TORONTO — The phone conversation that occurred on that February day six years ago between a lifelong San Diegan who had moved away for work and his dad, at home in East County, illustrates the magnitude of the moment.
Father and son had watched their favorite team be sometimes good but usually have a ceiling of mediocre. They had seen the promise in many players, all the while knowing the real promise was that those players wouldn’t be around long. They had loved cheering for some All-Stars and even Hall of Famers who came to town for a year or two at the end of their careers.
But this phone conversation about their team was 30 minutes of shock and anticipation and disbelief.
The Padres didn’t sign free agents to record contracts.
The Padres didn’t get a player like Manny Machado.
And then they did.
“I was still in my second or third year in the big leagues,” Joe Musgrove, then pitching for the Pirates, recalled of that phone call. “So Manny was still like this kind of idol, like a starstruck kind of guy to me. So talking to my dad and seeing how excited he was and trying to deny the excitement on my end, but feeling like San Diego has got like a real baseball player. … That felt like San Diego started to take a turn in baseball. And then you see the progression here.”
Musgrove became a part of that progression, arriving two offseasons later in a trade shortly after deals that brought Yu Darvish and Blake Snell.
There have been three playoff appearances in the past five seasons, including a run to the National League Championship Series in 2022. The Padres won 93 games last season, second most in franchise history. Attendance records have been set and reset and will probably be broken again this year.
It all seems normal now. San Diego is a baseball town.
But let us now that the Padres are a big deal and now that Fernando Tatis Jr. has returned to be all that his promise said he would be and now that we are swept up in Merrill Madness that one man’s arrival set a new course for a franchise and its fans.
Manny Machado changed the Padres.
And Manny Machado was the change.
‘Kind of unreal’
Should he start every game on this road trip, as he has started every game so far this season, Sunday will be Machado’s 860th game with the Padres.
That will equal the number he played with the Orioles.
“I’ve spent more time here than I did in Baltimore, and I felt like we spent a lifetime over there as well,” Machado said. “It’s kind of unreal.”
Machado was drafted third overall by the Orioles in 2010. He played 109 games in Double-A when he was called up to make his big-league debut on Aug. 9, 2012, in Baltimore, 34 days after turning 20 years old.
He played 156 games, made his first All-Star game and won his first Gold Glove in 2013. His 2014 season started late and ended early due to injuries before, in 2015, he played 162 games and finished in the top 10 in American League MVP voting.
While Machado was making his second All-Star team in ’15, the Padres were laying out their path to relevance.
And by the winter before the 2019 season, it was getting close to when they promised their championship window was going to open.
“We needed to make a statement,” Ron Fowler, the team’s chairman for the eight years leading up to Peter Seidler taking over in November 2020, said Monday. “We said in ’15 we were going to have a five-year plan. We were at a point where we needed to improve on the field. We had done a ton of stuff related to Petco. We had made capital improvements. We had the new scoreboard. We needed to improve the on-the-field product.”
Machado had been an All-Star again in 2016 and ’18, the last of those also being the final time he represented the Orioles in a game, as he was traded to the Dodgers during the All-Star break.
He helped that team get to the World Series, where they lost to the Red Sox, and then he became a free agent at 26 years old.
It was at that time that the Padres were looking for a third baseman. They were running out of options when, toward the latter part of the offseason, president of baseball operations A.J. Preller suggested almost as if on a whim to Fowler that they go after Machado.
Preller was ionate about Machado as a player. He also believed in the power of what is essentially the Machado team — Manny’s wife, Yainee, and brother-in-law, Yonder Alonso, the former Padres first baseman — as influences in the player’s life.
Fowler and Seidler believed in Preller enough to stay in as the price rose. And they eventually got their man by guaranteeing him $300 million over 10 years, the richest contract ever awarded a free agent in any U.S. sport.
Bryce Harper signed a 13-year, $330 million contract with the Phillies a week-and-a-half later, breaking the record. But that was beside the point.
A new order had been established in San Diego.
“Obviously,” Preller said Sunday, “Manny was a game changer in of getting one of the lead players in the sport who came to San Diego right in the prime of his career and indicating to the league that what we’ve talked about internally — that we were willing to to play on the big stage and being able to compete with anybody for any player at any time.”
A new Manny
It is true that Machado’s mere decision to come to San Diego altered the landscape. And also that his two top-five MVP finishes, pair of Silver Sluggers and 170 home runs have helped them win a lot of games.
