When I moved to New York City in January 2000, the Yankees reigned so supreme that it felt like a rupture in the universe when they lost. And then there were the Mets, who, it was sometimes hard to remember, also played in New York. The Subway Series that October felt less like a confrontation between municipal juggernauts and more like the Yankees doing their distant cousins from the outer boroughs a favor by giving them a moment on the national stage before slapping them around and putting them back in their place (which they did, in five quick games). To a newcomer like me, the Mets were merely the other team in town, the way the White Sox were the other team in Chicago and the Clippers were the other team in Los Angeles (and the Nets are the other team in New York City now). Of course the Yankees dispatched them with ease.
But, much as old-timers kept telling me about the good ol’ days in Times Square “before Giuliani Disney-fied the place,” there were always those who claimed the Mets’ time would come again, that they had ruled the city before — fairly recently, in fact, during the ’80s age of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. All it would take, they insisted, was a little push for it to happen again. I never really believed them. It has been 25 years since then, after all, and it still hasn’t happened.
If anything might make their prophecies come true, though, it might be Juan Soto. I wonder if we might be on the cusp of an epoch shift.
Sometime this week, Juan Soto, the 26-year-old superstar who might just be the next Ted Williams, will probably sign a massive contract with a new team. It is virtually unprecedented for a player of Soto’s caliber to reach free agency at such a young age, and the numbers thrown around for him reflect that historical anomaly. Soto’s contract is expected to approach $600 million — less than Shohei Ohtani’s titanic deal last offseason, but likely with fewer deferred dollars, which could end up making the overall value of the contract greater. This automatically limits the number of potential bidders; fair to say, the Sacramento A’s aren’t getting involved here. There are really only five teams considered serious candidates to sign Soto, most of which have already met with him: The Dodgers, the Blue Jays, the Red Sox … and the Mets and Yankees.
Even though Soto played for the Yankees last season, finishing third in MVP voting and helping his team reach the World Series, several reports speculate that they’re not very likely to re-sign him; NJ.com Yankees reporter Randy Miller actually has the Yankees fourth in the Soto sweepstakes. In first place? That team out in Queens.
The notion of the Mets stealing away a beloved Yankees free agent — of the Mets outspending the mighty Yankees for a transcendent talent — would have been absurd at virtually any other time over the past 35 years. But when you take the history out of it, when you look at these two franchises moving forward, and when you consider who, in fact, can spend more money, the question isn’t why Soto would leave the Yankees for the Mets, but why wouldn’t he.
First off, there’s the money. Reports have implied the Yankees’ limit for Soto is around $550 million, which, with the ruthless Scott Boras as Soto’s agent, isn’t going to cut it. Even if they up that offer — as they did when the Giants tried to poach Aaron Judge a couple of years ago — it is far from certain that the Yankees can win a bidding war with owner Steve Cohen and the Mets. Cohen is highly motivated, with an explicit goal of winning a World Series by 2025, and, of course, he has a pocketbook with a balance that bends toward the infinite; he’s personally worth $21.3 billion (nearly three times as much as the Yankees’ total estimated value) and has said he will spend “whatever it takes” to get the Mets a championship. Cohen has so much money that MLB has installed what is widely known as “the Cohen tax,” which doles out fees to teams that exceed a certain payroll threshold too many times. Cohen has shown little concern about this tax line, but the Yankees sure have; they were careful to stay under it last season and may do so again in the future. On a basic level, as hard as it might be to wrap your mind around, the Mets can simply pay Soto more than the Yankees can.
But even if they were able to pay an equal amount, the Mets still might be the better bet. The team is run by David Stearns, one of the brightest minds in the game (he’s the reason the Brewers, his former team, which has far less money than anyone bidding on Soto, keep making the playoffs every year). Stearns has positioned the Mets to enjoy a steady pipeline of talent for years to come. That’s thanks in many ways to the 2023 season implosion, which allowed the Mets to trade away expensive players (with their salaries still taken care of by Cohen) in order to stock themselves with young talent. Two of the top four prospects in the Mets system, outfielders Drew Gilbert and Ryan Clifford, came from trading away Justin Verlander that year, and Luisangel Acuña Jr., who has already made the big-league club, arrived in exchange for Max Scherzer. It helped jump-start the Mets’ rebuild, which is already a year ahead of schedule. The Mets are now spending big, already bringing in starting pitcher Frankie Montas, who flopped with the Yankees before reconstructing his career with Cincinnati and Milwaukee. And they have a foundation of young talent to build around in those prospects and youngsters Mark Vientos, Francisco Alvarez, and Brett Baty.
The Yankees are in a far different position. They have some young players, most notably Anthony Volpe, Jasson Dominguez, and Luis Gil, but on the whole, they’re much older and have a much less impressive farm system, weaknesses that are a by-product of their desperate attempts to get back to the World Series (and save the job of team president Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone). They’re as bloated as ever, so locked into aging players that they’ll be spending $129 million of their 2027 payroll on Judge, Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodon, and Giancarlo Stanton, all of whom will by then be in the back half of their 30s. This team barely held it together last year with Soto and a healthy Judge. Can you imagine what it would look like without them? If Judge gets hurt — and he’ll be 33 in April with the sort of body type that never ages well in baseball — this team is absolutely lost, regardless of who is around him. The Mets are building something that may last for years; the Yankees are, right now, just barely hanging on.
That’s another reason Soto makes so much sense for the Mets: Signing him might just augur the generational shift those old-timers assured me would happen someday. If the Mets get Soto, they’ll have Ted Williams for the next decade, surrounded by up-and-coming talent, a still-not-old Francisco Lindor, and, of course, whatever adornments Cohen deigns to sprinkle in around him. All the while, the Yankees will keep chasing their own tails. The Yankees are the team that can least afford to lose Juan Soto, and that makes him all the more enticing to their crosstown quasi-rivals. Could this be a Mets town again? If the Mets get Soto and the Yankees lose him — how could it not be?
