Padres latest recipient of John Fisher’s ineptitude in Miller trade

By J.A. SCHWARTZ

Padres General Manager A.J. Preller and the Major League Baseball trade deadline are clearly made for each other. Preller, who famously gets by on fewer hours sleep than most of his peers, made several high-impact trades that offloaded a plethora of minor league talent to bolster a roster that is now well fortified to accomplish a goal that every previous iteration of the San Diego Padres has failed to do: Win a World Series.

As baseball has evolved over the past decade, the importance of relief pitchers who can get swings and misses and record outs without balls being put in play has become magnified. Workhorse starting pitchers who throw 200 innings a year are a dying breed. Exactly four starters (Logan Gilbert, Seth Lugo, Logan Webb and Zack Wheeler) hit the 200 inning threshold in 2024. That number was 34 as recently as 2014, and 42 in 2004. With more data available to assess the effectiveness of pitchers, it has become commonplace for teams to have their starting pitchers avoid facing batters a third time in a single game, giving rise to a higher demand of innings coming from the bullpen. In 1995, roughly a third of innings were tossed by relievers. In 2024, that number rose to 41%, and in the 2024 playoffs, 52% of outs were recorded by relief pitchers, the second highest total in the history of the game. As recently as 1980, that number was below 30%, but it has risen dramatically over time, especially in the past ten seasons.

Preller’s Padres were drummed out of the playoffs in 2024 by the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, who held San Diego scoreless over the last 24 innings of their National League Division Series, helped along in no small part by their legion of nasty relievers. Preller has long prioritized the strength of his pitching staff, and was determined to augment that aspect of his roster in any way possible at the 2025 deadline. Despite having the top-rated relief corps in the game as the deadline approached, the tireless Preller became fixated on adding perhaps the best fit for his team-a reliever who threw the hardest average heater in the game (101.1 MPH): Sacramento Athletics reliever Mason Miller.

Miller checked a ton of boxes for the Padres GM. He threw lightning. He struck out a higher percentage of batters than any other healthy reliever at the deadline-39.1% of at-bats against him ended in a whiff. He was hard to hit, allowing a .159 batting average against him in 2025 at the time of the trade. Most importantly, Miller was under team control through the 2029 season, and would earn only $765,000 in 2025, making him the rare impact trade target who wouldn’t carry a huge salary, and wouldn’t require a significant financial burden to the team this year or in the coming 3-4 seasons. Preller saw his opportunity, and would not back down until he secured his services.

There was one small problem: Athletics General Manager David Forst had zero incentive to trade Miller. For all the reasons Preller coveted his hulking closer, Forst saw the value inherent in the talented right-hander, and knew that his young team would need a reliable presence at the back of the bullpen as the squad matured ahead of its planned move to Las Vegas for the 2028 season. When Jhoan Duran, the fireballing Twins closer (his 100.2 MPH average fastball velocity is second only to Miller this year) was dealt to the Phillies on July 30 in return for two top-100 prospects, Forst knew he would need to best that price point to move Miller. Duran makes $4.125 million in 2025, and only has two more seasons of team control before he’ll be a free agent. Preller kept putting packages together to entice Forst to relent and trade Miller to San Diego, but Forst refused all Preller’s efforts, Until Preller put his best prospect on the table on deadline day.

Leodalis De Vries was the top international baseball prospect signed in the 2024 class, receiving a $4.2 million bonus to become a Padre. Since being added to the franchise out of the Dominican Republic, De Vries showed precocious skills at the plate and in the field, and the talented shortstop had risen to be considered the fifth best prospect in the game according to Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list released on July 28, 2025. If the Padres and Preller wanted to acquire Miller, De Vries would have to be in the package.

“It took a player the caliber of De Vries to get our attention and get us to the negotiating table,” Forst would say after the transaction was made. “In Mason’s case, we knew it was going to take something special,” Forst would add. “When the Padres suggested they were open to including Leo, that’s kind of when this got serious.”

In the final accounting, the Padres and Preller traded De Vries with pitching prospects Braden Nett, Henry Baez and Eduarniel Nunez to acquire Miller and lefty starter J.P. Sears.

“He was asked about in every deal,” Preller noted about De Vries. “He’s a really good player. He’s a tremendous prospect. We weren’t going to do it unless we got the right fit, the right pieces. Mason’s an A-lane performer, one of the best in the world at what he does,” Preller said. “We understand you’ve got to give up good players to get good players. If they’ve put your team in a good position for now and for the future, that’s a positive outcome,” he added.

