The Juan Soto chase appears to be nearing a conclusion. As the offseason's biggest domino wobbles, it's a good time to illustrate what's at stake when it falls.
From a pure baseball standpoint, Soto's pending decision should capture the interest of all 30 teams. News flash: Soto is really good. He's also still only 26, and the team that lands him should get to watch him continue to build on a first-ballot Hall of Fame career for the next decade or more.
That makes one interpretation of his impact blatantly obvious: If you sign Soto, he makes you better. If you don't, you aren't going to be as good as you would have been if you did.
We know Soto will make any team that signs him better by around five wins, all things being equal. That number varies somewhat, but that's a good thumbnail number -- the difference between Soto and whatever player his acquisition would push down the depth chart.
Not every team can afford to pursue him though, and the competitive context for each team that can is different. This is what we want to focus on today -- competitive context. Those five wins matter more, and in different ways, depending on which suitor we're talking about.
So let's talk about some of those suitors. The rumor mill has given us five leading possibilities -- teams believed to have already forwarded offers to Soto and superagent Scott Boras. Those are the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Red Sox and Blue Jays.
To that quintet, we'll add three teams:
• The Phillies, just because you never know when Dave Dombrowski will swoop in.
• The Giants, because they typify teams that should arguably be more aggressive in the Soto market (and others) but haven't shown much indication that is going to happen.
• The Royals, who were briefly attached to Soto very early in the process for, reportedly, making a call about him. But the Royals typify the kind of midlevel team in a not-large market that might get an outsized gain from a splash like this. It won't happen, but it's illustrative to see how much of an impact a player of Soto's value could have on clubs.
New York Yankees
Soto Score: 107.69
Postseason increase: 12.8% | Championship increase: 9.0%
We know what the Yankees were in 2024 with Soto: the American League champions. We also know Soto hit a career-high 20 homers at Yankee Stadium. We also know Soto hitting in front of Aaron Judge gave us one of the most potent one-two offensive tandems in baseball history.
The figures above, listed with each team, are just cold numbers, meaning they don't include possible intangible benefits that matter in the real world. Such things are hard to capture in this kind of analytical exercise but they are important.
For the other teams in this look, adding Soto is a matter of super-charging the improvement of their existing roster. For the Yankees, it's a matter of retaining the considerable gains they made last year.
In the simulations, the Yankees landed the AL's 1-seed 41% of the time with Soto and 24% without him. They advanced to the ALCS more than half the time with him, but just a third of the time without him.
If the Yankees don't retain Soto, they can pivot elsewhere in the free agent market to account for most of the win shortfall. But it's the intangible impact they should focus on. Because they've already seen what Soto can do in pinstripes.
Kansas City Royals
Soto Score: 105.58
Postseason increase: 25.1% | Championship increase: 4.9%
When it was reported that the Royals kinda, sorta might have thrown their hat in for Soto, if only for due diligence, it was one of those things you kind of forget as soon as you read it. It just doesn't seem possible.
Which is kind of sad, but that's the reality. Even if Kansas City could entice Soto to take its money, his deal would be really hard to work around when it comes to building out its rosters over the next decade.
At the same time, dreaming of Soto as a Royal -- or a Guardian, a Brewer, a Tiger, or any other team in a similar context -- is instructive. It shows just how dogged the Royals should be in seeking to add a few wins to their baseline after reaching the ALDS in 2024.
For teams at this level, the impact of a Soto-like infusion more than triples their probabilities of winning the World Series -- from 1.5% to 6.4%. It wouldn't make them the favorite, but it would make them much less of a Cinderella story.
Los Angeles Dodgers
Soto Score: 102.89
Postseason increase: 1.6% | Championship increase: 9.7%
Talk about a dynasty. The Dodgers don't seem to be leading players in the Soto sweepstakes -- and the primary arguments for and against that status are fully offered in the above numbers.
On one hand, Soto barely nudges the Dodgers' chances to make the postseason. Whether you're talking about a 97-win baseline or 102, you're still talking about division, pennant and title favorites.
On the other hand, the marginal gain from adding Soto to an already star-laden roster really shows up in my simulations of the playoff bracket. With Soto, the Dodgers won the World Series in more than a third of the simulations (they won almost a quarter of the time without him, too). And that's even before they add other players, such as Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki.
