The Juan Soto chase appears to be nearing a conclusion. As the offseason’s biggest domino wobbles, it’s a good time to illustrate what’s at stake when it falls.

From a pure baseball standpoint, Soto’s pending decision should capture the interest of all 30 teams. News flash: Soto is really good. He’s also still only 26 and the team that lands him should get to watch him continue to build on a first-ballot Hall of Fame career for the next decade or more.

That makes one interpretation of his impact blatantly obvious: If you sign Soto, he makes you better. If you don’t, you aren’t going to be as good as you would have been if you did.

We know Soto will make any team that signs him better by around five wins, all things being equal. That number varies somewhat, but that’s a good thumbnail number — the difference between Soto and whatever player his acquisition would push down the depth chart.

Not every team can afford to pursue him though, and the competitive context for each team that can is different. This is what we want to focus on today — competitive context. Those five wins matter more, and in different ways, depending on which suitor we’re talking about.

So let’s talk about some of those suitors. The rumor mill has given us five leading possibilities — teams believed to have already forwarded offers to Soto and superagent Scott Boras. Those are the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Red Sox and Blue Jays.

To that quintet, we’ll add three teams:

• The Phillies, just because you never know when Dave Dombrowski will swoop in.

• The Giants, because they typify teams that should arguably be more aggressive in the Soto market (and others) but haven’t shown much indication that is going to happen.

• The Royals, who were briefly attached to Soto very early in the process for, reportedly, making a call about him. But the Royals typify the kind of midlevel team in a not-large market that might get an outsized gain from a splash like this. It won’t happen, but it’s illustrative to see how much of an impact a player of Soto’s value could have on clubs.