The Athletics Hired Cam Castro Off the World Series Champions. Their Pitching Drafts Have Produced One Star in a Decade.
The Athletics named Cam Castro their general manager on Wednesday, pulling him out of Milwaukee days after the Brewers finished winning the World Series. Ken Rosenthal broke it. The A’s confirmed it inside two hours. Castro was introduced Thursday at the club’s Experience Center in Las Vegas.
Castro is 36. He reports to Taylor Smith, the 31-year-old president of baseball operations the A’s hired on Oct. 19. That is the youngest front-office pairing in baseball, and both men come from organizations that win by developing players rather than buying them.
Why a Pitching Guy, Specifically
Castro’s title in Milwaukee was senior vice president of player development and performance. He got there the long way: seven seasons coaching at Division II Defiance and Lake Erie, a stint training at Driveline, then eight years with the Brewers starting as a Single-A pitching coach in 2019. Pitching coordinator, then director of pitching development, then vice president of player development, then the senior job after 2024.
The Brewers finished second in MLB in team ERA this year at 3.51 and went 103-59, the first 100-win season in franchise history. The A’s finished 64-98 with a 5.51 team ERA and allowed 937 runs.
Here is the number that got Castro hired. Across the past ten A’s draft classes, Mason Miller is the only pitcher who became a real asset, and Hogan Harris, at 4.6 career WAR, is the only other one to clear a single win above replacement. The hitting pipeline works fine: Nick Kurtz, Tyler Soderstrom, Jacob Wilson, Henry Bolte and Zack Gelof were all A’s picks. The pitching pipeline has produced almost nothing for a decade, and no amount of lineup development fixes a staff that gives up 937 runs.
What He Actually Inherits
Better than the record suggests. J.T. Ginn went 9-8 with a 3.71 ERA over 138.1 innings and a 120 ERA+. Gage Jump, 23, posted a 5.47 ERA against a 4.01 FIP, which is the signature of a pitcher whose results lagged his stuff. Luis Morales, Kade Morris and Braden Nett are all under 25, and left-hander Jamie Arnold is the system’s best arm.
The payroll is both the problem and the opportunity. Oakland has only $47.5 million in guaranteed 2027 money against $272 million in total future commitments, with Soderstrom at $84 million through 2032 and Wilson at $66 million through the same year.
He Has About 26 Days
The collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Dec. 1, and a lockout would freeze every transaction involving a 40-man roster player. Castro took the job on Nov. 4. That leaves less than a month to do anything, in an offseason where almost nobody is signing because everybody is waiting on the labor fight.
Smith called Castro “one of the best development minds in the game” in the team’s announcement, and said at Thursday’s press conference that Castro will oversee both major league and minor league development.
Castro called the A’s “one of the very few select legacy organizations in our game” and said that after each conversation with Smith he “found myself more and more excited about this opportunity.” Asked about the Brewers’ pitching method, he offered the least quotable version possible: “good process,” and that “it starts with good info, what matters, why it matters and how that’s going.”
Boring is fine. Milwaukee’s process produced a 3.51 ERA and a parade. The A’s have one more season in a Triple-A park in West Sacramento before the move to Las Vegas in 2028, and they need somebody who can turn arms into wins before the new building opens. That is the entire job description.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
