San Diego Padres general manager AJ Preller speaks on the phone during NLCS workouts at Petco Park on Oct. 17, 2022. Orlando Ramirez-Imagn Images

Padres' AJ Preller Has Traded With Every MLB Team Except One

Originally posted on San Diego Padres on SI
By J.P. Hoornstra | Last updated Aug 27, 2025 7:18 PM ET

From Rey Fuentes in November 2014 to Brandon Lockridge on July 31, San Diego Padres general manager AJ Preller has not been shy about trading his own players.

Except to one team.

In almost 11 years on the job, Preller has managed to swing a trade with 28 other MLB teams. Just not the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Clearly, this is not an AJ Preller issue. He's done deals with the Colorado Rockies, the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers in a sport where intra-division trades are often harder to complete. Teams looking to increase their near-term odds of winning are typically able to extract better trade packages from teams outside their own division.

Yet Preller traded River Ryan to the Dodgers in 2022, Barry Enright to the Rockies in 2017, and Alex Dickerson to the Giants in 2019, among other intra-division trades during his tenure.

The Diamondbacks under executive Mike Hazen simply don't like doing deals within the division. As noted by SI's Jack Sommers, Hazen's lone trade with a National League West rival came on April 20, 2018, when he sold reliever Tyler Pill to the Dodgers for cash considerations.

Other teams are similarly reluctant to make deals within their own division. As it concerns the Padres and Diamondbacks specifically, this is a Mike Hazen thing. Not only have the Padres, Rockies, and Giants never been a trade partner for Arizona, neither have the Philadelphia Phillies, as Sommers notes.

In 2012 — four years before Hazen was appointed the Diamondbacks' GM — Arizona was a top-five team in MLB when it came to doing deals within its own division.

The Padres were almost universally included on every list of trade deadline "winners" in spite of, not because of, Hazen's willingness to do a deal with Preller.

This stance hardly kept Arizona from making moves at the deadline. Merrill Kelly, Josh Naylor, Eugenio Suarez, Shelby Miller, Jordan Montgomery and Randal Grichuk were all given their pink slips by Hazen on or before July 31.

It's clear that the Diamondbacks under Hazen have a specific M.O. when it comes to shutting out their NL West rivals on and off the field.

What isn't clear is whether Preller and his counterparts within the division try to do deals with the Diamondbacks and the talks never progress to the point of executing a trade, or if they simply don't try at all anymore.

At some point at least, one imagines a sense of learned helplessness will set in.