15 year, $765,000,000. $75M signing bonus. No deferments. If he chooses not to opt out after five years his per year salary would increase by $4M, making the value of the contract $805,000,000.
Lower per year on paper than Ohtani but the richest contract in sports history.
Is this baseball?
I had the impression baseball was slowly dying?
The NY Mets do play baseball. Generally not very well but that’s the game they play.
Isn’t it the Mets who are still paying a former player a ton of money every year and he’s been retired for like a decade? Or is that another team?
Bobby Bonilla. He retired in 2001 and the Mets are still paying him.
I don’t understand how these contracts make sense, but they must at some level.
It seems no one paid attention to the Albert Pujols contract. Pujols’s 10-yr $240MM was an albatross around the Cardinals neck, and performance wise he never lived up to it.
Soto is 26 years old. Maybe the Mets get 10 tremendous years out of him, which might be good enough for the Mets. Or maybe keeping Soto away form the Yankees was what the Mets were after.
I knew he was still getting paid, but I didn’t realize how much longer that lasts so I had to look it up. He will continue getting paid $1.9million per year until 2035!
Most of Ohtani’s contract is deferred. Ohtani will get $68M per year for the 10 years after the contract is up. Bonilla’s was chump change in comparison.
Merch, advertising, media contracts, eyeballs on TV, and asses in seats.
But why are they happening in baseball and not other sports, or maybe they are?
A playground for rich owners?
Baseball doesn’t have a salary cap.
Some of the superstar salaries in Euro soccer rival these baseball contracts and are way more on a per year basis. Wasn’t Messi making like $200M/year?
I don’t understand the world. My favorite story from the weekend was that Notre Dam reopened. 5 and a half years of feverish work by 2,000 artisans across France to rebuild one of the greatest buildings and cultural symbols in Europe and the cost was in the same ballpark (pun intended) as hiring one sports ball guy. Nuts.
I thought the Browns are a football team?
I do not understand how these contracts make any financial sense or how they’re even remotely possible.
At some point you’d think there has to be a salary cap to protect the future of these franchises and the league. But clearly they know more about it than I do.
This was my thought as well. Maybe it’s just being the cranky old guy, but signing a contract with a 26 year old for more than three quarters of a billion dollars to play a school yard game is a preposterous statement about how messed up our value systems are.
We won the pennant with Soto and paid him just over half a million for his services. If my figurin’s correct the Mets are due 1, 340 World Series titles before he hangs up his spikes.
Can you really put a price on that kind of success?
Reporting is that the Yankees offer was nearly the same. $750 million over 16 years. So I guess it’s not just the Mets who have lost their minds.
People have opinions about this.