A.J. Preller Builds Time Machine or Finds No. 4 Starter

I try to be humble and open-minded as an analyst; there’s so much we don’t or can’t know at the time a player signs with a team. And the future? She is as capricious as she is mean-spirited. Nothing is guaranteed.

So I look at the Padres’ busy Presidents’ Day weekend — in which they signed Nick Castellanos, Griffin Canning, Germán Márquez, Walker Buehler, and Ty France — and think to myself: I don’t know for a fact that A.J. Preller doesn’t have a bunch of European polymaths in the basement of Petco Park developing a time machine. That might sound farfetched, but “stick a bunch of smart guys under a stadium and see what happens” is literally how we got the world’s first working nuclear reactor. If Preller turns out to be the General Leslie Groves of time travel, he’ll have earned his contract extension and then some.

If Preller can retrieve previous versions of these players from the ethers of subspace, we’ll look back on this weekend (or forward, considering we have the ability to move through time in this hypothetical) as a definitive one in the 2026 NL West race.

Assuming no paradigm-shifting technology is to come, this seems OK.

At the most basic level, this kind of mid-February roster filler shopping spree is pretty common. Every team with holes left to fill is trying to gobble up bodies before we get too far into training camp. Every team without holes to fill is waiting eagerly to gobble up 40-man roster crunch guys in trades and waiver claims, like a flock of seagulls outside a boardwalk hot dog stand. This is all newsworthy because it involves, first, a bunch of relatively famous players, and second, baseball’s foremost roster fidgeter.

Right now, the Padres have only three starting pitchers I would feel good about: Michael King, Nick Pivetta, and Joe Musgrove. Of course they’re interested in cheap help for the rotation. Likewise, as good as San Diego’s lineup is in spots, first base and DH were shaping up to be an issue. Let’s take those two positions in turn.

Canning, a 2017 second-round pick out of UCLA, showed flashes of competence during a bumpy five-year tenure with the Angels, but looked to be figuring things out last year with the Mets. He posted a 3.77 ERA and 4.04 FIP in 76 1/3 innings across 16 starts. If the Padres could get that from their no. 4 starter, I think they’d probably be pretty happy.

The thing with Canning is that his fastball isn’t very good, but he has two solid breaking balls and a good changeup. Actually, the changeup was more than just good in 2025; opponents hit .196 and slugged .239 off it, and it was effective against both left- and right-handed hitters. It looks like he was throwing the changeup a little harder, with a little more drop and a little less arm-side run than in 2024 — when it was still his best pitch.

That change turned Canning, who’d run groundball rates in the high 30s and low 40s throughout his career, into a groundball machine. He also allowed only eight home runs last year, down from 31 (albeit in more than twice as many innings) in 2024.

Even the best version of Canning isn’t the kind of guy you start in a playoff game. First, he gave up a lot more hard contact than his numbers would suggest in 2025. He also ran a 10.7% walk rate, which is not good for any starter, especially one who isn’t also an elite bat-misser. Then there’s the reason he made only 16 starts in 2025: a ruptured Achilles tendon that ended his season in late June.

Achilles injuries can be unpredictable, but the plan is for Canning to come back sometime this spring. San Diego will live and die by the bullpen in the postseason, but 100 average innings from him would help the Padres get to the playoffs in the first place.

The same goes for Buehler, whom I was slightly surprised to see command only a minor league deal. Buehler is one of those former Dodgers prospects who seems perpetually youthful (can you believe Will Smith turns 31 next month?), but he’s entering his age-31 season not having been healthy and effective at the same time since 2021. True, he was outstanding back then; he made 33 starts, posted a 2.47 ERA, and finished fourth in Cy Young voting. But a lot has changed over the past four seasons.

Tommy John surgery wiped out the last two-thirds of Buehler’s 2022 campaign, all of 2023, and the first month of 2024. And it has not been smooth sailing since then. Buehler’s third right UCL has held up OK, but he missed two months with hip inflammation in 2024, his final year with the Dodgers, and another three weeks with shoulder bursitis at the start of 2025 with Boston. The Red Sox gave him a one-year contract at the qualifying offer, $21.05 million in late December 2024, but cut him at the end of last August. Maybe they were trying to do him a solid by giving him a chance to latch on with a team that might use him in the playoffs, or maybe they had seen enough of his 4.93 ERA. It seems that 112 2/3 Innings Below Replacement Level is not regarded as one of Jules Verne’s best works.

Latch on with a different playoff team Buehler did; he pitched three times for the Phillies down the stretch, recording the win in every outing and totaling one earned run allowed in 13 2/3 innings. But that seems to be the result of small sample magic; Buehler made Philadelphia’s NLDS roster but did not pitch in the four-game loss to his former team, the Dodgers.

Age and injuries have taken their toll on Buehler. My theory on what’s wrong with him starts with the fact that his four-seamer is both slower than it was four years ago and has lost some of the cutter action that made it so good earlier in his career. But also, the league has only gotten better during the time Buehler has spent nursing injuries and picking up essential connective tissue secondhand. Maybe he just hasn’t been truly healthy since 2021, or maybe he’s tickling the edges of the dreaded Noah Syndergaard Zone.

Nevertheless, I’m a little surprised, as I said, that Buehler couldn’t get a guaranteed contract. He was so good at full power, and has such a varied arsenal (he threw seven pitches at least 100 times in 2025) that I think he deserves some rope to figure things out. The Phillies had him throwing more four-seamers and fewer cutters than the Red Sox; maybe that approach would’ve borne fruit over a longer trial period. Not only that, as bad as Buehler was in 2025, he was way better than Márquez, who is reportedly getting a guaranteed deal.

