Jeff McNeil will be 34 years old in April. The 2022 batting champion has had some bright moments in his career, and when the Athletics acquired him from the Mets this week for a prospect, he immediately upgraded the club’s second base situation compared to last season.
He’s also a bridge player, unlikely to be a part of the next great A’s contender.
After their first season playing in Sacramento, a temporary home for at least three years while a stadium in Las Vegas is built, the A’s are still a team in-between — not only in location, but in build. The A’s might wait at least two more winters before making an aggressive offseason push, despite a commitment from owner John Fisher to spend more in 2026 than last year’s total of $118 million.
“I can tell you it’s going to be higher,” Fisher said of next year’s payroll in a phone interview with The Athletic. “That’s something that we’re continuing to work on internally. At the end of the day, our goal is to put the greatest team on the field that we can and payroll is an important part of that. But our guys (in the front office) have demonstrated over decades now that they can see things in players that other teams don’t see. … We’re going to sign our guys to longer-term deals, as well as sign free agents who can make our team better.”
In some settings, a roster like the Athletics’ could be ripe for a front office and ownership group to reorient around a nearer-term future. A 76-86, fourth-place finish in the American League West last season is nothing to brag about in many contexts, but it was the best tally the club has turned in since 2021.
“It was everything that we could have hoped it would be and more,” a particularly bullish Fisher said of 2025.
More important than the record was the group’s composition: only two teams had a younger group of batters last year than the A’s, per Baseball-Reference.
Slugging designated hitter Brent Rooker, a veritable veteran on a team like the A’s as he enters his age-31 season next year, was joined by rookies Jacob Wilson, an All-Star shortstop with a .311 batting average, and Nick Kurtz, a first baseman who hit 36 home runs — including four in one game — and was named Rookie of the Year.
“I don’t fully subscribe to, ‘Let’s wait until 2028,’” Fisher said. “We want to be good now and demonstrate the kind of team we can be.”
Yet, the A’s are also playing in a converted minor-league stadium through at least the next two years, targeting a 2028 opening for their new ballpark in Las Vegas. Revenues aren’t exactly soaring. Attendance was the worst in the majors at Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, following a much-maligned exit from Oakland, the team’s home of 56 years.
Last year, the A’s sold 768,464 tickets as one of just two teams to finish with fewer than one million. The World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers cracked four million.
“For us, it’s difficult,” manager Mark Kotsay said. “We’re still in a situation where we’re in Sacramento for two more years. We are still in that trending-up phase, right? I think had we maybe not gone through a season where we had some adversity in May and finished better, that maybe there’s a perception that we’re really ready to go. But I do think that we’re right there, and we have an opportunity.”
From Kotsay to Fisher to general manager David Forst, the team tries to sell both the present and the future. That’s a fine line many club owners and executives try to walk, sometimes to talk up a roster that simply hasn’t improved. But the A’s and their itinerant existence are also unique.
“It depends on how you define aggressive,” Forst said when asked when the A’s would push hard in player acquisition. “We’re always looking to add and to get better. There’s no doubt a lot of our focus is on what the team looks like in 2028. That said, we have a really good young core and have a chance, I think, to compete going forward. So it would be silly not to take advantage of some opportunities this offseason.”
Earlier in December, before the McNeil acquisition, Forst said “there’s a lot of questions we have to figure out.”
Second base was high on the list, as was third base. The A’s also want to add to their rotation. But after handing out the largest contract in club history last winter to pitcher Luis Severino, the team’s external moves this winter have been smaller.
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Jeff McNeil has one guaranteed season left on his contract, with the option for a second. (Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
There’s action brewing internally, however.
The A’s have made long-term extension offers to some players, Forst said, without offering names or an expectation as to when deals might be completed. It was this time last year when Rooker agreed to a five-year, $60 million extension. Outfielder Lawrence Butler then signed a seven-year, $65.5 million deal during spring training.
But, in a wrinkle that underscores the sense the A’s are in limbo, even the group making these roster decisions has an uncertain future. Aside from Billy Beane — the team’s famed former general manager who started the Moneyball movement and who remains a senior advisor to Fisher — the only A’s staffer under contract beyond next season is Kotsay.
Forst and the A’s are in extension talks, however.
