With the recent news of Juan Soto and the Washington Nationals not being able to agree on Washington’s 15-year, $440 million contract extension offer, it seems that what once seemed impossible is now just a formality.
The Nationals are now looking to trade their slugger.
But for any teams who try to pick him up at the trade deadline, it’s going to take a lot in order to actually acquire him.
Jeff Passan of ESPN tweeted a hypothetical trade where the Los Angeles Dodgers acquire Soto from Washington.
Passan used the financial algorithms of both the Dodgers and the Nationals to see just how much it would cost the Dodgers to acquire Soto.
Every team has an algorithm that assigns a dollar value to a player. These numbers from @BaseballValues are one example of those. Cannot imagine the Dodgers would do a deal like this. But it gives you a sense of just how much talent the Nationals would look to reap for Juan Soto. pic.twitter.com/53GknQWV4b
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 16, 2022
What Soto Will Cost
If you’re trying to land Soto at the trade deadline, good luck with that.
He is going to cost a boatload of not just minor league prospects, but talent on a team’s Major League roster as well.
Because of how much it will cost to land one of the best hitters in all of baseball, it might be that several teams don’t want to touch Soto with a 10-foot pole.
Several teams can certainly afford to acquire him, with the Dodgers being among those teams.
The St. Louis Cardinals also have a lot of solid prospects such as Jordan Walker, Masyn Winn, and Matthew Liberatore.
But if a team wants to acquire Soto at the trade deadline, they’ll have to give back a lot, and it’s worth it for those teams’ executives to ask themselves if it’s really worth it to give up that much, especially when there’s no guarantee that Soto will agree to an extension.
The fact that he turned down 15 years and $440 million should concern a lot of teams.
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