The Athletics are in agreement with first baseman Joey Meneses on a minor league contract, reports Francys Romero. The MAS+ client spent this past season in Triple-A in the Mets organization.
Meneses is coming off a .265/.322/.447 line with 11 homers at the top minor league level. He put the ball in play but didn’t walk much and posted average batted ball marks. That wasn’t going to be enough to force his way onto the MLB roster behind Pete Alonso and Mark Vientos. He’ll have a similarly uphill path to a big league job with the A’s. They have Nick Kurtz and Brent Rooker locked into first base and designated hitter, respectively.
The 33-year-old Meneses is likely to head to Triple-A Las Vegas. He’s a career .282/.338/.480 hitter over parts of five Triple-A seasons. Meneses played in the big leagues with the Nationals between 2022-24. He had a huge showing out of nowhere as a 30-year-old rookie, hitting .324 with 13 homers in his first 56 big league contests.
A rebuilding Washington team gave him a full year as a starting first baseman to see if they’d stumbled on a late-career breakout. That didn’t prove to be the case, as Meneses hit .261/.311/.370 in nearly 1000 trips to the plate in 2023-24. The Nationals dropped him from the roster at the beginning of last offseason.
