The hottest part of a July day in Phoenix is as good a place as any to begin trying to understand how the Padres have gotten here and where they think they’re going.

A general manager who is almost always dressed like he’s going sailing off Nantucket, sweat clinging to his polo shirt and khakis as he stands to the side of a batting cage. A 6-foot-3 17-year-old flicking his wrists and sending the first two batting practice pitches he sees the opposite way and over the outfield fence.

A.J. Preller smiling as he watches Fernando Tatis with the Padres Rookie League team.

Yes, that explains as well as anything the evolution of the plan the Padres executed this summer.


There is no way to go from A to B to C with this thing. And, really, it’s difficult to discern even what Point A is.

Tatis, however, provides an apt starting point.

It was June 4, five days before the amateur draft began, when the Padres made their first move of what everyone involved hopes will prove to be the most important two months in franchise history.

That is the day they sent $29 million and James Shields to the Chicago White Sox for Tatis.


But that deal can trace its ancestry to the previous spring and summer, when Preller and Padres international scouting director Chris Kemp liked what they saw from Tatis while scouting him in the Dominican Republic. And Tatis wasn’t signed at that time because the Padres didn’t really put in the work to do so because they were focused on wooing Yoan Moncada. And while they did end up offering Moncada the second-most money behind the Boston Red Sox, the Padres didn’t go higher because they had decided to save their funds for a deep dive into this year’s international class.

And so it goes.

Tracking the Padres’ machinations is like keeping up with a typical Preller sentence, which starts and stops and goes another direction and trails off and picks up and eventually portrays the equations and formulas and sabermetrics he seems to simultaneously be figuring out on a white board in his head.

While Preller won’t share the entire blueprint, he reveals enough to leave no doubt there is one. Conversations with the Padres G.M. – as well as his bosses – throughout this period of zealous organizational replenishment make it clear there is a plan and that the Padres deeply believe in it.


Yet, for the $80 million or so it put into acquiring international players and draft picks from June to August, the organization’s leaders know their strategy lies closer on the spectrum to throwing as much paint at the wall as possible than it does to creating a spreadsheet.

But the possibility that what remains on the wall will one day be a priceless work of art is what will make tracking this process so intriguing.

For sure, the plan will require patience while the paint dries.

The bulk of the players who will make up the next good Padres team will be pretty close next year.


But so far away.

All anyone has to do to see them play in the spring is drive up Interstate 15 to catch a Lake Elsinore Storm game.

In Single-A.

Preller smiles at the quip about Lake Elsinore.


“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty good. We’re going to have some guys.”

The Padres added 66 players to the organization between June 4 and Aug. 11. Almost half are 20-years-old or younger, and 21 are teenagers.

The math quite clearly shows the next couple years in San Diego will probably be rough. What happens beyond that, if the math works out, could be something unprecedented.

“It’s important to line up the window,” Preller said. “You want to have as many guys as you can coming in at the same time.”


Preller traded away four of what many ranked as the Padres top-10 prospects in 2015 in deals that brought Wil Myers and Craig Kimbrel. Setting aside that Preller did not asses the system he inherited to be good enough or deep enough, the players the Padres jettisoned were closer to the big leagues than the ones with which they recently restocked.

If projecting a Double-A prospect will be a solid major-leaguer is like hitting on 17 in blackjack, then projections about a kid who has never played or just started playing pro ball are like doubling down on 13 with the dealer showing a 10.

Even when you’re counting cards.

“If your (scouts) are good, if your process is good, if you know what you’re looking at, you work hard, you should be right,” Preller said. “… Is there risk involved? There’s risk in all these players, but the upside is what you’re trying to get to.”


We don’t know if this summer’s jolt to the Padres’ system will be the catalyst that eventually leads to them getting them back to the playoffs for the first time since 2006. But we can be certain they’re in this to win, going big or staying at home in the cellar.

Preller and the Padres wish the best for Burch Smith, Matt Wisler, Joe Ross and Trea Turner. Preller thinks he gave up some good players. He believes, however, he has acquired better players – and the kind that will continue to get better.

In fact, in forecasting the fruition of the Padres plan, we could start with that tenet. We could start with Yonder Alonso.

Alonso was a Padre. Perhaps, even, the middling first baseman was the Padre.


As in, a guy. Just a guy.

If this Preller-led ascension leads to a World Series title, how Alonso became a No.1 starter will be among the tales told again and again.

