A’s courting free agents amid move to minor league park

Luis Severino joined a videoconference on the Friday after Thanksgiving with an Athletics contingent that hoped to make him not only the ace of their staff, but one of the biggest, most consequential additions in franchise history. He was receptive but skeptical.

“I had a lot of questions,” Severino recalled in Spanish. “Lots and lots.”

A’s general manager David Forst sat alongside manager Mark Kotsay and a handful of other staffers while Severino probed them about the direction of a team that lost 307 games over the past three years, the dynamics of the minor league ballpark they’ll call home for the next three seasons and the intentions of a franchise that had spent decades as one of the sport’s most frugal.

A few days later, Severino, a 30-year-old right-hander who was among the more affordable standouts in a deep crop of available starters, received an initial offer that proved the A’s were serious. Within a week of that first meeting, he signed the largest contract in team history — a three-year, $67 million deal that nearly doubled their previous high for a free agent.

“Neither I nor my agent were expecting them to offer a contract of that magnitude,” said Severino, represented by Nelson Montes de Oca of Klutch Sports Group. “It was impressive.”

The A’s, dormant in free agency for most of their existence, have spent these past two months talking at contract levels they never have, even while navigating the most volatile juncture in franchise history. They have moved out of Oakland, their home for the past 56 years, and will spend the 2025, 2026 and 2027 seasons — and perhaps the 2028 season — playing in a Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento while waiting for a new stadium to be erected in Las Vegas.

In his 26th offseason in the A’s front office, Forst is facing arguably his most difficult task: persuading accomplished major league players to play in a minor league stadium, join a team in transition and lead a group still learning to win. Overpaying is a necessity.

Forst’s pitch is built around a young core the A’s believe is talented enough to build around, shown in glimpses of the team’s .500 record in the second half, as well as a manager in Kotsay toward whom Forst thinks players gravitate. The team’s on-field product, not to mention the playing-time opportunities within it, has been received favorably by free agents, Forst said.

Their temporary stadium — Sutter Health Park, a 14,000-seat venue they will share with the San Francisco Giants‘ Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats — has been a bigger obstacle.

While meeting with prospective free agents — most notably Severino and fellow starters like Sean Manaea and Walker Buehler, the latter two still unsigned — Forst and his group have done a lot of up-front explaining to address concerns about amenities, seating capacity, weather, living arrangements and, notably, clubhouse commutes.

“I just think there’s a lot of unknowns,” Forst said in his Dallas hotel suite during last week’s winter meetings. “This is not a city that a lot of players have been to. When we were trying to bring guys to Oakland, at least it was a place that guys had been to. They’d stayed in San Francisco, they’d taken the bus over to the ballpark, they knew what the stadium looks like.”

The A’s expressed interest in Severino shortly after he declined the New York Mets’ qualifying offer on Nov. 19 and filled his agent’s inbox with PDFs leading up to their initial meeting 10 days later.

One held information about how a tweak in usage patterns could help Severino improve off a year in which he went 11-7 with a 3.91 ERA in 182 innings for a Mets team that became one of baseball’s biggest surprises this past season. The other was a slide deck with floor plans, pictures and key information about the upgrades being made to Sutter Health Park, most notably a replenished irrigation system to help natural grass withstand the rigors of two teams playing in the summer heat and a new, two-story clubhouse consisting of lockers, showers, offices, dining rooms, lounges and neighboring batting cages. That space, however, is located beyond the left-field wall, necessitating a fairly long walk outside every time players go back and forth from the field. It’s no small problem.

“That’s the biggest difference from a big league experience in most places, is that you sort of associate walking across the field to the clubhouse with the minor leaguers,” Forst said. “We’ve just been up front in saying, ‘Hey, there was nothing we could do about that. But the clubhouse itself is going to be big league.'”

On Dec. 6, Severino conducted his introductory news conference from the ballroom of a Kimpton hotel in downtown Sacramento, attached to the arena that houses the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. He then crossed neighboring Tower Bridge and toured a ballpark still under heavy construction.

