San Diego Padres

An expansion club and a long apprenticeship

The Padres joined the National League as an expansion franchise in 1969, taking their name from the Pacific Coast League side that had arrived in the city in 1936. They played at San Diego Stadium from 1969 until 2003, and for most of those decades the club's landmarks were individual rather than collective: Randy Jones on the mound in the mid-1970s, Dave Winfield in the outfield, and above all Tony Gwynn, who won eight National League batting titles in a career spent entirely in San Diego.

Six numbers hang retired at the ballpark — Steve Garvey's 6, Gwynn's 19, Winfield's 31, Jones's 35 and Trevor Hoffman's 51, alongside Jackie Robinson's 42, retired across the sport. Gwynn and Hoffman both went into the Hall of Fame with the Padres listed as their primary club, which for a long stretch was the sum of what the franchise had to show for itself.

Two pennants, no trophy

The club has won the National League twice. In 1984 it reached the World Series and lost to the Detroit Tigers; in 1998, behind a pitching staff anchored by Hoffman, it reached the World Series again and lost to the New York Yankees. Those remain the only two pennants in franchise history. Five division titles sit alongside them — 1984, 1996, 1998, 2005 and 2006 — and no championship.

The move downtown changed the club's economics more than its results. Petco Park opened on 8 April 2004 at a cost of more than $450 million, clad in Indian sandstone and stucco, with a hundred-year-old brick warehouse, the Western Metal Supply Co. building, preserved in left field and its southeast corner serving as the foul pole. Capacity now stands at 39,860. The grandstand looks out towards San Diego Bay and Balboa Park, and the outfield opens onto Gallagher Square, a public lawn that stays open when there is no game on.

The dragon up the freeway

The 2020s reshaped the franchise's reputation, largely through its relationship with Los Angeles. The Dodgers swept the Padres out of the 2020 Division Series in Arlington under pandemic protocols. Two years later San Diego returned the favour in the most unlikely circumstances available, beating a Dodgers side that had won 111 regular-season games — 22 more than the Padres — three games to one, and reaching a first NLCS since 1998 before losing to Philadelphia in five.

The 2024 Division Series went the other way: San Diego led 2-1 and lost in five, in a series marked by objects thrown at Padres players and open confrontation between the dugouts. The late owner Peter Seidler's description of the Dodgers as the dragon up the freeway has outlived him as the club's working self-image. Last October the Padres went out in the wild-card round at Wrigley Field, with the Cubs taking two of three.

A first-time manager and a season that nearly went

Mike Shildt retired on 13 October 2025 after two seasons in San Diego, aged 57, citing the toll the job had taken on him mentally, physically and emotionally. A.J. Preller's replacement was an unusual one. Craig Stammen, a reliever in the majors from 2009 to 2022 and a Padre for the last six of those years, had been sitting on the other side of the table interviewing candidates from his front-office post. He got the job himself in November on a three-year deal, with no previous managerial or coaching experience anywhere in professional baseball.

For half a season the appointment looked indefensible. San Diego reached 29-18 on 18 May and led the National League West. Then it came apart: by 23 July the record was 50-53. Fernando Tatis Jr. did not hit his first home run until his 56th game. Manny Machado spent stretches of the spring batting below.200. Nick Pivetta and Joe Musgrove both lost time to injury, and by late July the lineup ranked last in the majors in batting average.

Deadline business, then a 17-3 finish

Working with a thinner farm system than in previous years, Preller bought rotation rather than bats at the deadline in early August, taking right-hander Casey Mize and left-hander Robbie Ray, plus utility man Gage Workman from Detroit and reliever Hunter Stratton from Pittsburgh. The Ray deal closed on deadline morning and cost San Francisco's price of two top-ten prospects, Miguel Mendez and Joniel Hernandez. Preller was blunt about the bat he did not get: "Ultimately, we didn't line up at the Deadline with that left-handed bat."

What followed was the best stretch of the club's recent history. San Diego closed the season 17-3, winning its final seven series. A 4-2 win over the Dodgers on 24 September secured a postseason place; a 9-4 win over Arizona on 28 September, with Gavin Sheets homering and Freddy Fermin driving in three while Tatis, Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts were rested, secured the top wild card. The final record was 91-71, second in the West.

The individual lines are less impressive than the finish. Tatis hit.285 with 25 home runs and 81 runs batted in; Merrill.254 with 26 and 86; Machado only.218, but with 28 home runs and 84 runs batted in. The two genuine surprises were Mason Miller, who closed out games at a level few relievers in the sport matched this year, and Ty France, signed cheaply and productive enough to enter the Comeback Player conversation. Michael King, the Game 1 starter, finished 12-10 with a 3.21 earned run average. It is a fifth consecutive winning season, a franchise record, and a third consecutive postseason, also a first.

New owners, and a ballpark rebuilt around them

The ownership question that had hung over the club since Seidler's death was settled this summer. Major League Baseball's owners unanimously approved the sale of the Padres to José E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones on 17 August, at a reported $3.9 billion — the richest sale in the sport's history, comfortably past the $2.4 billion Steve Cohen paid for the Mets in 2020. Jones becomes the first Black woman to hold majority ownership of a major league club; Feliciano, born in Puerto Rico, the first Puerto Rican.

The ballpark itself has been steadily reworked. Two video boards measuring 24 feet by 22 feet went up on the first- and third-base towers for 2026, carrying live pitcher metrics during at-bats. A cocktail lounge, the Diamond Room, opened next to Gallagher Square in a deliberately 1970s register of velvet, mirrors and turntables. Concessions added Pop Pie Company and the Japanese curry chain Coco Ichibanya. Less popularly, paid parking arrived, and a share of the schedule moved to NBC.