But at the heart of the story about Machado being the man who changed the Padres is the changes Machado has made while with the Padres.
how Machado’s first year with the Padres went?
“I played like (expletive),” he said the day before the 2019 season ended.
He put up a 3.1 WAR, the lowest of any of his full seasons by a half-point and not quite half of his average over the previous four seasons.
He denied publicly that he essentially shut it down once the team was out of contention, but several sources over several years have said he privately owned up to that being the case.
That offseason began a series of reckonings Machado would have as he matured into his late 20s and then into his early 30s.
Over dinners and in hallway and dugout discussions, Preller and Fowler and Seidler massaged their messages into Machado. And he listened.
“You just learn,” Machado said. “Honestly, I’m lucky to have the group of people I have here.”
It was the arrival of Mike Shildt as Padres manager following the disastrously disappointing 2023 season that truly helped Machado realize and embrace his potential as a leader.
“Shildty has been a very big impact the last two years of how you can grow as a teammate, as a player, as a human being,” Machado said.
Shildt worked throughout his formative years in the clubhouse of the Orioles’ Double-A and spent 18 years rising through the ranks to eventually become manager of the Cardinals. He is an evangelist of the “Cardinal Way” and the “Orioles Way,” the doctrine of two of the major leagues’ most successful franchises at various points over the past 60 years.
Machado is one of the best at what he does and leaves no doubt that he knows it. Perhaps more than most, he values credibility. He felt Shildt had it.
“He knows what it takes to win,” Machado said. “He’s been in a really good organization for a very long time — his entire professional career. He brought that over here. And I understood that on the East Coast, playing in Baltimore, seeing the Yankees, playing against Boston. So his vision came here.”
Shildt had two other things going for him.
He was with the Padres, as an advisor and sort of de facto member of the coaching staff, for two seasons before being named manager. He saw the good and bad, the right and wrong and identified what could be done differently in of building the heart of a team.
For all his baseball acumen, the thing Shildt puts above all else is pouring love and into his players and empowering them to be their best version of themselves. He also makes it clear to them that they are the ones who play, the ones who do the hard work and the ones who get the credit.
Machado, as much as any player, has responded to Shildt’s brand of caring. Given Machado’s importance to the team, that is good for the Padres. And it is not coincidental that Shildt’s empathy for Machado’s particular load and his journey is perhaps unmatched.
“It’s one of the things life is about,” Shildt said. “One of the most challenging things in life is growth. And through growth comes pain. Generally speaking, many people aren’t willing to go through that pain to get that growth because it’s too hard. In Manny’s case, the growth comes very, very publicly with a lot of big expectations.”
Walking the talk
The 2023 Padres — and, to some extent, the 2020, ’21 and ’22 versions — were a star-studded group without a coalesced vision from the top.
Machado was the leader of the ’23 team because he was the best player, the highest paid, the most accomplished, the one with the most forceful personality. Others have said they felt he took on certain roles because he felt he had to.
Several teammates and others in the organization said in ’23 that they felt his clubhouse speeches lacked conviction; the speeches also didn’t land sometimes because they felt he was not doing some of the things he seemed to be asking of others.
Maybe this was fair. Maybe not. Maybe it was both an accurate and incomplete picture.
Shildt understands that teams with successful histories have a lot of people to share the burden of continuing a winning culture. Teams trying to establish a winning culture do not.
“When you’re starting to do something to the level we’re doing it, that is a lot,” Shildt said. “He has embraced all of it. There has been a learning curve to some of it. That’s just common sense; you’d expect that. It’s way more than people think. It’s not as easy as Manny has shown he can make it and how he handles it. Manny has continued to evolve. That’s the part I ire, among many things about Manny, is the growth, taking the next step.”
Not everyone is comfortable with every aspect of being a leader. Not everyone is equipped to be the leader that every other individual on a team needs.
Shildt created a sort of leadership council among players — a half-dozen or so veterans he and/or Machado can lean on to create a culture, spread a message and, when necessary, encourage a teammate or take him to task.
“Some people think it’s like, ‘OK, Manny, here you go. … You have all this money, you have this contract. You have to take up on this,’” Machado said. “And Shildty is like, ‘It takes everyone. It takes a whole team.’ It takes everyone to buy in. It takes everyone to chip in in their own way, whether it’s hitting home runs or saying one word to someone that can impact them in different ways.”
