Juan Soto, the biggest baseball free agent since Shohei Ohtani last year, agreed to a staggering 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets on Sunday. The Mets outbid the New York Yankees and a number of other teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the biggest prize of the offseason.
And while Soto did sign with the team offering him the biggest contract, some are saying that wasn't the only factor involved. In fact, ESPN's Jeff Passan told Scott Van Pelt something about Soto's choice that Yankees fans probably don't want to hear.
"I think Juan Soto looked at the New York Mets' future ... and believed that the Mets have a better future than Yankees."@JeffPassan tells @notthefakeSVP on why Soto chose the Mets over the Yankees despite only a $5M difference 👀 pic.twitter.com/lL4bXmARGD
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 9, 2024
"The Mets weren't that much at a different place, Scott, than the New York Yankees were," said Passan. "The Yankees had a $760 million offer, only five million dollars left spread out over 16 years. So it wasn't a huge, demonstrable difference. In the end, I think Juan Soto looked at the New York Mets future and looked at the New York Yankees future and believed that the Mets have a better future than the Yankees, which is a wild thing to think, right? The Yankees have been the most successful franchise in North American professional sports history. They have 27 championships. The New York Mets have been the New York Mets.
"And so to see the transformation that Steve Cohen has helped make with this franchise over the last four years after he bought it," Passan continued. "To turn them from laughingstock into the team that Juan Soto wants to play with because he believes that they are going have the brighter future speaks volumes about what he has been able to do since he has bought the team. And this I think is just the beginning. They are going to spend more money. They are going to continue to have payrolls like this. And to spend $765 million. To be up potentially at $805 million? It seems unfathomable, but that is how ultimately the New York Mets got Juan Soto."
Weird how the team with the brightest future just happened to have the biggest pocketbook, but sometimes things just work out like that. The Mets had the biggest payroll in baseball coming into the 2024 season and still had a start so bad that fans had to rally around a fast food mascot and convince themselves that they were plucky underdogs and a feel good story instead of the George Steinbrenner-era Yankees when accounting for inflation.
Either way, the future is bright in Queens. Just ask the guy making $51 million a year.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jeff Passan’s Reason Why Juan Soto Chose the Mets Should Really Bum Out Yankees Fans.
