“It had to be a team that needed the piece,” GM Mike Rizzo told reporters back on August 2, 2022 after trading Juan Soto (and Josh Bell) to San Diego at the trade deadline. “It had to be a team that was obviously in contention, and it had to be a team that had the personnel that we needed to get back in the trade.”
Rizzo and Co. in Washington, D.C. set a high bar to even consider trading Soto, now 24, who had two-plus seasons of team control left at the time, and had reportedly turned down a 15-year/$440M extension offer from the club which signed him out of the Dominican Republic in 2015 and called him up to make his MLB debut in 2018 (and with whom he won a World Series in 2019).