By Patrick Mooney, Will Sammon, Brendan Kuty and Ken Rosenthal
Juan Soto laughed when a friend asked where he was going. It was early December and that question mystified Major League Baseball’s most valuable franchises, the ones lining up to guarantee the biggest player contract in the sport’s history. The coveted free agent was still processing what he had heard from club owners and officials as they pitched their respective franchises during extensive meetings in Southern California.
“It’s so hard,” the friend recalled Soto saying. “Everyone makes it sound so good.”
Indeed, Soto had commanded the full attention of the reigning World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, as well as the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays and the two rivals that would ultimately emerge as the last teams standing — the New York Yankees and the New York Mets. For years, Scott Boras had been planning for this moment, bypassing an extremely lucrative contract extension for Soto because the agent knew that a 26-year-old free agent on a Hall of Fame trajectory would create the ultimate frenzy.
That bidding war ended Sunday night with Soto agreeing to a 15-year, $765 million contract with the Mets, according to sources briefed on the terms, a seismic decision that shook MLB’s Winter Meetings in Dallas. Even though the baseball industry fully anticipated a record-setting deal, the final numbers are still staggering.
The Yankees, a franchise defined by its 27 World Series titles and a relentless obsession with winning, offered Soto what league sources said was a 16-year deal worth $760 million. And they still lost the player, forcing them to scramble to put together a team without him.
Soto’s familiarity with the Yankees was perceived to be a significant hurdle, a Mets official said at the outset of their recruiting efforts. In this person’s view, Soto was either going to take the money of Mets owner Steve Cohen, or simply use the Mets to drive up the price ahead of his return to the Yankees.
“Always thought they were there,” another Mets higher-up said of their crosstown rivals.
Until they weren’t.
Also, if you’re a Yankees fan, do you have to wonder how much Juan Soto valued remaining a Yankee if the money was this close at the end?
— Brendan Kuty 🧟♂️ (@BrendanKutyNJ) December 9, 2024
The Pendry Hotel in Newport Beach, Calif., served as Soto’s home base for talks. It provided a conveniently luxurious location near the Orange County headquarters of Boras’ agency. One team owner, however, requested to be an exception. Cohen insisted that he host his meeting with Soto at his California residence. The Mets’ owner wanted to make a more personalized pitch. That gamesmanship did not go unnoticed among rivals.
A disruptive presence within the ownership class since taking control of the Mets in 2020, Cohen has pushed his club’s payroll to unprecedented heights. During the meeting with Soto, Cohen and his wife Alex outlined their vision for the Mets, and how the best free agent on the market would fit into that picture. According to a league source, Cohen referenced the relationships he built over the course of his long Wall Street career, and shared his insights about what it takes to be successful in any field.
Cohen was not going to defer to the Yankees, the way he did in 2022 when Aaron Judge flirted with other teams before signing his nine-year, $360 million contract to remain in the Bronx. But Cohen’s eagerness to spend — and the possibility of poaching a superstar from a crosstown rival — was just one aspect of this perfect storm.
Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner acknowledged the pressure to retain Soto at MLB’s recent owners’ meetings in Manhattan, telling reporters: “I know what’s expected of me.”
During his season with the Yankees, Soto noticed how Steinbrenner connected with Judge and Gerrit Cole, and it emphasized his desire for a strong relationship with the owner of the team he ultimately picked. According to a league source, Steinbrenner also expressed an interest in creating a partnership with Soto, though he explained he was keeping a certain distance because he didn’t want to bother Soto during the season.
As the Yankees prepared for their effort to keep Soto, the team’s top historic rival seemed to suddenly snap to attention.
After years of drifting, the Red Sox appeared focused on a rare opportunity to add a 6-WAR player in his prime who would also be a big attraction both at Fenway Park and on their regional sports network. Red Sox owner John Henry, who has taken a more conservative approach to running the club, is generally reluctant to give long-term deals to pitchers. That philosophy made pursuing Soto a more logical priority.
Meanwhile, a year after whiffing on Shohei Ohtani, the Blue Jays might have been even more desperate to land Soto.
With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette positioned to become free agents after the 2025 season — and Toronto’s front office on the hot seat — the Blue Jays appear to be headed toward a reckoning. Adding Soto would have radically improved their immediate outlook.
As if all those forces weren’t enough, the Dodgers kept lurking on the edges of the race, with the financial might to seemingly do anything they wanted. This was perhaps best evidenced by Ohtani’s heavily deferred, 10-year, $700 million contract.
Helping Soto navigate it all was Boras, the superagent still grinding at age 72, seeking to establish new standards after a difficult offseason last winter. This winter, he aimed at demolishing Ohtani’s benchmark deal. For Boras, it was mission accomplished. For those keeping score, Soto’s deal includes a $75 million signing bonus, no deferred money and an opt-out clause after the fifth year.
