How these Padres were built, Pt. 1: The Rockstar GM

Seven years ago, the hiring of A.J. Preller as the manager of the San Diego Padres set the team in motion to where they are today.

Welcome to a week-long series where I explain all the things that came together to make the 2021 San Diego Padres who they are. I’m sure that I’ll miss some things along the way, but I will attempt to explain both how the roster was put together how the team earned it’s place as the coolest team in sports.

There’s going to be a lot here. Hopefully, not too much, but I will be going over all of the trades and free agent signings that got us here. I’ll also be going over changes to the coaching staff and their various effects. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with the man who put the whole thing together: A.J. Preller.

There are so many different directions one can go in when discussing the “Rockstar GM”, and it’s easy to get lost, so I’m going to go back to the beginning and try and take it slow.

Preller before Padres

A.J. Preller is from Long Island, New York. That doesn’t really matter, although if you’ve ever known someone from Long Island, you know that it affects their psyche in one way or another.

The “strong island” lives in the shadow of the island of Manhattan despite being bigger. They’re always second place. Manhattan gets the Yankees, Long Island gets the Mets. Manhattan gets the Knicks, Long Island gets the Nets. Manhattan gets the Rangers, Long Island gets the Islanders. And so on.

Most of those that move away from Long Island have a complex to crush everything in their way. To show the world that they’re actually the best, not the second best, no matter where they’re from. It’s like a Napoleonic complex.

So it should be no surprise that Preller went on to be a wiz kid with the determination of a hungry bulldog. He did well enough in school to get into Cornell, which is ironically the only Ivy league school in New York that’s not in Manhattan, and graduate summa cum laude.

Preller joined the Delta Chi fraternity while at Cornell and became friends with fraternity brother Jon Daniels. They shared a love of baseball. After graduating, Daniels went from intern with the Texas Rangers to their Assistant, Baseball Operations in one year and then was promoted to their Director of Baseball Operations the next year.

Daniels hired Preller to be his Director of International and Professional Scouting by the Texas Rangers the next year. Before that, Preller had interned for the Phillies and worked for the Dodgers and for MLB itself.

Finding his niche

Read just about any story about A.J. Preller and you’ll come to the conclusion: This guy is different.

But when you read the stuff about his education you realize that he’s also incredibly smart, and he decided that his success in baseball would come from doing what others were unwilling to do. He was going to, like Moneyball, find the things that other baseball teams weren’t doing and then he was going to do that.

First, just look at that title with the Rangers. Preller was both the head of scouting and the head of international scouting. Those are two jobs that are typically done by two people. That’s different.

Preller also tackled the job of international scouting different than other MLB teams. Instead of hiring someone from the Dominican Republic to either work as scout or work as translator for an American scout who couldn’t easily fit in, Preller took an immersive class and became fluent in Spanish himself. Then he started spending more time in Spanish-speaking countries than he spent in the states. That’s different for a scout, much less an MLB team’s Director of Scouting.

Preller found his niche as the guy willing to go to places and do things other executives weren’t, and that was going to be his edge. In a lot of ways, it still is.

Getting the Padres job

A.J. Preller believes in himself. He really, really does. And when he was told in 2014 that he wouldn’t be getting the job as General Manager of the San Diego Padres, he asked for one more meeting. One more chance to make his case.

Mike Dee, who was running the Padres at the time, agreed only because Preller had been so accommodating during the process. The meeting, which deserves a freaking statue of its own, took place at 3am at a closed restaurant at LAX. Any time Dee tried to explain why he was going with Billy Eppler as his choice, Preller explained to Dee why he would be better off hiring A.J. instead.

Somehow, it worked. The “courtesy meeting” in the middle of the night at a closed restaurant, as much of a home-field advantage as Preller could cook up, ended with Dee calling the owner of the Padres to tell him he had changed his mind. Preller had to be the guy.

This is pretty incredible, when you think about it. Not only did Preller come from behind to steal the victory, but he stole it from a guy that was a highly sought after candidate who had previously been an Assistant GM with the Yankees. Preller wasn’t much more than an incredibly gifted and dogged international scout, to the point that MLB had once suspended him for breaking its rules around contact with a unsigned prospect.

Being different

I don’t want to spoil what’s in store for later this week, but Preller has delivered on a promise to be different. To try things that other GMs and other teams wouldn’t dare.

Preller trades more frequently than any other GM, having twice torn down and rebuilt the entire roster almost exclusively via trade, and seems completely unafraid when doing so.

When you’re trying to run your team different as a way to gain an advantage, it certainly helps to have a decision-maker at the top who has complete faith in himself. And when you’re trying to take the mantel of best team in baseball from the Los Angeles Dodgers and their immeasurable resources, it helps to have someone that grew up in the shadow of New York City.