Athletics will aim to raise payroll, retain coaching staff

While the Athletics’ move from Oakland to Sacramento will naturally dominate the headlines this season, general manager David Forst will have his hands full just with the normal trappings of the baseball offseason.  

Forst told reporters (including radio broadcaster Jessica Kleinschmidt and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser) that the team plans to spend more on payroll than it did in 2024, and that the A’s are hopeful of bringing back the entire coaching staff for their first season in Sacramento.

As per RosterResource, the A’s spent roughly $63.1M on payroll last season, easily the lowest in baseball. Forst’s front office also has an entirely clean payroll slate heading into 2025, as the A’s don’t have a single dollar officially committed to any player for the coming season.

The Athletics have five impending free agents, five players eligible for salary arbitration (to the tune of a projected $13.8M if all are tendered contracts) and the rest of the roster is still in its pre-arb years.

In theory, this gives Forst some flexibility in upgrading a team that showed some promise last season. While the A’s were only 69-93, this at least represented a sizeable improvement from the club’s 112-loss performance in 2023.  

Moreover, the Athletics seemed to turn a corner around midseason, as they were 39-37 from July 1 onward. Between slugger Brent Rooker, flamethrowing closer Mason Miller, breakout outfielder Lawrence Butler and others, the Athletics’ latest rebuild has already developed some interesting pieces of a new core. Both Rooker and Zack Gelof are quoted in Slusser’s piece as having an eye toward contending as early as next season.

Of course, given the Athletics’ usual reluctance to spend, we should probably wait and see if owner John Fisher will indeed approve even a modest payroll increase. This winter in particular carries the X factor of how the Athletics’ revenues will be impacted by the move to Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, a Triple-A stadium (home of the Giants’ top minor league affiliate) with a total capacity of just over 14,000.  

As Slusser notes, there are still plenty of details about the move that team officials themselves aren’t yet certain. Forst believed Sutter Health Park would continue to have an artificial playing surface during the Athletics’ tenure, though no renovation work has started on the field itself in preparation for 2025.

The other challenge facing Forst this offseason is how exactly he’ll be able to lure desirable players to join the A’s, even if more money is available to spend. 

“We do have to sell it, and I’d be lying if I told you I knew what the answers will be on the other side,” Forst said.  

While the younger talent on the roster might be attractive to free agents under normal circumstances, the fact remains that many players might not have interest in joining a franchise that will be spending at least its next three seasons in a minor league ballpark.  

It seems likely that the A’s will again be limited to signing players to one-year contracts, only to flip those players at the trade deadline if the team isn’t in contention.

As for the coaching staff, some turnover might develop if other teams step forward with job offers or promotions for any A’s coaches. Slusser also suggests that the Athletics might not stand in the way if rival clubs had an interest in manager Mark Kotsay, which would be an interesting wrinkle to both the team’s rebuilding plans and any possible managerial vacancies around the league.

Kotsay is only 179-307 over three seasons as the Athletics skipper, though the poor record doesn’t fairly access his managerial ability given how little Kotsay has had to work with on a rebuilding roster, not to mention the added tumult of the franchise’s planned move. 

Kotsay is under contract just through the 2025 season, and it is perhaps worth noting that the A’s let previous manager Bob Melvin go to the Padres when Melvin also had a year remaining on his contract.

“As far as the potential for losing [Kotsay], those things are out of my control right now,” Forst said. “He absolutely deserves to be considered by anyone who has a managerial opening, but he’s under contract here and wants to be here. And there’s no one I would rather have managing this team.”