When the Padres surprisingly hired A.J. Preller as their new general manager in August, team president Mike Dee described him as the candidate who would be best at bringing in “impact talent, championship-level talent.”
While it’s unknown if Preller will bring San Diego its first World Series, he has turned the bland franchise into the talk of baseball in his first five months on the job.
Preller made his latest strike Monday by signing James Shields to a four-year deal to be the ace of the Padres’ rotation. The 37-year-old’s offseason additions also included landing Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Will Middlebrooks and Derek Norris.
Preller was seen as an out-of-the-box choice by San Diego, though the Long Island native is raved about in baseball circles.
“I think one of the reasons we got along so well was because we shared ideas and decisions,” Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who worked with Preller for the Arizona Fall League, told MLB.com.
“We talked to each other like equals. He had his own thoughts. He wasn’t a ‘yes’ man. And he’d come to me with fresh ideas, things I hadn’t thought about.”
Preller, a Cornell graduate, started his life in baseball working as an intern for the Phillies before going to the Arizona Fall League and then as a scout for the Dodgers and finally the Rangers. That’s where Preller made his bones as a scout scouring Latin America.
“At the time, the rules were different, and I think A.J. identified it was an area where you could make hay … and then he took it to another level,” Rangers GM Jon Daniels told the website. “He taught himself Spanish, spent 200 nights every year there. It wasn’t just a trial deal, it was immersion.
“It wasn’t any magic formula. He saw that there was an opportunity to beat some people. He just flat outworked people. He got people here in the mindset that we’re going to do things differently. At the time, 2004-05, there weren’t many teams there. He created the model teams are now going with.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that Preller has now involved the Padres in the pursuit of Yoan Moncada — the latest projected star to come out of Cuba.
But Preller’s time as a scout was not without controversy. He was suspended one month by MLB for reportedly negotiating with a player who had been suspended for lying about his age. Preller shrugged it off as a “disagreement” between the Rangers and the league, but it was a consideration when the Padres investigated his background.
“We discussed this in detail with A.J. and with senior management at MLB. We were assured by MLB that the suspension was not a problem in hiring A.J. to be our GM,” Padres executive Ron Fowler told ESPN.com.
And while the Padres have not played a single game with Preller at the helm, the team is relevant after years of inhabiting the NL West basement with middling talent and punchless lineups.
Preller talked about his reputation with ESPN “as this maverick out in the middle of nowhere, doing my job. The biggest thing is: Can you connect people? That’s what we did with the Rangers, and that’s what I want to do with the Padres.”
From Long Island to Philadelphia to years in Latin America, Preller has gone from anonymous scout to one of baseball’s most interesting men.