DALLAS – For 327 days, Juan Soto was a New York Yankee.
It was a glorious, reckless tenure. One filled with swaggering acts of baseball dominance – no doubt home runs and challenging bases on balls and gestures of love before hordes of adoring bleacher creatures. A perfect match, they said. Soto, a monumental player born to play for baseball’s most monumental club. In ALCS Game 5, with an at-bat for the ages and a swing for the books, Soto sent the Yankees to the World Series. It all felt like just the beginning.
Late Sunday night, that joyride came to a sudden, thunderous, and final end.
Soto is now a New York Met.
Mets owner Steve Cohen extended an eye-popping, paradigm-shifting 15-year contract worth $765 million to make that happen. Not only is it the biggest deal in MLB history; it’s the biggest deal in sports history. Cohen, one of the 100 richest souls on the planet, was willing to reach previously unthinkable heights to bring Soto to Queens. He outbid the Yanks, plain and simple.
According to ESPN, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner’s best offer was 16 years, $760 million, about $4 million less per year than the final deal. That’s a strong offer, which should understandably keep voracious Yankees fans off Steinbrenner’s tail, but no one is hoisting a “we tried it” banner in the Bronx.
Can the Yankees put together a competitive team after Soto’s departure? Absolute. The Bombers still employ Aaron Judge, the best hitter in the world, and Gerrit Cole, one of the best pitchers in the world. There are still plenty of free agents available to strengthen that core. For example, adding left-handed starter Max Fried, first baseman Christian Walker, right fielder Teoscar Hernández and a few experienced relievers would help the Yankees remain a formidable force. Some, but probably not all, of the roughly 750 million earmarked for Soto will be allocated elsewhere.
That said, it will be nearly impossible to make up for Soto’s offensive production. No player offers that combination of strength, basic skills and sheer intimidation; that’s why he just got paid $765 million. The Yankees will try, as the Moneyball mantra goes, to replace him altogether. And on a purely statistical level, they might. When it comes to roster construction, paths to redemption remain for Steinbrenner and general manager Brian Cashman.
But from a PR perspective, the loss of Soto is an unmitigated disaster.
For decades, the Yankees have functioned as a colossus, an unquestioned, untouchable financial juggernaut at the top of the baseball world. It’s a record of economic superiority that goes all the way back to Babe Ruth. When Hal’s father, George Steinbrenner, bought the club in 1973, in the early days of the MLB free-agent era, the dollar bill bullying only got worse. The Yankees have always spent the most money, both to retain their own players and to acquire new players.
Now they’re not even the top dogs in their own city.
Juan Soto is on the Mets because Cohen is a much, much richer man than Steinbrenner. Suddenly the Mets, who long took a baseball punch for their austerity under old ownership and their propensity for shaky controversy, are all grown up. Not only do they sit at the adult table, but they run it with ungodly amounts of money. Cohen once spent $244 million on a pair of images; Soto is pocket money to him.
Money, in sports as in life, is only important to the extent that it allows or limits one’s actions. Giving Soto a king’s ransom won’t change the way Cohen lives (lavishly) or how his baseball team does business (assertive). Whether Soto is too worth $765 million doesn’t really matter, not in the grand scheme of things and not to Cohen. He’s good for it. If Soto doesn’t fulfill the contract, it’s all just cash.
Steinbrenner, whose fortunes stem directly from the Yankees’ success, simply cannot operate in that hemisphere. And if he had outbid Cohen, Cohen would certainly have raised the bar again.
That dynamic represents a significant changing of the guard, both in the Big Apple and in the MLB. The Mets and Dodgers are in a financial league of their own. The Yankees are one level down. Such a statement would have sounded ridiculous fifteen years ago, when the Mets were run by the greedy Wilpon family and the Dodgers were bankrupted by an ignorant owner.
But times have certainly changed and the Yankees, now without Soto, must find a way to adapt to this new, brutal reality.
