The Padres improved to 58-54 with today’s 5-4 win over the Giants, and San Diego has now won eight of its last nine games to move within a game of the final NL wild card berth. This surge might officially push the Padres into more of a clear-cut buying stance as the deadline approaches, yet one can never count president of baseball operations A.J. Preller out of making any sort of unexpected move in regards to roster-building or addressing his team’s payroll.
To this end, Joel Sherman of the New York Post reports the Padres have expressed at least some interest in a couple of unlikely trade targets. San Diego has “checked in on” the Mets’ Kodai Senga, with Sherman specifying that the Padres were “more in the investigating and inquiring mode” rather than being more “heavily focused” on a potential deal. Sherman has also heard from multiple sources that “Preller has at least considered” trying to obtain Rafael Devers from the Giants, though it isn’t clear if these considerations are just internal talks or any actual negotiations with the San Francisco front office.
It is certainly possible that these are nothing more than due diligence endeavors, in the same way that every front office will float dozens of ideas before narrowing in on the players they’re truly interested in obtaining. Preller in particular has a reputation for exploring creative trades, and plenty of such deals have some to fruition over his 12 years in change of the San Diego front office.
In a broad sense, looking into players like Senga and Devers probably means that Preller is considering swaps of unfavorable contracts. Senga is owed the remainder of a $14MM salary for 2026 and is owed another $14MM in 2027. Devers is a much different story, with roughly $220MM still owed to the slugger through the end of the 2033 season (though $52.5MM of Devers’ remaining money is deferred).
Senga is likely the more realistic of the two as a trade candidate, as the Mets are in pure seller mode and are probably open to parting ways with Senga in the fourth year of his five-year, $75MM contract. After an impressive 2023 rookie season, Senga has battled injuries that sidelined him for almost all of 2024, and limited him to 113 1/3 innings in 2025 and 44 2/3 frames this year. While Senga still posted good numbers when healthy prior to this year, he has sunk to an 8.66 ERA and was dropped from New York’s rotation before returning to start Friday’s game.
As Sherman notes, the Padres were one of the other teams bidding on Senga when he came to the majors from Japan, plus Senga has a longstanding friendship with Yu Darvish. It could be that Preller views Senga as a change of scenery candidate, with the idea that the right-hander can help the Padres address their need for rotation help. Nick Pivetta and Joe Musgrove are slated to begin minor league rehab stints on Tuesday, but the Padres could use all the arms they can get to cover innings.
Reports emerged in June that the Giants were open to creating some long-term payroll space by trading one or more of Devers, Matt Chapman, or Willy Adames. There hasn’t been much traction on any of those fronts due to the hefty salaries commanded by the trio, with Devers standing out as the most expensive of the bunch. Devers’ 119 wRC+ (from a .250/.324/.481 slash line and 23 homers) is below his career norms, but he has been hitting basically like his usual self ever since a brutal month of April.
Purely speculatively, some kind of wild deal of big contracts involving Devers for one of Xander Bogaerts or Fernando Tatis Jr. might be plausible, except Bogaerts and Tatis each have no-trade clauses. There’s also the unlikelihood of two division rivals lining up on a trade of such a magnitude in the short window of time between now and tomorrow’s deadline. It’s probably safe to rule a Devers out as the longest of long shots, though maybe there’s a chance the topic could be revisited by the two teams down the road.
