The Padres have spent years living on the edge, pushing chips in at the deadline and trusting A.J. Preller to keep the window open.
That approach has delivered plenty of action, plenty of payroll commitments, and a lot of October baseball. It has also left San Diego staring at a roster with real money tied up in the wrong places at the wrong time.
At the center of that squeeze is Xander Bogaerts.
Preller handed Bogaerts an 11-year, $278-million deal in December 2022, and the contract now runs through the 2033 season. Bogaerts will be 40 when it expires, and the deal still carries nearly $25.5 million a year. For a player who posted a .231 average and .676 OPS in the regular season, those numbers land with some force.
Bogaerts did finish strong enough to remind everyone what he can still do. He hit .286 (6-for-21) in the Padres’ six-game postseason run against the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers, adding a double, home run, two RBIs and four runs scored while providing some sharp defense. But that came after a regular season that never quite matched the price tag.
He played in 153 games, his most since 2023, yet the broader picture was hard to ignore: career-low batting average, lowest OPS since 2014, and a contract that suddenly looks far heavier than it did when it was signed.
That matters even more now because the Padres are heading into a landscape filled with uncertainty. There is growing expectation that owners will lock out the players on Dec. 1 in an effort to introduce a hard salary cap, a move that could drag into the 2027 season.
On top of that, the team’s new owners, Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, officially took over on Aug. 17, and nobody yet knows how aggressive they’ll be with spending.
So the question becomes obvious: what do the Padres do if they need flexibility?
A Bogaerts trade sounds simple in theory and messy in reality. He has seven years left on the deal, plus a no-trade clause and no opt-out language. That combination gives him control and makes any deal extremely difficult to pull off.
Tremayne Person of Friars On Base laid out the problem this way on Oct. 11: "The Padres cannot ship the contract to whichever team offers the most convenient financial relief.
He would have to approve the destination. A workable trade would probably require the Padres to cover a substantial piece of the remaining salary, accept another undesirable contract or include young talent to make the deal palatable.
They could end up using all three levers."
If Bogaerts is effectively stuck, rival clubs could start looking elsewhere on San Diego’s roster and asking about bigger names. Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill and Mason Miller are the obvious ones that could surface in trade talk if another team senses the Padres are boxed in.
Tatis is under contract for eight more seasons, with a $25.7 million salary in 2027 and 2028 that climbs to $36.7 million from 2029-34. Merrill signed a 10-year extension before this season that pays him $7.1 million, $9.1 million and $11.1 million from 2027-29, then $21.1 million per year from 2030-35. Miller, the MLB co-leader in saves this year, made $4 million in 2026 and becomes arbitration-eligible after the 2027 season, with free agency approaching after 2030.
The Padres would almost certainly try to secure Miller on a long-term deal before that point. But between the labor picture, the uncertainty surrounding new ownership and the weight of contracts like Bogaerts’, even that kind of planning may be harder than it should be.
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The timing, though, makes this a far more demanding handoff than a standard changeover. San Diego has just come out of the 2026 postseason and now heads into an offseason loaded with roster uncertainty, from looming free-agent decisions to the question of how Joe Musgrove fits as he comes back from injury. For owners who arrive with pressure already baked in, the first winter is rarely about patience, and this one could set the tone for everything that follows. [Read more 🡒]