The Yankees’ plan to lure Juan Soto back to The Bronx will include Aaron Boone.
The manager, whose option was picked up last week, will be a part of the contingent that descends upon Southern California next week for a meeting with Soto and agent Scott Boras.
“I want him in pinstripes moving forward,” Boone said during a Zoom call Monday. “But you also know there’s going to be a lot of people competing for that, and who knows where it ends up. All I know is that we’ll try and put our best foot forward with it and hope that Juan’s back.”
Hal Steinbrenner will lead a Yankees cohort that Boone believed would be “fairly small.” The presence of the club’s owner reflects the gravity of the negotiations for a 26-year-old slugger who could set or approach records on the open market.
The Mets’ Steve Cohen — and surely other owners across the league — is expected to meet with Soto and Boras this week, the first tangible signs of a bidding war that could come down to the New York billionaires.
Boone saw Soto over 176 games between the regular season and postseason. He knows the player and he knows the person. He is hoping that familiarity will come in handy in making his pitch.
“Let the meeting go where it needs to go,” Boone said of his strategy. “Maybe he’ll have questions now that he is a free agent or want to address certain things, but I’m just going to go in there and be myself and confident in my relationship with Juan and the ability to have honest conversation with him and certainly, hopefully cement the point of how valuable and how much we think of him, not only as a player, but as a person.
“I got to live that with him this year. And so that would be my sales pitch: Of course [convey] how much we want him, but let the meeting go where it goes.”
Consistently, Boone has praised the person as much as the performer.
Soto’s excellence (.989 OPS with 41 home runs in 157 games plus an excellent postseason) helped bring the Yankees three wins away from a World Series title, but the clubhouse presence was a positive, too. Boone called getting to know Soto “a pleasure.”
Because of his brilliance and his age, Soto is the best free agent on the market and one of the best ever to hit the market. The Yankees can devise Plan Bs, but just about any would be seen externally as a disappointment.
“Whatever happens,” Boone said, “I’m confident that the Steinbrenner family and the front office are going to do everything possible to put us in a position to have another strong team — another team that has a chance to compete for a championship. They’ve done that long before I got here, and I know that’ll continue to be the case.
“Hopefully it’s with Juan, but we’ll see how it all plays out.”
