Juan Soto’s "got now" -- to borrow Shohei Ohtani’s commercial slogan for New Balance. Does he ever. A year ago, it was Ohtani, maybe you heard, who broke the bank as a free agent, signing a $700 million contract with the Dodgers -- real money no matter how much of it is being deferred.

Now it’s Soto’s turn at-bat, entering the market having just turned 26 and entering the market at around the same age that Alex Rodriguez, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado were when they became free agents. Ohtani turned 30 in his first year with the Dodgers after he got paid as big as he did. Aaron Judge, who beat out Ohtani to be the home run king of baseball again this year, played his age-31 season after he got paid by the Yankees.

• Latest Juan Soto rumors

Soto signed his first professional contract, with the Nationals, for $1.5 million as a 16-year old. “More money than I’d ever given somebody that young in my life,” Nationals boss Mike Rizzo told me once. That was a decade ago. Now Soto is set up to make a lot more, and as crazy as it sounds, he might even be set up to get a contract whose total money rivals Ohtani’s. Or even surpasses it.

If timing is everything in sports, this is Soto’s time, coming off the best statistical season of his career with the Yankees hitting in front of Judge, on his way to making the World Series for the second time in his career: 41 home runs, 109 RBIs, 129 walks, 128 runs and a stat line, all the way across, that was up in lights for the Yankees from Opening Day on.

He was a rookie with the Nationals when Harper, another wonder child of baseball, was playing his last season in Washington. It will be five years ago next spring when I was sitting with Rizzo -- a great baseball man who tried to keep both Harper and Soto in Washington but could not in the end -- in his office at Cacti Park of The Palm Beaches and said this about Soto, the kid the Nationals used to call the “Latin Mamba”:

“I honestly believe this young man has the chance to be the face of Major League Baseball someday."

Now, because this is his free-agent moment, Soto is all of that, with the Yankees willing to pay big to keep No. 22 at No. 2 in their batting order and Steve Cohen of the Mets reportedly wanting to make his own pitch -- thus setting up a different and unprecedented kind of Subway Series, not with the World Series on the line, but one gifted 26-year-old player. The Yankees just made it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years, and they wouldn’t have gotten there without Soto. The Mets made it to the National League Championship Series, where they played the Dodgers tougher than the Yankees just did. Wait: Did I just mention that timing is everything.

A-Rod was still just 25, and a shortstop, when he left the Mariners, with numbers already in the books that you had to see to believe at the time. Here are just his home run/RBI numbers his last three seasons in Seattle: 42-124, 42-111, 41-132. Scott Boras was his agent then the same as he is Soto’s agent now. A-Rod went with the Rangers for 10 years and $252 million. And why was it $252 million? Three years earlier, Kevin Garnett had signed what was the biggest long-term contract in American sports, one whose total value was $126 million, which Rodriguez doubled. It wasn’t just one of those crazy coincidences you get in life sometimes.

Rodriguez had played six full seasons in Seattle by then. Harper had played seven seasons in Washington when he left them for the Phillies as a free agent, and he had already won an MVP Award, winning it right after turning 23 in October 2015 and having just hit 42 homers. Machado? He was still 26 when he signed with the Padres, having split the previous season with the Orioles and the Dodgers. In his last four seasons before free agency, he hit 35 homers, then 37, then 33 and then 37 again.

Now it is the free-agent season of Soto, four years younger than Ohtani was when he left the Angels for the Dodgers and five years younger than Judge was when he made his score with the Yankees after hitting 62 homers in 2022. Judge will almost certainly win another MVP Award this season. So will Ohtani. But Soto, in what was his first season in New York City but might not be his last, was right there behind him and ended up having a better both season than both of them.

“[Soto] is in an age category that separates him,” Boras said the other day.

It separates him as a free agent the way it did Alex Rodriguez when he was in the same age category, and Bryce Harper did much later, and so did Manny Machado. Now it’s Soto’s moment. He’s got his chance to be the face of baseball. Got now.