MLB insider Ken Rosenthal said he had trouble sleeping after covering Juan Soto's historic contract with the New York Mets. Photo Credit: Fair Territory podcast Photo Credit: Fair Territory podcast

Ken Rosenthal has covered countless huge MLB stories during his career. Yet he’s literally never covered a story like the one involving Juan Soto and the New York Mets.

No one has, for that matter. The Mets and Soto agreed on Dec. 8 to a record-breaking 15-year, $765 million contract. The Mets signing Soto was hardly a surprise, but the amount stunned baseball insiders, with some even ridiculing the contract as a huge overpay.

On his Fair Territory podcast Monday, Rosenthal described the flurry of work he did after the Soto story broke. Rosenthal said he’d already mostly completed two stories about Soto, but the massive contract figure left him scrambling to add context.

“It was quite an interesting night, to say the least,” Rosenthal said. “And it was a moment, that as a journalist, you could prepare for. …

“I had a column ready, and it was a column that I had written maybe a week or two before in anticipation of the signing, and it was a column going back to Soto’s rejection of the 15-year, $440 million offer by the Washington Nationals in 2022. There’s the headline, ‘In landmark deal with the Mets, Juan Soto gets what he’s wanted all along,’ and if you remember going back to that rejection of the Nationals deal, that deal at that time would have been the biggest deal in baseball history.”

Rosenthal added the numbers and context.

“Even now, the numbers blow me away,” he said.

Rosenthal rushed to finish a story for The Athletic on how the Soto deal came together. That story, along with the aforementioned column, was published Sunday night after Jon Heyman of The New York Post and MLB Network broke the Soto news.

Rosenthal then burned the midnight oil finishing a column for The Athletic on how Soto’s lengthy contract would hold up as he aged.

A flurry of activity for Rosenthal, to be sure, and other MLB reporters were going through the same grind that night.

“There is no clock, you just keep going,” Rosenthal said.

Is it any wonder the veteran MLB reporter could not sleep that night?

“[It] was so exciting, so electric, that that night, I had trouble sleeping,” Rosenthal said. “I had trouble kind of putting my head around what had just happened …”

Rosenthal recalled the buzz surrounding the deal the next day.

“Not only is it of course a record number, $765 million, a record AAV,” he said. “There’s no deferrals, the opt-out thing I mentioned, the $75 million signing bonus. In the end, I had an agent the next day ask me, ‘Exactly what did [Mets owner] Steve Cohen say ‘No’ to with Scott Boras?’ (Soto’s agent), and I don’t have an answer for that.”

[Barrett Sports Media]

About Arthur Weinstein

Arthur spends his free time traveling around the U.S. to sporting events, state and national parks, and in search of great restaurants off the beaten path.