​The Athletics are expected to name a new head of baseball operations in the coming days, with the most recent reports suggesting that the team is zeroing in on Boston Red Sox executive Taylor Smith. Regardless of who ends up being the team’s hire, the team’s approach to pitching will need to be overhauled in the coming months and years after the A’s ranked 29th in team ERA in 2026 with a 5.53, and last in home ERA with a 6.37. The team just won’t be able to compete with those stats moving forward.Baseball America also put out a report this week that seemed to point to a key area for the A’s to focus on when new leadership is installed, and that is how often they threw fastballs in the minor leagues. A’s minor leaguers threw fastballs 52.1% of the time, the second-most in the minors behind just the San Francisco Giants (53.8%). The A’s were also one of just eight clubs that threw over 50% fastballs in the minors, joining teams like the Kansas City Royals and the Angels, as well as the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers. Two teams are not thought of as ahead of the analytics curve, while the Padres tend to have good pitching and the Dodgers are one of the analytics leaders in the sport.That’s not the only blemish for the Athletics, however. The organization averaged 92.5 mph with those fastballs, ranking them 24th out of 30 teams. The final piece of this puzzle is that the team’s pitches overall didn’t rank highly in the stuff+ metric, with only the Seattle Mariners grading out worse. In other words, the A’s farm system as a whole didn’t have velocity with the fastball, the entire arsenal didn’t have a lot of movement and “stuff,” and they also relied on the fastballs quite often. If Smith is the pick for head of baseball operations, he’d be coming from a team that famously tinkered with their fastball usage at the big-league level in 2024, taking them from a 4.52 ERA that ranked 21st in 2023 to a 3.42 ERA that ranked 5th through June 13. They ended up finishing with a 4.05 ERA at the end of 2024, but that is still a big improvement. Smith came in following that season, and the Red Sox ended up posting a team ERA of 3.72, ranking 5th, and a 3.54 ERA this season, ranking 3rd. While he may not be solely responsible for this turnaround, he’s been involved with taking a team from the bottom third of the league to the top five in a span of a couple of seasons.The question for the A’s will be about bringing in the right talent, on top of tinkering with the pitchers’ arsenals they already have to work with. The tinkering could come in 2027, while the additions are made before the 2028 campaign.Not only would that give the new head of baseball operations time to learn the roster and get things up and running, but it would also give them a chance to further measure the in-house options after some adjustments. This would give them a better sense of what they truly have to work with, and would also buy some time until the team lands in Las Vegas i