grover contributed to this article.

After riding their talented core of players to three straight postseasons, from 2018-2020, the Oakland A’s missed the playoffs in 2021, and the writing was on the wall. Most of their players were getting expensive and running low on years of control, and their farm had been decimated by trades to try to goose the MLB team to deeper runs in those years. It was clear to the baseball industry that a selloff was coming.

And it came. In the offseason of 2021-22, despite a hiccup with the lockout, the A’s traded starting pitchers Chris Bassitt and Sean Manaea, and star infielders Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. During the 2022 season, they also traded starter Frankie Montas and Christian Bethancourt (a journeyman pickup who had gotten off to a solid start). More recently, this offseason, they traded catcher Sean Murphy and starter Cole Irvin.

After dealing all of that talent, you’d think they would have come away with a boatload of good prospects, which should have vaulted their farm back into at least the top half of the league.

But it hasn’t turned out that way. Baseball America currently rates the A’s farm 27th out of 30. In our model, it’s at 22. That’s partly because the deals they made all appear to be underpays. 

Let’s take a look:

A’s Player traded	Value at the time	Value of return package	Difference
Bassitt	13	11	-2
Olson	45.3	43.3	-2
Chapman	24.1	14.7	-9.4
Manaea*	10.3	2.9	-7.4
Bethancourt	3.1	0.4	-2.7
Montas*	27.1	22.8	-4.3
Murphy*	51.3	15.3	-36
Irvin*	16.2	2.7	-13.5
Total	190.4	113.1	-77.3

*Includes value of additional player included in trade. (Also, both Bassitt and Manaea’s values have been reduced by $4M from their original, as, at the time of their trades, their values had assumed and included that amount to represent the value of a draft pick they would have received in the QO system. But the general consensus in baseball at that time was that QOs were going away in the new CBA, which, ironically, did not happen. In any case, the Mets and Padres were able to leverage that expectation in the negotiations and save some surplus value.)

In total, since their teardown began, the A’s have traded eight veterans, worth $190.4M in surplus value according to our model, and received $113.1M in value, for a net loss of $77.3M. On a percentage basis, that’s a 46.1% hit.

Making matters worse, they came out on the losing end of all eight trades. The Olson package was the closest in value, and, interestingly, the Murphy trade would have been very close in value ($51.3M to $47.7M) if they had kept William Contreras, an all-star catcher, instead of flipping him for Esteury Ruiz, a mid-tier (at best) prospect. That portion of the three-way trade accounts for a big chunk of the losses here.

For a low-revenue, rebuilding team, that’s inexcusable. This is exactly the opposite of what the A’s should be doing. One could argue that, because all the other teams knew they were selling off their players, they got lowballed – and there’s likely some truth to that. When your sign says “must sell,” the bids you get are going to be low, and you take the best one. Granted, their timing didn’t help – it’s possible that the lockout worked against the A’s being able to play teams against each other in a bidding war, given the compressed timetable.

Still, that shouldn’t account for these large gaps. In any deal-making scenario, you should be able to read the market, and leverage the bids up. Instead, the A’s seem to have paid less attention to getting value than on targeting players they particularly liked. How else to explain Contreras for Ruiz? Or Irvin and a prospect for Hernaiz? 

Is it a flaw in our model?

That’s the first question we ask ourselves. When we see a value gap that is out of the ordinary, as with the Murphy and Irvin trades, we double-check to see if we missed anything. That doesn’t appear to be the case with either.

As mentioned, the first “half” of the Murphy trade with Atlanta was fair. The Olson/Braves trade was also close enough to fair. Lots of other trades made by the Braves with other teams have been fair as well, so it’s not like there’s something amiss there.

And overall, our model is performing fine – it’s hit on just under 95% of all trades since 2019, as of this writing. To date, this offseason, it’s hit on 53 out of 59. Granted, there have been a few odd misses, but nothing too egregious, except for the last two A’s trades.

No, it’s the A’s

Which tells us that our model is specifically out of sync with the A’s front office. One way is in the type of position player they’re targeting: young, speedy contact hitters with no power, for some reason, like Ruiz and Hernaiz. 

That’s fine, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of value. The only way any rational front office would trade Contreras, a proven MLB hitter with five years of control, for Ruiz is if they valued Ruiz as a sure-thing star. But prospect analysts do not – he was the 8th best prospect in a middling Brewers’ system, according to Baseball America, and rated a 40 by Fangraphs.

And the only way a rational front office would trade four years of Irvin (admittedly a back-end starter, but whose numbers compare favorably to recent free agents like Jordan Lyles and Trevor Williams, both of whom were paid well in a resurgent market for even back-end starters) for a 40-rated prospect in Hernaiz is if they viewed him as a sure-fire future regular. For what it’s worth, A’s executive David Forst described Hernaiz as “a kid with great athleticism and really good track record in High-A as far as contact rate. Our scouts are really excited about what they've seen."

