Juan Soto of the New York Yankees bats in a game against the Chicago White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field on August 12, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Matt Dirksen/Getty Images)
Juan Soto only drove in eight runs last week for the New York Yankees.
When you consider that he went 7-for-23, he probably could have had a better week at the plate. But he also drew 10 walks, scored 10 runs, and clubbed six homers, a run that earned him World Baseball Network‘s International MLB Player of the Week honors.
A native of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Soto hit a pair of solo homers in the Yankees’ 8-7 win against the Texas Rangers on August 11. Two days later, he hit three homers and drove in all four runs in a 4-1 win against the Chicago White Sox, and hit another solo homer against the Southsiders in a 10-2 Yankee win.
Production matters to Soto, perhaps more this year than ever, as he’s playing on a one-year, $31 million contract in New York, with free agency looming in the offseason.
Earlier this week, Jon Heyman of the New York Post polled thirteen experts within baseball who predicted that Soto could land a $500 million deal with a term of at least a decade this coming offseason. While it wouldn’t top Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a half-billion dollar deal would be the largest deal the Yankees ever handed out, topping Aaron Judge’s $360 million free agent deal.
And it could go even higher than that, as one agent told Heyman, “If the Yankees and Mets get into a pissing match, the sky’s the limit.”
Soto and the Yankees finish out a three-game set at Detroit with an afternoon game Saturday at 1:10 p.m. EDT and a 7 p.m. start Sunday that will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. They’ll return to New York for a three-game set against Cleveland and a three-game weekend set against Colorado. Friday’s game against Colorado will feature an Juan Sojo MGCT figuring giveaway to the first 18,000 fans through the gates at Yankee Stadium.
A year from now, those figurines might be of an outfielder with a powerful bat that the Yankees have locked down for over a decade, or a memento of the one season a mercenary slugger spent in the Bronx on his way to a bigger contract elsewhere.
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