The San Diego Padres have been very proactive on the trade market in recent years; for example, instead of letting Juan Soto head into free agency and try and keep him by engaging in the biggest bidding war the league has ever seen, they traded him last year to maximize asset value. And rumor has it that the Padres, this offseason, are looking to pull off the same maneuver, this time with starting pitchers Dylan Cease and Michael King.
However, it seems like the Padres won’t be making any seismic changes to their roster with Spring Training already underway. According to Ken Rosenthal and Patrick Mooney of The Athletic, general manager AJ Preller, who tends to be very aggressive with his moves, intends to be a bit passive this time around.
“Significant trades in spring training are rare. San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller, who has entertained conversations on Dylan Cease and Michael King, prefers to keep his team together, sources say,” Rosenthal and Mooney wrote.
Padres look to finish the job in 2025
For a second in last year’s playoffs, it looked like the Padres were once again going to play spoiler to the Dodgers’ World Series hopes. They led 2-1 in the 2024 NLDS before the Los Angeles Dodgers’ arms woke up and shut them down the rest of the way.
With the Padres threatening the Dodgers unlike any other team in last year’s playoffs, it would be a bit daft for them to try and make the team worse in the name of asset maximization and preserving the team’s future. Cease was quite the reliable hand atop the Padres’ starting rotation last year, recording an impressive 3.47 ERA across 33 starts (189.1 innings of work) — contributions that were worth 4.8 WAR, according to Fangraphs.
Meanwhile, King played his best baseball last season with the Padres; in his first full season as a starter, King recorded an ERA of 2.95, and most importantly, he started in 30 games — proving himself capable of the heavy workload that comes with being part of the rotation.
Both Cease and King can enter free agency at the end of the 2025 season, although considering how important they are to the Padres, they are likely to stay with the team until season’s end, especially with this development. It’s not quite clear if the Padres will have the budget to keep them in San Diego for the long haul, but since they intend to win now, they couldn’t really afford to set their sights too far into the future.
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