The Athletics 2025 End of Season Review: The A’s Young Core Gives Hope for the Future -

The 2025 MLB regular season ended yesterday, and so, it’s time for me to write my Season Review article on The Athletics.

Because, at this point, it’s now a habit to make sure I have my end of season review article on the A’s ready for the day after the end of the regular season, as that’s when the A’s season ends.

I probably shouldn’t be so snide, as the A’s have been better this season. Firstly, ending the 2025 season with a 76-86 record – again finishing fourth in the American League (AL) West – is objectively a season-on-season improvement on last year’s 69-93 regular season record.

The eye test also shows that the A’s have continued to get better offensively as well, and this is backed up by the stats – we ended the regular season in the top half for a number of hitting stats, finishing 2025 seventh in the league for home runs (219), twelfth in runs (733) and RBIs (709) and we had the fifth-highest batting average (.253) and amount of hits (1403).

This has been thanks to some fine performances at-bat on an individual level; Nick Kurtz had 36 home runs and 86 RBIs despite only being called up to the majors part-way through the season, Shea Langeliers had 31 HRs and 72 RBIs despite missing part of the season with an oblique injury and Brent Rooker hit 30 homes runs and had 89 RBIs. This is the first time three different A’s players have had 30 or more homes runs in a season since 2001. That is not to take anything away from other A’s batters though – Tyler Soderstrom hit 25 home runs and had 93 RBIs while Lawrence Butler hit 21 home runs and had 63 RBIs. Jacob Wilson, meanwhile, finished the season with the third-highest batting average in all of MLB (.311).

However…

The same issues on the mound that I highlighted in my 2025 mid-season report back in July have continued to be true in the second half of the season – the A’s finished twentieth in all of MLB for strikeouts (1323), issued the third-most walks (570) which was helped in no small part by the fact the A’s hit the second-most batters (80) and allowed the eighth-most hits (1387) and the third-most home runs (222).

This is particularly disappointing given how much the A’s invested in pitching last off-season, handing out the largest guaranteed contract in franchise history to Luis Severino in free agency, while also bringing in Jeffrey Springs and Jose LeClerc, among others. While Severino and Springs has certainly showed their class at different moments throughout the season, neither of them were consistently the difference-making game winners A’s fans hoped they would be, as evidenced by their ERAs (4.54 for Severino and 4.11 for Springs) and Jeffrey Springs in particular went through a period early in the season where he was not a good starting pitcher, effectively losing the game for the A’s in the first inning by giving up multiple runs. Jose LeClerc, meanwhile, made a grand total of 10 appearances on a one-year, $10m deal with the A’s before being shut down on 23 April with a lateral muscle injury that then required season-ending surgery in July.

All-in-all, the A’s struggles on the mound, coupled with some costly defensive errors, contributed significantly to why the team didn’t have a better win-loss record in 2025.

The Second Half of the Season

As things stand, there is cause for optimism when considering the A’s going into 2026 as, following the All-Star Break in July, the A’s had the ninth-best record in MLB (35-29).

We also swept a few teams in the second half of the season, the most notable being the Detroit Tigers at Sutter Health Park in late August. What made this one satisfying is that the Tigers had the best record in the American League at the time. We then followed that up with a sweep of the Cincinnati Reds – another good team in and around the playoff places – in early September. Perhaps most satisfying of all, the A’s helped ensure our divisional rivals the Houston Astros missed out on the post-season by winning two out of three games in the penultimate series of the season.

All told, the A’s were a very good team after the All-Star break. Quite frankly, if they hadn’t dipped so badly after the first month of the season, they might have had a chance of grabbing a Wild Card spot in the playoffs.

The uptick in form post-the All-Star break was very much thanks to the outstanding at-bats of the players – Shea Langliers was in MLB’s top ten for home runs following the All-Star break and was rightly named the AL Player of the Month for August, while Nick Kurtz continued to play so well that he was named the AL Player and AL Rookie of the Month for July and is now the frontrunner for AL Rookie of the Year having also made the top ten for home runs following the All-Star break. In my mid-season review, I said Kurtz would have been the frontrunner for AL ROTY if it wasn’t for Jacob Wilson. Following the second half of the season, I have to amend that; Jacob Wilson would be the frontrunner for AL ROTY if it wasn’t for Nick Kurtz.

The fact that the top two contenders for AL ROTY are both A’s is certainly a point of pride. The A’s are a team that has been built on the back of promising young players full of potential for as long as I’ve been a fan of them, and the same is still true now – in addition to Kurtz and Wilson, the defensive play of Denzel Clarke was notable this season prior to him being injured, and guys like Carlos Cortes and Colby Thomas have already shown their prowess too. We haven’t seen the best of either Cortes or Thomas yet, but, from what I’ve seen, I think both will develop into fantastic power hitters, much like Langeliers is now.

The A’s have a good line-up of young batters (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)

There are the makings of a very good young batting lineup in Sacramento currently; Langeliers, Cortes, Thomas, Kurtz, Wilson, Zach Gelof, Butler and Soderstrom with Rooker as designated hitter certainly sounds good to me, particularly given there are other young players like Max Muncy, Darrell Hernaiz and Brett Harris along with veterans like JJ Bleday, Luis Urias and Gio Urshela that can come into the line-up and do a job as well.

This is the problem with being as fan of the A’s though; it’s the hope that gets you. While A’s owner John Fisher and the front office should want to keep a young, exciting line-up like that together so they can develop together and become a cohesive unit that consistently starts to put wins together ahead of the move to Las Vegas so that people will want to come to the new ballpark, experience tells us that some of those players will instead get traded away once they’ve proved their value for other prospects.

There is not a doubt in my mind that Fisher’s hubris is telling him that he’ll be able to fill the new ballpark in Vegas with tourists and business travellers regardless of how the team is performing. Nothing will be further from the truth though; there are a multitude of other entertainment options in Las Vegas the A’s will be competing with, so the front office will need to build a core fanbase of Las Vegas residents that are willing to pay major league ticket prices, particularly given that there will still be a Triple-A ballclub, the Las Vegas Aviators, just down the road (such is MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s desire to have a constant MLB presence in Las Vegas and to make that work though, I’ve no doubt the Aviators will be moved out of town very quickly if it’s felt they are pulling business away from the A’s once they’ve moved to Vegas.)

And to highlight how bad the A’s ownership and front office is, they’ve now apparently decided to embrace the team’s temporary home in Sacramento from the start of next season after insisting on being called ‘The Athletics’ this season, thereby alienating the team from the people of Sac-Town this year. I’m mixing my sporting metaphors here, but it amazes me how those running the organisation have managed to both score an own goal and fumble the football at the same time – if the A’s organisation were going to publicly embrace their temporary home in West Sacramento, they should have done it at the start of this season. The Oakland-based celebrators of The Oakland Coliseum, Last Dive Bar, did a good job of summing it up more forthrightly than I have following the jersey reveal yesterday.

Conclusion

The A’s have been slowly getting better the past two seasons, and the offence in particular has been a joy to watch.

Experience tells me that the A’s will very likely trade away some of the names I’ve mentioned above though, breaking up a talented young team that has been developing together and building cohesion with each other along the way.

As a slightly jaded UK-based A’s fan who has stuck with the team despite the failings of the organisation, I await the 2026 MLB season with continued, if historically-misplaced, hope then.