A Look At The Padres Head Scratching Moves
- Updated: August 9, 2016
The San Diego Padres certainly got their money’s worth in transactions this summer prior to the August 1 non-waiver trade deadline. Between June and July, they traded away a closer, four starting pitchers and two starting outfielders. While some of these moves appeared great at the time and have only gotten better as the weeks have passed, others left us scratching our heads.
There is hardly any veteran of note left on the roster, so San Diego certainly did its due diligence during trade season to take advantage of a non-competitive season. But the execution wasn’t always there. The first question mark comes from the team’s trade involving Andrew Cashner and Colin Rea. No one is even sure what went down when San Diego and Miami made a deal and then reversed half of the deal by sending Rea back to his old home. The Marlins claimed they received damaged goods in Rea, who was forced to the disabled list after injuring himself in his first outing with his new club. Since he presumably passed his physical before the original deal, who’s to say he didn’t actually hurt himself during that first outing?
Nevertheless, Rea is back with the club and on the DL. Someone who is gone for good is Matt Kemp, and that was an equally strange deal from the Padres’ point of view. San Diego traded the veteran Kemp to the Atlanta Braves for Hector Olivera.
This is simply a deal of one team’s trash for another team’s garbage, but wasn’t San Diego’s trash better in the first place? Kemp is a shell of the All-Star player he used to be, and an expensive shell at that. But he still plays baseball, takes the field, has some power remaining in his bat and is presumably a pretty okay guy. He is owed roughly $21 million per season through 2019, which is an atrocious contract for his production, but the Padres traded that for the albatross that is Olivera’s contract.
First, Olivera is seemingly not any of the things Kemp is. Olivera does not play baseball currently; he was designated for assignment by San Diego immediately after they acquired him. When he was playing, he didn’t have any power, albeit in a very small sample of plate appearances. And lastly, if reports are to be believed, Olivera is not an okay guy at all. He faces domestic-violence charges in Virginia stemming from an incident with a woman outside a bar. The league handed down an 82-game suspension for his actions that just wrapped up August 1, leading to the release by the Padres.
On top of all that, Olivera is owed about $47 million more on his old contract from the Dodgers that pays him through the 2020 season, at which point the then 35-year-old would be arbitration eligible. So what was the point of San Diego trading Kemp for a contract on a ledger that lasts longer than Kemp’s? Sure, Kemp is owed more money overall, but now the Padres are eating $7.5 million of that deal anyway. And Kemp has been a competent hitter these past few years even during his precipitous decline. He was worth 2.2 and 3.7 wins respectively the past two seasons with his bat alone. The MVP-caliber Kemp is gone forever, but what remains is guy who deserves at-bats on a regular basis.
I get the argument for shedding salary when Kemp isn’t helping San Diego win a pennant, but who knows where this team will be in two or three years. Now, instead of having a useful bat, it has nothing at all and is still paying around $12 million per season for it plus the $2.5 million per year owed on Kemp’s contract. Not all deadline deals are fun; this was one of those.
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