Tom Krasovic: Padres’ new arrivals allow Mike Shildt to play championship-level chess

The first rule of baseball chess is that without good players, a manager and his coaches will look like dummies.

Doesn’t matter how smart the field staff are. They’ll make solid decisions that implode.

No one put this better than Greg Booker, the late Padres pitcher and coach.

“You can train a donkey to run in the Preakness but don’t expect him to win,” cracked Booker, soon after he lost his job as bullpen coach of a Padres team headed to 98 defeats — five years after Booker assisted a Padres club that won 98 games and the 1998 pennant.

The current Padres’ grandmaster of baseball chess is manager Mike Shildt.

In light of what went down Thursday, when Padres talent man A.J. Preller dealt for several big leaguers — including a crackerjack reliever and an All-Star slugger— you’ll have to excuse Shildt for feeling a lot smarter Friday about his chess game.

That’s because in baseball chess, as opposed to actual chess, the quality of pieces differs between players.

Now, I won’t say Preller dummy-proofed this Padres’ roster.  None of the newcomers Shildt will deploy came with guarantees of matching the performances that led Preller to trade for them.

In Padres history, the bats of some acquired hitters — poor Ryan Ludwick — obtained during the baseball season were lost in transit and ended up in another country, rotting away in lost and found.

Witness also some pitchers — poor Mike Clevinger — who arrived to fanfare in August only to exit in October with a bum elbow.

But Shildt will be able to dial up more favorable matchups throughout games, be it the some 40 plate appearances when the Padres are pitching and defending or the 40 plate appearances when the Padres are batting and running the basepaths.

The idea of team-builders like Preller is to build a comprehensive roster that, foremost, allows the manager to avoid bad matchups.

“If you’re gonna win a championship, you can’t have really any weak links,” Preller said Thursday after decompressing. “And that was a focus for us over the last few weeks.”

Reliever Mason Miller was obtained Thursday to strengthen Shildt’s already strong hand in the bullpen. The primacy of a stout relief corps in October makes Miller a potential star acquisition. Boasting a fastball that’s been cocked as high as 104.1 mph, the right-hander ought to give the Padres a fifth established reliever with explosive pitches.

The bullpen alone might make Shildt look like a baseball Einstein.

Even before Preller paid big to get him from the A’s, the Padres’ relief corps stood first in win probability added, a metric used by MLB teams. Their figures blew away the totals of each of the other five National League teams that would make the playoffs if the season ended today.

The arrival of several positional players will create challenges, yes. Shildt will need to draw upon his much-praised ability to further a one-for-all ethos.

Playing time could be tougher to come by and maintain for several players, making it harder for them to maintain sharpness and confidence.

On the flip side, these hitters moved up in the standings and are joining an operation that seems to excel at preparation and adjusting during games. That could boost performance.

Finding much-needed rest for several players just become a lot easier, too.

Shildt seems up to the much-welcomed task of working up to seven new players into the Padres’ flow.

Straight-shooting pitcher Joe Musgrove, formerly with the World Series-winning Astros and the Pirates, said he’s never been on a team that prepares as well as Shildt and staff prepare the Padres. Shildt and Co. have an obsessive streak when it comes to finding edges that win. They dig into and apply data as granular as where pitches in the dirt tend to end up, a cheat code for baserunners.

Shildt’s teams are 13-7 when they face Bruce Bochy, perhaps the best manager of the past 15 years and a future Hall of Famer. Bochy, the former Padres skipper, owns four World Series rings, two obtained with wild-card winners.

Preller did his part. The chessboard is yours, Mike.