Padres Press Clips Wednesday, December 6, 2017
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Padres Press Clips Wednesday, December 6, 2017 Article Source Author Page Contract extension is commitment to Preller's Padres SD Union Tribune Acee 2 Japanese star Shohei Ohtani would be big in San Diego SD Union Tribune Lin 5 (or anywhere else) Padres will be last team to make their pitch to Shohei SD Union Tribune Lin 9 Ohtani Padres roster review: Jabari Blash SD Union Tribune Sanders 10 Padres roster review: Buddy Baumann SD Union Tribune Sanders 12 4 reasons Ohtani could choose the Padres MLB.com Cassavell 14 Padres, Jays made splashy deal 27 years ago MLB.com Merns 17 Preller preaches stability following extension MLB.com Cassavell 19 Padres announce 2018 Major League Coaching Staff Fox Sports SD Staff 21 Blash Joins Quintet of Padres Playing in Mexico FriarWire Center 24 1 San Diego Union Tribune Contract extension is commitment to Preller's Padres Kevin Acee A.J. Preller will be around to finish what he started. The Padres might not be in the World Series by 2022, when his contract is scheduled to come to an end. But they will be on their way. Or they won’t be. Point is, he’ll be given the chance to make this franchise something this city has never had. That was the purpose of the three-year contract extension the Padres announced Sunday for their enigmatic general manager. This wasn’t a reward for losing. This is an award of time to stop the losing. This is a commitment. The man who is in charge of stocking the system with the kind of talent that will win and win and win and maybe even stick around to win some more is being given a long runway, because the owners of the Padres like the look and feel of the road he has paved so far. This is the guy who tried to win quick with the trades that titillated us all before the 2015 season. It didn’t work. From the start, no one was more realistic about that possibility than Preller. He tried. Nothing wrong with trying. He learned from it, too. That’s most important. If anything, the Matt Kemp trade taught Preller to push harder for prospects. The Dodgers had more to give. He should have demanded it. Later, when it came time to unload Craig Kimbrel, Preller made his bosses sweat, not making a deal until he got four top minor leaguers from the 2 Red Sox. Not three. Not three and a scarecrow. Four players who instantly became top-20 prospects for the Padres. Fact is, Preller had a backup plan before instituting the first plan. It’s a credit to him he initially went with shock and awe. It was against his constitution. His way is to build from the ground up and never stop building. That’s what he sold to Ron Fowler and Peter Seidler back in 2014. To say Preller has improved the minor-league system is like saying Julia Roberts has teeth or Whitney Houston could sing. Ranked somewhere in the 20s two years ago, the Padres’ farm system today is roundly considered one of the best three or four in baseball. Dealing in currency more volatile than oil, Preller has gone the route of surplus. Baseball is a business where if four of a team’s 10 best prospects end up a “plus” major leaguer it is considered success. So Preller’s philosophy is to shove 20 prospects into the bag while shooting to better the industry standard. He masterminded an overhaul of the system in both personnel and the personnel teaching the personnel. The facilities are better. There are more facilities and more instructors at those facilities, all espousing the same philosophy about plate discipline and attacking the strike zone and all sorts of other proprietary baseball stuff. He did it by asking the bosses for more money to invest in more things. To the things they didn’t immediately agree, he found a new way to ask. Relentless directness is how you succeed working for a man like Fowler, who made his team-buying money the old-fashioned way — through hustle, guile and creativity — and who still gets his jollies helping people with initiative. In 2015, the Padres had two of the top 100 prospects in baseball according to MLBpipeline.com. Now, they have seven. A 250 percent increase when there are 30 teams and 100 spots. That’s unreal. That’s exciting. Of the Padres’ top 11 prospects, nine were acquired in the past 18 months. They became Padres via trade, the draft and international signings orchestrated by Preller. 