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When Juan Soto came to the plate in the first inning Monday night, most of those in the lower bowl at Nationals Park stood and applauded. Washington’s last first down as a National? When he slid headfirst across the plate moments later, the thought was inevitable. Last race as Nat? In the fourth, when he hit a how-to-replace-that shot to left center, you had to wonder. Last homer with the Nats? Meanwhile, the clock was ticking toward Tuesday’s trade deadline — a Soto has been the fulcrum for more than two weeks.
By the eighth inning, many of the Nats fans among the 29,034 who drank in a 7-3 loss to Max Scherzer and the New York Mets were standing and chanting, “We love Soto!”
“It means a lot,” Soto said after going deep and walking Scherzer in his other three plate appearances. “It also feels strange, because nothing [has] it’s still happened, and we’re still waiting.”
It’s tough stuff, and on an unusually pleasant August night, you can almost feel it strangling the franchise and its fan base. There’s a chance, a possibility, that when dawn breaks on Tuesday, Soto faces a future in which he never puts on a Nationals uniform again. Put the evaluation of everything in return on the back burner for a moment. It’s a lot of stomach.
“You’re not going to give these players away and you’re not going to get something in return that makes us feel like, ‘Hey, this is what our future is going to be, and this is going to be really good for us,'” coach Dave Martinez said. Those guys up there [in the front office] We are working diligently to get those players we need, if we can get them. If not, we’ve got one of the best young players in the game, and I love the kid.”
Until 6pm on Tuesday, the situation is incredibly fluid. By the time you read this in the news paper, Soto might have been traded. Update your Twitter feed frequently. It’s the only way to keep up.
“I feel good where I am, and I understand that it’s a business and they have to do what they need to do,” Soto said. “I’m just another player, another employee here, as Zim used to say.”
Forever Nat Ryan Zimmerman never faced such a situation. But here’s an eternal truth about any potential Soto deal: The Nationals must ask for an unprecedented return. This is his responsibility, considering a player of his skill and age has never been changed with two years and two months of control before free agency. For a rival team, this isn’t just three pennant races and three Octobers. That’s also two full 162-game seasons, which can’t be ignored.
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But the flip side of asking for that kind of transportation, which is entirely appropriate, is that it might be too much for an opposing CEO, let alone an opposing ownership group, to swallow. Any club that trades for Soto and hopes to sign him to a contract extension hasn’t listened closely to the player, who has repeatedly talked about his curiosity about having 30 teams bid for his services in free agency, or his agent, Scott Boras.
A potential deal should be based on his baseball sense, and will be framed as such. But there’s also an undeniable PR element. And it would be hard for general manager Mike Rizzo to stand in front of the fan base and argue that what he got for a generational talent will transform the franchise if the rest of the industry reacts with some version of “That’s all they got ?”
This has to be a great return, one that gives the fan base more reasons to come to the stadium, not just in two or three years, but immediately. It’s a tough pack for any team to pick apart.
Also, it would be entirely reasonable for Rizzo to say some version of, “Why is this a bad result? We still have one of the best young players in the game. There will be a new ownership group in the offseason. Maybe they can go beyond the ’15-year, $440 million deal that Soto turned down from the Lerner family.
I’ve become pessimistic about whether a deal can be reached, and it feels more like 65-35 against that possibility than 90-10, so Soto will likely be traded five minutes after these words are published . There is no certainty about this. Hold on to your hat.
Well, wait. There is certainty about this: October 2019 and the parade that followed: man, they feel like more than two years and nine months ago.
“It seems like a long time ago,” Martinez said. “It does.”
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As if to twist that particular knife, the Mets started Scherzer on Monday night in what might have been Soto’s final game in the uniform they each wore during that wild run to a World Series title. In an unusually expansive and moving pregame meeting with reporters, Martinez cried a couple of times as he thought about what he was and what remains. Since trading Scherzer and Trea Turner, not to mention Daniel Hudson and Yan Gomes and others, at last year’s deadline, the Nationals are 53-111, numbers that make sense if you watch this team play regularly , but they still look amazing in black and white.
Martinez said Monday that he has a room in his home where he stores the most meaningful memorabilia he’s collected over the years. So much for 2019. In these dark days, we often turn to reminiscing with old photos.
“It kind of says, ‘Hey, no matter what happens, the goal is to get back there, right?’ ” Martinez said. “So every day, I’ll go down there, pick myself up and say, ‘Hey, one day we’ll be back.’ Keep those memories intact.”
But it’s not just the whirlwind around Soto that makes those days seem more distant. It is the deterioration of professionalism in some corners of his own club. On Monday afternoon, Víctor Robles, once the unquestioned starting center fielder for a World Series champion, now a spare piece with an unclear future, had a box of jerseys in front of his locker, handing them out to teammates interested Front: A picture of Robles with a clown nose — a look back at his dugout antics last month after Arizona’s Madison Bumgarner called him a “clown” for hitting a solo home run when the Nats were down six runs in the eighth.
On a winning team, a funny, even self-deprecating shirt could be unifying. But for a group that has the worst record in baseball, and may have an even more secure grip on that status come September, it’s comical. Who are the clowns, Victor? The effort put into designing and ordering these shirts could have been better used to figure out how not to get dumped on the base paths.
But I digress. That, of course, doesn’t come close to the most important part of this week. The most important part of this week isn’t even about this week. It’s about the direction of the franchise. And we’ll know something about that direction depending on whether Juan Soto gets another standing ovation in front of the Whites on Tuesday night, or whether he’s packed up his belongings and left the home club for the last time.