The Impossible Job of A's GM David Forst
The job that A's GM David Forst is being asked to undertake is the hardest job in all of baseball. We all know that owner John Fisher doesn't like to spend money on payroll, even when the team is good. We also know that he is planning on uprooting the club for Las Vegas if he has his way. But it's that interim period and the lack of knowledge of where they'll be playing that makes Forst's job impossible.
You can look at any team in baseball and say they would have more success with more payroll flexibility, or a larger scouting department, or if they tapped into the international market more often, and all of those would be correct. But at least they'd have something that they could be striving towards, or perhaps even working to acquire.
For Forst, he doesn't even know where his team will be playing past this season. There were even rumors that the team could literally disband following the 2024 campaign. How is he supposed to go about building a roster when there may not even be a team in a year? While disbanding seems like a fever dream, the very real reality is that there is a good chance the team won't be in Oakland in 2025, which means that the home park factors will be completely different.
If you don't think that's a big deal, then here are two quick examples. If a random team was dropped into Yankee Stadium with their short porch in right, would they have the same amount of success as the Yankees would? The same goes for left field at Fenway, or gap-to-gap hitters at Oracle.
At the end of May last season, Forst said that the team "doesn't really have a long-term [plan]" when it came to re-assessing the team's next window of contention after a 10-43 start. "We've always worked year-to-year." Forst and the front office may be up for the challenge, but this will be a new undertaking if it happens.
The offense may not be the big concern moving forward for the A's. Last season their pitching staff ranked No. 29 in ERA with a 5.48, but when you account for park factors, they were last by a wide margin. The Coliseum generally plays as a pitcher's park. If the A's end up in Utah, they'd be playing in high altitude. Daybreak, Utah isn't quite as high as Denver's Coors Field, but it's only short by about 400 feet.
The Rockies have had 30 years to figure out the altitude and still have trouble finding the right pitchers. Forst is supposed to have a game plan ready to go?
You may be thinking that it doesn't matter, but the A's need to be good in the lead-up to their proposed Vegas debut in 2028 to get the residents excited to go out to a baseball game (or 81).
Then again, the A's could be playing up in Sacramento, and they could field a roughly similar team to what they're building now with some adjustments. Or maybe they play half of their games at Oracle, where they need gap hitters, and then another half elsewhere where they'd benefit from an entirely different roster.
The other part of this is that the A's have been able to constantly rebuild by typically maximizing a player's value before trading them away and then using those returns to help build out the next competitive cycle. While the latest round of trades isn't having the usual amount of success just yet, wherever the A's end up in 2025, those stats on the field could play a huge factor in what kind of a trade return the team receives in their next wave of moves.
From a roster construction standpoint, not only is Forst being asked to build a team with few financial resources, he's also being asked to build an amorphous team that can hopefully just be plopped in the middle of any ballpark and be set loose to go win enough games to make the people at their future home get excited enough to go to a baseball game.
He has to build a winner over the next few seasons and is being asked to do so while blindfolded with an arm tied behind his back.