Juan Soto gets a ring, Yankees get a win — and the rivalry gets a long-term jolt

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NEW YORK — This was before his old bleacher pals turned their backs on him, before five tiers of fans besieged him with boos, before he flied out meekly to end a one-sided defeat. An hour and 20 minutes before first pitch in the Bronx on Friday, Juan Soto, the $765 million Met, got his final gift from the Yankees.

As the Mets took batting practice on the field, Aaron Boone walked alone through the tunnel between the clubhouses at Yankee Stadium. He carried a Yankees shopping bag with boxes for three members of the Mets.

Pitcher Clay Holmes and coach Desi Druschel greeted Boone in the hallway outside the door. They went back to the clubhouse and soon Soto emerged, alone. Boone gave him the box and Soto opened it to admire his 2024 American League Championship ring. They exchanged warm words and hugs. That was it.

Aaron Boone gives Juan Soto the American League Championship ring he won as a member of the Yankees in 2024. (Tyler Kepner / The Athletic)

In a more polite world, Boone might have given Soto, Holmes and Druschel — all Yankees last season — their rings on the field, so the crowd could salute them. But fans tend to sniff at commemorating achievements that fall short of glory. And Soto is not exactly popular on 161st St. anymore.

That is understandable, of course. But remember that the only Yankees World Series team in the last 15 years was the team with Soto. He was one-and-done in navy pinstripes, but made that one season count.

“The Soto homer was probably the greatest moment of my career as a baseball player, my greatest memory,” Yankees starter Clarke Schmidt said recently, recalling Soto’s seismic playoff blast in Cleveland, when teammates poured onto the field as Soto exulted by the dugout on his trot. “We’re all, like, standing on the logo. It was crazy.”

The Soto era was a good chapter in the Yankees’ history book. But it was very thin, it ended in defeat to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the rest of Soto’s story will unfold for the team in Queens. The Mets’ decision last December to lure Soto from the Yankees with a 15-year bonanza will reverberate in the city for years.

“I felt from the minute Steve (Cohen) bought this team, without even having spoken to him at that point, that he was buying them to take dead aim at the Yankees,” said Howie Rose, the Mets’ longtime radio voice and a lifelong fan. “Not to overthrow them, but more to climb up to the same sort of pedestal. I think they’re on their way to doing it. Now, they’re gonna have to win, sooner or later — win at all. And then the dialogue becomes even more evolved and nuanced.”

There’s not much nuance to the figure that swayed Soto to the Mets: $51 million per season, easily a record, with a strong chance to earn more than $800 million in the deal. But the appeal extended beyond that.

Carlos Beltrán, who signed his own nine-figure deal with the Mets two decades before Soto, now works as a special assistant to David Stearns, the Mets’ president of baseball operations. The Mets cannot be on the same plane as the Yankees, he said on the field Friday, gesturing to some of the 27 championship banners ringing the suite level. But that is simply a function of history.

“When it comes to investing, I do believe that we are on the same level,” said Beltrán, who also played for and advised the Yankees. “When it comes to World Series, we’re not that close, but I do feel that Steve Cohen is doing an incredible job, showing every free agent out there that the Mets are going to be serious to put out a good team for the city. In the years that I played, I don’t feel it was like what it is today.

“I think the ownership now has a lot of passion, has a lot of commitment, not only to the players but also the families. Alex (Cohen) has done an incredible job hosting the families. When you become a free agent as a player, you look at which team is going to go out there every single year and try to compete, and (also) which team is going to take care of my family while I’m playing and when I’m not in town. The Mets do an incredible job of that and the Yankees do a good job also. They’re putting this team of support around the players, and that has value.”

Stearns — the bright, clear-eyed executive Cohen brought home from Milwaukee — grew up in Manhattan yearning for a Mets championship. He was just a year old in 1986, the last time they won. He didn’t hate the Yankees, not at first. Then came the lopsided years of the rivalry, which darkened his teen years.

“In ’96, it was sort of like, ‘Yeah, this is good, it’s fine, it’s good for the city,’” Stearns said. “But then, as it kept going, it got really tiresome. By the time you got to ’98, I think any Mets fan at that point was ardently rooting against them. The Mets were good again and Yankee fans were getting just a little bit too confident. Obviously that would continue for some time.”

Yankees fans still exude confidence, and the standings back it up. They are the only American League East team with a winning record, at 26-18 after Friday’s 6-2 victory, and their five-game division lead is the widest gap of any first-place team.

Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt, part of the Yankees’ post-Soto pivot, went 5 for 9 on Friday. Max Fried, who brings an MLB-low 1.11 ERA to Sunday’s start, looks more like a Cy Young contender than a consolation prize.

But on some level, Yankees fans have to concede that the Mets really do know what they’re doing now. They are well-funded by Cohen, well-run by Stearns, well-managed by former Yankees coach Carlos Mendoza. They’re also in first place, at 28-17, and a serious threat to long-term New York supremacy.

“The expectations around the Mets now, it’s not as though, ‘Yeah, they’re having a nice year, let’s see if they can sustain it,’” Rose said. “This team should be good for years to come because of ownership and its commitment and its financial largesse. That’s what’s different, and so that permeates down to the fan base, where I think a Met fan can throw his chest out a little bit and say, ‘Hey, we’re not yielding to you. We’re fighting for the same thing.’

“Plus, when the other guys have won, what, one World Series in the last quarter-century, that’s nothing that anybody should be forced to look up gawkingly at.”

That championship, in 2009, is one more than the Mets have lately, and the Yankees capped their last dynasty with a triumph over the Mets in 2000. The past will always favor the franchise of Ruth, Mantle and Jeter.

The future, though? That will be shaped, largely, by Soto. The fans who cheered him last season may always feel betrayed. But Soto should be proud of the ring Boone gave him on Friday — and deep down, in the privacy of the brotherhood, both sides are better for the fling.

“I’m just happy to see those guys and see them doing well,” Soto said. “They have a lot of respect for me, and I have a lot of respect for them.”

(Top photo of Aaron Boone and Juan Soto before Friday’s Yankees-Mets game: Michael Urakami / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

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