Except for the final number of dollars, which blew away even veteran baseball executives, the signing of Juan Soto by the New York Mets was the most predictable outcome in years on the free agent market. No offense to the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox, but they all were competing for second place and the golf clap from their fans that they tried really hard.
You can break down the $765 million, 15-year deal—the largest known contract in the history of sports—all you want. How Soto had the chance for a monument at Yankee Stadium by riding shotgun with Aaron Judge into the next decade. How a pure hitter, with little defensive or baserunning value, turned the $700 million of two-way unicorn Shohei Ohtani into a bargain just one year into Ohtani’s 10-year deal. Whether Soto is “worth” it or not.
That’s not what is the story behind why Soto is a Met.
The story is Mets owner Steve Cohen and how he collects art.
In 2020, when Cohen bought the Mets, Fortune magazine estimated his net worth to be about $14 billion. Today it estimates his net worth to be $21.5 billion, making him the 30th richest person in the United States and the richest in MLB.
Cohen began collecting art in 2000. When he was worth a mere $13 billion, he explained to Fortune how he purchased art: “I am purely from the gut. And I know right away. It stays in my brain. Let’s say I go see a picture. If I keep thinking about it, I know it’s something I like. If I forget about it, then I know, couldn’t care less.”
In 2019, for example, Cohen could not stop thinking about Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit,” a three-and-a-half-foot steel cast of an inflatable plastic toy. He paid $91 million for it, the most ever paid for the work of a living artist. It joined works from the likes of Warhol, de Kooning, Picasso and others in his collection that years ago was worth $1 billion.
Soto was the baseball version of “Rabbit.” Cohen kept thinking about Soto, who is such a generational hitting talent he joined Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle as the only players with 200 homers and a .420 on-base percentage through age 25. He had to have Soto, which meant he was going to get Soto.
Nobody was going to outbid Cohen, as he proved by going to an average annual value of $51 million, $3.5 million more than what the Yankees put on the table. When a prospective employer is telling you he wants you more than your current employer, what are you supposed to do?
See, besides being the richest man in baseball, Cohen is a Mets fan. He remembers when in the 1980s New York was a Mets town, not a Yankees town. He bought the team not as a hobby but as someone who wants to see his team win a World Series for the first time in almost four decades. Signing Soto guarantees him nothing; the crapshoot of the expanded postseason is the great equalizer when it comes to payroll disparity. But by outbidding and outwooing the Yankees for one of their own players, Cohen established the Mets as the alpha team in New York, a team that will swing with the Dodgers when it comes to financial might.
The $765 million? That’s a function of Cohen’s largesse, his determination to acquire what his heart desires and his quest for a title. Save the breakdown of Soto’s WAR-per-dollars. It’s definitely not about that.
“North of where I thought,” one executive texted about the total value. “I thought it might reach $700m but that is only because the Shohei deal has some anchoring effect there even though it was about $460m [in present day dollars].”
Other sports may celebrate massive contracts as signs of institutional health, with a halo effect on attracting young athletes. Those sports generally have salary caps. Not baseball, where record contracts spark internal debate on whether such spending is good for the game.
One team source texted a “mind blown” emoji and pointed out that when Soto is 33 years old, he will have eight years and $400 million left on his contract. “He’s the best hitter I’ve ever seen,” the source said. “But I do think the LAD/NYM war will just make small markets throw their hands up next CBA.”
The collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season.
“True,” another source said about possible tension between the Dodgers-Mets spending axis and everybody else. “I think it’s good for the game. There’s still a lot of randomness in October. The Mets should be a marquee franchise. 5 playoff appearances in 24 years is not good for a NY team. That should change.”
Cohen is not done. He must consolidate the Soto signing by getting a big-time pitcher and not just rely on David Stearns working his buy-low magic on starters.
The Yankees will pivot to Plan B. As one Yankees source told me hours before Soto finalized his decision, “Sometimes Plan B turns out to be the better plan.”
There is no replacing Soto. In a year Judge was the unanimous American League MVP, he saw more pitches in the strike zone than he ever saw before. Why would pitchers be more aggressive with Judge when he was that good? Because Soto got on base more than anybody not named Judge, who kept coming up with traffic. Ever since the Yankees whiffed on Bryce Harper, they needed a left-handed power bat to compliment Judge. They finally got that bat in Soto. The result was 99 homers between the two of them.
Now Soto is gone and there is no lefthanded bat who will be that kind of running mate. Make no mistake, the Yankees will pivot aggressively. They can get serious with Alex Bregman, Pete Alonso, Anthony Santander, Teoscar Hernández and Christian Walker, the best bats left on the market. But all are right-handed except for the switch-hitting Santander, who did hit 44 home runs but is a pull-hitting, pop-up prone slugger who hit .197 against four-seam fastballs last season.
What the Yankees need to do is get Judge out of center field to save wear and tear on the big man. (Jasson Dominguez is not a surefire plug-and-play option there.) They also can turn their resources to Corbin Burnes or Max Fried to make this team more pitching dependent.
Two years ago, at age 23, Soto turned down $440 million from the Nationals to bet on himself. After his trade to the Yankees a year ago he turned down any overtures about a contract extension to bet on himself. He then posted the best season of his life and one of the all-time great platform seasons heading into free agency. He loves the game and plays it with passion and no fear. In his worst season he posted an OPS+ of 142. He is the surest investment in baseball. Cohen had to have him.
The Yankees and Mets largely had never bid against one another for one of their own top free agents. Cohen was the one with the paddle in his hand who was going to keep raising it until the Yankees broke. Forget David Ortiz trying to recruit Soto to Boston or the Blue Jays being run by a communications company that needed a splash or even the Dodgers trying another heavily deferred deal. None of that mattered. I texted another executive about the simple version of how Scott Boras, the agent for Soto, could smash records with this contract: “Scott had the perfect NY-NY storm. Cohen was never going to be outbid.”
The reply: “Exactly.”
Cohen won the bidding. He got his “Rabbit.” Again. We should not be surprised.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Steve Cohen Was Never Going to Lose the Biggest Auction in Sports History.