Still, the playoffs are the playoffs. The Dodgers are a cinch to return to October with or without Soto. Signing him helps them once they are there but guarantees them nothing.
Philadelphia Phillies
Soto Score: 101.04
Postseason increase: 18.8% | Championship increase: 4.5%
When you look at the Phillies' depth chart, you can see how the thumbnail of plus-five wins with a Soto signing might be a little low. They need help out in the grass.
The Phillies also will have a fiercer path than ever through the National League. In their own division, the Braves figure to be rejuvenated by injury returnees and will be one of the favorites in projection models entering spring training.
Meanwhile, the Mets are an emerging powerhouse, fresh off an NLCS appearance after knocking Philadelphia out of the postseason. Comparisons with New York are maybe the biggest motivator for the Phils to leap into the Soto fray.
The Phillies' odds with Soto in house end up at 16.2% for a pennant and 33.6% for the NL East title. In the alternate reality in which Soto ends up with the Mets, those numbers fell to 8.9% and 3.6%.
In other words, one big motivation for the Phillies to go all-in for Soto is simply to keep him away from the Mets -- and the rest of the National League.
Boston Red Sox
Soto Score: 97.92
Postseason increase: 26.2% | Championship increase: 1.8%
The Red Sox land here because of a modest impact on their pennant and World Series odds. That simply means they have more work to do on their roster than baseball's current set of elite teams. However, none of the Soto suitors got a bigger regular-season boost in simulations than Boston.
While we refer to five wins as a good baseline expectation for Soto's impact on a team's record, for Boston that number landed at 6.5 -- pushing the Red Sox from a below-.500 baseline to around an 83-win expectation. That improvement moves Boston from the fringe of playoff contention to about a 40% shot at playing into October.
Some of this is misleading. The Red Sox are young in some key areas and while youth can hold down a forecast, it adds to variability in the projection as well -- for the better. Still, you can certainly understand why the Red Sox have been so aggressive in their pursuit of a player who has so often been compared to Ted Williams.
New York Mets
Soto Score: 96.51
Postseason increase: 20.8% | Championship increase: 3.0%
The Mets' baseline is likely to improve a great deal over the weeks to come as David Stearns fine-tunes a roster that saw a number of players fall off the depth chart because of expiring contracts.
Right now, adding Soto has a marginal upgrade on the Mets' title chances in 2025 because New York would still slot below other NL contenders such as the Dodgers, Braves, Phillies and (possibly) the Padres. That's going to change, though those other teams will be adding as well.
Although we're focused on next season in this exercise, Soto is likely to sign for more than a decade. Thus his impact, as measured here, will compound on an annual basis.
Whatever happens the rest of this offseason, Soto would make an ideal cornerstone player for the Mets for years to come.
Toronto Blue Jays
Soto Score: 95.16
Postseason increase: 21.7% | Championship increase: 1.8%
The Jays are similar to Boston in how a Soto addition boosts them against the AL's other top teams: It closes the gap, but there is more work to do. Toronto also gets less of a jolt to its regular-season projection than Boston.
You can argue whether Soto makes sense for Toronto given the uncertainty around the long-term presence of foundational players Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, both of whom can become free agents after next season.
Having a 26-year-old Soto in hand would give the Blue Jays a centerpiece to rapidly reset things in Toronto. As much as he'd cost, the Blue Jays' future payroll outlook is very clean. Of course, Soto would have to buy into this vision. Given the apparent aggressiveness of Toronto's push for him, the Blue Jays must believe they can sell it.
San Francisco Giants
Soto Score: 93.21
Postseason increase: 22.2% | Championship increase: 0.7%
With Matt Chapman and Jung Hoo Lee both locked in for the rest of the decade, Soto would propel the Giants back to relevance as the star of a foundational trio of position players the team can build around.
First-time exec Buster Posey is still figuring out this president of baseball operations thing, but now is not the time to sit tight, though that's apparently what the Giants are content to do.
The Dodgers have already left the Giants in the dust, and if the Giants don't start acting like the big market team that they are, that's not going to change.