A's Reportedly Zeroing In on Red Sox Exec for Top Baseball Ops Job

Last week, it was reported that the Athletics were close to naming their next president of baseball operations. Over the weekend, it came out that Sam Fuld had been offered the position and decided to remain with the Philadelphia Phillies instead. That has led to a delay in any sort of announcement, but on Thursday, Jon Heyman of the NY Post reported that the A's "seem focused" on Red Sox assistant GM Taylor Smith. 

When Jeff Passan reported that Fuld had taken his name out of consideration for the A's job, he also mentioned that Smith remained a top candidate to take over as head of baseball operations for the A’s.

It's still unclear if the A's are looking to hire both a POBO and a GM, or just one person for both roles, like they had with David Forst, who was fired after the August trade deadline. 

Smith is currently one of Boston's senior vice presidents as well as AGMs, along with Michael Groopman, who has also interviewed for the A's role. Smith has been in this role with the Sox since October of 2024, when Boston hired him away from the Tampa Bay Rays.

He spent six years with Tampa Bay, beginning as an analyst of baseball research and development for two years, then moving up to lead analyst for another year before rising up to director of predictive modeling for his final three seasons. 

Smith also spent four months as an intern for the Los Angeles Dodgers' research and development team during the 2017 season. He has hit a number of different areas of a front office in a short period of time, which certainly makes him an intriguing candidate for this role.

Having spent time seeing how things are done with the Dodgers, Rays, and Red Sox is the right type of experience for a club like the A's to target for this opening. The one pushback would be the resources each of those teams provides for their baseball operations departments, which is something that came up in our discussion with a former San Francisco Giants executive. 

One of their questions for ownership was what kinds of resources they'd be willing to invest in the A's own baseball operations team, given that the team currently runs with one of the smaller groups in baseball. 

There are plenty of challenges that will come with running the A's baseball operations — regardless of the official title — and getting the most out of the payroll and the resources available will be one of the biggest, before even considering the unknown ballpark factors in Las Vegas and how they'll have to adjust the roster with that information.