After weeks of speculation about where he would land, sought-after baseball outfielder Juan Soto signed with the New York Mets for 15 years and $765 million on Wednesday. It's the longest and richest contract in professional sports history. And while the Mets' rivals are likely disappointed they did not land him, there's no guarantee Soto will be worth the historic investment.

Soto, who played the 2024 season with the New York Yankees, debuted with the Washington Nationals at age 19, significantly earlier than most players reach the majors. He will be 26 for the 2025 season, making him the rare superstar whose best years might still be to come.

What did the commentators say?
Despite the astronomical value of Soto's deal, the reaction to the Mets' gamble has been mostly positive. "If you made me pick one hitter in baseball to have on my team until he retired and told me money were no object, I'd pick Soto," said Ben Clemens at Fangraphs. While the terms "blew away even veteran baseball executives," Soto is the "surest investment in baseball," said Sports Illustrated. Others noted the significance of the Mets swiping a player out from under the nose of the Yankees, their storied crosstown rivals. 

Not everyone was sold. "It won't necessarily be easy for Soto to perform to the level of his salary," said The Athletic, citing the example of Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout. The Angels signed Trout to a 12-year, $430 million extension in 2019, and he has been injured frequently, playing in just 29 games in 2024. 

What's next?
Calculating a baseball player's value is more of an art than a science. Soto is projected to accumulate 65.8 WAR — wins above replacement, the metric that teams use to determine an individual player's contributions — over the life of his contract, according to Fangraphs, a site that tracks MLB statistics. Fangraphs estimates Soto's WAR at a value of $719 million. 

The Mets fell just short of reaching the World Series last year. They have high hopes Soto will carry them to glory in 2025.

Before President-elect Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, to lead the National Institutes of Health, Bhattacharya rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. The doctor opposed lockdowns and, later, vaccine and mask mandates.

An elite doctor takes on the Covid consensus
In 2020, Bhattacharya became one of the leaders of a movement pushing back against stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the Covid-19 pandemic. In a widely shared March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed that he co-authored with Eran Bendavid, he speculated that no more than 20,000 to 40,000 people would die of the virus in the U.S. A policy of indefinite lockdowns "may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community, and individual mental and physical health," they said. In terms of the "claim-staking" article's accuracy, for "every death his estimate implied, there were, in the end, more than 35," said David Wallace-Wells at The New York Times.

Bhattacharya was also one of the three initial co-authors of the "Great Barrington Declaration," an October 2020 anti-lockdown open letter that was eventually signed by thousands of public health leaders and scientists. Critics charged that the Great Barrington Declaration's "approach would endanger Americans who have underlying conditions" and could result in perhaps a half-million deaths," said Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at The New York Times. 

Mixed reactions
Reactions to Bhattacharya's nomination have been mixed, breaking down largely along familiar Covid battle lines. Bhattacharya is a "serious scientist with a track record of success," said Justin Perry at The Dispatch, praising his courage in challenging the public health consensus during the pandemic. His appointment will be a "major victory for science and academic freedom," said John Tierney at City Journal.

Bhattacharya is an "A-tier Covid minimizer" whose appointment is "very worrying in the context of what the NIH does," said Beatrice Adler-Bolton on the Death Panel podcast. His appointment is a "nod not only toward Covid and lockdown skeptics but also to those who might place economic concerns over public health," said Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic.