The Padres and president of baseball operations A.J. Preller have agreed to a multi-year contract extension, per a team announcement. The exact terms of Preller’s new deal are not yet known.
Preller, 48, was entering the final year of his contract in 2026 but now figures to continue his work at the helm in San Diego for the foreseeable future. He began his tenure with the Padres late in the 2014 season, and while it took several years for him to pull the organization out of the basement of the National League they’ve become one of the NL’s premiere teams during the 2020s. The team has gone to the playoffs four times in the last six seasons, with a 470-400 record during that time that’s good for a .540 winning percentage. The Padres have only made it to the NLCS once in that timeframe, but it’s still undeniably the most successful stretch in franchise history given that the organization had just five postseason appearances under its belt in the 45 years it existed prior to Preller joining the team.
After more than a decade leading the Padres, Preller has become well-known among fans all across baseball as the league’s most free-wheeling executive. He pilots the Padres with dynamic energy, frequently making the sort of aggressive trades that most front office leaders around the game would shy away from. The results, in terms of stars brought into the fold, have spoken for themselves. In recent years, Preller has traded for Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Josh Hader, Joe Musgrove, Mason Miller, Dylan Cease, and Juan Soto at the height of their careers in order to augment a lineup built around likely future Hall of Famer Manny Machado and homegrown star Fernando Tatis Jr.
Impressive as Preller’s work to turn the Padres franchise into one of the premiere organizations in the majors has been, it’s not been without flaws. Extensions for players like Machado, Tatis, Darvish, Musgrove, and Jake Cronenworth (as well as the free agent deal signed by Xander Bogaerts) have contributed to a bogged-down payroll that has limited the team’s flexibility in recent seasons and forced some creative moves such as trading away Soto ahead of his final year under team control, as well as signing players like Nick Pivetta and Michael King to unorthodox contracts in order to fill out the rotation. Preller and his front office have managed to pull off the balancing act of keeping the team’s spending under control without trading away Tatis or another major asset under long-term club control from the big league club so far.
It’s a task that figures to only get more difficult as time goes on. For now, though, Preller has managed to keep his house of cards in San Diego from collapsing well enough to earn himself the opportunity to continue the work, and it’s not terribly hard to see why ownership would have confidence in his abilities. Preller’s penchant for trading away top prospects (including CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, James Wood, and Leo De Vries) has been compensated for by a knack for consistently churning out high-rated prospects, a few of which (such as Tatis and Jackson Merrill) have even made their way to the majors as impactful pieces of the club. Preller has also developed a knack for putting together talented bullpens stocked with high-end talent. Even after losing players like Hader and Robert Suarez, the team can still field an elite relief corps thanks to Miller, Adrian Morejon, Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam, and others.
Notably, the vote of confidence Preller is receiving from ownership comes at a time when the team is in the midst of a transition at its highest levels. Longtime owner Peter Seidler abruptly passed away from cancer back in 2023, and since then the team has been under the control of a variety of Seidler’s family members and associates are various points in time. After some internal drama regarding the future of the franchise, things appear to be headed towards a potential sale of the franchise as the Seidler family announced that they’re exploring that possibility back in November. It’s unclear whether a sale will come to fruition at all, much less if progress is being made on that front. With that said, if a sale were to occur in the next couple of years, this extension ensures that Preller will remain in place to help guide the team through that transition on the field and provide some stability to the hypothetical new ownership group as they get settled in.
