What a "far-fetched" Red Sox trade package for Juan Soto would look like
BOSTON -- The Boston Red Sox are not in the best of spots right now, having gone 5-12 to start the month of July and dropping out of the current Wild Card picture along the way. The team looks more like a seller than a buyer at the All-Star break.
Yet with the news that Juan Soto rejected a 15-year, $440 million deal resonating throughout the baseball world, baseball fans in Boston can't help but wonder what a theoretical trade package to acquire the 23-year-old superstar from the Washington Nationals would look like.
Fortunately, someone has concocted exactly that.
The Associated Press' Noah Trister set out to draw up some potential trade packages -- some more realistic than others -- for Soto, using the baseball trade simulator at Baseball Trade Values. The first trade package that he drew up came from the Red Sox, and it looked like this:
NATIONALS RECEIVE
SS Marcelo Mayer
1B Triston Casas
RHP Brayan Bello
RHP Tanner Houck
2B Nick Yorke
SS Xander BogaertsRED SOX RECEIVE
OF Juan Soto
That is, to put it mildly, a lot.
Bogaerts -- a four-time All-Star, two-time World Series champion, and four-time Silver Slugger winner -- is actually the least that the Red Sox would be giving up in that deal, considering he's just months away from free agency.
For this deal to happen, the Red Sox would have to give up all of their top 100 prospects. Mayer is ranked as the 10th-best prospect in all of baseball, while Casas is 14th. Bello (44th) and Yorke (64th) are a bit farther down the list, but that quartet makes up the entirety of the Red Sox' representation in the top 100 prospects list.
Considering how hard Chaim Bloom and the front office have worked to build up the Red Sox' system in the post-Dave Dombrowski era, this is a theoretical deal that probably has somewhere between a 0.0 chance and a 0.0000001 chance of actually happening. It does, however, show just how absurd of a price that will have to be paid if any team does indeed convince the Nationals to move their star outfielder before this year's deadline.
