One of my favorite games to play with friends, and I don’t think I’m unique here, is to play a hypothetical of what you might do for a large sum of money. Like, for $2 million, would you wear nothing but a toga for the rest of your life. Or $5 million, but you have to blare Michael Bolton music at all times. If you do it right, you find a number that makes you really think about it, even though it could never happen. I suppose that’s what makes it fun.
Unfortunately for Juan Soto, he will never be able to play that game, because it just wouldn’t make sense. That’s because there’s no amount of money you could propose for him to do anything, as the New York Mets have already done just that – only in this case, it’s real. The Mets just signed the 26-year-old outfielder to a 15-year, $765 million contract, the largest in the history of American sports. So asking him whether he’d legally change his name to Mickey Mouse for a couple million doesn’t work. A not insignificant sidebar around Soto’s signing was that the Mets stole him away from the New York Yankees, whose history and aura couldn’t overcome a small discrepancy between the offers.
Soto’s deal betters the previously hard to fathom contract signed last year by Shohei Ohtani with the LA Dodgers for $700 million over 10 years – although Ohtani still leads on annual value. And it more than doubles the 2022 Yankees deal with Aaron Judge of nine years and $360 million. Not surprisingly, the top three contracts in baseball history have come in the past three years. Also not surprisingly, all three came baseball’s two largest markets. If you continue down the list of mega contracts, you will notice a trend – big cities, deep pockets. The individual annual salaries of the top three guys is over half the entire payroll last year of the bottom tier – like Pittsburgh and what now used to be Oakland. And with billionaires like Steve Cohen buying teams, expect the rich to keep getting richer.
So once you get over the shock and awe of Soto’s contract, there are some big questions raised by this deal and the ones surely to come next. For starters, what will it mean for baseball if the fiscal divide goes from big to unimaginable. At the going rate, the split between rich teams and poor ones will only allow a handful of teams to ever truly able to compete. And this isn’t just about baseball. With the wild west of NIL deals and player contracts, the college sports bidding war is officially on – led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison basically buying Michigan their next quarterback because what appears to be his sixth wife is an alum. And while that might be good for college athletes looking to get paid, it’s less good for all the football programs that don’t have a Larry Ellison in their rolodex. And it’s even worse for all the Division I sports programs that are about to get cut because their university can’t afford to maintain a swimming and lacrosse program when football and basketball take everything. So it’s worth considering Soto’s contract not as an isolated case, but rather in context of big time American sports, where there will be winners and losers off the field as well. And just remember, those extra dollars do have to come from somewhere.
And perhaps that’s the second, and more unusual quandary of this time and place. It’s fairly clear that people in this country are angry about bills and things like buying a home, health care, and college. So much that this past election was an angry response to everything we can’t afford. And yet at the same time, we’re all excited about players making more money in a season than most entire extended families will earn in a lifetime – I’m talking uncles, nieces, cousins, and so on. It’s a dissonance I can’t really understand while at the same time the world’s richest man is tasked with cutting the American budget of things we all likely need. What I didn’t hear from Mets fans as the ink dried on the contract was how much they’ll pay for tickets next year and whether Tampa Bay will have to shut down unless they bilk more money out of St. Petersburg to stay solvent. But sport is an opiate. And we don’t always make logical decisions.
Of course, if someone offered me two million to wear a toga forever, I’d be plenty logical.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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