The Mets Are the Yankees Now
And Juan Soto is the highest-paid athlete in the world
I’d first like to say that I’m impressed with how far our ability to Photoshop players into new jerseys has come. Check this guy out! He looks excited to be in New York’s other set of pinstripes.
And you would be too, if you’d just signed the richest deal in U.S. sports history. $765M, averaging out to a nice, non-round number of $51M a year for the next decade and a half. Juan Soto is just 26 now, and players of his caliber — read: future Hall of Famers — usually don’t become available at that age. The Mets will be his fourth team, which is also an unusual trajectory. Given this deal will take him through his age-41 season, though, they might be his last too.
Good for him. This is the sort of deal he must have envisioned for himself when he turned down the massive extension offered by his first team, the Washington Nationals, in 2022. That wasn’t exactly a slap in the face, by the way; they offered him 15 years too, and what was then a record $440M, while he was logging the worst season of his career. The deal would have made him the highest-paid athlete in the sport, and just a touch off the mark that had been set by Patrick Mahomes’ $450M deal with the Chiefs in 2020.
So much for that. Soto got a whole ‘nother mega-contract’s worth of money by playing out the next two years in San Diego and New York, excelling in both cities. For reference, a $325M deal would be good for top 10 in the sport today, and that’s what he got on top of that first offer. Behold, via Spotrac, rectangle mine:
Does he deserve it? He probably won’t by the time he’s 40, but today? For the next ten years? Yeah. He does.
Soto is one of the best baseball players I’ve ever watched. At times, I’m reminded of growing up in St. Louis and watching Albert Pujols.1 He is special special, and I’m not terribly concerned about how his game will age either. I think he’ll become a full-time DH sooner than later, but that’s not much of a knock in today’s game. Barring some kind of injury disaster, he’s bound for Cooperstown.
For the Mets, then — New York baseball’s little brother — this is a historic coup. We already knew the Steve Cohen Mets were capable of throwing money around, after their offseason spending spree a few years ago. This is different. While it’s one thing to get a guy like Soto, it’s quite another to take him from the Yankees.
Lest we forget, this was not just any free agent race. Anytime someone’s already playing for the team that’s chasing him, that’s thought to be an advantage. When that team makes the World Series, that amounts to a rather large headstart. For the Mets to blow that all away with a Godfather offer — that’s alpha behavior.
The obvious question is whether it will amount to anything. Baseball championships do not tend to revolve around single players, no matter how good they are. Even with Soto in hand, can the Mets win? We’ll have to see, but I think they can. It’s a good roster around him already, and they’re probably not done. Getting Sean Manaea back would be nice. Sounds like they’re in on the next pitching phenom from Japan, Roki Sasaki, too, which wouldn’t hurt. All in all, they’re well-positioned.
They are similarly well-positioned in their city, in terms of… I don’t know what else to call it, so let’s go with ‘standing.’ Yes, they’re not the Yankees, but I’d draw a clear distinction between them and two basketball examples I’ll get into momentarily: the Nets vs. the Knicks here in New York, and the Clippers vs. the Lakers in L.A.
I’m basing that largely off of vibes, but you certainly sense that there’s more of a Mets spirit here than is the case with either of those two — we can say it — lesser franchises. At least the Mets have won titles, even if it’s been a while. Although, by Yankees standards, it’s been a while for them too.
What the Soto deal announces is that the Mets are now the truer successor to the OG Steinbrenner Yankees. They’re the bullies. So far, they haven’t found the success that goes along with that reputation, but they’ve definitely given themselves the tools to pursue it.
To the extent this can be compared to the NBA examples I mentioned, we’ve seen some other intra-metro-area coup attempts in recent history. First it was the Brooklyn Nets swinging an ill-fated deal for the aging core of the Boston Celtics. They’d later try again with the KD-Kyrie-Harden trio that we never really got to see. That second time, it does seem clear that, like Soto, those guys chose the Nets over the Knicks, which was a real dagger for the Dolan faithful. But at least they hadn’t just played for the Knicks and still decided to bolt.
