NEW YORK — As we cross over the midway point of the baseball season, two major questions still need to be answered: Where is Juan Soto going to be playing? And when and how is Jacob deGrom going to be playing?
Taking the first one first because after Soto turned down the Nationals’ 15-year, $440 million offer last weekend that’s all everyone in baseball is talking about. How could he and what’s next now? Once you understand the modus operandi of Soto’s agent Scott Boras, whose objectives all along have been to make Soto the highest paid player in the history of baseball with an AAV well to the north of Max Scherzer’s $43.3 million, it’s easy to see why the Nationals’ offer, while staggering in its totality, was well below what it was going to take to keep the 23-year-old pre-eminent hitter in baseball from going year-to-year in arbitration until he becomes a free agent after the 2024 season. The contract was heavily backloaded, with an AAV of $29.9M, which is already topped by 20 other players.
Once Soto rejected the offer, the Nationals, whose owners, the Lerner family, have put the team up for sale, announced they would now entertain offers for him, albeit making it clear they would have to be substantial offers in which bidding clubs should be prepared to gut their farm systems of their top prospects. Ordinarily most clubs would be loath to consider any such thing for one player. But, as everyone agrees, Soto is a very special player, only 23, and the thought of having three bites at the postseason apple with him, has whetted the appetites of at least a seven clubs (that we know of) — the Yankees, Mets, Cardinals, Giants, Dodgers, Padres and Mariners — to step up to the plate with the keys to their farm systems.
