Juan Soto will be paid a tremendous, unprecedented amount of money to play baseball for the New York Mets through 2039.
A topsy-turvy free agency period ended—wouldn't you know it—with the prized player going with the team that offered the money. Soto is an incredible player with a winning pedigree, and his ability to get on base is something that has a good chance of remaining a razor-sharp tool until Soto is 40 years old and beyond. Most people in baseball who don't have an allegiance to one of Soto's unsuccessful suitors seems to be generally happy for him while also pointing out that such a groundbreaking deal, in both size and scope, could become an albatross down the road.
There's also a different argument in regards to Soto's actual value to the Mets. Sure, he should help them win baseball games. But how much is he actually going to move the needle and pad the pocketbooks to offset such an investment? Soto is one of the best players in baseball but he is not Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge or Elly De La Cruz or anyone else who has a slightly more dynamic skill set.
A.J. Pierzynski gave voice to this on , speaking about his own lack of experience tuning into anything just to see Soto and probably speaking for a fair amount of baseball casuals and diehards.
"I've never turned on a game to watch Juan Soto," Pierzynski said. "I've turned on a game to watch Shohei, I've turned on a game where Aaron Judge is coming up in a big situation."
When pressed on who else he might tune into watch, Pierzynski rattled off some of the following names: Bryce Harper, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. The former White Sox catcher made it abundantly clear that he thinks Soto is a spectacular player and his is a matter of personal preference. He closed with some shots about all the walking and how that's celebrated in today's baseball which wasn't particularly germane.
Reasonable minds can disagree, but this doesn't really seem like an indictment or a knock or anything too negative. For all the great things Soto is, being a top-3 or even top-5 player in the collective baseball consciousness is not one of them. Many big thinkers will tell you that a 1.5 decades in New York will change all that.
Soto will be judged on how much he wins, not how many people stop what they're doing to watch one of his at-bats in May. The Mets and the networks and Major League Baseball will all be focused on what happens next October and the 14 Octobers after that. They all want him to be someone that doesn't have to be tuned into. They all want him to be someone who cannot be ignored.