Queens Gambit: How the Mets Stole Juan Soto From The Yankees

Meet the Mets: endearing, entertaining ... and eternal underdogs. But the franchise vibes are changing, thanks to a billionaire owner who bleeds orange and blue—and who just spent big for Juan Soto, one of the greatest hitters baseball has ever seen.

One clue you are talking to the richest owner in baseball and one of the 40 richest people in the U.S. is the answer provided when you ask about the rarity of owning a Giacometti. 

Pieces by Alberto Giacometti account for four of the five most expensive sculptures ever sold at auction, at an average price of $106.25 million.

“Uh, which one?”

The story of how Steve Cohen, billionaire hedge fund trader and owner of the Mets, came to acquire a fourth Giacometti presaged the greatest acquisition in the auction environment that is baseball free agency.

Jeffery A. Salter/Sports Illustrated

It was May 11, 2015, a little before 7 p.m., smack in what photographers call the magic hour, when Cohen arrived at Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Center. The last hour of sunlight, low and soft, slathered 49th Street in gold. Cohen walked through a bronze revolving door and headed for the main salesroom, a two-story cavern that can seat a few hundred people on its floor. Major bidders such as Cohen, however, may follow a sale anonymously in private skyboxes.

Up for bid that spring night was Giacometti’s L’homme au doigt (Pointing Man), a piece the artist created in one frenetic night in 1947. This was its first time coming to auction. According to the Christie’s catalog, “Cast in bronze and standing whippet-thin at five feet ten inches, this dynamic and powerful figure is widely recognized as one of the most important sculptural achievements of the Modern era, created by the greatest master of the medium.” It estimated the piece would go for “in the region of $130 million.”

Cohen, who began collecting art in 2000, had purchased another Giacometti only seven months earlier at auction for $101 million. He wasn’t interested this time. “I went in there not wanting to buy it,” he says.

“And then I had this thought in my head,” Cohen says. “It was like, You would have the best Giacometti collection in the world. And then I decided, I’m gonna go for it.”

The bidding opened at $100 million. It quickly went to $105 million, then $110 million, $115 million, $120 million and $125 million. Cohen went to $126 million. The auctioneer checked with two rival bidders. There was no response.

With the auctioneer’s swift banging of the gavel in his left hand, Cohen owned another Giacometti. He walked into the room with no intention of buying it and walked out having paid the highest auction price ever for a piece of sculpture: $141.3 million, including the buyer’s premium.

“Sometimes,” he says, “in the moment, you get a little carried away.”

Almost 10 years later, and four seasons into his ownership of the Mets, Cohen entered the auction for free agent outfielder Juan Soto, this time very intent on buying. Having just turned 26 years old, Soto is one of the most reliably elite hitters in baseball history. He is the only player to have seven seasons through age 25 with an adjusted OPS of no worse than 142, a ranking that levels out factors such as ballparks and hitting environments. It means in his worst season, Soto was still 42% better than the average player. He has the highest floor in baseball.

“I look at it pretty simply,” Cohen says. “There wasn’t going to be another player like him on the market maybe in the next five, six, seven years. So this really was an opportunity to bring someone in at an age where you were getting him in his prime years. It’s pretty rare. I mean, we already had a pretty good club. This was an opportunity to get a special player in an opportunity that may not exist for a while.”

Cohen, left, shakes hands with Soto as Stearns looks on during Soto’s introductory press conference. | Al Bello/Getty Images

The bidding for Soto made Christie’s look like a school bake sale. “It was like bidding with a bag over your head,” Cohen says. 

Cohen thought Soto was returning to the Yankees. But Cohen, a guy with an art collection worth more than a billion dollars, won the biggest auction of his life. He signed Soto for $765 million over 15 years. It is the most money guaranteed to an athlete and the longest contract given a baseball player.

Winning this auction was more meaningful to Cohen than winning the Giacometti, which would be on private display at his Greenwich, Conn., home. This win goes toward a public trust.

