Juan Soto's record Mets contract: What to know
DALLAS — Does it feel real yet?
Juan Soto is a member of the Mets. Steve Cohen agreed to give him $765 million over the next 15 seasons, the biggest contract in the history of North American professional sports.
It is a paradigm shift for the Mets — who beat out the rival and formerly big-brother Yankees — and a mind-boggling commitment and sum of money for the rest of us.
Here is what you should know about Soto’s Mets contract.
Juan Soto will receive a $75 million signing bonus.
This is another way Cohen’s wealth makes a difference.
Players like signing bonuses because they pay taxes on it based on their home state, not their in-season state. So instead of getting that sum averaged across the decade and a half as part of his salary and thus paying New York’s significant tax rate, Soto receives the massive chunk of cash as a resident of Florida, where there is no state income tax. That moves the needle.
And Cohen, a hedge-fund boss with a net worth estimated by Forbes to be $21 billion, can cashflow that $75 million like few, if any, team owners can. He’ll barely feel it.
Juan Soto has a full no-trade clause, per a source.
So if the Mets want to move him between now and 2039, they will need his approval. No-trade clauses are pretty normal for players of his stature and in contracts of this magnitude.
Juan Soto's contract includes no deferred money.
Teams sometimes like to defer a portion of a player’s salary until a later date — often when the contract is over — for the sake of limiting what they owe on a year-to-year or month-to-month basis and to limit the salary hit for MLB’s luxury tax. This is routine throughout baseball.
The most famous example may well be Bobby Bonilla, who is receiving from the Mets annual payments of $1.19 million through 2035, the result of his 2000 deal. In more recent years, the Mets also deferred money in deals with Francisco Lindor, Edwin Diaz and J.D. Martinez. Heck, Keith Hernandez’s Mets contract from 1984 includes a once-a-year payment in perpetuity.
Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers took this concept to an extreme last offseason by agreeing to defer $680 million of the $700 million total. He gets only — a relative term — $2 million annually from the team over the 10-year life of the deal. The rest will come later. Because it is so heavily deferred, the so-called present-day value of Ohtani’s deal, in the eyes of MLB, is about $461 million.
Juan Soto can opt out of the contract after the fifth season.
There is a version of events that sees Soto absolutely crush it for a half-decade, the Mets win a World Series or two, him deciding to become a free agent after the 2029 season and cashing in again as a 31-year-old. And maybe the Mets would be content to just let him go.
Much will happen between now and then, of course. Another variable: The Mets can void Soto’s opt-out ability by adding $4 million to his salary for the final 10 years of the contract. That would increase their payout to $805 million over the 15 years.
The Mets and Juan Soto set several records, not just largest total.
Fifteen years represents the longest contract in baseball history, edging Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 14 years with the Padres.
Soto’s average annual salary of $51 million is the highest in baseball history as calculated for luxury-tax purposes (since Ohtani’s ostensible $70 million counts as $46.1 million for luxury tax purposes because of the deferrals).
It’s even wilder in a Mets-specific context.
The previous richest deal for the franchise belonged to Lindor, who is getting $341 million over 10 years. Soto more than doubled that.
And the pre-Cohen Mets? The record was David Wright’s $138 million over eight years prior to the 2013 season. Soto’s deal is 550% of that.
Juan Soto will make comical amounts of money over very small amounts of time.
Technically, players get paid only during the regular season, but some averages just for fun: Soto will make $139,650 per day for the next 5,478 days beginning in 2025.
That breaks down to $5,819 per hour.
And $97 per minute.
And $1.62 per second.
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
