It’s Been A Bummer Summer In Sacramento

Quick programming note: I’m working on a very special bonus Five Things that would normally run in this slot, but as with most bonus things, it’s taking a bit longer than expected. Look for it next week, along with a regular Five Things. In the meantime, join me in puzzling over what’s gotten into the A’s.

In 2023, the Oakland A’s were putrid. They won only 50 games, got outscored by 339 runs, and generally looked like the worst team in baseball. But over the next two years, sandwiched around a move to Sacramento, they figured things out. In 2024, they improved by 19 games. In 2025, they improved again, to a 76-86 record. Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom, Brent Rooker, and Jacob Wilson either broke in or broke out in that span. Coming into 2026, the A’s weren’t favorites in the AL West, but they were trendy playoff picks, with various market and model estimates spitting out projections between 75 and 80 wins.

Yeah, about that. The American League is about as bad as it’s ever been this year, and the AL West is particularly poor. Eighty-two wins might be enough to take the division. But the A’s aren’t part of the race. They’re 54-86, a mere game ahead of the Angels for the worst record in baseball. They’ve been outscored by 194 runs, 54 runs clear of the Rockies in second-to-last place. I had to investigate what went down – both because rubbernecking is fun, and because I want to figure out what I should think about the A’s for 2027.

The obvious place to start is the offense. Last season saw four different Athletics eclipse 3.0 WAR on the batting side – Kurtz and Wilson had standout rookie seasons while Langeliers and Soderstrom both broke out to establish new career highs. Throw in Rooker and Lawrence Butler as offensive building blocks, mix in a blazing-fast center fielder (your choice of Denzel Clarke or Henry Bolte), and the bones of an upper echelon offense were clearly there. Even if you count the two center field options as only one position filled, that’s seven spots spoken for. The A’s traded for Jeff McNeil to fill an eighth spot. Their plan was surely to score a boatload of runs – a great plan in the snug confines of Sutter Health Park.

Here’s how that has gone:

Three of the nine have roughly met expectations. Bolte — and I’m perhaps being generous to the A’s by counting him among their core given that we didn’t project him for much playing time before the season — has been the only positive surprise. Meanwhile, five hitters the A’s were counting on have been far worse than expected. And so that’s what went wrong, right?

Nope! I included Bolte, who isn’t a strong spiritual fit in that group, as a teaser for a group of contributors who have kept the Sacramento offense from completely sputtering. Bolte has lifted the floor in center. Zack Gelof has bounced back from two nightmarish years to post a 110 wRC+. Carlos Cortes has been league average offensively, better than we expected. Alika Williams, an in-season acquisition from the Pirates, has chipped in with a 97 wRC+ over 175 plate appearances. The A’s scored 4.52 runs per game last year. They’re scoring 4.36 runs per game this year, hardly a disastrous fall.

If you wanted to, you could nitpick my framing. I covered how the hitters have done at the plate, but not how they’ve done in the field, and the Athletics have struggled to turn batted balls into outs. Per DRS, they’re the fourth-worst defensive team in the majors. Per FRV, they’re second worst. Truthfully, though, the defense was already bad. They were fifth worst in DRS and ninth worst in FRV in 2025. The outfield defense has gotten worse – Soderstrom and Butler are having down defensive years and Bolte, while solid, can’t hold a candle to Clarke in center. But on the infield, the opposite has happened. Wilson was either a little (DRS) or a lot (FRV) better than he was last year before he went down with a season-ending injury. Kurtz looked more comfortable at first base before he suffered a season-ending injury. And oh boy, have season-ending injuries been in style this summer.

Believe it or not, the A’s have actually scored more runs per game since Kurtz hit the IL. Even more surprisingly, Langeliers has been out for the entire stretch, too. Soderstrom and Wilson are both out for the year after hitting the IL halfway through August. Kurtz has definitively been their best hitter this year, and his absence has meant a great deal of McNeil playing first base. Langeliers was having a second straight great season; his replacements have been just fine. Soderstrom and Wilson are valuable cogs. But the runs have kept coming. Baseball is hard to predict sometimes.

