For a second straight offseason, Major League Baseball’s winter will revolve around a player so appealing his free agency might be unprecedented.
Last year, that was two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, of course. This year, it’s Juan Soto who lays claim to a big market.
You’d have to call Soto a more normal player than Ohtani, in most ways. He does not pitch, for instance. Nor does he include the eyes and marketing opportunities of an entire second nation as a package deal.
What Soto does is hit.
In the batter’s box, he’s precocious and ferocious, metronomic and magnetic, disciplined and dangerous. His .421 career on-base percentage leads all active big leaguers, and his 41 home runs in a contract year with the New York Yankees was a career high.
His 2024 season was almost flawless, with a 90.0 total raw value that led all MLB hitters.
He capped that off with a monstrous postseason performance, batting .327 with four homers to lead New York to the AL East title and a World Series appearance.
Soto’s foray onto the open market registers as seismic because of a different duality than Ohtani’s: the assuredness his greatness inspires and the possibilities his youth permits. Having just turned 26 years old, Soto has been an elite hitter in the major leagues for a quarter of his life.
He’s undoubtedly the first person to make Ted Williams comparisons old news before being able to smoothly rent a car – take that, 50-50 season – but his free agency begs for a more contemporary point of comparison. The build-up to this winter’s bidding war began back in 2022, when the rebuilding Washington Nationals traded him away less than three years after he led them to a championship and shortly after he reportedly turned down a long-term contract offer.
Now the question is no longer hypothetical but concrete and pressing: What is a reasonable contract for a 26-year-old superstar with one of the most ironclad profiles imaginable? Is $500 million enough? And can anyone this side of Ted Williams offer a hint?
Any conversation about Soto’s free agency has to start with the fact that his availability is once-in-a-blue-moon stuff, and his experience hopping between three teams already is an all-time anomaly. Hitters this young and this good rarely make it through the team control years and hit the market without their teams ponying up to keep them around.
The three-time All-Star is only the 18th different hitter since 1995 to reach free agency before their age-28 season (though Carlos Correa and Cody Bellinger did so twice thanks to bubble contracts). Out of that already elite group, Soto’s .953 OPS is the best, and his 201 homers are second only to Prince Fielder.
He’s only the fourth hitter since 1995 to reach free agency heading into his age-26 season or earlier, following in the footsteps of Alex Rodriguez, Manny Machado and, of course, Nationals predecessor Bryce Harper. And it’s here we can begin to ask whether Soto is short on good comparisons or simply incomparable.
Harper, the chosen one whose shoes Soto filled shockingly quickly in Washington, has a timeline from debut to payday mirrors Soto’s. They were both born in mid-October and both debuted early in the season while 19 years old, Harper in late April and Soto in May. They both played a roughly average corner outfield, but their offensive resumes look a bit different.
Mostly, there is a consistency gap. Harper posted an otherworldly 2015 season that earned him NL MVP honors, an award Soto has yet to win, but also logged two seasons closer to the baseline average hitter than the superstar stratosphere (.768 OPS in 2014, .816 OPS in 2016). Soto, famous for his intensely focused plate discipline and post-pitch shuffle, has never had a season with a sub-.400 on-base percentage, nor a sub-.850 OPS.
Harper’s contract negotiations were memorably slow as teams slow-played free agents at the nadir of pre-lockout spending reluctance. Eventually, he chose long-term commitment over top-of-the-market average annual value, signing with the Philadelphia Phillies for 13 years and $330 million, which now looks like a steal. With a much older Aaron Judge having secured $360 over nine years, Soto can easily expect to clear that $40 million per year benchmark.
Alex Rodriguez’s first deal with the Texas Rangers was a leap unlikely to be replicated. Then an elite shortstop with an elite bat, Rodriguez was also entering his age-25 season, even younger than Soto is now. Though Soto is a more impressive hitter than the young Rodriguez, his defense is merely average at a non-premium position and the likelihood is he will be best served at first base or designated hitter by the end of his future deal.
That’s not exactly going to slow down the bidding war expected to be led by the Yankees and the deep-pocketed New York Mets, but it creates a ceiling that didn’t exist for Rodriguez.
It’s hard to contextualize just how extreme Rodriguez’s free agency was at the time. He signed a $252 million deal that guaranteed him 108% more money than the next largest deal in baseball history (which had been signed only two days earlier). By the end of that offseason, when Manny Ramirez had inked a $160 million contract with the Boston Red Sox, Rodriguez was still guaranteed 57% more than any other player in baseball history.
There are complicating factors in comparing that to Soto’s situation – namely, Ohtani’s record-breaking deal from last year is heavily deferred. Even using the estimated $460 million present day value of Ohtani’s $700 million pact, Soto would need a $724.5 million deal to match Rodriguez’s post-offseason leap, or a $956.8 million (!) deal to line up with his day-of-signing history.
Don’t expect either of those numbers to reach pen and paper unless they come with the sort of extreme deferrals Ohtani accepted, and Soto reportedly rejected in the Nationals offer that preceded the trade.
The best way to think about Soto is perhaps as a distinctly contemporary precedent setter. By Baseball-Reference WAR, he’s already the fifth-best position player since integration in 1947 to change teams at all before the end of his team control years. At the top of that list, Mookie Betts exhibits what we might reasonably expect to happen: Team trades for star, team signs star to extension. Soto pushing into free agency, undoubtedly with encouragement from Scott Boras, will reset the market for a non-Ohtani franchise anchor in the post-lockout world.
In the context of the one-way players who make up 99.9% of free agent history, Soto has real claims at singularity. Since 1947, 557 hitters have taken at least 3,000 plate appearances by the end of their age-28 season. Soto, who has taken 4,088 through his age-25 campaign, ranks seventh in park- and era-adjusted OPS+.
The recent hitters who rank ahead of him – Frank Thomas, Mike Trout and Albert Pujols – all signed extensions with their original clubs before reaching the market. Mickey Mantle and Ralph Kiner were one-team players in an earlier, more restrictive era of the game’s labor landscape. And Dick Allen, the late third baseman who may soon get his rightful Hall of Fame enshrinement, was traded in the 1969 deal that prompted Curt Flood to fight for what became free agency.
That Soto has been traded twice adds a bizarre novelty factor to the equation – and repopulated vast swaths of the San Diego Padres, Yankees and Nationals farm systems – but ultimately it doesn’t change the matter at hand: There has never been a hitter this good, this young, available to any team for money.
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