IN THE BACKYARD of his 11,540-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion, next to the saltwater pool with an underwater sound system, Steve Cohen was talking about building things. Trying to construct something great nearly broke him once. The hedge fund Cohen founded made him one of the richest men in the world, and insider trading from two employees led to a $1.8 billion fine and the dissolution of the business. Cohen was being transparent, more than someone in his position might otherwise, because he wanted the man sitting next to him to understand that work ethic and drive and sacrifice and the pursuit of excellence are building blocks for something bigger, something that lasts — something that can change lives. As he locked eyes with Juan Soto, who stared back at him, rapt, Cohen posed a question.

“What are your aspirations?”

Soto paused to think. He had made a career out of careful consideration. No baseball player in his generation, and scant few before him, wielded such immaculate control over his own decision-making skills. From the time he debuted at 19 years old, Soto had launched himself on a trajectory toward the Hall of Fame in large part because of his mastery of the strike zone. He has the ability to process information so fast that to him the half-second between the time a pitcher releases the ball and when it pops into the catcher’s mitt feels like an eternity. It carried Soto out of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and all the way here, to California’s 90210 ZIP code, where Cohen, the wealthiest owner in baseball, was trying to convince him to sign with the New York Mets.

The answer was multipronged. Soto wanted to win championships, plural, and he wanted to win a Gold Glove in the outfield, and he wanted to do a million other things, because he wasn’t in the business of restricting himself. What he said next aligned with that.

“I want to be the best hitter of all time,” Soto said.

More than 17,500 players have stepped into a major league batter’s box. Soto’s suggestion that he wanted to stand atop that list took hubris, but Cohen gleaned something else from Soto’s words. He saw a kindred spirit, a perfect embodiment of what he wanted his Mets to be. The franchise had spent most of its 64-year existence bumbling along, while the New York Yankees, for whom Soto played in 2024, won championship after championship. Now, Cohen believes the Mets have finally replaced decades of amateur-hour mismanagement with a functional group of leaders — and created a franchise that any free agent would choose over the 29 other clubs. Particularly a 26-year-old in search of his forever home.

Cohen sat at the head of the outdoor table, flanked by Soto to his left and the Mets’ new president of baseball operations, David Stearns, to his right. Soto’s agent, Scott Boras, sat next to him and across from Alex Cohen, Steve’s wife. Her father, 93-year-old Ralph Garcia, a Mets fan for decades, showed up to the meeting, as did Cohen’s son, Josh. The attendees reinforced a point Cohen wanted to emphasize: The Mets might function around the principles embodied by Cohen’s hedge funds, but at its heart, theirs is a family business. For hours they talked, enjoying Dominican food, making sure that this seemingly perfect match of team and player was as substantive in person as it was in the computer models that suggested Cohen spend more money to secure Soto’s services than had ever been guaranteed to a professional athlete.

For the entirety of Cohen’s adult life, he had assessed the value of financial products and leveraged them to inconceivable riches. This deal was value anthropomorphized, an opportunity for something bigger, lasting, life-changing — delivering a moment decades in the making for Ralph and the other Mets diehards and all of Queens. And Cohen intended to finish the meeting with a flourish. He told the group to follow him to the theater room downstairs.

On the way, Cohen told a story. He is one of the world’s great art collectors, and one piece in particular enraptured him: Picasso’s Le Rêve. Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn owned it, and Cohen had agreed to purchase it in 2006 for $139 million. Then Wynn accidentally elbowed a hole through it, scuttling the sale. One restoration and seven years later, Cohen bought the piece for $155 million.

The point, Cohen said, was that when he sees something he wants, nothing will stop him from getting it. With that, the lights in the theater dimmed, and a video started to play. Josh Cohen had devised it. Soto in a Mets uniform. Soto at Citi Field. And at the end, next to the statue of Tom Seaver that adorns the outside of Citi Field, a large, bronze version of Soto. He could stay with the Yankees or go to Los Angeles or Boston or Toronto, sure, but nowhere, Cohen said, would he change the arc of baseball history like he would with the Mets.

TWO MONTHS AFTER signing the largest contract in the history of professional sports, a tectonic 15-year, $765 million deal with no deferred money, Juan Soto was ready to report to New York Mets spring training. And he was nervous. His jitters were more the first-day-of-school variety than anything, but in the time between when he agreed to the deal and mid-February, Soto considered the gravity of what he soon would undertake. His career was his most valuable possession, and he was entrusting it in an organization that for its six-plus decades of existence earned a reputation for brokenness.

