Oakland A's Draft Lottery Problem

A's owner John Fisher has made it more difficult for the front office to piece a team together, and before long it will impact where they fall in the draft order

For the second straight season, the Oakland A's will have the highest chances (16.5%) of landing the first pick in the MLB Draft after finishing with one of the worst records in baseball. Following the 2022 season, the team would have been in line to pick second in the old format, but ended up falling to pick number six with the newly instituted lottery system. They used that selection to pick Jacob Wilson, who is now the team's top prospect, sign him for an underslot deal, and then spend a little more on picks a little later in the Draft.

The lottery for the 2024 Draft will take place in December, but there is one rule that fans should be aware of following the latest CBA. With the lottery system, the idea is to make it so that teams that tank don't automatically get high draft picks. It also gives teams that just missed the playoffs a chance to potentially pick higher than they would have if the draft order had been determined by reverse record. 

For example, the Minnesota Twins finished with a 78-84 record in 2022 and under the old format would have held pick #13. With the lottery, they vaulted all the way up to pick #5. The Twins finished with 28 more wins than Oakland last season and also got to make their first pick before the A's in the subsequent Draft. 

The rule in question, however, is one that Jim Callis of MLB wrote about last March when the new CBA went into effect. 

"Teams that receive revenue-sharing payouts can't receive a lottery pick for more than two years in a row and those that don't can't get a top-six choice in consecutive Drafts. Furthermore, a club that's ineligible for the lottery can't select higher than 10th overall."

Essentially that means that the A's, a team that is on revenue sharing (and by their own admission is fairly dependent upon it), isn't allowed to hold a selection in the first six picks in more than two consecutive years. That is part of why their fall in the previous Draft was a big deal, because they fell just enough to still get a lottery pick, but it also counted against them with respect to the consecutive years rule. 

The worst the A's can pick in 2024 will be pick number seven, given that the lottery only exists for picks one through six, and then the rest of the draft order is filled out by record. The A's 50-112 mark was the worst in baseball. 

But this also means that while the likelihood of Oakland making a selection in the lottery is high, it would also be their second year in a row with a lottery pick, meaning that they wouldn't be eligible for a lottery pick in 2025. Assuming the A's pick land in the lottery in December, the highest they could select in 2025 would be tenth. 

The chances of the A's improving significantly enough to not be one of the worst ten teams in the game are pretty low at this point in the offseason. The tenth-worst team in baseball in 2023 was the Cleveland Guardians, and they finished at 76-86. That's still 26 more wins than the A's. 

To be clear, this isn't the format's fault. The lottery is doing what it should be doing, and that is making teams at least attempt to contend. The Washington Nationals had baseball's worst record in 2022, landed the number two pick, and then improved to a 71-91 record. With the new rules, the Nationals, who aren't on revenue sharing, can't get a pick before #10. But they also showed improvement. The drop from pick number six, where they would have slotted by record, to pick number ten is less significant than going from one to six. 

In terms of the money a team can spend on those picks, the top pick in the 2023 Draft had a slot allotment of $9.72 million. The sixth pick was $6.63 million, more than three million dollars less. The tenth pick was slotted at $5.48 million, or roughly one million less than the sixth pick. 

The A's are set up to fall in the draft order ahead of the 2025 Draft. That not only hurts the caliber of player they'll be able to take in the higher in the draft, where they'd likely end up based on record, and drops them down to at least tenth, depending on how things shake out with records, and draft order for 2024. It also hurts the overall amount the team can spend in the Draft, which impacts the entire thought process when selecting players.

If and when this happens, it's not going to be the system's fault. This is all on John Fisher for not attempting to put out a winning product, and the front office, who have whiffed on their recent batch of trades involving fan favorites. There have been some nice additions from those deals like Shea Langeliers and Esteury Ruiz, but they're also not on the same level as Matt Olson, Sean Murphy, Matt Chapman, Chris Bassitt, Sean Manaea, or Frankie Montas just yet. 

It's also not the player's fault. The A's have played the same hand repeatedly in the twenty years Fisher has owned the team. They get a good group of young players, ride them to the playoffs for a couple of seasons, and then trade them away for a new group of players. Then the cycle repeats. It's become so predictable that the fans have a good sense of when the next batch of trades will happen. 

If you're an opposing GM and you know that the A's have a mandate from ownership to slash payroll and they need to trade their star players in order to do so, would you trade away anyone you're not comfortable with? John Fisher has handicapped his own front office into making trades that he has mandated in order to save money. The returns on those trades haven't produced like the A's are used to, and now they're looking at not even getting the draft picks that used to go along with being a bad team. 

It's going to take at least a few years to climb out of this Fisher-created hole. But according to him, he's a caretaker of the franchise.