Superstar outfielder Juan Soto recently agreed to a 15-year deal worth a reported $765 million with the New York Mets ahead of the Winter Meetings last week. The signing, which equates to the largest contract in professional sports history, reportedly has an average annual value of $51 million, a full no-trade clause, $75 million signing bonus, no deferred money and an opt-out after the fifth year that can be voided by augmenting the total value of the deal to $805 million. In officially announcing the signing, the team secured a 26-year-old phenom at his craft and shook the baseball world. Ken Rosenthal was on the ground in Dallas covering the proceedings and outlined his process during a recent episode of Fair Territory from Make Plays Media.
Rosenthal explained that although he knew the signing was coming, it was a moment for which journalists were able to prepare. The general consensus was that Soto would either return to the New York Yankees, where he played the 2023 season, or join one of four teams – the New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays or Los Angeles Dodgers. Before Jon Heyman of the New York Post and MLB Network broke the news at 10:10 p.m. EST on X, Rosenthal nearly had two articles ready that had to be tweaked.
“I had a column ready, and it was a column that I had written maybe a week or two before in anticipation of the signing, and it was a column going back to Soto’s rejection of the 15-year, $440 million offer by the Washington Nationals in 2022,” Rosenthal said. “There’s the headline, ‘In landmark deal with the Mets, Juan Soto gets what he’s wanted all along,’ and if you remember going back to that rejection of the Nationals deal, that deal at that time would have been the biggest deal in baseball history.”
Once the news of Soto signing became official, the only thing Rosenthal needed to do after disseminating the information on X was to update the numbers. In the afternoon before the signing was reported, he had been working on a second column about whether or not Soto’s deal would age well. Upon discovering the opt-out clause in the contract, he needed to add some context to the story before it was published the next morning.
“There is no clock, you just keep going,” Rosenthal said of his work at the Winter Meetings. “And then there was one other story I was working on as well, and this was a story that the staff at The Athletic had been kind of trying to put together for weeks in anticipation again of the signing, and it was basically how the deal came together.”
Rosenthal’s first column and the news story about how the Soto signing came together were both published the night of the initial report, while his second column was disseminated the next morning. In reflecting back on the venture, he described it as the kind of sequence to resemble why he entered the business. Despite having knowledge that the signing would take place, he conveyed that it was even bigger than he imagined.
“[It] was so exciting, so electric, that that night, I had trouble sleeping,” Rosenthal said. “I had trouble kind of putting my head around what had just happened because the deal, not only is it of course a record number, $765 million, a record AAV. There’s no deferrals, the opt-out thing I mentioned, the $75 million signing bonus, and in the end, I had an agent the next day ask me, ‘Exactly what did Steve Cohen say ‘No’ to with Scott Boras?,’ and I don’t have an answer for that.”
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