The Padres are finalizing a two-year extension with manager Mike Shildt, a team source told The Athletic, an expected outcome after Shildt led San Diego to the second-most wins in franchise history in his first year at the helm.
Shildt, whose contract was set to expire at the end of the 2025 season, will soon have a deal through 2027. The imminent extension, which was first reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune, will likely be announced Wednesday.
Padres president of baseball operations, A.J. Preller said last month that he and ownership had begun talks with Shildt regarding an extension. The Padres also are expected to retain most, if not all, of Shildt’s coaching staff, although final decisions on that front remain pending.
Under Shildt, the Padres won 93 games in 2024, including 43 of 63 games after the All-Star break. They advanced to the National League Division Series, where they came within one game of advancing but fell to the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers after an untimely drought on offense.
The overall season success still represented a stark contrast from 2023, when the Padres missed the playoffs amid their most disappointing campaign to date. Amid reports of a fractured relationship with Preller, manager Bob Melvin subsequently was allowed to leave to take the same job with the San Francisco Giants. Preller settled on Shildt, who had been in the Padres organization as a senior advisor, as his fifth full-time manager.
In 2024, it was hard not to notice that Shildt seemed more aligned with Preller than any of the executive’s previous managers.
Winning, of course, helped. It is the main reason Shildt, 56, will enter 2025 with increased job security.
“Seeing the way the staff and Mike led this team on the field was a lot of fun to be a part of,” Preller said last month. “And I thought the staff was extremely tight. We had staff members that came from the (farm) system. We had staff members that had been on our previous big-league staffs and teams, and then we had some experienced guys that came in from outside.
“And I think Mike being able to blend and get those guys together on the same page and get our team to play at a really high level, a lot of credit goes there.”
Shildt, a former National League Manager of the Year with the St. Louis Cardinals, originally joined the Padres as a player development consultant in early 2022 after his abrupt firing by the Cardinals. Including the 2024 Padres, he has led teams to the playoffs in each of his four full seasons as a big-league manager.
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