Trying to make sense of the latest Juan Soto rumours
Are the Blue Jays going to make the highest bid, and would it even matter if they did?
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Andy Martino of SNY wrote early on Monday that “there is a widespread belief among bidders that the Blue Jays will come in with the highest offer” for Juan Soto. And he’s not the only one hearing it, either.
The same notion appears to have also made its way to Jim Duquette of MLB Network. BRACE YOURSELVES:
You can't rule out the Blue Jays. I've heard that from many people—that they feel like Toronto's going to be the highest bidder.
Meanwhile, Chris Cotillo of MassLive pivoted off of Martino’s reporting in a piece of his own, then added:
Another baseball source told MassLive on Monday that there’s a lot of talk throughout the industry about the Jays definitely being in play, even if they’ve gotten less in the way of headlines than the other interested teams.
Now, if the Jays have any hope of landing the 26-year-old superstar, I think there’s no doubt that they’ll have to put in the highest bid. The $700 million question is: Will that also be the case for some of the other teams involved in the process?
For the moment, nobody seems to know. Duquette, though he’s far from certain, thinks it’s more likely that everything will eventually be filtered through the prism of the Yankees:
I think that the prevailing thought has always been that, if it was close, that he was going to stay with the Yankees. It checked a lot of the boxes that he was looking for, including winning, and obviously just the way the season went there and all that—the support from ownership, and support with the lineup. All those things. The chances to win each year, or year after year, have been pretty consistent there with the Yankees.
But how much more would the Jays, or any other team, have to pay above what the Yankees are going to pay to convince him to go elsewhere. That, to me, we have no idea.
Martino, however, has a source that doesn’t quite see it that way:
There is also widespread skepticism that Soto would go to the Blue Jays — but a source pushed back on that, saying that if a team is involved in the final bidding, Soto is willing to play there. That tracks with the above point that Team Soto has no need to inflate the perception of his market by adding teams that aren’t legitimately in it.
The Bergen Record’s Randy Miller hears something completely different, which feels suspiciously conjured in order to specifically scare Hal Steinbrenner:
The Red Sox have emerged as a favorite — maybe THE favorite — to land Yankees free agent Juan Soto, two people with knowledge of the contract negotiations told NJ Advance Media.
And, speaking of suspicious, we have longtime Scott Boras favourite Jon Heyman, who appeared on an episode of Foul Territory and laid this on us:
I think there's a chance [that the team that gets him is one that doesn't make the highest offer], but I think not likely.
I mean, the last two years we've seen superstars come out—this is the third year in a row we've had a superstar, right? We had Judge, and then Ohtani, and now we have Soto. The previous two guys did not go for the most money, right? I don't think Ohtani is particularly interested in money, right? You don't have your best friend steal $17 million out from under you if you're really that interested in money. And we know that he was willing to take that same deal, or at least offered it to a few teams, and I think he ended up in the location that he wanted to be in.
Same with Judge. He could have gotten more money from San Diego and San Francisco, and ultimately took less from the Yankees.
I think those were rare cases.
In this case, we're talking about guy who's going to have opt-outs. So, if you have opt-outs, that's more evidence that you're going to go for the biggest money. Because if you don't like the place you can then opt out, right? So, I think it's very likely that he would [take] the biggest deal that he is offered.
I wouldn't say it's a guarantee.
Look, Toronto might offer the most and maybe for whatever reason—taxes or the Canadian dollar or something—of course that's affected by the money. Or maybe he wants to be in the United States.
So, I think it's possible he could leave a little money on the table. But I don't think it's a situation where Judge wanted to go back to the Yankees and, of course, you had Ohtani want stay in Southern California.
His conclusion: “I think all five teams have a realistic shot.”
In other words, we really don’t know anything more than we did a week ago. Except maybe that the deal is likely going to have opt-outs.
Yet the idea that the Jays are hanging around the process, and might actually be willing to be the top bidder, isn’t going away. It obviously remains an intriguing one, even if it feels almost certain to lead to more heartbreak for Jays fans. And, for a few reasons, I do think these sort of horse race reports we know full well not to get worked into a lather over are worth thinking about at least a little bit seriously.
Now, before we do that, I think it’s worth noting that you don’t have to spend much time on Soto’s Instagram page to clock his affinity for trading off of his likeness—an itch that likely won’t be nearly as well scratched in Toronto as it would in New York or L.A. There’s the Fanatics collaboration shown in the image at the top of this post, the new partnership with weird beverage-makers Celsuis that I wrote about last week, and bio links for both Lids and something called Sorare, which describes itself as a “next-level fantasy baseball game where you collect and compete with ownable digital player cards to win epic prizes.” This potentially speaks to a willingness to squeeze as much money out of his career as possible, and yet my inclination is probably to think of the Canadian market as a limiting factor.