A Mets fan during his childhood in Great Neck, Long Island, Cohen wants badly not just to end the franchise’s 38-season World Series championship drought, but also to end his beloved team’s reputation as the Wile E. Coyote of baseball. Often entertaining but rarely successful, the Mets always seem to be one cel away from finding Acme TNT explode out of a would-be gift box.

Soto, hitting between sluggers Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso, adds historical greatness to a team that last year came up just two wins short of the World Series. The Mets are loaded with offense, sass and swag, young stars on the rise (infielders Mark Vientos and Ronny Mauricio), a dominant closer (Edwin Díaz) and a manager who takes every wicked turn of a New York season with the placidity and skill of a driver negotiating Le Mans (Carlos Mendoza). They also have pitching depth, but for now lack the high-ceiling, stuff-centric starters teams prefer in October.

“I said in my opening press conference, if I could turn this organization around, I could make millions of people happy,” Cohen says. “That’s my philosophy. I view it as somewhat philanthropic. 

“I’m not trying to make money. We’re trying to win. And I love the fact that I can change how the Mets are perceived, how the Mets fans perceive themselves. And if I can pull it off, wow! I’ve just made New York City and millions of fans happy.

“It’s a civic responsibility. Listen, we have a foundation. We do a lot of philanthropic things. But I felt this was … different.”

There remains one part to the Soto signing that Cohen and his general manager, David Stearns, admit they still don’t comprehend: Why did Soto choose them? Scott Boras, Soto’s agent, says he had four suitors offering in the range of $700 million or more: the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays. I tell Cohen I am going to ask Soto the next day why he chose the Mets.

“And I’m curious what he’s going to say,” Cohen says. “I mean, I’m hoping it was the conversations. We met multiple times. Was that something to do with it? Was it the perception of family and how we treat families? Maybe it was he wanted to be his own man? I mean, we can all speculate.

“And I really don’t care. Because he’s with us.”

None of Soto’s 15-year, $765 million contract will be paid in deferred installments. | Jeffery A. Salter/Sports Illustrated

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ALMOST THREE years ago, Boras took a piece of paper, wrote a number on it, tucked it into an envelope and stashed it in a desk drawer. It was the number he thought it would take one day for a team to sign Soto as a free agent. When Cohen made his first offer for Soto, Boras did not need to consult his secret number to know what to make of it.

Boras told Cohen it was the worst of the initial offers he received: “Steve, you’re not even in the hunt.”

“All right,” Cohen harrumphed. “I’m out.”

Boras says he wrote an email to Cohen the next day. It said, “Steve, my job is a couple things here. One is to represent the player. But the other thing is to give you a vision for the market so you compete in it. So, when I tell you you’re noncompetitive, you should view that as good news. Because then you have the opportunity to be competitive. Otherwise, I’m going to say you should drop out.”

At 7:30 that night, Cohen called Boras.

“All right. I’m open,” Cohen said.

“O.K.,” Boras replied. “I’m going to probably have a couple of evaluation rounds.”

“Well, how many are there going to be?”

“I haven’t determined that yet.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to optimize the market. I have to really see if people see what we see. Because right now, they’re not. I have a surplus value of $1.5 billion for this player.”

Boras compared Soto to former clients Greg Maddux, Alex Rodriguez and Max Scherzer, free agent outliers with surplus value; that is, they returned more value to the teams that signed them than what they were paid. Boras’s models, which assign nonlinear financial value to WAR (the per-WAR value rises as WAR increases), defined Soto as worth as much as $1.5 billion.

Cohen reconvened with Stearns. They arranged to meet Soto and his representatives, including Boras, at Cohen’s home in Boca Raton, Fla., on Dec. 6. The meeting did not go well. Soto told Cohen one of his most important prerequisites was protection in the batting order. Soto never had a big bat behind him until teaming with Manny Machado on the Padres in 2022 and ’23 and then Aaron Judge with the Yankees last season. Soto told Cohen the Mets did not have enough protection to suit him.

