The direction of the San Diego Padres made an abrupt, 180-degree turn at 3 a.m. in a dimly lit, long-since-closed Marriott restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport.

When team President Mike Dee landed at 11:30 p.m. during the first week of August 2014, he already had decided on the Padres’ new general manager. It wasn’t A.J. Preller, the man waiting for him outside baggage claim.

Preller was the quirky, baseball savant who showed up for interviews with a nondescript spiral notebook that Peter Seidler, the franchise’s lead investor, described as the kind you’d pick up at a Target with “scribbles and notes at all these weird angles.”

Other finalists, by contrast, surrounded themselves with leather-bound notepads, Power Point presentations and unmistakable polish.


Preller, though, had climbed into final contention for the job with Yankees Assistant GM Billy Eppler, now GM of the Anaheim Angels and reportedly Dee’s initial pick. The candidate with the no-ego notebook requested one more sit-down as he scouted an area high school tournament.

“I told him I’d meet him one last time, just as a kind of courtesy, because he was so good throughout the process,” Dee said. “He basically blew me away. When I said, if we don’t go with you because of this concern or that concern, he was just like an attorney cross-examining. He basically mitigated every concern.

“I got back to San Diego at 5 a.m. and called (Chairman) Ron Fowler at 8 a.m. I said, ‘I had a change of heart overnight.’ We have to hire A.J.”

The selection of Preller, which set in motion the eventual hiring of new manager Andy Green, was the final piece in a metronome-like time-line of change, one August after another, that has reshaped the organization at its highest levels.


In August 2012, a group led by Seidler and Fowler purchased the team from John Moores. In August 2013, the team hired Dee. In August 2014, in a stunning 11th-hour reversal, Dee plucked Preller from the wee hours of an L.A. morning.

Professional sports franchises routinely experience top-of-the-food-chain change — but the complete reboot and churn, top to bottom, so evenly spaced, seemed unprecedented.

“The chronology was in the right order,” Dee said. “If the sequence was different, if the new owners hired the GM before they hired me, if we’d hired a new manager before we made the change with Josh (Byrnes, the former GM) and A.J — it still may have worked out, but it would have been harder.

“You see it all the time in sports. A new general manager comes in and everyone says, ‘Well, that coach or manager isn’t his guy.’ He has to wear that label as, quote-unquote, not the general manager’s guy.


“The great thing about the way it was laid out for us, we’re all in it together.”

For the first time, an organization re-imagined from the moment of the Seidler-negotiated, $800 million deal to purchase the team in late summer 2012 is complete with Green — Preller’s first full-season manager.

For the first time, the organization 43 months in the making sits firmly in place. Whether the Padres win or lose, it’s unquestionably on their shoulders — and on their terms.

“You’re in a sport where success is measured by whether you win the World Series,” Seidler said. “We know that.”


The purchase

In late summer 2011, successful private equity businessman Peter Seidler prepared for a life centered more on beaches than baseball.

The grandson of famed Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley and nephew of longtime club president and owner Peter O’Malley learned in August of that year — of course, August — that his wife was pregnant. They planned to step away from life’s hustle to focus on raising a family in Laguna Beach.

In December, Seidler was diagnosed with cancer. It was the same month he heard the Padres were for sale. He absorbed the whispers about ownership infighting and a failing, layaway purchase plan between Moores and former sports agent Jeff Moorad. The sale unraveled as it faced rejection by Major League Baseball.

Seidler had flirted with the idea of buying the Dodgers, a storied franchise spiraling toward bankruptcy, before learning his wife had become pregnant. The family ties were deep and obvious. The rough run of the Dodgers, however, had soured him on a team he recognized in name only.


“I thought (former owner) Frank McCourt ran the team into the ground,” Seidler said. “I didn’t respect that. It was a mess.”

Then, the cancer. Then, the Padres.

“That gave me a great project to work on,” he said. “I thought, if you can help bring a championship to a place like San Diego, man, what an accomplishment.”

In early 2012, Seidler completed his chemotherapy treatments. He was told by Moores, who had grown impatient after years of trying to shed the club, that potential owners would be given only 90 days to close the deal. Seidler lost nearly 40 pounds, lost his hair — but never lost his resolve to finish the deal.


Moores invited Seidler to Petco Park, where he experienced a business person’s equivalent of a teenage crush. He loved the park. He loved the potential: “I was convinced I needed to buy the team, no matter the demands, no matter the cost.”

As the pair toured Petco, wandering to the area in center field where plaques of legendary players Tony Gwynn, Steve Garvey, Dave Winfield and Randy Jones are displayed, former Padres center fielder Cameron Maybin began to yell at them.

