All for Juan
Well, 2025 is here, we’re all back from vacations, family outings, and general post-holiday malaise. Back to the grindstone, as the saying goes. Your favorite baseball blog author is also back after holiday travel, law school applications, and moving apartments, and I’m ready to start talking baseball again. The first thing I wanted to tackle in the new year is the thing that most of my non-baseball-enjoying friends and family asked me about over the last month or so: Juan Soto’s f*cking enormous contract.
In case you missed it, Juan Soto, 26-year-old outfielder, signed the biggest contract in the history of professional sports in December, a whopping 15-year, $765 million agreement to be the New York Mets’ rightfielder until he’s 41. That’s $51 million a year. Quite a lot of money for someone my age. Some of you probably saw that number and balked, maybe you even said something like “No one needs to make that much money!” or, “$765 million for a baseball player? What about (fill in the blank with your choice of doctors, teachers, nurses, etc.)?!”
Yes, this is a picture from his deposition for insider trading.
Look, $765 million IS a lot of money. But, I would recommend that you adjust the target of your rage to the man who made this contract possible, Mets’ owner Steve Cohen. Cohen is worth over $20 billion, and made his money as a hedge-fund founder. If you’ve heard his name before, it’s probably because he’s a crook, having paid the largest settlement ever for insider trading, $1.8 billion—more than double what Soto’s deal is worth. And that was just for the time that he got caught, he has been investigated for insider trading and racketeering on multiple occasions. He made his money in the same way that most billionaires do—by exploiting the working class and developing a parasitic attachment to the global financial system. Remember, we at A Blog About Baseball (both its author and its readers) see the ownership class as the enemy. When it all boils down, you, me, and Juan Soto, are cogs in a machine that makes money for other people. We are labor. When labor gets a bag, we should all applaud. Further, Steve Cohen has not become a multi-billionaire by making bad investments. For “Mets’ Owner Makes Bad Investments” please see this article about how their previous owner invested billions of dollars into the largest Ponzi Scheme in history. For all of you that were waiting for me to mention Bernie Madoff, there you go.
You may now find yourself saying, “Okay Max, I get it, billionaires bad, labor good. But why did he get the largest contract in the history of professional sports?” Well, my dear reader, it’s because Juan Soto is really, really good at baseball and he is really, really young, and baseball makes team owners lots and lots of money.
Soto began his career in 2018 with the woeful Washington Nationals. Just 19 at the time, Soto put together a very impressive season, accumulating 3.7 WAR over just 116 games. If you assume that he played a full-season’s worth of games, you’re talking about a 5 WAR player. How good is that? Well, in 2024, only 18 position players put up more than 5 WAR. From his first year in baseball, Juan Soto was one of the best players in the game. And he has only gotten better. In 7 MLB seasons, including the COVID-shortened 2020 season, Soto has put up 36.3 WAR. Since MLB was integrated in 1947, that is the 9th best WAR total among position players before turning 26. Of the names ahead of him on the list, only four are not in the Hall of Fame: Mike Trout, who is still playing and is therefore ineligible but will be a nearly-unanimous Hall of Famer when the time comes; Albert Pujols, one of the greatest hitters of all time who retired too recently to be in the Hall of Fame; Andruw Jones, who will probably be elected this year or next; and Alex Rodriguez, who will never be in the Hall of Fame because he took steroids and is one of the most unlikable humans on the planet. If you don’t believe me, here’s a picture of him kissing his reflection in a mirror.
A brief aside here for something that makes Juan Soto weird. Teams usually hang on to their young superstars for dear life. That is because of MLB’s arbitration system, in which players make almost no money for their first 6 full seasons in the league. For at least the first two years, but in most cases three, teams get to pay their pre-arbitration players the league minimum. These seasons are often some of the most productive seasons of players’ careers, and in many other cases, the only seasons that players will ever see at baseball’s highest level. The vast majority of MLB players will never sign a free agent deal. Soto is one of the lucky few who does. However, Soto has been on three teams already, the Mets will be his fourth. He was signed, developed, and made his debut with the Washington Nationals, won a World Series with that team in 2019 and put up four and a half seasons of excellent production. The Nationals, however, are one of the teams with terrible owners. They tore down a championship-winning team immediately after they won and traded several of their best players, including Soto, away. Soto then spent a year and a half with the San Diego Padres, a team with an excellent owner and a lot of talent on the roster. Unfortunately, the Padres’ then-owner, Peter Seidler passed away from cancer shortly after the 2023 season. It has been reported that he and Soto had engaged in contract talks and were interested in signing him to a long-term deal, but his untimely passing nixed those conversations, and the team prioritized fiscal conservatism over winning shortly after. The Padres then flipped him to the Yankees, where he was also excellent. The Yankees should not have let the Mets beat their offer, but they did. So off to a new team for the third time in four years.
