We Still Don’t Know How Padres New Owners Feel About Lockout

The San Diego Padres have a new ownership group, and they announced their arrival with a press conference that was more like a celebrated. The party was all about the new owners being “all-in” on winning, and they proceeded to prove it by giving GM A.J. Preller the freedom to trade for starters Casey Mize and Robbie Ray.

That move didn’t quite work out the way the Padres wanted it to, but the pair did give manager Craig Stammen enough innings to get the Padres to the playoffs and a series win. 

We still don’t know how the new owners feel about the coming lockout, but we’re about to get some clues. The GM meetings happen on Nov. 9, and they’re expected to generate a flurry of free agent activity because there almost certainly won’t be any winter meetings after Dec. 1. 

Expect Preller to be in on this, and it’s hard to imagine him having anything else than an itchy trigger finger when it comes to potential deals. Whether he’ll be allowed to do it is a different question entirely, as some owners will doubtless sit out this particular free agency dance until new rules are in place about spending, a salary cap and so on. 

The counter here is that the Padres have a boatload of needs, and they’re not issues that can be solved through trades or minor signings. The Padres have an aging roster with some bad contracts, and regardless of what happens in the lockout, some trimming and changes are needed. 

One party who’s already been heard from on this is third baseman Manny Machado. He’s declared multiple times that the Padres aren’t a small market team based on the recent purchase price of $4 billion, and he’s not wrong about that. 

The owners who have spoken out about this are hawks when it comes to the cap, i.e., they want one and they’re willing to go the distance with the lockout to get it. That’s not atypical, especially since we’re right at the beginning of this labor dispute and it’s easy for the owners to present a united front. 

MLB has been at the forefront of all this, issuing internal memos about what’s allowed and what’s not, but of course some of this has already been leaked to the media. It would be nice to have owners Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones say something about this, but if they don’t their actions in the coming weeks will speak volumes.