With every passing day, it becomes even clearer that the New York Mets stealing Juan Soto from the Yankees was personal for owner Steve Cohen, who knocked over every hurdle and threw handfuls of caution to the wind in order to make a remarkably expensive statement. In other words, there's no way that David Stearns, the Mets' personnel decision maker, had the same level of interest in the reckless spending it took to lure Soto.
After all, more than one month removed from that monumental decision, the Mets are still haggling over chump change with franchise icon and homegrown talent Pete Alonso. The "family over everything" atmosphere that Met fans swore was the difference between Soto living the suite life in Queens and staying with the Yankees doesn't seem to have translated in this particular case.
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While it still seems inevitable that the Mets and Alonso will eventually reunite, it's more frustrating by the day that Cohen had no limits when it came to lavishing Soto, but has pivoted to treating Alonso with the utmost caution. When the Yankees lost the Soto bidding, we were assured that the reins were off and that Cohen was about to go supernova. In reality, he seems to have only been willing to do so for the player the Yankees coveted most. In the process, he has forced Alonso's camp to grovel.
Mets fighting tooth and nail with Pete Alonso, but had no problem blowing Yankees away in Juan Soto chase
Stearns, who built a shoestring budget contender that operated with machine-like efficiency in Milwaukee and always seemed to find enough pitching without marquee names, has continued to build the rotation in New York the way he always did back home. He's a small-market tinkerer and thinker with a big-market budget, in the way that Boston fans assured us Chaim Bloom would be with the Red Sox. His rotation -- Sean Manaea, David Peterson, Frankie Montas -- doesn't look very intimidating on paper, but surely it eventually will be. It always is.
We thought that the only things that might stand in the way of Cohen and Co. blowing the doors off for Soto were the Yankees' proud tradition and his friends in the locker room, as well as Stearns being an internal blocker, preferring to spead his money around the way the Yankees ultimately have. Who knows? He might've come out on top, if given the same freedoms.
Instead, as it turned out, Stearns and Cohen banded together to make a mockery of the market for exactly one player -- the player the Yankees most coveted -- before going back to leaving Alonso on read and making him sweat over a relative pittance. The way this negotiation has played out, leaving a homegrown talent in the lurch and begging to return, has made the "Soto-Yankees culture" hot takes and the reality of the Mets' nonstop bidding even tougher to absorb.