Cohen grew so frustrated by the tenor of the meeting that at one point he snapped, “Why are we even having this meeting? It sounds like you’re coming up with a lot of reasons why you don’t want to come to our team!”

When Soto and his team left the house, Cohen told Stearns, “He’s going back to the Yankees.”

“That was my gut feeling,” Cohen says. “I was having a hard time coming up with a reason why he would join us.”

The next morning Boras called Cohen.

“That was a really, really great meeting yesterday,” the agent said.

“What?” Cohen said. “That was one of the worst meetings I’ve ever been in.”

“Juan liked you. You definitely checked the ownership box.”

“Um, ohhh-kay. Great.”

At 3 p.m. the next day, Sunday, Boras’s phone rang. It was Soto. “You have my direction to go final with the Mets and try to work it out,” Soto told his agent.

By the end of the night, Soto and the Mets agreed on the richest contract in sports. None of the money is deferred. In net present-day value, Soto bested the previous record contract of Shohei Ohtani (deferrals bring his $700 million down to $460 million) by more than 60%. “He’s a numbers genius,” Boras says of Cohen. “I say different things to Steve than I would say to most owners because he’s so adept at just transacting. He’s also adept at dealmaking because he dealt with the art world, where your market is nobody else’s market, because you want the art. Because your vision of the art has a real market in the future.”

Soto hit a home run in his first at bat for the Mets in spring training. | Jim Rassol/Imagn Images

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THE METS were christened with a strikeout. On May 8, 1961, in the crystal room of the Savoy Hilton, owner Joan Payson announced the expansion team that would return National League baseball to New York for the first time since the Brooklyn Dodgers left for Los Angeles in 1958 would be called the New York Mets. To commemorate the event, Payson picked up a Stan Musial bat while someone held a bottle of champagne. She took a swing at the bottle. Nothing happened. She swung again. Strike two. She swung a third time. The bottle fell to the carpet, intact. Strike three.

A waiter took his turn next. He used a bottle opener. 

The Mets have won the World Series twice in their history, 1969 and 1986. Each title is mentioned in the same vein as Lourdes; each ranks among the most miraculous World Series ever witnessed. In 63 seasons, the Mets have finished in first place only six times and reached the playoffs only 11 times—never in three straight years.

The team’s spring training clubhouse is festooned with giant images of the franchise’s greatest homegrown players: Tom Seaver, their only homegrown player enshrined in the Hall of Fame as a Met, and Darryl Strawberry, Ed Kranepool, Dwight Gooden, Edgardo Alfonzo, David Wright and Jerry Koosman. They epitomize what it has meant to be a Met: more endearing and entertaining than fulfilled greatness.

Further, of the 17 pitchers in history with the most strikeouts in their first 50 games, four pitched for the Mets: Gooden, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. Each of them was a comet: spectacular to behold, until they fizzled out.

What defines Mets zeitgeist nearly as well as such charismatic players are the many famous comedians who root for the team. The roster includes John Oliver, 47; Sebastian Maniscalco, 51; Jim Breuer, 57; Ty Burrell, 57; Jimmy Kimmel, 57; Kevin James, 59; Hank Azaria, 60; Chris Rock, 60; Jon Stewart, 62; Ray Romano, 67; Bill Maher, 69; and Jerry Seinfeld, 70. Why in the name of Mr. Met, the huge-headed, ever-smiling OG of live mascots, do comedians fall for the Mets?

“Comedians are attracted to well-drawn, outsized personalities,” Seinfeld says. “We don’t like people that efficiently go about their business. We like people that entertain you. And hopefully go about their business as well.

“I became a Mets fan when I was just so entertained by the personalities and the color, versus the Yankees. You know, the orange and blue versus the depressing navy.”