What makes Juan Soto so special, and worth all of this money, is that he is one of the most talented hitters who has ever lived. Most of you have seen or heard of the movie Moneyball, which is one of my least favorite movies ever because it turned baseball from a sport to a field of profit exploitable by the likes of Steve Cohen. However, that movie DID teach a lot of people that “a walk is as good as a hit” (that is not ENTIRELY true, but for the most part it is). Juan Soto is incredible at walking. How good is he at walking? Well, walks are probably the most boring play in baseball. The pitcher throws four balls before the plate appearance is over, and the batter gets to go to first base for free. Well, it’s the most boring play in baseball UNLESS Juan Soto is batting. Why? Because if you throw him a ball, he’s going to dance right in your face. Look at this:
His Shuffle is so cool that El Alfa made a whole song about it.
The Soto Shuffle is just cool. He’s just a cool dude who turns boring plays into must-watch TV. He is constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the pitcher. Each one trying to outsmart and outmaneuver the other. As a result of his other-worldly ability to get on base, Juan Soto is an incredibly valuable part of a team. One of the reasons that he is so good at walking is because if you throw him a strike, he might hit one to the moon. (This highlight comes from Citi Field, which will be his home ballpark for his tenure with the Mets, I’m sure Mets fans that hated this when it happened are jumping for joy that he might do this a few hundred times in their uniform.)
I love this home run highlight. Soto crushes this pitch up and in. He gets his hands through to the ball in the blink of an eye and hits the furthest homerun that I have watched at Citi Field.
Okay, so what, he’s young and has been good, there are a lot of good, young players in baseball. Yes there are. But there are not a lot of young, elite players. Juan Soto is far more than just “good;” he is on pace to be one of the greatest players of all time. He is a generational talent and is so, so young. His skills are not based on physical attributes that will dissolve with age, like speed. He’s a great hitter with a great eye at the plate, two skills that tend to get better as you get older, he was the fourth-best player in baseball last year and we aren’t at his peak yet. According to FanGraphs wunderkind Dan Szymborski, Soto projects to be worth 65.8 WAR over the life of the contract (that’s the 50th percentile outcome, it could be better or worse). That would put him over 100 WAR for his career. Since integration, only 8 players have put up over 100 WAR. If Juan Soto hits his 50th percentile projection, you’re talking about one of the ten best players EVER. Even if you only look at the total for his time as a Met, 65.8 WAR is enough to make the Hall of Fame even if you took away all of the WAR that he accumulated in the run up to that contract.
Szymborski’s projection system also includes an estimate for what a player’s production is worth to a team, and he found that Soto’s production would be worth about $720 million over the course of this contract if he hits his 50th percentile outcome. But that’s only his value as a player on the field, he also sells tickets, merchandise, food, and gets more people to watch Mets games on TV. He may very well be worth $1 billion to a team over the course of this contract, maybe more. More evidence to support that: the New York Yankees, the team he played with in 2024, also offered him an incredible amount of money: $760 million. Billionaires don’t like losing money, that’s how they got to be billionaires. Soto is a smart move for any team and Yankees fans should be pissed off that their owner decided to let Cohen pull Soto from them.
The bottom line here: Juan Soto is an excellent ballplayer. He’s going to be excellent for the next decade. He got paid what he deserved and we should all celebrate when labor makes a “fair” cut of what they produce. Those poo-pooing the signing, the money, and the circumstances that make them both possible have a lot to learn about labor and the labor theory of value before critiques begin flying. When you side against players making more money, you are—in effect—saying that you do not believe YOU are worth more than whatever you are getting paid. And if you believe that, I sincerely hope you reflect on the value that you provide to your company or your workplace and reconsider. Management will always do whatever they can to rob you of whatever value you create, that is how they make profit. Juan Soto will make the Mets much richer than the $765 million they are paying him. Every season he leads them to the playoffs, the team will make tens of millions more than if they didn’t. He turns that team from a borderline playoff team to a perennial contender for the World Series. Players like him make the batters around him better. Teams don’t want to pitch to Soto because he might hit a ball 520 feet:
So they have to throw strikes to his teammates, who are equally capable of some incredible offense:
This is a great signing for the Mets. Their fans should be happy. Fans of baseball should be happy too. For all of the years that we have been hearing about how our sport is dying—including from some owners, see this piece on the A’s—this is proof that baseball is doing okay. It also holds the possibility to attract new people to the sport, athletes who may feel the pull of the NBA or NFL and the salaries earned by their stars. Baseball and its fans love Juan Soto, we should love that he makes an absurd amount of money.
