Hot Stove Takes: Luis Severino Signing Marks an Abrupt, Calculated Shift for A’s

After starving his fan base of talented players for years, team owner John Fisher is suddenly willing to hand out the largest contract in franchise history upon leaving Oakland.

Severino helped the Mets reach last season’s NL championship series to rebound from an awful 2023 campaign with the Yankees. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

This piece is part of our Hot Stove Takes series, where staff members give quick reactions to the latest notable MLB transactions.

Stephanie Apstein: At first glance, this feels like a lot of money! Incredibly, Luis Severino's three-year, $67 million deal marks the largest contract in franchise history, narrowly outpacing the six years and $66 million extension Eric Chavez signed in 2004 and more than doubling the previous high for a free agent, Billy Butler's three years for $30 million from ’15. It well outpaces the three years, $51 million MLB Trade Rumors, which tends to be good at this sort of thing, predicted Severino would get.

But if you look closely, you can see the logic. The Oakland A’s believe their young position player core, headlined by catcher Shea Langeliers and right fielder Lawrence Butler, is rounding into form. The AL West is likely to be softer than ever before, as the Houston Astros almost certainly lose star third baseman Alex Bregman. You have to squint to see it, but there's a window.

And if you're going to ask a major leaguer to play in a minor league stadium, you're going to have to overpay. I can't believe I'm saying this, but good on owner John Fisher for shelling out some money here to try to improve his roster.

VERDUCCI: Luis Severino Signing Reflects Sudden Pressure Surrounding A’s

Emma Baccellieri: First: Severino was clearly right to decline the qualifying offer from the New York Mets. He ended up with a contract here that beat nearly all of the public mainstream projections. Second: The … A’s? The putatively-soon-to-be Las Vegas A’s formerly of Oakland and currently of Sacramento? Those A’s? This is the largest guaranteed contract in the history of the franchise. (It just beats out a four-year, $66-million extension with Chavez from 2004. Yes, that’s right, it’s been two decades since the club spent this kind of money.)

There was just one player on the A’s roster last season to earn more than $3 million. (That was Ross Stripling, acquired in a trade with the San Francisco Giants, and even he did not earn more than $10 million.) Severino’s deal has an average yearly value of just over $22 million. That’s how drastic a shift this signing is for the A’s. 

This does fill a clear need here. The A’s could badly use some competent starting pitching, and they should get that from the soon-to-be 31-year-old Severino, who is fresh off a solid rebound campaign. (This was his first season pitching more than 110 innings since 2018.) At the very least, Severino can offer stability and a veteran presence on a club that has very little of either.

But the A’s have lots of needs to fill—as they have for years!—and suddenly paying up to address this specific one in such a big way is puzzling. And that’s putting it lightly.

Will Laws: Signing Severino (our No. 27-ranked free agent) makes the A’s MLB’s third-highest spending team thus far this offseason, behind the Los Angeles Dodgers and ... the Los Angeles Angels? It looks like the AL West’s bottom feeders are gearing up to return to respectability in light of disappointing campaigns from the three teams above them, as 88 wins proved enough to win the division this year.

More cynically, however, this also seems like Fisher needed to show some sign of upward mobility to key stakeholders in Las Vegas, where ground has yet to be broken on the team’s proposed stadium on the Strip. In related news, a major hurdle was cleared Thursday to allow progress on that front.

It’s encouraging that Fisher appears primed to spend more money to improve what’s been an embarrassing on-field product for the last three seasons. But it also must feel like a slap in the face to the team’s Oakland fan base that he was only willing to do so after leaving them scrapping for literal dirt.

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