The past five years have been the best of times for the Padres.
Three postseason trips, four playoff series wins. As many All-Star selections in four games (15) as in the previous 11 years combined. More top-10 MVP finishers (six) than in the previous 15 years combined. The first two no-hitters in franchise history. A Cy Young Award winner.
The first half of the decade has also been marked by the franchise’s worst moments.
Chairman Peter Seidler’s death. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s PED suspension. Almost an entire starting rotation decimated by injury, a shouting match in the dugout between the team’s two biggest stars and a manager fired in 2021. A record payroll, disconnect and discord in the star-studded clubhouse, escalating animosity between the manager and his boss and the manager leaving for a rival in ‘23.
It is all so jumbled. So very much what they have been shooting for and, then, not at all what Seidler once declared the Padres’ decade was supposed to look like.
“I mean, ’20, ’22, ’24, making the playoffs, winning playoff series,” Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller said, “I think we’re one of five, maybe five or six teams that have won ‘x’ number of playoff series in that time. But also in the middle of that, the ability to … do it back-to-back seasons, do it five of seven years, look up over the course of a 10-year period, you’re in the playoffs seven or eight times, that’s been the plan here from Day 1.”
The Padres are, indeed, one of seven teams to have won at least four playoff series since 2020. They are one of 10 to have made the playoffs at least three times. At 380-328 (.537), they are the fifth-winningest team in the regular season in that span.
They want more.
They want the championship that Seidler whimsically guaranteed in 2023 with the quote that now accompanies his photo above the entrance to the clubhouse in spring training:
“One year soon, the baseball gods will smile on the San Diego Padres, and we will have a parade.”
To have that chance in 2025, the Padres are going to have to do something they haven’t done in 20 years and have done just once in franchise history: make the playoffs in consecutive seasons.
“For sure,” Manny Machado said. “The biggest goal is to be in the playoffs every single year. That’s our goal.”
Doing so, however, goes beyond that objective declared by virtually every team every year.
It is important for multiple reasons, not the least of which is having the consistency to create a culture.
There is also the matter of maintaining the extraordinary level of fan interest — and accompanying revenue — the team has generated over the past five years.
And there is the lurking reality that time could be running out on this particular version of the Padres.
The time is now
To say this has to be the year for the Padres would overstating things. But the overarching theme of such a declaration does ring true.
The Padres’ decade is half over, and the core in which they place much of their hopes and have guaranteed much of their money is eventually going to not be their core.
The fact of the matter is Seidler authorized the spending to set up the Padres for now. The Padres have subsequently made moves that make it possible but also make it somewhat urgent.
Now or never is rarely an actual circumstance, unless you’re hurtling toward a cliff and deciding whether to jump out of a vehicle.
This is not that.
But it feels like an inflection point, both for what looms over the Padres off the field and what looms in the distance on the field.
And also for the specter of doom that it seems so many longtime fans perceive after 56 seasons without a championship and most of those without a chance.
Something Machado said in February illustrated how perception melts into reality.
“Our vision that Peter left us … was to bring multiple championships to the city and be in the top of the league and have a productive team out there every single day,” Machado said at FanFest. “And it’s kind of sad not to see it happening.”
His assessment may have been paradoxical, but it summed up the takeaway of many who watched as the biggest news the Padres made in the offseason was a spat between the family that owns the largest stakes in the team becoming public.
Peter Seidler’s widow, Sheel Seidler, filed a lawsuit on Jan. 6 alleging that two of her husband’s brothers defrauded her in their roles as trustees of his estate. The suit asks for decisions made by the trust to be vacated, which would include a reversal of the recent naming of John Seidler as Padres chairman, and makes an argument for Sheel Seidler to take over control of the franchise. The brothers, Matt and Robert Seidler, have denied Sheel Seidler’s accusations, and they and others have disputed contentions made in her lawsuit regarding her previous involvement in running the club.
The case — which, barring a settlement, is not expected to be resolved before the end of this season — seems to have largely been a non-issue for players.
And Machado has said multiple times, including that same day at FanFest, that he feels “good” about this year’s team.
“We expect to be good again,” he said last week.
Building for something
Rumors of the Padres’ demise were greatly exaggerated.
They have kept the core of their team together and could start their season with 19 players back from last year’s playoff roster. They made some low-key crucial signings around the time spring training started.
However, this does also feel like a period of great import.
Almost entirely by virtue of several incumbent players having their salaries increase, the Padres will have a payroll somewhere around $200 million on opening day. That will likely rank ninth or 10th in the major leagues, roughly where the organization hopes to reside for years.
But that isn’t guaranteed. There is no telling what will happen with ownership, and the team acknowledges it has maxed out its currently available local revenue streams.
For now, the immediate future of the franchise will be decided on the field.
The situation is probably short of now or never, because never is an impossible thing to predict.
Heck, last season might have been the Padres’ then or never, as they could not take advantage of so many wondrous developments that led to 93 wins and the belief they were one of the two best teams in MLB.
David Peralta and Donovan Solano. Kyle Higashioka. Jackson Merrill and Jurickson Profar. Injury after injury to Dodgers starting pitchers. And then 24 consecutive innings without scoring to end the dream.
“It’s still hard to reflect on,” Xander Bogaerts said recently. “I saw Miggy Rojas said it the other day. We felt like we had the best team. We knew it. We felt it.”
Rojas, a Dodgers infielder, was one of many around baseball to express the sentiment that the Padres had the Dodgers right where they wanted them for more than just a 2-1 lead in the National League Division Series. The belief was that the World Series was essentially won in the NLDS.
“I think everybody in that clubhouse knew that we didn’t have the best team last year,” Rojas said on a podcast last month. “We had to work. If you put both teams — Padres and the Dodgers — on paper, we didn’t have the advantage in that series.”
