Padres chairman says team was embarrassed by events surrounding GM suspension.

Padres Chairman Ron Fowler was a interviewed on the Mighty 1090 this morning. He didn’t go into any further explanation regarding the circumstances that led to A.J. Preller’s 30 day suspension. However he didn’t cling to any of the host’s excuses for the team either. Instead he owned the punishment the Padres received from Major League Baseball.

It sounds like Fowler is disappointed, in a way, with A.J. Preller for still acting as a scout instead of growing into the General Manager role he’s held for over two seasons.

But frankly, his overall experience in terms of the GM role is somewhat limited because he was so focused on the finding and developing of players and there’s more to being a GM than that and frankly this was a situation where he didn’t properly understand the reg[ulation]s and we did something we shouldn’t have done and we got spanked and frankly I don’t think that baseball did overreact here.

My guess is that Preller has continued to do what he does best and has evaluated talent while shirking off the other responsibilities of a GM. Those responsibilities were probably picked up by the same group that is taking over all the responsibilities now. As Fowler tells it, everyone seems to have learned a lesson from the experience.

A.J. owns part of it and we as an organization own part of it and I’ll tell you that we were embarrassed by what happened when we found out. Baseball did a very thorough investigation. We are very satisfied with what they did. We don’t think they overreacted. We are responding and I think A.J. as he said in his [press] release has learned from it and we’ll be a better organization and he’ll be a better GM at the end of it.

While Preller serves his deserved suspension Padres President Mike Dee is again/still heavily involved in the decision making process of baseball operations. In the past this has reaped the team such draft picks as Johnny Manziel, so we’ll see what kind of damage can be done in 30 days. Also it’s interesting since Dee is suspected of being involved with the activity that the MLB was investigating.

It’s a collective group. Mike [Dee] is involved and two or three of his direct reports work closely with Mike so it’s collective but he [Preller] worked up until the eleventh hour getting all the stuff in place and I talked to him yesterday. I’m his contact point, his only contact point he has over the next 30 days. He can gather a lot of data but he can’t do anything with it.

Note also that Preller can only have one point of contact with the team and it’s Fowler himself.