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How Juan Soto became a San Diego Padre -- inside the biggest deal in baseball history
BLEARY-EYED AND SLEEP-DEPRIVED, their five-o'clock shadows looking more like 10, A.J. Preller and Mike Rizzo lurched into their offices on opposite coasts early Tuesday morning ready to do the unthinkable. Pulling off the biggest trade in the century-and-a-half-long history of Major League Baseball had taken the two general managers to the brink of exhaustion — and done the same to Juan Soto, the superstar outfielder who in a few hours would be dealt by Rizzo's Washington Nationals to Preller's San Diego Padres. For a deal so complicated, so consequential, so tectonic, though, an unfamiliar feeling that morning overwhelmed the principals of such a massive endeavor: peace.
