How Exactly Did the Padres Get So Danged Good So Fast?
A Case Study
Photo Credit: Jeff Nycz / Mid-South Images)
In this glacially cold baseball winter, an old Giants nemesis and a growing NL West behemoth has been doing their best to heat up the old stove. The Pads stunning two-day acquisition spree that netted them 2018 AL Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, 2020 (and 2013) Cy Young runner-up Yu Darvish, and intriguing Korean Free Agent Ha-Seong Kim has pushed them from up-and-comers to the game’s elite.
Per Fangraphs, the Pads are now projected to join the Dodgers as the two best, most complete rosters in the game. Indeed, Fangraphs is projecting an extraordinary divisional race between the two southern California teams that might have us thinking back to 1993 (except for that whole, 103-win team going home for the winter thing).
For those of us who have grown fat and comfy on decades of bumbling, stumbling Padres teams, the speed of their ascent is mind-boggling. This is a team that finished seven games worse than a pretty bad Giants team just 16 months ago, for Pete’s sake! How the heck did this happen?
The answer, of course, the simple answer is that most tantalizing of prospect-laden words: REBUILD. They rebuilt their farm system and once it was filled to the brim that system poured forth its riches.
There you go. Nothing complicated about that. Done and done!
But, hey, since these Padres are sorta supposed to be the two-years forerunner of our own Giants, perhaps it does merit taking a little closer look into exactly what happened here.
So, let’s take a little trip with the Ghosts of Prospects Past and see if there are any lessons we might glean from the Padres’ path to (presumed) glory.
2016 State of the System: Schrecklich!
Baseball America Organizational Ranking: 25
Mistakes were made. That’s probably the first thing we have to say about the San Diego Padres heading into the winter of 2016.
A.J. Preller had been named the team’s new General Manager at the end of the season in 2014, and during the winter meetings that December over the course of an astonishing two days Preller had announced his presence with authority — almost literally emptying out the farm. In four transactions between December 18-19, Preller moved 14 different prospects, including six of the previous year’s top 15 prospects and three of the club’s previous four 1st round picks. Some of those guys would go on to have small, interesting careers — René Rivera, Zach Eflin, Burch Smith, Mallex Smith, Joe Ross, the contributor types. One of them, LHP Max Fried has emerged as the ace of the Atlanta Braves staff. And one of them, of course, has gone on to become one of the most under-appreciated stars in the game — the player who led major league SS in batting average, OBP, AND slugging in 2020, Trea Turner (in return for Wil Myers). The following year, as the full extent of the damage done was felt (at both the major and minor league levels), Preller reversed course and began selling off his underperforming acquisitions, but he was starting from the very bottom.
So yes, things were bleak on the farm this time five years ago. Their system was ranked a woeful 25th in baseball at the time by Baseball America. By comparison, a Giants’ system that was topped by Christian Arroyo, Tyler Beede, and Phil Bickford was ranked 19th! Man, life comes at you fast!
It was topped by SS Javy Guerra who had come to the Padres with #2 prospect Manny Margot from Boston in a deal for Craig Kimbrel. The slick fielding Guerra was once part of one of the all-time great prospect infields with the Greenville Drive: Rafael Devers, Michael Chavis, Yoan Moncada and the Giants own Mauricio Dubon. But the bat never developed and his career stalled out — sort of. If you guessed whether SS Javy Guerra might be the same guy as relief pitcher Javy Guerra, who posted a 10.13 ERA for the Pads in 2020, you’d be right!
Over the next couple of years, the #2 and #3 prospects (Margot and Hunter Renfroe) would be given extended chances to become building block players for a better future. Both showed glimpses of productivity, each produced a season that almost perfectly encapsulates the term “2nd division starter,” topping out at 1.9 fWAR (generally 2 WAR is considered an average big league regular). Ultimately Preller would conclude that neither was a long-term piece and packaged them together to Tampa Bay in the somewhat ill-fated deal for Tommy Pham.
