SAN DIEGO _ There is the catcher his senior research and development analyst kept bugging him about and one member of his inner circle's dad vouched for.
There is the second baseman a couple of his scouts insisted was going to be better than people expected.
There is the young center fielder he and his staff believed was for real that they got in exchange for an infielder they no longer were certain about.
He tried to get the new left fielder a couple years ago. He met the newer left fielder 12 years ago in Curacao and brought him in this year to be an infielder. He was able to acquire the corner infielders because he knows how to convince his bosses to open their wallets a little wider and because the market was right.
And he listened to his director of baseball operations when he came back from seeing a 17-year-old shortstop and said, "He could be a big piece for us down the road."
This is how a playoff team gets built. Or at least how A.J. Preller put the finishing touches on this one.
The Padres on Sunday passed the first marker on the road to where they said their process would take them. For all the twists and turns, they arrived about on schedule. The team with the second-worst record in baseball over the past nine years had been trending upward for a bit. So that they qualified for the playoffs is not all that surprising.
But who knew this new kind of Padres team would literally be so new?
No one. Not even the architect. No chance.
"When we started it, there's no way to predict," said Preller, who was hired as Padres general manager in August 2014. "We've had so many variations. ... We're constantly whiteboarding it, going to the next idea, the next idea in terms of what we're trying to do big-picture wise."
This is what he did know when the Padres embarked in late 2015 on a quest to build up an organization by tearing it down:
"The starting point is you try to build talent," Preller said. "You need a lot of quality players. That was really the formula when we started out five years ago. That was the goal. We knew if you're going to win at the major league level, you need a lot of talented players. From there, it gives you options, different paths you can go down."
Preller says "we" a lot when talking about decision that get made concerning the Padres. His "we" is more vast than people might imagine, and it includes but is not limited to senior adviser Logan White; Chuck LaMar, the former Rays GM and a scout Preller relies on; scout Keith Boeck and R&D (analytics) analyst Dave Cameron. There is also international scouting director Chris Kemp, amateur scouting director Mark Conner and professional scouting director Pete DeYoung. And integral to the functioning of it all are baseball operations director Nick Ennis and assistant GMs Josh Stein and Fred Uhlman Jr., who pay attention to procedures and numbers that Preller doesn't.
"It's a fun group," Preller said. "We like each other. We have spirited discussions."
Where all that ink on the dry erase boards and the lists and hundreds of hours of debate and thousands of hours of scouting have led is a 28-man roster that as of Sunday had 17 players in their first season with the Padres. Seven have been in the organization for three weeks.
Dinelson Lamet (2017), Wil Myers (2015) and Craig Stammen are the only players who have been on the major league roster since before the 2018 season.
While the outside world was wondering how all those prospects were going to fit on the Padres in the future, Preller and his crew were figuring out how to turn some of them into players who could make an impact right now.
"The most valuable thing in the game today is quality young players and talent," Preller said. "That's always going to be our goal _ to make sure we have as many good young players as we can have. One reason is it allows you to make trades. The bigger reason is we expect a lot of those guys to come up and be big parts of the Padres. ... When you have attractive players, it gives you access to some of those type of deals. You identify guys and say, 'What's going to help us win at the major league level?' "
Here is a look at the roster (including players who have contributed this season and/or are expected to be on the postseason roster) and how it was assembled.
