Grading A.J. Preller and the San Diego Padres front office at the midway point

Acquired or traded

Especially at deadline time, Preller can be aggressive in his team-versus-team maneuverings. Just last season, he acquired 13 players via trade, waiver claim or purchase. Most of those, however, were deadline deals of names such as Juan Soto or Josh Hader.

We’re not at the trade deadline yet … and, for the eight months since the end of the 2022 postseason, he has been unusually passive in this respect. In fact, Preller has added only one new face to the Padres’ major league roster via a multi-team transaction in that time.

That new face was catcher Gary Sanchez, picked up from the Mets on a late May waiver claim. Sanchez, who washed out in Queens and in Minneapolis and the Bronx before that, has actually been a contributor for the Padres, hitting seven home runs and catching passably enough that he has not worn out his welcome.

But Sanchez is the full extent of Preller’s acquisitions from other teams.

Nor has he moved many out that way. The only one who can even plausibly be counted is Washington Nationals pitcher MacKenzie Gore, and Gore doesn’t technically count because he was included in the 2022 deadline deal that brought Juan Soto to the Padres. But the Nats kept him at Triple-A the rest of 2022, so as a functional matter he was a rookie for Washington this year.

Free agency

Preller may have been reticent to deal with other teams, but he was aggressive in his direct dealings with players. He signed, re-signed or extended 17 players to big league contracts since the end of the 2022 postseason, 15 of whom have made major league contributions.

The point of that activity was to buttress the talent base already on hand and hone the San Diego Padres roster to something approaching a powerhouse. The additions included Xander Bogaerts, Nelson Cruz, Michael Wacha, along with the extensions given to rotation starters Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove.

That all looked good on paper … until life intervened. Wacha (+1.0 WAA) and Bogaerts (+0.6) have been legit contributors. But Cruz (-0.6 WAA, .250, five home runs) has been a disappointment, Darvish (-0.5 WAA with a 5-6 record and 4.84 ERA) is having a bad year, and free agent signee Matt Carpenter (-0.9 WAA, .182) hasn’t hit either.

Collectively, the return on all the millions Preller spent lining up those additions and retentions amounts to -1.1 WAA. If you want to know why the Padres are not winning as often as anticipated, that list of free agent signees is a good place to start.

At least Preller made one or two good open market calls. He walked away from Jurickson Profar, who was picked up by Colorado in March and has been a disaster there. Preller rightly gave up on Wil Myers, released to be signed by the Reds, where he lasted two months before being shown the door.

Farm system

With his focus on obtaining proven talent (even if that talent hasn’t translated to San Diego) Preller has not leaned on the team’s farm system this season. Only four first-year players have seen playing time, and none of the four is currently with the team.

Three of the four are injured and the fourth has been sent down to Triple-A.

Statistically, the most productive has been reliever Tom Cosgrove, one of the injured trio. Before going to the IL in mid-June, he was carrying a 0.53 ERA in 17 innings of work, good for a +0.6 WAA.

None of the other three seemed to be on a contributory course when they were either injured or dispatched. Pitcher Reiss Knehr had a 15.88 ERA in six innings, while backup catchers Luis Campusano and Brett Sullivan were hitting .227 and .184, respectively.

Under Preller, the Padres farm system has always been highly touted, although more often than not its products have failed to deliver on their promise. For every Fernando Tatis Jr., there have been a couple of Chris Paddacks or David Weathers or Joey Lucchesis or Dinelson Lamets, guys who arrived with impressive clippings but never broke through.

The difference this year is that Sullivan and Cosgrove have arrived without the clippings.

Overall

The Padres were supposed to win and they haven’t. In baseball, that’s pretty much a self-incriminating statement.

Preller pushed hard again this past offseason on free agency. He signed, re-signed or extended 18 players … that’s more than four times as many as newly came to the Padres via trades and the farm system combined. And for all that signing activity, he got a negative WAA from the collection.

Here’s the first-half report card on the Preller front office. Note that grades for players departing the organization are based on the reverse of those players’ WAAs with their new teams.

Mode                    WAA                   Grade

Acquired              +0.4                       C

Traded                  +1.2                       D

Signed                  -1.1                       D

FA Lost                 -3.7                       A

Rookies                -0.4                       C

Overall                 +1.4                      B

Preller has made 32 personnel moves since the end of 2022 involving a player with 2023 major league experience. Only 13 of those moves favored Preller and the San Diego Padres; 16 went against him and three were neutral.

As with a few other front offices we’ve looked at, the problem for Preller is that his positive score is inflated by the players he got rid of, not the ones he brought in. Preller’s greatest strength this year has been knowing which non-performers to dump.

Coincidentally, he has also paid a lot of money to bring in a lot of non-performers, so that +1.4 grade is deceivingly inconsequential. All it really says about the work of Preller is that as bad as it’s been, it could have been a lot worse.