MLB 2017: One prediction for each team

Oakland A’s: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to figuring out what exactly is going on in Oakland. If all the reports are to be believed, the A’s were the runners up in the bidding for Edwin Encarnacion. That wouldn’t have made much sense for a rebuilding team coming off two straight seasons with fewer than 70 wins.

Not much has made sense with Billy Beane and the A’s the past three years. They blew up their farm system to acquire Jon Lester, Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel in 2014. Trading away Yoenis Cespedes, their best player, hurt the first-place A’s that year, and they were forced into the Wild Card game, where Lester’s inability to control the running game cost them. That playoff disappointment was followed up with a trade for Ben Zobrist and a signing of Billy Butler. Beane also traded away Josh Donaldson for Brett Lawrie, a deal that will haunt the A’s forever.

After the A’s flamed out in the 2014 playoffs Beane should have pulled the plug on his roster and begun a full-scale rebuild. He tried to make incremental improvements to a roster that was massively overachieving to even make the playoffs. It can be difficult to even pull off a rebuild with the type of roster Beane had, where the sum of the parts was much greater than the parts themselves.

Entering 2017, the A’s are not much closer to winning than they were last year. It makes little sense for them to bid so heavily on Encarnacion. Taking a flier on Rich Hill last year made sense because he was so easy to trade for prospects. Encarnacion will not be easy to trade, and his value may take a hit moving out to the pitcher-friendly environs of Oakland. Beane is way smarter than almost everyone when it comes to assembling a roster with whatever resources his budget allows, but his recent moves have been all over the place.