This is why the A's are a better run team. The A's know this. But listen to what assistant GM David Forst told FanGraphs' Eno Sarris at the winter meetings: I think Billy has articulated in a couple of places that we knew that just bringing back the current team, assuming the losses of Lester, and Gregerson, and Lowrie and some of those guys that we didn’t have an opportunity to sign -- bringing back that team wasn’t going to work. The Angels were obviously 11 games better than us and the Mariners were right on our tail, and poised to get better. Just bringing back our group and just supplementing it with little pieces, wasn’t going to give us a chance to compete, and was also going to leave us further down the path of having an older, more injury-prone club, frankly. We decided very early on that we needed to take a similar route that we did in 2011, in November in December, and work hard on increasing our depth, getting younger and getting healthier.