The Yankees need Juan Soto more, that’s a well established baseball fact around here. The Yankees need him, and badly, because he helped put them back in the World Series for the first time in 15 years, and because he did as much as he did to get Aaron Judge nearly all the way back to 60 home runs. They need him because he is one of the most valuable players in baseball, one younger than Judge, younger than Shohei Ohtani, younger than Francisco Lindor and not even two years older than Bobby Witt Jr.
But they need just as much for him not to go to the Mets who, if they win the Soto Sweepstakes, will not just be making a player acquisition as significant as anything they’ve done since Mike Piazza, they will have done something even more significant than that:
They will have taken Soto away from the Yankees.
Not once in the history of the New York Mets have they done anything as big or dramatic as that. The real fact of things is that nothing like this has ever happened with our two baseball teams, and might not ever happen again. It has become a perfect storm, mostly of money, even with other teams still in play. This is both the Knicks and Nets wanting Kevin Durant, just bigger and louder, because it’s baseball.
Never a high-stakes game like this. Neither the Yankees nor the Mets was ever going to sign Yoshinobu Yamamoto last winter. Judge always felt like a free agent-ish, because no one really believed he was leaving. Again: There is no guarantee that Soto ends up with one of the New York teams. But this has turned into a classic bidding war between the Son of Steinbrenner and Uncle Steve Cohen:
A star player like this, one who actually might just be entering his prime, they both want.
And by the way? Both the Yankees and Mets will survive if they don’t end up with Juan Soto. He doesn’t guarantee either one of them a trip to the Canyon of Heroes. Twenty years ago, the Yankees made a trade for Alex Rodriguez after they’d just lost a World Series (to the Marlins that time), and the rest of baseball acted as if the Yankees had punched their ticket back to the Series for the next decade. If you’re keeping score at home, they didn’t go back for five years, and have won one Series in the last 20. The Padres traded away Soto and ended up winning 93 games after just 82 the year before; also ended up giving the Dodgers a harder time in October than the Yankees ultimately did. The Yankees got Jason Giambi a year after he’d won an MVP award, and after the Yankees had played in five of the last six World Series at that time, and only went back to the Series once with Giambi in pinstripes. And you know how things worked out for the Nets after they beat the Knicks out of Kevin Durant.
Still: Soto is still just 26 years old. People keep talking about him as a generational talent, but what that really means and clearly, because we all saw it with our own eyes, is that he is a generational talent with a bat in his hands. He is a free agent at basically the same age as A-Rod was. Rodriguez broke a record when he signed with the Texas Rangers for $252 million. Now Soto may break another one if this particular bidding war gets past the $700 million total that Ohtani got, as much of that was deferred by the Dodgers in a brilliant way of gaming the system.
Does Soto check all the boxes the Yankees need to check right now, all over the field, and even just having made the Series? We’ve gone over this. He doesn’t. Doesn’t solve their infield openings and outfield openings and this year’s round of openings on their pitching staff. And as well as the Mets finished this season, as hard as they pushed the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, it’s not like David Stearns is just sitting with his feet up at Citi Field, not in a tougher division in which the Yankees play, or in a much better, and deeper, league.
“I am so grateful for the incredible run this team went on,” is what Cohen said on social media after the Mets finally lost Game 6 to the Dodgers, then sat back and watched the Dodgers take out the Yankees in 5.
Now he’s in the running for Soto, along with the Dodgers, and the Yankees, of course, and the Red Sox. It really has become a perfect storm of money and power and ego and what has always been the balance of power in baseball in the city, even when the Dodgers still represented National League New York along with the Giants. With rare and dynamic exceptions — Giants in ’54, Dodgers in ’55, the Mets in ’69 and ’86 — the Yankees have been the big game here.
They just went deeper into the postseason, obviously. But the Mets did remind everybody how the balance of power can shift, and mightily, when they’re back in play. Now along comes Steve Cohen, with more money than anybody in this country in team sports, to wanting it to shift permanently. Who knows when we get another Subway Series? But here is this Subway Series over a single ballplayer. Yankees had Juan Soto, want to keep him. Cohen wants to take him away from them. He grew up a Mets fan, knows everything there is to know about them being — with two remarkable exceptions — the Other Team in town. He also knows he can’t change the past. Just the narrative. Not just beat the Yankees out of Soto. Beat them back to the Canyon of Heroes and do it with one of theirs.