Differing information coming out regarding Blue Jays' final offer to Juan Soto

Throughout the current offseason, we have heard of all of the rumors and details on how the Toronto Blue Jays pursued top free agent Juan Soto. Everything from what teams the Jays were up against, to when Toronto finally contacted and met with Soto, all the way to potential offers that they could make, it gave everyone a gleam of hope in Jays’ land that it could actually be happening this time around.

However, as most likely have expected, the Blue Jays would come up short yet again for the second consecutive year in terms of landing the top player in the free agent class. Soto would finally decide to begin his new baseball life with the New York Mets for the next 15 years on a whopping $765 million contract. That contract easily surpassed the massive 10-year, $700 million one that Japanese two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani received from the Los Angeles Dodgers last offseason.

How close did the Blue Jays really come to landing Juan Soto?

So if the Jays were that close to getting Ohtani the last time out, how close were they actually in reality this time around in securing the services of Soto? If taking away all other non-quantifiable factors in the equation and looking solely at the offer numbers, Toronto actually came close, but just not close enough to landing the 26-year-old phenom. 

According to Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet, the Jays came up with an offer at just under $700 million for Soto. There were rumors that the offer amount got as high as $760 million, as per MLB insider Jon Heyman on a segment in the Michael Kay show. But it was speculated that such a number was just overblown.

In a perfect world, MLB free agency could work like an auction so that the highest bidder could just add a million on top to win out on the sweepstakes. But of course, things unfortunately don’t work that way, so Jays’ fans will just have to suffer the utter disappointment that they came close, yet still so far to meeting the salary offer amount.

On the positive side, there are still many big-name, impactful players left in the free agent market that the Jays could seriously use that money on to significantly boost the team back into contention for 2025. So as much as missing out on Soto could hurt deep down inside, it should eventually be more comforting to know that at least he is no longer in the American League and that Toronto should now have more financial flexibility going forward. As a result, the Jays can now officially focus on addressing their more relevant offseason needs to bring a winning product back onto the field for the upcoming season.