The kids are alright -- to trade

This week brought another example of how young players with a reputation can bring proven stars to a franchise ready to win.

Mickey Moniak had 12 triples in a high school season. He made scouts blink at their stopwatches. His bat kept cooking through all those pre-draft meat markets. When the draft came around, Moniak was picked first overall by the Phillies, and the city of Encinitas, Ca. had a day for him.

That was in 2016, when the Phillies wouldn’t have taken a wheelbarrow of established All-Stars for Moniak. On Tuesday, Moniak was packed off to Arte Moreno’s Anaheim gulag, in exchange for rental pitcher Noah Syndergaard.

The key to the city hasn’t unlocked the secrets of major league hitting, but at least Moniak gets one more chance than most contemporaries.

The story of the 2022 trade deadline is being scribbled furiously, but the moral of that story won’t be known for years. It will be revealed in how well the Moniaks, the minor league players whose hype allowed their teams to deal them for superstars, figure things out.

San Diego sounded the loudest horn when it got Juan Soto from Washington, along with first baseman Josh Bell, another rental. Petco Park was filled to the top of the dog dish on Wednesday night for Soto’s first game. To get him, San Diego had five well-respected prospects Washington coveted, along with first baseman Luke Voit after Eric Hosmer nixed the deal (and subsequently got dealt to Boston for another lost soul in the 2016 draft, pitcher Jay Groome).

— Lefthander Mackenzie Gore was the third pick in the 2017 draft. He has been waylaid by mechanical problems and, in his first full major league season, was 4-4 with a shoddy 1.475 WHIP for San Diego.

— Shortstop C.J. Abrams was the sixth pick in the 2019 draft. Subbing for the injured Fernando Tatis Jr., he hit .232 for San Diego. He doesn’t turn 22 until October.

— Outfielder Robert Hassell was the eighth pick in the 2020 draft. He has a minor league OPS of .846 and is in High-A after a year and a half of pro baseball.

— Outfielder James Wood, a second-round pick in 2001, slammed 10 home runs in Low-A this year as a 19-year-old.

— Righthander Jarlin Susana, 18, dominated the Arizona Rookie League this season, as most legitimate prospects should.

Is this the skeleton of the new Nationals, who won the World Series in 2019 and have ruthlessly liquidated themselves ever since? There are scouts who say yes. The odds are against it, and even if it works out that way, Soto only has to deliver the Padres’ first World Series title to make it worthwhile.

The best player in the 2016 draft? Unquestionably it has become the Dodgers’ Will Smith, who sneaked into the first round and leads all those neophytes in games played, home runs and OPS.

Best player in the 2014 first round? The Dodgers’ Trea Turner, picked 13th by the Padres, leads those first-rounders in games and batting average.

And, of course, there’s the 2009 draft, in which No. 25 pick Mike Trout launched a career that has taken him to 1,367 major league games, or 732 more than No. 2 pick Dustin Ackley (Seattle).

Spencer Torkelson was the top pick in 2020. He is getting his chance to play in Detroit. Sometimes that is not a good thing. Torkelson is hitting .197 with 16 extra-base hits in 83 games.

Of course it’s an inexact science. You’re trying to project teenagers into the most mentally cruel game there is. That’s why Jim Leyland used to correct people: “They’re not prospects, they’re effing minor league players.”

Or, as the late, great hoops coach John Chaney used to say, “You got to go with the known and leave the unknown alone.” The Nationals have laid their most valuable card on a whole deck of unknown. If not, it’s back to the hopeless days of the late 50s, when the Senators made Washington first in war, first in peace and last in the American League.

(Talk about offensive nicknames, by the way.)

Soto will turn 24 during the World Series. Already he has placed ninth, fifth and second in MVP voting, and has a .427 lifetime on-base percentage. The Padres will place him between Manny Machado and the recuperating Tatis, sit back and savor the popcorn. Since Voit was the only proven player they lost, and since they also snatched Josh Hader and his unfair stuff from the Brewers’ bullpen and still kept the league’s best starting rotation, they have everything but excuses.

The Hader deal was not without risk. He becomes a free agent after 2023 and hasn’t been automatic lately. The Padres sent Milwaukee Taylor Rogers, their own closer, and quality righthander Dinelson Lamet along with two touted outfielders. They’ve shown the decisiveness that fans crave and writers praise, although neither group will bother looking back through the other end of the binoculars, when the truth can be discerned.

There were other transactions. The Mets probably made the best move by trading Jacob deGrom from the injured list to the active roster. No trade deadline pitcher can match deGrom, and the Mets were already three games ahead of the Braves anyway.

But Atlanta was a close second when it signed 25-year-old third baseman Austin Riley to a 10-year, $210 million contract that might look like a Dollar Store bargain by the time it’s done. Riley, the 41st pick in the 2015 draft, is eerily polished, with a .963 career OPS. In July he hit .423 and had 26 extra base hits.

The Yankees, their pitching beginning to fray, picked up Frankie Montas from Oakland. The Orioles, faced by the first green shoots of local enthusiasm in seven years, made sure to stomp them by dealing closer All-Star Jorge Lopez to Minnesota, and inspirational outfielder Trey Mancini to Houston. But then they won their next two games anyway, so maybe they’re unstoppable.

The Dodgers put their fix-it crew to the test by picking up Joey Gallo from the Yankees. Gallo has struck out 38.8 percent of the time this year. Yet, only two seasons ago, Gallo had 38 home runs and led the A.L. in walks while at Texas. Players under repair often find what they need in Los Angeles, and all Gallo has to do is hit a couple of well-timed bombs in October.

The Mariners packaged four shiny pieces of the future, including shortstop Yoelvi Marte, and shipped them to Cincinnati for prime righthander Luis Castillo, who becomes a free agent. It’s what you do when you have the longest playoff drought in baseball and haven’t visited a World Series in your 45-year history.

And the Phillies, a tough playoff chore anyway with starting pitchers Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, picked up Syndergaard and closer David Robertson (Cubs).

Meanwhile, Moniak has plenty of room to find himself, now that he’s in the Angels’ desolation row.. He is a .189 major league hitter who strikes out 39 percent of the time. In the minors he was a .256 hitter with a .715 OPS. He is suddenly 24 years old.

There may come a day when Moniak, who took the Phillies’ bonus check of $6.1 million, will make them regret this. If so, he will finally become what everyone in baseball thought he was all along: An exception.