What would I have to do to get some baseball team to pay me $700 million?
Hey, excellent question. And I think we’ve figured that out.
On one hand, you could be a unicorn – a once-in-a-lifetime home run hero/Cy Young starter/make-the-impossible-seem-possible kind of guy. Like Shohei Ohtani, for instance. Or…
You could just be Ted Williams.
All right, let’s take a deep breath now. It always seems sacrilegious to call Juan Soto – or anyone else – a modern-day Ted Williams. But this is the story where we let you know that it’s not as crazy as you want to believe it is.
The Mets obviously think so, since they just agreed to deposit $765 million in Soto’s money market account over the next 16 years. But you should know that they’re not the only team that sees this Juan Soto/Ted Williams thing. Far from it.
Consider the response from one big-league coach this week when we asked for his reaction to Soto’s staggering new contract.
“What it says to me,” he replied, laughing, “is that Ted Williams would make a hell of a lot of money if he was playing today.”
True!
Then there’s this story, told by an executive of a team that had interest in trading for Soto in 2022, when the Nationals were dangling him. Just to make sure he had the go-ahead, this exec and another high-ranking member of his front office decided they’d better run it past their owner first. This is how the exec remembers the conversation going:
“He said something like: ‘I understand he’s great. But can you put in context how great he is?’
And I said: ‘I think he’s Ted Williams.’
And he just gave me a look like: ‘You’re a freaking lunatic.’ But I just said: ‘No, that’s kind of what he is.'”
We couldn’t have said it any better. That’s kind of what he is.
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