Comparing Yankees-Padres, Padres-Nationals Juan Soto trades - ESPN

It's not often that a general manager makes two of the signature moves of his tenure with a team by making trades involving the same headlining player, but that's exactly how it has played out for San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller — who has now both acquired and dealt away generational hitter Juan Soto.

There's an obvious way to evaluate how Preller fared in his two Soto deals by comparing the hauls. The tricky part in doing that is you have to consider the value of the contributions Soto made to the Padres (6.6 WAR over 214 games) and what he was paid in that span (just over $29 million), and then adjust for his trade value being almost cut in half because of that passage of time.

And all of that is before you get to the hardest part: comparing the value of 10 young players who were traded in these deals and are completely different types of players at different points in their careers.

Here is a complete breakdown of the returns in both Soto deals and how the two trade packages stack up.

Date of deal: Dec. 6, 2023

Yankees acquire:

OF Juan Soto

OF Trent Grisham

Padres acquire:

RHP Michael King

RHP Drew Thorpe

RHP Jhony Brito

RHP Randy Vasquez

C Kyle Higashioka.

King is the key player in the deal despite being 28 years old with 19 career big league starts. The package San Diego got back is built around acquiring several years of control of starting pitchers, but the Padres' biggest short-term need is 2024 starting pitching help. King comes with two years of control that will probably cost less than $10 million total while being the biggest 2024 contributor among the pitchers in this deal.

He shows frontline starter upside when he's right, but there is risk. He hasn't been stretched out to a conventional