Hours after the offseason officially got underway Thursday, the San Diego Padres made their first addition of the winter, signing journeyman utility player Pablo Reyes to a minor league deal.
The 32-year-old has seen big league action in every season since 2018, except for the 2020 campaign, when he served a suspension for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy. He opened 2025 with the Yankees, making just 34 plate appearances before being outrighted in early June. He refused the assignment and became a free agent, then finished the year in the Mets organization. He has an .808 career OPS in over 1,600 Triple-A appearances, but just a .647 mark in 259 big league games.
Lopez will be in line for an invitation to big league camp, but is likely to open the year in El Paso.
While Lopez was arriving, 22 players who finished the year in the Padres minor league system were declared minor league free agents on the fifth day after the World Series ended.
Eguy Rosario will bid farewell to the only organization he’s known (Photo: Jorge Salgado)
For perhaps none of them was it a more surprising outcome than infielder Eguy Rosario, who was the longest-tenured player in the system. He ranked as the 15th prospect in the system going into 2024 before exceeding rookie eligibility and seemed likely to earn a big league job out of camp in 2025. He didn’t, went unclaimed through waivers, and then performed so poorly in El Paso that he wound up back at the complex by mid-May. He suffered a sports hernia there and spent more than two months on the shelf. He returned to action with rough showings in Fort Wayne and San Antonio at the end of the year, finishing the season with a .563 combined OPS. The 26-year-old, who originally signed all the way back in 2015, will be looking for a minor league deal with just his second career organization heading into 2026.
Two other players who have seen big league time with the Padres also reached the open market. Utilityman Tyler Wade got plenty of action in the majors early in 2025, but logged only three plate appearances before being designated for assignment at the start of August and didn’t play in the final month of the season in El Paso. Wade originally came to the Padres as a minor league free agent with an invitation to spring training, and will likely seek a similar opportunity in a new organization this winter.
Righty Reiss Knehr, the Padres’ 20th-round pick in 2018 and a veteran of 31 major league appearances over parts of three seasons, missed all of 2024 following Tommy John surgery, but returned to the organization on a minor league deal last spring. He made 18 appearances through the first three months of the season solely as a reliever, but had another injury to his elbow and missed the rest of the campaign. It is unclear whether he is healthy enough to pursue another opportunity in 2026.
Infielder Nerwilian Cedeño and lefty Bodi Rascon, who both earned appearances on multiple of our individual top 30 lists after beginning their careers in 2019, both reached minor league free agency. Rascon, who earned fourth-round money to sign out of high school as a 13th-round pick that year, never reached Double-A. He missed all of the 2024 season following Tommy John surgery and posted a combined 8.06 ERA at both Single-A levels in his return to action this year. Cedeño, 23, showed interesting tools at various times, but injuries kept him from ever logging more than 406 plate appearances in a year, and he struggled to produce above Low-A.
Yonathan Perlaza, who had a big year in El Paso but never got especially close to a big league call-up in his first year returning from Korea, was the other highest-profile farmhand to reach free agency.
Logan Gillaspie has seen time in El Paso and San Diego in each of the last two seasons. (Photo: Jorge Salgado)
The Padres did re-sign several players before they reached the open market. Pitchers Logan Gillaspie and Eiker Huizi, infielders Francisco Acuña and Clay Dungan, and catchers Rodolfo Durán and Victor Duarte all signed deals before they could be declared minor league free agents.
Gillaspie, 28, has seen big league service time with the Padres in each of the last two years after being acquired on waivers at the end of the 2023 season. He was outrighted to El Paso in July of this year and struggled over the final three months. His deal will almost certainly include an invitation to big league camp in 2026.
Acuña and Durán each produced career years in the upper minors after joining the Padres organization last winter via minor league free agency. They will both likely open spring training in big league camp, though both are long shots to see MLB action in 2026. Huizi and Dungan both arrived in the organization through the minor league phase of the Rule 5 draft, while Duarte has been in the low minors since signing as a 17-year-old out of Venezuela in 2018.
Following the series of moves, 143 players in the Padres system count against MLB’s offseason roster limit of 175 domestic minor league players.
Other players declared free agents are:
RHPs Raul Brito, Harold Chirino, Jose Geraldo, Stephen Jones, Yerry Landinez, Misael Tamarez
LHPs Jake Higginbotham, Fernando Sanchez
OFs Damon Dues, Albert Fabian, Moises Gomez, Tim Locastro
INFs Nate Mondou, Ripken Reyes