For most of the quarter century general manager David Forst has spent with the Athletics, he’s had to do his job one way.
When they called Oakland home, the A’s routinely drafted and developed star players whom fans fell in love with. Then the same movie would play time and again: whether it was Matt Chapman or Barry Zito, the best players left as free agents or were traded away, deemed too pricey to retain.
“I’ve tried to get our group not to spend too much time sort of wistfully wishing,” Forst said. “I don’t want to get too sort of overly emotional about the players that have left. You sort of knew that was always the way things were going to end with guys, as long as we were in that building in Oakland.”
Over two decades, the A’s searched for a new stadium, and the revenue a shiny state-of-the-art building could drive. That quest gave Forst hope for an antidote, a means to someday break free of his obligation to dismantle.
The fanbase was just as tired of all the turnover, if not more so.
“It gets fans frustrated. Understandably so,” A’s owner John Fisher said. “They want to know when they buy a jersey with the guy’s name on the back that it’s going to be good the next year.”
Fisher’s decision to relocate the A’s from Oakland to Las Vegas has created anguish that, for some fans, no roster move will heal any time soon. But amidst so much disappointment, a new era for the A’s has begun. They’re not only building a core this time — they’re keeping it.
When Opening Day in Vegas arrives, planned for 2028, four A’s players are in line to take the field under long-term contracts: outfielder Lawrence Butler, designated hitter Brent Rooker, left fielder Tyler Soderstrom and shortstop Jacob Wilson.
Rooker signed a five-year $60 million in December 2024, followed by Butler for seven years and $65.5 million in March 2025. Then this past offseason came two more seven-year deals: Soderstrom for $86 million and Wilson for $70 million.
“That’s how a team becomes a franchise,” said A’s pitcher Luis Severino, who inked the largest free agent contract in club history prior to last season.
The team isn’t in Las Vegas yet, making do in the meantime at a small minor-league ballpark in Sacramento, Calif. But the present seems brighter, if not yet fully realized.
“It definitely feels different. And it should,” Forst said. “We’ve all looked forward to this for a long time, and the reality of having those press conferences that we’ve had over the last year plus is, those are good days for the organization. Those are good days for the players.”
More extensions could follow. The A’s have tried to negotiate with others, including their towering first baseman with huge power, Nick Kurtz, known as “Big Amish.” They’ve also engaged catcher Shea Langeliers, people briefed on those talks who were not authorized to speak publicly confirmed.
Langeliers, a 28-year-old catcher, is three seasons away from free agency. He hit 31 home runs last year.
“Catching is undervalued,” said Scott Boras, Langeliers’ agent. “There’s only a few men that can hit 25 to 30 home runs and catch and manage a pitching staff. Many catchers are managing a $150 million to $200 million pitching staff and getting little credit for it.”
Forst said generally he doesn’t draw deadlines for extension negotiations. If a long-term deal is a good idea in November, he said, then it probably remains so in April. But he doesn’t expect more long-term deals before Opening Day.
“There are other players who can look at that now and say, ‘Hey, that, ultimately, can be me at some point,’” Forst said. “I don’t doubt there was a time when a lot of our guys were counting down the days till they had an opportunity somewhere else. And that’s never good for the long-term health of the organization.”
Having the group of four in place has already helped shift the tone around the team.
“The big thing for me is it communicates that the front office feels that we have the right people in the room to do what we want to do,” said Rooker, who reached 30 home runs last season for a third straight year. “And we know we feel that way as players, so when that can be reinforced by people in charge, people making decisions, it does nothing but build confidence.”
But in the background of all these signings lurks uncertainty that could turn ironic.
The executives who nailed down these deals — who waited so long for this chance to try their hands at a different mode of play — might not be around to enjoy the fruits in Las Vegas themselves. Forst and his front-office group are signed only through this year.
Back in 2013, Fisher watched alongside Billy Beane, then the GM of the A’s, as their team destroyed the Houston Astros over and over.