3 He does it with work days that make the rest of our species look lazy. He does it by sleeping in a Marriott bed more than his own. He does it by barely sleeping. The Padres weren’t a worldwide player pre-Preller. That’s not entirely on the men who preceded him. Establishing such a reach takes a commitment by ownership, to be certain. But Preller was the man to give the franchise not just a presence in Latin America and Asia but a familiar face that wouldn’t go away. If the Padres land Shohei Ohtani, it is in large part due to Preller spending so much time in Japan and empowering his lieutenants to do so as well. Just the fact the Padres are being mentioned was unfathomable in the past. Now, this Preller path might not work. That’s something we all know, including Preller. And Fowler and Seidler. But they believe in this direction. Fowler and Seidler rightly love this curious, focused, hyper-competitive, forthright guy. They sit in on Preller’s staff meetings and marvel at his inclusion of staff, retention of detail and ability to fit together all the calculus of the variances of possible moves. The only thing they worry about is whether he does enough away from baseball. Like, truly, they have attempted to force him to get a life. (I don't know if they love Preller as much as they love Andy Green. But everyone should try to find someone to love them the way these guys love Andy Green and hold onto that person.) The point is, the Padres are committed to this process. And a decided lack of being decided has plagued this club over all the championship-less years. We can live with the decade-plus of no playoffs and the five postseason berths in 49 seasons. We have to. But it’s the best we can hope for that the man with the plan is empowered to see change through. 4 Japanese star Shohei Ohtani would be big in San Diego (or anywhere else) The Padres are the only team among seven finalists that has yet to make a pitch to Ohtani in Los Angeles. That meeting presumably will take place Wednesday. Dennis Lin Shohei Ohtani may be the world’s most famous baseball player despite never having logged an inning in the United States, where he has long desired to test himself and where his dream, and the dream of countless fans, should soon come true. The two-way star, having been made available by the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, faces a Dec. 22 deadline to finalize a contract with a major league franchise. Most agree that Ohtani, already a legendary figure in Japan, will make a decision well before then; it is not in his nature to inconvenience others. Many other things about Ohtani — 23, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite, frighteningly gifted — are nebulous, atypical or secrets. The offseason’s most interesting man has reduced his choices to seven teams, including the smallish-market and historically downtrodden Padres. If Ohtani picks San Diego, more fans will descend upon Petco Park and long-suffering loyalists will receive a serious injection of hope. If he shuns a half-dozen organizations that have been more successful, it will remind locals of when Tony Gwynn chose to stay. If. ... “He’s very difficult to get an answer from in terms of baseball,” said former Padres pitcher Anthony Bass, who played for the Fighters in 2016. “He’d be a very good poker player because he doesn’t reveal his hand very easy.” Sometimes billed as a modern-day twist on Babe Ruth, Ohtani could become the first big- leaguer to capture sustained success as both a pitcher and a hitter. At 6-foot-4, he has thrown a 102.5 mph fastball, a Nippon Professional Baseball record, and smashed a drive through the roof of the Tokyo Dome. He has run to first base in 3.8 seconds, on par with the top speedsters in the majors. His athletic ability, in Bass’ estimation, is comparable to Mike Trout’s or Bryce Harper’s — only it extends beyond offense. 5 “There’s never been anybody like him,” said Jim Allen, a Kyodo News reporter who has covered Japanese baseball since 1993. Ohtani, who throws right-handed and bats lefty, could have landed a $200 million contract by staying in Japan for two more years, after which he would no longer be subject to international signing guidelines. Instead, he left last week, apparently content to receive a signing bonus ranging from $3.5 million to a mere $300,000. The New York Yankees, who offered an unrivaled level of fame and lucrative endorsement opportunities, failed to survive a sweeping round of cuts. Ohtani’s private life has supplied minimal clues, and executives have grappled with the same question for months: If not money, what exactly does he want? Significant hints surfaced over the weekend, as Ohtani’s representatives informed more than two dozen teams whether they would remain in the running.