The Thursday Thorns column hasn’t made an appearance here in awhile, due to our attempt to light the mood with our content over the past few months. Our subject today is one we touched on recently, however: the Athletics bullpen/pitching woes. Entering today’s play, the A’s are 38-42, and their bullpen is a joke. Since that post on May 30, the team has blown six more saves, continuing the trend of costing it victories in a mediocre AL West Division race that the Athletics really should be winning by a lot.

If you’re counting at home, that’s a total of 17 blown saves this season already for the A’s pitchers. It’s not even the halfway point of the season, and the team is in a three-way tie for second in the division, just 2.5 games out of first. Not all blown saves come from the “closer” so we can’t assume all 17 of the blown leads would have resulted in victories, but we safely can project that at least 10 of the blown saves should have been victories, for even an average bullpen. That means the A’s could be 48-32, currently.

That would give them a 7.5-game cushion in the division, which would be the second largest in MLB right now, trailing only the Los Angeles Dodgers and their nine-game lead in the NL West Division. The Dodgers, however, are spending over $300M on their team (the second most, overall, in the sport), while the Athletics have just a $95M payroll (25th in MLB). Yet this is more than just about payroll; it’s about team-roster mismanagement and dugout-level managerial decisions that anyone predict would fail badly.

Are the A’s trying not to win? That is the real question.

Oddly, despite the shitty bullpen save-conversion rate(s), the Athletics are still 14-11 in one-run games and 6-3 in extra-inning contests. Those are not mutually independent categories, of course, and the team is only 32-39 in regulation results, many of which have featured these blown saves. The bullpen ERA—which 4.98, the exact same right now as the rotation—isn’t the issue, really, as the team still has notched 23 saves. It’s the haphazard way the roster has been built with crap relievers … and how they’re used.

First, who are these assclowns? Eight different pitchers have a save for the 2026 Athletics: Hogan Harris (6); Mark Leiter, Jr. (4); Joel Kuhnel (4); Jack Perkins (3); Scott Barlow (2); Elvis Alvarado (2); Justin Sterner (1); and Mason Barnett (1). Usually, a team will have a singular closer, the primary guy they go to all the time in the ninth, etc., and they might have one or two other guys available in situations when the designated closer has pitched too many days in a row, or something like that.

Harris is allegedly that guy, but his 1.595 WHIP says otherwise; he has the highest walk rate of any regular on the roster. Leiter is now on the DL; his 4.85 ERA and 1.382 WHIP are bad. Kuhnel was waived after that aforementioned debacle at Wrigley Field three weeks ago; Perkins has an ERA in the sixes, while Barlow was sent down to the minors with his 6.48 ERA. Alvarado has an ERA in the sixes, too, and the Sterner/Barnett combo actually seems to be the best duo in the bullpen, statistically speaking, now.

Sterner (3.96 ERA, 1.128 WHIP) and Barnett (1.32 ERA, 1.024 WHIP) have been underused, for varying reasons, but Athletics Manager Mark Kotsay—who we used to rip endlessly—continues this closer by committee approach, despite very little data and/or evidence that the strategy ever works. It seems good on paper, but in practice, there is a lot of psychological preparation that goes into knowing one’s role and entrenching one’s mindset within those parameters. MLB pitchers are a weird bunch, of course.

What the A’s front office should do is two-fold here: keep churning young arms in the farm system through the organization until you get the best arms in the majors while also ordering Kotsay to pick a closer and stay there … preferably Barnett, who still walks too many guys but doesn’t give up a lot of hits, either, while striking out a healthy number of batters at the same time. These strategies could change the trajectory of the A’s rebuilding process and send them to the postseason for the first season since 2020.

Yet … we have heard the whispers that MLB doesn’t want the Athletics in the postseason while they’re playing in their temporary Sacramento home, and this sort of jibes with hushed insinuations we heard in MLB press boxes across the country for a decade (2009-2018) when we wrote for CBS affiliates: the sport’s leadership didn’t want the Oakland Coliseum hosting a World Series, either. There’s also the reality that the team doesn’t play in a Top 10 TV market, which is another issue altogether, of course. Hmm.

Maybe the Athletics want to make their big splash in 2028 when they arrive in Vegas, but in the meantime, they’re sure blowing it.