Yankees' Juan Soto Makes Surprising Move to Rival Team with 'Deep Pockets': Latest Bold Predictio - lulu

The Yankees are open for business, like all teams across MLB, this offseason. They’ve already been making moves, like locking up reliever Luke Weaver and avoiding arbitration with Trent Grisham. Those are not headline moves, of course. Not when there is just one headline we’re all waiting on.

That would be Juan Soto picking his destination, of course.

The Soto business is the most important aspect of this offseason, and is likely to be the most important of the next five years or so. Soto hit 41 homers and 109 RBI, with a slash line of .288/.419/.569 in 2024, his only season in New York after he was traded from the Padres.

As you’ve surely heard, Soto is a free agent. The Yankees obviously want him back, but the Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, and Blue Jays are in the mix, too. . The combination of his age (26) and the number of big-market teams willing to shell out for him figures to make Soto’s contract an MLB record-breaker for position players, projected to be in the $500-$600 million range, with some estimates running to $700 million.

On Black Friday, in an article titled,  “One Black Friday 2024 free-agent deal for every MLB team,” the folks at The Athletic have Soto soon delivering some bad news to the Yankees.

That’s because, as many in Pinstripes have feared, in the end, MLB is a business and Soto is a businessman. The teams he has met with offered their pitches to him, but this is likely to come down to dollars and cents. Or, in this case, mostly just dollars.

No one can give Soto more of those than Mets owner Steve Cohen, and he should eventually drive the price for Soto out of the reach of competitors.

Writes Andy McCullough: “Scott Boras referred to Soto as “the Mona Lisa of the museum.” Steve Cohen is baseball’s most prolific art collector. We looked like knuckleheads last year when our galaxy-brained take on Shohei Ohtani led us to forecasting him joining the Texas Rangers. No need to complicate things. Cohen has the deepest pockets. He will dip into them to sign Soto to the richest (present-day value, for sure) contract in baseball history.”

That’s always been the fear for the Yankees on the Soto front. There’s increasing sentiment, it seems, that those fears will be realized.