The San Diego Padres are essentially a fantasy team. Is that a good thing?

By Jake MintzFOX Sports MLB Writer

At first glance, the Padres roster looks like something a teenager would construct in “MLB The Show.”

“Oh, yeah, Blake Snell was great in the 2020 World Series, we need him. Isn’t Joe Musgrove from here? Let’s trade for that guy. Yu Darvish throws, like, 100 different pitches! Very cool! Trent Grisham made a huge error in a big spot? He must be undervalued! Wait, Juan Soto is available? Yes, absolutely, whatever the Nats want. Give them my house.”

It’s a European Soccer approach to team construction: Develop talented youngsters, and flip them to other teams for cash or established players. Depending on whom you ask within the baseball industry, it’s either a brilliant strategy or completely untethered from reality, wonderfully cunning or unnecessarily risky.

The prototypical approach to building a formidable, sustainable contender in MLB nowadays is usually (1) Develop a homegrown star or two, (2) complement that with a handful of depth pieces from your farm system, (3) make a splashy free-agent signing and (4) finish things off with a “Go For It” trade. It’s simple, really. Anyone can do it — even you. But make sure you get those homegrown stars. It’s all about those homegrown stars.

Look around the postseason, and you’ll see this recipe everywhere. Houston built a dynasty around José Altuve and Alex Bregman, then kept it going with Kyle Tucker and Jeremy Peña. The Dodgers have Clayton Kershaw, Julio Urías, Tony Gonsolin, Will Smith and Gavin Lux. Even the Mets, who won 101 games with a roster reshaped over the winter by a Steve Cohen spending spree, still rely on franchise stalwarts Jacob deGrom, Brandon Nimmo, Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso.

But the Padres and GM AJ Preller have more or less raised an enormous middle finger to that strategy. While most teams see their own prospects as future members of the big-league roster, Preller has used his farm system to craft an entirely different team.

Only three players on San Diego’s NLDS roster were originally drafted or signed and then developed by the Padres. There’s Luis Campusano, a young and promising, yet-to-establish-himself catcher whom the Padres drafted in 2017; Steven Wilson, a dependable reliever who signed for just $5,000 in 2018; and Adrian Morejon, a 23-year-old, flame-throwing Cuban reliever to whom San Diego gave an $11 million bonus in 2016.

Both shortstop Ha-Seong Kim and reliever Robert Suárez technically started their American baseball careers in San Diego, but Kim was signed out of Korea as a 25-year-old and has never played a game stateside in the minor leagues. The 31-year-old Suárez spent half a decade pitching in Japan before he joined the Padres. 

The entire pitching rotation — Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Joe Musgrove, Mike Clevinger and Sean Manaea — was acquired through the trading away of prospects. A third of the starting lineup — Soto, Josh Bell and Brandon Drury — only joined San Diego a few months ago at the deadline. Austin Nola, Jake Cronenworth Grisham and Jurickson Profar were all traded for. Manny Machado, the closest thing the club has to a stable centerpiece with Fernando Tatis Jr. on the ringworm suspended list, was a huge-money free-agent signing.

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Whatever you want to call it — master plan or frantic assembly — it’s all the vision of one man: GM AJ Preller. The fourth-longest tenured head honcho in baseball, Preller got the Padres’ top job in August 2014 after a decade with the Rangers. During his time in Texas, he developed a reputation as something of a farm system Whisperer, and most assumed he would do much of the same in San Diego: Replenish the minor leagues, develop a bunch of prospects, and make the Padres, long one of MLB’s least relevant franchises, notable for once.

But Preller zagged almost immediately. Just a few months into his tenure, at the 2014 Winter Meetings, he went wild, wheeling and dealing up a storm. In the span of a few short days, he added Wil Myers, Matt Kemp and Justin Upton in three deals for a host of prospects, establishing a reputation as an unpredictable tradesmith. 

That era of Padres baseball soon fell flat, and Preller learned from his mistakes — sort of. He laid low for a few years, quietly building up an impressive farm system considered one of the best in baseball. But instead of patiently waiting for those players to contribute in the bigs, Preller picked up his cell phone and blasted back into the trade market like the Kool-Aid Man. 

The slender, wild-haired 45-year-old always looks like he either desperately needs a nap or just woke up from a great one. In an industry dominated by 40-something-year-old Ivy League grads who overwork themselves, Preller might be the big boss. Some consider him an unhinged madman, some a creative maestro; Preller is baseball’s most polarizing executive. 

He has created a roster of players who didn’t rise through a farm system together, didn’t learn how to lose and win as a unit. These are not lifelong friends, groomsmen, godparents. That said, there’s nothing wrong with a bunch of talented coworkers coming together to accomplish something impressive at the office. Your associates don’t need to be your buddies.

But in 2021, that strategy imploded, as the Padres spent September racking up a fine collection of L’s and plummeting their way out of playoff contention. Out went skipper Jayce Tingler, and in came longtime Oakland A’s manager Bob Melvin. 

After a decade in The Bay spent squeezing value from every nook and cranny of the Oakland Coliseum, Melvin found himself tasked with a new and bizarre assignment: Keep a disparate group of mercenary ballplayers together, something his predecessor failed to do. 

As managers so often do, Melvin drew on past experience. In 2001, he was the bench coach for the World Champion Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that just three years prior had risen out of the desert through an expansion draft. It was an old team, an experienced team, a team of players relatively unfamiliar with one another. But Melvin says there was one obvious, unifying factor that kept everything together. 

“All those guys were brought in to win a world championship,” he said. “That bonds everybody.”

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Whether Melvin can help work that same magic 21 years later remains to be seen. It’s a gargantuan task. The Mets and their two-headed pitching monster stand in their way. Beyond that, the juggernaut Dodgers. Behind them are most likely the defending-champion Braves. 

When the games get more important, the lights get brighter and the tension swells, a sense of genuine unity within a dugout or a clubhouse can really matter. Teams that have “been there together” have an edge. Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright have a decade of trust. The Padres have less of that than any other club this October.

Maybe it won’t matter, and Soto will hit 16 homers before Daylight Savings. Either way, it’s a fascinating baseball experiment, one that will surely render some type of judgment upon Preller’s shoulders.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ, is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. Follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.

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