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“PADRES FANS-DON’T DO THIS….YET”
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Padres fans, rooting with their hearts at Petco Park during the season.
Now in off season, Padres fans worrying too much with their heads.

The Hot Stove League is rolling.
Padres fans are waiting for their team to make a deal.

Everyone knows the storylines at this hour.
The passing of Peter Seidler a year ago, changed the team’s spending pattern.

The Friars got to the playoffs with a reduced payroll of 170M.
But they have 7-name players, all due pay raises.
If the Padres wrote checks to all of them, the payroll would blow up to 210M.
Ownership won’t allow that to happen.

Rumors are everywhere, popular catalyst Jurickson Profar is gone.  Ha Seong-Kim will likely leave but might not play till June.

The price tag on 1st baseman-DH Luis Arraez is too steep for a singles hitter.

The team has yet to sign Dylan Cease and Michael King to 2025 deals, but both deserve big pay raises.

It appears Tanner Scott, setup guy, is gone, maybe to the Dodgers or Yankees.
Catcher Kyle Higashioka has gone to Texas.  The bench bunch (Solano-Peralta) are still out there but might want raises.

So AJ Preller is boxed into a corner.  Some guys will surely depart.  Replacing them will be a challenge.  God says you have to have a 25-man roster.  You wants World Series talent on that roster.

But now the rumor mill is working overtime.

Padres brass split about the true value of Arraez and his singles hitting-free swinging style.  Might he net you multiple players in the trade market?  But you create a hole in the batting order.

And now comes word, teams are calling the Padres about front of the rotation starter Dylan Cease and we now worry Preller’s hand may be forced to move an established starter for younger talent because of dollars.

You do those deals and the Padres no longer resemble anything close to the team that many viewed as a potential World Series team last summer.

The additional scary thing is this.  Front line pitching is coming off the free agent board at a fast rate, and the second level guys are disappearing.  Alarming though are the prices.  Max Fried and Blake Snell sign deals worth (36M) each.

That next level of pitchers are signing big number deals too.  Nathan Eovaldi went back to Texas for 25M.  Nick Martinez got 21 to stay with the Reds.

So you wonder if the Padres can actually afford, and convince, Jack Flaherty, Roki Sasaki, Sean Manaea, Andrew Heaney, Jose Quintana or Kyle Gibson to come here and at what price?

Will trade more the farm system to outbid others for the White Sox Garrett Crochet or the Marlins’ Jesus Luzardo or Sandy Alcantara?

If the Padres can’t pay whom they currently have, and have to trade them, how are they going to replace those who depart.  And how are you going to pay them

There are still names out there to go get  via trade or free agency.  So don’t hit a panic button yet.

But if they come back from these Winter Meetings trying to tell you they’ll be okay with a rotation that includes Randy Vazquez, Matt Waldron, Jhonny Brito or Adrian Morejon, then we will all reach for the red panic button.

You’d hate to think the Padres season would be over before it started.

Don’t do it yet, but the Panic Button is the red one in the upper right corner of the panel.  Hope we don’t have to use it.

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