Mets, Juan Soto Agree on Record-Breaking Contract

A year ago, Juan Soto was the buzz of baseball’s Winter Meetings. It wasn’t because of anything he had agency over, though. The San Diego Padres were reportedly looking to trade him, and they eventually did. This year, Soto is the story again. But instead of waiting to see what his fate is, he’ll get to choose. Or maybe I should say that he did choose, because as Jon Heyman first reported, Soto signed a 15-year, $765 million dollar deal to join the New York Mets.

Presumably, you aren’t reading this article with no background knowledge of who Soto is. Still, I want to give you a refresher, because Soto is such a delightful player. He’s your favorite hitter’s favorite hitter. He has the best batting eye in baseball, and it’s not close. His sense of the strike zone is so good that it feels like he’s dictating the terms rather than the pitcher, one of very few hitters in baseball who gives that impression. He’s perennially one of the best in the game when it comes to avoiding swinging and missing, and he walks nearly a fifth of the time because pitchers are too afraid to challenge him.

Why are they too afraid? Because he’s also one of the best power hitters in baseball. He launched 41 homers and 31 doubles in 2024. He’s hit 201 home runs in his career, seventh-best in the majors over that span. His worst seasonal line was in 2022… when he hit .242/.401/.452 while getting traded mid-season. “Worst” is all relative, though; it was the ninth-best offensive line in the majors that year. Soto is so good offensively that despite being known for patience first and power second, he’s actually 11th in the league in batting average since debuting. He’s just good at every facet of hitting.

Players like this don’t come around very often. They especially don’t get this good, this young, and then go year-to-year with arbitration contracts before hitting free agency. Soto turned 26 during the World Series this year, and hit .318/.522/.563 in a losing effort. Few hitters have been this consistently good right from the jump, and fewer still have done it starting at age 19. That’s how you end up with this ludicrous projection for the next 15 years:

Players don’t get projected for five-plus wins six years in the future. They definitely don’t get projected for four wins in a freaking decade. That’s just not how it works. If you’re good enough to produce that many wins now, you’re probably approaching an aging cliff, or aren’t established enough for the model to trust you to keep delivering MVP-level production. But Soto has done it for his entire career, and he’s just so young.

ZiPS is an excellent projection system, but I’m skeptical of its ability to predict 10 years into the future, let alone 15. I think the best way of looking at this is that the model thinks Soto will be great for the next decade, then start to slow down after that. The error bars are no doubt enormous that far out. Baseball is a high-variance game. But imagine how good you have to be at 26 for a projection system, which herds towards the middle, to think that you’ll still be delivering All-Star-caliber production when you’re 36.

That’s a lot of words to get across a simple point: If you made me pick one hitter in baseball to have on my team until he retired, and told me money were no object, I’d pick Soto. No one his age has anything approaching his track record. He plays nearly every day. His bad seasons are still excellent. He’s played in two World Series and won one of them. He’s coming off of his best season. The accolades go on and on.

That’s not to say there are no downsides. Soto is a middling baserunner and fielder. He’ll cost you a few runs in both phases of the game. He’s great because of his bat – but again, it’s the best bat in baseball, so that’s okay. He’s certainly not the most aesthetically pleasing baseball player – defense is pretty, there’s no way around it – but “beautiful defensive plays” don’t go on the scoreboard and “runs” do. The guy is a run-making machine. The downsides are dwarfed by his phenomenal offensive production.

For that reason, the bidding for Soto’s services was fierce. Every team with a budget that could theoretically accommodate him entered the race. He reportedly wanted to stay on the East coast, and yet the Dodgers entered the fray, because c’mon, it’s Juan Soto!

The whole point of Steve Cohen buying the Mets was that he was going to turn them into a juggernaut. He’s the richest owner in baseball, and the Mets have run enormous payrolls since he took over. They’ve been flexible about how to use them – sometimes signing a coterie of stars, sometimes eating salary in trades to sweeten the deal, sometimes signing a ton of speculative pitchers and hoping to strike gold once in a while. But this move is simpler than that. Cohen is so rich that he could never spend all his money. The best player in baseball, on a forward-looking basis, was available, and for money rather than in trade. So Cohen went out and signed him.