I’ll try not to spill to much ink on Márquez, who is probably the longest shot of the three to contribute. From 2017 to 2021, the right-hander was one of the most reliable starting pitchers in baseball; he’s one of only 14 pitchers to compile 15 or more WAR over that five-year span. I loved Márquez back then; I was certain he’d get traded to a contender with a better handle on pitcher development and compete for a Cy Young before the end of the decade. Even now, I’m never going to completely give up on him.

Unfortunately, Márquez’s salad days are so long ago that the Rockies were good back then. He took a beating in 2022, then missed almost all of 2023 and 2024 with a torn UCL, and in 2025 he went 3-16 with a 6.70 ERA. Which, even accounting for pitching on a bad team at altitude with a FIP that says he was a run and a third better than his ERA… that’s still godawful.

Márquez’s fastball, once two ticks better than average, is now mediocre. It bleeds into his sinker. His curveball doesn’t curve, his slider doesn’t slide, he doesn’t miss bats and doesn’t induce weak contact.

My prediction would be that if the Padres get one decent season out of this trio, it’ll likely be from either Canning or Buehler. I would love to be wrong; Márquez was such a cool pitcher earlier in his career. If they manage to get some oxygen in him and straighten him out, I will smooch pitching coach Ruben Niebla on the face. (With his permission, of course.) I just don’t see it happening, absent the aforementioned time machine.

On to the DH and first base situation. A week ago, the plan for both positions was something along the lines of, “Maybe the one good Gavin Sheets year is the real deal, and not the three bad Gavin Sheets years that came before.”

It’s not what you want out of two positions that an ordinary contender would count on for serious offensive production. The good news is, first base and DH are the two easiest positions to play, so it’s possible to find a bat there, even this late in the offseason. How do you think Sheets ended up on the Padres in the first place?

The Padres made some strides toward shoring up that hole last week with the signing of Miguel Andujar. I’ve never been a big Andujar fan, but he was OK at the plate for the A’s in 2024 and 2025 and terrific down the stretch for the Reds. As a part-time guy on a one-year deal with $4 million in guaranteed money? That’s fine.

But San Diego’s depth at the position is such that Castellanos is a worthwhile get on a flier. Having been released by the Phillies last week, he is only getting $780,000 from the Padres, which makes signing him a pretty reasonable proposition.

In the interest of space, and of not piling on a guy who’s had a pretty rough go of it the past four years, I’ll be brief in my appraisal of Castellanos’ recent performance. It was poor. Even the highs — and there were highs — were few and far between. The Phillies, a team that usually goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid straight-up cutting anyone off the 40-man, ate more than $19 million to be rid of him.

I probably would’ve done that at least 20 months before Dave Dombrowski did, rather than continue to throw good money after bad. His five-year, $100 million contract wasn’t the worst in Phillies history, but I did have to take a look at Ryan Howard’s and Danny Tartabull’s player pages before I felt comfortable saying that for sure.

That said, Castellanos can still be a useful major league player. The Phillies brought him in to be a star right-handed bat to counterbalance Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber, and in this role he quickly turned out to be overextended. His stature (and the structure of the rest of the roster) dictated that he play as many innings as possible in right field and hit in the middle of the order. When the Phillies deviated from that plan, and moved Castellanos to a platoon and situational role, his relationship with manager Rob Thomson degraded quickly, leading to an ambivalent, perhaps even acrimonious, exit.

If I were running a team, I’d sooner spend $20 million on novelty popcorn than on Castellanos. But on a minimum-salary deal as a part-time DH? Assuming Castellanos is OK with that role, he can still be useful.

Despite his size and long swing, Castellanos is more of a doubles-over-homers guy. He doesn’t walk very much, swings at too many pitches outside the zone, and struggled against four-seam fastballs in 2025.

But he still has good in-zone contact numbers overall and can punish mistakes. He doesn’t have big platoon splits himself, but Sheets does, which makes Castellanos useful as a short-side platoon guy. If the Padres find the right matchups for Castellanos and hide his glove someplace he can’t find it, they can get a tune out of him. Again, the question now isn’t, “Can he hit cleanup on a World Series team?” but, “Is he a better right-handed bench bat than Juan Miranda or Nick Solak?”

Even I, a longtime Castellanos skeptic, have to say that he is.

And if I’m wrong, the Padres now have France as insurance. France hasn’t been what I’d call good since about 2022, and with a .104 ISO in 2025, he doesn’t hit for anything like the kind of power you’d want from a first baseman or DH. And while France has more major league experience at first base than Castellanos (which is to say, any), his defensive numbers there have been inconsistent. All I’ll say is I don’t think he’s going to be a Doug Mientkiewicz-level defensive wizard there.

But France, while not walking that much, doesn’t chase or whiff nearly as often as Castellanos. He also wears 20 pitches a year, which has a significant impact on his on-base percentage. Between Castellanos and France, the Padres are getting two designated hitters in their 30s who have a wRC+ under 100 over the past two seasons, but the designated hitters San Diego ran out last year had a collective wRC+ of 83, which was 26th in baseball. This is not a difficult area to improve, and there’s nothing to be lost by trying these two veterans out.

But the 40-man roster crunch monster comes for everyone. As of this writing, the Padres have not formally announced the signings of either Canning or Márquez, because Castellanos took the last 40-man roster spot. San Diego cleared one spot by moving Jhony Brito to the 60-day IL; Yu Darvish will surely join him there soon.

The one drawback of just trying stuff, as the Padres are doing, is that you do need to find a spot to put all these players. But if there’s any GM I trust to clear a roster logjam, it’s Preller. That, and presumably not the time machine thing, is why they pay him the big bucks.