The Juan Soto free agency was one of the most anticipated in baseball history. It was expected to deliver historic results and did just that. He signed a massive 15-year, $765MM deal with the Mets. That’s the longest contract ever and the largest guarantee. The $51MM average annual value is also a record if one considers the deferrals in Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Dodgers. Ohtani technically got $700MM over ten years for a $70MM AAV but the heavy deferrals bring the net present value down to the $45MM range annually.
Despite all those records, Soto claims he could have got more. Abriendo Sports released a teaser for a Spanish-language interview they did with Soto. The full conversation won’t be released until Sunday but reporter Mike Rodriguez provided an English translation of the teaser. Soto says that the field was narrowed to the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Blue Jays and Red Sox and that the Mets didn’t offer the most money, with multiple teams offering more.
No other details were provided but it’s potentially an interesting bit of information. The five finalists are not surprising, as they were the clubs most often connected to Soto throughout the winter and towards the end of his free agency. Soto’s claim that the offer from the Mets wasn’t actually the highest doesn’t align with previous reporting. At the time of the agreement with the Mets, it was reported by Jon Heyman of The New York Post that the Yankees topped out at $760MM over 16 years. Sean McAdam of MassLive reported that the Red Sox maxxed out at $700MM over 15. Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet reported that the Blue Jays stopped short of $700MM. Patrick Mooney, Will Sammon, Brendan Kuty and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported the Dodgers stopped at $600MM.
All those numbers are under what Soto got from the Mets, so it’s tough to figure which teams could have had a larger offer than $765MM. Andy Martino of SNY reports today that Boston was one of multiple clubs willing to go higher than the top offer if they thought Soto would accept, but he went to the Mets because of the “family-friendly vibe” established by Alex Cohen, wife of Mets owner Steve Cohen. Perhaps the Red Sox had topped out at $700MM in terms of an official offer but had made some sort of verbal indication to Soto and agent Scott Boras that they were willing to keep pushing.
Speculatively speaking, it’s also possible that there was some creative accounting going on. The Dodgers are famous/infamous for their heavy use of deferred money in the contracts they sign with players. Ohtani’s contract is the most extreme example. As mentioned, it came with an advertised sticker price of $700MM but actually had a net present value that the league calculated at just over $460MM while the MLBPA calculated it around $438MM. While the Dodgers reportedly stopped their offer at $600MM, perhaps that was a post-deferral number, while the offer might have had a shinier pre-deferral number.
Or perhaps there was some mystery team willing to throw out wild numbers that Soto never took especially seriously. 11 clubs reportedly reached out to him at the start of free agency. Soto was connected to clubs like the Giants, Phillies, Rays, Royals and even his original Nationals club at various points through the offseason. None of them seemed to get especially close. The Rays reportedly offered Soto some kind of high-AAV deal on a short-term, so it’s also possible that’s what Soto is referring to. Maybe the Rays offered a higher AAV than the Mets but with far fewer years.
Ultimately, it’s all a moot point. Soto has signed with the Mets and that can’t be changed now. Still, it does make for fun hypothetical speculation. Teams generally went nuts for Soto because of his incredible track record at such a young age. Many top prospects don’t debut until their mid-20s but Soto already had 936 big league games under his belt by the end of his age-25 season. And he had hit .285/.421/.532 for a 158 wRC+ in those. To get that player with so many prime years remaining was a very rare alignment that led to an unprecedented bidding war and perhaps we don’t know how high it actually could have gone.