Once considered a cornerstone corner infielder on a team that could only hope to catch lightning in a thimble, Alonso was the key piece sent to the Oakland A’s last December to acquire Drew Pomeranz, a left-hander who had largely languished flip-flopping between the bullpen and starting rotation with two clubs over five major-league seasons. Some eighth months later, the Padres sent Pomeranz, by then an All-Star, to the Boston Red Sox for 18-year-old Anderson Espinoza, a righty considered by many to be the best pitcher in Boston’s farm system.

Whether this becomes a trail of bronze to silver to gold remains to be seen. Espinoza is two or three years from the majors. But his upside skyrockets past anything imagined for Alonso or Pomeranz.


This all working out depends on the development of a bunch of kids, not to mention their continued health and a fair amount of luck. But Preller & Co. are guided by a principle that says, essentially, you ride thoroughbreds, not mules, to victory in a stakes race.

“That’s what I’m trying to give the coaching staff and development staff,” Preller said. “If it clicks, it is going to click big. You’re not just giving them guys that are limited, that are going to be nice, but ultimately you’re trying to beat the Giants and the Dodgers. You need some real guys.”

When will the Padres arrive at “ultimately”?

Like children in the back seat of a car on a long trip, we ask repeatedly.


Preller, indeed, has his eyes fixed far down the road. He can squint and see the distant offramp – beyond a valley and then a steep incline.

This is a layering process.

Preller already made the gambit in 2015 where he felt he might have had the pitching to build around and took the best shot he could. He and his personnel staff are now going about building the right way, with a deep foundation that can withstand tremors.

“We have to get to a point where we have a lot more answers than questions,” Preller said. “We know we’ve gone into these seasons where, ‘If these seven things go right, we have a chance.’ You want to get to where you know these seven things are going to go wrong but you still have the answers.”


That’s part of the reason (along with his tenet of not making a trade unless he gets the precise value he wants) Preller held out at the trade deadline last year instead of sending Craig Kimbrel to the Red Sox. A little less than four months later, the Padres got what they considered a better deal, a fourth Red Sox prospect Preller coveted, Carlos Asuaje, as part of a trade for Kimbrel.

It’s why Preller did not trade Andrew Cashner after his first quality start in July. And, as his bosses’ anxiety increased, Preller didn’t so do after two or three starts. It was after Cashner’s fourth such start that the offers reached a level where Preller felt the Padres would get multiple players who could one day help them win.

“The biggest thing is probably getting to ’19, ’20,” Preller said. “That’s when you want to have the large majority of your club that is going to be young, fun, exciting, cheap, which will be important because then we’ll have the financial flexibility to go out and spend money on a guy or two to get us where we want to be.”

Like a good driver, an eye on the horizon does not mean Preller isn’t aware of the current traffic situation.


He talks of the possibility for success in 2017. He is optimistic about the bullpen and the power potential. He has high hopes for Hunter Renfroe, Manuel Margot and Austin Hedges. Alex Dickerson, Ryan Schimpf, Yangervis Solarte and Travis Jankowski will be here. Wil Myers remains the centerpiece of the near future.

But, really, the next couple years are about getting the players currently at the upper levels of the farm system experience in the big leagues, seeing where they can get to, while waiting for the arrival of the future.

On the July day Preller went to Arizona and saw Tatis raking in batting practice, he also saw first-round draft pick Cal Quantrill throw four no-hit innings and Hudson Potts, another 2016 first-round pick, drive in two and score three times. Preller also watched three of the Padres’ other top-10 draft picks throw bullpen sessions.

“That’s the fun part of going into our system now,” Preller said. “Sometimes you go to a game and you see one guy or two guys. Now you go to some of the affiliates, especially at the lower levels, there are five, six, seven guys you look and you can legitimately say, ‘That’s a big-league prospect.’ That’s when it starts getting fun, when you start getting depth and numbers and waves of guys coming through, because it is a numbers game.


“Some guys are going to get hurt, some guys aren’t going to develop. But when you start getting six, seven, eight or nine at each level … ultimately if you have six or seven legit major-league prospect and three or four get by and that’s at four or five levels, that’s a lot of talent.”

Some day. That’s the plan.

Maybe it’s a long ways away, but maybe we can start to see it as well.

RELATED

Andy Green on Jon Jay’s return