The New York Yankees did not re-sign Juan Soto, but still had to spend part of the MLB Winter Meetings talking about the newest member of the New York Mets.
One interesting wrinkle to emerge from the postmortem of the Yankees' attempt to re-sign Soto has been the question of stadium suites, and whether a player should pay for them. Per the New York Post's Jon Heyman, one thing that differentiated the Mets' offer from the Yankees was a free suite at Citi Field.
The Yankees declined to offer the same at their own stadium, citing precedent of past greats paying for suites:
"The Yankees shouldn't be faulted for bidding a whopping $760M, but they wouldn't budge on the suite. The Yankees felt they couldn't give a suite to Soto when [Aaron] Judge pays for his suite, and even Derek Jeter paid. They were willing to discount a suite but not alter their precedent.
"[Mets owner Steve] Cohen didn't give the suite much of a thought. When he has his eyes on a prize, he is singularly focused."
Given a chance to respond Wednesday, Cashman stuck to his guns, via NJ.com:
"Some high-end players that make a lot of money for us, if they want suites, they buy them," Cashman said.
He walked through the Yankees' process of providing stadium seats for wives and family members, adding that a suite is also available because of weather and other factors.
"If they ever want to be upstairs, they have a choice to be down or up and protected and enjoy it," Cashman explained. "We have a great family room set up with babysitting. It's a great, safe setup to take care of families and stuff like that. But obviously, when we have a roster with a lot of great players and high-end players, we've gone through a process on previous negotiations where this might have happened, and this is what we did. We're gonna honor those. So, no regrets there."
It feels easy to scold or mock the Yankees for potentially giving the Mets the upper hand in their pursuit of Soto, but this also feels akin to Homer Simpson looking for a peanut.
Soto wanted a suite at his home stadium. The Mets were willing to give him a lot of money and the suite for free. The Yankees were willing to give him a lot of money and the ability to buy a suite. If the suite mattered so much to Soto, he could have asked for more money from the Yankees and bought a suite, because money can be exchanged for goods and services and Soto, again, was about to get a lot of money.
In the end, the Mets' compensation offer was worth an amount of money well higher than $765 million, due to the add-ons such as salary escalators, opt-out and perks including, yes, the suite. The Yankees tried to beat that value without the added worth of a free suite and are apparently comfortable with that decision, because there really shouldn't be much functional difference between, say, $760 million and no suite and $755 million and a free suite ($5 million is a guess for how much a suite costs a player over 15 years).
The question was never how Soto wanted to receive his total compensation from the Yankees. This is all a very small part of a complicated process, and the suite is probably more relevant as a reflection of Cohen's commitment to landing one of the best free agents in living memory.
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