98 Losses and a Shrinking GM Candidate List: The A's Most Consequential Week Wasn't on the Field

The Oakland Athletics closed the 2026 season at 64-98, a .395 winning percentage, outscored by 238 runs (699 scored, 937 allowed). But the most important story of the past week wasn't another lopsided loss — it was who gets to fix this.

Since parting ways with David Forst in August, the A's have run an interim tag on Dan Feinstein while conducting a first-stage, largely video-call interview process for their next general manager. That list is now both taking shape and thinning out. Jon Daniels, a senior advisor in Tampa Bay's baseball operations department since November 2022, removed himself from consideration, per USA Today's Bob Nightengale, preferring to stay put rather than jump back in.

The names still attached to the job say a lot about how the franchise is pitching itself. James Click, who won a World Series running Houston's front office, has "emerged as a serious candidate" per Nightengale. Mike Rizzo, the executive who built the Nationals' championship core, has interviewed. So has longtime A's assistant GM Billy Owens, plus Boston assistant GMs Mike Groopman and Taylor Smith, both of whom conducted preliminary interviews for a job that now sits in Sacramento.

Why the hire matters more than the record

This isn't a normal front-office reset. The Athletics are a nomadic club playing in a minor-league ballpark while ownership angles toward Las Vegas, and the incoming GM inherits a roster that graded out as the worst in baseball. The most recent power rating places Oakland dead last at No. 30 with a -2.54 neutral-field rating, and it cratered another 0.8 points in a single week. The market agrees: championship futures sit at 100,000-to-1 at multiple books, with one outlier at 300,000-to-1 — an implied probability so small it barely registers.

That's the environment a new GM walks into. Whoever takes the job will effectively decide how aggressive this rebuild gets, how much of the young core is untouchable, and whether the club spends real money in the years before a Vegas ballpark opens.

The injury ledger is worse than the win total

Ten Oakland players finished the year on the 60-day injured list: Mark Leiter Jr., Justin Sterner, Nick Kurtz, Jacob Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom, Brooks Kriske, Gunnar Hoglund, Luis Severino, Brent Rooker and J.T. Ginn. That's not one bad break — that's the top of the roster hollowed out.

Kurtz's situation stings most. In 99 games before going down, the first baseman posted a .256/.396/.483 line with 21 homers, 69 RBI and 79 walks against 141 strikeouts — a .879 OPS from a player who was supposed to be a foundational piece. He was even better at the Coliseum, slashing .284/.404/.612 with 36 career home runs there. Losing him to a 60-day stint robbed the A's of their best on-base threat for the stretch run.

What the numbers say about 2027

The underlying profile explains why the GM job is bigger than any single draft pick. Oakland hit .249 with a .320 on-base percentage and a .725 OPS while striking out 1,330 times against just 510 walks. On the mound, the staff posted a 5.57 ERA and a 1.52 WHIP, allowed 222 home runs and walked 4.24 batters per nine. That combination — passive at the plate, wild on the mound — is how you get to minus-238.

There were flashes: Henry Bolte arrived and played 119 games, hitting .277 with 21 stolen bases, and the club went 3-3 over its final six games while scoring 29 runs and allowing 44. That's the kind of small sample a new front office will point to as evidence the pipeline is producing.

But the honest read is that Oakland's week wasn't decided by anything that happened between the lines. It was decided by which executive says yes — and right now, one candidate has already said no.