Lennon: Losing Soto to Mets ‘hard to believe’ for Yankees’ Cashman

DALLAS — When the door to his hotel suite swung open Monday, roughly 16 hours after losing out on Juan Soto, GM Brian Cashman sat awkwardly on a couch, leaning up against one side.

A dozen or so reporters entered, signaling it was time to face the music, for Cashman to explain the Yankees’ failure to keep Soto after he spent the entire season playing in pinstripes. This wasn’t Cashman’s first rodeo. He’s used to these interrogations.

And frankly, the Yankees’ GM didn’t look all that uncomfortable with Soto’s decision.

In the final analysis, Hal Steinbrenner’s only crime was his inability to get a free agent to take $760 million from the Yankees, a scenario that was unimaginable only a few weeks earlier. When I asked Cashman if he was shocked that such a mammoth offer didn’t close the deal, what else could he possibly say?

“When you’re playing at that level, it’s hard to believe,” Cashman said.

Not all that long ago, if you put that number and Yankees in the same sentence, chances are there wouldn’t be another team within $100 million. Cashman has been doing this job for nearly three decades. He knows when a Steinbrenner is hellbent on blowing away the market, from CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira to Gerrit Cole and Aaron Judge.

Soto represented another one of those opportunities, only multiply that times 100. There’s a reason these deals are done at the ownership level — because no rational GM would lobby for them from a pure baseball perspective. Steinbrenner’s obsession with Soto took hold during his first weeks in pinstripes, with the owner pushing for in-season contract talk as early as May, according to Cashman.

Steinbrenner desperately wanted to retain Soto. That was clear. He saw the immediate impact on the attendance, the TV ratings and the team’s on-field performance. So when it came to submit the Yankees’ final offer, Steinbrenner did so figuring his 14-year, $760 million bid would get it done.

But the Yankees can’t be confident in such beliefs anymore. Not when Steinbrenner has baseball’s richest owner for a neighbor, and he’s never competed with someone at Steve Cohen’s weight class before. How can Steinbrenner beat an owner that refuses to be outbid? Cashman said Monday that the Yankees were mostly flying blind at the end, not knowing where the rest of the numbers came in until Boras called them Sunday night with the verdict.

“It wasn’t a back and forth,” Cashman said. “They wanted everybody’s final official offer and the process played out. Then we just waited.”

What else could the Yankees do? If a nine-month Bronx courtship, which included being paired with Aaron Judge and a trip to the World Series, wasn’t good enough when packaged with $760 million, then all that was left was a shoulder shrug.

The Yankees did learn a valuable lesson though. The old way of doing business is over. Thanks to Cohen and his $21 billion fortune, the Mets have been elevated to superpower status, and now every highly-coveted free agent has the potential to ignite an interborough arms race. The Yankees used to rely on their championship tradition and piles of cash to separate themselves from everyone else. But the Mets’ recent success and Cohen’s megabucks are raising the bar, forcing the Bronx to be better, and not just among their AL rivals.

The war over Soto wasn’t just about baseball. The last five teams to win the World Series did it without him on their roster. Signing Soto doesn’t even guarantee a playoff berth (though he should significantly increase the odds). What Steinbrenner did understand, however, is that Soto was a huge needle-mover from a PR standpoint, as did Cohen, only the Mets’ owner has a bottomless vault of disposable income. And Soto defecting to Queens was truly the worst-case scenario for the Yankees’ century-long grip on New York, even if Cashman tried to suggest otherwise.

“I’d rather him not be in the American League East, you know?” Cashman said. “Pick your poison. Ultimately, the Mets got a great player, so congratulations to them. And our work continues as we focus on our team and how to reconfigure. Our efforts on a year-in, year-out basis don’t change.”

Presumably, the Yankees should now be flush with money to address their remaining needs in a post-Soto world. That’s $50 million right off the top to re-invest in the 2025 roster, over the next decade-plus. To a GM, that’s like Christmas morning, and Cashman sounded energized now that Soto was off the board. The Yankees already are paying a trio of $300 million players in Cole, Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, so tacking on Soto making more than double that was a daunting task financially for a team with more holes to fill.

Steinbrenner was determined to re-sign Soto anyway and believed he came up with the dollars to do it. For Cashman, who had difficulty wrapping his brain around those astronomical bids, he declined to be specific when asked if Hal exceeded the GM’s personal recommendations.

“I just would say Hal went above and beyond to try to find a way to keep Juan Soto in pinstripes,” Cashman said. “But there’s a lot of different ways to figure this thing out, so we’re just going to have to figure it out a different way without Juan.”

And somehow cope with Soto now playing in Queens.

David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball’s Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.