Padres Faux Winter Meetings: Behind the scenes of lineup construction

We talk about how the trades and signing went down for the San Diego Padres in our Faux Winter Meetings and how we came up with the lineup we did.

So you want to be the GM of the San Diego Padres, huh? If there is anything I learned in our FanSided Faux Winter meetings it’s that a GM’s job is a lot more difficult than we make it sound on Twitter.

Granted, I work a full-time job and am a site-editor for two sites at FanSided, I didn’t quite have the time and resources to put my best effort into this fast-paced simulation.

Basically, all of the MLB site experts at FanSided were given one week to sign free agents and make trades, while staying within the team’s projected payroll, to build their squad for the 2020 season and beyond.

While this was a lot of fun, I quickly realized how unprepared I was for this simulation.

I knew the holes I wanted to fill for the Padres, but I did not have a list of players put together. And I certainly didn’t have a priority list for the ones I needed to go after the most.

This really put me behind early, especially with the free agents.

The way free agency worked in our simulation is that once a player was posted, you had 24 hours to out-bid the other teams and once those 24 hours were up the highest bid won the player. And, you could only place two bids on one player.

So once you put in your second bid, if someone outbid you there was nothing you could do.

Trades were somewhat difficult because not every site expert is as available and active as others. There were some teams you just weren’t going to be able to make a deal with.

All that aside, it was a very fun and enlightening exercise. Here are how things went down as I tried to revamp the Padres outfield and add to the starting rotation this offseason.