Juan Soto agreed to a reported 15-year, $765m contract with the New York Mets on Sunday night, the largest contract in the history of professional sports by total value. But as well as the brain-frying amounts of cash involved, it also represents a shift in the dynamics of baseball.
The obvious thing to say is that $765m is an obscene amount of money, which it is. But baseball salaries were obscene long before Soto’s deal was agreed. The 26-year-old got $65m more than the Los Angeles Dodgers committed to Shohei Ohtani last winter, albeit over a contract that is five years longer. Soto’s contract, various reports on Sunday indicated, does not include the kind of deferred payments that comprised almost all of Ohtani’s pay from the Dodgers. Soto’s contract is a generational haul and could upend the balance of power in an already strong National League East.
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The Mets, who lost to Ohtani’s Dodgers in the National League Championship Series in October, will be a threat for the NL pennant for the foreseeable future. And in signing Soto, owner and hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen has dealt a devastating blow to the crosstown Yankees, who enjoyed exactly one year of Soto’s brilliance before losing him to their Subway Series rivals. For most of major league history it was the Yankees who pulled off these kind of deals, while the Mets settled into their role as the city’s lovable underdogs. But Cohen is rich even by sports owner standards: $21bn has a funny way of changing a team.
Soto’s free agency was a blockbuster moment, the kind of looming event that caused teams to reshuffle their plans over the course of several years. The Washington Nationals, Soto’s first team, traded him in 2022, collecting a crop of talented prospects only after it was clear that they could not reach terms with one of the best hitters who would ever reach the free agent market. Soto had transformed the Nationals, helping lead them to their first World Series title in 2019. The San Diego Padres made the same calculation in moving Soto for their own collection of young talent after he spent the 2023 season in southern California. Soto’s profile only rose when he got to New York in 2024, as he hit for a .288/.419/.569 slash line with the…