“I feel like I have everything in front of me,” Soto said. “I just gotta put the work in and do what I have to do. It’s going to take a lot, but I think when you put the bar that high and you put your goals in a big spot, it brings the best out of you, and that’s what I want to bring every day.”

What for most of baseball history would have seemed inconceivable was now a reality: a future Hall of Famer in the prime of his career fleeing the Bronx for Queens. For the better part of a century, Yankee Stadium had functioned as baseball mecca, the place where the best players found the best of themselves. From 1921 to 2009, they won the American League pennant nearly half the time and captured 27 World Series championships, more than twice as many as the next-best franchise. The baseball universe orbited around East 161^st Street and River Avenue.

The Mets weren’t just little brother; they were the distant step-cousin. They didn’t spend like the Yankees. They didn’t develop like the Yankees. The Yankees’ brand was greatness, the Mets’ dysfunction. Even when they cobbled together a championship-caliber core in the 1980s, the Mets’ reign stopped at one championship, in 1986, dreams of a dynasty dashed. Little changed until Cohen, who grew up in Great Neck, about 10 miles from Citi Field, arrived. He saw the Mets not only as an undervalued asset but a loom that could weave the social fabric of Queens and regions beyond. And for all the money he planned to spend to make that happen, the Mets needed an anchor, a face, a defining character for the franchise’s defining era.

Though plenty of talented baseball players have plied their trade for the Mets, none has matched Soto’s luminescence. He is coming off the best year of his career, hitting .288/.419/.569 with 41 home runs. His lifetime on-base percentage of .421 is 13^th among all players with at least 2,000 plate appearances in the modern era, sandwiched between Shoeless Joe Jackson and Mickey Mantle. And at 26, plenty of prime years remain for Soto to help reinvent the Mets in his image — on-field alphas, shuffling in the batter’s box, staring down pitchers — saying they’re the ones who own New York now without needing to open their mouths.

On that first day, all Soto wanted to do was fit in. His first seven years in the major leagues were unlike those of any player of his caliber in the game’s history. Superstars rarely get traded before they reach free agency; none moves more than once. Soto had gone from Washington, which signed him as a gangly 16-year-old, to San Diego, which regarded him as the missing piece to winning its first championship, to the Bronx, where the Yankees paired him with Aaron Judge to fashion a fearsome duo in the image of Ruth and Gehrig, Mantle and Maris.

Soto pulled in to Port St. Lucie, Florida, with no specific plan to ingratiate himself. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza, who had been hired before their surprising National League Championship Series run last year after 15 years managing and coaching with the Yankees, encouraged Soto to ignore the fact that he’d now be viewed through a different lens than the previous half-decade. Though his talent had always set Soto apart, now he was the $765 million man, and even if the money would not change him, it would alter the perception of him.

“I just bring myself. This is who I am. I hope you guys like it,” Soto said. “I’m going to try my best. If not, I’m going to make adjustments. That’s what I did. I didn’t have any strategy. ‘Oh, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ I don’t want to change anything. This is who I am, and this is the guy you’re going to see for the next 15 years.

“I don’t want to try to do more. I don’t want to try to be a superhero. I’m just going to be the same guy I’ve been.”

Whatever Soto does or doesn’t want to try to be, he’s wise enough to recognize that to Mets fans he’s Superman, Batman and Captain America amalgamated. Once he arrived at camp, fans started showing up in droves — thousands on the backfields, plenty wearing Soto’s No. 22, craving just a peek at the one prophesied to liberate them from the shackles of their history. Being a Mets fan is a lesson in second-class citizenry, and with Soto in the fold, it mattered not that their presumed Opening Day starter, Sean Manaea, would miss the beginning of the season, or that another free agent signing, right-hander Frankie Montas, would be out for two months with a lat strain. Soto’s presence alone made the sun shine a little brighter, the bat crack a little louder, the loaded NL East — with Atlanta and Philadelphia teams also harboring World Series aspirations — a little less intimidating.

“At the beginning, I didn’t know what to expect, especially with Soto,” Mendoza said. “That was the biggest thing for me: the guy that’s been around a lot of different teams, but he’s making that transition to another New York team with a huge contract. So how is that going to go here? And I think it was Day 2 of position players [reporting]. I saw him joking around, smiling, laughing. I was like, ‘OK, I think we’re good here.'”

Soto made clear to Mendoza that the size of his contract would be no impediment to him fulfilling all of the goals he told Cohen. “He wants to be held accountable,” Mendoza said, and if that meant getting on him about his defense or baserunning or being a good teammate or even his hitting, he expected the same treatment as someone making $765,000.

