The Mets are heading to Yankee Stadium, with Juan Soto on their side. What does the showdown means for baseball in New York? Plus:
In December, Juan Soto left Aaron Judge and the Yankees for their crosstown rivals. “We’re on even ground,” one Met said.Illustration by Paul Rogers; Source photographs from Getty
Louisa Thomas
Thomas writes The Sporting Scene column.
No one can call Juan Soto a loser. He was only sixteen years old when he signed with the Washington Nationals, in 2015; nineteen when he made his big-league début; and twenty-one when the team won the World Series, partly owing to Soto’s blistering performance in the post-season. By then, he was among the best hitters in the league. Soon after, he turned down a four-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar contract from the Nationals, even though it would have been the largest deal in M.L.B. history at the time. He thought he could do better. In 2024, he helped lead the Yankees to the World Series. Then, less than two months later, he signed a record-breaking contract for seven hundred and sixty-five million dollars, over fifteen years. But here’s where things get weird: he was leaving the Yankees for the Mets.
For the better part of their existence, the Mets were synonymous with haplessness. There have been teams that lost more, but the Mets had a special association with “futility and bizarre circumstances,” as one Times reporter put it, in 1964. Even the team’s two championships couldn’t change the existential plight of Mets fans. And yet low expectations also seemed to give them unusual reserves of joy. The Yankees, with their twenty-seven titles, might have been the titans of New York, and of the world. But the Mets were fun. When Steve Cohen—a hedge-fund billionaire from Great Neck, Long Island—bought the team, in 2020, he signalled his ambition not only to build a perennial World Series contender but to rebuild the Mets’ reputation. He didn’t just want to win—he wanted to turn the Mets into winners. Luring Soto away from the Yankees was his boldest statement of intent. It’s no longer a “David-versus-Goliath story,” Brandon Nimmo, the Mets’ longest-tenured player, told me. “It’s now a Goliath-versus-Goliath.”
In the New York Issue, I explore what this move means for baseball, and for the city. And, tomorrow, the Mets head to Yankee Stadium for the first time since Soto’s departure. Yankees fans have been preparing for his return for months. During the team’s home opener, at Yankee Stadium, the crowd began chanting, for no clear reason, “Fuck Juan Soto.” Now both teams are at the top of their respective divisions, and among the best in baseball. Expect to hear plenty of Bronx cheers—otherwise known as razzing.
For more: read Roger Angell, from 1962, on spring training during the Mets’ inauspicious inaugural season.
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Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.