This story was excerpted from AJ Cassavell’s Padres Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

A month ago, the Padres' season was at a crossroads. The Trade Deadline loomed. They hadn't committed to a direction.

Sitting on the fringes of the National League Wild Card race, five games out of a playoff spot, they had the option to buy and make a run toward contention. Or they had the option to sell, trading expiring contracts like Blake Snell, Josh Hader and Seth Lugo to bolster their future.

They chose the former. A month later, it's worth asking whether they should've chosen the latter.

Recent results certainly tell one story, although I’m not sure the answer is quite that simple.

With Wednesday's walk-off loss in St. Louis, the Padres are 10 games below .500, 7 1/2 games out of a Wild Card spot, their playoff hopes all but extinguished.

“You don’t stop fighting until the end of the year, whether it’s going our way or not,” Hader said. “None of these guys in here are quitters, so we’re going to keep fighting.”

Speaking Wednesday morning, prior to the loss, Hader expressed his happiness at remaining in San Diego through the Deadline. He was traded midseason a year ago, and the transition wasn't easy.

The 2023 Padres, Hader felt, had a chance to make an October run. (He clearly still feels that way.)

"We have a good team that could do a lot of great things," Hader said. "That's something I wanted to be a part of. Obviously it's not going the way we want it to. But when you have something with a bunch of guys like we do, what we're capable of doing, you want to be a part of that.

"At the Trade Deadline, if you get traded, it's sending out a different message. We want to win, right? The biggest thing is trying to stay here and make that playoff push."

Hader wanted to see it through, because he felt there was a chance for something special in San Diego. I'm not sure he was wrong about that. A slim chance, perhaps. But a chance nonetheless.

That left the front office to answer this question: Was that chance at a playoff run worth the cost?

General manager A.J. Preller decided it was. These Padres were built to win in 2023, so he supplemented the roster with needed parts. Some of those parts have proven useful -- Garrett Cooper and Scott Barlow have been solid of late. Some of those parts have flopped -- Rich Hill owns an 8.50 ERA, and Ji Man Choi didn't record a hit before he landed on the IL.

Those acquisitions didn't cost the Padres much in terms of prospect capital. But that's not the true cost of the decision to go for it a month ago. The true cost will be the long-term pieces Preller could've added in potential trades.

Who knows what those pieces were? Here’s what Preller had to say a month ago: "We understand you obviously have the ability to make trades and add players for your future," he said during his post-Deadline press conference.

"We just never really got anything that was that compelling for us on that standpoint."

Maybe that’s true. Maybe the Padres weren't offered the type of truly impactful prospects they would've been looking for. If so, maybe buying at the Deadline was prudent, given their playoff odds at the time.

That still doesn’t change the repercussions of that decision. Should the Padres end up missing the postseason, they're going to be faced with the prospect of reloading for a run in 2024. A month ago, they could’ve gotten a jumpstart on doing so.