Tom Krasovic: Don't look for A.J. Preller to take the fall if $250-million Padres miss playoffs
A.J. Preller appears safe to me.
Peter Seidler firing Preller, instead of having him direct a 10th offseason, would stun me — even if the Preller-Seidler $250-million creation were to fall short of both the last National League wild-card spot and a winning record.
Be advised, I’m the dummy who wrote in May that although I believed the Padres were toast in the NL West race, they were too talented not to win a wild card.
The update: At 59-66 entering Monday, the Padres trailed four teams in the race for the third card.
I’m not someone who marvels that Preller has survived as the club’s top baseball executive.
It’s true that not one of his nine Padres teams has made any noise in the divisional race. A losing season this year indeed would be the seventh in the eight seasons to span 162 games.
Often in Major League Baseball, those results absent a World Series run would prompt a dismissal. But as has been obvious for years, the Seidler-Preller dynamic differs from the norm.
Recall that less than two years into the younger exec’s tenure here, Seidler told the Union-Tribune he probably could hold the job as long as he wanted it.
Two months ago, when the Padres were doing another faceplant, Seidler still sounded infatuated.
“A.J. is excellence,” the Padres’ owner told my Union-Tribune colleague, Kevin Acee.
The team chairman has approved a five-year contract and issued two multi-year extensions to Preller, a former longtime Rangers scouting executive whose star soared when Texas reached the World Series in 2010 and ’11.
For all we know, Preller’s current contract may run longer than 2026, in that media were unaware of Preller’s first extension for several months until the team announced it.
Factors in addition to winning percentage appear to matter to Seidler.
Attendance and buzz, to name two.
A third: Seidler seems comfortable collaborating with Preller. The Padres’ owner facilitated negotiations with Scott Boras on the $280-million contract for Xander Bogaerts in December and signed Manny Machado to a $350-million contract in spring training.
Former Padres owner John Moores was less involved in baseball transactions across an 18-year tenure that produced four West titles and an NL pennant.
Moores, recall, placed a former World Series-winning team president, Larry Lucchino, between himself and his two Padres GMs. Today, no Padres executive whose MLB credentials remotely compare with Lucchino’s occupies a spot between Preller and Seidler.
So it’s crucial Seidler seems comfortable working with Preller. The private-equity man and his top baseball exec zig while the rest of the industry zags, as Seidler has put it. They’re indisputably bold, even fearless — an admirable, if double-edged, trait.
Whatever the on-field results of their approach, their efforts command attention from fans and MLB media rights-holders.
Preller, true to his rock-star persona, stirs up almost every offseason and trade market. Not just by what he does, but what he might do. Previewing this offseason, for example, MLB insiders are speculating that Preller and Seidler will renew their pursuit of Shohei Ohtani.
Put another way: I doubt most baseball fans and a good number of media outside of their respective markets could name the top baseball executives for the Rays, Astros and Braves — three relatively faceless organizations that have run circles around the Preller-Seidler Padres in terms of winning ballgames.
Preller, they could identify.
It’s not just buzz for buzz’s sake that the Padres stoke excitement off the field, although there’s no getting around the sub-.500 winning percentage of the Seidler-Preller era.
Let’s not revise history about the ’23 Padres. Preller built a club that most of the baseball world regarded as capable of challenging for a World Series trophy. Betting lines set the futures total at 91.5 to 93.5 victories. The majority of ESPN’s 28 baseball panelists picked the Padres to win the West race.
The stronger case against Preller keeping his job is far less this year’s win-loss record than the baseball results of his nine-year tenure.
It’s obvious Seidler takes other results into account, too. He has extolled the benefits of maintaining stability and continuity atop the franchise.
Go back to when Seidler and Ron Fowler headed a group that bought control of the Padres in August 2012, two years before they and then-CEO Mike Dee hired Preller. They inherited a top-3 farm system, per Baseball America and others. At the time, a pair of analytically driven clubs, the Cubs and Astros, led by Theo Epstein and Jeff Luhnow, had decided that full-scale rebuilds made sense under MLB rules. Losing, say, 100 games, wasn’t viewed as odious.
Seidler and Fowler opted to try to win right away — or at least give that impression. When Preller took over, his splashy “win-now” moves earned the Padres a great deal of goodwill among fans and media, including national media pundits who chastised other teams for being too cautious and cheap.
Padres attendance didn’t crater even as the Seidler-Fowler Era began with seven non-competitive seasons and plenty of on-the-job training. Yet in 2019 amid the franchise’s ninth consecutive losing season and fifth under Preller, attendance nevertheless finished 14 of 30 MLB teams. The average crowd of 29,585 in the East Village topped even the big-market White Sox, Rangers and Blue Jays.
Sure, the Chargers moving out of town in 2017 made many locals hug the Padres that much harder. Even so, when the Padres finally became competitive, both the payroll and attendance soared. The team ranked third in the National League in attendance in 2021 and fourth last year. This season? The Padres are second.
For Seidler to swap out Preller now would be out of character. Getting fans excited about the next season shouldn’t be difficult, as compared to many other years. Preller can get a start by promoting Jackson Merrill soon from a farm system that has five prospects in Baseball America’s top-100. There’s still a core of stars to point to — among them 2023 Padres MVP Ha-Seong Kim.
As for attendance in 2024, judging by CEO Erik Greupner’s letter to season ticket-holders two weeks ago, the Padres expect it to be robust.
I doubt Preller is going anywhere other than baseball parks, MLB’s offseason meetings and Encinitas basketball courts for pickup games.
