IN THE HOURS leading up to the largest deal in sports history, Steve Cohen was convinced he wasn't going to be the one to give it out. Cohen arrived at Vitolo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to grab dinner with a friend Sunday night feeling defeated. For more than a month, Cohen had done everything he could to convince Juan Soto, one of the most gifted hitters ever to play in Major League Baseball, to spend the remainder of his career with the New York Mets. He sold Soto on the Mets' future and his place in delivering their first World Series title in nearly four decades. He highlighted the Mets' family atmosphere, a vital element of the team's sales pitch to free agents since Cohen bought the franchise in 2020. And still, Cohen feared, that wasn't enough to preclude Soto from returning to the New York Yankees, the Mets' crosstown nemesis.
Then, as Cohen prepared to tuck in to his pork chop with sweet vinegar and hot cherry peppers, his phone rang. On the other end was Scott Boras, the agent who had negotiated billions of dollars in contracts. Soto, the rare player to reach free agency at the tender age of 26, was his pièce de résistance. Boras never offered a buy-it-now price to shut negotiations down. Offers had jumped tens of millions of dollars at a time, and they still weren't enough. Boras' carrot-and-stick routine -- telling teams they were in the bidding, only to remind them that they needed to go to an even more uncomfortable place to remain so -- had worked wonders.
His tone in this conversation differed. And Cohen couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"Usually I'm pretty good at reading the signals. This one I totally missed," Cohen told ESPN. "Scott called me, and I realized, 'Holy s---. This could happen.' I didn't expect it. I had no expectations it was going to happen. I was blown away."
Quickly, the veneer of pessimism that swathed Cohen at the beginning of dinner melted. This was it. This was how the New York Mets, a franchise defined more by its dysfunction than success, would be reborn. Soto and his family members had made a decision. He wanted to be a Met, to decamp from the Bronx to Queens, to alter not only the trajectory of Major League Baseball but all professional sports. Cohen's bonanza offer -- 15 years for $765 million with no money deferred and a $75 million signing bonus -- had won the wildest free agent sweepstakes in nearly a quarter-century.
Over the next few hours, as Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns prepared to fly to Dallas for MLB's annual winter meetings, he and Cohen hammered out the fine details of the agreement with Boras. Cohen is one of the 100 richest people in the world. He is worth more than $20 billion and a connoisseur of fine art, with a collection that includes Picasso and Pollock and Warhol and is valued at more than $1 billion. Only after the news of the agreement broke and Mets fans rejoiced and Yankees fans burned No. 22 jerseys and the emotions that only sports can generate spilled into the ether did Cohen truly understand the gravity of what was happening, a makeover of the Mets as significant off the field as on.
For having spent his career winning, Cohen's victories were limited in scope -- for him, personally, or those at his hedge funds. Convincing Juan Soto to abscond from the most storied franchise in North American sports and join the New York Mets represented a civic triumph, something to be savored by the vast array of people who have spent their lives futilely rooting for a team so snakebitten that venom runs through its veins. "I totally underestimated how people responded to this," Cohen said. Whether those are the words of a person who cares not to unleash an end zone dance on a Yankees organization he genuinely likes or of someone beginning to understand the tectonic nature of the contract he proffered does not matter.
Juan Soto is a New York Met. And this is how it happened.