A.J. Preller is generally not the emotional type.
But as the Padres' president of baseball operations stood in the visitors' dugout at PNC Park a few days ago discussing the trade that sent a bunch of young players to Cleveland in August 2020, he ran a finger down his cheek.
"I don't want to say I had tears in my eyes," he said. "But I had tears in my eyes."
That reaction was specifically about the conversation in which he told Gabriel Arias he had been traded as part of the mega-deal that brought pitcher Mike Clevinger to the Padres.
"That's the hardest part of the job," Preller said.
He recalled the first time he saw Arias as a 15-year-old, remembered what he walked like, what he was wearing, what they talked about in Spanish.
"You get attached," he said.
The topic sent him down a somewhat wistful path in which he discussed Ty France and Jack Suwinski and Tucupita Marcano and others shipped as part of the construction process of the Padres' current roster.
"I follow them all," Preller said. "I love those guys."
He doesn't plan to be at Progressive Field for the intermarried family reunion that will take place over the next two days. There's a team to continue building, places to be, probably some teenage baseball players to see in some far-flung locale.
He might, later in the season, make it to Seattle, where there are almost as many former Padres playing as there are in Cleveland.
But not quite.
Austin Hedges, Owen Miller, Josh Naylor and Franmil Reyes are in the Guardians' lineup more days than not this season. Cal Quantrill will be their starting pitcher Wednesday against the Padres.
That is, in order, a catcher who played 406 games for the Padres from 2015 to '20; a former top-11 Padres prospect; a former top-10 prospect who played 112 games for the Padres in '19 and '20; a gregarious slugger who was beloved in the team's clubhouse and by its fans during his time in San Diego from 2018 to '19, and a first-round draft pick who pitched 33 games for the Padres in '19 and '20.
(Arias, the Guardians' third-ranked prospect who has started two games for them, fractured his hand Sunday in a game at Triple-A. Pitcher Joey Cantillo, who was the Padres' seventh-ranked prospect at the time of the Clevinger trade, is in Double-A.)
MacKenzie Gore, drafted third overall by the Padres in 2017, will start Wednesday against Quantrill, drafted eighth overall by the Padres in 2016.
That is after Clevinger makes his season debut Tuesday facing off against his friend, Zach Plesac.
"It's going to be so great," said Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla, who spent 21 years coaching in the Guardians organization.
Clevinger has hardly been able to contain his excitement. He was traded to the Guardians (then the Indians) by the Angels as a minor leaguer in 2014 and made his big-league debut in 2016. He figured he would spend his career in Cleveland, where he went 42-22 with a 3.30 ERA in 101 games.
"I've had (this series) marked on my calendar since before the season, since the schedule dropped," he said last week.
Clevinger is at the heart of all this Padres-Guardians crossover.
After the signings of Eric Hosmer and Manny Machado and the fortuitous trade in 2016 for Fernando Tatis Jr., the Clevinger trade stands out for its part in shaping the existing makeup of the Padres. Arguably, it could be considered the defining move. More than any of the other ones in which Preller cashed in his prospect chips, this trade set up the Padres to be what they are now — a $209 million veteran-stocked roster urgently chasing a championship.
In that deal, Preller spent astonishing player capital on a proven starting pitcher. He sent a half-dozen players, including five who were 25 or younger and possessed of tremendous upside, to the Guardians for a pitcher the Padres will have, by the end of 2022. paid a little more than $12 million for what they can hope is about a season's worth of work.
Multiple Padres executives have acknowledged recently that many of the team's big moves that followed were set up by the investment Preller made at the trade deadline in 2020.
That Clevinger's and Dinelson Lamet's elbow issues would play a large part in derailing the Padres in the 2020 postseason and that Clevinger required a second Tommy John surgery that November could not be known at the time.
"We looked at Clevinger as a guy we're getting for three pennant races," Preller said. "And I think that enabled us to be open to the fact that we're putting the number of guys that we did into that deal. And I think also, (a big) factor is the talent that we we've built up in the organization at the big-league level and the minor-league level. I don't want to be flippant about it, but the opportunity of certain guys to play was going to be limited."
Miller plays first and second base. Arias is a middle infielder who can also play third.
Hedges was not ever seen by the Padres' decision makers as a long-term fit. Giving up Naylor and Quantrill was considered the price of doing business.
"We made a deal that ultimately was about getting somebody who could pitch in the front of a rotation," Preller said. "… We're not looking to move those guys, but, you know, having a team we thought could win a World Series in '20 and '21, having Clevenger at the front of the rotation, that was the motivation behind the deal."
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