People are starting to fret over the constant rebuilding in Oakland:
“I’d rather run a club that has a 3- or 4-year plan and implements it and see it getting better over time, than going on the patchwork basis of year-to-year,” Beane said. “We haven’t been as successful when we go year-to-year.”
Beane understands the frustrations.
“We’ve been through this cycle a number of times,” he said. “And it gets shorter and shorter because the gap between us and everyone else grows.”
Fans, though, are losing patience. “When do you stop rebuilding?” said John Coyle of Los Angeles, 73, a fan since the club was in Philadelphia. “Do Billy and the owners want a major-league team or don’t they? I know it’s not an easy situation without a new stadium, but in the meantime, there’s no one out there to watch.”
As pointed out in the article, the A’s have either rebuilt nor gone all-in for a win in the last four years. Billy Beane seems to think they will get a new stadium soon, so they are starting to rebuild toward being ready to move into that park.
They never should have left Philadelphia.
I think a big part of ‘not going for it’ is that Oakland hasn’t had a team worth going for it with in a long time. The last time the As were really good, they had three very good young pitchers, Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, and the not-yet-a-corpse Eric Chavez.
Since then, the As have had a lot of young players not quite work out for them, and basically none that really hit their 95% percentile projection. There’s been no core of talent around which to spend money to build a real winner. And Beane doesn’t have so much money that he can shrug at that and spend the cash anyway.
Rebuilding I Oakland almost done with, soon they will move their rebuilding to San Jose.