The New York Yankees have long been the favorites to land Juan Soto this winter after having him during the 2024 season. The New York Mets have been looked at as the second most likely team to land him because of their rich owner Steve Cohen,
It seems as thought those two teams have flipped places, at least according to USA Today's Bob Nightengale. And there's one key reason why Nightengale favors the Mets: money.
"The Mets are the clear-cut favorite, executives say, simply because they don't believe there's a soul who will outbid owner Steve Cohen, while Yankees have a price in mind that they don't want to exceed," Nightengale wrote.
Nightengale's report is quite shocking because it's completely out of character for the Steinbrenner family to lose bidding wars for their own star players. Usually, those players are brought back no matter the price. But they also haven't directly dealt with Cohen yet.
The key word that Nightengale wrote was "want," as he stated there's a number the Yankees don't "want" to exceed. If this is a strict cutoff of, let's say, $650 million, then the Yankees are almost completely out of the sweepstakes. But if the Yankees simply don't "want" to exceed a certain number, but push comes to shove and they do exceed it, we have a completely different discussion to have.
Either way, Cohen and his deep pockets have the Mets favored to sign Soto. If he is really willing to outbid any offer for Soto, we could very well see the free agent outfielder land that $700 million contract that keeps popping up in rumors.
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