GM Forst explains why Montas trade ‘made sense' for A's

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The Athletics were going to make a big move before the 2022 MLB trade deadline, so when they dealt away their ace Frankie Montas and closer Lou Trivino to the New York Yankees on Monday, it didn’t come as much of a shock. 

But why the Yankees? 

A’s general manager David Forst joined A’s Pregame Live on Tuesday to break down the process and why they pursued a trade with the AL-leading Yankees. Hint: It didn’t happen overnight. 

“This has been a discussion we’ve been having since spring training,” Forst told NBC Sports California hosts Brodie Brazil and David Stewart. “Obviously we traded a number of other guys. There comes sort of a right time to trade guys and with Frankie, it wasn’t in March. But considering the interest now and the way he’s pitched the last few months, this was the deal that made sense for us moving forward. 

“When it came to the Yankees, it was really about the arms that they had to offer. We certainly talked to a number of teams, you saw some of the other teams that traded for starting pitching [Tuesday] were very much in our conversation, but at the end of the day, the Yankees had the offer that we liked, and adding Lou to the mix allowed us to expand the trade.”

The A’s looked into the future with four prospects to improve their farm system after acquiring pitchers Ken Waldichuk, Luis Medina, JP Sears and infielder Cooper Bowman in the trade. 

While Forst acknowledged it was difficult to trade away a fan favorite in Montas, he’s excited for what’s to come with the newest prospects. He also explained why he targeted those specific players, and even peaked into the future a bit with his expectations for the young players moving forward. 

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“This process starts a long time ago," Forst said. "This isn’t a case of just a couple of days when we start identifying these players. In the case particularly of Sears and Waldichuk, it goes back years to the amateur draft. And then our scouts seeing them every year in the minor leagues or a couple times a year, similarly with Medina, seeing him as an amateur in the Dominican Republic. So this is a lot of years in the works and Waldichuk particularly was a guy we saw right in our backyard at St. Mary’s and didn’t get a chance to grab in the draft but he’s kind of shot through their system the past couple of years. Sears we saw up close and personal back in May at Yankee Stadium.

“And this ultimately was the package, with Cooper Bowman at the backend as a position player. This is a group that we felt like added best to our system, a combination of guys who might get here quickly. You may see Sears and Waldachuck sometime this season. Medina coming behind and then Bowman hopefully moving up to Double-A by the end of this year.” 

But as the trade deadline quickly approached, the mindset of the A's organization was a bit unclear. 

Were they looking for players to fulfill organizational needs or were these four prospects the best possible players Forst and Oakland could get from New York in this trade? 

“It’s a good question," Forst said. "We’ve been going after the best players and certainly going back to the trades we made in spring training with [Chris] Bassitt and [Matt] Chapman and [Matt] Olson. I think there’s been some commentary out there about a lot of pitchers coming in and certainly before this process started, we felt a need to increase the depth in starting pitching, but at this point, we are looking for the best players.

"We’ll figure out where they all fit. If they all get to Oakland and [manager] Mark [Kotsay] has too many good players to work with, that’s a good problem to have. But when you trade Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino, you’re not looking for organizational needs, you’re going out there to get the best big leaguers and we hope that’s what we did."

RELATED: Why Montas, Trivino trade 'was not easy' for A's GM Forst

Like A's fans have grown so used to doing, we'll just have to wait and see. 

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