 27 innings of work and held an 8.00 ERA thanks to 30 hits and 23 walks allowed. He also struck out 28 batters in that span.

As we noted last year, the job that A's GM David Forst faces isn't an easy one for a number of reasons, but dealing with the constraints put on him by ownership is certainly one of them. It's become fairly routine for the A's to trade away star players before having to pay them, and typically those types of deals result in big hauls of prospects for the team trading the star players.

So why has Forst and the A's front office whiffed so badly on their recent big trades? The simple answer is ownership. While some teams will trade star players, they're doing so because it's the right strategy to kick-start a rebuild. When the A's have typically made those trades, it's for financial reasons, meaning that Forst has to move these players when they're traded--and opposing GMs know this.

That is why the returns for Matt Chapman and Murphy in particular haven't panned out terribly well for the A's. The club did end up with Shea Langeliers and Joey Estes in the Matt Olson trade, but that's just two guys that are pretty decent in exchange for a five-time Gold Glove award winner and a couple of All-Stars with hardware of their own.

Those shackles are how the A's end up targeting Ruiz as the centerpiece of the Murphy deal, while trading him away for a reliever with command issues two years later--only to DFA that relief pitcher two months later.

For the A's to give up on Duran, who is still just 23, so quickly, it tells us that they're becoming more aggressive with the use of their 40-man roster spots as the team attempts to return to contention in the next year or two. They gave Duran a couple of months with their coaches in the minors, and even brought him up for a quick stint in the Majors, but ultimately decided to go a different direction.

There is also a chance that Duran sneaks through waivers and sticks with the A's organization without needing to be on the 40-man, which would provide him at least a few more months with the club to try and figure things out. That would be the best-case scenario. The worst-case would be Duran landing right back with the Dodgers, leaving the A's with nothing to show for the Ruiz (or Murphy) trade.