The Padres’ Future Is on the Line This Postseason
The team spent its way into contention and clinched a spot in the MLB playoffs.
This year’s run could have an outsized impact on its next moves—and long-term sustainability.
As October strikes, the Padres, like the other 11 MLB playoff teams, will seek to turn an impressive regular season into a postseason run—one fans will be talking about a decade later. The Padres, however, have more at stake than most teams.
Capriciousness is built purposefully into baseball’s structure: A team can be dominant during the 162-game regular season, then extinguished in three games during the playoffs. That’s why the 84-win Diamondbacks, not the 104-win Braves, represented the National League in the 2023 World Series. That same unpredictability could help change the long-term narrative of the Padres, who have never won a title.
San Diego has spent most of this century as a fun but ultimately unthreatening team. From 2000 to 2020, it won the NL West twice, falling in the first round of the playoffs both times. Meanwhile, the rest of its division has reached greater heights. The Dodgers are a perennial juggernaut. In the 2010s, the Giants improbably won three World Series in five years. The Diamondbacks began the 2000s by dethroning the Yankees on Luis González’s flare to center. Even the Rockies, who still seem baffled by how to build a winning team at altitude, have been to the World Series more recently than the Padres.
But in the past five years, things have been different in San Diego. The team signaled a new era when it signed star third baseman Manny Machado to a stunning $300 million deal in 2019, then doubled down with a $350 million extension beginning in 2023 as he was approaching an opt-out in his contract. In 2021, it ensured Fernando Tatis Jr. would remain in brown and gold, well before he was nearing free agency, with a 14-year, $350 million contract.
And why stop there? It has since added or extended Xander Bogaerts ($280 million), Yu Darvish ($108 million), and Joe Musgrove ($100 million), among others. In 2023, the team’s payroll was a decidedly un-Padres-like $256 million, third behind only the two New York teams.
