With yet another sub-.500 Angels team serving as the opponent this week, there’s more reason for Padres fans to appreciate Peter Seidler, the team chairman who died in November 2023.
How can it be that the small-market Padres have been much better at baseball, for several years in a row, than the big-market Angels just 90 miles to the north?
The best explanation is this: Seidler outperformed his Angels counterpart Arte Moreno in their roles as the franchise’s top decision-maker.
Look no further than Seidler’s far-reaching actions with A.J. Preller to see how the Padres have run laps around Moreno’s Angels in the past five-plus seasons.
Seidler was two years into a large rebuilding job when he approved Preller becoming the team’s top baseball executive in August 2014.
Though Preller would have some success early on, he also made large errors that may have caused another ownership group to fire him.
Seidler stayed firm. He insisted Preller had rare ability and energy. The part-owner drew a parallel, saying his private equity firm’s success derived not just from finding talented leaders to run companies, but sticking with them and helping them grow.
The same approach, he said, would bear fruit with Preller and the Padres.
Indeed, Preller learned from his mistakes and grew into one of MLB’s better team-builders. The franchise has reached the postseason in three of the past five years. Last year’s team won 93 games and a playoff series despite new ownership’s mandate to slash the player payroll. The 25-14 record the Padres took into Monday sets the club up well to get a fourth wild card in six years.
The Angels haven’t achieved similar success. Not by a longshot.
Moreno has hired four GMs. Tony Reagins, the first of those four, oversaw 100- and 97-game winners after succeeding well-regarded Bill Stoneman. From there, the Angels have been one of MLB’s most bland and underachieving franchises. They dipped late in Reagins’ four-year run and sagged further under Moreno’s subsequent hires. Among those overmatched team-builders was a finalist for the Padres’ job that Preller got, Billy Eppler.
Moreno leveraged his fortune earned largely in the billboard advertising industry and wisely bought the Angels from The Walt Disney Company in May 2003, eight months after the franchise had won its first World Series trophy. He inherited Stoneman, a good roster and a respectable farm system.
In October 2007, Stoneman stepped down, saying he was worn out. Moreno was put to a big test: Could he succeed as a long-term builder, as Seidler would do with the Padres?
The answer has been a resounding no. The Angels have won just one postseason series in the 17 seasons that followed. And it’ll take a turnaround for the club to avert a 10th consecutive losing season.
The Padres, in contrast, were frequent non-contenders leading up to when investors headed by Seidler and Ron Fowler bought control of the franchise in August 2012.
Though growing pains were evident among Seidler, Fowler, their hand-picked CEO Mike Dee and Preller, who were all new to their respective jobs, the bottom-line outcome has been this: the Padres have fulfilled Seidler’s forecast of evolving into an annual contender for the playoffs.
Why the big disparity between the Padres and Angels? Start with pitching aptitude.
Preller has evolved into one of MLB’s pitching gurus. Dating to the 2020-21 offseason, he figured out how to build, maintain and replenish pitching staffs that ranged from good to great, while also enjoying very good health relative to MLB’s pitching-injury crises.
For a decade-plus, Angels GMs have largely failed in those pitching departments.
Seidler targeted 2020 as the season for the Padres to initiate yearly playoff contention. Since then, the Padres stand eighth of 30 teams in both win-loss rate (.542) and ERA (3.84), while the Angels sit 25th in both win-loss rate (.430) and ERA (4.51).
So it was no surprise that when this week began, the Angels were second-to-last in run prevention among American League teams, while the Padres trailed only the Mets in the same category among National League clubs.
If the Angels have had a GM problem, has it also been a Moreno problem?
That’s impossible to know, but as the Padres continue to pitch well and play before much livelier crowds than the Angels draw in Anaheim, they’re validating Seidler’s faith in Preller.
