SAN DIEGO — When it comes to Jackson Merrill, you can be sure A.J. Preller has given some thought to this question:

Should Preller try to sign the 21-year-old center fielder/shortstop to a mega-contract, buying out his arbitration years plus portions of free agency?

At first glance, it’s too soon to consider. Merrill just this month finished his first big-league season; he played in only 200 minor-league games before this year.

Why not wait and see how his next season or two play out?

Besides, Merrill himself may not want to complicate things.

The young dude seems to excel at keeping the main thing the main thing — as he described it several times this year, concentrating on helping the Padres win the day’s game. Three summers ago, Merrill — eager to start his professional career after Preller drafted him out of a Maryland high school — agreed to a draft bonus that was about $800,000 less than MLB’s recommendation for that slot.

Still, a long-term contract seems worth considering.

Merrill’s rookie year was that special.

Greatly outperforming his $740,000 salary, the rookie helped the Padres hang with two big-market rivals — the Dodgers and Mets — who spent about twice as much on player payroll.

Merrill was one of 16 position players to accrue 5.3 or more win shares, a very complicated (and flawed) statistic that, per FanGraphs analytics, takes all the contributions a player makes toward his team’s wins and distills them into a single number. Three of the 16 had yet to qualify for salary arbitration: Merrill, the Orioles’ Gunnar Henderson, 23, and the Reds’ Elly De La Cruz, 22.

Merrill’s season would be worth between $34 million and $42.3 million on the free agent market, estimated FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com. Though his free agency won’t come before the 2029-30 offseason, those numbers show where things might go.

So, there’s reason to believe Merrill’s early career bodes well for sustained success.

Two ingredients have stood out among many impressive features.

One, the Nationals in fact asked for Merrill in the Juan Soto trade talks during the 2023 season.

Two, as part of his laser show that produced all-fields hitting power, the rookie showed a rare ability to hit home runs off high-speed pitches that were between him and the inside corner of the plate.

Why does it matter that Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo sought Merrill as part of the Soto package that began with young big-leaguers CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore?

It means two of MLB’s better talent evaluators – Rizzo and Preller – believed in Merrill and therefore likely weren’t stunned by his special rookie year. Showing high regard for Merrill, Preller held him out of the trade and included James Wood, a slugging outfielder and Padres draftee who reminded some scouts of a young Aaron Judge and drew higher rankings from some media outlets than Merrill entering this season.

As for Merrill turning pitches inside of the inside corner into home runs and other hits, it was far from the only special hitting skill he showed.

But it was stunning nonetheless because many big-leaguers either can’t get good wood to those pitches or hook them foul or well short of the wall.

Quick with his hips, unified from head to toe, Merrill pulled “inside-inside” pitches of 90.1, 90.4 and 94.4 miles per hour over the right-field wall. And, he did it without setting up farther from the plate.

Dodgers reliever Blake Treinen raised his hands in disbelief as Merrill’s 394-foot, ninth-inning launch tied the July 30 game at Petco Park.

Because he’d allowed recent homers to MLB stars Alex Bregman and Manny Machado, Treinen afterward compared those blows to the rookie’s.

“The most impressive one is probably Jackson Merrill,” Treinan told Bill Plunkett of Southern California News Group. “It’s a ball and a half inside. So I’m not going to try to reinvent the wheel.”

Merrill hit .292 with 31 doubles as a rookie. And he surprised outsiders by hitting 25 home runs, including a postseason blow at Dodger Stadium.

Proof that Merrill’s tough to figure out: five homers went to the opposite field, 12 beyond center field and eight beyond right field.

If there was any flukiness to the rookie’s well-rounded season, it’s beyond me.

His expected batting average (.308) and expected slugging percentage (.547) — statistics designed to account for randomness of outcomes — placed among MLB’s top 4% of hitters.

Yes, he chased pitches out of the strike zone at a fairly high rate. That wasn’t surprising, given his bat-to-ball skills. His ability to handle some of those pitches — a skill that helped homegrown Giants regular Pablo Sandoval contribute to three World Series-winning teams — added to his unpredictability.

His was a rookie season to behold.

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