On not signing Juan Soto

A bad move, but also an obvious one

For as long as I’ve felt like talking about it, I’ve been making jokes about the Giants not signing Juan Soto.

It’s the beginning of the season and he’s off to a great start for the Yankees? “The price for coming in second for Soto just went up!” It’s late August and he’s having the best season of his career? “Here comes the second place finish for the second place MVP!” He’s transcendent in the playoffs? “This taste of October might just be the four hundredth nail in the coffin of Soto signing with the Giants!”

And so, when this news came in, my first instinct couldn’t be anything other than, yes, of course:

Let’s cut the middleman. Let’s not even pretend. The Giants are going to Not Sign Juan Soto so hard, there’s no point in even throwing their hat in the ring. We were all tired of them getting our hopes up for every big free agent, right? Good news! Now we don’t have any hope at all. It’s called progress.

Really, there isn’t much difference between this state of things and the Ohtani/Yamamoto offseason, other than one fewer month of useless hope, and that Soto is much less likely to go to the Dodgers. Soto is said to strongly prefer the East Coast, and has enjoyed New York, and with the deep pockets of Steve Cohen and the general Yankeesness of the Yankees, those are the most likely destinations, Dodgers’ deep pockets be damned.

Even if Soto did kind of want to come to San Francisco, it’s hard to see it working. The Giants intend to cut payroll this offseason, not increase it, and with Soto making an extremely large amount of money — $50 million a year is in the ballpark, and probably a little low — that makes it tough to give the investors the profit they want. Even assuming a Soto deal means the team doesn’t pay LaMonte Wade Jr or Mike Yastrzemski, that’s around $14 million in savings, which means there’s still a lot of ground to make up just to get to even, much less make some cuts.

But shouldn’t they be involved? Shouldn’t the San Francisco Giants, one of the most historic, proud franchises in baseball, get a seat at the table? When you have a future Hall of Famer (or at least as close as you can get at the age of 26) on the market, who can be had for only money, shouldn’t you do your best to give him that money? This is a great player. Give him great money. Remember Bryce Harper? If the Giants had broken the bank for him and given him $35 million a year, they would be ecstatic with that deal right now. If the Juan Soto deal is just the Harper deal 6 years later, wouldn’t they want to be in on that too?

And the answer is: Well, maybe. Even a team with a big payroll (other than the two in New York) will at the minimum end up using something like 20-25% of their budget on just Soto. Taking into account prior payroll commitments, it becomes hard to go out and get help anywhere else. Don’t get me wrong: it would be great to have Juan Soto on the Giants, but the inevitable downstream effect would be that the team would not be able to get a starter or a shortstop in free agency.

(I am aware that they could, of course, simply spend the money. But the Giants badly want to avoid being in the luxury tax for a second straight year, and also rich people tend to get kind of jittery when they lose money on what they thought was a sure bet, so they’ll be pretty adamant about staying below that line and raking in that cash)

This is also a reflection on how this franchise has fallen. If the Giants were the golden boys of baseball — also known in current times as “the Dodgers” — then everyone would at least take their meeting. There would be no question about it, no ifs. The Giants would make time for Soto, and he would make times for them, and maybe he’d sign with San Francisco and maybe he wouldn’t, but the very concept of that meeting wouldn’t come off like a joke.

That’s not where we are now. Of course Soto isn’t going to come to San Francisco, because the entire point of being Juan Soto is that you get to choose any team you want, and he certainly doesn’t want the Giants. He wants to win, and he wants endorsements, and he wants to be the star in the big city, and the Giants can’t offer any of that.

But he should also want to be a Giant. He should crave the prestige that comes with the orange and black. He should look at this team, and declare, “I want to be the heir to Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, and Gregor Blanco.”

That’s not where the franchise is, though, and for good or for ill, they’ve realized it. No more false hopes, then. No more allowing ourselves to be used to pump up the deal that the other team will pay, the team that the player really wants to go to. No more pleasant distractions. The Giants are simply not going to be in on this one, because they’ve been in several recently, and not one has gone well. The lesson, as Homer Simpson once said, is never try.

But that’s not where we want to be. That’s not who we want our team to be. The fact that they will not succeed in signing Juan Soto is an unhappy one, and there’s not a lot that anyone can do to change that. The real answer is to keep getting better, and when the next big free agent comes along, the Giants will be able to put in a more credible offer.

For now, though, the Giants will have to content themselves with picking from a lower tier of free agents. Juan Soto isn’t even a pipe dream. He’s just a guy who won’t be on our favorite baseball squadron this year. In a way, that’s just like every year, because Juan Soto has never once been on the Giants, which is pretty unfair. But you get what you get, and unfortunately, the Giants won’t get Soto.