Preller wasn’t done. By the time the deadline struck, he had traded eight of his top 20 prospects, including the #1 (DeVries) overall talent, as well as four other minor leaguers and two major leaguers. In return, he acquired Miller and Sears from the A’s, imported 2025 All-Star Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Laureano from Baltimore, Freddy Fermin from the Royals and Nestor Cortes from the Brewers. All six of those players were added to the roster, and represent a huge influx of talent for a team battling to catch the Dodgers for the NL West crown.

According to a baseball simulation at Fangraphs, those upgrades represented the largest increase in likely playoff outcomes of any franchise based on the trade deadline changes. The Padres saw their odds to win the NL West rise from 12% to 20%, their odds to make the playoffs go from 76% to 88% and their chances to win the World Series move from 4% to 7%.

Preller got his man-Miller-in a fashion reminiscent of another frenzied pursuit three years earlier.

Back in 2022, Preller gave up a large chunk of his minor league system to add Juan Soto and Josh Bell in a deal with the Nationals. That transaction cost the Padres C.J. Abrams, MacKenzie Gore and James Wood, among six total prospects that headed to Washington. Abrams, Gore and Wood now form the core of a young and talented Nats team, while Soto lasted only a year and a half in San Diego before being traded to the Yankees ahead of his free agent year in 2024.

While he may come to regret some of the deals he’s made (he’s also traded Trea Turner, Max Fried, Emmanuel Clase, Andres Munoz, David Bednar and Josh Naylor), it can never be said that Preller isn’t always pursuing every possible edge to push his team to a title.

Other executives characterized his deadline frenzy as being a “massive gamble” and “potentially devastating,” but Preller is unfazed by such criticism. “I feel like we made our club better,” Preller observed. “We’re looking forward to seeing how we do here in the last few months. The expectation with this group is always to go win a ring-go win a championship. That’s the goal.”

Such sentiments would ring very hollow were they being uttered by any Athletics executive of recent vintage. John Fisher has been the majority owner of the franchise since 2005, and his penurious stewardship of the club has galvanized the baseball community in and around Oakland. As much as any other fan base, A’s fans are united in their disdain for Fisher, who has failed to make genuine efforts to build a new ballpark in Oakland to rescue the team from the embarrassing confines of The Coliseum. Lights that don’t function consistently (or well), rampant infestations of various strains, including mice and feral cats, and plumbing issues that caused sewage to accumulate in both dugouts and clubhouses are only the most recent examples of neglect players and fans had to endure to play in “Mount Davis” over the past few decades. Fisher used the poor condition of the stadium as leverage to get the city to help him build a new one, and when the local legislature stiffened against his demands, he agreed to relocate the franchise to Las Vegas, sealing his ignominious reputation with Oakland baseball loyalists.

The list of fan favorites and All-Star talent traded under Fisher’s watch is extensive. His history of allowing franchise players to leave the team before they got expensive has earned him few partisans among the fan base. In the past ten seasons, players like Matt Olson, Matt Chapman, Chris Bassitt, Josh Donaldson and Yoenis Céspedes were all traded or allowed to leave as free agents before they could earn multi-year contracts with the team. With the Miller deal, the maddening trend of having their best talent traded away continues, despite the maturing core of young talent led by rookies Nick Kurtz and Jacob Wilson, front runners for the AL Rookie of the Year Award.

Fisher had allowed the A’s payroll to drop so precipitously that the franchise faced a grievance from the MLB Players Association this winter, because the sport’s collective bargaining agreement requires teams to have a payroll that is more than 1.5 times the amount they collect in revenue sharing. The $63 million payroll they carried in 2024 was going to be well short of the approximately $105 they’d need to have to avoid such a grievance, leading the club to sign free agent Luis Severino (three years, $67 million) and to trade for Jeffrey Springs from Tampa to take on the rest of his salary. They also signed Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler to extensions (five years, $60 million, and seven years, $65 million, respectively) to help push the payroll above the minimum threshold. It bears mention that the $67 million guaranteed to Severino is the largest contract in the history of the franchise. Every other franchise has easily eclipsed the $100 million level for their largest contract to date aside from the White Sox, whose five-year $75 million deal with Andrew Benintendi is their largest effort.

In a world where it seems like so many sports franchises are motivated by vectors aside from putting a winning product on the field, it is uniquely refreshing to see a team and a leader so singularly aligned with what should be the aim of every team, every season: To win a title. Preller may be willing to consistently trade away valuable, cost-controlled players from his farm system in a way few of his peers would be comfortable with, but he’s doing so to maximize the chances of his team to achieve at the highest level possible, leaving no opportunity to improve un-investigated.

The city of San Diego has never celebrated a championship in any major sport. With the Chargers having left town for Los Angeles, the Padres are the last bastion of hope for a parade in town. Preller might not sleep long enough to dream at night, but millions of Friar Faithful likely see visions of Mason Miller blowing smoke past American League hitters en route to the team’s first ever title this October.