Padres News: AJ Preller Reveals Thinking Behind Building Roster
It was a very tough season for the San Diego Padres, and they now will enter the postseason with a bunch of questions to answer. After building a star-loaded roster, San Diego missed the playoffs in disappointing fashion.
They never seemed to get their season off the ground until the final few weeks of the year, but by that time, it was too late. Their offense went through some big slumps and never found their footing together.
President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller broke down his thinking into how the Padres roster was built for this past season.
“If you’re gonna win a World Series, you need to have supremely talented players and a lot of them,” Preller said. “... We didn’t build the team saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking to have four superstar players and that’s it.’ You look at a Ha-Seong Kim, what he did. Guys like Cronenworth and Grisham, guys like Campusano and his development, Gary Sanchez. I think, one through nine, we feel like we have a good team, and there’s a lot of different ways to build it."
The Padres had other guys that surrounded their big four, but they also needed more help. Teams are only as good as the weakest link, and the Padres struggled to find any form of consistency throughout their lineup all year.
Preller even looked at some of the teams playing in the playoffs now to help his case.
“There’s teams playing in October right now, that if you look at production from players nine to 13 on their roster, you know, it was very minimal but the top four or five guys performed very well. There’s other teams that one through 13 have pretty good equal balance and blend. So there’s no one way to get there.”
While there is no one way to get to the postseason, most teams do have more well-rounded rosters. The Padres went all in on this season, and it came back to bite them.
They have a solid core in place but need to tweak some things across the board. The Padres top guys had good seasons, but they also didn’t fully perform up to their standard. If they had, San Diego may have found themselves in the postseason right now.
This offseason will tell us a lot about how the Padres future will go. Do they double down on the philosophy that has gotten them to this point? Or do they learn from the mistakes of this season and build the roster with more depth? Only time will tell, but we should be in for a fascinating winter.
