Athletics Hire Taylor Smith, 31, as President of Baseball Operations to Build the Team That Arrives in Las Vegas in 2028

The Athletics have chosen the executive who will build the roster that opens their Las Vegas era. The team hired Taylor Smith, 31, as president of baseball operations on Monday, October 19, according to Field Level Media via Reuters, the Associated Press via Sportsnet and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Smith arrives from the Boston Red Sox, where he spent the past two seasons as senior vice president and assistant general manager, and he takes over a baseball operations department that has been without its top leader for two months.

The appointment is a bet on a specific kind of expertise at a specific moment in franchise history. According to the Associated Press, Smith oversaw Boston’s research and analytics department and held a player personnel role with the Red Sox. Before Boston, he spent seven years with the Tampa Bay Rays, an organization long associated with extracting competitive rosters from careful player evaluation and development. That background — measuring performance, projecting development and building systems around both — is precisely the language the Athletics used to explain the hire.

What owner John Fisher said about the search

Athletics owner John Fisher called Smith “one of the brightest minds in the game today” in the team’s announcement, according to Field Level Media via Reuters and the Associated Press. Fisher said the club conducted a thorough search and that Smith stood out for his “acute understanding of the game, especially in the areas of measuring player performance and player development.” Those are not decorative phrases for this franchise. A team that will play one more season in a Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento before moving to Las Vegas in 2028 has to identify and develop its next core before it can sell that core to a new home market.

Smith invokes Moneyball — deliberately

Smith’s own statement leaned directly into the franchise’s most famous idea. “The Athletics changed the way baseball thinks about building a team, and their pioneering work during the Moneyball era opened the door to my own career in the game,” Smith said, according to the Associated Press and Field Level Media. “It’s an honor to build on that legacy as we work to create the next great A’s team, build on our foundation for sustained success and prepare for our new home in Las Vegas.”

That framing does useful work for both sides. For Smith, a 31-year-old taking his first job running a baseball operations department, it connects his analytics background in Tampa Bay and Boston to the organization that popularized analytics-driven team building in the first place. For the Athletics, it presents the hire not as a reset but as a return to an identity — evidence-based roster construction — at the moment the club most needs that identity to produce a credible team for a new city.

The vacancy Smith fills, and the one still open

The job opened two months ago, when general manager David Forst and the club mutually parted ways. Forst had served as general manager since 2015 and had been with the organization since 2000, according to the Associated Press. Assistant general manager Dan Feinstein served as interim leader of baseball operations during the search. What remains unresolved, in the initial announcement and reporting, is the general manager position underneath Smith: Field Level Media and the Associated Press both noted that it was not immediately clear who will serve as GM under the new president, or whether the club will fill that role from inside or outside the organization.

That structure — a president of baseball operations above a general manager — is now the common shape of a modern front office, and it gives Smith both authority and a layer to build. His first decisions will signal how he intends to use it: whether Feinstein’s interim group stays largely intact, how the research and analytics functions he ran in Boston get replicated in an organization with different resources, and how aggressively a 64-win team should push its young players toward contention before the move.

The team Smith inherits: 64-98, young, and in transit

The on-field starting point is stark. The Athletics went 64-98 in 2026, their fifth straight losing season, and they have not reached the playoffs since 2020, according to the Associated Press. They are a young team playing its second year at a Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento, with 2027 set as the final season there before the planned Las Vegas move for 2028. Previously’s earlier coverage of the Las Vegas ballpark taking shape on the Strip shows the other half of the timeline: the building is rising on a fixed schedule, whether or not the roster is ready for it.

That is the assignment in one sentence. Smith does not have the luxury of a long, quiet rebuild, and he does not have a finished roster to simply maintain. He has roughly one transitional season in West Sacramento to evaluate a young core, decide which players are part of the Las Vegas debut and which are trade capital, and put development systems in place that survive the move. A president hired for measuring player performance and player development, in Fisher’s words, will be judged on exactly those outputs — in the standings in 2027, and far more consequentially in the team that takes the field in Las Vegas in 2028.

Why Las Vegas should care about a front-office hire now

Las Vegas has watched this franchise from a distance for several seasons — as a future tenant, a ballpark construction site and a 2028 date on a rendering. Monday’s hire is one of the first moves that directly shapes what local fans will actually watch. The executive choosing the players, running the drafts and trades and setting the development pipeline for the next two seasons is, in practical terms, choosing the inaugural Las Vegas roster. Coverage of the team’s arrival continues on the Previously sports front and the Previously news front, alongside the rest of Monday’s Las Vegas sports news, including the Raiders’ 33-30 loss to Buffalo.

Smith’s statement ended where Las Vegas readers begin: “prepare for our new home in Las Vegas.” The preparation now has a name, an age and a résumé — Rays systems, Red Sox analytics, and a mandate stated by his owner in the language of measurement and development. The next great A’s team, as Smith put it, is supposed to be built before it arrives. Monday was the day the building got its architect.

Sources: Field Level Media via Reuters (reuters.com — announcement, Fisher and Smith statements); Associated Press (apnews.com) via Sportsnet (sportsnet.ca — Smith background, Forst departure, team record and Sacramento timeline); Las Vegas Review-Journal (reviewjournal.com — announcement coverage).