Juan Soto Reportedly Breaks Shohei Ohtani's Record with Massive $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.

Photo by: Mike Stobe

All of Juan Soto's precedents are in or headed to the Hall of Fame

Pretty much every precedent for what Soto has done up to his current age puts him in Cooperstown.

For example, here is the list of every MLB player with at least 3,500 plate appearances and a 150 OPS+ (which adjusts for era) before turning 26 years old in the modern era, via Baseball Reference:

1. Ty Cobb, 180

2. Mickey Mantle, 174

3. Mike Trout, 172

4. Jimmie Foxx, 171

5. Rogers Hornsby, 165

6. Juan Soto, 160

7. Eddie Matthews, 154

8. Mel Ott, 153

9. Hank Aaron, 151

That is a list of seven Hall of Famers and two active players on pace for slam-dunk Hall of Fame cases. If you lower the criteria to 3,000 plate appearances, you add Albert Pujols, Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio and Eddie Collins. Barring horrific scandal, every single one of the players listed above will be in Cooperstown two decades from now.

There is no shortage of numbers that can be used to make Soto look like a future Hall of Famer. He has the best eye for balls and strikes that MLB has seen since, arguably, Ted Williams and has tortured pitchers since he was a teenager. Every metric that captures overall offensive production, especially those that reward walks, shows him to be elite.

Soto also plays the game with a unique flair and seems to enjoy the higher-pressure moments, from his rookie year to the 2024 World Series, in which he hit .313/.522/.563.