Putting a Potential Juan Soto Trade into Perspective

Trading Juan Soto invalidates years of roster building for the Padres

Juan Soto is one of 40 players in baseball history to post an OPS+ of at least 150, with a minimum of 3000 plate appearances. He currently ranks 23rd on that list with a 157 mark, and of those 40 players, all but seven of them — Soto, Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, Manny Ramirez, Frank Thomas, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire — debuted before the San Diego Padres came into existence in 1969. Only four others — Dick Allen, Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron and Willie Mays — even remained in the league at that time.

Simply put— you don’t find these guys every day.

Soto, now 25, is also one of 286 players to have amassed at least 2000 plate appearances through his age-24 season. Of that group, he ranks 10th with 160 home runs and 11th with the aforementioned 157 OPS+. Trout and Albert Pujols are the only post-1969 guys on either of these lists.

By all measures, he is one of the best hitters of the last 50 years, and is off to one of the greatest offensive starts to a career in history.

Since debuting in 2018, he’s third in OPS+ and ninth in WAR, with four top-10 MVP finishes, four Silver Slugger awards, three trips to the All-Star game, a runner-up Rookie of the Year finish and a World Series ring. He’s a below-average baserunner and defender, but not nearly enough of a liability in those areas to negate his impact at the plate.

The Padres have certainly never had a player of this caliber on their roster in their 55-year tenure. No, not even the late, great Tony Gwynn.

In fact, the Padres were so bad for the entirety of the 2010s that they consistently boasted one of the game’s strongest farm systems every year from 2017 through 2022.

And as those prospects developed and graduated, AJ Preller came along and built a potential winner through endless trades and big-name free agent signings. A decade-long rebuild culminating in a mega-deal with the Washington Nationals for one of the game’s best young players.

So why is San Diego so eager to move on — a mere 16 months after dismantling the remainder of that farm to acquire him — for what is likely pennies on the dollar?

I’m actually asking, because I have no idea.

Maybe it’s too late. Perhaps their minds were made up last offseason, when they inked shortstop Xander Bogaerts, 30 years old at the time and definitively not one of the greatest players of his generation, to what is essentially a lifetime contract running through the 2033 season.

But as Soto is on the verge of becoming a New York Yankee, it’s hard to see this as anything other than an organizational failure. CJ Abrams is coming off a 3.4-bWAR season. Gore, 2.3 bWAR. James Wood is a consensus top-10 prospect. All gone for nothing.

I don’t think the Padres are on the verge of a rebuild. They still have plenty of big league talent, plus Ethan Salas and Jackson Merrill waiting in the wings.

But for all the talk of “how can you trade a player of Soto’s caliber?” back in 2022 and all the outrage surrounding the Mookie Betts trade less than four years ago, it’s truly incomprehensible for the hyper-aggressive Padres — a team just one fluky season removed from the NLCS — to sell off a 25-year-old superstar.

A Soto extension should have been priority number one last offseason. Instead, the Padres opted for a shortstop on the wrong side of 30, and are now facing the consequences.

Betts was dealt to the Dodgers with one year remaining on his contract— just like Soto has now. Since then, Boston has no playoff series wins and three last-place AL East finishes, while the Dodgers have three division titles and a championship. Betts has three top-five MVP finishes, while Verdugo was shipped off earlier this week following an unremarkable four-year stay in Boston. On top of that, the Red Sox fired GM Chaim Bloom earlier this offseason.

By trading Soto, the Padres and AJ Preller could be in for a similar fate.