“Billy is under a longer-term contract,” Fisher said. “Aside from that, look, I’ve now worked with David since Lew Wolff and I bought the team in 2005. So we’ve been together for 20 years and I’ve seen the kind of leader he is and how he has stepped up when David took on the role of being the GM. And I’m really proud of the work that he’s done, and how well we work together and we’re continuing to have conversations about the future, and those conversations are ongoing.”
The A’s have long been mired in stadium drama. For most of this century, the question was whether they’d end up with a new park in Oakland. Now the questions pertain to the quality of their temporary digs in Sacramento, and the construction effort for their planned home in Vegas.
“There was a lot of learnings when you go into a new ballpark,” Fisher said. “We went from a ballpark that has the largest foul territory in baseball to a ballpark that probably has one of smallest territories. … The weather in Sacramento’s drier, the ball flies farther, so it’s a learning experience for our team to figure out what it’s like to play in a new park with all-new facilities.”
Some A’s players and visiting players alike criticized the quality of the facilities at Sutter Health Park. Forst, however, said those complaints dipped as the year went on.
Now, a small facelift is coming for 2026.
In big-league ballparks, locker rooms are typically an easy walk from the dugout, where players sit during games. Not so at Sutter Health Park, where both home and away players have to take a long walk to the outfield to reach their clubhouse.
“The biggest thing we’re going to do is add an area in each dugout where the starting pitcher in particular can have a chance to kind of escape,” Forst said. “The one thing we heard about the most last year was, in most parks, the starting pitcher can go down to the clubhouse.”
The A’s are also replacing the sod, which will again serve double duty in 2026, hosting a Triple-A team (the Sacramento River Cats) when the A’s are on the road.
The A’s are paying for the upgrades, a person briefed on the team’s construction plans said. The team hasn’t disclosed the expected cost. MLB and the Players Association declined comment this week on the state of the A’s facilities.
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The Athletics are making improvements to what remains inescapably a minor league stadium. (Scott Marshall / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, there are two matters to watch: the nine-acre stadium itself, and the development around it on a 35-acre plot.
“The stadium is going great and we are absolutely on track,” Fisher said when asked about the targeted 2028 opening. “Every day I go out to the site is pretty inspirational. We have 300 workers on site. That number is going to work its way up to close to 1,800 when we’ve got everything going on and a roof is going on.”
Bally’s, the casino operator, has announced a 500,000 square foot entertainment district surrounding the A’s ballpark, but the Nevada Independent and Las Vegas Review-Journal have reported that Bally’s funding for the project is not yet in place. That could mean the A’s eventually need to either themselves fund — or find other ways to fund — some of the infrastructure relevant to the ballpark, like a parking lot, a person briefed on the A’s plans said. But shared sites are complex, and financing is just one piece that would have to be sorted through if Bally’s doesn’t proceed.
“That is something that Bally’s is working on putting together,” Fisher said.
The Independent cited a Citizens Bank gaming analyst, Jordan Bender, who believes Bally’s might ultimately not be the company to build around the A’s park.
Fisher has been looking for investors and said he’s had success.
“You’ve seen what the Giants have done in San Francisco, where they have lots of partners,” Fisher said. “What the Warriors have done, Golden State Warriors, I remember reading, I think, a New York Times Magazine story about their system, and how all the additional partners they brought in had made the team that much stronger.
“We have a group of Korean partners who’ve come in. We have a number of local partners who’ve come in. We’re working with other sports team owners.”
The A’s declined to specify any names.
Before Las Vegas, Fisher believes the A’s can improve attendance in Sacramento.
“We absolutely think there’s room to grow,” the owner said. “I went to a lot of games, and the Sacramento fans were incredibly enthusiastic and positive.
“It’s an opportunity to see our team for a few years, and the exciting players that we have on it. It’s also an opportunity for them to see visiting teams, from the Yankees to the Giants, to this season, they’re going to see the Dodgers. Which will be truly, I think, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the Dodgers coming to Sacramento to take on our A’s.”
Ultimately, the A’s are trying to build to a time when their own team is closer to the main attraction, where their roster has at least similar appeal to the vaunted competition. But Forst contested the suggestion that the A’s weren’t “full throttle” yet.
“I don’t know that that’s fair,” Forst said. “This group as it is, I think they have a chance to be really good. Our payroll will go up as we get closer. It’ll go up from last year. We’re already dealing with more resources than we had the last few years in Oakland.”