Beyond Margot and Renfroe the Padres’ top 10 was dismal, including mostly flame outs like Ruddy Giron and Michael Gettys, with OF Travis Jankowski and pitcher Colin Rea being the “successes” of the group. Further down in the back half of the top 30 there was a young Dinelson Lamet, as well as our good friend Alex Dickerson. And outside the top 30 the system did include more 2nd division types like Franchy Cordero and the Franimal, Franmil Reyes. And at the very bottom of the top 30, there was an intriguing international hitter that would soon be at the forefront of their rise, but we’ll leave Luis Urias for another year. Overall, the joint was pretty bottomed out in terms of talent.
The top 20 prospects in the system have since produced 12.6 fWAR cumulatively in their careers with just four of them (Margot, Renfroe, Jankowski, Lamet) producing positive WAR. But even with a bottom-tier system, it is interesting to note how many big leaguers the 2016 Padres produced. Mostly those second division types, but Margot and Renfroe were just starting in a World Series, and Reyes, Cordero, Jankowsi and Dickerson have all been starting OF in the majors and all got their audition time in with the Padres before the team moved on to other options.
Lesson: Evaluate and move on! Don’t get too attached to minor success stories
Supplementary Lesson: Things will go wrong! Deal with it and move on!
2017 State of the System: Upswing!
Baseball America Organizational Ranking: 9
As they say, the trademan taketh away and the trademan giveth. As the July 31, 2016 trade deadline approached, the Pads turned into full sell-off mode and made a series of deals that brought an influx of talent. And one of those deals was a gobsmacker that provided the Padres with one of the most coveted prospects in the game of baseball. With this star-in-the-making, a top 20 prospect in all of baseball, the Pads vaulted up to a top 10 organization, slipping in at #9 in Baseball America’s 2019 organizational rankings.
That star prospect was, of course, right-handed pitcher Anderson Espinoza, who became the system’s easy #1 prospect. Espinoza was the tip of a spear of exciting new arms that also included their top pick in the 2015 draft, Cal Quantrill out of Cal, and the Cuban free agent Adrian Morejon, whom the Pads had snapped up for a jaw-dropping $11 million in July of 2016. Chris Paddack, a high school project drafted the previous year, came over from Miami in a deal for ageless Fernando Rodney. The Pads didn’t quite know what to make of him yet, but he was interesting.
Sadly, the excitement surrounding Espinoza’s acquisition would quickly lead to frustration. After throwing just 32 innings for Ft. Wayne in the late summer of 2016, Espinoza underwent the first of two Tommy John surgeries and has, at this point, never thrown a pitch in an official game again.
They drafted Quantrill, on the other hand, while he was rehabbing from Tommy John, though their excitement about his future was nearly as strong. The Pads were long rumored to have locked Quantrill up well prior to the draft (he stopped showcasing himself for other teams once the Pads had signaled their interest), and they saw in him a pitcher who could move quickly in rehab. But Quantrill, too, would prove to be chimeric in his promise. He turned in “ok but not great” performances in AA and AAA before moving up to deliver “not particular good” performances in San Diego. There are those in the game who look at Quantrill (and some others) and wonder how good San Diego’s ability to develop pitching really is. And many looked at last summer’s Mike Clevinger deal and thought: “Cleveland’s going to find another gear in Quantrill that the Pads weren’t able to get to.”
The system had also seen some strong gains from players in 2016, most notably Lamet and young hitter Luis Urias. I’ve told the Lamet story in detail before, but the 2016 the older (24) international signing had given the org a dominant performance in the California League and finished with a strong six weeks in AA. He leapt from the backend of the team’s top 20 into their top 10, landing at the #9 spot in 2017. The Prospect Handbook said he “can be a No. 4 or 5 starter with further refinement of his changeup.” Lamet would have a promising big league debut in 2017 before, guess what, undergoing Tommy John surgery.