“It’s a mess right now, but they say it’s going to be ready for the start of the season,” Severino said. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but they’re going to do everything they can to make their players comfortable.”

Severino wasn’t too concerned about playing in an area that regularly sees 100-degree temperatures in the summer — “I’d rather it be hot than cold,” he said — but he did ask questions about Sutter Health Park’s favorability to hitters. The A’s told Severino they believe it will play relatively neutral, at least relative to the other ballparks that reside within Triple-A’s hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League.

Severino also asked if the A’s intended to keep adding players to supplement their young core — a group of position players consisting of Jacob Wilson, Lawrence Butler, JJ Bleday, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom, Zack Gelof and, eventually, Nick Kurtz, the No. 4 pick in this year’s draft. He was told, rather definitively, that they would.

The Severino signing was followed by a trade with the Tampa Bay Rays for another starting pitcher, Jeffrey Springs, a 32-year-old left-hander who has shown upside when healthy. On Thursday, they filled their desire for an everyday third baseman by agreeing to terms with Gio Urshela. The A’s could still add a left fielder and have been open to signing another starter for a rotation that could still use help. They’ve also been public in their desire to hold onto Mason Miller, their young star closer, and have shown interest in extending Brent Rooker, their best hitter.

In some ways, they have no choice but to spend.

The A’s are scheduled to receive 100% of their revenue-sharing pool for the first time under the current collective bargaining agreement, which stipulates that teams put 1½ times that amount toward their major league payroll. An industry source estimated the A’s will receive approximately $70 million in revenue sharing next season, confirming a report by the Athletic, which means anything short of a $105 million payroll in 2025 would open them up to a grievance from the players’ union.

It’s a sizable bump for a team that opened the 2024 season with roughly $60 million committed to players and finished it without a single financial commitment beyond then, and a gap still remains. After adding Severino and Springs, the A’s luxury-tax payroll — the one used to determine how teams allocate revenue-sharing money — is projected at $89 million, according to FanGraphs. (Terms of Urshela’s deal have not been disclosed.)

“That is something that we’re aware of,” Forst said of the CBA provision. “I can’t say that that is the reason why we’re spending. We’re trying to get better.”

The A’s finished last in payroll each of the past three seasons and have been among the industry’s least willing spenders during John Fisher’s 20-year ownership tenure. But their key decision-makers have promised to increase payroll in the lead-up to Las Vegas, a natural source of frustration for an Oakland fan base that spent years clamoring for them to make greater financial commitments.

The Severino deal, which gives him the ability to opt out after the second year, qualified as an opening statement. It’s $1 million greater than the largest contract in team history — a six-year, $66 million extension given to third baseman Eric Chavez in 2004 — and blew away its previous high in free agency, a four-year, $36 million deal for outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. Before Severino, the last A’s player to receive more than $15 million and sign for more than two years was reliever Ryan Madson in December 2015.

Money was probably the biggest factor in Severino’s decision; the A’s offered more than most projected, especially considering the penalties associated with adding a player who had declined a qualifying offer.

But when Severino met with the A’s on Nov. 29, he talked about how impressed he was while watching them take two of three from his Mets in the middle of August. He told a group consisting of Forst, Kotsay, pitching coach Scott Emerson, coach and interpreter Ramón Hernández, and assistant general managers Dan Feinstein and Rob Naberhaus that it reminded him of the 2017 team headlined by Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, young stars who helped lead the A’s to three straight playoff appearances before being traded away in this latest rebuild.

At one point in the conversation, one of the A’s staff members laid out a goal that, to Severino’s camp, spoke to the group’s conviction: to create a logistical nightmare for Major League Baseball by qualifying for the playoffs in a minor league ballpark.

In lieu of comfort and security, the A’s are offering hope and opportunity.

Also, in a surprising twist, money.