A's fall in Draft -- again -- but can take comfort in track record

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Draft Lottery has once again produced what has become an unfortunate common theme for the Athletics.

Despite entering Tuesday’s MLB Draft Lottery carrying the fifth-highest odds (6.55%) for the No. 1 selection, the A’s will be picking eighth overall in next July’s Draft. Among the teams jumping ahead of them were the Giants, who landed the No. 4 pick after holding the 15th-highest odds for the first pick, and the Royals, picking sixth overall with the 16th-highest odds for No. 1.

At this point, the A’s front office has come to expect that no matter what the odds might be heading in, the team should expect to fall a bit further than the initial projections might indicate. The A’s fell out of the top three in the first two lotteries held in 2023 and ’24 after being tied for the highest odds of landing the No. 1 pick in both, then they were ineligible to pick in the top 10 for the ’25 Draft due to receiving revenue-sharing payouts and holding Lottery picks the previous two years.

For A’s general manager David Forst, there is some solace in that the A’s finished the 2025 season tied with the Braves for the eighth-worst record (76-86) in MLB. Had the normal rules from before the inception of the Lottery process been in place, they would have still received the No. 8 selection.

“We knew when the Royals and Giants moved up, it probably didn’t bode well for us,” Forst said. “I don’t know. We finished with the eighth-worst record and we got the eighth pick. I guess it’s hard to complain too much.”

The A’s are not so much upset about a lower-than-expected first-round pick. After all, they’ve nailed their last three first-round selections. Nick Kurtz (No. 4 in 2024) and Jacob Wilson (No. 6 in ’23) finished 1-2 in American League Rookie of the Year voting and now headline a talented young core looking to help lift the A’s back to playoff contention in ’26. Left-hander Jamie Arnold, whom they selected 11th overall in July, is ranked as the A’s No. 2 prospect and the No. 38 overall prospect in baseball by MLB Pipeline.

The bigger disappointment from this result is how it affects the rest of their Draft. The bonus-pool money available with the eighth pick is a significant difference from picking in the top five.

“I feel good about [scouting director Eric Kubota’s] process and what they do,” Forst said. “Being closer to the top [of the Draft], one of the bigger advantages is the size of your pool. That as much as who you’re going to get with your first pick. Obviously, we’ve done a good job with our picks the last couple of years. So the focus is not as much on that as what you can do in the rest of the Draft. But we’ll figure it out.”

The Draft is seven months away, which means the Draft prospects list will likely fluctuate from now until then.

Per MLB Pipeline, Gio Rojas, a left-hander out of Stoneman Douglas High School (Florida), ranks as the eighth-best Draft prospect. Pipeline’s Jim Callis released his first full 2026 mock Draft shortly after the Lottery and had the A’s selecting Coastal Carolina right-hander Cameron Flukey with the eighth pick. Flukey, listed at 6-foot-6 and 210 pounds, currently ranks as the best college pitching prospect available, with a nasty arsenal of pitches that features a fastball that tops out at 98 mph and an upper-70s curveball with good downward break.

“I have a sense of who the top few guys are,” Forst said. “We always have meetings in January where we kind of bear down on it a little bit. We picked [Kurtz and Wilson] because they were honestly the guys we liked most in the Draft. It just so happened those two guys were quick movers through the Minor Leagues. … I don’t think that changes how we look at the Draft board.”