Face It: He's Gone.

 

I keep thinking these days of the last thing that Hank Schrader said to Walter White in Breaking Bad: 

 

“You’re the smartest guy I know, but you’re too dumb to see he made up his mind ten minutes ago.”

 

Hal Steinbrenner made up his mind about Juan Soto ten months ago, or even longer, probably before we ever sent five players off to San Diego for him on December 7, 2023, a date which will live in Yankee infamy. 

What we got to see for his efforts was Soto sitting alone in the dugout at the end, looking as if he could smell the aroma of departed greatness somewhere around him, from those times when the New York Yankees grabbed up generational players and held on to them for dear life. 

 

But that was many years ago, in a stadium across the street, and besides the wench is dead.

 

It has been asserted by many that Soto’s satanic agent, Scott Boras, would have insisted he test the free-agent market this winter, no matter what offer the Yanks might have made. But of course there were other ways for the Bombers to signal their interest, at least during the time when they held the exclusive rights to negotiate with Soto. (Something that would seem to be the main point of acquiring him at the cost of so many pitchers.)

One might have been a pre-emptive nuclear strike of a contract, one that would have sent even Scott Boras scuttling for his gold-plated, agent's fallout shelter. But apart from that, Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner might have taken Soto out on the town. They might have talked constantly of how they wanted him to stay, how they saw him following in the tradition of the greatest Yankees superstars. How invaluable he was to the team, how they would top any offer.

 

“He wooed me like a woman,” or words to that effect, was what Reggie Jackson said about George Steinbrenner’s whirlwind courtship of the slugger, back in November of 1976. 

 

George’s heir could easily have done the same. But there has not been a peep out of him or Cashman all year long, and there won’t be one now. Instead, we all know that Hal & Pal are preoccupied in coming up with some strategy not for signing Soto—or any big-contract replacement—but for choreographing their Dance of Failure.

 

They will come in second in the Soto bidding—or really third, and say they’re second—then try to appease us by hauling in some much older, already declining player, like Alex Bregman or Pete Alonso.

 

They’ll do this not because it’s a real plan—the Yankees under Hal & Pal don’t actually make plans, they just bob and weave, and clutch their analytics. They are a small-market team in a big city, but smart as they are at maximizing their money—if Juan Soto signs with the Mets—they are going to be dead in the water.