Baseball Gets Down to Business

Well, it was a really quiet winter meetings … until it wasn’t. Then, blammo, the Yankees became the Yankees again, the Padres became the Padres again, the Cardinals hired their next manager, the Diamondbacks pretty quietly made a splash and the Shohei Ohtani mania went over the cliff and up to 11.

We’re diving right in to talk about all those things and more, but I did want to quickly pass along, from the good folks at Park Road Books here in Charlotte, that if you want a signed and personally inscribed WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL in time for Christmas gift-giving, you have until Dec. 15. You can order online here, but you might want to also give them a call at (704) 525-9239 to get the inscription.

Let’s start with a strange-looking stat: There are three every-day players in baseball history who have posted six three-WAR seasons before they turned 25 years old. Well, technically, there are only two such players — Baseball 100 members Ken Griffey Jr. and Mel Ott — but it’s three when you consider that Juan Soto only missed the mark in 2020 because the season was 60 games long. He was actually having the best season of his career — he led the league in batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage: .351/.490/.695. He posted 2.4 WAR in just 60 games.

So three incredible players have done this incredible thing. Right behind them, with five 3-WAR seasons, you have this collection of 17 greats and near-greats:

Hall of Famers: Johnny Bench; Ty Cobb; Mickey Mantle; Al Kaline; Frank Robinson; Al Kaline; Jimmie Foxx; Arky Vaughan; Orlando Cepeda; Roberto Alomar; Willie Wells and Rogers Hornsby.
Hall of Fame Candidates: Vada Pinson; Sherry Magee; Andruw Jones.
Active stars: Carlos Correa and Mike Trout.

What’s the point?

Only one of those guys — Roberto Alomar — got traded by the time he turned 25. That was a pretty big deal, you might remember, one of the biggest trades in the history of the winter meetings. In December 1990, the Blue Jays traded Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff to the Padres in exchange for Alomar and Joe Carter.

“This was fun,” Padres GM Joe McIlvaine said at the time. “A good old-fashioned baseball trade.”

Even that trade, I would argue, happened BEFORE everyone realized just how good Robbie Alomar was. In many ways, Joe Carter was the big man in the deal (and, of course, he ended up getting the biggest hit in Blue Jays history)

Now we are getting to my point: Juan Soto is 25 and has now been traded TWICE. And nothing like that has ever happened in the history of baseball. No super-young hitter as great as Juan Soto has ever been traded before. It just doesn’t happen. I mean, you can look through history at all those precocious young players who became stars in their early 20s — forget about it, their teams wouldn’t even THINK about trading them. You think the Red Sox thought about trading the young Ted Williams or the Orioles thought about trading the young Cal Ripken Jr. or the Cardinals thought about trading the young Albert Pujols? Wasn’t going to happen.

But the Nationals traded Soto in the middle of his age 23 season — this one year after he almost won the MVP award — for a bunch of prospects. Prospects!

And now the Padres have traded Soto to the Yankees before his age 25 season — again, for a bunch of prospects. Prospects!

What in the world is even happening here?