The Athletics have been cold recently, which general manager David Forst acknowledged today. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot of color in the way we played the last three weeks,” Forst said of the team’s first half, per Martín Gallegos of MLB.com. He said they played well for a while but admitted that “they obviously need to start playing better baseball right away.”
A few weeks ago, the A’s were 38-38 and held the final Wild Card spot in the American League. They went 3-17, dropping to 41-55. That puts them 6.5 games back of a playoff spot in the American League’s weakest field but they will have to jump seven teams to get back into a postseason spot.
Forst’s comments about needing to play better soon are a nod to the August 3 trade deadline, which is now just two weeks away. The team now has a less than 2% chance of making the playoffs, according to Playoff Odds on FanGraphs. They will need to come out of the All-Star Break red hot or else the front office will have to trade something.
MLBTR recently took a look at the club’s deadline as part of its Trade Deadline Outlook series for subscribers. The team’s expected free agents aren’t doing very well, so it could be a quiet deadline unless they decide to buy out. Shea Langelierswhich is controlled for two more seasons than this one.
The A’s have already thrown in the towel on one of their free agents, as Aaron Civale you have been assigned an assignment this week. He could still be traded in the next few days but his value will be less as a slow-throwing journeyman with a 5.42 earned run average.
Forst tells Gallegos that Civale’s departure will allow him Jacob Lopez to get another chance to rotate. Lopez proved to be an effective starter last year. He made 21 appearances, including 17 starts, and posted a 4.08 ERA with a 28.3% strikeout rate and a 9.3% walk rate. That performance earned him a rotation job to start 2026 but he was optioned to the minors in early June after posting a 6.75 ERA over 12 innings.
After being selected, he didn’t pitch for two weeks, then made a brief Triple-A appearance, throwing a combined 3 2/3 innings in that one. He then returned to the regular season, making two traditional starts for Las Vegas, going a combined 11 1/3 innings with one earned run. He was then called up to the senior team and played two games, one free and one first. Now he will get another shot to serve as a starter, hopefully with results similar to last year.
Turning to the coaching staff, A’s fired coach Scott Emerson earlier this week and promoted Bulls coach Dan Hubbs to replace Emerson on an interim basis. Today, Forst tells Gallegos the former major leaguer Javy Guerra will be promoted from the minors to replace Hubbs as coach of the bulls until the end of this season.
Guerra, 40, is not to be confused with the 30-year-old righty with the same name as the White Sox on a minor league deal. The elder Guerra pitched in the majors from 2011 to 2021, suiting up for the Dodgers, White Sox, Angels, Marlins, Blue Jays and Nationals. He won a title with Washington in 2019, making two postseason appearances for that club. He pitched in Mexico in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, the A’s hired him as a coach for the Double-A Midland RockHounds. He was in that job until this big league title came.
Photo courtesy of D. Ross Cameron, Magn Images
