It’s not too early for baseball people to expect a Yankees, Mets competition for Juan Soto

TAMPA -- Juan Soto arrived at George M. Steinbrenner Field on Sunday, reporting for duty as the shiny new star for a New York team.

Will we be uttering the same sentence 12 months from now, but with a Port St. Lucie dateline, and subbing in Clover Park for GMS?

Look, it’s too early to report anything concrete on this or get any answers. But the view from here is there really isn’t any reason why the Mets wouldn’t make a massive push for Soto in free agency after this season. The Mets aren’t talking about it, at least to people like me, but the industry certainly expects it.

“I bet he goes for both,” one league executive who knows Mets owner Steve Cohen, but does not work for the team, said of Soto and free agent-to-be Pete Alonso.

If the Mets do land Soto, it might be the biggest icon swap in New York baseball since Yogi Berra became a player, coach and manager in Queens. And this would far exceed the impact of that long-ago borough change because Soto will be a 26-year-old future Hall of Famer in his prime when next season begins.

Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was supposed to represent the first Steve Cohen/Hal Steinbrenner free-agent competition, but that battle failed to fully launch. Despite the Mets’ best efforts, they knew by November that Yamamoto was drawn more to the Yankees and Dodgers, and that they were longshot underdogs.

Ultimately, Yamamoto went for the marketability of a pairing with Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers’ attempt at a superteam. That left Steinbrenner and Cohen on the outside looking in at the end of the offseason’s biggest non-Ohtani storyline.

This time, Soto will have already spent a year playing for the Yankees. Whether or not that is an advantage will depend on how the season goes -- a miserable grind would leave a different taste than a World Series run, and of course either is possible.

The Mets, after a winter in which Cohen and new president of baseball operations David Stearns agreed on the wisdom of a modest approach to free agency, will have plenty of money and ambition to burn next winter.

Max Scherzer and probably Justin Verlander (he has a vesting option and he is currently injured) coming off the books after this season, the Mets’ current payroll obligation for 2025 is $155.1 million, according to Cots Contracts. They signed just one player this winter, pitcher Sean Manaea, to a multi-year deal.

Stearns and Cohen would prefer to avoid paying the appropriately named “Steve Cohen” luxury tax every season, which leads to a penalty of 110 percent on every dollar. And the 2025 team will need serious rotation help, meaning that the Mets need to consider expensive free agents like Walker Buehler and Max Fried.

Then there is the Alonso situation, which will be very much in flux heading into the offseason. The Mets will try to bring Alonso back, but will surely try to be rational about the price tag. As Jon Heyman wrote in the New York Post on Saturday, “Alonso could stay in Queens. I just wouldn’t count on it.” That sounds right to me.

Could the Yankees pursue Alonso as Anthony Rizzo’s replacement? It’s possible, but the team’s player profile for first baseman emphasizes more athletic defenders like Rizzo and Mark Teixeira. It is worth noting that they are occasionally willing to deviate from that for a star with other qualities, like Jason Giambi. In a perfect world for the Yankees, they’d probably want a lefty hitter at first.

These are two big stars with a million variables, and a season in New York left to play. But it’s not hard to imagine either -- and especially Soto -- becoming an object of desire for both teams in town when free agency begins in less than nine months.