The news broke fast Friday afternoon. Ken Rosenthal was first to report it, with Jon Heyman confirming moments later: the A's had fired longtime general manager David Forst.
The A’s have fired general manager David Forst, sources tell me and @charlottevarnes
This isn't some rookie exec getting canned after one bad summer. Forst joined the organization as a scout back in 2000, worked his way up through the front office, and took over as GM in 2015 when Billy Beane moved upstairs. That's 27 years in the building, 11 of them running the baseball ops show. The team is framing this as a mutual parting of ways, but Rosenthal, Heyman and the rest of the beat are calling it what it looks like from the outside: a firing.
A’s fire longtime GM David Forst @Ken_Rosenthal and @charlottevarnes 1st
The timing matters as much as the move itself. The A's are mid-relocation, playing out a stopgap residency before the planned shift to Las Vegas, and reports indicate Forst wasn't planning to make that move with the club — his family is settled in California. Pair that with a rough season on the field and you've got a GM who was never going to be part of the Vegas era anyway. Whether it's a firing or a mutual exit is semantics at this point; either way, Forst's run in Oakland is over.
Assistant GM Dan Feinstein is stepping in as interim boss for the rest of the 2026 season, per Mark Feinsand's report on the team's announcement. That's not a small task — running a big-league front office through a relocation, a coaching staff, and a trade deadline aftermath, all without the title being permanent. The A's say they're launching a comprehensive search for Forst's full-time replacement, which means Feinstein's audition clock starts now.
Owner John Fisher put out the standard praise-the-departing-exec statement, calling Forst 'an integral part of the A's and our success for nearly three decades.' Forst, for his part, called it 'an honor' to spend 27 years with the organization. Nice sentiments — but nobody walks away from a GM job 2 years before a franchise-altering move to a new city unless something's genuinely broken. Watch who the A's target for the permanent gig; that hire will say a lot about whether ownership is serious about competing in Vegas or just running out the clock in Sacramento.