The San Diego Padres offloaded a huge package to land Mason Miller from the Athletics at the MLB trade deadline. It was the biggest deal of the deadline, and it stunned the baseball world, as A.J. Preller gave up top prospect Leo De Vries, ranked 3rd by MLB Pipeline at the time of the trade.

Mason Miller is right in the middle of the National League wild-card race as a member of the San Diego Padres, but he was reportedly almost part of the same race with a different team.

When the work was finished, and five trades involving 22 players had been executed within six hours, A.J. Preller's peers called him everything from a "lunatic" to a "genius," a divergence befitting Major League Baseball's most polarizing executive.