On the other hand, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball since Kurtz’s departure. They’ve gone 9-19, a half-game ahead of the woeful Rockies. They’ve given up nearly six runs per game in that stretch, highlighted by a three-game, 30-run drubbing by the Rays. And that gets us to what’s been ailing the Athletics most this year: They can’t keep the ball in the park, and even when they do, they can’t get opposing hitters out.

This feels like the core problem facing this iteration of the team. Playing in a bandbox in Sacramento, it’s hard to imagine the offense not flowing to some degree. But preventing runs? The A’s knew it would be an issue when they made the move before last year, which is why they brought in Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs. They knew they needed some extra bulk innings after last year’s pitching staff allowed five runs per game and tired down the stretch, so they added veterans Aaron Civale and Mark Leiter Jr. They fast-tracked 2024 draft pick Gage Jump, calling him up after only nine starts in Triple-A. To be fair, we still had the A’s down as having one of the worst staffs in baseball in our positional power rankings, but not the worst staff.

There’s no kind way to put this: The rotation has collapsed. Severino, the presumptive staff ace, made only 12 starts before a shoulder injury ended his season. Springs has been available, but the results have been disastrous. He’s made 25 starts and surrendered 33 home runs, the most in baseball. He’s allowed five or more runs nine different times, and delivered only four quality starts, none since May 17. That’s also the last game where he went six innings or more. Civale pitched so poorly (5.42 ERA, 5.33 FIP) that the A’s designated him for assignment in July; after being traded for a lottery ticket, he’s turned his season around as a reliever with the Cubs.

Those were the veterans who were supposed to anchor the pitching staff. In their absence (or in Springs’ case, despite his presence), the team has cast a net far and wide; 14 pitchers have started for them this year. A few have been pleasant surprises. J.T. Ginn, a sinker-heavy fifth-starter type, is having the best year of his career, with a BABIP-aided 3.71 ERA and a 4.38 FIP. That FIP might sound bad, but it’s more or less average; visiting pitchers have posted a 4.40 FIP in Sacramento this year.

Jump has been even better. Or maybe he’s been much worse – pitching is so hard to decipher sometimes. Through the end of July, Jump was having an excellent debut season – a 4.00 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, a pile of strikeouts and a few signature games. But whether it’s random variance or just hitting a rookie wall, he’s been bad since the calendar flipped to August. He’s made six starts and surrendered 25 runs, all of them earned. He’s walking more than six batters per nine innings. His 7.58 ERA is laughable, but his 5.52 xERA isn’t much better. He’s given up scorched contact to all fields, and generally looked like a guy who’s ready for a winter of conditioning and a new season.

Two other A’s pitchers have chipped in double-digit starts this year. Jacob Lopez, sneaky average in 2025, has been only OK in his second bite at the apple. In somewhat of a trend for A’s starters, he’s walking way too many batters: a 11.2% walk rate, or 4.5 per nine innings. Jack Perkins, a fifth-round pick from 2022 whom we projected as a reliever, has thrown in 12 walk-prone starts of his own, with run estimators ranging between the upper fours and lower sixes.

The A’s were never projected to have a good bullpen this year, and their relievers have been pressed into carrying a large workload because the starters have struggled so much. ERA estimators agree that the A’s have around the fifth-worst bullpen in baseball; their relievers are fifth worst in FIP, sixth worst in xFIP, seventh worst in xERA, and ninth worst in SIERA. But their actual results have been much worse than that. They’ve allowed a 5.56 ERA, worst in the game by half a run. They’re surrendering a ludicrous .320 BABIP, which accounts for a lot of the issue, and have the lowest strand rate in the game. And they’ve been even worse at home.

