Amid their recent celebrations, the Padres should’ve sent crates of champagne to the White Sox for trading them Dylan Cease a week before the season began.
The Padres, desperate at the time, landed a durable ace on a low salary, then saw him finish among the top big leaguers in ERA, innings and strikeout rate.
Oh yeah: he also threw the second no-hitter in club history.
Cease, 28, will make the first postseason start of his career Saturday in Game 1 of the best-of-five National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium, opposite Yoshinobu Yamomoto, the Japanese star whom L.A. acquired for about $400 million, all told, last winter.
The trade for Cease represents a big victory for Padres team-builder A.J. Preller and his scouts. It also throws shade on Dodgers execs Andrew Friedman and Brandon Gomes for gambling on Tyler Glasnow instead of trading for Cease.
Preller was in dire need of an innings-eater entering spring training, even with the Juan Soto trade that brought Michael King and other pitchers from the Yankees.
Joe Musgrove or Yu Darvish couldn’t be expected to hold up for long stretches, nor was the farm system ready to graduate any pitchers who could do it.
Because of a budget crunch that cut $90 million from last year’s payroll, Preller couldn’t retain three free-agent pitchers who’d outperformed their salaries in 2023: Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo.
With free-agent swingman Nick Martinez cashing on his fine Padres tenure, too, Preller was up against it.
Or was he?
Judging by the first-year results of the March 14 trade, Preller seemed to have more leverage than his White Sox counterparts – Chris Getz, a rookie general manager, and Jerry Reinsdorf, the club’s longtime owner.
Cease outperformed his $8 million salary by tens of millions of dollars in making an MLB-best 33 starts and pitching to a 3.47 ERA across 189.1 innings.
He led his new team in innings pitched, quality starts and fielding independent ERA.
Musgrove and Darvish sat out multiple months with injuries. The rotation hit other rough patches. Cease never missed a start and allowed one run or fewer in 13 outings that exceeded five innings.
As for the White Sox’ four acquisitions, three hit major snags.
Drew Thorpe, 24, posted a 5.48 ERA before having surgery to shave a bone spur in his elbow. Sidelined by a back ailment since May, reliever Steve Wilson provided none of the summer trade value that Chicago — headed to 121 defeats — must’ve sought..
The trade’s hitting prospect, 19-year-old Samuel Zavala, batted .187 with a high strikeout rate in high-Class A.
The best player Preller sent to the Sox, said a neutral scout in March, was pitcher Jairo Iriarte, 22.
Signed by Padres scouts out of the Dominican Republic for $75,000, Iriarte had a good season with Chicago’s Double-A club this year, then made his big-league debut. Working in relief, Iriarte faced the Padres last month at Petco Park
It’s hard to overstate Cease’s productivity — valued at $35.8 million by analytics site FanGraphs.com — for a budget-constrained Padres team that was in win-now mode in part also because of the back-loaded mega-contracts to infielder Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts, both 32.
Cease isn’t a one-year rental. The Padres control his negotiating rights through next season.
In trading for Glasnow last December and not the durable Cease then or much later, the Dodgers opted for a pitcher who had comparable ability to shut down opponents but carried a far riskier health profile, no demonstrated ability to soak up a high number of innings and stood just one year from free agency.
Where Cease was one of nine pitchers to amass 165 innings in each of the previous three seasons, the 30-year-old Glasnow has yet to put up 125 innings in a big-league season.
Further, Glasnow was due a Rays-record $25 million – more than three times Cease’s salary – in 2024 before becoming eligible for free agency.
The Dodgers paid up. They signed Glasnow to four-year, $111.5-million extension on top of the $25 million soon after sending pitcher Ryan Pepiot and outfielder Jonny DeLuca to Tampa.
Glasnow broke down again, an elbow injury shutting him down in August. He finished with 134 innings and a 3.49 ERA. (Pepiot, 27, gave Tampa 130 innings and a 3.60 ERA on a $740,000 salary.)
Biding his time until March, Preller landed Cease less than a week before the Padres and Dodgers opened the season in South Korea.
It wasn’t the first time the Sox rescued the Padres.
In 2016 they sent them Fernando Tatis, Jr. to take James Shields off Preller’s hands at a time when Preller’s tenure had earned mediocre-or-worse grades.
Six years earlier, the Sox helped pave the 2010 Padres’ road to 90 victories by trading for Jake Peavy and his $52 million in guaranteed money soon before his body broke down.
The Padres really ought to send Reinsdorf a thank-you note.
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