With stunning Juan Soto deal, the Mets put an entire sport on notice

Steve Cohen is going to break baseball. It’s not just that the New York Mets owner spent $51 million a year for 15 seasons of Juan Soto’s services. It’s that no team in baseball can employ a star without the eerie feeling that Cohen is ogling him from afar. Wait till he’s free, and if Cohen wants him, he’ll be a Met.

That’s the feeling in the sport as the winter meetings truly get underway, with the marquee player already off the market in jaws-to-the-floor fashion. Soto’s departure from the Yankees to the Mets offers a contrast between the New York teams, to be sure. It’s an obvious role reversal, with Cohen as the driving force.

But Soto’s $765 million deal with the Mets should send shivers through baseball. What team – other than the Los Angeles Dodgers – can look at the competitive balance tax threshold, which for 2025 is $241 million, and consider it a mere nuisance? The Mets can and will.

Other teams worry about gate receipts and revenue sharing. One aspect of the Soto deal that caught the attention of rival executives: None of the money is deferred. Who can afford all that cash in real time? Cohen can. The Mets can now take a budget and obliterate it.

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with that. Cohen has to be considered a hero in Queens, where the locals haven’t won a World Series in what will be 39 years next season. Soto played right field at Yankee Stadium this past season. He hit in front of Aaron Judge, as comfortable a lineup spot as there is in the game. And Cohen still went a little further, in years and dollars, to lure him crosstown.

Cohen will take a back seat to no one. Any player he targets has to pick up his call. The Mets are a destination like they have never been.

Think about how this reshapes the National League East. The Mets haven’t won the division since 2015, which is also the last time they reached the World Series. Now, they’re coming off a season in which they roared into a wild card, knocked off the Central champion Milwaukee Brewers, crushed the rival Philadelphia Phillies in the division series and pushed the Dodgers to six games in the NLCS.

To that mix, they add Soto?

Sure, the Mets have work to do beyond just adding a right fielder. They need to continue to rebuild a starting rotation that was a surprising strength in 2024 (though adding former Yankee closer Clay Holmes and fellow free agent Frankie Montas is a start). They need to decide on what to do at first base, where Pete Alonso has hit more homers than anyone other than Judge since 2019 – but is testing free agency as well. There are always more holes, and not all deals are as stunning as Soto.

Which is what makes the Mets even scarier. Leading their baseball operations department is David Stearns, who just completed his first season in charge of Cohen’s roster. Stearns previously ran the Brewers, whom he led to four straight postseason appearances.

This really has Andrew Friedman-to-the-Dodgers vibes. Remember when Friedman was a 20-something who built the financially strapped Tampa Bay Rays into a team that reached the postseason four times in six seasons even while competing against the behemoths in the American League East?

In late 2014, the Dodgers hired Friedman to do the same job, but for an organization that annually leads the sport in attendance and therefore can afford any shiny bauble it desires. Here’s how Friedman described that transition to me in the spring of 2015: “One of the most attractive aspects of this job to me personally was the idea of having to rewire how my brain works – going from a small-revenue team to being ‘big stack’ and how that changes how you do things,” Friedman said. “And I’m still kind of formulating that. But I do think it’s really important to maintain some of the disciplines that we incorporated with the Rays and marry that with using our financial advantage to create as dynamic of a roster as we can.”

The results: postseason appearances in each of Friedman’s 10 seasons, highlighted by two World Series titles. Turns out brains plus cash equals consistent competitiveness.

Which is to say that Stearns could well back Cohen’s economic clout with solid baseball analytics. Paying one player $51 million every year means there have to be smart decisions filling out the lineup around him. Stearns is equipped to make those decisions.

Back to the division: It seems a generation ago that Soto came up with the Washington Nationals back when the Nats were throwing their weight around – both financially, with a payroll that consistently ranked among the top 10 in the game, and through development and shrewd trades.

Now, Nats fans will watch Soto face them in another uniform 13 times a year, just like they watch Bryce Harper and Trea Turner play for the Phillies. That’s not about baseball decision-making. That’s about ownership commitment.

Cohen in New York and John Middleton in Philadelphia have spoken with their checkbooks, and the fans have responded. The Lerner family has put the Nats on the market and then pulled it back off it, all the while keeping its checkbook in its pocket when it comes to player payroll. Is that a way to draw fans to the stands, to watch your former players beat up on your current team?

For other owners, Cohen’s aggressiveness has to be unsettling. He doesn’t care. He said early in his tenure that he makes his money from his hedge fund – enough money that Forbes ranks him as the 39th wealthiest American, with a net worth of more than $21 billion – and he doesn’t have to make more money off his baseball team.

What he’s doing is spending money on his baseball team. Juan Soto is a Met because of that approach. That brings unprecedented possibility to Queens, and absolute anxiety to almost every other market in the sport.