The vein of colorful Mets characters has been strong from the start, beginning with Casey Stengel as the franchise’s first manager and Marv Throneberry as its first cult hero. In his 27th game with the expansion 1962 Mets after a trade from Baltimore, “Marvelous Marv” was called for obstruction while botching a rundown play at first base, was called out on appeal after missing first base on what was a triple and struck out to end the game. When Stengel came out to argue the call that Throneberry had not touched first, one of the umpires stopped him in his tracks by telling him, “Don’t bother, Casey. He missed second base, too.” Marvin Eugene Throneberry defined what it meant to be a Met. Literally. It was right there in his monogram.

It has been 39 years since the Mets won the World Series. Seinfeld was at Shea Stadium during the miracle against the Red Sox that was Game 6 in 1986, having taken four flights from Montana to get to his seat in the yellow upper deck. 

“I still remember sitting there, the game ended, and I just couldn’t leave my seat,” Seinfeld says. “Game 6. I just went, what? What was that? What happened? I couldn’t absorb it.

“Again, personality, you know? That was such a Mets thing. Just like 2024 was. I mean, 2024, oh my God, if you were a Mets fan in 2024, you’re branded for life. That was so much fun, partly because of how unexpected it was, especially after the way the season began.”

The Mets became only the third team to reach the playoffs after losing 33 of their first 55 games in a full season. They were the best team in baseball after that (67–40). They did so in their trademark comic book style: outsized and colorful, adopting Grimace as their unofficial mascot, riding the good vibes of infielder Jose Iglesias and his hit single “OMG,” and turning Citi Field into the largest karaoke bar in Queens every time Lindor came to bat. The run ended two wins short of the 

World Series, a familiar not-quite-there ride for Mets fans.

Says Stearns, who like Cohen grew up rooting for the Mets, “I think we share an appreciation for the scars and triumphs that the organization has gone through—that the fan base has experienced as well. These lived baseball traumas, and yet you still firmly believe that greatness is around the corner. And now, it’s partly my job to help greatness be around the corner.”

A friend recently remarked to Seinfeld he was worried that the magic of 2024 could not be duplicated this year. “I said to him, ‘Just be glad you have what you have,’ ” Seinfeld says. “ ‘You have a game you love. You have a team you love. Don’t look any deeper than that.’ He was saying, ‘How could ’25 be anything like ’24?’ How could Monday be like Tuesday? That’s not the way life works. You’re so lucky that you have anything.

“When you get older, you appreciate baseball more and more. You realize how few things in life you really have that are companions like that. You have a well-run team. You have a team where you have confidence in the ownership, the management and the on-field management.”

Seinfeld has become friendly with Cohen, the son of a dress manufacturer and a piano teacher, who took the train to Shea, bought a ticket to the upper deck and tried to finagle his way into the lower deck. “Steve Cohen immediately established himself with his wife, Alex, as having a fan-first attitude,” Seinfeld says. “And that’s what fans love more than anything. Our owner’s a fan. I mean, it’s a dream. ”

The Mets’ quirky zeitgeist has a strange draw on comedians like Seinfeld. | Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports

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JUAN SOTO wants to get one thing straight.

“The Yankees were No. 1,” he says of his preference entering free agency. “From Day One.”

There is another thing he wants to get straight. A rumored incident between Yankee Stadium security and his mother last season did not happen, at least not as portrayed. “Nothing happened,” he says. “All this news that came out that security … they bring my family around, that they don’t let them be, and all that kind of s---. That’s not true. The security in the Yankees, those guys were 1A with me and my family.”

Oh, and another thing: He says he did not care that the Yankees, per club policy, did not offer him a free suite for games at Yankee Stadium. The Mets have given him a suite, up to four tickets behind home plate for regular-season and postseason games, personal security for him and his family, travel assistance for his family during the season, eight types of award bonuses, a $75 million signing bonus and an option to opt out after five years. The Mets can void that opt-out by adding $4 million a year to the remaining 10 years, which would bring the total to $805 million.

The Yankees lost their position as Soto’s first choice. The Mets overtook them. How did it happen? It began when Boras arranged preliminary meetings with interested teams at a hotel in Southern California. Cohen would have none of it. He told Stearns to tell Boras he would host the meeting at his $32 million house in Beverly Hills. 