The threat from BK never fully materialized. Not that the Knicks were any good for much of that period, but they are now. Whether New York was anything but a Knicks town, though? That was never in question.
Los Angeles went through something similar. The long-suffering Clippers brought in the big-money owner — hey, his name’s Steve too! — and swung a trade for Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, both of whom were on the Lakers’ wishlist.
Different sports, obviously, but instructive examples nonetheless. Why? Because winning the offseason can be pretty meaningless when it comes time to play. You can’t win anything at the Winter meetings. The second iteration of those Nets, and the current iteration of those Clippers, have been bitten by bad luck. Some of that was foreseeable, IMO; some of it was not. Nothing is given. That’s why we play the games.
And look, I don’t mean that to be discouraging either. It’s clearly and rightly a moment of triumph for the Mets fans in my life, of whom there are many. The vibes are immaculate.
I just have no idea how good the Mets or Yankees will be next year. I think the Mets will be better, but I’m not positive that the Yankees will be worse when it’s all said and done. I have trouble believing that Soto won’t make a difference, but baseball’s an awfully funny sport like that. The Mets are still in need of pitching. And after watching them bumble their way through the World Series — which they did make, after all, so they can’t be that bad — I’d say the Yankees are still in need of a lot of things.
That’s why they turned around and snapped up Max Fried, for the comparative pittance of $218M. What to do with their now-overcrowded rotation, and the leftover $500M+? Maybe they’ll look Christian Walker’s way at first. Maybe they’ll trade for Cody Bellinger, or Kyle Tucker, or Nolan Arenado.
In the case of Arenado, though, there’s something telling going on here. He has a no-trade clause, which the Cardinals inherited from his Rockies deal when they traded for him a few years back. It gives Arenado a little bit of leverage in terms of picking his destination.
This sort of thing is common now, even when you don’t have the no-trade clause. You leak your list of preferred teams, so as to publicly announce — but not directly from your mouth, of course — who you’d say yes to if they made an offer.
That list? His hometown Angels (curious), and all the biggest, baddest teams out there. The Padres, Dodgers, Red Sox, Phillies, and… the Mets. No Yankees. Just the Mets.
So it goes in the big leagues.
🏈 I… do not think that UNC hiring Bill Belichick is a good idea at all! And I’m kinda surprised that either side is interested in pursuing this. I trust they know that he will need an excellent GM, because college football teams have those now, in order to make this work. That said, definitely here for the Chapel Bill puns, and if anyone deserves the benefit of the doubt as a football coach, it’s Belichick. Maybe his lack of experience with the college game is actually not that big a disadvantage when everything about it has changed so much in the last few years, all in the direction of a professional league? We’ll see.
🏀 To compare BYU to the Mets would be a stretch, but there’s been a somewhat related development out west this week. A.J. Dybantsa, this year’s top high school basketball prospect and the prohibitive favorite to go #1 in the 2026 NBA draft, committed to the Cougars over a host of blue-blood programs. They’ve been thought to be in the driver’s seat for some time, to be clear, and they had an in-state advantage in recruiting him. That usually just doesn’t tend to matter once schools like UNC and Kansas come knocking. But you know what also helps? A reported $7M NIL deal. That’ll do it. Jeez.
🏈 The NFL will plays its play first regular-season game in Berlin next year. The league claims to have nearly 20 million fans in Germany, and they’re hoping to find some more by continuing their programming there. On marches the international play.
🏀 The NBA set an official date for their return to China, and it’s quite a web of financial interests. There will be two preseason games next October between the Phoenix Suns and Brooklyn Nets, the latter of which are owned by Joe Tsai, the co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Most of you knew that part, I’m sure. This next one’s more fun. The games will be played in Macao at the Venetian Arena, which is owned by the Las Vegas Sands conglomerate, which is still largely controlled by the Adelson family, who are now the majority owners of the Dallas Mavericks after Mark Cuban’s exit a year ago. How about that.
⚽ And staying with our international theme, FIFA has officially announced that the 2034 World Cup will indeed go to Saudi Arabia as expected. It is, by far, the biggest win yet in the kingdom’s overall sports(washing) strategy, which we’ve written about around here quite a bit.