What a Juan-derful holiday season it will be for the Mets. The ‘Subway Series’ just got a whole lot spicier. It is Juan Soto to the New York Mets by means of the richest known deal in the history of sports.
The former New York Yankees slugger, who helped lead the team to their first World Series appearance since 2009, received the most lucrative and anticipated payday of the offseason on Sunday night, agreeing to a 15-year, $765 million deal with the Mets, according to multiple reporters, including MLB Network’s Jon Heyman and ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million deal that he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, blew past and shattered all expectations of how much a single player can earn last offseason, but his record was mowed down after only one year. He will make more than Soto on an average annual value basis, but not if you take into account the heavy deferrals throughout Ohtani’s contract. After considering inflation, MLB has calculated the Ohtani deal as a 10-year, $460 million contract in its CBT calculations. Still not too shabby.
According to Passan, Soto’s deal includes no deferred money and has incentives that can balloon the contract’s value to an astonishing $800 million. The deal also has an opt-out clause for Soto after five years. According to multiple reports, the Mets can make the opt-out a moot point by raising the average annual value of the contract by $4 million, from $51 million to $55 million over the last 10 years of the deal.
Soto’s is also the longest contract in MLB history, passing the San Diego Padres Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 14-year, $340 million contract. By most experts’ standards, Soto is the new king of MLB contracts.
It has been the worst kept secret in baseball. Soto has been thought of as the ‘golden prodigy’ and was expected to reach a new level of riches since before he could legally grab a beer in the U.S., and those lofty expectations only grew as he honed his skills over the past seven seasons into one of the most productive young hitters the game has ever seen.
By every known statistic, Soto projects to be not only in Coopers Town as a Hall of Famer but also an inner-circle one. Players that exude that level of greatness rarely, if ever, get to test the free agency market, and almost never do so at Soto’s young age of 26 years old. Hence the hundreds of millions of dollars now awaiting the Santo Domingo native.
Soto joins a great Mets team and organization that rallied late in the season to make the playoffs as a wild card and advanced to the NLCS against the eventual World Series champion Dodgers. In signing Soto, the Mets were the big winners in a bidding war with the crosstown rival Yankees, who lose Soto’s services after a single season in the Bronx that ended with a trip to the Fall Classic, where they lost in five games.
Soto came into MLB as a talented, but not necessarily elite, prospect for the Washington Nationals in 2018. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the 19-year-old could swing the bat with the best of them, but he was thrusted into the spotlight of the majors earlier than expected due to a rash of injuries in D.C.
At that point, Soto had played only eight games above High-A ball. Yet he was a supreme hitter with a great eye from Day 1, hitting .292/.406/.517 that season and finishing as runner-up for the Rookie of the Year award. He got even better in his sophomore campaign in 2019, ended in a World Series title for the Nationals.
One of the highlights and turning points of that series was Soto hitting a fastball from future teammate Gerrit Cole to the train tracks of Minute Maid Park in Houston.
Embed from Getty Images
The Nationals, by no fault of Soto’s, proceeded to become bad enough that they either needed to sign him to a long-term extension or trade him away before allowing him to walk out the door for nothing.
The Nationals pulled out the red carpet and did everything they could in an attempt to convince Soto to stay, offering him a reported 15-year, $440 million deal, but Soto turned it down and bet on himself, a decision that has since been proven to be the right one. A trade to the Padres followed in 2022.
Soto joined a talented team in San Diego midseason, and they proceeded to reach the NLCS, but a frustrating 2023 and the death of high-spending Padres owner Peter Seidler led to another trade last winter. Again, it was no fault on Soto’s part beyond the fact that he would not sign a contract extension.
The Yankees had a clear understanding that it was risky to acquire Soto with only one year left before his free agency, but they took it anyway. The result was their first trip to the World Series in fifteen years, with Soto forming a devastating 1-2 punch with AL MVP Aaron Judge.
All indications still point to Soto being a future Hall of Famer with many of his prime years still ahead of him, and that’s why he ended up being worth so much money.