The A’s won 15 of 19 meetings with the Astros that year, a time when Houston was rebuilding. The Astros’ young second baseman, Jose Altuve, was making waves, Fisher remembered, yet the club still looked terrible.
“Those guys aren’t very good,” Fisher told Beane during one of the drubbings.
“You watch,” Beane shot back to the owner. “They’re gonna be amazing.”
Beane was right: The Astros won a pair of World Series championships over the next decade.
Beane is the progenitor of the Moneyball movement, the search for inefficiency in roster building that, today, has influenced every Major League Baseball front office. Now a senior advisor for the A’s, Beane still talks to Forst “three times a day, every day” Forst said.
But as the A’s prepare for Vegas, the club has taken up a strategy that’s more tried and true than innovative, a derivative of teams like the Astros.
“We studied sort of the successful franchises: Houston, Cleveland, and others,” Fisher said. “You see a lot of teams that they’re great for a little while, and then they come down and they rebuild, and they go back back up. But the periods of maintaining greatness seem to be relatively short.”
The Astros signed Altuve to a long-term extension in 2013, years before the club again became contenders. The Braves are a good example, too, Forst said. They locked up infielders Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies in succession early in 2019.
But neither of those clubs were the first in modern times.
“When Cleveland was moving into Jacobs Field in 1994, they had a lot of great young players, and they signed these guys to longer term contracts,” Fisher said. “That allowed that franchise to have 10 years of dominance in that division.”
In one light, the A’s deals are just four individual processes that finished around the same time. But a common thread runs through the deals. Butler, 25, Soderstrom, 24, and Wilson, 23, have similarly structured contracts, Forst noted, and are close in age.
“You’re trying to sort of focus on what we consider the prime years, and the first couple free agent years, without going too far down the road for either side,” Forst said. “Letting the player get back to free agency at some point, while there’s still money to be made, but also letting the team minimize risk of going too far into their 30’s, things like that.”
There’s also a domino effect, where players want to stick together as a group. Players trade at least some information about their processes with the club, trying to help one another.
“I talked to a couple of them throughout the entire time,” Wilson said. “I didn’t really lean on them as much as I could have, but at the same time, you kind of want to keep it minimal between how many people you’re talking to.”
There are three key phases for baseball players when it comes to salary. They start off at the league minimum, which is set at $780,000 for 2026. Then three years into their career (or two, if they’re particularly successful on the field), they become eligible for arbitration, a process that will typically grant them their first seven-figure salaries. After six years, they can become free agents, where the biggest money awaits.
In extensions, players and agents typically are “looking at the floor more than the ceiling,” said one player agent who worked with the A’s on a recent extension.
“There’s some protection of creating a floor for what a player’s career earnings will be,” said the agent, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive negotiation. “It’s important to us that there’s a balance between protecting that and also recognizing what the player could make in the future as well.”
Extension talks today differ from the past, Forst said. The biggest change Forst has detected is that players are less focused on their salaries during their arbitration years than they once were.
“Now these conversations are not about that,” Forst said. “They’re about, what is the price of the club getting access to free agency? When guys are signing for $60 million a year in free agency, that is clearly where you have to sort of find the value.
“So we spend less time now on how much value you get in years three, four and five, as opposed to, OK, what price do we have to pay to lock a guy up in years six, seven, eight? And then the player has to be willing to do it.”
Every player is in a different situation. Kurtz, for example, received a $7 million signing bonus as the fourth overall draft pick in 2024. Some players want an immediate infusion of cash, while others find it easier to wait.
“Everybody in the game knows that there are agents out there who tell their players there’s no price that’s worth giving up for your free agency years,” Forst said as a generality. “And I respect that. It doesn’t work for everybody, but you have to find someone who is willing to negotiate that value.”
Last season, in his Rookie of the Year campaign, Kurtz hit 36 home runs and batted .290 — elite production at any position. In talks with the A’s, Pete Alonso could be a reasonable comparison, according to The Athletic’s Tim Britton, who tracks player contracts.