Now the Dodgers appear stacked again. The Padres appear to be playing for second place in the National League West and another chance to get past them in the postseason.
Perhaps regret can best be recycled as fuel.
“We don’t wipe (the slate) completely clean,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “We also don’t want to sit there and beat ourselves up for what didn’t happen at the very end of a very competitive season. Let’s build on the things that were really good, but let’s not forget we didn’t reach our goal, and that hunger will still be there, that’s for sure.”
Urgency needed
Forever is a long time.
The Padres could pull their every-other-year disappointing act this season and come back in 2026 and win the franchise’s first championship on the backs of Merrill’s MVP campaign and Rookie of the Year Leo De Vries and riding the arms of ageless Yu Darvish and new closer Jason Adam.
You just don’t know.
But the fact is there is a lot on the line in 2025.
The Padres have Bogaerts and Machado still presumably in their prime but with an unknown shelf life and an expensive denouement on the horizon. They have Merrill, who presumably is pre-prime but has already shown he is among the league’s top center fielders. And they have Tatis, who is presumably still in the prime of his prime.
The Padres have Dylan Cease and Michael King in their rotation this year, and both are due to be free agents. They have Darvish, who may not play out his entire contract. They have closer Robert Suarez, who could opt out after this season.
Players come and go on every team virtually every year.
For the Padres, arguably the most significant factor regarding the urgency of this year is that it is another year closer to Bogaerts and Machado slowing down for good. It is essentially a given that the stars, both of whom are 32 entering this season, will eventually be a drain on the lineup and a drain on the payroll.
This is not necessarily a suggestion that is imminent. Just inevitable. And it is something to be increasingly cognizant of with each passing year.
By 2027, the duo will make a combined $60 million per season, and that will be their annual take through 2033. (From ’29 through ’33, with Tatis making $36 million, three players will consume $96 million in payroll space.)
“These are our prime years,” Bogaerts said. “… We know that this is our time, and that’s why we work so hard and we push so hard for it to be now. I mean, I’m not saying that you don’t want to be good at 35, 36, 37, but you know that these are the prime years, because this is what we kind of built our roster for. … These are our prime years that we’re very aware of.”
Preller has built a team that will almost always go as its stars go.
Depth is important, sure. However, a synopsis of how the big-money players led the Padres the past five seasons tells a story about the tone they set:
- Monster years by Machado and Tatis, who finished third and fourth, respectively, in NL MVP voting that season, propelled the Padres to the playoffs in 2020.
- The next season, those two kept the team in playoff contention through August. But Tatis missed two weeks at the start of that month with a shoulder injury, and the Padres were largely relying on bullpen games and castoff starters as they collapsed in the final month.
- Machado finished third in NL MVP voting in 2022, and he was, by most measures, the league’s top offensive contributor the final two months of the season as the Padres surged to a playoff berth.
- It was too late because they had largely collectively underperformed to that point, but Juan Soto (1.156 OPS), Bogaerts (1.122) and Machado (.891) led a 20-7 surge in September of ‘23.
- From mid-June to the end of last season, as the Padres went from below .500 to the fourth-best record in baseball, Merrill and Machado ranked third and ninth, respectively, in the NL in WAR.
Barring Tirso Ornelas not only earning a job but becoming this year’s Merrill and Jason Heyward or Jose Iglesias becoming this year’s Jurickson Profar, and even in light of the Padres’ dedication to (and success with) “winning on the margins” under Shildt, the trajectory of this season will again likely be decided by how well (and for how long) some combination of the team’s core performs.
Golden era
So here we are. The 57th season of Padres baseball is about to begin.
By some measures, the team has never been better.
Just four times since the Padres came into being in 1969 have they had a winning record over a five-year period.
The past five years have arguably been the best of those four.
While they made the World Series in 1984 and ’98, no other five-year period saw them go to the playoffs more than twice or win more than two series. Before 2020, the Padres had been to the postseason five times and won three playoff series.
They have had a winning record in four of the past five seasons after being above .500 just 14 times in their first 51 seasons.
So by that measure, they are accomplishing a significant portion of what they set out to do when they endured the build of 2016-19, when they flooded the roster with prospects and fliers and were a combined 98 games below .500.
This build is something different. Not only in expectations but in how results will be achieved.
Making the playoffs every other year and stumbling spectacularly every other year would run counter to two of Shildt’s core tenets — those of consistency and culture.
“I think it’s critical,” he said of the need to make the playoffs again in 2025. “It’s not absolute.”
By the last part he meant that there are no guarantees regarding how good other teams will be or ways to predict factors outside the Padres’ control. He went on to explain the importance of consistency, continuity and communication, concluding with this: “So, long answer to the question, I think it’s vital.”
Winning is the only thing, because the alternative is impossible to quantify.
There could be transition, if not turmoil, in the coming years.
Preller, whose seat was at least warm last spring, has a contract that runs through 2026. The Seidler family emphatically contends it plans to keep the team, but the stated intention to not sell an asset worth billions has been made and recanted several times in several places, and a court could make decisions that serve as a catalyst for a sale. Baseball is potentially headed toward another work stoppage in 2027. If that were coupled with the Padres losing, it is difficult to fathom that support in the form of buying tickets and jerseys would not suffer.
They believe they have the team to win.
“When I look around I still see dudes surrounding myself,” Tatis said. “… We feel like we can make a battle happen with that group that we have right now.”
They know they need to.
“I think it’s super important,” Preller said. “… I think our ability as an organization to back up last season, (we’re) just hungry to go do it. I think it would speak a lot for our players and our staff and our organization to go out there and have another team that gets into October and plays deep into October. We understand what it means, the excitement that creates for our city and for the Padres fans that deserve it. We understand all of that. That’s the game plan, that’s the goal.”
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