Padres GM AJ Preller Reveals Offseason Plan

Maren Angus-Coombs | Oct 31, 2024

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San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller likes to say that "every offseason is different." For him, it has to be in order to build his team each year.

This winter will be unlike any other and maybe the toughest.

“We’ve got the foundation of a good team that’s coming back, so that’s positive,” Preller told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “But, obviously, some of the free-agent players … those are all things that we’re going to weigh out. And if those guys don’t come back, that creates opportunity and spots that we’re gonna have to evaluate. … It’s a good place to start and then, similar to last year, we had to weigh out the Juan Soto situation versus potentially moving him. We’ll do that on a bunch of different individual fronts over the next couple weeks and hopefully have something that makes some sense when we get to spring training.”

Preller was daring last offseason when he sent Soto to New York in exchange for five players but it also brought the payroll down from $256 million in 2023 to $172 million in 2024.

“It’s about winning championships, doing it responsibly,” Preller said. “(Ownership) has shown repeatedly since I’ve been here that we’re going to be open, and that’s all you can ask for at this point in time. We’ll see how the offseason presents itself.”

With a championship at the forefront of his mind, Preller has a handful of decisions to make sooner rather than later.

Players eligible for free agency officially enter the market the day after the World Series concludes. However, they cannot sign with a new team until 2 p.m. PT on the fifth day following the Series' end.

What will the Padres do with Luis Arraez, Jurickson Profar, pitching, and catching? It all depends on the landscape.

“I think the biggest thing I (am) focused on right now in our group is just kind of like knowing the landscape,” Preller said. “Here’s the different possibilities, here’s what’s going to be out there, being open-minded to (where) different paths you take us to from a payroll standpoint. The only thing I’ve seen repeatedly when I’ve been here — and I think we’ve demonstrated — is we want to win. We’re here to win a championship. I think we’re going to do it responsibly. But we’re looking to win championships. We’re looking to get in the playoffs.

“And when you do that, if we need to have certain resources, we’ll have those conversations. But that’s really what the next couple months are for. And it’s not like, ‘Hey, you have to be at this price point to do X, Y or Z’  It’s gonna be a lot of different ways to do that. We’ve done it a lot of different ways over the last five years or so. And I think … we’re gonna get to over the next couple weeks and months, depending on what players are out there, what we need to do.”