Insider Says Washington Nationals Should 'Open the Vault' for Juan Soto Reunion
On Monday, Washington Nationals fans saw a familiar sight.
Juan Soto will be manning right field at Nationals Park throughout the three-game slate as they welcomed in the New York Yankees.
It's only the third time he's been back in the nation's capital since the organization decided to trade away the mega talent in 2022 when they couldn't come to an agreement on a contract extension that would have kept him with the team who signed him as an international free agent in 2015.
Fast forward to now, and the Nationals have a chance to get the superstar back with their franchise.
The Nationals are in a different place now.
Many of their star prospects, some of whom were acquired in the Soto deal, are impact players at the Major League level, which brings into question if they should even go after their former star.
For Barry Svrluga of The Washington Post, the answer is a no-brainer.
"Open the vault for one Juan Soto," he writes when discussing how they should allocate their resources. "This shouldn't be a fantasy. It should be a plan. Soto won a World Series here once. He could and should be a piece of the next team that brings home a trophy. And the one after that."
Landing him is not going to be cheap.
It could cost in the $600 million range, something that makes owners sweat no matter how much capital they have.
How badly does Washington want to have a contending team right now?
That's the exact question the Lerner family has to answer as head into this offseason. They could be more than willing to let their young players grow and develop while spending money on some veterans to fill out the roster's depth.
But with Patrick Corbin's contract coming off the books, the stars are aligning for them to reunite with Soto and have him lead this group of youngsters into contender status much like Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon, and others did for him back in 2019.
"There's no team in baseball that wouldn't benefit from Soto's immense presence. The Nationals are among them, and should count themselves as such. The most excruciating step in this years-long rebuild was trading Soto away to San Diego. It would be absolutely delicious to fold him into the group that was partially assembled through that deal ... Juan Soto might seem like a moonshot. He shouldn't have to be," Svrluga adds.
It will be interesting to see what the Nationals ultimately decide to do.
Anytime one of the game's best players can be added to a foundation of young players that looks to have a bright future, it's exciting for any fanbase.
Then factor in that Soto was a major part of this franchise winning its first ever World Series title, and it's hard not to dream about seeing the superstar manning right field in Nationals Park for years to come.
BRAD WAKAI