The subject for today’s Sunday Surmising is the the MLB team that bottomed out in 2023 and has shown steady improvement since as it transitions to a new home: the former Oakland Athletics, a.k.a the future Las Vegas A’s. The team is 60-71 this year, after winning just 50 games in 2023 and 69 games in 2024, all while enduring “criticism” from people who were clueless about the franchise history for decades now.

Well, we were right, of course: with just 31 games left in the 2025 season, the A’s need just 10 more wins to secure another seasonal improvement, as was the plan all along after the club stripped the roster following four winning seasons in a row (2018-2021) and three consecutive playoff appearances (2018-2020). We will remind everyone here that the San Francisco Giants have never made three straight Octobers. Fuckin’ ever.

Maybe that ownership group should sell, eh? Nah, we know San Francisco fans love their prospering cheats.

But we digress: we laid down the reality for the Giants last Sunday. Today, we extolling the A’s and their future success, which is almost a certainty. Again, if the Athletics post just a 10-21 record in their final month of games, the team will improve its record for the second season in a row while remaining on the trajectory to be fielding a competitive playoff team in a new stadium on the Sin City Strip come 2028.

What’s craziest about this team in 2025 is that it endured a 3-24 stretch from May 6 to June 4, where the team saw its record go from 20-16 to 23-40 in the blink of an eye. Since then, the A’s have posted a 37-31 mark that shows how much the roster and the talent level have increased throughout the summer. Heck, even if the team had just played .500 ball in that rough month, the Athletics would be 71-60 right now.

That’s how close the franchise is to posting a winning record. And it’s only going to get better from here on forward. The team’s pitching staff has been terrible this season (4.80 ERA), and part of that is playing in its temporary home in Sacramento: the A’s have just a 26-37 record there. One benchmark for a good team is posting at least a .500 record on the road, and the Athletes have done that to this point: 34-34. Impressive.

The road ERA, by the way, is 4.47 overall, currently—not stellar, but a lot better than the home ERA (5.13). The pitching will improve, albeit slowly for as long as the team stays in Sacramento (right now, through 2027, but we still think the team is going to migrate closer to Las Vegas, maybe one step at a time). With a 19-14 record since the All-Star break, the A’s are setting themselves up to be a choice destination for … someone.

We don’t know who, exactly, but with a young core of talent showing itself to be competitive, a lot of mid-range free agents can see the appeal of being part of something special for the next few seasons as the franchise gets closer to its Las Vegas debut. Of course, the A’s also need to increase their payroll in the process, but they’ve done that over the last few years, too, going from $62M in 2023 to $78M this year.

Slowly but surely, the Athletics will return to the top, just as they have in multiple cycles already this century: with 11 postseason appearances on small budgets since 2000, the franchise knows what it is doing, no matter who the owner has been. Compare this to the high-spending Giants across the Bay, an organization with just eight playoff berths since 2000—and pretty much all of them fueled by PED use.

Yeah, we’d say the A’s are doing just fine.