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

Coming off a strong 2022 NLCS finish, expectations were high for J.J. Preller and his San Diego Padres. If any team was to dethrone the perennial National League West champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the judgment went, Preller had put it together in San Diego.

Well, somebody is in the process of dethroning the Dodgers … and it isn’t the Padres. Preller’s team sits fourth in the NL West, a disappointing 37-44. How much of the fault for that failure falls on Preller?

Grading the San Diego Padres at the midway point of the 2023 season

What follows is a mid-term assessment of Preller’s personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the Padres’ performance.

The standard of measurement in Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by Preller impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.

A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:

1.       By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.

2.       By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.

3.       By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.

4.       By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.

5.       By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.

Here’s how Preller stacks up by those five yardsticks.

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.

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.