The six degrees (at least) of Juan Soto

The Yankees' outfielder will be the No. 1 free agent prize, but there's a lot of baseball between now and then.

The season of Juan Soto stretches from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve. There isn’t a day in which Soto isn’t rearranging someone’s furniture. He plays on a team with Aaron Judge and he plays in a league with Bobby Witt, so there’s a limit to the postseason awards he can earn. But maybe he’s good enough to invent his own, like Most Visible Player.

Soto has already written a couple of careers, and he’s only 25 years old. This is his first year with the Yankees. It might be his only year, since he becomes the headline free agent at the end of the season, but then he’s turned on the Hot Stove and cooked up wintertime news for the past two years.

Soto, the Yankees’ leftfielder, is on a one-year, $31 million deal. He remains the fourth highest paid Yankee. One suspects the club frowns upon the possibility of making Soto the richest one, of letting him surpass Judge’s $40 million a year deal, particularly since Judge is committed through 2031. But the Yankees say they’ll show up for the bidding, as will the Mets, Giants and other usual spendthrifts. Judge watched Soto slam three home runs in Chicago in a game last week and called him “the best hitter in the game.”

But a new team would be Soto’s fourth in seven years. That seems almost sacrilegious for a player of his range. Soto already has 194 career home runs, a World Series title with Washington when he was 20, a comeback season in San Diego last year after he was booed for his struggles the year before that, and four years of receiving MVP votes. He won the batting title in the hors d’oeuvre season of 2020, when he also won the “slash” triple crown by leading in slugging, on-base percentage and OPS. He and Judge are 1-2 in American League walks, which explains why he seems to be everywhere all at once, but Soto has 104 of them with “only” 85 strikeouts, and for his career he has walked 744 times and struck out 662 times. He has two 100 RBI seasons already.

Most of all, Soto has had a profound effect on every team that has traded him or has traded for him.

His first four years were in Washington, which won the Series in 2019 and then played Jenga with the roster. Unfortunately for them, they held onto Stephen Strasburg, giving him a $245 million contract and watching him pitch 31 innings before he retired. The Nationals are paying Strasburg $32.5 million this year and then again in 2025 and 2026, to grill hamburgers or watch Netflix. That motivated them to deal Soto, because he was bringing down big arbitration numbers, and he would bring more in exchange.

The lucky recipient was San Diego. The Padres sensed a chance to win in 2022. They got Soto, but they gave Washington shortstop CJ Abrams, outfielder James Wood, pitcher Mackenzie Gore, outfielder Robert Hassell and two others.

The Nationals are still scuba-diving under .500, but Abrams, the sixth-overall draft pick in 2019, was in the All-Star Game this year and has 17 homers and 25 steals. Gore, the third-overall pick in 2017, hasn’t found his footing, with a 4.53 ERA, but the Nationals are keeping him in the rotation.

The real prize was Wood, who is 6-foot-7, 21 years old and is hitting .284 with an OPS of .831. Washington’s future depends almost entirely on the residue from the Soto trade. As for San Diego, it endured Soto’s struggles at the end of 2022, although the Padres got to the N.L. Championship Series. In 2023, most everything else but Soto fell apart, as he slammed 35 homers with 109 RBI and 132 walks. He was sixth in MVP voting on one of the most disappointing teams in the league. But changes were imperative for San Diego, and Soto had become that cold, fashionable buzzword, favored by all general managers. He was an “asset.”

The Yankees needed to take a load off Judge.  They got Soto and underperforming outfielder Trent Grisham in exchange for pitcher Michael King, pitching prospect Drew Thorpe, reliever Kyle Higashioka, pitcher Randy Vasquez, and another prospect.

Soto has made them better. Counterintuitively, trading Soto made San Diego better. The Padres are headed to the playoffs because King, who wanted to be a starter in New York, is 11-6 with a 3.18 ERA, and has come to the rescue with Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove hurt. Higashioka has a career high OPS of .778, although his nine passed balls are a league high.

In spring training, the Padres packaged Thorpe with three others and sent him to the White Sox by Dylan Cease,  who has thrown a no-hitter and is 12-9 with a 1.025 WHIP. Cease would probably be San Diego’s Game 1 starter in its first playoff series.

But the aftershocks are even more profound. To replace Soto in leftfield, San Diego picked up Jurickson Profar, once the best minor league prospect in baseball but a vagabond whom the Padres released after 2022. He played 14 games for Colorado last year and was on the market again. Today Profar is a clubhouse leader who also leads the National League with a .388 on-base percentage.

Grisham had been the Padres’ centerfielder. To replace him, they promoted Jackson Merrill, their first-round choice in 2021. In doing so they probably have groomed their first Rookie of the Year since Benito Santiago in 1987. Merrill is hitting .290 with 69 RBIs, but he has become a late-inning boogeyman of historic proportions. Five times Merrill has won or tied a game with a home run in the eighth inning or later. No 21-year-old has done that since Frank Robinson in 1956.

There is more than a slight chance that the Yankees and Padres will play each other in the World Series. That’s right, this one. And why not? Soto has played in seven postseason series already. After that comes another free-agency launch, spiced by the fact that no one who has ever picked up Soto has regretted it. Neither has anyone who has traded him. You can find him at the end of any team’s pursuit of happiness. If you can’t, check the basepaths.