O/T - Juan Soto - 15 years/$765M with the Mets

[nat]

Free agent contracts have nothing to do with ticket prices, unless and only to the extent that signing a free agent increases demand for tickets. Teams are already charging whatever price for tickets that they figure is going to maximize revenue. Unless people are going to be willing to pay higher prices so that they can see Soto (which they might!), the Mets aren't going to be able to raise prices. And if people are willing to pay higher prices because they're excited about their team, that's not a sign of an unhealthy sport at all. Quite the opposite.

Will Soto be "worth" this contract, is really two questions. There's an economic question about whether the increased revenue that the team gets from having him (which could come from higher ticket prices if folks are willing to pay more to see him, or from extra sponsorship deals, or from post-season appearances they wouldn't have made otherwise, or larger cable deals or whatever) will more than make up for what he's getting paid. And there's also a question particular to the guy who is going to be writing Soto's paychecks. Is Steve Cohen going to be happy about it? The former question is difficult to answer, I'm not going to even try to predict baseball finances 15 years out. As for the latter question though: Cohen has more money than God. Like, nearly an order of magnitude more than some of the other baseball owners. He's not just rich, and he's rich by the standards of guys who own sports teams. And he has apparently decided that the Mets are his new favorite toy (see, for example, the Verlander and Scherzer signings) and doesn't mind spending money on it. We buy cardboard rectangles with pictures of baseball players on them. He buys baseball players. Whether this deal will be worth it to him is more a question about how much he enjoys his hobby than it is about how much (if any) money he's going to make on this deal.