SAN DIEGO — It took a while, but A.J. Preller — entering his 11th spring training with the Padres — has established San Diego as one of the National League’s smarter franchises.

Don’t take it only from me. Take it from executives with other teams.

Front-office folks surveyed by MLB.com this winter have voted the small-market Padres as the best franchise at tapping into international amateur markets, a key aspect to Preller’s team-building model. The Padres surpassed even the Dodgers, who finished second.

The execs gave Preller good grades in other areas, too.

Reputed scouting expertise in Latin America helped Preller get the job as the Padres’ top team-builder in 2014.

For years now, other teams have been keen to trade for Padres minor leaguers whom Preller and staff signed as teenagers from other countries. Such players helped Preller get frontline starting pitchers Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Joe Musgrove and Dylan Cease, plus offensive star Juan Soto.

Two international teenagers the Padres have retained, shortstop Leodalis De Vries and catcher Ethan Salas, each 18, now stand among baseball’s top prospects as rated by several media outlets.

Which team does the best job of drafting?

Of finding and developing sleeper prospects?

The Padres, in the same poll of MLB front offices, finished fourth and tied for fourth among the 15 National League clubs.

So in three underlying areas of team-building, the Padres are judged as no worse than fourth in a league that awards six playoff berths every year.

Before Padres pitchers and catchers report to Peoria, Ariz., let’s maintain a high-altitude view of Preller’s pursuit of the franchise’s first World Series trophy.

What’s the first realistic goal the Padres try to attain every season? It’s to land one of three wild-card spots sought by the other 11 teams that don’t win their divisional race.

Again, don’t take it only from me.

Listen to Preller, who has acknowledged that surpassing the Dodgers in the annual 162-game race isn’t very realistic, so it’s best to focus on the wild card.

“The reality is, the Padres are never going to be able to compete financially and roster-wise completely with the Dodgers,” Preller told ESPN’s Pedro Gomez in November 2020, soon after L.A. swept his team out of the postseason following the pandemic-shortened season. “So what’s your next-best option? Let’s do the best we can and if we get there, we can beat them in a seven-game series.”

In the NFL, whose parity-driven economic system and quarterback-centric sport allows smart small-market clubs to become true powerhouses, it would be preposterous for a team-builder to say his franchise is never going to be able to compete financially and roster-wise completely with any rival.

Preller’s clear-eyed appraisal, influenced by MLB’s economic system and the Dodgers’ brilliance/uber-wealth, has been proved right so far.

The Dodgers own MLB’s best win rate over the past four regular seasons. Yes, the Giants edged them out for the West crown in 2021, but that required winning 107 games and seemed to exhaust the Giants, whom the Dodgers knocked out of the postseason. The exception proved the rule.

Preller and Co. gave it an impressive run last year. Preller made several upgrades while also slashing the payroll. The Padres congealed under first-year manager Mike Shildt and notched their highest victory total since 1998 after posting MLB’s best record over the season’s second half.

But let’s not pretend the Dodgers went through a season of normal internal challenges. They were hit by a historic injury barrage to their starting pitching, yet finished with MLB’s best record. And now, following several apparent upgrades, L.A. will field a team that’s clearly more talented than the 98-game winner of last year.

So, let’s keep the main thing the main thing.

Longshots to win the West, the Padres will try to outperform several other NL teams to claim one of the three wild cards. Head-to-head victories over the Diamondbacks and Giants will be more important, if less uplifting, than head-to-head victories over the Dodgers.

Preller has become adept at building wild-card contenders. Over the past four years, the Padres have the NL’s sixth-best regular-season win rate (.529), trailing the Dodgers (.640), Braves (.590), Brewers (.565), Phillies (.546) and Giants (.535). Of those six teams, only San Diego and Milwaukee aren’t big-market clubs. Winners of two wild cards in that span, the Padres leveraged those entries into three victorious playoff series.

Fernando Tatis Jr., 26, and Jackson Merrill, 21, give this year’s Padres team a good shot at challenging for another wild card.

Tatis and Merrill are each projected by FanGraphs.com to produce one of MLB’s top 20 win-share totals by position players in the season ahead. In that rarefied subset, no other positional tandem of teammates is so young. Merrill’s forecasted win-shares total edges out high-priced NL stars such as Freddie Freeman, Bryce Harper and Willy Adames.

It didn’t happen right away, but the Rock Star GM has found his beat. Ahead, we’ll see if this Padres team, to which Preller will add several players between now and August, can ace out several non-Dodgers teams for a playoff berth.

Then they might get a shot at blowing up the Blue Death Star.

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