Alonso made $42.5 million via arbitration, so Kurtz could be in line for a few million more, perhaps $45 million. Were he to receive another seven-year deal, and two of his free-agent years were bought out for $30 million each, that could put the total value of an extension at around $105 million.
Kurtz’s agency, Excel Sports Management, declined to comment.
Every player starts at a higher number than they end up with, naturally. The A’s conversations have all typically been contained to roughly one offseason. Wilson, who finalized his deal in February, said his talks started in October, after the regular season.
At the 2024 winter meetings, the A’s reached out to Butler’s representatives at CAA to begin negotiating, but after a few exchanges, they stalled for a bit around the holidays, people briefed on that process said. His agents arrived in Arizona early in spring training, and A’s assistant GM Dan Feinstein checked back in. Butler’s camp felt like it was up to the A’s to make a new offer. Once they did, a deal was reached quickly. But even those three months felt like a long time for those involved.
No one knew at the time the A’s would lock up two more players the next year.
“You’re not gonna hit on everyone,” Forst said, “and it’s not like a foolproof plan.”
If there’s a new pain point for A’s fans in seeing the money flow, it’s a lament for the past.
In a different world, the A’s would have executed this strategy with their players in Oakland. They tried to, in fact. When Matt Chapman and Matt Olson were the club’s stars, Forst wanted to lock them up.
“There were conversations with Chapman and Olson about extensions, but we sort of dipped our toe in. We didn’t have the same conviction,” Forst said. “In fairness to us, we couldn’t. Everything was still so year to year.”
Forst didn’t have enough payroll to work with. When Fisher was granting $50, $60 million, “the more spots that are locked up, the less chance you have to recreate the team in a way that’s going to win,” the GM explained. Cot’s Contracts projects the A’s to have a $140 million payroll for 2026.
When giving out long-term contracts, teams often regard them as a collection of bets. Someone could get hurt, or regress. In the Oakland days, there was less margin for error.
“I couldn’t tell John, this is the way we should operate on a payroll of that size, and not risk sort of being stuck in some spots,” Forst said.
In the time of Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada, the A’s did lock up one key position player: third baseman Eric Chávez, in 2004 on a six-year deal for $66 million.
“It didn’t work out, because his health didn’t hold up,” Forst said, “and it felt like there was so much pressure on that contract to work out that we had to take a step back for a while.”
Now, the new ballpark, and the expected jump in revenue it provides, gave the A’s a “certain future,” as Fisher put it.
“Our guys always had the desire to be able to execute this kind of a strategy, of building one core and holding them for a long period of time,” Fisher said. “And the fact that we now have a ballpark that we’re building toward that is going to open in 2028 gave them — along with more payroll that continues to move up as we are moving toward Vegas — an opportunity they hadn’t had before.”
The Athletics’ 33,000-seat domed stadium under construction on the Las Vegas Strip this month. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
Until that Vegas move actually happens, there’s still an inescapable sense the A’s are a team in between, looking toward the future. But the present is increasingly enticing, Forst and Fisher believe. A skid where they lost 20 of 21 games soured their chances in 2025, and they finished in fourth place at 76-86.
Actually building a championship team in Las Vegas will likely require increased free-agent spending as well. But it’s unknown whether the roster architects will be around to see the project through.
Forst had no comment on his own future with the club. To stay, he and other club executives might be asked to move to Las Vegas. He has said in the past that his family loves being in California.
“Our conversations, they started last year, we’re continuing to have them,” Fisher said. “David and his team — Billy Owens, Dan Feinstein, Rob Naberhaus and others — have done a really great job, and have really led the whole process of the extensions that we’ve been able to make.”
For now, Forst’s group has helped shift the conversation around an oft-embattled franchise, even compared to a year ago.
“It’s important as we get into the ballpark in Vegas,” Forst said, “that we’re not losing guys to free agency the way we have for so long.”