Sunday’s 4-3 loss to the Cincinnati Reds dropped the San Diego Padres to a 38-46 record, as the team continues to languish in fourth place in NL West. San Diego is closer to the last-place Colorado Rockies than they are to a wild card berth (8.5 games) or the first-place Diamondbacks (11.5 games). And the Padres aren’t exactly gaining momentum, with seven losses in their last eight games.
It’s a very surprising dropoff for a club that reached the NLCS last season and has been spending to franchise-record levels to continue that success. The Padres exceeded the luxury tax threshold in each of the last two seasons and are easily on pace for a third, with a $250M payroll and a projected $275.8M tax number (as per Roster Resource). Getting to the NLCS only made the Padres hungry for more, but a busy offseason that included signing Xander Bogaerts and extending Manny Machado and Yu Darvish has thus far yielded mediocre results.
The struggles of the Padres’ first three months haven’t dampened the overall view of team chairman Peter Seidler, who has not yet written off the Friars for 2023. “We have half the season to play. I mean, much, much stranger things have happened….So there’s a lot of catching up for us to do. I’m on the train that says we’re gonna catch up,” Seidler told Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune, adding that just because the Padres’ plan for 2023 “hasn’t worked yet….it doesn’t make me lose sleep at night or lack confidence in what we’re doing.”
“I know we’re going to be good. We’re gonna have every chance to be in the mix for the World Series every single year. And so that gives me some kind of serious long-term comfort. We’re not going to reverse course. We’re always gonna adjust….All my focus now is on this year, because I’m as solid as I can be on the year after and two years after and three and the next decade.”
While Seidler naturally isn’t pleased with how the Padres have performed to date, he pointed to the trade deadline as an opportunity for improvement, saying “You know we’re always open for business.” While naturally much can still change between now and the August 1 deadline, Seidler’s comment would suggest that the Padres are looking to be buyers, rather than sellers. Of course, the team might take a middle ground and pursue both routes, perhaps trading some shorter-term assets for players who can help the Padres either for the rest of 2023 or in 2024 and beyond.
As to who could be making these calls on deadline day, Seidler expressed his total support in club CEO Erik Greupner and president of baseball operations A.J. Preller.
“I’m not afraid to make changes. I never have been. But I really value stability,” Seidler said. “And when I know the person as well and the skillset as well as I know A.J. and Erik, they’re not going anywhere. Period….I believe in stability. It is something that is undervalued, generally speaking, in organizations and maybe particularly in sports franchises. But I’m not for mediocre stability. I’m for excellence. And to me, A.J. is excellence.”
“That’s the very interesting thing about professional sports. You have a couple of bad months and fans or the media say, ’You’ve got to fire this guy.’ It’s crazy to me. Absolutely crazy.”
Preller is one of the longer-tenured front-office bosses in baseball, running the Padres’ baseball ops department since August 2014. It hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride, as his tenure has included only two winning records in his eight full seasons, though he did oversee a substantial rebuild (albeit in the wake of an ill-fated attempt to load up on big-name talent early in his stint as general manager). Even as recently as 2021, the Padres seemed to be stumbling both on and off the field, but the hiring of Bob Melvin as manager seemed to calm things and San Diego went 89-73 in 2022 before making their postseason run. Preller received a contract extension following the Padres’ playoff berth in 2020 and his current deal runs through the 2026 campaign.
Seidler endorsed Melvin as well, though as Acee noted, Seidler (like Preller in recent comments) didn’t give a full guarantee about Melvin’s future as the Friars’ manager. Melvin’s deal with the team is up after the 2024 season and if the team's struggles were continue, a managerial change might be one logical route of shaking things up, if a larger-scale front office change isn’t happening.
That said, Seidler seemed to disagree with the premise of a true guarantee of Melvin’s job security, asking “What’s the point in saying that? Bob is one of the great managers in our game. I’ll leave it there. As well as being a great guy and as trusted a human being as you’ll ever find. But we’re talking about a job here.”
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