Oakland Athletics: Looking ahead to 2018

Lock someone up

One talking point that gets batted around quite a bit is that it’s hard to know who’s on the A’s at any given time because their roster turns over so much. Name the last big star they had that they kept for more than a couple of years that also stayed healthy. Most of the recent stars have been traded away, and the one that they actually signed, Eric Chavez, couldn’t stay on the field. And no, Daric Barton doesn’t count as a big star.

That said, with a new ballpark in the works and a fanbase starting to believe once again, this is the perfect winter to put some eggs in a basket and show that they are building around someone. Manaea, Olson and Chapman are the candidates that come to mind as players with some time before they hit arbitration, let alone free agency, making it a little more likely that they’d take the immediate bump in salary.

If the A’s were to sign one of their young players through their arbitration years and eat up a year or two of free agency, it would be a sign to the fans that this isn’t the same old song and dance. It would also potentially save them big time in arbitration and allow them to spend more in free agency in a few years when the park is being built and their contracts would be much, much higher (assuming they keep performing).

Of course they could surprise everyone and somehow land Shohei Otani with the promise of letting him be a two-way player and making him the centerpiece of their rebuild. It’s not a terrible offer, but there will likely be better opportunities out there where he could land sponsorships in a big market to recoup some of that money he’ll be missing out on if he decides to come over to the big leagues this offseason.