The trade I wish the Padres would make

The Padres have one glaring hole left on their roster, and it's one they've been dealing with for years. The team doesn't have a backup center fielder but they do have options on the trade market.

While looking through the San Diego Padres current roster, and trying to predict who will make the final 28-man roster (that’s coming tomorrow), I found myself rooting for José Azocar.

Why? Well, because he played pretty well with the El Paso Chihuahuas last season and because he’s out-playing Trent Grisham during spring training this year. Those things matter a tiny bit, but what is actually important is that the Padres still have question marks in their outfield (even after trading for Matt Beaty).

Azocar doesn’t necessarily answer those questions, but he might. One of those questions (“who will be the backup CF?”) literally has no other potential in-house answers. That is definitely why I’ve been focusing on him, but there are even better options if you look outside the organization, and two (or three) of them are on the same team with reason to believe they’ll be traded.

Let’s trade with the Rays!

Trading with the Tampa Bay Rays is almost always a bad idea. They’re well known for getting the most out of their players, which means anyone you trade to them gets better and anyone they trade to you almost assuredly gets worse as soon as the trade is consummated.

Case in point: Tommy Pham (Other examples will be along shortly…)

But the Padres were able to steal Jake Cronenworth from TB and turn him into an all-star, so maybe they shouldn’t be completely written off. And right now, the Rays have a glut of outfielders that could really help the Padres.

Who to target?

The Tampa Bay Rays have three guys that would either fit as the backup CF or starting OF with the Padres. Let’s go through the options…

Plan A: Kevin Keiermaier

Keiermaier might be the best defensive center fielder in baseball. He’s also a league-average hitter.

His contract goes up in value every year, and has reached $12M this season. It jumps to $13M next season before he hits free agency. The chances of him staying past that are nil, so Tampa is going to move him in a trade at some point before that. Doing it now probably maximizes his value.

$12M might not seem like much to the modern-day Padres, but it makes Keiermaier the highest paid player on the team by a fairly wide margin. The Rays have always operated with the idea that guys getting paid this much money can be replaced by cheaper, younger players with similar results.

It’s possible they’re asking for one of the Padres top prospects for Keiermaier, and that’s why a deal hasn’t happened here. If one were to go through, Keiermaier could take over in CF and play between Trent Grisham and a Wil Myers / Matt Beaty platoon, with Jurickson Profar playing the role as 5th OF.

Plan B: Manuel Margot

Yup, you remember him. The Padres traded him to the Rays two years ago in exchange for (gulp) Emilio Pagan.

Margot hasn’t exactly turned into a superstar in Tampa, but he’s been a little bit better while mostly playing RF for the Rays.

He’s still a plus defender and somewhere around a league-average hitter. The good news is that he can play all 3 OF spots and could fill in as a starter or simply be the Padres 4th (or 5th) OF.

Right now, for Tampa, Margot is either keeping a seat warm for Josh Lowe (who should honestly be getting his shot sooner than later) or he’ll be asked to fill in at CF if the team finds a trade for Keiermaier that they like.

The Padres would have to give up less for Margot, who is both not as good as Keiermaier and a free agent at the end of this season. At a price of $5.6M this year (hilariously, he’s the 4th highest paid Ray this season), I believe the Padres would remain under the luxury tax if they added him to their roster.

Plan C: Brett Phillips

I’ve always had a fascination with Brett Phillips, even going back to his early days with the Kansas City Royals. Similar to Joey Gallo, Phillips is a player that is hard to quantify because of his incredibly low batting average.

Phillips has everything else. He’s a great defender in all three OF spots, he walks like crazy, and last year he even added a little power to the mix (hitting 13 HRs, his career high by a lot). But, like Gallo, he struggles to keep his average above .200. Does that matter when his OPS is over .700? Not really, but years of watching baseball does sometime make it hard to swallow.

Phillips is set to start the season on the bench, possibly blocking a spot that the team would like to open up for Josh Lowe (or Luke Raley).

Phillips is my least favorite option here simply because he’s left-handed. He could platoon with Myers in RF and/or work as the 4th OF, but he would make a lot more sense if the Padres hadn’t just added LH 4th OF Matt Beaty.

It’s possible that, like Keiermaier, he could take over in CF (with Beaty platooning with Myers and Grisham taking the other corner OF spot). However, I don’t know that Padres would be willing to do that for a player that strikes out as much as he does.

The C.J. Abrams thing

If, and this is a huge if, the Padres didn’t want to start the season with C.J. Abrams on the roster (either because he needs more time in the minors or because they don’t want to start his clock), backup CF is the key to everything.

Right now, Jake Cronenworth is the starting 2B (duh) and Ha-Seong Kim is filling in for Fernando Tatis Jr. as the starting SS. C.J. Abrams, if he makes the team, is probably the backup for both. With Tatis out and Jurickson Profar either playing LF or working as the team’s 4th OF, there’s not a lot of options for backup SS/2B without Abrams on the roster.

However, adding another OF (or just keeping Azocar, which feels far less likely) pushes Profar back to the bench so that he could be the backup 2B (meaning Cronenworth could be the backup SS). If the Padres make a trade to solve their backup CF problem, that would be a pretty clear sign that C.J. Abrams will start the season in El Paso. If Abrams starts with the big league team, I’ll be excited for him but holding my breath for the first Trent Grisham injury.

Tomorrow: 28-man roster projection!