A.J. Preller
President of Baseball Operations and General Manager
A.J. Preller was promoted to his current position of president of baseball operations and general manager in February 2021. He originally joined the Padres as executive vice president/general manager on August 6, 2014, making him the 5th-longest tenured GM in Major League Baseball.
Under his leadership, the Padres have reached the postseason twice in the last four years. In 2022, San Diego reached the National League Championship Series, marking the first time the club advanced to the NLCS in 24 years (1998). San Diego defeated the New York Mets, 2-1, in the Wild Card Series and beat their division rival Los Angeles Dodgers, 3-1, in the NLDS before falling to the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-1, in the NLCS. The club ended a 14-year postseason drought in 2020 with a 37-23 (.617) regular season record, their best winning percentage in club history. After finishing the season with the second-best record in the National League, the Padres defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Wild Card Series, their first postseason series win since 1998 and the first postseason series win at Petco Park.
Over his tenure, Preller has overseen the acquisition of a significant level of talent through various channels. He signed marquee free agents, including Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts and Ha-Seong Kim. Across multiple years, he executed trades netting a talent haul of Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Joe Musgrove, Josh Hader, Jake Cronenworth and Trent Grisham among others. Along with the professional scouting group, Preller mined the waiver wire and minor league free agency to find key bullpen pieces and eventual All-Stars in Kirby Yates and Brad Hand along with Craig Stammen. Under his direction, the amateur scouting department has drafted several consensus top prospects, including Jackson Merrill, Robby Snelling, Dylan Lesko, MacKenzie Gore, C.J. Abrams, Robert Hassell and Jakob Marsee, while the international scouting staff signed Ethan Salas, Jairo Iriarte, Samuel Zavala, Adrian Morejon, Luis Patino, Tucupita Marcano and Leodalis De Vries.
While constructing a winning Major League roster, Preller has also strengthened and preserved the club’s farm system, earning a Top 3 ranking from 2019 through 2021. The Padres made history in 2019 with a record-breaking 10 players on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 Prospects list. The farm system is once again one of the strongest in MLB entering 2024, including No. 4 in ESPN’s yearly rankings (was 23rd entering 2023).
Prior to his time in San Diego, Preller served as assistant general manager of the Texas Rangers, overseeing the player development and scouting departments and serving as a key advisor on all player acquisitions. Over 10 years in Texas, Preller was integral to the Rangers’ efforts to upgrade the talent level throughout the system, playing an instrumental role in the club’s consecutive World Series appearances in 2010-11, as well as in the construction and organization of the Rangers’ development program in the Dominican Republic. From 2010-13, he served as a senior director of player personnel, overseeing professional, international and amateur scouting.
Before joining the Rangers, Preller spent three years in the baseball operations department of the Los Angeles Dodgers, working with the professional, amateur and international scouting departments. He also was heavily involved in salary arbitration work for the Dodgers.
A native of Huntington Station, N.Y., Preller graduated Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University in 1999 and was inducted into the South Huntington Hall of Fame in 2012. He began his baseball career with an internship for the Philadelphia Phillies before taking a position with the Arizona Fall League where he worked under Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, whom he later joined at Major League Baseball for two years, aiding Robinson in several areas and working closely with the Labor Relations Department on salary arbitration issues.
