The Importance of the Oakland Athletics
Josh Donaldson, Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, Chris Bassitt, Sean Murphy, Sean Manaea, and Frankie Montas all have a lot in common. First off, they are all players that dominate their position. All of these men have proven over their years of service that they are capable of producing high-caliber baseball in any situation. Perhaps more importantly, they also all share the place where they honed their skills: Oakland, California.
Oakland has been the home of the Athletics since 1968. During this time, the team has made the postseason 21 times out of 55 seasons, winning four World Series pennants. While these numbers are certainly respectable, the major long-term issue that the Athletics face is their willingness to spend money. Between having one of the smallest market sizes and having the sixteenth wealthiest owner in the MLB who is notorious for not spending big money on players, the Athletics can never seem to keep a group of good players together long enough to have a real chance at building towards a dynasty. While this situation is nothing short of unfortunate for fans of the Oakland club, it creates a very interesting ripple in the economics of Major League Baseball.
For the past several years, the Athletics have had a menagerie of young stars emerge from the depths of their farm system as their proven stars leave in free agency or are shipped off to new teams via trade. These young stars then develop on the Athletics’ major league roster, prove that they are high-value players, and the cycle repeats. In short, almost every year the club loses big name talent, calls up unproven players, develops them, then loses the now developed major league players. This essentially establishes the Oakland Athletics as a part of the farm system for teams that don’t mind paying big money to players or, more commonly, trading prospects for proven talent.
One team that has seemingly bought into this quasi farm system is the Atlanta Braves. Within the past two years, the Braves have made blockbuster trades to acquire first baseman Matt Olson and later catcher Sean Murphy from the Athletics in exchange for prospects that were not expected to see any sort of major action for the club in the foreseeable future. In both instances, the Braves immediately offered their newly acquired talent massive contract extensions that the Athletics simply would not and could not provide.
While the Braves have certainly seemed to utilize the failing state of the Athletics the most, they are far from the only team using prospects to lure the team into trading away their star power. When referencing the former Athletics players mentioned at the beginning of the article (Donaldson, Chapman, Olson, Bassitt, Murphy, Manaea, and Montas) , the players signed contracts worth a combined $392,450,000 from the clubs they were traded to from the Athletics. This number simply cannot be ignored when analyzing the economic landscape of Major League Baseball. This chunk of money, which does not include the massive contracts earned by Donaldson from teams other than the team he was originally traded to, is worth more than seven times the Oakland Athletics’ entire 2023 payroll. Even more impressive still, the contract extensions earned by these seven players is worth $56,306,668 more than the payroll for the highest-earning New York Mets in 2023. This demonstrates how players developed by the Athletics are some of the most valuable commodities on the MLB market.
Despite being one of the least valuable teams on paper, the Oakland Athletics provide an extremely large amount of value to Major League Baseball. The club’s unique willingness to develop players that they do not intend to keep long-term make the club a farm system of star power that other teams can utilize if they are willing to give up some prospects with low salaries in exchange for a polished, seasoned major league player. It is this system that establishes the Oakland Athletics as one of if not the most important teams in baseball in terms of the economics of the MLB.