Padres have a real chance to turn a temporary ballpark storyline into rotation help

The Padres don’t usually get discounts on starting pitching. Not the kind that actually matters, anyway. 

But there’s a weird little loophole sitting in plain sight: Luis Severino, The Athletics, and the minor-league reality of Sutter Health Park.

This is the kind of “only in baseball” storyline that A.J. Preller should love. A pitcher whose road results look like a legitimate rotation stabilizer, whose home environment has clearly been a mess, and whose contract is big enough that it basically forces the selling team to blink first.

Padres could exploit Luis Severino’s ugly split to upgrade the rotation fast

The Padres need innings they can trust. And Luis Severino’s 2025 season basically handed the “change of scenery” crowd a gift-wrapped argument: he pitched like a different human being depending on the zip code.

Early in the year, his road ERA sat down around the 0.9 range while his home ERA ballooned north of 7.0 — a gap so cartoonish it was tracking as one of the biggest in the sport at the time, and MLB.com made a point to spotlight just how extreme it was. The point isn’t that Petco turns him into an ace overnight — it’s that a normal big-league routine, real big-league facilities, and an atmosphere that doesn’t feel like a weird spring-training knockoff might get you closer to the version of Severino you’d actually trust in October.

Also, the A’s are locked into Sacramento as a temporary home for multiple seasons. That matters, because it turns this from “one bad road trip” into an ongoing problem they may want to manage — especially if they can shift money while retooling.

The contract is the whole game here. Severino is owed $20 million in 2026, with a $22 million player option for 2027. For the Padres, that won’t work unless the Athletics eat salary or the return is light enough that you’re basically purchasing innings more than talent.

The performance risk is real. The home struggles were ugly, and the strikeout drop/overall volatility means you’re betting on a specific version of the player showing up. If you trade for him and get the wrong version, you’ve just stapled a pricey mid-rotation question mark to a roster that already lives on tight margins.

If Preller can structure this as salary relief  and modest prospect cost, this is exactly the kind of market inefficiency the Padres should pounce on. Not because Severino is a sure thing (he isn’t) but because the circumstances give San Diego a rare chance to buy rotation help where the leverage isn’t all pointing in one direction.