Last year wasn’t the best for baseball in the East Bay.

The Oakland Athletics’ awful season didn’t seem like a building period for the team. They were just bad.

To give the A’s some credit, they didn’t have a complete roster. Key players were missing due to injury. Players such as Sonny Gray and Sean Doolittle are heavily missed when the ball club is struggling.

The presence of those two alone ease the pressure. When those guys take the mound everyone knows what to expect. The quality pitching they bring makes a manager and the defense feel at ease.

Having quality pitching takes pressure off of the offense. The pitching didn’t help as the A’s were almost dead last in runs scored.

In an interview on MLB’s website with Jane Lee, the recent A’s addition, Rajai Davis said, “You have to have good pitching and you have to be able to play defense behind their good pitching. That keeps you in ball games.”

Matt Joyce, Adam Rosales, and Rajai Davis were additions made in the off season that give hope to a more veteran team to go along with the plethora of youth the A’s have.

Davis believes this young team is capable of putting up the runs to win ball games. “With a young team you never know what you may get, but we have the talent and ability to turn some heads,” Davis said.

There were a few bright spots to last year. The A’s didn’t strikeout much, posting the third least amount of strikeouts in the league. But that was about as good as it got.

When a team finishes last there’s only so much good you can say. The biggest positive is to look to the next year.

That’s what most of the fans do anyway.

The only way I see the A’s succeeding in the future is if they can acquire and keep some talent around rather than being a farm team for everyone else in the league.