Grant Brisbee is right that the A's are bad right now. The question is whether his reasons are right. He points out the bad defense, the resources spent on the bullpen, the roster churn, and the apparent lack of plan that we can glean from the transactions. To those:

• I can't really say anything good about the defense. It's not good. By Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency (i.e. by solely asking whether batted balls are turned into outs, and adjusting that for park), they're merely below average (19th in MLB) rather than horrendous, but that ignores things like outfield arm (Crisp, Davis) and catcher stuff that can make a difference.
• The bullpen contracts look weird for a cash-strapped team. You had to pay \$12 million per year on top of Sean Doolittle for Ryan Madson and John Axford? But it's worth asking where else that money should have gone. Maybe you can sign Mike Napoli and Mat Latos, with a little room to spare, but there's not a lot out there at the A's positions of massive need (first base, DH, starting pitcher) that you can get for \$12 million. (Maybe that money should have gone to winning the bid for Byung-ho Park? That's a tough process to second-guess.) In any event, Grant doesn't make too much of this, so I won't either; he points out that the expenditures have worked out so far.
• The roster churn is sure something, but I don't know what it is, and Grant notes that he doesn't know what it is, either.
• I can't really put any stock in anybody outside any organization being unable to discern a plan. Maybe there isn't one! But not every team is in the business of telling us what it is, and in any event plans tend not to survive contact with the enemy. That's not to say plans aren't important, but it is to say that when we examine the totality of a team's conduct, it's not easy from the outside to create a narrative when X and Y were driven by the team's internal narrative while A and B were driven by the sudden need to take certain action in the face of exigent circumstances, whether those circumstances came in the form of opportunity or loss.

What this all adds up to for Grant is concern that the A's aren't building well from within. I think this concern can be overstated because the state of the A's system is bad after so many trades of good, or at least useful, prospects (Daniel Robertson, Addison Russell, Billy McKinney, Jacob Nottingham). The 2009-11 drafts were brutal for the A's, though, and 2014-15 aren't looking much better, though we can certainly pin our hopes on Matt Chapman. Of course, the 2013-15 drafts were depressed by the A's success in 2012-14, and even when they've been bad, they've never been Astros-Cubs bad: the last time they had a single-digit first-round pick was 1999. On the other hand, their one-in-four success rate when they've had top-half picks (Jemile Weeks, Grant Green, Michael Choice, Russell) is nothing to write home about, particularly given the necessity that they nail those picks in order to compete with the teams that have actual funding.

All of which might bring me back again, though, to the most important notion about the A's not so much being their failures at tactic X and Y but rather their refusal to engage in the teardown strategy. This isn't to say the strategy always works (Houston's 2016 is certainly still up in the air), and I certainly find it distasteful, but the dollars and players that have been spent by the A's the last few year in the name of acquiring enough talent to not let the team sink into the muck (Axford and Madson, Billy Butler, Khris Davis, Ben Zobrist, Rich Hill, Marcus Semien, Brett Lawrie, Tyler Clippard) is a different commitment than we've seen at various times from Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington, and Cincinnati.