With Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner set to meet with free agent Juan Soto and Scott Boras at the agent’s Southern California headquarters next week, Aaron Boone plans on joining the meeting.
The exact date of the visit is unknown, but the Yankees will visit Soto after the Mets and their owner, Steve Cohen, do so this week. Last week, at the GM Meetings, Boras said that Soto wants to meet with owners so that he can hear their plans for consistent contention, an expectation the slugger has for any team he signs with.
Of course, Soto is also expecting considerable financial offers, as the 26-year-old is expected to command at least half-a-billion dollars after one of the better seasons of his career helped the Yankees reach the World Series in 2024.
“His focus always was, ‘I want to know who my owner is, I want to know that we’re going to be able to win, and I want to know that besides me, there’s going to be a great number of support on the part of the owner that he has the same desire to win that I do,’” Boras said, per SNY. “’I’m going to commit my career to it, and I want the owner to commit his resources to it.’”
Boras added that Soto is expected to go through a “thorough process.” The agent also said that Soto was “really comfortable” in New York this past season, but the player previously declared himself available to “all 30 teams.”
Soto also declined to publicly promise the Yankees the chance to match any final offers.
“The Yankees have open arms to come in and talk to me,” Soto said. “I don’t have any doors closed. I’m going to keep all of my doors open, and whoever wants to come in and talk, we can have a conversation.”
Boone, preparing to be part of that conversation, said he’s not going into the meeting with a specific sales pitch.
Instead, the manager, who just had a 2025 club option picked up, will lean on the relationship he built with Soto this past season.
“I do know him,” Boone, who played an active part in Aaron Judge’s free agency a few offseasons ago, said over Zoom on Monday. “Let it be organic and let the meeting go where it needs to go. I’m sure maybe he’ll have questions now that he is a free agent or want to address certain things. I’m just going to go in there and be myself and confident in my relationship with Juan and the ability to have honest conversations with him and certainly, hopefully cement the point of how valuable and how much we think of him, not only as a player, but as a person. I got to live that with him this year. That would be my sales pitch. Of course, how much we want him, but let the meeting go where it goes.”
Boone added that it will be a “fairly small meeting,” though he isn’t sure who else will attend just yet.
Boone is hoping that whoever is in the room can convince Soto to spend his foreseeable future in the Bronx. However, it’s unlikely that Soto’s free agency ends with the Yankees’ meeting.
In addition to the Mets, Soto will have plenty of interest from baseball’s biggest spenders and annual contenders. Teams including, but not limited to, the Blue Jays, Dodgers, Phillies, Red Sox and Nationals, Soto’s original team, have all been linked to the superstar.
With that in mind, Boone isn’t being shy about how much he’d like Soto to stay.
“What Juan did for us between the lines this year was pretty special,” Boone said. “He put together a remarkable season. But equally, I was just impressed with the person and really getting to know him, and getting to manage him was a pleasure. So I will be there next week. I certainly would love to have him back, obviously. I want him in pinstripes moving forward, but you also know there’s going to be a lot of people competing for that, and who knows where it ends up?
“All I know is that we’ll try and put our best foot forward with it and hope that Juan’s back, but also know that whatever happens, I’m confident that the Steinbrenner family and the front office are going to do everything possible to put us in a position to have another strong team, another team that has a chance to compete for a championship. They’ve done that long before I got here and I know that will continue to be the case. Hopefully it’s with Juan, but we’ll see how it all plays out.”
