How these Padres were built, Pt. 3: Stealing Tatis
After a disastrous attempt to build a winning team in 2015, the San Diego Padres decided to burn it all down in 2016. The decision netted them the best player in baseball.
We’re about halfway through this weeklong series about how the San Diego Padres became the coolest (and maybe the best?) team in baseball after spending decades being….well, the opposite of those things.
When we left off yesterday, A.J. Preller had completely destroyed the Padres in his very first offseason as general manager and had somehow avoided being fired for it. Quite the opposite, Preller was given the keys to the castle the next year and another chance to change the trajectory of the Padres.
How these Padres were built:
The 2016 season was a strange one for San Diego. A historic one, for sure.
After almost 15 years of begging for an all-star game, all the Padres had to do was name part of their stadium after MLB commissioner Bud Selig to finally get one. (Joke’s on him, as the team eventually left his name off of the in-stadium Hall of Fame when it opened two years later.) In 2016, Petco Park would host its first all-star game.
As for the Padres, they had crashed and burned in 2015. After all of those big trades and signings orchestrated by Preller in an attempt to “win now”, the team finished below .500 and in 4th place in the NL West.
So, while baseball’s best players were coming to town and being celebrated, A.J. Preller was concocting a plan to trade away as much of his major league roster as he could.
Trades in reverse
Almost immediately after the 2015 season ended, Preller started working to get as many of the highly-paid player off this roster and replace them with cheap prospects, preferably ones with high ceilings.
Traded Joaquin Benoit to the Seattle Mariners. Received Nelson Ward and Enyel De Los Santos.
Traded Craig Kimbrel to the Boston Red Sox. Received Logan Allen, Carlos Asuaje, Javy Guerra and Manuel Margot.
Goodbye to the setup man and closer, hello to a bunch of prospects! With the exception of Manuel Margot, who is an above-average CF for the Tampa Bay Rays now, nothing the Padres got back in any of these deals amounted to much. But they did get their payroll obligations lowered!
Traded Yonder Alonso and Marc Rzepczynski to the Oakland Athletics. Received a player to be named later, Drew Pomeranz and Jose Torres. The Oakland Athletics sent Jabari Blash (December 10, 2015) to the San Diego Padres to complete the trade.
Although this was more salary shedding, this one actually worked out well for the Padres. Pomeranz ended up making the 2016 all-star team and was then quickly traded to the Boston Red Sox for more prospects. The rebuild was on.
Traded Jedd Gyorko and cash to the St. Louis Cardinals. Received Jon Jay.
Gyorko represented a different time, from about five years earlier, when the Padres were trying to sigh long-term extensions with young players before they came anywhere near free agency. It blew up in their face every time they did it.
Jon Jay was a fine player, although he never really did much in San Diego, and was being traded for because his contract ended sooner (and because Justin Upton was gone).
Traded James Shields and cash to the Chicago White Sox. Received Erik Johnson and Fernando Tatis Jr.
Hit the brakes. This one happened in June, when it was obvious that bad James Shields from 2015 showed up as worse James Shields in 2016.
Shields gave up a home run to Bartolo Colon and later gave up 10 ER in 2.2 innings against the lowly Seattle Mariners. Team chairman Ron Fowler went on his weekly radio hit and said that Shields wouldn’t pitch again for the Padres, and we all held our breath for a trade that came the next day.
By June 4th, 2016, the San Diego Padres were somehow eleven games out of 1st place already. The Chicago White Sox were in 3rd in the AL Central, just 2 games out. They wanted a veteran pitcher who had playoff experience, and A.J. Preller wanted the lanky 17-year old kid in their system that he had watched play in the Dominican Republic years earlier.
The Padres had to pay for most of Shields’ contract to make it happen, but the White Sox decided that having a guy like Shields was worth giving up on a prospect who hadn’t even played rookie ball yet. Their mistake!
We’ll come back to Tatis Jr. in a little bit. Let’s continue tearing this team down.
Traded Fernando Rodney to the Miami Marlins. Received Chris Paddack.
Preller was figuring it out now. For a guy that had spent his life becoming one of the world’s best baseball scouts, turning veteran players into prospects was right in his wheelhouse. He liked this.
Traded Drew Pomeranz to the Boston Red Sox. Received Anderson Espinoza.
The aforementioned sell-off of Pomeranz. If you don’t know, Espinoza is a lights-out pitcher who has struggled to stay healthy.
