It's not often that a general manager makes two of the signature moves of his tenure with a team by making trades involving the same headlining player, but that's exactly how it has played out for San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller -- who has now both acquired and dealt away generational hitter Juan Soto.
There's an obvious way to evaluate how Preller fared in his two Soto deals by comparing the hauls. The tricky part in doing that is you have to consider the value of the contributions Soto made to the Padres (6.6 WAR over 214 games) and what he was paid in that span (just over $29 million), and then adjust for his trade value being almost cut in half because of that passage of time.
And all of that is before you get to the hardest part: comparing the value of 10 young players who were traded in these deals and are completely different types of players at different points in their careers.
Here is a complete breakdown of the returns in both Soto deals and how the two trade packages stack up.
San Diego Padres trade Soto to the New York Yankees
Date of deal: Dec. 6, 2023
Yankees acquire:
OF Juan Soto
Padres acquire:
RHP Michael King
RHP Drew Thorpe
RHP Jhony Brito
RHP Randy Vasquez
King is the key player in the deal despite being 28 years old with 19 career big league starts. The package San Diego got back is built around acquiring several years of control of starting pitchers, but the Padres' biggest short-term need is 2024 starting pitching help. King comes with two years of control that will probably cost less than $10 million total while being the biggest 2024 contributor among the pitchers in this deal.
He shows frontline starter upside when he's right, but there is risk. He hasn't been stretched out to a conventional starter until this point in his career in part because he's a late bloomer, but he also broke a bone in his throwing elbow in mid-2022. If King can post 150 innings at the level of quality he showed for 104⅔ innings as a multi-inning relief option in 2023, he will be a steal. The best scenario for San Diego is that King does that in 2024 and 2025, posting something like the 6.6 WAR that Soto added in his roughly 1½ seasons with the Padres -- but for a third of the cost.
And there are still four more players in this deal to add to that potential value!
Higashioka is the easiest to analyze. He's under control for one more year at $2 million to $3 million (he's subject to arbitration like King) and if forced to sign a one-year deal on the open market, he'd get something like $7 million $9 million due in part to a down catching market.
Thorpe is the only true prospect in the deal, and he'll likely land in the back half of my upcoming list of the top 100 prospects as a starter who is close to MLB ready with a standout changeup and plus command. He is mostly solid to above average at everything else and has a real shot to offer six-plus years of No. 3 or No. 4 starter-quality performance starting as soon as the second half of the 2024 season. There's also an outside shot he exceeds those expectations as a finesse frontline starter if everything clicks. Thorpe did have a subluxation of his non-throwing shoulder at the end of the 2023 season, but no one I spoke with seems worried about that long term.
The final two players in the package, Brito and Vasquez, are what made the Yankees stand out as a fit for the Padres in this deal. As I touched on in another piece this week, teams either can create internal pitching depth or they're going to have to pay for it. The Yankees are very good at manifesting solid young pitching depth all over their organization, and the Padres aren't. With Nick Martinez ($26 million to the Reds), Seth Lugo ($45 million to the Royals) and Blake Snell (likely to get at least $100 million but still unsigned) hitting free agency all at once, the Padres would have had to pay dearly to bring them back and maintain their rotation depth, so they opted to use the Soto trade to solve the problem more completely because it looks like they need to cut payroll while improving parts of the team.
Brito is similar to Martinez in that he's a fastball/changeup-oriented multi-inning pitcher who could be a bulk-inning starter. Vasquez is roughly a Lugo type in that he's a fastball/breaking-ball-oriented multi-inning pitcher who also could be a bulk-inning starter. Both made their MLB debuts in 2023 and are under team control for six more seasons, with two of those at the league minimum.
Put all of this together and the Padres cut about $38 million from their payroll (Soto's and Grisham's 2024 salaries), then added five players who will all likely appear in San Diego in 2024 while being paid roughly $40 million less than their projected season performance would cost on the open market. On top of that, San Diego gets six more years of Thorpe, five more of Brito, five more of Vasquez and one more of King -- all at heavy discounts from market rates. King's second year and Thorpe's six-plus seasons raise the upside of the trade package, while the six years of both Brito and Vasquez raise the floor.
It's not fun to be a Padres fan losing Soto and seeing payroll cut, but avoiding spending $35 million in 2024 payroll to get 350 league average innings from three starters is an efficient way to approach the challenge Preller faced this offseason.
Washington Nationals trade Soto to the Padres
Date of deal: Aug. 2, 2022
Padres acquire:
OF Juan Soto
1B Josh Bell
Nationals acquire:
LHP MacKenzie Gore
OF Robert Hassell III
SS CJ Abrams
OF James Wood
RHP Jarlin Susana
1B/DH Luke Voit
The Nats went the more conventional route when they traded a star player: prioritizing getting lots of prospects -- some far from the big leagues -- in return for a couple years of control of a player they knew they couldn't extend who is playing for a non-contender.
The co-headliners of the trade were Wood and Abrams, both of whom were consensus top-20 prospects in the sport at the time of the trade. Wood has mostly held serve in that regard, with a possible 2024 MLB debut coming, but his strikeout rate is still the main question around his potential. Meanwhile, Abrams posted 2.1 WAR for the Nationals in 2023 and appeared to turn the corner in the second half of the season. He is probably more of a good player than a star, but there's a chance both of these players become All-Stars.
The other three young players in the deal -- Gore, Hassell and Susana -- are so far a solid example of Preller's history as a top scout with the Texas Rangers: He knows which of his prospects to trade and largely when to do it.
Gore's star had faded a bit by the time of the trade, but for Washington in 2023 he threw 136⅓ innings of roughly the same quality he showed in the big leagues with San Diego. He's still just 24 years old but looks more like a No. 4 starter than a frontline one going forward. Hassell's prospect hype had also started to decline by the time of the trade, moving from the top half of my top 100 to the back half. He had a bad 2023 season after suffering a broken hamate bone in fall 2022. He looks more like a role player than a strong starter now, but his 2024 will go a long way toward answering that question.
Susana, now 19 years old, had made eight pro appearances for the Padres after signing for seven figures as an international prospect but was already notable for his triple-digit heater, nasty slider and burly 6-foot-6 frame. He has walked 49 batters and struck out 84 in 78⅔ innings with Washington, which is a succinct way to explain what sort of pitcher he still is.
In my mind, Wood and Abrams require more patience, but they look like they'll be good big leaguers of some sort. Gore, Hassell and Susana are more wait-and-see types as it's still unclear whether they'll turn into core pieces or are just young players who are nice to have.
Say what you want about Preller, but his best quality is knowing how to scout his own players. Time will tell if he scouted the Yankees' system effectively, as well.