This is the largest deal in baseball history. It’s the largest deal in sports history, in fact, at least from a total dollar outlay perspective. $51 million a year for 15 years would have sounded unthinkable five years ago. It would have sounded unthinkable two years ago, really, until Shohei Ohtani blew the top off of the market last winter. But money is for spending, and deals like this don’t come along often.

If you’re looking to win and don’t care about the monetary side of things, how could you justify doing anything else? Most roster moves are about picking up a marginal half a win, maybe a whole win if you’re really cooking. Juggling two players perfectly might provide some unseen synergy. Picking the right starting pitching options in free agency is nice, of course: signing Sean Manaea last offseason instead of, say, Wade Miley was a coup for New York.

Those are hard ways to pick up wins, though. Everyone is trying to do that. There are a ton of good-but-not-great pitchers in the world, and every front office in the league is sifting through them looking for an edge. Elegance and efficiency are only nice if they work. Signing Soto? That’s just six-ish wins out of nowhere, without much risk of failure. Every team would do it if they could.

Forget projection systems and depth charts. This deal propels the Mets to NL East favorites, and they’re likely to remain towards the top of the division for years to come. Their rotation needs some work. They’re about two hitters short still, and they might be out of the Pete Alonso market now that they’ve signed a bat-first superstar. But the holes they have left to patch are eminently fixable, and they’re starting with a massive leg up on their opposition for the foreseeable future.

Earlier tonight, before news of this deal broke, I was talking to my colleagues about what I like to call “the Cardinals trap.” At their contending peak, the Cardinals seemed to build the same team every year. They had no glaring weaknesses. They ran out average players at every single position. But they struggled to improve at the trade deadline, and frequently to get over the hump into true pennant-winning contention. Why? It was just too hard to improve.

It’s fairly easy to move from a replacement level player to a one-win option. There are tons of one-win guys out there just waiting for a chance, particularly if your team can put them in a good position to succeed and work with them to develop their skills. It’s harder to find two-win players, but it can be done. Trading for three-win players at the trade deadline or in the offseason? It happens every year. And signing a free agent projected for four wins a season? If you have $100 million lying around, you can definitely do it.

The higher you go up the WAR scale, though, the fewer players there are, and it’s not even a linear decline; there are exponentially more one-win players than five-win players. If your team is made up of average players with no stars, it’s incredibly hard to improve, because everyone in the world is looking for stars. If you have a few amazing players and some gaping holes in your lineup, improving is easier: just patch the gaping holes.

The Mets have put themselves in the position of never being short on the star end of the equation. That’s why they traded for Francisco Lindor not long after Cohen bought the team. It’s why they signed Max Scherzer and then Justin Verlander. But Soto is the ultimate version of this. He’s a proven star who will be around for more than a decade. If you’re not too hung up on money – and that’s one thing that seems very clear about the Mets under Cohen’s stewardship – there’s no downside here.

Finally, a note on the money. Not only is Soto’s deal the largest in professional sports history, it’s a little bit fancy. In addition to a $75 million signing bonus and no deferrals (practically novel in this day and age), he has the right to opt out after the 2029 season. Only kind of, though: The Mets can void that opt-out by adding $4 million to the guarantee in each of his last 10 seasons with the club. That voidable opt-out is immaterial in most cases – it’s hard to imagine a world where Soto wants to opt out but where the Mets won’t chip in $40 million over a decade to keep him. It’s there, with the potential to tip his deal over the $800 million mark or let him take another bite at the free agency apple, but I’d assign it a sub-1% chance of him ever actually wearing another team’s uniform.

That’s all window dressing. This deal isn’t about contract flourishes and long-term team construction. It’s about a 26-year-old who has already amassed 200 homers and 36 WAR, a generational talent who bet on himself when he turned down the Nationals’ $440 million extension offer in 2022 and hit free agency at a shockingly young age. It’s also about a team that has all the resources in the world, and is using them in the most direct way imaginable. They saw the best player in baseball, and so they pulled out all the stops to convince him to join their squad. It doesn’t always need to be more complicated than that.