When Will the Athletics Be Truly Competitive Again?

They might still play in a minor league ballpark, but things were looking up for the Sacramento-ish Athletics coming into the 2026 season. The franchise hadn’t had a winning record (and typically hasn’t even been close) since 2021, with their last stretch of playoff relevance ending after the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The 2025 A’s only went 76-86, but an offensive core of Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Brent Rooker, Tyler Soderstrom, and Jacob Wilson seemed to give the club a good chance to score runs this year. The A’s entered the season with 21.4% playoff odds, their best in some time.

The team’s most plausible breakout scenario involved leaning on a good offense while cobbling together just enough pitching to keep from being on the short end of a bunch of slugfests. The A’s were even confident enough to be on the other side of a salary dump for once, picking up Jeff McNeil over the winter. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone exactly to plan. The A’s are 43-59 entering play on Friday. The offense has been middling, and though they’ve gotten a few promising pitching performances from J.T. Ginn, Hogan Harris, and Gage Jump, the staff has more holes than a wheel of Emmentaler after a run-in with a shotgun.

So are the A’s underperforming, or was the optimism simply premature? To help look at the team’s near-term future, I ran updated ZiPS projections for the A’s and the players in their system. (Here I should note that ZiPS was a little grumpier them than our site projections were at the start of the season, pegging the team for 74 wins instead of 78.) The lineup hasn’t broken out as hoped, but the outlook hasn’t really changed all that negatively. While there are a few position players who have taken a hit, most notably Lawrence Butler, Wilson, and Rooker, all three remain legitimate cogs in the offense. ZiPS was already projecting Wilson to fall back a bit from his rookie year, and a lot of the drop in WAR for Rooker comes from reduced playing time because of the uncertainty of the knee injury that cut his season short. But ZiPS likes Kurtz and Soderstrom better than it did at the start of the year, it’s still plenty optimistic about Henry Bolte‘s breakout despite a poor July, and it mostly buys that this version of Zack Gelof is the real one. It also sees Joshua Kuroda-Grauer’s breakout as more or less sustainable, though he’s obviously not going to continue to hit .400; hopefully he’ll recover from his…uh…sensitive injury soon.

Here are the full hitter projections:

The gainers outnumber the decliners, and a lot of the disappointing parts of the offense are players who weren’t really in the team’s long-term plans anyway. McNeil was always going to be a stopgap (it seems unlikely the team will exercise its 2027 club option), and he’d probably already be obsolete as one if not for the loss of Kuroda-Grauer. It’s a team that could still stand to beef up its supporting cast, but if we make a very rough depth chart for 2027, ZiPS sees the A’s as having the 12th-best offense in baseball, just from in-organization talent. Their only free agent is Jonah Heim, who isn’t projected here as a result. But unless the A’s suddenly start panicking about Langeliers’ arbitration cost (always a possibility for the A’s), Heim isn’t really needed.

On the other side of the ball, the pitching was generally projected to be at or near the bottom of the league, and the A’s haven’t thwarted expectations in that department. They rank last in baseball in pitcher WAR and FIP, and are ahead of only the Rockies in ERA (and Colorado has a better hitters’ park than the A’s do). At this point, the team would need a miracle to get out of the bottom five staffs in A’s history:

But the news isn’t all bad on the pitching front, as the lousiness has generally been concentrated within the stopgap players who weren’t expected to be part of the team long-term. It would have been nice if Jacob Lopez could have established himself as at least a mid-rotation starter after a useful 2025, but players like Jeffrey Springs (5.96 ERA, -0.5 WAR), Scott Barlow (6.48 ERA, -0.7 WAR), and the already departed Aaron Civale (5.42 ERA, 0.2 FIP) were never going to stick around for the next three or four years. On the flip side, Ginn has made some progress, and while Kade Morris has seen his projection go backwards a bit, Jump, Jamie Arnold, and Wei-En Lin, three of the team’s top five prospects, all have improved projections as well:

Of the 31 pitchers on this list, only seven saw their projections improve from the preseason. But four of those seven are Ginn and the aforementioned prospects, players the team really cares about. Now, Lin will be out for a good chunk of 2027 due to Tommy John surgery, but he’s still just 20, so the A’s aren’t pressed for time when it comes to waiting for him.

When I ran preliminary ZiPS projections for 2027, the A’s actually projected better than they did entering the season, with a 78-84 record. Things get foggier the further out you look, and the roster will obviously change a lot, but ZiPS now sees the A’s as an 81-81 team for the 2028 season.

There may not be another team with a greater need for a big free agent pitcher than the A’s, and since they stand on the precipice of Wild Card contention, their situation actually has something to recommend it. The problem is that the A’s have a very poor record of making big splashes for top free agents, and having to spend another year at Sutter Health Park doesn’t help either. Even if the A’s were willing to make the highest bid for someone like Tarik Skubal, he might not want to play in a less-than-big-leauge-quality facility, or for a club with a history of blowing up its roster to save money. But if the A’s can pull off a meaningful upgrade to their rotation, whether it comes via a signing, a trade, or a successful reclamation project or two, this team does have some real upside. If the ZiPS projections are correct, it wasn’t so much that the A’s weren’t a possible breakout team, just that we jumped the gun a bit in 2026.