Padres’ coaching staff could be raided while manager search begins

The Padres didn’t just wake up to a managerial vacancy; they woke up to a coaching market that can smell uncertainty from a mile away. Mike Shildt’s abrupt retirement dropped San Diego into an eight-to-ten team scrum for leadership at precisely the moment contenders and retoolers alike are filling staffs. That timing matters. 

Every open chair elsewhere becomes a threat to poach the people the Padres most need to stabilize the transition — starting with the architects of a run-prevention group that kept them competitive through two straight postseason trips. The search for a new skipper is the headline. The undercard is whether San Diego can keep the staff that makes the headline work.

 Ruben Niebla could draw manager interest as Padres hunt for a skipper

That’s why Ruben Niebla’s name looms so large. He isn’t just “the pitching coach”; he’s a program unto himself — a biomechanics-forward developer with credibility in every corner of the clubhouse and a multi-year deal that signaled how central he is to the plan. In normal times, you’d feel insulated by that contract. In a winter like this, it reads more like a permission slip for other teams to ask. 

With Shildt out and the carousel spinning, clubs in their own manager hunts could target Niebla for interviews, while others might try to pry away members of San Diego’s bullpen braintrust for promotions. The Padres have to run two races at once: hire the right manager and keep the best parts of their infrastructure from getting raided. 

According to Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune, both Niebla and bullpen coach Ben Fritz are potential flight risks this offseason.

“A team seeking a manager could ask permission to interview pitching coach Ruben Niebla,” Acee reports, noting Niebla’s previously stated interest in managing and the fact he’s under contract for two more years. Acee adds that one or more of the teams that hire a new manager could also look at Fritz for a pitching-coach promotion. That’s the danger zone for San Diego: Niebla is good enough to be a manager candidate; Fritz is respected enough to be someone’s next pitching coach; and the Padres are suddenly the team everyone’s calling. 

Niebla’s résumé explains the attention. After years helping build Cleveland’s pitching machine, he arrived in San Diego ahead of 2022 and quickly became the connective tissue through multiple regimes — first Bob Melvin, then Shildt, while the front office doubled down with an extension last offseason. 

He blends individualized game-planning with delivery cleanup and pitch-shape refinement, the kind of modern “developer-strategist” hybrid that front offices covet. It’s not typical for pitching coaches to leap straight into the big chair, the bench coach track remains the more common springboard. But it’s hardly unprecedented (see: Bryan Price in Cincinnati), and Niebla’s standing inside and outside the organization makes him exactly the kind of exception search committees explore. 

Fritz, meanwhile, is the quiet glue in the late-inning operation — part traffic cop, part fixer, and precisely the profile rebuilding clubs poach when they want a new voice to lead a staff. Lose him and you’re not just replacing a role; you’re replacing relationships, routines and a shared language that took years to build. Stack that on top of a manager search and you risk a winter of reset upon reset, asking pitchers to re-learn voices and processes at the very moment you should be sharpening them for 2026. That’s how good teams stumble in April: not because the talent disappeared, but because the translation layer did. 

The task for A.J. Preller now is sequencing and signaling. Sequencing: move quickly on a manager who values and retains the existing pitching architecture. Signaling: make it clear, publicly and inside the industry, that Niebla and Fritz are pillars, not spare parts, and that the Padres will match opportunity with title and security wherever it makes sense.