Teasing out park effects in small samples is very difficult, but here’s one way of explaining how much of a nightmare pitching at home is for this staff. On the road, A’s pitchers have been broadly unremarkable. They’ve managed a 4.25 FIP, which isn’t great, and their 4.58 ERA is even worse. But at home, they’re putrid. They’ve posted a 5.54 FIP, the worst in baseball by more than half a run, and a 6.33 ERA, the worst by more than a run. They’ve given up a gobsmacking 132 homers in 69 home games. Sure, they did play six home games in Las Vegas, and they got tagged for 15 homers in those games, but even excluding those, they’ve been flammable in Sacramento.

There’s probably some random variance to that split. Last year, the pitching was a little worse at home, but not markedly so. But pitching in a bandbox in front of a porous defense would make anyone afraid to attack the strike zone, and the A’s have nibbled to an extreme extent this year. They throw to the heart of the strike zone at one of the lowest rates in baseball, and throw far outside the zone at one of the highest rates. They don’t miss many bats or induce many chases, which means that those out-of-zone pitches aren’t turning into strikeouts as often as they’d hope. No team in baseball gets ahead in the count less frequently.

Therein lies the answer to what’s gone wrong with the A’s this year. There are levels to pitching incompetence. You can be garden-variety bad, putting your team in tough situations. You can be bad but jagged – some good performers, some bad performers. But the A’s are a different kind of bad. They’re “play lots of your games with little hope of winning” bad. They’ve gotten tattooed early 22 times this year, by which I mean losing by three or more runs while having surrendered five or more runs through only four innings. I set those bars somewhat arbitrarily, but they feel like a good barometer for feeling like the game is likely lost.

Somehow, they are not the team that has been blown out early most frequently — that’d be the Rockies, who have managed the task 27 times. But the A’s have been blown out early the second-most times, and they have blown their opponents out early only nine times, tied for third fewest in the league. Likewise, they’re getting comprehensively stomped – down four or more while having given up eight or more runs through seven innings – an eye-watering 19 times. They’ve done it to other teams only eight times; they’re the only team in baseball with such a lopsided ratio between blowout wins and blowout losses.

In other words, these pitchers have been so bad that they’ve played the team out of games. And try as you might to reduce baseball to a contextless sequence of random plate appearance outcomes, that’s not how the game works. Things get weird when you’re down big early. The low-leverage bullpen crew stretches out. Managers sub out players who might need a rest day. Position players pitch, often on both sides. Pitching styles change. Approaches change, too – as much as a player might try to take things one out at a time, it probably gets harder in a game that is probably already over.

From my perspective, that’s the takeaway from this A’s season. Through a combination of injuries, ineffectiveness, and poor upfront planning, the A’s couldn’t put together a big league-caliber pitching staff this year. The guys they ended up with have gotten crushed far too frequently, which means that a truly shocking number of A’s games have stopped being competitive early. The bummer season follows somewhat naturally.

I can’t measure the long-term effect this might have on A’s players, but I think you should assume there’s at least some effect. This is a rough environment to play baseball in. The facilities, while much improved over the last two years, are well below the major league standard. The games are often uncompetitive. The squad that has played most of the summer – down some pitchers due to injury, and losing more players as the team started planning for next year – has gotten flat out demolished. The A’s are 14-40 since the start of July, and they’ve allowed 6.4 runs per game in that stretch, a number that I calculated four times because it hardly seems possible over that long of a time period. It doesn’t even include the Vegas games!

This year is clearly over for the Athletics. But they’ve collapsed so spectacularly that 2027’s outlook feels a little shaky too. Can a team survive in a PCL stadium with a PCL pitching staff, facing major league opposition? This summer would suggest that one cannot. Can the A’s do enough to fortify their rotation and bullpen, whether by trade, signing, or promotion? We’ll have to see, though 2026 doesn’t fill me with hope. But this year’s form just won’t work. You can analyze their woes in a lot of different ways, but at the end of the day, when you get scored on this early and this often, finishing at the bottom of the league feels all but inevitable.