It was a good story while it lasted. Meneses, a 34-year-old first baseman who didn't even make his MLB debut until he was 30, got called up to the Athletics after mashing his way through Triple-A Las Vegas, hitting .395 with 3 homers and 26 RBIs over an 18-game stretch in June that made him impossible to ignore. The problem: the version of Meneses that showed up in the big leagues wasn't that guy at all.
MLB Trade Rumors broke the news that Oakland was moving on from Meneses.
Over 9 games back in the majors, Meneses went 3-for-20 — a .150 average that made it easy for the front office to pull the plug. According to MLB Trade Rumors, the corresponding move was about need, not spite: Oakland had to open a 40-man spot for reliever Geoff Hartlieb after closer-caliber arm Justin Sterner went down with a right knee injury. Hartlieb himself had been DFA'd earlier in July before accepting a trip to the minors, and now he's back up. Baseball's roster math is brutal like that — one man's knee injury is another man's ticket out the door.
Meneses isn't a nobody. He broke in with the Nationals in 2022 as a rookie sensation, hitting .324/.367/.563 in a hot stretch that made him a folk hero in DC for about a summer. He's never come close to touching that ceiling since, bouncing between the majors and minors trying to recapture it. Oakland gave him a look because that June trip through Vegas was legitimately loud — a .944 OPS is a .944 OPS, wherever it happens — but the gap between Triple-A dominance and big-league at-bats proved too wide again.
Here's the part that actually matters for what happens next: Meneses has been outrighted before, which means he has the right to reject an outright assignment to the minors and become a free agent instead of quietly reporting to Las Vegas. The Athletics have 5 days to work out a trade before he hits waivers, but given the .150 average, a trade market seems unlikely. More probable is Meneses testing the open market and looking for a fresh org willing to bet on the bat one more time.
For the A's, this is just standard trade-deadline housekeeping — clearing 40-man clutter, shuffling arms in and out to patch a bullpen that just lost a piece. But for Meneses, it's another chapter in one of the stranger recent MLB stories: a guy who didn't sniff the majors until 30, had one magical summer, and has been chasing it ever since.