Major League Baseball is less than three years removed from an owner-initiated lockout which threatened (and did briefly delay) the start of the 2022 MLB season, and it was based on the premise that owners needed a better deal with the players with regard to their collective bargaining agreement. I suspected this was not the case then, but I will give the owners some benefit of the doubt when I say that it certainly isn’t the case now.

The 2023-24 offseason provided the most viscerally jarring contract news since Álex Rodríguez reset the free agency market when he signed with the Texas Rangers, when two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani obliterated the record for largest contract in sports history when the Los Angeles Dodgers signed him to a 10-year, $700 million contract. It later was revealed that the $700 million price tag included significant deferred money and that the net present value for a decade of his services came out to $460 million–still a record in North American professional sports, though a bit less of a paradigm-shifter than originally thought. That’s where Juan Soto comes into play.

Last night, it was revealed that Juan Soto (obligatory Carlos Correa-esque “pending physical” disclaimer) was signing a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets. I refrained from reacting too much in the moment to the news, fully aware of how I had been led astray by Ohtani the December before, but the contract turned out to be more or less what it appeared to be on the surface: $51 million per year for a decade and a half of Juan Soto, with a full no-trade clause and nothing particularly unusual about the verbiage.

Let me be very careful when I say this, because I do not want to make it sound like I am denigrating Juan Soto, who is an awesome player–unlike Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto is not a truly unique player. The most frequent comp for Juan Soto historically speaking is Ted Williams, which is extremely high praise but definitionally means that what he is doing is not without precedent–like the Boston Red Sox legend, Soto is an exceptionally patient hitter with great power. And while free agents are usually pursued slightly past their primes, at or near the age of 30, Juan Soto is barely 26 years old: he is 4 1/2 months younger than Luis Gil, his former teammate with the New York Yankees who won the American League Rookie of the Year award last year.

But Juan Soto is a one-dimensional player: probably the best one-dimensional player since Ted Williams, to be clear, but I say this to differentiate him from Ohtani, who won the National League Most Valuable Player award unanimously last season as a full-time designated hitter but will presumably go back to being a Cy Young-caliber starting pitcher in 2025. Unlike Ohtani, Juan Soto is not perceived as a particularly marketable player beyond his overwhelming talent. He is a mediocre fielder and base runner, and while his plate appearances are about as fun as you’re going to get out of a guy with an 18.8% career walk rate, he isn’t necessarily a human highlight reel. He is worthy of appreciation, if not immediate awe to the casual fan.

Whether Juan Soto is worth $51 million per year is a somewhat challenging question to answer. Based on his 2024 production: absolutely. FanGraphs estimates that he was worth $65.1 million last season. Evaluating his 2023 at this price tag is worthy of its own point-counterpoint: per FanGraphs, while with the San Diego Padres, he was worth $48.2 million. So lower. But barely. But how can you justify a contract where a sixth-place MVP finish wouldn’t be considered enough? But when you sign a Juan Soto, you aren’t paying exclusively for his 162 regular season games; you are coming with the anticipation that he is going to produce for you in the postseason.

The easy answer, as a baseball fan, is to note that you, individual baseball consumer, are not the one directly writing checks to Juan Soto, so why should you care how much money he makes? The counterpoint is that if a baseball team can afford to spend $51 million per year on one star outfielder, they could theoretically afford to spend that money on multiple star-level players; the Mets, for instance, could have brought back Michael Conforto to fill the spot that Soto will take and then spend the extra money on a starting pitcher like Corbin Burnes. Is this a better use of $51 million? I would offer an emphatic “it’s worth considering the pros and cons of each side of the argument”.

As a St. Louis Cardinals follower, my first instinct is to consider how any transaction will impact the Cardinals; I tend to curb that instinct in any broader baseball-wide conversation because why would anybody who is not a Cardinals fan possibly care, but that’s a personal choice. In this particular case, though, I can’t even feign anger at the Cardinals for not spending on Soto–$765 million is so much money. I fully believe that the Cardinals’ ownership group is worthy of some criticism about their spending habits and that the front office deserves, if not outright hostility, at least some follow-up questions about their small-c conservatism in pursuing any big-ticket free agents. But realistically, being a team in St. Louis is structurally different than being a team in the largest media market in the western hemisphere, if not by as many magnitudes as Midwestern baseball team owners would like for you to believe. Even if the Cardinals generally outdraw the Mets in gate attendance, which they typically do, the revenue streams are not even comparable.

But if you think the New York Mets are a cash cow, you should check out the other team in New York–the most iconic franchise in the history of North American team sports, the one whose financial might earned them comparisons to the bad guys in the Star Wars movies that they embraced, the one that employed Juan Soto just last year. It was not that long ago that the New York Mets were running middling payrolls while the Yankees blew the rest of baseball out of the water, and it is now evident that the Mets just managed to outbid the Yankees on what was likely the largest offer in the history of both franchises. But not that long ago, the New York Yankees were owned by George Steinbrenner, whose penchant for immoral and often outright illegal behavior was equaled if not surpassed by his penchant for spending outrageous sums of money on every shiny new free agency toy he could find. The Steinbrenner name is still around in New York baseball ownership–George’s son Hal is the team chairman–but the Steinbrenner ethos is embodied by New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.

The 68 year-old Long Island native, like Steinbrenner, has financial crimes to his name–he once paid $1.8 billion as a result of insider trading. He also likes to spend money like it’s going out of style, or possibly going into GameStop stock. Even by the standards of major sports owners, Steve Cohen is extremely wealthy–he is worth $21.3 billion per Forbes–but what really separates him from other owners is how loud his purchases tend to be. Cohen has an art collection with an estimated worth of over a billion dollars. His spending habits both on the New York Mets franchise itself and on free agents since assuming ownership have been far beyond the industry norm. Steve Cohen essentially lives his life like most of us who are too ethical and/or stupid to achieve his extraordinary wealth say we would–the man seems to just want to have fun.

Needless to say, the end result will almost certainly be the New York Mets blowing well past the luxury tax thresholds next and in future years–although their payroll went down for 2024 following a disappointing 2023, it was still the highest in the sport. The actual cost to Steve Cohen will almost certainly be higher than $51 million per year. But $51 million is the proportional equivalent for Cohen of a mere millionaire spending a little under $2,400, and because there’s only so much money any human can spend, the actual impact for him will be much lower than this. Amounts this small are effectively Monopoly money to a super-billionaire. The Juan Soto contract cannot fail because Steve Cohen is financially invincible–any useful guardrails on Mets payroll will not come from Major League Baseball but from Cohen himself.

Signing Juan Soto does not guarantee a championship for the New York Mets–I go back and forth on whether or not it even makes them favorites to win the National League East (and I outright do not believe the Mets are better than the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that is already adding Blake Snell and Pitching Shohei Ohtani to their one even remotely weaker spot from a defending champion). But it unquestionably makes them better, and if owners are no longer worried about making a profit in the sport, which I’ve always viewed as overrated compared to the increases in ownership equity anyway, the sport has entered a new, consequence-free era. I’m not really sure what the solution is–a hard salary cap would just suppress player salaries in a way that the MLBPA would (correctly) consider a nonstarter. But middle-market teams better be serious about improving their player development if they ever hope to compete with teams in New York or Los Angeles as anything other than the beneficiaries of Small Sample Size noise.