The first time he was traded, Juan Soto cried all day. The second time, he shrugged and went back to work.
“I already went through it,” he says, sitting at his locker at New York Yankees camp, a member of his third team before turning 26. “The first time hurt more. That was the team that gave me a chance, that trusted me, that brought me all the way up. That’s the team I won a championship with. That hurts a lot. When you win a championship, you want to win another one with that team. It was tough. But it did show me that that’s the hard part of the game, and I learned from it. I took it, and I just kept moving forward, and I was kind of prepared for anything else.”
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Two years ago at this time, Soto was a happy kid who saw baseball as a game and imagined he’d spend his whole career playing it for the Washington Nationals. But when he and agent Scott Boras turned down a reported $440 million, 15-year extension in July 2022, the team traded its star right fielder—the best hitter this side of Ted Williams—at the deadline to the San Diego Padres. General manager Mike Rizzo had told Soto that if they couldn’t agree to terms, the team would look to get something for him rather than letting him depart in free agency. But Soto never really believed that would happen. It broke his heart to leave.
Now that happy kid is a shrewder young man, one who sees the sport as a business and has begun acting accordingly. He studiously avoids talking about his future in a way that could hurt his negotiating position when he becomes a free agent after this season, taking pains even to avoid praising his new team too much lest executives think he is angling for an extension. Is he sad that naive kid is gone?
“I’m not gonna say sad,” he says. “I will say I learned something new that I didn’t know in the past.”
The trade to San Diego rattled him. Friends and family questioned his decision to turn down all that money, he told Sports Illustrated early last year, and it took him months to feel comfortable in his new home. After struggling in his first 80 games, he returned to his norms, hitting .290 and slugging .548 over the final five months of last season. He was an All-Star and a Silver Slugger, and he finished sixth in National League MVP Award voting.
But despite a $248 million payroll that ranked third in the majors last season and seventh all-time among all teams, the Padres collapsed and missed the playoffs. San Diego signaled it would shed payroll and Soto—who will make $31.5 million this year, a record for a player of his service time—began to see his name in trade rumors.
“I talked to [general manager A.J. Preller], and he was telling me that he’s not gonna trade me, I’m gonna be a leader of the team, this and that,” Soto says. “I trusted him. But then a week before I got traded, he told me, ‘We’re trading you. We’re really trying to get something for you.’ I was like, ‘O.K.’ That’s when I realized things were serious. Before that, he was telling me, ‘No, no, no, we’re just listening.’”
Soto says he did not feel betrayed. “It really hurts, but it’s all right,” he says. “It’s no hard feelings at all. They traded me [because] I know they think that’s the best thing for them.” So he decided to do the best thing for him. “I just had to sit down, take it like a man and keep going,” he says.
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Boras was thrilled that he ended up with the Yankees, Soto says. People around him believe he will excel on the grand stage in New York—ever the showman, he arrived at his first day of spring training in a T-shirt that read THE GENERATIONAL JUAN SOTO—and they expect him to thrive playing for a team that should contend for the World Series. For his part, Soto is just relieved that he will almost certainly make it through the whole season before he has to change addresses again.
Soto had never played with any of his new teammates except center fielder Trent Grisham, who came over from San Diego with him. But he has begun making friends. Shortly after he arrived in Tampa last month, he ran into shortstop Gleyber Torres, who quickly began heckling him. Torres had caught sight of Soto’s iPhone lock screen, which bears an image of him in 2019, hoisting the World Series trophy as a National.
“You gotta change that!” Torres cried.
Soto laughed. But he didn’t change it. He’s comfortable as a Yankee. But not that comfortable.
