Is Ethan Salas Suddenly An Untouchable Prospect Again For the Padres?

When Ethan Salas burst onto the Single-A scene as a 17-year-old back in 2023, it might’ve been easy to expect to see him playing home games at the top level for the San Diego Padres by now. Especially when he was up a level with Double-A San Antonio at the same age. Between injuries and subsequent uneven performance in the years since, however, he remains a catcher for… Double-A San Antonio. Perhaps not for long, however. 

Clear of a 2025 back injury that limited him to only 10 games, Salas has come out of the gates scorching for the Missions. As of mid-May, he’s slashing .320/.396/.546 with a 151 wRC+. His 23.4 percent strikeout rate sits around his career norm in the minor leagues, while his 11.7 percent walk rate is indicative of the improved discipline he demonstrated in his minuscule sample last season. What’s more impressive is the rate at which he’s performed over this last stretch of games. 

Salas has recorded hits in 11 of his last 15 contests. Eight of those outings have featured multiple hits. All of his home runs have come in that stretch, with nine total walks against 12 total strikeouts. It’s resulted in a percentile distribution that looks rather visually appealing: 

This isn’t a matter of a hitter finding a random hot stretch. He’s making a ton of contact and elevating the ball to the pull side. When those two things are working in conjunction with one another, good things tend to happen. Hence, the gaudy line you see before you through his first 110-ish plate appearances of 2026. 

The question is whether any of this will actually matter to A.J. Preller. 

Last year, we saw Preller trade his No. 1 prospect in Leo De Vries for a relief pitcher. Of course, Mason Miller isn’t just any relief pitcher (especially not thus far in 2026), but moving a middle infield prospect of his caliber amid the context of an aging group of veterans on the major-league roster still raises questions about how much value is placed on prospects for this organization and its leader. As Salas now begins to recoup his value, both in trade and in future projection for the Padres, is there a chance he’s the next marquee prospect to land with a new organization? 

This one is a bit more difficult to envision than the trade of De Vries. 

Don’t get it twisted. De Vries’ upside is massive. The Padres also have Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, and Jake Cronenworth around the infield in the long-term. Only Cronenworth is a viable trade candidate among that group, and the organization has been inclined to hold onto him through multiple bouts of trade rumors. On paper, there is personnel in place at a position which De Vries would be likely to occupy (with the “on paper” phrasing doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence). 

Salas faces much softer obstacles on his path to the big leagues. Sure, the Padres have two catchers with multiple years of team control in place; Freddy Fermin is arbitration-eligible through 2029 and Luis Campusano carries his through 2028. Fermin is a defensive-forward backstop without much to speak of in the bat. Campusano represents the inverse, with the organization demonstrating a prior reluctance to even allow him to catch given what some of his defensive metrics looked like. 

There are no established veterans on long-term deals standing in Ethan Salas’ way. And if he’s going to continue to look like he has this year, his promotion to the next level could be aggressive. It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to expect to see him in San Diego before year’s end if the current trajectory is even remotely maintained. When one factors in the positional context, trading Salas in the same way that De Vries was shipped out would be a really tough sell for Preller. 

Luckily, it’s one that he may not feel as inclined to make now that Salas has trended back toward ascent rather than spending time in Stagnation City.