The San Diego Padres took another step forward with a new bidder emerging in a process that could be done in April.
The price of buying a baseball team just went up.
The San Diego Padres were initially supposed to fetch a sales price of approximately $3 billion, but according to reports from Dennis Lin of The Athletic, the Padres are expected to sell for over $3.5 million, and a new bidder with deep pockets has also emerged.
The new bidder is Tom Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, and if any of the four prospective Mets owners ends up paying more that $3.5 billion it would set a new record for the price of an MLB franchise. Gores' estimated worth is $10.1 billion, so in theory he has the ability to pull off this kind of purchase, although whoever buys the club will be carefully vetted financially.
The other potential owners who are in the running are Joe Lacob, Jose E. Feliciano and Dan Friedkin, with the second round of bigs expected in early to mid-April. The big news as it relates to this part of the process is that the sale could be concluded by the end of April, according to Lin.
The highest total paid to date was $2.42 billion, which was the amount Steve Cohen paid for the New York Mets back in 2020. A final price of over $3.5 billion is considered “plausible,” Lin added, although the final price will also depend on the amount of debt involved as well as other terms and variable. The Padre are carrying a total of over $300 million, according to league sources.
The ramifications of this sale will reverberate around the game as a whole, and it could also affect the product on the field that Padres fans will watch this season. A high price would allow the Players Association to argue that a salary cap isn’t necessary, with the owners advocating for one as part of what’s expected to be contentious negotiations to renew the labor agreement.
But the Padres could also be considered an outlier price-wise. They play in an affluent market in a ballpark that’s an attraction, so that would be the counter argument.
On the field, the completion of the sale might allow the Padres to make immediate moves to improve the team’s competitive position. The Padres suffered through a quiet winter in which they barely made any baseball moves, and its widely believed that GM A.J. Preller was under spending restrictions going into this season.
As Lin pointed out, it could also change the Padres competitive position with regard to their neighbors to the north, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Having more spending power could restore some competitive balance to the NL West, and it might even finally allow the Padres to get over the top and have a genuine chance at a division title.