October 3, 2026
October 3, 2026
The Athletics’ 2025 season opened on unfamiliar ground, literally. Fifty-seven years after settling in Oakland, the team packed up for a minor league ballpark in West Sacramento. It dropped the city from its name entirely. Players were asked to find stability inside a season built on transition, and stability was in short supply. What they found instead was a 22-year-old rookie who rewrote the record book. They found a blockbuster trade that reshaped the farm system. They found a final record that reflected a club still searching for its footing between two coasts.
Stability came first, at least on paper. The front office locked up manager Mark Kotsay through 2028 in the middle of spring training. It was a vote of confidence in the man who would have to steer this roster through a season unlike any other in franchise history. General manager David Forst worked the margins of the offseason rather than the marquee. Left-hander Jeffrey Springs arrived in a December trade with Tampa Bay to anchor the rotation. Closer José Leclerc signed a one-year, ten-million-dollar deal in January to share bullpen duties. Gio Urshela settled in at third base on a modest one-year contract. T.J. McFarland returned to a bullpen that would lean on him more than anyone expected. None of it screamed contender. All of it was built to survive a year defined less by wins and losses than by geography. The Athletics were headed to Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, a facility built for Triple-A baseball. It was suddenly asked to host the majors for three years while a new stadium rose in Las Vegas.
The season announced its difficulty immediately. The Athletics dropped their first four games and never fully shook the shakiness that defined the opening months. By May, the record had sunk to 23-36. That stretch was bad enough to bury most playoff hopes before Memorial Day even arrived. Injuries and inconsistent starting pitching compounded the problem. Luis Severino finished 8-11 with a 4.54 ERA across 29 starts, solid innings that rarely translated into wins. September brought another rough patch, a fitting bookend to a year that never found sustained rhythm. Yet the collapse many expected never fully arrived either. The Athletics closed at 76-86, four games shy of .500. That mark still beat the 69-93 record the franchise posted in its final Oakland season a year earlier, seven wins of quiet progress buried inside a losing record. The standings put the club fourth in the AL West, fourteen games behind a Seattle team that finally broke a 24-year division drought. But the standings missed the point of the Athletics’ 2025 season. A roster was restocking itself in real time, even as the win total lagged behind.
No single storyline carried the season the way Nick Kurtz did. Called up from Triple-A Las Vegas on April 23, the first baseman needed only three months to author one of the great rookie stretches in franchise history. On July 25 against Houston, Kurtz seized a moment nobody saw coming. He went 6-for-6 with four home runs, becoming the first rookie in major league history to hit four in a single game. He wasn’t finished making history. On September 14, he crushed a grand slam that traveled far enough to rank as the longest home run hit anywhere in the majors in more than two years. By season’s end, Kurtz led every rookie in baseball in home runs, RBIs, runs scored, slugging percentage, and OPS. His 36 homers, 86 RBIs, 90 runs, .619 slugging mark, and 1.002 OPS placed him alongside only Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge among players with at least 400 plate appearances and an OPS above 1.000. Voters made the recognition unanimous. Kurtz collected all 30 first-place votes for American League Rookie of the Year, the first Athletics position player to win the award since Bobby Crosby in 2004.
Kurtz didn’t carry the rookie class alone. Shortstop Jacob Wilson hit .311 with 13 home runs and 63 RBIs across 125 games. Those numbers earned him a starting nod in the All-Star Game as the third fan-elected Athletics player since 1993, plus American League Rookie of the Month honors in May. Wilson finished second in Rookie of the Year balloting. That gave the Athletics’ 2025 season a rookie tandem that finished first and second in the voting, only the ninth such pair in league history and the first involving two position players since 1989. That kind of simultaneous emergence doesn’t happen by accident. It gave a lost-in-the-standings season a reason to matter for years beyond it.
Every rebuild reaches a moment of reckoning. For the Athletics, it arrived on August 1. Closer Mason Miller had been nearly untouchable before the deadline, riding an eleven-appearance scoreless streak into trade talks while posting 20 saves and a strikeout rate of 13.85 per nine innings, fourth-best in the majors. The front office moved him anyway, sending Miller and left-hander JP Sears to San Diego in a deal built around one player. That player was shortstop Leo De Vries, an eighteen-year-old switch-hitter ranked as MLB Pipeline’s third-best prospect in all of baseball. The Padres also included right-handers Braden Nett, Henry Baez, and Eduarniel Núñez to close the gap. Forst didn’t dress up the calculation afterward. It took a talent of De Vries’ caliber, he said, to get the front office to the negotiating table at all. Trading a dominant, cost-controlled closer in the middle of his prime rarely makes sense in the moment. It only makes sense through a longer lens, and for a franchise mid-relocation with an eye on 2028, that longer lens was exactly the point.
Every road trip home meant walking into the smallest ballpark in the majors. Sutter Health Park seated 14,014 fans, a mix of fixed seats and lawn space. The Athletics shared it on a rotating basis with the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats whenever the team left town. The franchise poured money into making it major-league functional anyway. A new home clubhouse rose behind the left-field wall. Video and audio systems got upgrades, and training facilities expanded. None of it disguised what the season represented: a temporary home for a team without one. Attendance reflected the strain, ranking lowest in the majors through the first half of the schedule. That discomfort was the price of a plan already in motion. Sacramento was never meant to be permanent. It was a bridge to Las Vegas, and the Athletics’ 2025 season will be remembered as the year the bridge held. Kotsay’s extension, Kurtz’s unanimous award, Wilson’s All-Star turn, and a trade built to pay off years down the road all pointed toward the same conclusion. This wasn’t a season measured by the standings. It was a season measured by what the organization set in motion for whenever it finally lands somewhere it can call home again.
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October 3rd, 2026 2
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October 1st, 2026 2
