Yankees Save Boring Winter Meetings, Trade for Juan Soto

After three days of not much action, the Bronx Bombers land one of the best young hitters in baseball.

Soto, so good. (Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images)

Hi friends-

1. Thank you to everyone who participated in our first-ever Book Club chat and Zoom discussing The Boys Of Summer earlier this week! I took a leap of faith that enough of you would want to read it and form a thoughtful, funny and brilliant group to talk about it, and you did not disappoint. We will definitely keep this train rolling. My only regret is that we didn’t form a book club earlier.

2. Our December book is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. We will discuss it in the Substack app on Sunday, Jan. 7, and over Zoom on Monday, Jan. 8. This is open to all paid subscribers. I hope you’ll join us!

3. We also had a wonderful introductory Zoom this past Tuesday night for those of you who are doing The Artists Way course this go-round. If you want to join this 12-week workshop, there’s still room in our group! It begins this Tuesday, Dec. 12. Just respond to this newsletter if you want more info.

Now, on to the baseball stuff.

MLB’s annual winter meetings were held in Nashville this week from Monday to Wednesday and, aside from Dave Roberts putting his entire foot in his mouth when discussing Shohei Ohtani (which we will get to tomorrow!!), nothing of note happened.

Then, late last night, after everyone had checked out of the Gaylord Opryland and headed for the airport, the Padres and Yankees decided to put an end to a nation’s boredom and completed a swap for one of the game’s biggest stars.

The full trade looked like this:

The Yankees got:

OF Juan Soto and OF Trent Grisham.

The Padres got:

RHP Michael King, C Kyle Higashioka, RHP Jhony Brito, RHP Randy Vásquez and RHP Drew Thorpe.

It’s a bit of a shock when any player as talented as Juan Soto is traded, and it will take a while for all of us to digest him in pinstripes, hitting in front of Aaron Judge. (God help the men who are assigned to pitch to those two back-to-back, and then have to lie after the game about how they “wanted that challenge!”)

Anyway, it was pretty obvious that