The men had wandered into the “batter’s eye” area, in the line of vision for hitters. Umpires had stopped the game.

“Cameron was yelling at Moores and I,” Seidler said. “We didn’t know what he was trying to tell us. When we figured it out, we scampered out of the way.”


That spark led to the two huddling in a room in July 2012 as the groups labored to hammer out a deal. Moores would not budge on the $800 million number, so everyone worked to chip away at the fine details.

Fowler, the current Padres chairman who partnered with Seidler on the purchase, recalled the numbers: Old owners grabbed $200 million off the top from the new deal with Fox Sports San Diego, while the news owners came up with $426 million.

The remaining total was debt in the form of a loan. The loan was structured so that it had to be inherited, rather than paid off. The “blended, ugly rate was 7.55 percent,” Fowler said, at a time when average rates sat at less than 3 percent.

Seidler, weakened by his cancer fight, brushed off the financial hurdles.


“Peter was like the Energizer bunny,” Fowler said. “He just kept going and going and going.”

The negotiations invigorated Seidler.

That final meeting unfolded in Los Angeles. Soon, the attorneys for Moores and Seidler began to spar.

“John’s attorney was from Texas, about 65,” Seidler said. “My attorney was about 40. They were just screaming at each other. The egos got out of control. His guys said, ‘Listen son, I’ve been doing deals before you were born.’ My guy said, ‘I’ve done more sports deals than your whole team combined.’


“I laughed at it, the theater of it all. It was too entertaining to stop them.”

The complicated deal reached the finish line, though, and Seidler and Fowler scrambled for a flight to Milwaukee to convince then-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig that they would be worthy owners.

The president

The courtship of Dee played out with elements befitting a Cold War spy novel.

In the summer of 2013, Seidler and Fowler boarded a hush-hush flight to Colorado’s remote Eagle-Vail Airport. If meeting details leaked, it would prove awkward at best and harmful at worst on two coasts.


The Padres still employed a president in long-entrenched Tom Garfinkel. Seidler and Fowler were convinced, though, that the need for change was critical. Fowler thought of Dee, who had worked for the Padres from 1995-2002. Dee had followed former Padres boss Larry Lucchino to help build a pair of World Series winners with the Boston Red Sox.

At the time of the meeting in Colorado, Dee was gainfully employed as CEO for the NFL’s Miami Dolphins. Fowler, however, felt certain that he would be the right fit and found a way for the three to quietly connect during Dee’s family vacation in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

As the Padres played the Dodgers that day in San Diego, Dee greeted Fowler and Seidler on an empty airport tarmac. The group drove to the Silver Sage Restaurant at Red Sky Golf Club, west of Vail — burying themselves for hours at a table in the back.

“Mike was still CEO of the Dolphins, so we didn’t want all of that to get out,” Seidler said. “After all, Mike’s pretty noticeable. He’s a tall guy with a shiny bald head.”


The more they talked, the more it became clear to them that Dee belonged back in baseball.

A deal began to take shape in the thin, mountain air.

Arrival of Preller

When people tried to explain Preller to owners, it sounded like someone describing a mythological figure. How could anyone — any sane anyone — be that consumed by baseball?

In the year before being hired by the Padres, Preller traveled more than 300 of the 365 days while working as an assistant general manager for the Texas Rangers. He amassed more than 3 million frequent flyer miles in baseball travel alone on American Airlines.


A few years ago, all those airplanes contributed to surgery for a herniated disc in Preller’s neck — a la Peyton Manning and Prince Fielder. Surgeons fused bone from Preller’s hip into his neck.

Preller kept going. The benefit of all the time and miles became obvious.

“He could talk with great first-hand knowledge about the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Japan, Korea — you name it,” Seidler said. “My first impression was that he was comfortable in his own skin, very honest and something of a mad scientist.”

Dee recalled: “It was immediately clear he was off-the-charts smart. He was encyclopedic about baseball. From the commissioner’s office to player development to the draft. Anything you could think of.”


Preller signaled the stretch run of the Padres’ August churn, shifting to something more comfortable and settled in 2016.

“It’s taken a few years here to get the pieces in place, but we feel like we have the right dynamic and people to have a quality organization,” he said. “You need people with ability first, then you need stability.”

Seidler said he pledges to fans that the continuity will be lasting.

“We bought the team to build a long-term success story in San Diego,” he said. “We expect to own the team for generations. We plan to be here 25, 35, 45, 100 years, I hope. We haven’t yet brought winning baseball here, but we will.”


August 2012. August 2013. August 2014. By August 2015, the wheels were in motion for a managerial change.

Now, the remake is complete. Time to win.

“Are our fans going to give us a break forever? No, so the winning has to start,” Fowler said. “And we expect it to.”