Padres jolt MLB with bold moves to set up title bid
NEW YORK: The San Diego Padres, long one of Major League Baseball’s quietest teams, jolted the sport last week.
The Padres grabbed two elite pitchers, swelling the franchise’s payroll at a time of deep financial uncertainty in the game and immediately becoming one of the favourites to win the 2021 World Series.
“This place is going nuts,” Tony Gwynn Jr said in a phone interview from San Diego.
The son and namesake of the Hall of Famer known as “Mr Padre”, Gwynn has spent most of his life in the area, watching his father, playing with the team himself and now working as a broadcaster for the club.
He watched the 2020 Padres become one of the most electrifying teams in an MLB season abbreviated by the coronavirus pandemic, going 37-23 for their first winning record since 2010, thanks to stars like Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr.
“People were just so excited to have a team that was relevant and playing well,” Gwynn, 38, said.
Now, during an off-season in which 90 percent of MLB’s free agents remain unsigned — including top players like Trevor Bauer, George Springer and JT Realmuto — and teams are confronting the financial consequences of the pandemic, the Padres have already added roughly US$100 million in salary commitments over the next few years.
On Tuesday, the Padres completed a trade with the Tampa Bay Rays for Blake Snell, the 2018 American League Cy Young Award winner.
Later that day, Padres general manager AJ Preller finalised a swap with the Chicago Cubs for Yu Darvish, who finished second in the National League Cy Young Award voting this year.
With so many financial questions hovering over the MLB — How much did each team lose without fans in the stands last season? Will a full 162-game season be played in 2021? — most teams will be reluctant to make large long-term commitments this off-season, said Marc Ganis, the president of SportsCorp, a consulting firm.
“The Padres are the anomaly,” he said. “If you’re going to be a contrarian, this is the year to do it because there will be more top-line players made available because of all the negative financial conditions on other teams. The Padres will be hurt by the Covid uncertainty, too, but this is the opportunity for them. I give them credit for seeing it.”
The Cubs and the Rays certainly factored pandemic finances into their decisions, but they had other reasons to make their deals with the Padres.
The Cubs, who have carried one of baseball’s heftiest payrolls the past few years but fallen short in the play-offs after winning the 2016 World Series, had committed to a remodel of their roster this off-season.
But in trading Darvish, 34, and the nearly $60 million he is owed over the next three years, the Cubs got essentially four lottery tickets — prospects who were not rated among the Padres’ best.
Snell, 28, and the Rays went to the World Series this fall, losing to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but Tampa Bay have routinely traded away their pricier players, especially pitchers. Snell was due $40 million over the next three years.
As lay-offs and furloughs occur throughout MLB, including in San Diego, it remains to be seen how many MLB teams will follow an austerity plan. So far, the Padres are the only one to emphatically reject that approach.
“It’s cool to go to a team where the owner spends money and wants to win and wants to win now,” Snell told reporters Tuesday.
Already, some oddsmakers have moved the Padres ahead of the New York Yankees and behind only the Dodgers as the leading 2021 World Series contenders.