For most of Winter Meetings, the San Diego Padres vigorously pursued a few of the best free agents available only to come up short on Trea Turner and Aaron Judge. Well, they finally made their big splash after most of the reporters and analysts had returned to their climatologically inferior home cities, signing shortstop Xander Bogaerts, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, to a monster 11-year contract. Bogaerts now stands an impressive $280 million richer and a lot of the Padres’ positional dominoes have fallen into place for the 2023 season.

If you’re ever prone to thinking that a player opt-out is mere frippery, like Roy Oswalt’s tractor or the mustache wax benefit that Rollie Fingers received, Bogaerts’ prior contract extension ought to firmly disabuse you of the notion. Bogaerts would have originally hit free agency after the 2020 season, but he came to terms with the Red Sox on a six-year, $120 million deal to keep him in Boston for what was likely to be the rest of his prime. Here’s what the projection looked like if we go back to that blessed time when we might have mistaken “Covid” for the first name of a Swedish scientist:

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SAN DIEGO — The early hours of Wednesday morning at the Winter Meetings brought a giant-sized deal for baseball’s latest home run giant… but not from the Giants. After a day in which it appeared as though Aaron Judge had decided he was not in fact prepared to be “a Yankee for life,” as he had previously professed, and would instead leave the Bronx to sign with the the team for which he grew up rooting in Linden, California, about two hours from the Bay Area, the 2022 AL MVP has returned to the Bronx via a record-setting nine-year, $360 million deal.

The move happened only after Judge arrived in San Diego on Tuesday night and heard overtures from a third team, the Padres, who had reportedly offered Trea Turner a $342 million deal before the shortstop signed with the Phillies on Monday. Via USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale, San Diego offered Judge $40 million per year over 10 years; whether either deal included deferred money isn’t known. According to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees had offered Judge eight years and $320 million — about $90 million more than the offer that he spurned just before Opening Day. “Once Judge told Hal Steinbrenner he wanted to be a Yankee (but had more $ on table elsewhere — SF and SD) Hal sealed the deal by bumping it another $40M and one year,” Heyman wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and today’s team is the San Diego Padres.

Batters

When you look at the Padres’ depth charts, there’s a kind of clarity when trying to decide what the team needs to do this winter. The strengths of the offense are obvious: Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and a healthy Fernando Tatis Jr. enter any season as top-notch MVP contenders. And unlike a certain seraphim-themed organization I won’t name with a few mega-stars at the top, there isn’t a huge drop-off to the next tier, whether it’s Jake Cronenworth, Ha-Seong Kim, or Trent Grisham after you’ve threatened him with torture if he tries to bunt for a hit at an awkward moment.

The team’s needs here are also quite obvious; I can’t imagine the Padres actually enter the season with Taylor Kohlwey and José Azocar splitting playing time in left field. The problem is, I also couldn’t imagine Nomar Mazara actually getting 41 starts in 2022, but that’s just what he did.

San Diego would also benefit from some figuring out what to do about Tatis’ position long-term. Right now, we have him splitting time in several places, but I think that the Padres are best served by figuring out whether Cronenworth or Kim are the answer at second, determine where they can put Tatis, and then find a full-time upgrade over Eguy Rosario or Brandon Dixon, whom I see more as complementary talent.

Another thing that is obvious here is that the Padres do need to spend some time this winter fattening up their organizational depth. The high minors are fairly empty at the moment — a combination of graduating talent, traded talent, and a bunch of minor league veterans now in free agency or in other organizations. Most of the players here who look like “break in case of fire” emergency options like C.J. Hinojosa or Domingo Leyba are no longer in the organization. This isn’t necessarily an expensive thing to do, either, and adding a left fielder and a couple of pitchers wouldn’t hinder this. Read the rest of this entry »

The 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Here I endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Jones might be ready to break out in Colorado, and turning 4 o’clock into 7 o’clock is how he would go about doing it. His time in Cleveland over — the Rockies acquired the rangy 6-foot-4 outfielder from the Guardians earlier this week in exchange for Juan Brito — Jones heads west with a swing that is, by his own admission, compact in the cage and too long in the batter’s box. Striking an effective balance between the two is an ongoing goal and a key to his future success.

