Padres Preparing To Spend Insane Amount of Money

San Diego has plans to sign several International free agents

For the Padres, 2016 has not gone according to plan. But help might be on the way. In, like, eight years.

On Saturday, July 2nd, Major League Baseball’s International signing period opens and the Padres are expected to go crazy. They’re rumored to be the favorites to land three of the top six players on the market (according to Baseball America rankings), two of them from the Dominican Republic and one from Venezuela.

The Friars are also said to be on the frontrunners on a few highly regarded Cuban prospects, although it’s not certain when (or if) they’ll be cleared and made available by MLB. The kicker here is how much cash the Padres are willing to spend to do this.

MLB gives you a certain amount of money based on your finish from the year before. You’re allowed to go over your pool allotment but there’s a tax for doing so. The Padres have a pool allotment of about $3.3 million.

If they land all the players they've been linked to it will cost them about $30 million, and that’s just for the players themselves. The tax for going over your allotment is one dollar for every dollar you go over. So if the Padres really go $27 million over their pool they’ll have to pay a $27 million tax.

That is astonishing for a franchise that has a well-earned reputation of frugality. The ownership group led by Ron Fowler and Peter Seidler has put its faith in General Manager A.J. Preller, who came to San Diego with the reputation of being a wizard with Latin American players.

Keep in mind, all this cash will be to lock up a bunch of 16-and-17-year-old kids, which would appear to be a huge gamble. But is it really? That is among the questions I asked A.J. about what could be a defining moment in Padres franchise history.

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