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Padres News: UT-SD Chat Wrap With Sam Geaney

By Billy Brost |

Recently, the Union Tribune’s Dennis Lin caught up with San Diego Padres’ farm director, Sam Geaney, and picked his brain as to what this first season working for the Friars, and most notably, GM A.J. Preller has been like. Prior to coming to San Diego, Geaney was with the Oakland Athletics and another quick working GM in Billy Beane, serving as the A’s director of international scouting. Let’s see what Geaney and Lin discussed in their recent sit-down:

Lin asked Geaney what he’s been up to over the past few months, and Geaney responded by stating that he’s basically been reviewing and hiring coordinators throughout the minor league system for the Padres, as well as just getting comfortable working around so many new faces and personalities in the Padres’ front office. Ownership overhauled the entire front office when Josh Byrnes was shown the door, and imported the best and brightest minds they could find to move the San Diego Padres in a whole new direction, including Geaney. 

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Lin then asked Geaney his thoughts on what he believed a farm director’s job entailed, in which Geaney replied by stating: “As I’m looking at it, it’s overseeing a department that at its core is tasked with developing 200-odd players to the best of their ability, with the aim to impact the Padres at the big-league level.” Geaney once again touched upon the fact that utilizing his newly-hired coordinators such as Mark Prior and Moises Alou, is going to be of the highest importance as the minor league system gets rebuilt and further development occurs.

From there, the two men discussed the current state of the Padres’ minor league system, and aside from just a handful of remaining top prospects such as Hunter Renfroe and Austin Hedges, Geaney has his work cut out for him as he is basically working with a clean slate. It appears he’s hoping to blend a nice mix of domestic and foreign players together to help revitalize a farm system that was emptied to immediately upgrade the big league roster. Lin and Geaney also talked about the mega deals that Preller had made and instead of feeling frustrated by having so few top prospects, Geaney views it as an organizational challenge to rebuild and continue to develop solid talent, starting at the lowest levels of the farm.

Be sure to continue to follow Friars On Base throughout the baseball season, as the staff will have wall-to-wall minor league coverage, player profiles, scores and stories about everything happening in the San Diego Padres minor league system.

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