Shohei Ohtani Signing Highlights A's Inaction
Shohei Ohtani has found a new home with the Los Angeles Dodgers on a ten year, $700 million deal. Baseball's biggest attraction is headed to L.A. But it's Oakland A's owner John Fisher that is planning to relocate his team to Las Vegas, a city filled with attractions, and Dodgers fans, who has yet to have his team mentioned in a rumor this off-season.
The A's have talked to free agents, but they have all had the same question: Where will the team be playing in 2025 and beyond? It's pretty difficult to sell someone on playing for your team when you can't answer a pretty basic question. So the A's haven't made any significant moves.
Sure, they made a selection in the Rule 5 Draft, adding starter Mitch Spence from the New York Yankees system, as well as bringing in Abraham Toro and Miguel Andújar, but fans in Vegas that are awaiting the team were told things would be different. Spence + Toro + Andújar does not equal Ohtani.
Maybe they're waiting until the team gets closer to Las Vegas.
If that's the case, then the A's shouldn't wait too long. Over the course of the summer and into the off-season, the team's brand has gone significantly downhill. Try finding positive news on the A's anywhere on the internet. It doesn't exist outside of the Review-Journal. It's going to take years of proving to people that all those nasty things that have been written about the team aren't true.
Instead, in the first free agency period since the team announced their plans to move to Nevada, it has been business as usual, by which I mean there has been no business conducted.
The formula for opening up a new ballpark tends to consist of building a team up to be at their peak when the facility opens. The A's current roster lost 112 games in 2023 and thus far they are largely standing pat. The farm system is ranked 26th in baseball, so there isn't a lot of help on the way either.
The team has some talent on the roster, but not the kind of surplus you need to rebuild a roster through trades. They don't have the farm system to go acquire big-name talents. They just dropped three spots in the Draft lottery to the fourth pick in the 2024 Draft and can pick no higher than 10th in 2025 after back-to-back lottery picks. Fisher is still unwilling to spend in free agency.
So how exactly is this team supposed to turn things around for their proposed Vegas debut?
As things sit right now, the A's projected payroll for 2024 sits at $40 million, or $43 per GM David Forst. The luxury tax payroll is just under $60 million. While Ohtani's contract will be largely deferred, the AAV of that deal is $70 million. How much he gets per year has not been disclosed just yet, but we'll find out in due time.
The point here is that the Dodgers, a team that won 100 games in 2023 and made the playoffs for the 11th straight season, just handed out the biggest sports contract ever. Meanwhile, the A's entire team payroll sits below what that one player would make next season without the deferrals.
One team is writing checks, while the other is just collecting them.