Juan Soto reportedly breaks Shohei Ohtani’s record with monster $765M deal with Mets
It’s Juan Soto to the New York Mets via the richest known deal in the history of sports.
The former New York Yankees slugger received the most anticipated payday of the offseason on Sunday, agreeing to a 15-year, $765 million deal with the Mets, according to multiple reporters, including MLB Network’s Jon Heyman and ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million deal shattered all conceptualizations of how much a player can make last offseason, but his record stood for only one year. He will make more than Soto on an average annual value basis, but not if you account for the heavy deferrals in Ohtani’s contract. After accounting for inflation, MLB sees the Ohtani deal as a 10-year, $460 million contract in its CBT calculations.
Per Passan, Soto’s deal includes no deferred money and has escalators that can inflate the contract’s value to $800 million. The deal also has an opt-out for Soto after five years. Per multiple reports, the Mets can void the opt-out by escalating the average annual value of the contract from $51 million to $55 million over the last 10 years of the deal.
Soto’s is also the longest contract in MLB history, passing Fernando Tatis’ 14-year, $340 million contract with the San Diego Padres. By most standards, Soto is the new high point of MLB contracts.
Soto has been expected to reach a new level of riches since before he could legally drink in the U.S., and those expectations only increased as he developed over the past seven seasons into one of the most productive young hitters the sport has ever seen.
By every objective metric, Soto projects to be not just a Hall of Famer but also an inner-circle one. Players such as that rarely hit free agency — and almost never do so at Soto’s age of 26 years old. Hence the hundreds of millions of dollars now awaiting the Santo Domingo native.
Soto joins a Mets team that rallied late in the season to make the postseason as a wild card and advanced to the NLCS against the future World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers. In signing Soto, the Mets won a reported bidding war with the crosstown rival Yankees, who lose Soto’s services after a single season in the Bronx that ended with a trip to the World Series.