The other major development leap in the organization belonged to Urias. The sweet-swinging middle infielder had blistered the Cal League with a .330/.397/.440 campaign and had finished his age-19 season by hitting his first AAA homerun. By the following year, Urias would be a consensus top 30 prospect in baseball as scouts everywhere were convicted about his ability to hit.
Ah, but of course all of this is misdirection and buried lede. The REAL impact deal of the 2016 trade deadline, of course, had been that all time heist, sending James Shields to Chicago for the 17-year-old Fernando Tatis, Jr., who had yet to appear in a professional game. Following the trade, the youngster had made his pro debut in the rookie level Arizona League, hitting a very promising .273 with 4 home runs. He was ranked the 10th best prospect in the AZL (behind his own teammate Hudson Potts, among others) and was listed in the Prospect Handbook as the Padres’ #17 prospect. No, it was Anderson Espinoza who had them dreaming of glory!
Lesson: Sometimes it ain’t what you think it is!
Supplementary Lesson: Never trust pitching prospects
2018 State of the System: Scintillating!
Baseball America Organizational Ranking: 3
Now THIS is the year it really happened. The Pads jump up the ratings in 2017 was akin to the Giants move last year: from bottom-tiered group to among the really interesting. But in 2018, the system took a quantum leap. They were ranked the #3 system in January and moved up to the #1 spot by midsummer, thanks to a big draft haul (including the #3 overall pick) and yet another trade that brought in Cleveland’s Francisco Mejia.
But the major ingredient fueling their rise to prominence was the meteoric development of Tatis, Jr. That intriguing 17 year old, who had a nice little year in rookie ball suddenly morphed into a monster, crushing 21 home runs as an 18 year old in the chilly climes of the Midwest League — where teenaged bats usually shrivel and sink away from the cold spring weather. Tatis was so dynamic he convinced the Padres to skip him over A+ altogether and spent the final few weeks of the season in AA as an 18 year old.
Almost overnight, he’d gone from a promising rookie leaguer to a potential superstar. Translating to Giants’ language, Tatis’ 2018 was what Giants’ fans hoped Marco Luciano’s 2020 would be (and now desperately hope his 2021 will be). And it transformed the entire organization.
A lot of other good things happened for the Padres’ organization in 2018, too — Urias continued to look like a big league hitter, Chris Paddack and Logan Allen took major steps forward, Morejon showed off his electric arm, Michael Baez showed god-mode level stuff in short bursts.
Suddenly there were waves forming. By mid-summer the team had eight top 100 prospects: Tatis (2), third overall pick in the draft MacKenzie Gore (21), Morejon (24), Mejia (25), Urias (30), Paddack (59), Allen (70), Baez (73), and Josh Naylor (83). Baseball America, in their organization rankings, further noted:
Beyond the eight prospects in the Top 100, there are another wave of prospects who could crack next year’s Top 100 (Luis Patino, Jacob Nix, Anderson Espinoza, Austin Allen, Buddy Reed, Xavier Edwards and others). Now, Padres general manager A.J. Preller’s biggest task is sorting out which prospects are keepers and which ones should be traded to speed the big league club’s rebuild.
A little more than 16 months later, Preller has mostly sorted guys into the latter category. Amazingly, seven of the 14 prospects named in the above passage (not to mention previous year’s top prospects like Margot and Renfroe) have been moved in the last year and a half. Once Tatis emerged as a superstar who could reach the majors quickly, Preller committed to constructing a team around him made up of established big league vets.
Lesson: Things Happen Fast
2019-20 State of the System: Sorting
Baseball America Organizational Ranking: 2
Tatis’ emergence transformed Preller from a steady prospect compiler back into the “bold moves” maverick that he’s always been at heart. And bold moves have defined everything about the Padres since opening day of 2019, when they daringly included both 19-year-old Fernando Tatis, Jr. (skipping yet another level, for those keeping track, as Tatis, Jr. never played in AAA) and pitcher Chris Paddack on the opening day roster, service time manipulation be damned.