Traded B.J. Upton and cash to the Toronto Blue Jays. Received Hansel Rodriguez (minors).
Traded Andrew Cashner, Tayron Guerrero, Colin Rea and cash to the Miami Marlins. Received Carter Capps, Luis Castillo, Jarred Cosart and Josh Naylor.
Pause! The trade deadline is here and this is another epic steal by Preller. The best player going out the door is Colin Rea, who was above-average at best, and the Padres were receiving three very good pitching prospects and a big HR hitter in Naylor. What’s not to love about this deal?
But this is where things almost went sideways for Preller again. Pomeranz got injured shortly into his tenure with the Red Sox and Colin Rea walked off the mound with an injury early in his first start with the Marlins. Both teams suspected foul play, and the Red Sox asked MLB to intervene.
A.J. Preller was suspended by Major League Baseball, for the second time, for hiding valuable medical information. In addition, the Padres had to find a way to make it right with the Red Sox and Marlins.
Boston said they were happy to keep Pomeranz, whose injury was not serious. Miami wanted to give Rea back. Leading to the next trade…
Traded Luis Castillo (back) to the Miami Marlins. Received Colin Rea.
Ugh. That sucked. Luis Castillo is a dynamite starting pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds now. I don’t think Rea ever made it back to the majors after his injury.
Traded Matt Kemp and cash to the Atlanta Braves. Received Héctor Olivera.
Released Héctor Olivera.
This was the bellwether. Yes, the Padres were shipping out every player that made significant money. They didn’t care how much it cost to do so. They didn’t care about losing star power or admitting the mistakes of 2015. And, when they couldn’t get back prospects (as was the case with Kemp), they were fine to trade him away and immediately release the guy they got back. This rebuild was ruthless, and expensive!
Traded Derek Norris to the Washington Nationals. Received Pedro Avila.
This was the final move. Just about every player acquired in that whirlwind 2015 offseason was gone after the 2016 season.
It cost a lot of money to shed all those contracts, but the Padres had also built back a farm system that had been razed the year before. Now, with the influx of youth acquired from the Red Sox, Marlins, and White Sox, there was enough of a foundation to start building around.
Most importantly, and nobody knew it at the time, the Padres had found a generational superstar. A player that would go on to be the face of the franchise for decades, if not longer. In all likelihood, their teardown had netted them the greatest player in Padres history and potentially the greatest player in baseball history.
A.J. Preller had found a way to redeem himself, and Fernando Tatis Jr. was the great redeemer.
One more thing…
Part of Preller’s pitch to the Padres before he was hired was that the farm system could be stocked with talent from the international pool. After all, who knew international scouting better than A.J. Preller?
I’ll simplify the situation here, for your benefit and my own. MLB rules around international signings, at the time, basically said that teams would be limited in what they could spend on international free agents in the years after going over a certain standard spend limit. However, there was no limit to how far they could over that spend limit in that one year.
So, Preller’s plan was to pick a year and push all the chips in. Spend an absurd amount of money to acquire the greatest class of international free agents ever assembled (keeping in mind that most of these kids are 16-years old and won’t make it to the major-league team for 6+ years, if ever) and not worry about the penalties imposed in later years.
Knowing that the clock was ticking after his disastrous 2015 offseason, and sensing that a particularly good crop of players was joining the international free agent pool, he told Ron Fowler and Mike Dee that it was time to pull the trigger.
The Padres ended up signing 54(!) players during the 2016-17 international signing period, which cost them roughly $40 million in contracts and an additional $40 million in overage penalties.
Some of those players are contributing to the 2021 Padres, either on the field or as assets that were eventually traded away for players that are on the field. Let’s go over some of the bigger names that joined the franchise during this frenzied signing period:
Adrian Morejon
Jorge Oña
Michel Baez
Ronald Bolaños
Luis Almanzar
Gabriel Arias
Tirso Ornelas
Tucupita Marcano
The plan to build around this crop of players would eventually be scrapped, and the new (more impatient) plan will be the topic of tomorrow’s post, but I can not stress enough how different the 2016 season felt for Padres fans.
The team was selling off players for prospects, and that felt normal, but they were burning cash to get bad players off the team. Then they were outspending just about everyone in baseball to assemble a huge international free agent class.
The Padres? Spending money? It seemed too good to be true, but it was only the tip of the iceberg.