The Padres are what happens when you aim for the middle and miss
The San Diego Padres relieved general manager Josh Byrnes of his duties on Sunday. The Padres are off to a dismal start to the 2014 season. Their offense is the worst in baseball by a considerable margin, their pitching and defense are decidedly mediocre.
The Padres are not in a good place right now. Other than a 2010 season in which they rented a bunch of wins and just missed the playoffs, they’ve been bad for the better part of a decade. They seem to operate as a small market team, forced to sell off their marquee stars as they become too expensive or prepare to bolt via free agency.
There is nothing wrong with operating this way as a rule. The problem in San Diego remains converting those established players (like Adrian Gonzalez and Mat Latos) into viable big leaguers. The Padres haven’t exactly struck out on their deals over the last four years or so, it just seems like they aimed for safety over quality. Floor over ceiling. Controllable years and pre-arb potential over guys who can turn a franchise around.
This is what happens when the idea of value gets out of whack. The Padres brought in “cost-controlled years” by the truckload, grabbing large packages of players that might be short on upside but all come with the pristine arbitration clocks. But sometimes repeatedly aiming for value in bulk results in no reward.
The 2014 San Diego Padres are what you get when you risk nothing. The tepid rewards created a terrible on-field product and cost Josh Byrnes his job.
Maybe the Padres aren’t this bad. Maybe injury undermined their season and their talent is better than we see on the field today. Or maybe they settled for too many role players who are instead playing like scrubs. Even the modest goals set for Yasmani Grandal, Yonder Alonso, and Cameron Maybin seem like greedy wishcasting compared to their current realities.
This Padres club doesn’t look like it was built with greatness in mind. They have a feeling of a team built with budgetary concerns first but with a limited ceiling. Now they’re falling well short of that ceiling, crashing into the floor and headed for 100 losses.
Just like taking a snapshot of how the team is playing today doesn’t paint a picture of their future, GMs aren’t fired for a bad stretch to open a year. 2014 never looked like the Padres’ great leap forward. There just isn’t enough talent on hand to make a real move. Factor in the ongoing health struggles and ownership stepped in to make a change.
At some point in the chain, the Padres broke. They started “losing” players, watching assets depreciate and reaping only minimal returns on their trade hauls. They sprung a leak along their talent evaluation-player development-coaching at the highest level pipeline and the big league product suffers.
Given how much of their current business model depends on cheap, young players, it’s a faulty system and change was inevitable. Perhaps it is the model that must change. Perhaps worshipping at the altar of “value” has its limitations - in addition to a razor-thin margin for error.
Like their NL West division-mates in Colorado, the Padres can be painted as victims of their unique circumstances, perhaps spending far too much worrying/relying on the impact of their extreme home park. Internally, does a fear of what Petco Park means for hitters influence their choices in the draft, on the trade market, and when pursuing free agents?
Rebuilding the Padres is an interesting job. There aren’t any ugly contracts to shed, just bad players to weed through and place into piles.
How many current Padres end up in the “salvageable” heap? Not enough to save Josh Byrnes’ job, that much is clear. Just as Petco Park turns homers into doubles and doubles into fly outs, it’s time for San Diego to make better use of what they have.