From a prospect-follower’s perspective, what’s fascinating about Preller’s work over the last two years has been the speed with which he’s seemingly made evaluations of players. Over the course of the 2019 season, he decisively sorted out the glut of OF. He inserted Reyes in the many moving parts of the Yasiel Puig-Trevor Bauer deal (which, for a time, brought the Pads yet another Top 100 prospect in Cincinnati’s Taylor Trammell). By the end of the year, he’d decided to move on from all of Margot, Renfroe, and Cordero, packaging the first two for Tommy Pham and sending Franchy to Kansas City.
More shockingly, he moved on from Luis Urias after a 71-game audition. The reports on Urias’ defensive work in the majors were certainly rough, and the bat hadn’t performed as expected. After just 83 games as a Padre, Preller sold high on Urias hoping to solve the team’s CF issues — very successfully, based on Trent Grisham’s 2020.
Other moves seemed to come equally quickly. Cal Quantrill lasted 120 innings with San Diego. Francisco Mejia struggled mightily as a pitch-framing catcher, but he hit decently in an extended chance in 2019 before suffering from a sore thumb throughout 2020. Josh Naylor, who makes Alex Dickerson look like a defensive whiz but who has always hit, was given virtually no chance to fill the Padres’ LF hole last year before Preller moved on.
Mostly, that’s what AJ has done the last two years with his prospects: he’s watched, and then moved on. Preller had been hurt badly by a quick judgement on a player he hadn’t seen much in Trea Turner. And we’ll see if any of these come back to haunt him, but for right now he looks like a GM who knows which prospects he wants and which he doesn’t.
Fernando Tatis and Dinelson Lamet became the keepers. Chris Paddack started out strong, but the two-pitch starter suffered through a rough 2020 and has been quickly pushed to 4th on the depth chart. He’d be 5th were Mike Clevinger healthy and with MacKenzie Gore coming up behind him it does feel like his shelf-life may not be long.
The 2018 Padres promised great things in the near future. The 2021 Padres look to be one of the best teams in baseball. But there’s not a direct line that links from one point to the next. Preller established Tatis as the lever that moves the world, and then set to work putting as much big league talent around him as possible. Manny Machado and Eric Hosmer came in on mega-deals (Hosmer’s a highly questionable one). Grisham, Jake Cronenworth, Austin Nola, Tommy Pham were picked up to raise the overall talent. First Clevinger, then Snell and Darvish were brought in to give the team the kind of ace arms that (along with Lamet) you want starting playoff games.
Like Houston before, the rebuild has consisted mostly of identifying a primary impact piece or two and trading everyone else for big league talent and top of the line pitching. Though even with all the moves the talent is still incredibly rich and it seems clear that Gore and 2019 1st rounder C.J. Abrams are in the “hands off” zone for now.
But unlike the Dodgers, San Diego has been quick to use even high-end prospects (just not the highest-end) to return big league talent. And it’s not hard to see why. The Dodgers have had the luxury of holding onto much of their talent because they started with an exceptionally gifted big league roster. When Corey Seager made his major league debut, he joined a team that was days away from clinching its third straight division title. When Fernando Tatis, Jr. made his major league debut, he joined a team that hadn’t won 80 games in almost a decade (since 2010 — boy, Jonathan Sanchez’ triple really did kill their spirit, didn’t it!). And using a system to climb the wheel from the bottom to the top is a very different process from using a system to stay on top.
Lesson: Find your superstar(s)
One key difference between the Padres organization’s rise and the Giants is that Padres’ strength has tended towards the pitching side and that pitching has frequently not turned out. Interestingly they ended up with a homegrown ace anyway — just not one of the expected ones (yet — we’ll see what Gore turns into). But Lamet’s ascension would be much more akin to Logan Webb suddenly becoming one of the league’s best pitchers in a couple of years than it was the result of a super prospect turning into a super star.
