Last year, when Anaheim Angels star Shohei Ohtani was a free agent, there was a question throughout the league about which team he would go on and how much money they would pay him. The combination of Ohtani’s great pitching and MVP-caliber hitting was predicted to require top dollar from teams recruiting him, and the result of this shook the league. The Los Angeles Dodgers agreed to give Ohtani a ten-year 700 million dollar deal. This deal was miles past any previous contract that any MLB team had offered a player and was seen as generational, one that would take years and another once-in-a-lifetime player to surpass. Just a year after, the Mets signed Juan Soto for 765 million.

Shohei Ohtani is a once-in-a-lifetime player. He can not only hit over .300 and pick up multiple 40-home-run seasons but is also incredibly skilled at pitching. In 2023, Ohtani pitched a 10-5 record and a 3.14 Earned Run Average (ERA). His 2022 season was even better, posting a 2.33 ERA and placing fourth in the Cy Young Award. All while having to bat the same game. However, much of the praise for the Ohtani contract wasn’t due to his skill but what his skill would bring. Shohei Ohtani is from Japan, and since he gained many fans from his home country, the Dodgers saw Japan as an untapped market that they could advertise through Shohei Ohtani. So, while the decision to break the contract record by 250 million dollars was somewhat due to what Ohtani would bring to the team, the biggest reason for this number was because the signing was an investment in the Japanese baseball market. The experiment seemed to work. While the Dodgers, with Ohtani, would go on to win the World Series, the signing brought viewership up in Japan, as the 2024 postseason would break numerous viewership records.

Juan Soto is a great player in his own right. Soto has made the all-star team each of the past 4 years, won the batting title in 2020, and placed as high as 2nd place in MVP voting before, and he did this all before turning 26. Juan Soto is by all means a superstar, and while he may not have as impressive a resume as Shohei Ohtani, he is deserving of a massive contract. However, the biggest difference between the two contracts is that the signing of Juan Soto isn’t an investment different from the average contract of a superstar player. There is no untapped market that the Mets are trying to appeal to. Nothing separates the signing of Juan Soto from the previous signings of Mike Trout, Aaron Judge, or Mookie Betts, which were all at least 300 million dollars less. The Shohei Ohtani contract shook up the sports world, but most understood that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sign a generational player and expand the Dodger’s market. However, now the Juan Soto signing shows that payments to superstars of that amount might not be as rare as people thought, and this is problematic for the teams without New York or LA money.

A significant difference between the MLB and leagues like the NFL is how the games are broadcast. While NFL games are played on national networks, baseball games are broadcasted on local networks instead because of their high volume of games. The issue lies with local networks in higher-population cities having more viewers than lower-population cities. This results in teams in populous cities like the Mets and Dodgers getting much more revenue than teams like the Athletics, Pirates, and Orioles. This creates an imbalance of high-market and low-market teams and allocates higher-market teams more money to spend on payroll, and it has only gotten worse over time. Even before Ohtani’s contract, the high-market to low-market team gap was a big issue, but the sudden jump in the max dollar for contracts could widen the ever-increasing financial gap. The Dodgers paying 700 million was a big step, but the Mets paying 756 million dollars for Juan Soto showed that these contracts could become a normality in the league, and this is disastrous for a low-market team with a star player. The contract of Juan Soto will undoubtedly convince other star players to barter for similar contracts. Therefore, when players like Paul Skenes, Bobby Witt Jr., or Mason Miller's contracts expire, there might only be a few teams with enough money to sign them.

This is extremely problematic in a league that’s already so imbalanced. The highest payroll in the MLB is double the 15th and triple the 26th highest, resulting in an extreme imbalance in pay. Obviously, the financial gap will widen, and while people have pushed for a salary cap and floor to lessen the imbalance, there isn’t a uniform idea on how to enforce them. The MLB is a unique league. It can’t follow the steps that worked for other leagues, but it’s evident that if no steps are taken to prevent the top contract amount from rising, the MLB may soon have only a few teams fighting for the World Series.