It was clear in the years leading up to and through ’23 that Machado felt leadership was best done by example, which he felt he set by playing well and playing every day, regardless of infirmity.
The result of Shildt not tasking Machado with being everything as a leader was that Machado became an even more complete one.
“In the time I’ve been here, his confidence in taking on the leadership role — I mean, he was the leader here when I first got here, but it was more of, ‘That’s Manny Machado. He’s the leader,’” Musgrove said. “And this is not a knock on Manny at all. I hope this just explains how much better he’s gotten over the last couple years. He wasn’t the leader that he is now back then. I think you just see him really taking ownership of the position and doing the uncomfortable things, still leading by example, just kind of doing everything the right way.”
One small change for Machado was that he has made an effort to in virtually every drill the team does before games. Before last season, that was an extremely rare sight.
Machado doesn’t do eyewash — exercises performed just to look like you’re working hard. Shildt got his buy-in by impressing on him how important it was to win on the margins and because Machado appreciates the effectiveness and focused nature of the work.
And while it was true that Machado often was in the training room or otherwise working instead of doing drills conducted by previous coaching staffs, he acknowledges it was good to embrace some new ways of doing things.
“There is a happy balance,” he said. “Just trying to be great. Some of these guys, man, they honestly push me to be better. That’s something that you kind of take for granted. Sometimes you lose that track. Every single day you’re playing the big leagues, you’re playing a game that you love, and you kind of just fall into that pattern of an everyday pattern. You fall into what’s worked for me, what I’ve always done. But there’s still other levels that you can still reach, and you can get there by doing stuff maybe a little bit different. So trying to get there, trying to be better.
“It’s just a matter of, you’ve got to put in the work. I want to be good and great for myself. And you do that for yourself, guys are going to follow. I want to be better. And, you know sometimes, yeah, you look at it, there’s certain things you’ve got to do for other people and for people to follow. But man, I’ve gotten to the point I’m just enjoying it. I’m just enjoying every aspect of it.”
‘The rock of this team’
Machado says simply that Shildt has empowered him to “just be me.”
Shildt would agree to that, to some extent.
“As he has grown comfortable in his own skin and who he is, I’m so happy he is happy being himself,” Shildt said. “Because he’s special.”
Shildt has also seen something else alight Machado.
“It’s been really good to see him have such a beautiful young family that he is so clearly in love with,” the manager said.
Machado became a father a year ago, and his toddler son is now a fixture in the clubhouse after many games — especially after wins.
The idea that being a dad would influence a man and how he might grow speaks really to the natural maturation process.
“We talked about internally: we understood Manny brings tons of positives,” Preller said of the team’s deliberations before g him. “Like anything, at 26, you’re not a finished product. We talked about how he was a younger player right in the prime of his career that had accomplished a lot, but there was gonna be a lot of growth over the course of his career. He has held true to that. He has played great on the field, but he’s continued to mature a ton as a person and leader and a player over his time in San Diego. That is something we talked to him a lot about before we signed him and have continued to talk to him.”
Machado will almost certainly retire with the Padres after g an extension two years ago that runs through 2033.
He is already the franchise’s home run leader. Provided he remains healthy, he will likely finish second in virtually every other offensive category behind Tony Gwynn.
Gwynn is beloved in San Diego arguably as much for his decision to remain with the team for his entire 20-year career as for his Hall of Fame achievements. Even though he finished his career with the Brewers, that sort of loyalty also applies to Trevor Hoffman, the other Hall of Famer with a statue at Petco Park.
Machado was not drafted or traded to the Padres, as Gwynn and Hoffman were. He chose to come here and has played the single biggest role in what has by many measures been the franchise’s best period.
“You sign here for the long term,” Machado said. “It’s not just about the instant moment. It’s about the future. … It’s growing. It’s definitely, from the first day that I got here, (San Diego) has turned into a baseball town. … Is there still a long way to go to continue to be great as an organization? Yeah, absolutely. There’s always growing pains.”
Already, though, he is the Manny.
“Just watch the games, you’ll learn,” Musgrove said. “Nobody gets a chant but Manny. He’s the only guy that still gets a name chant. Out of all the superstars that we have and the exciting players, Manny is still the rock of this team, still the guy that the city gets behind.”
