SAN DIEGO — Now that the Major League Baseball season is past the halfway point and we’re a few days away from the All-Star break, many fans wonder about their team's strategy regarding the upcoming trade deadline.
Will their team be buyers? Will they be sellers? What exactly is out there? Do the bad teams have viable trade chips and which of the good teams will get the good trade chips?
For the San Diego Padres, their front office and fans hoped 2023 would be the year when all their big moves paid off, and they would be at the top of the National League West division at this point in the season.
Instead, they’re in fourth place behind the Arizona Diamondbacks, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Francisco Giants in the division standings. They’re ten games out of first place and six games out of a Wild Card spot with a 40-46 record.
So the question for them is, should they be sellers at the deadline?
Javier Reyes, the host of Locked On Padres, discussed this on the latest episode of his show, saying, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen a team this tricky. I compare it to the 2015 Washington Nationals team. They’re a little bit similar where they had all those guys, those big superstars that they brought in, and all of them underperformed.”
Those 2015 Nationals finished a disappointing 83-79 and in second place in the National League East behind the eventual National League pennant-winning New York Mets.
As for the 2023 Padres, all of their big moves have been documented repeatedly because they were one of the teams “going for it” and handing out big money contracts and extensions, but so far, those deals are not paying off.
Reyes talked about where the team is in the standings and mentioned their playoff chances. It was an 18.7% chance when he recorded the episode, but a glance at Baseball-Reference.com on Wednesday, July 5, will tell you it dropped to 17.6%.
Reyes believes the Padres are going to go for it at the deadline and not be sellers. He said, “A.J. Preller and company currently at the moment are like, ‘Let’s go for it. We’re gonna go for it because we have to.”
He cited Juan Soto and how the Padres only have him for one more year. Josh Hader and Blake Snell are going to be free agents. Fernando Tatis, Jr., Manny Machado, and Xander Bogaerts are all on the books for a long time and you also have Yu Darvish who is signed past the age of 40.
The Padres are in a no-win situation of their own making, and they have to be buyers otherwise, they’ll have to admit this season was a failure, and who wants to do that? Certainly not A.J. Preller.
Preller appeared on a San Diego radio show last Friday, saying, “The next month will tell us a lot. From our standpoint, the intention is to continue to look at this team playing into October and continuing to look at ways to improve the roster and get this team in a spot where we win a lot of games here in the second half.”
Manager Bob Melvin also said this about his team just last week, "We never expected to be where we were record-wise at this point. But it is what it is, and it basically tells you who you are."
The good thing for the Padres is they have a few weeks left to right the ship enough to where it won’t look silly for them to be buyers at the deadline. But, if they make a big move and still miss the playoffs, they could finish 2023 with egg on their faces.
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