San Diego Padres 2020 MLB Winter Meetings Preview

We take a deep dive into what we could see from the San Diego Padres at this year’s annual MLB Winter Meetings, which is right in our backyard.

A.J. Preller has already been busy this offseason making moves to try and make the San Diego Padres a contender in 2020.

This may be the biggest offseason for the Padres since the last time the Winter Meetings were held in San Diego.

Back in the 2014-15 offseason, Preller made several big moves to try and build a contender for the 2015 season.

While he didn’t make a big move during the actual Winter Meetings in 2014, they did create a lot of buzz and were very active after the meetings.

Soon after they completed trades for Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Justin Upton, and Will Middlebrooks.

Just before Opening Day in 2015 they also traded for Melvin (B.J.) Upton and Craig Kimbrel.

While all of those moves ended up being complete disasters, it did make for a very fun Winter Meetings and offseason.

Interesting to note as Preller starts to trade away some of the farm system, that offseason he traded Zach Eflin, Yasmani Grandal (wasn’t a prospect at the time but worth noting), Joe Wieland, R.J. Alvarez, Jesse Hahn, Jake Bauers, Burch Smith, Joe Ross, Trea Turner, Max Fried, Dustin Peterson, Jace Peterson, Mallex Smith, Johnny Barbato, Jordan Paroubeck, Matt Wisler, and a Comp A pick.

That’s a pretty impressive list of players. Preller traded away almost half of the top 20 prospects in the system.

But in all, only Turner and Grandal have gone on to be great players. Fried could join that list with another good season in 2020.

It just shows you can’t get too hung up on these prospects when the percentages are low that they’ll ever become star players.

I don’t think we’ll see Preller trade away half of the farm system again, but I do think we see him continue to use their depth of prospects to improve this team for the immediate future.