BACK TO BASICS
Last fall, following his club’s third last-place finish in five years, Padres general manager A.J. Preller and his staff gathered in a freezing, sub-level meeting room beneath Petco Park.
The Padres normally hold their end-of-season staff meetings in a spacious auditorium on the upper floors of the ballpark. But this time, for reasons no one can quite remember, the auditorium was unavailable.
Instead, members of the Padres front office, pro scouting department and research and development group put on their winter wear, walked down a ramp to below field level and took their seats in a frigid room with no direct sunlight. There, they plotted the course for the 2020 season.
“It started in the basement of Petco and went from there,” Preller said, laughing. “It was about 30 degrees when we were down there for three days. (If) that spurred on good or bad ideas, I don’t know.”
The Padres had not made the playoffs since 2006 or had a winning record since 2010. They had suffered five straight losing seasons since Preller took over as GM. Andy Green, Preller’s first managerial hire, was fired with eight games remaining in 2019. The day after the season ended, Padres executive chairman Ron Fowler told a group of fans “heads will roll” if the team did not show marked improvement in 2020.
After a failed attempt at playoff contention in 2015, Preller steered the team into a rebuild in the summer of 2016. From the outset, he circled 2020 as the year the Padres would start to contend.
He oversaw the construction of the game’s No. 1 farm system to that end. Under his watch, the Padres set a new record for the largest contract in franchise history three years in a row—Wil Myers’ six-year, $83 million extension in 2017, Eric Hosmer’s eight-year, $144 million contract in 2018 and Manny Machado’s 10-year, $300 million deal in 2019—to create a veteran core to lead those up-and-coming prospects.
But after graduating six of the top 10 prospects from their vaunted farm system in 2019, including No. 1 prospect Fernando Tatis Jr., and adding