Earlier this spring, the Mets set up an optional bunting station that hitters could visit to work on their technique. Perhaps no one should have been surprised that Soto ambled over and spent 15 minutes there. He is an excellent bunter who stole four hits last year pushing the ball away from shifted fielders. But a number of people in the Mets organization were nevertheless pleasantly surprised: If the highest-paid player in sports history can work on rarely used fundamentals, what is anyone else’s excuse to skip the bunting station?

Divas can poison cultures, and the shift in the Mets’ since Cohen bought the team — the hiring of Stearns, who made the playoffs in five of eight years as general manager for the payroll-challenged Milwaukee Brewers, and the immediate success of Mendoza, a first-time big league manager — is fundamental to the Mets’ reimagination. Without a solid foundation, a team filled with nine-figure players would be susceptible to wobble. Organizational sturdiness can help make the complicated seamless.

“We saw it last year with the Dodgers getting Shohei,” said Manaea, who played with Soto in 2022 with San Diego and witnessed firsthand last year how adding one of the best players in baseball can take an already good team and turn it into something special. Los Angeles blitzed the Mets in the NLCS, with Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ $700 million free agent signing, getting on base 17 times in six games and blasting a pair of home runs. What Ohtani is to the Dodgers, Soto can be for the Mets. And his desire for that — for everything baseball has to offer — helped guide him toward that ultimate decision.

JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Soto wrapped up his in-person meetings with the five teams courting him and started to confer with his family, Boras and Boras’ lieutenants. Quickly, he realized he had absolutely no idea where he wanted to spend the remainder of his career. He was most impressed by the Mets’ meeting. The Blue Jays wowed him as well. The Red Sox’s cadre of prospects foretold a bright future. The Dodgers were the industry standard. And he loved playing for the Yankees, whose fans had spent much of the season and October rhythmically chanting “Re-sign So-to,” a clarion call for owner Hal Steinbrenner to channel the energy of his late father, George, and treat the team less as a business and more as a win-at-all-costs championship factory.

“It was a lot of meetings, a lot of back and forth looking at the teams,” Soto said. “What is going to be the best? Who’s going to be at the top for the next 15 years? Who’s going to be willing to spend money after five, six, seven, 10 years?”

The pressure was understandable. Soto had been barreling toward this moment for years. He turned down three contract-extension offers from the Nationals — the first for $100 million-plus, the second a near-facsimile of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s $340 million deal with San Diego and the final a 14-year, $440 million offer that would have made him at the time the highest-paid player in baseball history at 23 years old. He vowed to prioritize fit over money, not because he didn’t care about the economics of the deal but because Boras assured him that eventually the bidding would reach levels never before seen in sports.

At the center of the fit was family — literally, with his parents and siblings deeply involved in his decision, and colloquially, with the length of his expected deal tantamount to a marriage. Soto was raised in a household, said his younger brother, Elian, where they were taught to “be respectful and be nice to everyone — to the game, to the coaches, to our teammates. And try to be as positive as we can on and off the field.”

Cohen’s bet on involving his family in the meeting proved spot-on. Soto saw Cohen not only as a billionaire who was willing to devote the necessary resources to building a team to compete with Los Angeles, but as a husband with the means to give his father-in-law the gift of winning. As much as Soto liked the Dodgers, they were the one team unwilling to match the others financially, with Ohtani’s contract already on their books. As engaging as the Blue Jays were in their meeting — with a video nearly as resonant as the Mets’ and the presence of Edward Rogers, the team owner who never before had involved himself in these sorts of summits — their farm system lagged far enough behind that he eliminated them. And though Boston expressed a willingness to go well beyond $765 million, the Red Sox never made a formal offer in that range, and Soto removed them from the proceedings, too. The biggest free agent contract in MLB history was officially a battle between the two New York teams.

Among the pros for the Mets: Soto believed he could create something bigger, something that lasts, something that would change lives and legacies. For the Yankees: He had grown weary of baseball nomadism, and the Yankees, for all of the consternation among a fan base aggrieved by the lack of championships since 2009, still have the most wins of any team this century and the third most in Major League Baseball over the past decade.

Sensing the endgame, Cohen requested, and was granted, a second meeting right before the beginning of the winter meetings in early December — an opportunity only the Mets received. (The Red Sox had inquired about one but Soto did not take it.) At a lunch gathering at his home in Boca Raton, Florida, Cohen went into dealmaking mode, asking: What do we need to do to get this done? More power in the lineup, Soto said. More pitching, he added. Already Cohen had promised Soto a luxury suite for every home game — a perk the Yankees declined to match — and a security detail for him and his family. And the money kept rising — to $750 million first and eventually to $765 million, $5 million more than the Yankees’ final offer spread over 16 years.

