It’s Juan Soto to the New York Mets via the richest known deal in the history of sports.
The former New York Yankees slugger received the most anticipated payday of the offseason on Sunday, 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 shattered all conceptualizations of how much a player can make last offseason, but his record stood for only one year. He will make more than Soto on an average annual value basis, but not if you account for the heavy deferrals in Ohtani’s contract. After accounting for inflation, MLB sees the Ohtani deal as a 10-year, $460 million contract in its CBT calculations.
Per Passan, Soto’s deal includes no deferred money and has escalators that can inflate the contract’s value to $800 million. The deal also has an opt-out for Soto after five years. Per multiple reports, the Mets can void the opt-out by escalating the average annual value of the contract 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 Fernando Tatis’ 14-year, $340 million contract with the San Diego Padres. By most standards, Soto is the new high point of MLB contracts.
Soto has been expected to reach a new level of riches since before he could legally drink in the U.S., and those expectations only increased as he developed over the past seven seasons into one of the most productive young hitters the sport has ever seen.
By every objective metric, Soto projects to be not just a Hall of Famer but also an inner-circle one. Players such as that rarely hit free agency — and almost never do so at Soto’s age of 26 years old. Hence the hundreds of millions of dollars now awaiting the Santo Domingo native.
Soto joins a Mets team that rallied late in the season to make the postseason as a wild card and advanced to the NLCS against the future World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers. In signing Soto, the Mets won a reported 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 World Series.
All of Juan Soto’s precedents are in or headed to the Hall of Fame
Pretty much every precedent for what Soto has done up to his current age puts him in Cooperstown.
For example, here is the list of every MLB player with at least 3,500 plate appearances and a 150 OPS+ (which adjusts for era) before turning 26 years old in the modern era, via Baseball Reference:
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Ty Cobb, 180
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Mickey Mantle, 174
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Mike Trout, 172
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Jimmie Foxx, 171
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Rogers Hornsby, 165
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Juan Soto, 160
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Eddie Matthews, 154
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Mel Ott, 153
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Hank Aaron, 151
That is a list of seven Hall of Famers and two active players on pace for slam-dunk Hall of Fame cases. If you lower the criteria to 3,000 plate appearances, you add Albert Pujols, Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio and Eddie Collins. Barring horrific scandal, every single one of the players listed above will be in Cooperstown two decades from now.
There is no shortage of numbers that can be used to make Soto look like a future Hall of Famer. He has the best eye for balls and strikes that MLB has seen since, arguably, Ted Williams and has tortured pitchers since he was a teenager. Every metric that captures overall offensive production, especially those that reward walks, shows him to be elite.
Soto also plays the game with a unique flair and seems to enjoy the higher-pressure moments, from his rookie year to the 2024 World Series, in which he hit .313/.522/.563.
Juan Soto has looked special from Day 1
Soto entered MLB as a top, but not necessarily elite, prospect for the Washington Nationals in 2018. There was no question that the 19-year-old kid could hit, but he was pushed into the majors earlier than expected due to a glut of injuries in D.C.
At that point, Soto had played only eight games above High-A ball. Yet he was an advanced hitter 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 year in 2019, which culminated in a World Series title for the Nationals.
One of the highlights of that series: Soto hitting a fastball from future teammate Gerrit Cole to the train tracks of Minute Maid Park.
By that point, Soto was a polished, productive hitter with impeccable postseason bona fides. Teams rarely let those slip away, but 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 losing him for nothing.
Washington tried the former, offering him a reported 15-year, $440 million deal, but Soto turned it down (a decision that has since been vindicated). A trade to the San Diego 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 wouldn’t sign a contract extension.
The Yankees knew it was a risk 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 since 2009, with Soto forming a devastating 1-2 punch with Aaron Judge.
Could Juan Soto’s contract turn bad?
There’s always anxiety created when a team promises a significant chunk of its finances to a single mortal. There’s no such thing as a sure bet, but Soto is uniquely equipped to be the exception to those worries.
It all starts with his age. Because he made his MLB debut at 19, Soto hit the free market shortly after turning 26, which is almost unheard of among position players. The only good hitter to reach free agency at that age this century was Bryce Harper, and a) Soto has been consistently better than Harper was before his 13-year, $330 million contract and b) you would be hard-pressed to find someone in Philadelphia who regrets that contract.
Whereas most teams hope their free agents can continue to replicate their success into their 30s, Soto has nearly half his 20s still in front of him. And he projects to age well, considering that plate discipline and exit velocities, the two areas Soto particularly excels, tend to stay with a player late into his career.
Of course, that’s not to say Soto is infallible. He is not a good baserunner, and his defense is already rough enough that he might spend most of his time at DH in the later years of this contract. His game is notably one-dimensional; his one dimension — hitting — just happens to be the most important one in the game.
All indications still point to Soto being a future Hall of Famer with many of his prime years still ahead of him, though, and that’s why he ended up being worth so much money.