And that’s to say nothing of the state of the Jays’ roster as compared to the other teams bidding. Or the tenuous position their current leadership group is in. Or what being a lifelong Blue Jay might ultimately mean for his legacy versus playing the next decade or more in pinstripes or Dodger blue—or even in front of throngs of pasty, slack-fleshed, white-haired, massive-headed, jowly Bostonians. It’s just… it’s not the same.
That’s not any of our fault, of course. It’s the fault of Rogers Communications for choosing to run the Blue Jays like an also-ran until all the Canadian dollar equalization payments they could bilk had dried up and MLB and the union changed the revenue sharing formula in order to deny teams in the league’s largest markets from receiving payouts. Even though the Jays have done a nice job selling players the idea of “playing for a whole country” in recent years, I think we nevertheless have to grudgingly admit that it’s not the place ballplayers who can write their own ticket usually dream of playing. Hell, you can make the Hall of Fame here and they won’t even put up a statue of you!
Still, there are guys for whom landing the record-setting contract, or receiving every last dollar possible in order to help expand the scale of contracts for future free agents, truly does matter.
A-Rod comes immediately to mind, but perhaps an even better example is Marcus Semien. The Texas Rangers were coming off a 102-loss season, and had failed to reach the playoffs since getting bounced by the 2016 Jays, when they blew past all projections to sign Semien to a seven-year, $175 million deal in November of 2021. Though his decision was validated by a World Series victory in 2023, many felt at the time that Semien, who serves on MLBPA’s executive subcommittee, which is the union’s highest-ranking member body, chose money over a better chance to win in part as an act of solidarity.
It is also likely no coincidence that, just a month prior to signing, Semien switched representation from Wasserman to Boras Corp. Boras, who is of course Soto’s agent, and a figure that looms large over everything the union does—perhaps especially now that the union leaders he backed staved off a coup attempt this March—is another reason I’m thinking about this somewhat seriously.
At the 2018 General Managers Meetings, after more than 30 years of low-key acrimony between the uber-agent and the Blue Jays, Boras took aim at the team in a surprisingly pointed way. While bemoaning the large number of clubs then in the process of rebuilding—a move he called “the competitive cancer that dominated our game” that season—he singled out the Marlins, the Twins, and the Blue Jays.
“Toronto is a wonderful city,” he said. “It’s been a great franchise, they’ve drawn three million fans. [But] they’ve lost near a third of their fan-base due to the ‘Blue Flu’ of not bringing attractive players that their fans find interesting to their market.”
“Players have an obligation to perform every year and perform at the highest of levels,” he later continued, “and so do teams. We need a system that exactly addresses that issue. We have to create a performance model that is the equivalent of what we require of our players with owners in the sense of there’s a reward for winning. If there’s a reward for winning, I guarantee you they will do things differently.”
Now, many fans generally can’t stand Boras—I suspect that’s mostly due to the widespread and woefully misguided belief that players’ salaries, rather than simple supply and demand, is the primary driver of ticket price increases—but he certainly wasn’t wrong here.
He clearly also wasn’t simply speaking from the heart, as a fan of the game, about a broken system. As you’d fully expect from the most powerful agent in the sport, his words were dripping with self-interest. More teams willing to spend massively on player contracts means more money that flows to his clients, and ultimately back to him.
Surely he would love to draw a team like the Blue Jays—with their massive market and one of the wealthiest owners in baseball—into becoming another of the truly big-spending clubs. And adding a player like Soto to the payroll would all but force them to do so for many years into the future. Or at least until he opts out and makes a grab for even more money.
I obviously don’t know how much, if at all, any of this might actually matter to Boras—or, if it did, how much his own desires would ultimately matter to his client anyway—but you know that teams like the Yankees, the Dodgers, and now the Mets, are always going to spend big. The Red Sox seem ready to open up their wallets again. You don’t necessarily know that about the Blue Jays and, given their current outlook, you probably aren’t betting on it for much longer. Changing that trajectory and sparking an arms race in the AL East would be very good for Soto, for all players’ pocketbooks—and so, ultimately, for Boras himself.
That all said, let’s not go too nuts here. Maybe just by being in the bidding the Jays are already producing the desired effect for Boras anyway. Plus, for any of this to bear out, the Jays would still need to actually put in the highest bid. And there are plenty of other clients of his that the Jays could turn to if they do miss out on Soto. But there is at least a framework here, if you squint hard enough and can actually muster some kind of belief in Edward Rogers, that suggests Boras might have reason to encourage his client not to be dismissive of the Jays’ offer, should it be as high as many seem to suspect—or, at least, as many are being told.
Given how little such a potential marriage actually makes sense competitively and in terms of marketing opportunities and everything else, that’s the sort of thing we ought to be clinging to here. It’s at least something.
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I'll believe Soto's coming here when the Leafs win the Cup.
Your description of Bostonian fans, ….. “gold Jerry, just gold!”