In December, the Yankees swung a deal with the San Diego Padres to acquire Juan Soto, the young, fantastically talented slugger who often draws comparisons to Ted Williams. The cost to acquire Soto wasn’t even especially high, but the trade came with a major string attached: He can become a free agent after this season, so the Yankees are only guaranteed one year of his services.
New York has historically been a landing spot for superstars like Soto, but recently, the Yankees have been more careful about splurging. Fifteen years ago, the Yankees won the World Series — still their most recent — after signing the best hitter and the two best starting pitchers on the market, like an Onion article come to life. But the team has grown increasingly mindful of baseball’s luxury-tax threshold, and for every Gerrit Cole they’ve signed, there’s a Bryce Harper, who became a Philadelphia institution after the Yankees famously passed on him in free agency.
So far, Soto has been worth it and then some. Through his first 68 games, he’s batting .320 with 17 home runs and a 1.025 OPS that ranks second in the majors, behind only his teammate Aaron Judge. Together, the two are leading a lineup that through Thursday had scored the most runs in baseball, complementing a surprisingly dominant pitching staff that’s excelled despite a spring-training injury to Cole. The Yankees stand at 49-22, on pace with some of the team’s finest seasons.
Soto has quickly endeared himself to fans, who see in him a smiling, swaggering 25-year-old who could be the linchpin of their offense for the next decade. In his very first game, he threw out a runner at home in the ninth inning to preserve an opening-day Yankees victory. Perhaps his signature offensive moment came on June 2, when he crushed a go-ahead homer in the ninth inning in San Francisco, flipping his bat and pounding his chest as he left the batter’s box.
It’s a perfect situation for Soto: Every hit not only raises his price but turns up the pressure on the Yankees to keep him in pinstripes for a long time — especially with the Mets looming as a force in free agency thanks to a deep-pocketed owner who will need to turn around a floundering team.
Should Soto help lead the first-place Yankees on a deep playoff run, and especially if he plays a major part in ending their World Series drought, letting him walk away after the season will get even harder. He’s a franchise-altering talent; if he’s also the final piece to their championship puzzle, fans will demand his return.
The Yankees have found themselves in this kind of situation before. In Aaron Judge’s final season before free agency, he had a contract year for the ages, belting 62 home runs and winning the American League MVP Award. The thinking at the time was that the Yankees simply couldn’t afford to lose a player as talented and popular as Judge, even if signing him long-term carried clear risks.
Soto may not be a homegrown darling like Judge, and he may not be carrying the team the way Judge was forced to in 2022, but he’s also a much safer bet than his Yankees teammate. Judge was 30 years old with a history of injuries when he signed his extension for $360 million over nine years, while Soto will have just turned 26 when the next offseason begins.
By the time Soto turned 25, he was already a three-time All-Star and a four-time Silver Slugger Award winner with 160 home runs and a batting title. Judge didn’t even make his debut until he was 24.
The price for Soto will be staggering. Two years ago, he reportedly turned down a 15-year, $440 million contract from the Nationals that would have been the largest in MLB history. Since then, Judge signed his deal, which pays him $40 million annually, while Shohei Ohtani landed with the Dodgers for ten years and $700 million. Soto won’t likely top Ohtani’s contract, but he’s a generational talent who will benefit from that new ceiling for top-end stars.
ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel recently polled 28 MLB executives, agents, and insiders about what Soto’s contract might look like. Half of them predicted that Soto would ultimately sign for between $500 million and $599 million; three of them thought he’d get at least $600 million. The median prediction: 13 years, $500 million. The teams most likely to land him: the Yankees and Mets.
Winning over Soto isn’t strictly about money, even if it mostly is. As fans fall in love with Soto, he also has plenty of reasons to fall in love with the Yankees and with New York. (One imagines he wasn’t getting many 3 a.m. haircuts in San Diego.) Soto is thriving and reportedly happier than he was when he was a Padre. It helps that he’s on the best team in baseball right now — 50-22 through Friday, on pace for a historically good season. The Yankees want Soto to stay or, perhaps more accurately, they want him to want to stay.
This was the Yankees’ plan all along, of course. One year of Soto was a good deal for the price, but the real prize is a decade of Soto in his prime. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman has said that “we’d love to have him for a long time.” Trading for him made them the frontrunner even before the season began, and a monster season from Soto may force the Yankees to spend like the Yankees to lock him up. It’s a very expensive win-win.
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