The Padres spent the summer trying to patch a rotation hole, and now they’re staring at the bill.
San Diego’s trade-deadline moves were supposed to give the club a better shot in October. Instead, the two starters they brought in left the Padres with very little to show for the prospects they sent away.
Robbie Ray made it into the NLDS and gave up three runs to the Brewers over 3⅔ innings. Casey Mize never even got onto the roster because of an ankle injury and serious second-half struggles.
Both are now headed for free agency, and the Padres are left weighing whether it makes any sense to keep chasing a fix for a mistake.
That’s the trap here. Jim Bowden of The Athletic listed the Padres as one of the “best fits” for Ray in free agency and projected a two-year, $45 million deal for the left-hander, which would line up with the market for strong mid-rotation starters.
On paper, that sounds clean enough. In reality, it’s messier.
San Diego clearly valued Ray enough to part with Miguel Mendez in the summer, and the team’s scouting work doesn’t just vanish because he finished with a middling 5.02 ERA after the trade. But his time with the Padres also dinged his value, and that could affect both sides of the equation: whether Ray wants to come back, and whether the club wants to pay him like a dependable mid-rotation arm after what it just saw.
The bigger issue is money. The Padres already have a major decision to make with Michael King, who is expected to command a long-term deal with an AAV of $25-30 million after his excellent 2026 season. With so many holes in the rotation, there’s a strong case for spreading that money around and adding multiple arms instead of putting everything into one starter who has to carry too much of the load.
That logic applies even more sharply to Ray. If he’s looking for anything close to Bowden’s $22.5 million per year projection, the Padres probably need to walk away.
There just isn’t enough room for A.J. Preller to fill out the rest of the starting five if that kind of money goes to a pitcher who struggled in San Diego.
If Ray is willing to come back on a below-market deal, then a reunion makes some sense. Otherwise, the Padres need to own the trade-deadline miss and move on to bigger swings.
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Manny Machado Just Raised One Big Padres Offseason Question
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For San Diego, the bigger takeaway is what that kind of showing means going forward. Machado proved he can impact games against strong competition, and the offseason conversation now turns to how the Padres can build around that level of performance rather than waste it. [Read more 🡒]