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DALLAS -- The Winter Meetings hadn’t even officially started, and the big news everyone was waiting for happened. It was like opening your presents on Christmas Eve rather than morning.

The news of Juan Soto’s historic contract with the Mets greeted the baseball world as they assembled here ahead of Monday morning’s start to the 2024 Winter Meetings. As is often the case when things happen at that level, I like to wax nostalgic about how we at MLB Pipeline crossed paths with the game’s superstars.

Needless to say, our time in Soto’s orbit was brief, given how quickly he ascended the ladder to Washington after signing with the Nationals for $1.5 million back in July 2015, part of an international signing class that included Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr. and Andrés Giménez. Johnny DiPuglia, now a special assistant for international operations with the Royals, was the Nationals’ international scouting director and the man who deserves most of the credit for signing Soto. Unlike many players DiPuglia had scouted and signed, Soto didn’t have an abundance of tools that jumped off the page. The veteran evaluator points to how he was taught to scout players from his predecessors that allowed him to hone in on two important things: Soto’s feel to hit and his makeup.

“When you give a player that amount of money, you think he’s going to be a big leaguer, but a lot of times it doesn’t work out,” DiPuglia said. “We were signing the bat. I give credit to the foundation of old school scouting I was taught.

“You have to look at the total picture, the focus, the character, the integrity of the young man, along with the hit tool. That’s what made it equate to the money we gave the player. I don’t think an analytic machine could have equated to what I saw with my eyes. I was really convinced in the makeup and the innate ability to barrel the baseball.”

Soto skipped over the Dominican Summer League and made his pro debut stateside in 2016, hitting his way from the Gulf Coast League to the short-season New York-Penn League and serving notice his bat might be special by finishing with a combined .973 OPS.

He vaulted up to No. 3 on the Nationals’ Top 30 prior to the 2017 season as a result, and he posted a .351/.415/.505 line in 2017, but injuries limited him to just 32 total games. It was pretty clear he had the chance to be an elite player and we was up at No. 29 on our Top 100 ahead of the 2018 season (No. 2 on the Nats’ list), despite all the missed time. In retrospect, we were way light.

“That injury gave him another level of maturation,” DiPuglia said. “Not being able to play out of the chute allowed him to evaluate things young players usually don’t. He would ask questions that floored us at his age.”

The 2018 campaign was the one when Juan Soto really became … Juan Soto. The Nats tried to pump the brakes by sending him back to Single-A to start the year because he had played so few games there. But he would have none of it. Still a teenager, Soto got promoted from Hagerstown to High-A Potomac after 16 games. Fifteen games later he was in Double-A Harrisburg, which is when I interacted with him for the first time.

By that point, we had moved him to No. 15 on the Top 100 in our “Market Corrections” that May. As he told me during that interview, his goal was to make it to Double-A that season, but even he was surprised how quickly it transpired. I remember being struck at his insistence on doing the interview in English, at age 19, because he knew that was part of what it meant to be a big league star. Then I wrote perhaps one of the most prescient things I’ve ever penned in that story:

“All of this points to one thing: 19-year-old Juan Soto may have just arrived this week, but don't expect him to be here long.”

Our producers had barely hit publish (is this the modern-day version of “the ink had barely dried?”) on the story when Soto was on the move again, leapfrogging Double-A to the big leagues. In 39 Minor League games that year, he hit .362/.462/.757 with 14 homers and more walks than strikeouts. He ended up finishing second in National League Rookie of the Year Award voting after posting a .923 OPS, finishing behind Ronald Acuña Jr.

“His rapid pace of development was unbelievable,” DiPuglia. “We had the misfortune of guys having some injuries; we didn’t know where we were going to go and he was looking straight at us. “I said [to GM Mike Rizzo], ‘He looks the part.’ He had the courage and the fortitude to bring him up. Opportunity created something for him to get to the big leagues and not go back down, because he kept performing.”

DiPuglia has been a part of signing some of the best players from Latin America, and he knows that he’s inked some with much louder all-around toolsets. When he was with the Red Sox he brought Hanley Ramirez into the fold (for just $20,000!), and while he had a fine big league career that included a Rookie of the Year Award, a batting title, two Silver Sluggers and three All-Star nods to go along with 38.0 bWAR, No one would argue who has had the better career, with Soto now at 36.4 bWAR with a whole lot of runway left.

“No one could have thought he’d be the highest paid player in all of sports, but if I didn’t go to my grass roots of how I was taught, I wouldn’t have been convinced on the makeup and that one tool,” DiPuglia said. “Hanley Ramirez had better tools than Soto and should have been a better player, but it’s Soto’s intangibles and his makeup that let him get there.”