Cohen, wearing his ubiquitous Mets cap, his wife, the former Alexandra Garcia, who was born in New York and is of Puerto Rican descent, and her father hosted a lunch with Latin food. They dined on a patio in a combined indoor/outdoor living space with glass panel doors thrown open wide. There was one problem: the nonstop grind of chain saws from a tree-trimming service next door.

“Geez, Steve,” Boras said, “we’re in Beverly Hills and you’ve got a tree surgeon next door?”

The parties did retreat for a bit to Cohen’s home theater, where he screened for Soto a promotional video about the team and its player services. Since Cohen bought the team, he has invested heavily in analytics, boosting the staff of analysts from six to 35 and building a state-of-the-art performance lab at the team’s Port St. Lucie training site. He plans to invest in AI to improve performance and he promises that the technology infrastructure “will be elite, because I’ve got high standards.”

The heart of the presentation sold the Mets as a family-oriented business. Players who have played elsewhere depict the Cohens as especially attuned to the needs of family. For instance, when outfielder Jesse Winker was traded to the Mets last summer, he says “it was amazing” the way the club took care of any arrangements for his mother and daughter.

“Getting traded anywhere is hard, right?” Winker says. “In New York? In a playoff push? They made it so easy. It’s so much easier to come to the field knowing your family is safe and will be taken care of and you can just go out and play. It was like the smoothest transition ever. There are other places I’ve been that do a really good job as well, but here it’s just different.”

Says Cohen, “That’s the way I run my hedge fund. I don’t think it takes much. If I can make their experience positive and as easy as possible so they can focus on what they’re doing, I’m going to do it. I don’t know what other teams do and I really don’t care, but it’s important to us.”

The Beverly Hills meeting lasted only 90 minutes or so. Meanwhile, Cohen asked Lindor to gather any player intelligence on Soto. How would he fit in the clubhouse? Cohen has especially close relationships with Lindor and left fielder Brandon Nimmo, both of whom are signed to long-term deals.

“I said I’d do my research,” Lindor says, “but at the end of the day, he was just a guy that worked hard. And they did all their research themselves, you know? Steve is somebody that takes people’s opinions. He gathers information and makes decisions based on the information that he’s got. It’s not just him, him, him, him. ”

Meanwhile, Boras was doing his own research. One day he asked Soto, “Where is your highest career OPS?”

“I don’t know.”

“Citi Field.”

Of the 15 parks in which Soto has played at least 15 games, Citi Field, the Mets’ home, is the site of his best OPS (1.186). Boras showed him his numbers in seven other parks, including Rogers Centre in Toronto (1.005), Yankee Stadium (.979) and Fenway Park in Boston (.842). The next meeting was at Cohen’s $21.6 million house in Boca Raton. “I’m running out of houses,” he joked to Boras, though they had not yet convened at his $23.1 million Greenwich home.

Again, they met over an al fresco lunch. And again, they did so to the accompaniment of chain saws. Next door, renovation work was happening. Boras and Cohen had to laugh. Soto wasn’t laughing. This was the meeting in which he gave Cohen reasons why the Mets did not seem a good fit, especially with a lack of lineup protection.

When asked why he appeared so pessimistic, Soto smiles and says, “We tried to not show many emotions through the meetings. We kind of kept this process neutral.”

The final decision rested with what Boras calls “the Supreme Court of Soto.” Who, I ask Soto, are the members?

“My mother, my father and me,” he says. “My whole family is important to me. Everybody. But when it comes time to decide, that’s it.”

The Supreme Court of Soto chose Cohen and the Mets over Hal Steinbrenner and the Yankees. Why? It starts with Cohen. “I mean, the effort that he puts in,” Soto says. “He put a lot of things out there. They put my family into it. My family, and the way they take care of everything. They have to be taken care of.”

There was another separator: trust in long-term success.

