Why The Padres Had To Extend Manny Machado

San Diego made lots of big plans that were contingent on bringing their best player back.

The big breaking news out of the baseball world Sunday was that the San Diego Padres finalized an 11-year, $350 million extension with third baseman Manny Machado, keeping the star with the club for the long haul. Machado had previously said he would opt out of his existing contract, which has a player option after the 2023 season. This new deal reportedly has no opt-outs, though it also has a no-trade clause.

Obviously, this is an absolutely massive contract for a player who will turn 31 on July 6. (He will be 41 when it ends.) It represents the second $300 million contract of Machado’s career, making him the only player in baseball history to appear on this list twice:

With big questions coming up about MLB’s future revenue streams — the collapse of the cable-TV model leaves something like 20-25% of average team revenues potentially in doubt if rights payments are unable to be collected — as well as the structure of its financial system after the current CBA expires in 2026, one might question the wisdom of Padres owner Peter Seidler in opening up his wallet for such an extravagant deal. But the truth is, Seidler and the Padres had already made a series of decisions that gave them next to no choice but to give Machado what he wanted.

The Padres’ payroll table was already awash in huge contractual commitments before Machado ever signed this latest extension. They had given Fernando Tatis Jr. a 14-year, $340 million deal before the 2021 season, signed Joe Musgrove to a 5-year, $100 million extension last August, and more recently, they signed Xander Bogaerts away from the Red Sox with an 11-year, $280 million contract and extended 36-year-old starter Yu Darvish at 6 years and $108 million. Plus, they traded a ton of prospects at last year’s deadline for Juan Soto, who is still arbitration-eligible but will require a long-term extension before 2025.

The Padres’ plan is clearly to spend a lot of money and win a lot right now. But that plan doesn’t exactly work if Machado walks, considering that — for all of the team’s other big-ticket expenses — Machado is still San Diego’s best player. He had 7.1 Wins Above Replacement last season, which beat the team’s second-best producer (Darvish, at 4.7) by a mile. Even if we combine Soto’s output across the Padres and Washington Nationals (4.8), it doesn’t come close to matching Manny. And while Machado was more in the range of San Diego’s other best players in 2021 (4.7 WAR), he had 7.8 WAR per 162 team games in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, to go with his track record of multiple 6+ WAR seasons in Baltimore.

So spending all of this money on supporting talent while not also locking down Machado — who has shown be can be worth at least 5, if not 6-8, wins per season — would have torpedoed the Padres’ entire master plan to win as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Of course, we might ask if such a steep premium is truly worth it when other teams (like the Braves, Astros, Cardinals or even the hated division-rival Dodgers) have been able to develop cheaper homegrown stars to produce similar value. But the Padres don’t seem to trust their player development pipeline very much. Only 9.8% of the Padres’ WAR in 2022 was generated by players who actually debuted for San Diego, which ranked 7th-lowest in MLB. And even that number is arguably inflated artificially by Jake Cronenworth (who was drafted by the Rays but traded to San Diego as a prospect) and Ha-Seong Kim (who came up in the KBO and was only later signed by the Padres through the posting system).

Realistically, then, the Padres were looking at potentially losing their top star just as their roster behemoth was starting to flex its full power. That was clearly a nonstarter, so San Diego needed to do whatever it took to keep Machado in a brown-and-gold uniform for as long as possible.