HARRY LEADER, EUGENE, OREGON

Just like in the animal kingdom, the Oakland A’s have a circle of life. They are a young team who grows into a contender and then they lose all their good players because they cannot afford them and their chances of making the World Series dies. Many A’s fans are aware of the tactic used by the organization’s front office called “Moneyball”. Many casual fans of baseball may know of this tactic from the 2011 film Moneyball starring Brad Pitt as A’s GM, Billy Beane. The tactic is fairly simple: the team cannot afford good players so they pay small amounts of money for older and developing players who can’t get larger contracts. The tactic does work for about five years and then it crashes and burns once the developed players ask for more money, and thus the cycle loops back to the start. 

You may be thinking that they have to do this in order to stay afloat in a small market, but I beg to differ. The A’s are not the only small market team in the league. The Kansas City Royals and the Tampa Bay Rays are in very small baseball markets and have around the same budget as the Athletics, but the big difference is that those teams have made it to the World Series at least once in the last seven years. 

Currently, the Oakland A’s rank 29th in payroll, only in front of the Cleveland Guardians according to spotrac.com. The payroll total for the A’s is 51 million dollars which is only 20 million dollars higher than their payroll in 2001. For reference, the New York Yankees payroll has increased by over 100 million dollars since 2001. Yet, in spite of the A’s 15 winning seasons since 2003, they have failed to raise their payroll by more than 20 million dollars. The main reason for this is simple and the numbers don’t lie: the A’s are cheap.

There have only been a few seasons in which the A’s shelled out more than 2 million dollars for a single player and that player was eventually traded or not signed the next season.  I believe the Oakland A’s can be one of the best teams in baseball if they were given a bigger budget, and that’s not a bold claim. The A’s have battled with the best of the best before in previous seasons like when they swept the 1990 Red Sox in the AL Championship and were crowned World Series Champions in 1989. 

While the A’s roster management strategy has not seen success, it is important to note that the Oakland A’s are one of the poorest teams in the league, and this plays a major role in their chance at having a successful season. When competing for top free agents in the league, the A’s lack the resources to outbid larger market teams such as the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. From the lack of big talent on the roster, the A’s struggle to bring fans into the stadium and generate revenue through ticket and jersey sales. This struggle can be seen as the  attendance for the A’s games during the 2022 season is very low with some games only reaching 2,300 ticket sales for a stadium that can host 46,500. These low numbers are directly related to the departure of star players Matt Olson and Matt Chapman who were key contributors to the A’s success.

So far the A’s are shooting for an over .500 season which isn’t horrible but it’s not where the team should be. Success for the A’s is not a distant memory, but it will be if the organization does not break the cycle of losing its star players.