“As you see how long this contract is going to be, it just came down to that decision, you know?” Soto says. “What do they have in the farm system? How many times can we be good on this team? I know the Yankees are going to be good for the next five, six years. We don’t know after that.”

Over the past three seasons, Cohen has spent $1.25 billion in payroll and competitive balance taxes—27% more than have the Yankees ($984.9 million). Cohen is said to be worth $21.3 billion. Six years ago, his worth was estimated to be $13.6 billion. Cohen built his fortune placing high-volume bets on small movements in stock prices. His previous company, SAC Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in November 2013. Cohen was never charged or sanctioned in the case. He opened a new firm, Point72, the following year.

The Mets’ infrastructure (minor league player development, technology, systems, etc.) is still in start-up phase. Until it matures, Cohen’s personal wealth is the organizational backstop. As he said in a meeting with reporters, “I’ve always wanted to be more measured in payroll growth. And [until] we get there, I have the ability to spend if I have to.”

Soto is trusting that Cohen will spend what it takes to put a competitive team on the field for the next 15 years. “That’s what he told me,” Soto says. “He’s going to try to put a winning team out there every year. And he’s capable of it. And I give him all my trust. I hope to be happy.”

The Yankees, Soto says, simply did not fill him with confidence. “I mean, they made a pretty good effort,” he says. “But we went back and forth with a lot of things. We tried our best. But, I don’t know, I just feel like … it’s just weird. It’s kind of like … how can I explain it?”

He stops. He looks toward the ceiling. He is quiet for 10 seconds. It seems an eternity, more time than he has in the batter’s box to get ready for the next pitch.

Finally, Soto says, “I feel like the Yankees did a pretty good job. But they kept … they couldn’t get it done right. Like, I wanted to get it done, but they’re still bouncing around. ‘Here … at least that … maybe … maybe no … ’ instead of just getting it done right away. Yeah, just get it done.”

It was an amazing accomplishment by Cohen. It was very far from his goal, which is to build the Mets into something they have never been: a sustainable winner. But it was his greatest leap toward it. He convinced the most valuable free agent in the history of sports that his next 15 years are best spent with the Mets—the Mets of Stengel, Throneberry, Doc, Darryl, the Dark Knight, the eighth longest championship drought in MLB and, despite last year’s success, attendance that ranked behind 17 other teams.

“I think there’s always been a little bit of skepticism with believing that the Mets are going to be sustainable winners,” Cohen says. “I think Mets fans have had this negative perception. One of my goals is to break that negativity. I want that postseason feeling again for me. I want it for the team.

“I mean, that month was one of the most … I had not felt anything like that. I don’t know if I ever felt anything of that type of emotion.”

As for Boras’s number in the envelope, he will not reveal it exactly, but he does say, “We’re very close to it. [The final number] was a little bit above what I had.”

And as for the most expensive piece of sculpture ever won at auction, apparently, unlike pitching, you can have too many Giacomettis. Pointing Man was shown the door. “It turned out that it wasn’t something I really wanted,” Cohen says. “I ended up selling it a few years later. Uh, that sometimes happens.”

As for Mets zeitgeist, this season, more than most, is full of promise.

“I am either at the game or watching the game every single day and it’s gonna be phenomenal,” Seinfeld says. He thinks of Soto in blue and orange in the deep lineup Soto wanted. “That guy surrounded in that lineup is a thing of beauty and I just can’t wait to watch it,” he says.

One day in February, Seinfeld was riding in a car with his good friend Larry David, who is a Yankees fan.

“I don’t understand your life as a Yankee fan,” Seinfeld told him.

“What?”

“I don’t understand how you live. That if you don’t win the World Series, you fail. And if you do win the World Series, that meets your expectation. That’s it.”

He let the thought hang for a beat.

“What kind of life is that! What kind of life is that!”

The line made David laugh.

A Mets fan knows not satiation. For now, Cohen has bought them a team that resembles a Lichtenstein print: bold, bright, fun, loud, expensive. It is something to dream on. The dream is that this time, there really is greatness around the corner.  

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