It is no longer an issue. If it ever was.

In the upstairs offices at Petco Park, Andy Green has always been considered the man who would not only lead the Padres to the future but also well into it.

Officially now, the team has committed to Green being its manager through 2021, awarding him with a three-year contract extension that will be announced Sunday.

“We like him a lot,” Padres executive chairman Ron Fowler said Saturday. “We think he’s the right guy with us for a young team. We think he’s a teacher – not just baseball but teaching these guys about being a solid human being and a good citizen. … We think he’s a good baseball mind. We like his tenacity and his toughness, as well as the way he supports these guys the way they need to be supported.”


Fowler and Padres principal owner Peter Seidler began talking with Green about the extension around the start of this season, promising him at that time that he would not enter the final year of his original contract, which was set to expire after the ’18 season.

The details were refined over the last several weeks.

“They felt inclined to bring it to me now,” Green said. “And I have nothing else I want to do but pour myself into building a championship-caliber club in San Diego. … (The extension) is a commitment to the path we’re on, a commitment in the belief we’re building something special.”

Green said he never brought up his job status and that it was a “periphery” issue.


Said Fowler: “It was easy.”

The team’s always-blunt chairman described speculation that Green was being used to chaperon the youngest team in the majors only until it matured as “B.S.”

While the extension was long in the works, the consistent conjecture about Green not being in the plans long-term did play a part in the timing of the announcement.

The Padres, who are 51-65 and 31 games out of first-place, play 38 of their 46 remaining games against teams with winning records.


“It’s probably going to be a tough end of the year,” Fowler said. “We don’t want it lingering. We want people to know, we want Andy to know he’s our manager for the long term.”

Green, who turned 40 last month, was hired after the 2015 season. He has a 119-159 record in his first major-league managerial gig.

While Green is emphatic about managing to win every night, he and everyone else in the organization acknowledges the win-loss record is not the way the team is to be measured at this point. The Padres are enamored with the way Green relates to players, thinks outside the box both during games and in player development and fosters cohesion throughout the organization.

General manager A.J. Preller, who worked to finalize the deal over the last month, said Green has continued to check every box the Padres anticipated when they hired him. The past year-and-a-half has essentially been a formality, as Green simply needed to prove he was who they thought he was.


“It was (an opportunity) to prove himself … and we think he has,” Preller said. “That’s what this contract says. … It speaks to the big picture of what we’re in the process of creating as an organization – hire good people and get stability.

“It speaks to the notion of Andy growing with us as we’re in this building phase and then into the winning phase, him being the guy that can wear a lot of hats. He’s guy who can relate to young players putting on development hat, and he’s also a guy over the next years as we are competitive who gives us an advantage as we start to win championships.”

Green said Saturday he believes that with the talent in the Padres minor-league system combined with the young players on the major-league roster beginning to establish themselves the Padres are “going to have more than enough” to be competitive before his contract is up.

“I think everyone in our organization has a commitment to the path were on that will have us competing for a playoff spot here very soon,” he said.


His bosses have generally targeted 2019 or ‘20 as the time when they realistically expect to be contending for a return to the playoffs for the first time since 2006.

The extension through 2021 shows who they believe will guide them there.