So far, the San Diego Padres’ offseason will be remembered for two things: missing out on Roki Sasaki and the start of a bareknuckle ownership fight. As it turns out, they two might be related.
That ownership fight involving former Padres chairman Peter Seidler’s widow Sheel and brothers got uglier on Monday night. In response to Sheel’s lawsuit alleging breaches of fiduciary duty and fraud, Matt Seidler, one of the brothers, filed a response with its own set of allegations.
Most notably for Padres fans, Matt Seidler painted the timing of Sheel’s lawsuit as reckless in regard to the team’s pursuit of Sasaki, a Japanese phenom with so much built-in surplus value he could have transformed its offseason.
From The Athletic:
“During a crucial time when Padres management was in late negotiation stages with a star pitcher, Sheel’s lawsuit recklessly suggested that Matt and his brothers were plotting to relocate the Padres elsewhere,” the filing read.
The phrasing of “late negotiation stages” with Sasaki would indicate the Padres were making progress in convincing Sasaki to sign, though it’s hard to take something written in a legal filing as an objective portrayal of those negotiations.
However, Sasaki’s side definitely noticed:
“We knew it was an issue,” Sasaki’s agent, Joel Wolfe, said Tuesday when presented with the wording in Matt Seidler’s response. “The timing of it appeared oddly strategic, and I wanted to allow the Padres to deal with it first on their own terms rather than try to figure it out on our own, which they did.”
The Padres were seen as the most likely team to land Sasaki if he spurned the Dodgers and were not shy about their interest. Padres general manager A.J. Preller went as far as calling out Sasaki by name at Peter Seidler’s celebration of life last March. The team was reported to be willing to trade for enough international bonus pool money to offer him a bonus in excess of $10 million, significantly higher than the $6.5 million he got from the Dodgers.
Instead, Sasaki chose the Dodgers. During his introductory news conference, he said the No. 1 thing that stood out about his new team was “the stability of the front office.”
Some saw that as an indirect dig at the Padres and their situation. Former Padres outfielder Jurickson Profar said things more explicitly after leaving the team for a three-year, $42 million deal with the Atlanta Braves, calling out the team’s ownership “issue” as a reason why a return to San Diego would have been difficult.
More broadly, the team’s ownership woes can be seen by the fact the Padres didn’t sign a free agent to a major-league contract this offseason until Tuesday, when they brought back catcher Elias Díaz on a one-year, $3.5 million deal. Meanwhile, the Dodgers have blown the baseball world away and the San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks have both signed free agents to nine-figure deals.
San Diego ran up some of the largest payrolls in baseball during the last years of Peter Seidler’s life, but have continued to cut payroll since losing him.
Matt Seidler’s response to Sheel reportedly goes well beyond the Sasaki line, alleging she demanded $20 million in annual distributions from the team and describing her as “unhappy” that Peter didn’t leave her in control of the team after his death. It claims that Peter amended his trust at least seven times following his marriage in 2008 and didn’t name her as a successor trustee once.
Another of Peter’s brothers, John Seidler, is scheduled to be voted by MLB owners as the Padres’ permanent control person next week.
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