That doesn’t scream “future regular” – that just means they see some upside. No one is suggesting Irvin was worth top farm talent, but a package of two mid-tier prospects would have made more sense. Instead, they had to throw in a prospect of their own just to get the deal done. 

It looks like they’re getting out-negotiated, badly, by other GMs.

Was it always this way with Oakland? 

No, actually. Prior to this teardown, most trades made by the A’s fell in line with our model. When they were competing, and trading for veterans like Starling Marte, Josh Harrison, Yan Gomes, and Andrew Chafin, those deals came up reasonably fair.

So what’s different now?

Many years have passed since the Moneyball era, when the A’s were innovators. Since then, most of the rest of the league has caught them, and quite a few have surpassed them – the Rays, Dodgers, and Guardians, among others, are the innovators now. The A’s analytics department is small by comparison, and their tools are not known to be any different than what most teams use. So it’s unlikely they know something other teams don’t.

Speculatively, given that they’re a small-market team, with no particular analytical advantage, their next-best option to try to gain an edge is to gamble. 

They’re making concentrated bets. So far, though, these bets have not panned out.

Let’s take a look at how the returns from their 2022 trades have done so far:

Player acquired	Value at acquisition	Current value	Difference
Ginn	10.3	4	-6.3
Oller	0.7	0.7	0
Langeliers	27.8	22.9	-4.9
Pache	7.5	0	-7.5
Cusick	5.4	2.9	-2.5
Estes	2.6	2.2	-0.4
Hoglund	9.3	4	-5.3
Smith	4.7	2.7	-2
Logue	0.7	0.2	-0.5
Snead	0.3	0.3	0
Angeles	2.4	1.2	-1.2
Martinez	0.5	1.1	+0.6
Stevenson	0.2	0.1	-0.1
Fernandez	0.2	0.2	0
Waldichuk	9.9	14.7	+4.8
Medina	6.9	4.6	-2.3
Sears	4.8	9.5	+4.7
Bowman	1.2	1.2	0
Total	95.4	72.5	-22.9

So not only did they lose the trades at the time of the deals, they’ve lost even more value in the time since acquisition – their prospect portfolio has declined by $22.9M, or 24%. It’s even worse when you compare the current values of these players to the price they paid in veteran talent to get them. Excepting Murphy and Irvin, they traded away $122.9M in value, and now have only $72.5M to show for it. On that basis, it’s a loss of $50.4M, or 41%.

Yes, the trades they made before Murphy and Irvin have lost the team over $50M in value, and if you add the losses from those two, the hole has deepened even more, to a total loss of nearly $100M.

Of the 18 prospects they acquired, only three have appreciated in value (Waldichuk, Sears, and Martinez, the latter barely). Christian Pache has lost all of what was left of his value (he’s out of options, and still can’t hit, so he’s likely to be DFA’d early this season). Pitching prospects Gunnar Hoglund and J.T. Ginn have each lost more than half their value. Zach Logue was DFA’d and lost on waivers. Euribiel Angeles, the key player in the Manaea trade, was left unprotected in the Rule 5 draft, and was not selected.

Prospects, of course, lose value and bust all the time. But not all of them. And if you’re trading quality players like Olson (who promptly signed a big extension), Chapman, Montas, Bassitt, and Manaea (the latter two of whom just signed handsome free agent contracts), you should expect to get a few prospects who have a better chance of lasting than this. 

So far, only Langeliers and Waldichuk are valued in double digits and expected to be major-league starters. But neither are considered top prospects around the league. In other words, after giving up all that talent, A’s fans have little to dream on – they got mostly table scraps, and are now left only with the vague hope that Forst and his team know what they’re doing.

But do they?

In horse racing, the favorite wins about ⅓ of the time. If you just bet with the consensus “chalk,” you’ll break even at best, and maybe lose a few bucks at worst. You won’t go broke, but you won’t get ahead. You’ll just be stuck in the middle.

The only winning strategy is to bet on “overlays,” those opportunities where a horse goes off at odds higher than what you think they should be. If you hit on two 5-1 shots out of nine, you’ll do better than the guy playing the favorites, and you’ll make a small profit.

That’s extremely hard to do in reality, however. You have to seriously do your homework, and have the conviction that you’ve found an arbitrage play that the rest of the players (who are as smart as you) are not seeing. Most gamblers who try it fail.

But that appears to be what the A’s are doing. They’re mining for overlays – in this case, prospects they think have more of a shot than the consensus thinks they do.

Will their strategy work? The results so far suggest not.