Juan Soto might be a little full of himself.
Let’s just start there.
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He’s the highest-paid athlete in the history of sports.
The new face of the New York Mets is also on his fourth team in four seasons, has never won an MVP despite being paid $765 million to play baseball, and currently can’t be bothered to hustle for 90 feet.
Ninety feet: That’s the distance between home plate and first base on a Major League Baseball field.
That’s also the direct line that Soto avoided on Monday night, while selfishly admiring a hit that he immediately assumed was a certain home run.
Fenway Park has been around since 1912.
The famous home of the internationally known Boston Red Sox is most famous for its 37-foot and 2-inch Green Monster, so it’s not like Soto and the Mets suddenly discovered a massive wall had been erected in left field in between the fifth and sixth innings.
Yet there Soto was, refusing to run from home to first, even though that simple form of athleticism is taught in little leagues across the globe.
“I think I’ve been hustling pretty hard,” said Soto, after he went 1-for-4 during the Mets’ 3-1 defeat.
“If you see it today, you could tell.”
The internet, social media and human eyes collectively disagreed.
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“This is a perfect example of the whole ‘watch what I just did’ professional athlete,” one fan tweeted. “Complete ego case!”
“Juan Soto makes too much money to be doing that,” a second fan posted.
“You’ve got to get out of the box,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “So, yeah, we’ll discuss that.”
The biggest problem isn’t Soto admiring a long leadoff single off the Monster in a tight two-run game, during a season when the Mets lead MLB with a staggering $323m team payroll.
Anyone can see that Soto was basically trying to snap an absurd selfie in midtown Manhattan at 5 p.m., and he was reminded that real life waits for no one on the hard streets of New York.
The real problem is Soto’s $765m ego, which somehow convinced him that he did exactly the right thing on Monday as a team leader, face of the franchise, and the highest-paid athlete on the planet.
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He also ‘celebrated’ on first base after refusing to hustle, making his look-at-me error appear even worse.
Shohei Ohtani is being paid $700m to hit .312 with a league-leading 17 home runs and 1.078 OPS for the defending World Series-champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
Soto is batting .246 with eight homers and an .815 OPS, which means that he’s a border-line 2025 All-Star Game selection 47 games after alienating half of the baseball fans in New York.
There are obviously bigger problems in the world.
Soto sprinting to first base won’t end wars or fix broken systems.
But he wanted $765 million and he received it.
He burned the Yankees after losing to Ohtani’s Dodgers in the World Series, and intentionally chose the pinstripes’ cross-town rival as his latest team.
Soto thought he was too good to hustle for 90 feet, which is another reminder that no athlete is worth $765m guaranteed — especially someone hitting .246 for the Mets.
