With many internal issues and several pending free-agents, should A.J. Preller and the Padres have punted on the 2025 season? 

In his time as G.M. of the San Diego Padres, A.J. Preller has been a man of action, wheeling and dealing at a pace few other executives in MLB have ever matched.

This past winter, however, Preller was strangely silent, at least until a February flurry saw the club agree to free-agent deals with five players in the span of 10 days. Payroll constraints brought on after the unfortunate passing of controlling owner Peter Seidler presumably forced the team to slash payroll for the second consecutive offseason. This left Preller to patiently wait out the market hunting for late winter bargains.

It’s also likely Preller’s offseason plans hinged greatly on whether the team could successfully recruit Japanese pitching phenom Roki Sasaki to San Diego.

Adding a talented young arm on an affordable deal may have allowed the club to comfortably move a starter, either Dylan Cease or Michael King, both of whom are scheduled to be free agents after the 2025 campaign, for much-needed young talent. At the same time, Preller would have had a chance to reinvest the payroll savings elsewhere to upgrade the roster. Or, with Sasaki joining the club, the Friars would have boasted one of the best rotations in all of baseball, one good enough to perhaps catapult the team to its first-ever World Series win.

Sadly, Sasaki chose to make his home up the I-5 in Los Angeles rather than join the Padres.

The decision put Preller in an unenviable position. A team that came oh so close to beating the eventual world champion Dodgers in the playoffs should have approached the winter as a buyer, a club looking to improve the roster further. Instead, budget limitations pressured Preller to consider one of two approaches: One, to stand pat with several notable players potentially heading to free agency following the 2025 campaign, add inexpensive talent around the roster margins, and hope to contend for a wild card spot. Or two, move those pending free agents, take a step back today, but add young talent to bolster the minor league system and build a deeper team more capable of competing in 2026 and beyond.

Obviously, Preller chose the former route.

The Padres still possess a strong core, though one that is getting long in the tooth.

Manny Machado remains one of the better players in the game but is 32 and likely has only a few more years of high-level production left in his bat. Yu Darvish is 38 and has made only 40 starts over the last two seasons. Xander Bogaerts has yet to perform at the same level in San Diego that he showed in Boston. Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, and King are high-level producers either comfortably in their primes or just now approaching it, but beyond that, the team’s top young players (Ethan Salas and Leodalis De Vries) are at least a year away from contributing at the big league level. Suffice it to say immediate impact reinforcements are not on the way.

The Fan Graphs website has the Friars as about a one-in-three shot of making the postseason as it is currently constructed. The Dodgers and Diamondbacks, the latter of whom added Corbin Burnes and Josh Naylor, are both projected to finish ahead of the Padres in the NL West.

In the East, the Mets added Juan Soto, while the Braves and Phillies are both playoff quality.

The NL Central has Milwaukee as the defending Division champ, but the Chicago Cubs are trying to win, adding OF Kyle Tucker and reliever Ryan Pressly. Cincinnati hired one of baseball’s best managers in Terry Francona, and the Pittsburgh Pirates have some impressive young pitching talent. The road to the playoffs is fraught with challenges.

But what if Preller chose the alternative, dealing his pending free agents for young talent that could help the club in 2026 and beyond? Would their chances of winning it all have been better in future seasons than it is in 2025?

First, let’s use last off-season’s blockbuster deal, which sent Burnes to Baltimore for Joey Oritz, DL Hall, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick, the 34th in the 2024 draft, as a loose template for what Preller could have extracted for Cease. What teams would be in the market for a top starter, and what could those offers look like, given those parameters?

This Bleacher Report article lists seven potential packages for Cease, but we’ll dig into just three here.

Mets

In this deal, the Padres would get the Mets top prospect, pitcher Dillon Sproat, and a young OF in Drew Gilbert. Sproat could potentially step into the Friars 2025 rotation while also giving the team a long-term answer in the outfield. As it stands, the team is expected to platoon Connor Joe and Jason Heyward in LF. Both players are on one-year contracts, and neither represents any certainty for 2025, much less beyond.

Orioles

The Orioles, who aggressively moved last year to get Burnes from Milwaukee, could again go the trade route to add a top-of-the-rotation arm on an expiring deal via trade for the second winter in a row. They have an enviable collection of position players, among them OF Heston Kjerstad, who could have been the Padres’ long-term answer in LF. They also have a couple of young starters they could cash in to upgrade the rotation. Bleacher Report suggests Chayce McDermott, but they also have Cade Povich or even the more established Dean Kremer, whom they could package with Kjerstad.

Cubs

While I agree that the Cubs could and should be a suitor for Cease, I think the Padres should target players different from those listed in the Bleacher Report. I would go for outfielder Owen Cassie, a former Padres draft choice who went to Chicago in the Yu Darvish trade. They also have some extra rotation depth they could have used to send a quality back-of-the-rotation starter back to San Diego. Perhaps one of Javier Assad or Cade Horton would have been appealing to Preller.

Aside from dealing Cease, Preller could have also entertained offers for 1B Luis Arraez and reliever Robert Suarez. Suarez owns an opt-out after the 2025 season and is potentially a pending free agent. While the markets for those players are not known, it is likely the Padres could have acquired multiple prospects in each hypothetical trade.

Of course, we need to assume that the objective of competing in 2025 will still remain. With the money saved moving Cease, Arraez, and Suarez, Preller could have still signed Nick Pivetta, who was inked to a creative contract that keeps his 2025 luxury tax number palatable, but then added free agent bats such as JD Martinez, Anthony Rizzo, and perhaps even Alex Verdugo while also adding a reliever. Would that hypothetical group have been that much worse than the one currently expected to take the field later this month? With a 35.4% chance at the playoffs, according to Fan Graphs, even a drop of 10 points would keep them on the fringes of contention, but they would also be healthier in future seasons, with their depleted minor league system somewhat replenished and young controllable big league talent taking the place of players on the way out after 2025.

Ultimately, the question will boil down to whether Preller is correct to stay the course with a roster that has a 35.4% chance of making the playoffs and then take their chances there and then facing the likelihood of losing Cease, King, Arraez, and Suarez for nothing, or moving some of those pieces for young talent that could help the club in 2026 and beyond.

If the Friars fall short in 2025 with this group, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where they are a contender in 2026 unless ownership reverses course and authorizes major spending. If we assume that isn’t the case, Preller may have been better served taking a step back this year to give his club better chances in 2026 and beyond.

Glen Miller

Born and raised in Oceanside, I became a diehard Padres fan when my dad took me to my first MLB games at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium all the way back in 1983. My first favorite player was Terry Kennedy, probably because like most kids I was impressed by the “tools of ignorance.” I’ve experienced a lot of ups and downs in my 40+ years of Friar Fandom, mostly lows, but I’m still cautiously optimistic I’ll live to see a World Championship. One day.