Why Did the Padres Go Quiet, Close Up Shop on Deadline Day?

Heading into the final hours of Major League Baseball's non-waiver trade season, the San Diego Padres were expected to put up a white flag and start supplying buyers with valuable assets left and right. 

But now here we are in the aftermath of Friday's non-waiver trade deadline, and there's one question about the Padres that needs answering:

What in the heck happened?

By all accounts, it was a lot of things. But since it's a long story, we better start at the beginning.

The Padres did indeed have the look of a seller on the eve of the trade deadline. They entered the week at just 47-52, putting them 8.5 games out of first in the NL West. On Wednesday night, Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports reported that everyone was waiting on San Diego general manager A.J. Preller to open up shop:

And not just Ian Kennedy and Will Venable either.

Jon Heyman of CBS Sports reported last week that the Padres were "pushing hard" to move their big names too. At the top of that list were slugging outfielder Justin Upton, veteran relief aces Craig Kimbrel and Joaquin Benoit, veteran starter James Shields and young starters Tyson Ross and Andrew Cashner. Any of them had a chance to be traded. Heck, maybe even all of them.

But Thursday came and went with the Padres doing nothing. Then came Friday, where it was the same old story right up until the 4 p.m. ET deadline. It was then, finally, that the Padres made a trade.

Yeah, a trade. Singular. And it was this one:

To which everyone replied: "But, wait a second...That's not...What?"

That's all there was to say, really. When you're expecting a team to trade away players such as Upton, Kimbrel, Benoit, Shields, Ross and/or Cashner, watching that same team instead trade for Marc Rzepczynski makes for quite the system shock. 

Hence, the question: What happened?

Well, it turns out there are real explanations. And though some are more real than others, what they suggest is the Padres didn't necessarily err with their approach to the deadline.

Lenny Ignelzi/Associated Press

To their credit, the Padres aren't leaving us to fend for ourselves in regard to finding answers for their inactivity. They've come right out with a couple of official explanations.

Here's one of them: As much as it looks like they might be out of the National League playoff picture, the Padres don't believe they are just yet.

This is something Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports noted shortly after the passing of the deadline, reporting that Preller stood pat because he believes he has an October-worthy team on his hands.

Padres president and CEO Mike Dee would later confirm this, telling Corey Brock of MLB.com: "We like this team, and we believe with 60 games to go that we can make a great run."

The playoff odds at FanGraphs disagree, giving the Padres just a 3.6 percent chance of making it to the postseason as of this writing. But at the same time, it's not the craziest notion.

The Padres went into deadline day hot, having won 10 of 14 to move from nine games under .500 to just four games under .500. This is the best baseball they've played in a while, and Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times was quickly noted the Padres are in a good position to keep it going:

If the Padres do well over these next 16 games, they could find themselves safely above .500 with plenty of season left to go. Their postseason hopes may be smoldering, but they haven't gone up in flames just yet.

That's one logical reason not to sell. But beyond the Padres getting hot, something else happened in recent days: A seller's market turned into a buyer's market.

Lenny Ignelzi/Associated Press

Dave Cameron of FanGraphs suspected this was going to happen after he saw the Oakland A's get a good but not great return from the Houston Astros for ace left-hander Scott Kazmir, which was the first major trade of deadline season.

According to ESPN.com's Jayson Stark, it seems Preller lacked similar foresight:

For his part, Preller didn't try to hide that he was ever thinking about selling. On the contrary, he confirmed he just couldn't find good deals for the players he was shopping.

"In our situation we have a lot of players who are attractive to clubs," said Preller, per Brock. "We were working through all different scenarios. Ultimately, we felt like we didn't get the value we wanted to get to."

Now, based on what's out there, it's possible Preller couldn't find the value he was looking for because he was asking for too much.

Provided Heyman's information is accurate, FanGraphs' Craig Edwards notes that Preller turned down a pretty good offer from the New York Yankees for Kimbrel.

Then you have what Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Dave Stewart told Arizona Sports 98.7 FM's Burns and Gambo (via Vince Marotta, also of Arizona Sports 98.7 FM), saying the Padres asked for Paul Goldschmidt in talks for Kimbrel. If that's true...Well, yeah. No.

However, it's just as believable that San Diego's inactivity was due more to low offers rather than high asking prices on Preller's part.

Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports

For example, the relative shortage of teams in the market for impact corner outfielders limited Upton's market by default. It got more limited when the Baltimore Orioles traded for Gerardo Parra on Friday morning, which pretty much left the New York Mets as the only option for Upton. It's no surprise they swung a deal for Yoenis Cespedes instead, as the Detroit Tigers had very little leverage, thanks to a clause in his contract that bars him from receiving a qualifying offer at year's end.

As for San Diego's pitching, Preller was at a disadvantage there all along because of how much the market was prioritizing rentals. The only rental Preller had to offer was Kennedy, whose name simply couldn't compete with the likes of Kazmir, Johnny Cueto, David Price, Mat Latos or even Dan Haren.

The market's emphasis on rentals also put Preller at a disadvantage with Kimbrel, Benoit, Ross, Shields and Cashner, who are all controlled beyond 2015. Few teams had the talent and the cash to afford them in the first place, and the list of suitors diminished as the rentals were spread around. In the end, maybe the only way Preller was moving them was by lowering his asking prices below market value.

True, had Preller done that, he might have at least been able to unload a lot of payroll. And given that the Padres are working with a franchise-high $108 million payroll, you'd think that doing so would have been right there behind getting back good talent on the list of priorities.

But it sounds like that's not actually the case. Dee told Brock that there was "no mandate from ownership to slash payroll or save money." This, too, is believable.

The Padres may be working with a much higher payroll than usual, but they've benefited from that. This high payroll is the result of the offseason splurge that brought Upton, Shields, Kimbrel and Matt Kemp (among others) to San Diego over the winter.

And though this splurge hasn't produced a winner so far, it has been good for business. John Maffei of the San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported the Padres' TV ratings are way up. In a related story, so is their attendance.

When you're dealing with increased fan interest, you have to be careful about ruining it. Had the Padres taken lesser trade packages for their big players just so they could save some money, they would have been running the risk of doing just that. Imagine the 2012 Miami Marlins, except on the West Coast.

If the Padres end up regretting one thing from this deadline, it'll probably be not being more aggressive about finding a taker for Upton. Getting prospects for him would have been preferable to the compensation pick they'll eventually get after he rejects their qualifying offer at the end of the year.

But that may be it. All their other talented trade chips could possibly be shopped this winter, when they won't be hindered by an arbitrary deadline. If the Padres keep them, oh well. That would mean having quite a few good players around for a playoff push in 2016.

Oh yeah, and there is that possibility that the Padres not selling this year will result in a playoff appearance. Wouldn't that be something.

Granted, that probably won't end up happening. But even if it doesn't, it'll be hard to look back on what the Padres did at the trade deadline and see a mistake. Instead, what appears to have happened is a team came up against a collection of forces pushing against a big sell-off and reacted accordingly.

Maybe that's not a job well done, but it's not a job poorly botched either.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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