Joey Meneses' path to the majors was already one of the weirder stories in baseball: 10 years grinding through the minors, stints in Mexico and Japan, and a call-up at age 30 in 2022 that turned into a legitimate breakout with the Nationals. He hit .324 with 13 homers in just 56 games that first taste, looked like he'd finally arrived. Three years later he's bouncing through waivers again, and this time it's Oakland letting him go.
A's Outright Joey Meneses t.co/1ACq1L8XiE
The move follows a designation for assignment that came down over the weekend, giving the club five days to find a trade partner or run him through waivers before landing on the outright. Meneses got into 9 games with Oakland and went just 3-for-20, nowhere near the kind of production that made him a household name during that Nats run. At 34, the sample size is small, but the results weren't there, and the A's needed the 40-man spot.
There's a wrinkle here that matters: Meneses has been through this before, and a prior career outright means he now has the option to reject the assignment outright and become a free agent instead of reporting to Triple-A. That's a real decision point for a guy who's already had one late-career reinvention — the question is whether there's another organization willing to bet on a repeat, or whether this is the beginning of the end of his big-league window.
It's a quiet subtraction in the grand scheme of the trade-deadline stretch, but it's also a reminder of how thin the margin is for a player like Meneses. He wasn't a former top prospect with prospect capital protecting him — he was a 30-year-old journeyman who got hot for a few months and rode it as far as it would take him. Oakland giving up on him after a 20-plate-appearance sample says more about roster math than it does about whether he can still hit, but in this business, the math is usually all that matters.
Whatever happens next, this is worth watching. If Meneses elects free agency, some rebuilding club looking for veteran bat depth at Triple-A could take a flier on him for pennies. If he doesn't, he's stuck in the A's system hoping for another look. Either way, the guy who once looked like a late-blooming star is now fighting just to stay on a 40-man roster somewhere.