According to Bob Nightengale of USA Today, the Padres “are aggressively looking for help, but are telling teams that prized catching prospect Ethan Salas is untouchable.”

Assuming that’s true, there's a contradiction here: you can’t be aggressive if you don’t have much to be aggressive with. Let’s take a look at what Padres President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller has to trade from his farm if Salas is excluded:

 

Leodalis De Vries

Trade value: $21.6M

Trendline: Neutral

 

De Vries is 17 years old, and already in A-ball. Baseball America rates him as a 60, but with extreme risk (which is not uncommon for prospects this young). Fangraphs rates him as a 50. His slash line is nothing special on the surface – .223/.345/.393 – but he’s showing patience and good zone discipline, with a 13.5% walk rate. Although he hasn’t broken out yet, it’s too early. If the Padres aren’t trading Salas, De Vries is their biggest chip.

Robby Snelling

Trade value: $10.6M

Trendline: Down

 

Snelling is having a rough year, and scouts have noticed. Across 15 AA starts, Snelling has a 6.14 ERA and 5.14 FIP. His HR/FB rate has ballooned to 17.3% – he’s giving up dingers right and left. He’s young for the level, though, at age 20, so that’s a plus, but the results are dismal, and Preller may have a hard time selling another team to take a chance on him.

 

Dylan Lesko

Trade value: $9.7M

Trendline: Down

 

Lesko is also 20, but he’s in High-A, and also struggling, with a 6.03 ERA and 5.68 FIP, across 15 starts. His K-BB% has slipped from 22.1% in A-ball last year, to 17% after he was moved up to High-A, then to an abysmal 9.5% this year. He’s just walking too many guys.

 

If we expand the scope to include former prospects who have had some MLB time, we can add one more:

 

Graham Pauley

Trade value: $6.1M

Trendline: Down

 

Pauley was brought up for 13 games earlier this year, hit .125/.125/.313, and was sent back down to AAA, where he has since hit .223/.331/.388, for a well-below-average 78 WRC+.

 

After this group, there’s a big dropoff to a bunch of players whose values are in the 2s and 1s. There may be a diamond in the rough there (Francis Pena?), but it’s hard to imagine another team overpaying for, say, 25-year-old outfielder Korry Howell (.171/.273/.284 at AA) or 23-year-old outfielder Joshua Mears (.177/.257/.375 at High-A).

The Padres don’t have much prospect capital left because, of course, they’ve already traded most of it away, in deals for Juan Soto, Dylan Cease, Luis Arraez, and several others (the 2020 package to get catcher Austin Nola from the Mariners looks even worse now than it did then, given the success of Andres Munoz alone). Unhelpfully, their top two pitching prospects are struggling, and their values have dropped accordingly. 

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So what are their options?

 

Preller has a reputation for working magic, but you really can’t pull blood from a stone, and the rest of the league knows it. That’s why the White Sox reportedly “quickly dismissed” his offer for Garrett Crochet ($61.1M in surplus value) – it probably included De Vries and at least one of Snelling or Lesko, but that’s still nowhere close to a fair package. And after already trading three good prospects (and one veteran reliever) to the White Sox for Cease (in a very fair deal), you’ve got to figure Chicago already took what they wanted and left the rest on the rack.

In other words, the farm has been picked over, and there’s not much left that anybody wants except for De Vries. Teams generally don’t trade for prospects who are running cold. Bad results are red flags.

So what can Preller get for De Vries (and maybe a lottery ticket like Pena)? They need another starter, but they won’t get Crochet or Tarik Skubal. A rental like Jack Flaherty is possible, but trading De Vries alone would be an overpay in that scenario, unless the Tigers threw in another asset, like reliever Jason Foley. 

 

Can they take on salary?

 

Maybe. According to Roster Resource, their estimated luxury tax commitment is close to $225M. Assuming they want to stay below the first threshold of $237M, and the new ownership group consents to it (which is not a given), that gives them about $12M in capacity. Add that to the $21M estimate of De Vries and you now have about $33M in total capital to work with. 

That’s still not going to compete with the likes of the Orioles and Dodgers, so Preller will need to focus more on cheaper acquisition targets that fit his budget. 

In other words, he’s shopping at Wal-Mart, while his competitors, with fatter prospect-capital wallets, are cruising Rodeo Drive.