“I’ve got really long levers, so I’m trying to simplify my moves and make them more efficient,” Jones told me earlier this summer. “Like anybody else, my moves become bigger in the game, and when your limbs are long, a two-inch move in the cage can become a six-inch move. My swings in the cage are those toned-down moves. I’m trying to be shorter to where, when they get bigger in the game, they’re right where I want them to be.”

Reaching his potential has been a frustrating endeavor for the 24-year-old. Selected in the second round of the 2016 draft out of Philadelphia’s Holy Ghost Preparatory School, Jones has ranked as Cleveland’s top prospect multiple times, and he was No. 51 in our Top 100 as recently as the spring of 2021. What has largely held him back is a penchant to swing-and-miss, a trait that accompanied him to the big leagues this season. Along with a .244/.309/.372 slash line over 94 plate appearances, the rookie had a 33% strikeout rate and a worst-on-the-club 71.6% Z-contact rate. Given the Guardians’ preference for hitters who can consistently put the ball in play, Jones no longer fitting into their plans comes as no surprise. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure if you know this about me, but there are two things that I’ve always loved to do. First, I like to make things about me, even if the connection is tenuous. Second, I like to go over my own past decisions and see if there’s anything I can learn from them, hopefully without being too self-serving. I have great news – well, for me at least. Two free agent signings last week – Robert Suarez to the Padres and Rafael Montero to the Astros – have given me an opportunity to do both.

Of course, I don’t want to give either player short shrift. Both are excellent in their own right, late-inning relievers coming off of effective 2022 seasons and high-leverage postseason work. Egotistical as I am, I can’t completely ignore them and only talk about myself. As a compromise, I’ll start by profiling each player and their new contract. From there, we’ll move on to discussing why neither was on my Top 50 Free Agents ranking, and what I think I did wrong in making the list. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we begin, a quick apology from me: I haven’t gotten to these managerial report cards as quickly as I’d like. They take a lot of work, believe it or not. I comb through every game log multiple times to capture the particulars of each situation, keeping an eye on pitcher and batter availability while doing so. I like to watch key moments, too, just in case something pops up that way. I still miss things — it’s hard to get every last detail right, though I try to be thorough — but without poring over the details to get everything straight, I couldn’t write these.

Between the general rigors of writing and compiling the annual top-50 free agent list, I just haven’t had time to get these done. That’s not a great excuse, and I’m sure these are less interesting to read than they would have been if they had come out directly after the relevant eliminations. But hey, they’re here now! Well, this one is. More will follow in the coming week.

Bob Melvin, San Diego Padres

Batting/Lineups: B-
Melvin faced one central decision throughout the playoffs: who to play at first base. The lineup didn’t offer much in the way of flexibility anywhere else; every slot had a clear starter. That left Josh Bell, Wil Myers, and Brandon Drury to share DH and first base between the two of them. Drury theoretically has positional versatility, but there was nowhere else to put him. Melvin used two general rules: play Bell against righties and sit Bell against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

Craig Lefferts has a place in San Diego Padres history, and a good story that goes along with it. The 65-year-old veteran of 12 big-league seasons shared it with me prior to a recent Arizona Fall League game.

“My rookie year was 1983, with the Chicago Cubs,” said Lefferts, who is now a pitching coordinator in the Oakland Athletics organization. “We had two left-handers in the bullpen, myself and Willie Hernandez, and the two of us would play catch every day, trying to work on a changeup. We had a right-hander in our pen by the name of Bill Campbell who threw a screwball. He taught, or at least attempted to teach, us how to throw a screwball. Mine was terrible and Willie’s wasn’t very good either. [Pitching coach] Billy Connors told me, ‘I don’t want you to ever use that in a game. I want you to pitch with the stuff that got you here. You’re a rookie, so don’t go out there and try and throw a new pitch.’ So I didn’t, but I kept working on it. After the season, I went to winter ball and perfected it.

