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.

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.