Several years ago, Boras added to the scouting department within his agency, an initiative that came with specific instructions. What Boras wanted was a steady flow of information, evaluations of players’ talent and makeup, the stuff that does not show up on a computer screen. This wasn’t about analytics — and years later it would shape Soto’s free agency.
The game is so hard and so unrelenting at the major-league level that a player’s commitment to his craft is a separator. Boras wanted a purely scouting perspective from the back fields and the complex leagues, in hopes of gaining more insights into a player’s intellect and character. This process led Boras’ group toward a precocious teenager who demonstrated great promise with a Gulf Coast League affiliate of the Washington Nationals.
Soto’s driven mentality and physical abilities were apparent, though no one back then could have foreseen multiple teams bidding $700 million-plus for the privilege of potentially getting the cap on his future Cooperstown plaque. Those qualities, however, help explain how Soto reached this point, the composure he showed on the World Series stage and in the biggest media market, the patience he exhibited as a left-handed hitter and a negotiator.
The chain of events that led Soto to the Mets can be traced back to his decision to decline a 15-year, $440 million offer from the Nationals, a sum that nearly matched the $450 million purchase price when the Lerner family acquired the Washington franchise from MLB in 2006. Soto’s rejection of the Nationals ahead of the 2022 trade deadline compelled the club to move its homegrown star to the San Diego Padres for a haul of prospects.
Soto had viewed Ted Lerner, the Nationals owner who died in 2023, as a kind of grandfather figure. It was the type of connection that Soto resolved to seek with any future employer. Soto found it with Peter Seidler, who reimagined the Padres as one of the sport’s most compelling teams before his death last year.
“Juan Soto wants ownership that he knows is going to support an opportunity to win annually,” Boras said last month during MLB’s general managers’ meetings. “It’s remarkable to think of a player from a very modest beginning from the Dominican Republic, that all the monetary offerings that he’s received, record offers consistently, that his focus always was: ‘I want to know who my owner is. I want to know that we’re going to be able to win. And I want to know that besides me, there’s going to be a great number of support on the part of the owner that he has the same desire to win that I do. I’m going to commit my career to it, and I want the owner to commit his resources to it.’
“That’s really why Juan Soto became a free agent.”
Juan Soto spent one season with the Yankees, though he has now committed to spending the rest of his career in New York. (Luke Hales / Getty Images)
That free agency led to a pressure-packed weekend that would shape Soto’s fate.
In making the biggest decision of his life, Soto weighed the pros and cons of each situation. He thoroughly enjoyed his experience with the Yankees — the players, the staff, the city, virtually everything except losing the World Series. That disappointment, of course, upped the anxiety level for the Yankees and their demanding fans.
Soto came away impressed with Boston’s accumulation of young talent. But by Saturday, the Red Sox began to sense their chances fading. Team officials met that day via video conference with Boras, who appeared to be in a hotel room, but they did not discuss Soto. That left a team source to predict: “I don’t believe it will be us.”
That same day, after a period of what Yankees’ brass considered relatively quiet communications, the chatter picked up between the franchise and Soto’s camp.
Throughout the process, a rival executive said, the big question within the baseball industry revolved around whether Soto had a preference. If Soto had no preference, the executive surmised, he would be a Met.
In New York, Soto had also felt the energy at Citi Field, where, according to Baseball Savant, he has hit two of the five longest home runs in the stadium’s history. To Soto, these Mets seemed like a fun team to watch. They don’t have a player of Judge’s caliber to protect Soto in the lineup. But his career numbers in 35 career games at Citi Field — .333/.466/.709/1.175 with 12 home runs in 146 plate appearances — suggest that playing in Queens shouldn’t hurt his future Hall of Fame chances.
Such is Cohen’s reputation for getting what he wants. Last winter, when the Mets and Dodgers were vying for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Japanese pitcher, through his representatives, essentially told Cohen enough. Yamamoto wanted to play for the Dodgers and was satisfied with 12-year, $325 million offers, even though Cohen signaled he would go higher. With Soto, the ceiling for a contract appeared to be almost unlimited. But in this instance, a league source said that the Dodgers capped their offer to Soto at $600 million.
By late Sunday afternoon, a league source said that negotiations with the Mets had resumed, setting up the crosstown rivals for one final showdown over one of the best players of his generation. By Sunday evening, Cohen had increased his offer. Around that time, the Yankees were informed they were behind, another league source said. Boras asked for a round of new offers.
The Yankees went from $712.5 million — $47.5 million over 15 seasons — to a 16-year, $760 million proposal. And it still wasn’t enough.
“I don’t know what teams want to come after me, but definitely, I’ll be open to this and every single team,” Soto said after the Yankees lost the World Series. “I don’t have any doors closed or anything like that. I’m going to be available for all 30 teams.”
But there is only one team run by Cohen, who is worth an estimated $21.3 billion. He beckoned Soto to his home. And then he made him his new business partner.
(Top photo of Juan Soto at Citi Field: Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
