Manny Machado did the math out loud the day new ownership walked into San Diego, and the number still sits wrong with half the league. Eight hundred million dollars in 2012. A $3.9 billion sale fourteen years later. Nearly five times the money. “In my business, I wish I could do that investment,” Machado said. “That’s a great return.”
I call that the most inconvenient fact in baseball’s labor fight. The Padres have become the story both sides need. Players and union officials point at the late Peter Seidler and treat him like a blueprint: small-market owner spends hard, elevates the roster, turns the park into a destination, and the franchise value detonates. League voices and rival owners read the same arc as a cautionary tale. Southern California. One-sport town. A loan for liquidity. Juan Soto traded specifically to duck under the luxury tax. A barren farm system. An unsustainable payroll.
I am planting a flag. Seidler’s run is the cleanest argument against a salary cap that baseball has produced in a decade, and the “unique situation” chorus is mostly cover for owners who never intended to try it.
Twenty-Fourth Market, Paying Into the Pot
The 2019 Padres ranked 24th in payroll and had missed the playoffs for thirteen straight years. Machado arrived that spring and said it flat: “No one wanted to play here.” Bottom tier of organizations. Seidler took full control in November 2020. Over the next three years the payroll jumped from $180 million to $225 million to more than $250 million by 2023, trailing only the Yankees and Mets.
Attendance cracked three million every year since 2023. Franchise records on a near-annual loop. In 2026 the club is staring at a fifth consecutive winning season and a third straight playoff berth, both firsts in franchise history. The same franchise that leaned on revenue sharing in the early 2010s has paid into the pot every year since 2023. Still ranked 24th in market size under the current CBA.
Jake Cronenworth, on the MLBPA executive subcommittee, cut through the noise: “You can say it’s unique, you can say it’s not. But every club has the ability to do what we did — invest in a good product on the field, invest in the community, and see what happens.”
Market size is a ranking on a spreadsheet. Spending is a decision. San Diego made the second one and the first one stopped mattering as much.
The Outlier Label Is Doing Heavy Lifting
The counter-case has real edges. Seidler ate losses along the way. Liquidity got tight enough that a loan entered the picture. Soto got moved to get under the tax threshold. The farm thinned out. After Seidler’s death in November 2023 the payroll dropped hard before climbing back into the top ten in 2025 and 2026. Rival owners and league officials insist you cannot copy this path because the location and the one-sport monopoly inflated the exit price.
Geography helped. No argument. The Padres sit in Southern California without an NFL or NBA franchise splitting the town’s attention, and that premium showed up in the sale.
The “you can’t follow this” line still lets every low-spending owner off the hook. The Padres went from a place nobody wanted to a park setting attendance records because the owner put real money into talent and the product arrived. Machado framed the trade-off without spin: invest in the team and the organization, and good players want in while fans show up to support it. The return was $3.9 billion. That is a balance sheet that grew because somebody treated a 24th-ranked market like it deserved an actual roster.
The cautionary-tale version needs the Soto deal and the empty farm to feel complete. Those costs were real. They do not cancel five straight winning seasons or the flip from revenue-sharing taker to payer. Calling a payroll “unsustainable” after it positioned the franchise for a record sale is a strange definition of failure.
Labor Needs San Diego More Than San Diego Needs Labor
MLB wants a cap and a floor. The union wants a free market that actually functions when an owner chooses to use it. The Padres got drafted as mascot for both because the same facts bend depending on which sentence you lead with.
Lead with the loan and the Soto trade and you get a warning label. Lead with $800 million to $3.9 billion, a 24th market paying into revenue sharing, and three straight October trips and you get a blueprint. I am on the blueprint side. Cronenworth is right that every club has the ability. The ones who refuse are running a different calculation, one that prefers controllable losses and shared checks over the mess of trying to win out loud.
Seidler absorbed the losses. The franchise got nearly five times richer. Fans got a product worth three million tickets a year. Machado got a destination instead of a punch line. Baseball’s next CBA fight will scream about competitive balance and small-market survival for months. San Diego already answered the survival question. The people calling it a cautionary tale never wanted that answer on the record.
The $3.9 billion sale is still the loudest number in the room.