“The next year, Willie got traded to the Tigers and I got traded to the Padres,” continued Lefferts. “Both of us threw a screwball as our best pitch. He won the Cy Young Award and I had arguably the best year of my career. I had 10 saves, but was mostly setting up Rich Gossage. Then Willie and I met in the World Series.” Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres shake off the hurt from their NLCS loss, they’ll have plenty of reasons to look back on this season as a success in its own right and a springboard to more and better in 2023. They won 89 games and advanced further into the playoffs than they had in 24 years. Along the way they knocked off not one but two 100-win teams, including the hated Dodgers. Their top three starting pitchers are coming back, as are at least six starters of the remaining eight defensive positions. Oh yeah, and they’ll have a full season of Josh Hader and Juan Soto to look forward to.

Here’s the best news: At some point this postseason, you probably looked at Ha-Seong Kim and thought, “Was he always their shortstop? Didn’t they used to have this other guy? Tall fella, Freddie something?”

Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 2022 campaign was about as bad as his teammates’ season was good. Not only did he fail to play a single competitive game, but he also missed the season for pretty embarrassing reasons. First, he broke his wrist in a motorcycle accident — apparently one of several he suffered during the offseason — and thanks to the lockout the team didn’t find out the extent of his injuries until he arrived in camp in March. Then, just as his return seemed imminent, he tested positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid, which cost him the rest of the year. As reasons for missing an entire season go, a careless and avoidable injury followed by a careless and avoidable suspension are not ideal.

But he’s coming back next year. After being suspended the last 48 games of the regular season, plus 12 more in the playoffs, his return date should be April 20 against Arizona, barring unexpected setbacks from a second wrist surgery last week.

A lot of the talk around Tatis’ reintegration has centered on winning his teammates and Padres management back over. (My advice: A sincere and concise apology, follow-up conversations with individuals as needed, perhaps followed by a small gift to show contrition and re-establish an atmosphere of collegiality. I hear athletes send each other protein powder in lieu of flowers.) But that’s between him and his team, and besides, forgiveness is easy to come by when you’re a shortstop with a 153 career wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — This was what the Phillies had in mind all along: Sweeping three home games to clinch the NLCS, the decisive game featuring a dominant Zack Wheeler performance, a Rhys Hoskins home run, and the other runs scored by the stars the Phillies brought into supplement him — Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, and J.T. Realmuto. And atop it all, Harper, battling to break through against an unhittable reliever, at long last flicking a 98.9-mph slider off the outside of the plate and into the seats.

“I told [hitting coach Kevin] Long before I walked up the steps,” Harper recounted at his postgame press conference. “I said, ‘Let’s give them something to remember.'”

The ensuing at-bat was the most memorable of Harper’s already storied career, turning a 3–2 deficit into a 4–3 pennant-clinching win. An excitable but anxious crowd brought from despair to ecstasy, a dugout full of postseason novices leaping over each other and onto the field to celebrate, and the $330 million man, the one-time child prodigy now a week on the gray side of 30, cantering around the bases.

“J.T. set the tone and put pressure on them right away with a base hit. Then it’s the MVP, right? It’s the showman,” Hoskins said. “This guy finds ways in big situations every single time. I don’t even know how many times he did it this series.”

As much as Harper joined this team with precisely this kind of moment in mind, elements of this victory were not planned. Several years of false starts after the shift out of rebuild mode in the late 2010s, for example. Or a midseason managerial change. Or a sudden rainstorm that almost derailed the whole enterprise and brought the series back to San Diego. No matter. Within minutes of Harper’s home run, Calum Scott and Tiësto’s cover of “Dancing On My Own” was piping through the Citizens Bank Park loudspeakers, and lampposts were already being climbed at Broad and Locust. Read the rest of this entry »