LOS ANGELES – The vast riches beyond his wildest dreams await just weeks from now. His impact in just one season with the most storied franchise in baseball has placed him back on the game’s biggest stage.
Yet Juan Soto knows, deep down, that for as fantastic his 2024 season as a New York Yankee mercenary has been, as rich his bank account will be once he hits free agency, that the meaning of it all – the definition of success – is riding on the outcome of this World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Not yet. Not yet. I have one more step to go – and that’s winning the World Series,” Soto said Thursday at Dodger Stadium, on the eve of the Yankees’ first World Series appearance since 2009.
“That’s one of the things people never forget – you can be the best player. You can do whatever you want. But at the end of the day, people remember you because you won a World Series, and what you did for that community.”
Especially in New York.
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Friday, Soto will celebrate his 26th birthday by playing in Game 1 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium, a moment that would represent the career apex for 99% of players his age. But Soto, while still a relative kid in big league terms, has done so much in his short time.
He was a World Series champion at 20 – or 21, as that birthday passed by the time the 2019 Washington Nationals captured Game 7 of that World Series. He was traded by the time he was 23, the Nationals fading from contention and Soto rejecting a $440 million contract extension that, crazy as it sounds, was something of a lowball offer.
His time as a National and San Diego Padre almost felt like a prelude once the Padres shipped him to New York in a true win-win deal last December. Nothing against those markets, but the stakes that deal set up were undeniably huge.
A one-year rental – with no guarantees he’d stay any longer in the Bronx. An alliance with the great Aaron Judge, who needed a left-handed running mate in the thick of that Yankee lineup.
And the notion that any Yankee tenure that doesn’t end by winning the last game of the year is something of a failure – even if it’s just a one-year thing.
“This organization is based on championships. Either you’re a champion or not,” slugger Giancarlo Stanton, a Yankee since 2018 now in his first World Series, said Thursday. “Tenures are based on that. It’s not based on, you’re great but almost.
“It’s, are you a champion or not?”
‘He’s built for the biggest stage’
Soto knows the deal, knew it from day one, as he says. And it would be perfectly sensible for Yankee fans or even Soto himself – not that his competitive nature would allow it – to consider that he’s already done enough.
What a Bronx cameo: Forty-one home runs, 109 RBIs, a .989 OPS, and, for the heck of it, a Gold Glove finalist nod in right field that only buttressed his startling and career-best 8.8 Wins Above Replacement.
And if October is when Yankee legends are made, consider that box checked: Soto’s menacing at-bat culminating in a go-ahead, three-run 10th-inning home run to lock up the American League Championship Series against Cleveland and vault New York back into the Fall Classic.
“He’s built for the biggest stage,” says Stanton. “He can handle anything. He’s a great player, generational player, so I don’t think he’s too fazed by it.”
Five years ago, Soto hit a stunning opposite-field home run off then-Houston Astro Gerrit Cole in Game 1 of the 2019 Series. Now, they are teammates, Cole the Game 1 starter and the one far likelier to bring up Soto’s ’19 blast.
More memories are on deck.
“It’s going to be really special for me, for my family,” he says. “It’s always great to be back and have those memories and share it with this group of guys.
“This group is really special and I’m lucky to have them.”
And then what?
Soto deftly dodged numerous inquiries about his future Thursday, a far more pleasant experience than the same time he was in this patch of Dodger Stadium’s center field plaza. It was 2022, Soto’s rejection of the Nationals’ extension offer was rejected days earlier and now Soto, dourly, faced a media inquisition at the All-Star Game.
“That was crazy. And it was hot, too,” he remembers.
Yet for Soto, the clouds never linger long. He won the Home Run Derby that night, was traded weeks later to San Diego and ended up in the 2022 NLCS.
Now, this moment of truth – and a free agency impossible to escape, especially when teammates Stanton and Jazz Chisholm implored Yankee management to pay this man after his ALCS heroics.
His agent, Scott Boras, is known for demanding top dollar, less renowned for his skills as human shield.
“Scott is doing a really good job not making it hard for me. He’s been taking all the bullets,” says Soto. “I’m just focused on playing baseball right now. And everything that comes to that, I’ll let him do it.
The conditions couldn’t be much better for a Yankee reunion. Soto is effusive in the love he has for his teammates and bonds developed. He’s a perfect fit for the New York stage. And the love is mutual.
“He’s a superstar,” says manager Aaron Boone, “that’s incredibly easy to be around.”
A half-billion dollars, a championship window
Come December, the suitors will be knocking. San Francisco, Toronto, the crosstown Mets and maybe Philadelphia are among the sleeper cells the Yankees will be most concerned with.
All can offer the half-billion dollars Soto figures to command. Most can offer a credible shot at a championship.
And beyond the money, that remains priority No. 1.
“Every player wants to be happy where they’re at. At the end of the day, whenever you win, you’re really going to be happy,” he says. “Wherever you are that you have the chance to win a championship, you’re going to be happy, excited to play for.
“That’s the biggest mindset: Where’s the biggest chance? And go from there.”
Friday night, the Yankees and Soto can get to work on capping this very special one-year arrangement. And perhaps make the notion of breaking it up feel impossible.
