A Home, A Crown, and A Chance

Cincinnati, Oakland, and San Diego have different reasons for a win-now approach

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

If you don’t already subscribe (for free), please consider doing so today. And if you enjoy WTP, go ahead and share it.

The trade deadline is rapidly approaching, and the hours leading up to Friday at 4:00 PM ET will set the course for the remainder of the 2021 season.

I’m waiting to see what three teams in particular will do in the time remaining. The A’s, the Padres, and the Reds have already been active participants in the trade market — the most significant move taking place yesterday when Oakland shipped the talented-but-rarely-healthy Jesus Luzardo to Miami in exchange for center fielder Starling Marte.

In a win-now move, the A’s put the rest of the American League playoff hopefuls on notice.

Not too long ago, we never had to question a team’s motivation: it was to win… or not go bankrupt. The A’s have deftly negotiated that high-wire act of winning and staying in business for a while now.

Starling Marte won’t be the last addition to the A’s roster this week. Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

As the acrimony grows between A’s ownership and the Oakland City Council over the proposed ballpark project at Howard Terminal, the possibility of the team leaving the Bay Area appears more likely.

Public trips by A’s team president Dave Kaval to Las Vegas and Portland have been supported by everyone’s favorite hype man: MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. Whether it’s a bluff and an attempt to bully the Oakland City Council into providing $855 million in public funds remains to be seen.

This Oakland A’s roster is built to win today, with several key contributors reaching free agency or in line for substantial raises via arbitration next year. Unique to this club, though, might be the political ramifications of winning now. What better way to entice the taxpayers of Las Vegas or Portland than with a pennant winner?

The A’s, in fact, are playing for a reverse Major League. Instead of fielding a team so bad that attendance will drop below the necessary threshold for relocation, they are motivated to go deep into October so that other cities may offer their real estate and public dollars to build them a new home. (Terrible movie premise.)

Meanwhile, the Padres have the misfortune of sporting the fourth-best record in the NL, yet they only sit in third place in their division. I’m reminded of the 1993 Giants, a team that had the second-best record in all of baseball (103-59) and finished one game behind the Braves during the last full season before the Wild Card Era began.

Those Giants went home. These Padres have more than one way to punch their ticket to the postseason.

You don’t need to follow the game closely to know that the competitive window for San Diego has opened. With the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire on December 1 of this year and a number of reasons why a work stoppage is possible, I wonder if the Padres leadership feels a greater sense of urgency.

The strike that began in August 1994 robbed the Expos — 74-40 at the time of the stoppage — of a legitimate shot at the postseason and arguably changed the course of baseball in Montreal forever. (It also left Tony Gwynn sitting on a .394 batting average.) There’s no telling what baseball could look like in 2023 if next season is ravaged by labor strife.

The Giants and Dodgers will certainly be adding to their rosters before Friday’s deadline. The Max Scherzer sweepstakes could very well reset the tenuous balance of power in the NL West. I don’t see why the Padres would back down now.

How many times will Max have In-N-Out in August? Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos

Finally, the Cincinnati Reds keep trying to win, damn the oddsmakers, analysts and tarot readers. I’ve said it before about the Reds, and I’ll say it again: It’s nice to have one team trying to win while all other teams in similar positions actively market some euphemism for rebuilding.

For the Reds to make the playoffs, they’ll have to overtake either the NL Central-leading Brewers or the straggler of the NL West triumvirate. Entering play today, the Reds trail Milwaukee by seven games and the Friars by five. I don’t see them chasing down the Brewers.

So here’s their path to a Wild Card berth: The Reds have the softest schedule remaining in all of MLB. While the Padres will face the Dodgers and Giants in 13 of their final 20 games, the Reds have six games against the Pirates and four against a folding Nationals team.

There’s a decent chance for the Reds to lighten up and play the role of Mr. Pink. Let’s see if they’ll be the ones walking out of the warehouse after the other challengers wipe each other out.

Once They Were Horses

A pair of backend bullpen arms will likely find themselves on new teams this weekend.

Rangers closer Ian Kennedy and Nationals set-up man Daniel Hudson are both free agents after the season, and both have reinvented themselves successfully as relievers.

Ten years ago, that duo was pacing the D-backs starting rotation, each throwing 222 innings en route to a division title. These days their workloads are much shorter but still valuable.

There’s no way that either of them considered themselves one-inning pitchers back in 2011. Two Tommy John surgeries likely changed Hudson’s mindset, and Kennedy adapted very well to a new role after struggling over much of the course of a lucrative contract with the Royals.

Yet another lesson in resilience meted out by baseball: We all face adversity and uncertainty; how we choose to react makes all the difference.

Thank you for reading Warning Track Power. Subscribe now to have WTP delivered to your inbox every Thursday.