Even with all of the pitching mishaps, and the bad trades that began this whole story, the Padres successfully rebuilt on the strength of one superstar and the depth to make deals.
It’ll be fascinating to see which direction the Giants — who aren’t good but aren’t necessarily bad — go from here. Do they try to bring their wave of talent together to the big leagues and craft a contending club out of that wave? Or do they, like the Pads, separate the wheat from the chaff quickly and decisively, locate the superstar to build around and go from there?
Next week is International Signings week, when the 2021 J2 class is finally brought aboard. So, I’m planning a week of posts around the international signing to hopefully delight and inform you! Have a great, safe, and hopefully peaceful weekend everybody!
This is an excellent analysis of how the Padres finally stopped being the Friars of yesteryear. I think there's some really interesting takeaways one might glean from their process.
1. If there's one overarching lesson I could take from this saga, it'd be to adapt quickly and never be reluctant to admit a mistake or a flaw in process. If there's one thing it seems like Preller has mastered, it's the art of selling high- James Shields is always gonna be the biggest example, but the fact that he was willing to use Urias's residual prospect sheen to get Grisham AND Davies is one of the deftest moves I think he's yet made. At this point, Grisham looks like a solid contributor at worst and a sneaky star at best, and Davies gave the Padres a mid-rotation quality year and then helped them get Darvish. Meanwhile, Urias looks like a disaster. An absolute fleecing to this point at least.
2. Invest in the international market, big and small. The Pads have gotten a big contingent of their prospect surge from overseas, and they did it by both ponying up for premium talent (Morejon) and finding cheap gems with scouting (Patino). I think its an interesting comparison point for the Giants- Luciano and Matos (and Pomares, though he seems to have been a bit passed by) were big-ticket signings, while Canario and Toribio were not. The Giants under Farhan have seemed to embrace a philosophy of spreading their bonus money around and not pinning the hopes of a class on one or two prospects. Obviously the international market is different now and you can't just throw as much money around as you want, but I'll be curious to see what fruit that approach bears. The Giants recent success at finding unheralded gems would seem to bode well for it, but I can't help but be a little put out at two signing periods where the Giants haven't been linked to any "top 30" guys, when the last time they were seems to have worked out extremely well for them so far. It seems like you could always do both, though I know deals are locked up years in advance, so maybe the Giants just haven't been as fortunate with the premium guys lately. Yet that hasn't seemed to be the case with orgs like the Dodgers.
3. Focus on prospects who have at least one "carrying tool." I might be looking at this wrong, but from what I can tell, the Padres have seemed to prioritize finding guys who have at least one tool that can easily be graded plus, whether that's power (Franmil, Tatis, Naylor, Renfroe), speed (Turner, Edwards, Abrams), pure hitting ability (Urias, Grisham wrt strike zone discipline), or in pitching prospects, a plus fastball and a plus offspeed pitch (Lamet, Paddack, Baez.) Patino and Gore don't exactly fit that description because they're unicorns who are expected to do everything well at their peak, but both of them do have exceptional fastballs, Gore for its backspin and deception and Patino for pure gas. That makes pretty intuitive sense to me- you always want a prospect to have something you can safely bet on them doing well at the MLB level. The Giants have seemed to hew a bit closer to that philosophy in the draft once Farhan took over- Bishop's got crazy power, Wyatt has a great eye, Grant McCray's fast as hell. Patrick Bailey's a bit more rounded, though you could argue his carrying tool is "catcher", but Casey Schmitt is a plus defender, Nick Swiney seems to have at least one plus offspeed pitch (not sure whether consensus likes his curve or change better though) and great secondary fastball traits, and RJ Dabovich throws gas with spin. Harrison's another well-rounded upside play, but largely, this seems to be a philosophy the Giants are adopting.
The problem here is that we don’t have the draft position this year that SD had in 2018.