So What Do the Padres Do Now?

Last week, I wrote a piece about where the struggling Diamondbacks go from here, given their current position in the NL West race despite high hopes for their season. This week, on the back of the Padres dumping what they could of James Shields‘ remaining contract, it’s time to talk about the other NL West team whose hopes of contention have been dashed on the harsh rocks of reality.

During the Diamondbacks big splashy off-season, comparisons between Arizona and San Diego have been pretty common, as the Padres spent the prior winter making big moves in an attempt to skip the rebuilding line and get back to the winner’s circle. The moves mostly failed, though, with the Padres finishing 74-88 despite the roster makeover, and 2016 isn’t going any better; they’re currently 23-35 and just agreed to pay $31 million to make James Shields pitch for someone else over the next few years. But even as I write a piece with the same headline as the one that I wrote about the Diamondbacks last week, it’s important to note that the D’Backs and Padres aren’t really in the same boat. In fact, at this point, it’s not actually clear that the Padres even have a boat.

The parallels are easy to make because the Diamondbacks made some poor decisions to try and contend before they were ready, but that is where the similarities mostly end. Even with their struggles, the D’Backs do indeed have some pretty terrific players. Paul Goldschmidt remains one of the best first baseman in baseball, Zack Greinke can still pitch at a high level, and A.J. Pollock is probably still going to be a terrific player next year, even if he’s on the sidelines for 2016. The Padres, though, don’t have any of those guys.

At this point, the team’s best asset is Drew Pomeranz, a solid left-handed pitcher whom A.J. Preller stole from the A’s over the winter, but also a pitcher who has never cracked the 100 innings level in the big leagues. The success of converting Pomeranz back to the rotation has been the biggest bright spot for the Padres, but with a 12% walk rate and a .220 BABIP — not to mention the uncertainty that comes from carrying a season-long workload for the first time — there are some legitimate reasons to think that his second half won’t be quite as successful as the first few months of the season.

After Pomeranz, there’s Wil Myers, who has been forced to first base by a balky elbow, and probably doesn’t have enough offensive potential to become a star at the position. And that’s basically it. That’s everyone on this Padres roster that you could reasonably think might be part of the next good San Diego club; everyone else is either too old, too unproductive, or some combination of the two, to expect that they’ll still be a member of the Padres when the rebuild the team is undergoing starts to bear some fruit.

At least with the Diamondbacks, we could speculate about the team putting Grienke on the blocks, trying to get some interesting young talent in return, and then reallocating some of his saved money to gear up and make another run. That path isn’t an option for the Padres, though; they just traded their version of Greinke over the weekend, and the market for him had diminished to the point that all they could manage was a replacement level arm and a 17 year old who Eric Longenhagen projects as an average player if he gets to the big leagues, which is probably in five years, assuming things go well.

In reality, there’s no path back to near-term contention for the Padres. The team hired Preller for his abilities in signing international free agents, but those kids are 16 when they sign, and are the better part of a decade away from helping the major league team win. The Padres also have a significant bonus pool to use in the draft this coming weekend, but again, even in a best case scenario, you’re looking at a couple of years before those kids even get to the big leagues, much less are playing at a high-enough level to be core pieces of a winning team. Rebuilding through the draft and international free agency is a long game.

By the time the picks and signings start to turn into real players, everyone on this roster will have moved on. Even the two young guys who make up what the Padres have to pass off as a core are only under control through 2018 (Pomeranz) and 2019 (Myers) respectively, and at this point, it’s almost impossible to see the Padres being good again by the time the team will have to make trade-or-walk decisions on those two.

Realistically, the Padres are now where the Phillies were a year ago; staring up from the bottom of a long hole that isn’t easily dug out of. And while the Padres executives can publicly yell about being embarrassed by their team’s performance, the reality is that things need to get worse in San Diego if they’re going to get better. At this point, the Padres essentially need to blow things up and start from scratch.

And that means trading Pomeranz this summer. As I argued last week, the lack of rent-an-aces makes this a fantastic time to sell a starting pitcher, and while Pomeranz’s lack of track record will work against him, his almost-league-minimum salary and two remaining years of arbitration will be very attractive to cost-conscious buyers. While Pomeranz could still build value over the next year if he continues to pitch at a high level, the Padres have already been burned trying to make that bet over the last year, and have watched the value of Shields, Ross, and Andrew Cashner dissipate before their eyes.

Pomeranz would bring back a nice return this summer, as the team could easily market him as a younger Rich Hill, and more importantly, he’d bring back things that might actually help the Padres win in 2020 or 2021 or whenever the franchise is ready to put a contender back on the field. Prospects are certainly no sure things, but at this point, the question is when the Padres are going to trade Pomeranz, not if; there just isn’t enough talent in the organization to put together a winner while he’s still under team control.

And once you’re moving Pomeranz and admitting that this is going to be a long rebuild, you probably should explore the market for Wil Myers too. With Mitch Moreland and Prince Fielder struggling in Texas, a deal with the Rangers that sends Myers to Arlington seems possible, and I imagine Preller would love to get his hands on some of the kids he signed while running the international department in Texas. The Padres could even get extra talent out of the Rangers by agreeing to take back Prince Fielder’s contract, using some of the money they saved by dumping Shields to buy prospects and bolster their future even further.

Of course, they’ll get skewered for “tanking”, and if Ron Fowler doesn’t like watching his team with Pomeranz and Myers, he’d find the product without them even more disheartening. But for the Padres long-term health, this is the best road forward. Trying to maintain respectability while rebuilding the farm system at the same time is a noble goal, but it’s also not an easy trick to pull off. The Padres tried to walk that line and fell on their face in the process. At this point, with few assets of value left and a long road back to contention, it’s time for the Padres to follow the path of the Braves, Brewers, and Phillies.