If there’s life on Mars, even they know that Shohei Ohtani is the free agent to watch in this baseball offseason, even if he’s only going to hit and not pitch in 2024. Ohtani could stay with the Angels, which actually might happen, or go to the Dodgers or up the coast to the Giants, or across the country to the Mets, Yankees or Red Sox. In his case, it really might be a simple case of following what is expected to be historic free-agent money, for the kind of two-way player baseball hasn’t seen in 100 years.
But the free-agent-to-be to watch is Juan Soto.
The Padres might decide not to move Soto as they head into the last season when they have him under team control. No one knows for sure if the Padres really are looking to reduce payroll and beef up their farm system -- as has been widely reported -- and if they really will move Soto the way the Red Sox once moved Mookie Betts after making the determination that they couldn’t sign Mookie to a lucrative and long-term contract while they still had him under their control.
Maybe in the end, the Padres will decide to at least play things out with Soto until the Trade Deadline and see where they are then and what kind of season they’re having. Because as much of a disappointment as the Padres were in 2023, they came on strong in September and they ended up finishing just two games behind the D-backs, who made it all the way to the World Series, in the NL West standings.
Ohtani is the headliner of the offseason, of course, while we wait to see where he ends up. But the next most intriguing narrative in baseball this winter, and maybe even into the spring, is whether or not Soto -- still just 25 -- might end up somewhere other than San Diego.
There is no knowing about that, at least not yet. But what we do know, with great clarity and certainty, is that Soto showed people last season, all over again, just how big a talent he is. There were a lot of issues with the 2023 Padres. He wasn’t one of them. It started with him playing all 162 of their games.
“You know the first stat I look at? I look at that,” Buck Showalter said on Sunday when asked about Soto.
Then Showalter added this: “You know what he really did last year? He reminded people of what he can do.”
Here is how Tigers manager A.J. Hinch described Soto:
“He is incredible. In his worst season, he’s still an elite player. He has almost accumulated a 30 WAR before he is 26. He is the elite of the elite offensively, and you always have to manage against his spot coming up regardless of who is around him and whether or not he is swinging a hot bat. And in addition to all that, he never gives away an at-bat.”
Mike Rizzo, Soto’s old boss with the Nationals, once told me he honestly believed Soto could be the face of baseball someday. That was before Ohtani hit the stage, Aaron Judge hit 62 homers for the Yankees and Ronald Acuña Jr. was doing what he was doing for the Braves, even before Corey Seager became the game’s new Mr. October. But when Soto had his chance at the big October stage of the World Series -- the one during which he turned 21 -- he hit three homers, something no player his age had ever done, and had a .333 batting average and the Nationals won it all. This was 2019. The Nats played 17 postseason games that year, and Soto was on base in 16 of them.
“I was always blown away how, even when he was still a teenager, how he controlled the strike zone,” Omar Minaya, now an assistant to Brian Cashman with the Yankees, told me once.
In the year before his walk year, Soto hit 35 homers, knocked in 109, scored 97, batted .275, had an on-base percentage of .410 and an OPS of .930, all that on a team that was under .500 for as long as it was last season before making a run in the stretch for the last Wild Card in the National League. It means that he was exactly the player we all expected him to be when he was a teenager.
Now he may be in play again if the Padres decide to move in a trade before he has the right to leave them as a free agent. Without question, Ohtani is still the player to watch in baseball now that the World Series is over. But so, too, is Soto. Maybe people really had forgotten him because he’d only hit .236 with six homers after the Padres traded for No. 22 in ’22. But Showalter is right. Last season, he reminded us all of what he can do. Every single day.