Back at home in the Dominican Republic, Soto vacillated until Sunday afternoon, as much of baseball arrived in Dallas for the meetings. As tantalizing as it would be to go down in the annals of the sport as an all-time-great Yankee, the allure of Cohen’s commitment to build something spoke to Soto. He was far from the highest-rated prospect in his international signing class. Soto, in fact, originally saw himself as a pitcher. But he added skills, iterated, grew, worked, pushed himself, sacrificed, pursued excellence. The kindred spirit Cohen saw was reciprocated.

Hours later, as the news emerged that Soto had chosen the Mets and the $765 million figure was reported, the long-established dichotomy of New York baseball was flipped. The eternal winners lost the sweepstakes; the perpetual losers won the lottery. This did not mean failure for the Yankees, just as it does not ensure success for the Mets, but paradigm shifts in baseball can happen in a hurry, and Soto’s decision represented one. For all he has done — the World Series win in Washington, the exceptional October with the Yankees and everything in between — his career is still in its nascent stages. So much is yet to come. And when it does, it will be with the New York Mets.

THE BEST HITTER of all time is Babe Ruth. Or Barry Bonds. Or Ted Williams. Or Ty Cobb or Henry Aaron or Willie Mays or Rogers Hornsby or dozens of others whose accomplishments, to this point in his career, dwarf Juan Soto’s.

And yet when asked the question of who warrants the title, Soto does not hesitate.

“Myself,” Soto said. “Until you prove me wrong.”

When pressed, Soto’s answer offers a window into how he sees the sport.

“Freddie Freeman,” Soto said. “I feel like he’s one of the best hitters I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of guys that have (long) careers like (Albert) Pujols. Mike Trout has been having great years. But the guy I see every day since I’ve been in the big league has been Freddie Freeman.”

Soto’s answers, heavily skewed to active players, are not because he’s some myopic Zoomer with no knowledge of the game’s history. He knows it well. He values the greats. At the same time, it speaks to his reverence for the modern game. Hitting today is harder than it’s ever been, and Freeman almost single-handedly beat the Yankees in the World Series. There might be no prettier swing in baseball than Freeman’s when stroking an outside pitch to the opposite field. Soto deeply values being on the field, playing all 162 games in 2023 and 157 last year, and Freeman is the king of staying on the field, ailments be damned.

For Soto to enter the GOAT conversation among the general public, he’ll need more years like 2024, when he spent the season hitting second for the Yankees, one spot ahead of Aaron Judge. The Mets lineup he’s joining will be even more formidable than the Yankees’, with Francisco Lindor in the leadoff spot and Pete Alonso behind him. Add Brandon Nimmo at cleanup, Mark Vientos in the 5-hole and a variety of other dangerous bats occupying the bottom half of the lineup, and the Mets will need to hit as they await the return of Manaea, Montas, catcher Francisco Alvarez and second baseman Jeff McNeil from the injured list.

How the Mets evolve beyond 2025 will depend on the growth of their farm system — it’s currently a middle-of-the-pack group — and Cohen’s continued willingness to complement Soto and Lindor, the Mets’ two anchors. Replicating the Dodgers’ formula will take years, but their success begins with Mookie Betts, Ohtani and Freeman — all future Hall of Famers — atop the lineup. The vibe that helped fuel the Mets last October, Lindor said, is back this spring, and Soto’s addition to the lineup should only serve as accelerant.

“I’m happy he’s here,” Lindor said. “I think he’s definitely going to help us win. Why would I be mad? He’s putting our team in a much better spot. … My ego doesn’t get hurt when somebody big in this game walks in. It’s just like, I love it.”

He’s not the only one. In the stands at a game last week, Mets fans lined up along the dugout as Soto spent an inning autographing balls and jerseys for anyone who asked. Inside the clubhouse a few days earlier, Mets players were thrilled that Soto’s partnership with Call of Duty: Warzone allowed the team early access to a not-yet-released version of the Verdansk map. At the ownership level, they’re hopeful that the excitement about the Mets will only help Cohen’s attempts to win one of three casino licenses New York state plans to award this summer, paving the way for an $8 billion development next to Citi Field.

When Cohen bought the Mets for $2.4 billion, this was the idea: turn them into what they always should have been — not New York’s baseball bridesmaids but a team worthy of the city in which it resides. It took Juan Soto for that notion to feel real, and with Opening Day’s arrival, never has it been more so. In French, the name of the Picasso that Cohen bought from Steve Wynn — Le Rêve — means “dream.” The Mets are living theirs, and they don’t intend to wake up any time soon.