#MLBVideos: Juan Soto has been better than you think for the Mets | MLB Deep Dive

Juan Soto has been better than you think for the Mets | MLB Deep Dive

When compared to what he did for the Yankees last year, this has been considered a quote down season for Juan Sodto. A down season in which he’s on pace to reach 40 homers, 30 stolen bases, 120 runs scored, and 100 RBI while leading the majors in walks. Even Hall of Famers would dream of having such a down season. As a matter of fact, if Sodto continues his current pace and does indeed finish with 40 homers and 30 steals while scoring and driving in more than 100 runs and drawing 100 walks, he would be the first player this century and only the third all time to achieve those combined feats in a single season, joining Barry Bonds in 1996 and 97 and Jeff Bagwell in 1997 and 1999. Let’s take a closer look at how this incredible generational hitter has turned a queasy start in Queens into just another step in his potential journey to Coopertown. Now, before we talk about 2025, let’s talk about 2018 because that’s the year Sodto debuted with the Nationals at age 19, becoming the youngest player in MLB at that time and the first player to appear in the big leagues after being born in 1998. Sodto was seen as special from the start and he lived up to the hype. Here’s a fun fact. Juan Sodto actually belted his first major league home run before he even debuted. Well, sort of. Sodto debuted on May 20th, 2018, and he homered for the first time the next day. However, about a month later, the Nationals resumed a suspended game against the Yankees from May 15th. The game picked up with Sodto in the lineup, technically as a pinch hitter. And when he connected on a sixth inning blast, it was the sixth time he had gone deep since his debut, but the box score will forever be registered as May 15th, 5 days before his debut. So Sodto bent the space-time continuum, and he would go on to bend our brain in other ways. In his first seven MLB seasons with the Nationals Padres’s and Yankees, Sodto hit 201 home runs and drew 769 walks. How many other players had reached 200 homers and 700 walks prior to their age 26 season? Try zero. Sodto was truly one of a kind. That’s why the Mets backed up the Brinks truck for him last winter. Sodto’s 15-year, $765 million contract is the largest in the history of professional sports. As recently as 2011, you could buy an entire MLB franchise for less than what the Mets committed to Soda. When you’ve put up numbers that no one has ever seen before, both on the back of your baseball card and in your bank account, you’re going to attract scrutiny. So it was with Sodto. He notched a hit in his Mets debut on March 27th, hit a home run the following day, doubled in the third game, and singled, walked, and scored a run in the fourth. In four March games, he had a 308 average and an OPS over 1100. Everything appeared to be right in line. Then came April and things started to get a little weird. Sodto hit 232 in the season’s first full month. And bucking a career trend, he struck out exactly as many times as he walked, 18. Things didn’t get any better in May when Sodto hit 219 and struck out 22 times against 20 walks. If you looked under the hood at the end of May, you would find reason to be hopeful that Sodto’s season opening slump was just a phase. You didn’t have to be a cracked glasseswearing nerd to figure this out. All you had to do was call up Sodto’s baseball savant page to see that his hard hit percentage, chase rate, barrel rate, and other underlying metrics were right in line with his career norms. But games aren’t one with underlying metrics. They’re one with runs, and Sodto wasn’t creating enough of them to satiate the growing chorus of critics, particularly in a market as brutal as the Big Apple. They wondered why he wasn’t smiling, why he wasn’t sodto shuffling, and mostly why he wasn’t producing. Can we officially call Juan Sodto Juan Soso? When I watch him, I I watch a guy who’s trying to act what he thinks the world wants him to be. And Sodto didn’t make it any easier on himself with some incidents in which he wasn’t hustling out of the box, including notably when he hit a ball high off Fenway Park’s Green Monster and was held to a single on May 19th. Sodto exacerbated the hustle narrative by hitting the ball on the ground more frequently than we were accustomed to seeing. Still, as unusually low as the batting average might have been, there was still nothing about Sodto’s profile that screamed that he had gotten old overnight. Sure enough, over the course of the next couple months, those hard-hit balls started to fall, and the underlying metrics became simply the metrics. In 50 games across June and July, Sodto reached base a more sotlike 41.3% of the time while belting 16 homers. It was too late for him to be named an all-star, but his overall season numbers had crept back into the above average realm. And then in August, the real superstar Sodto showed up. It’s out of here. Number 30 for Juan Sodto in all his glory. Out of hair. A tying home run by Sodto. He is just phenomenal. The last month Sodto has looked like what he is the best hitter in the game. [Applause] 28 games, 28 hits, 10 homers, 11 steals, 22 RBI, a 1.009 OPS. This was the stood the Mets had signed up for. If there’s a knock on Sodto’s season at this point, it’s that much of his power production has come with no one on base. As of this recording, he’s gone deep 36 times this year, and only 11 of those blasts have come with men on. More like Juan Solo, am I right? Sodto’s 1.027 027 OPS through 328 plate appearances with nobody aboard was 251 points higher than his 776 OPS in 277 played appearances with men on base in that same period of time. But that wasn’t a problem for Sodto on Labor Day in Detroit when he batted with the bases loaded in the fourth inning with the Mets trailing 3 to2. Perez going back to the wall gone. Grand slam Juan Sodto his first as a New York Met comes in a massive spot. Later that same game with a score noted at six. Sodto batted with two aboard. Pulled over the bag. That’s a fair ball going down the line and the Mets will retake the lead. A six RBI day for Juan. Sodto and the Mets are back in front eight to six. It’s kind of funny really. If your memory is long enough to remember what was being said in May, you could only look at Sodto’s season stats after that 6 RBI outburst at the start of September and laugh because there he was with a 159 adjusted OPS plus that was only one point off his career norm. In other words, given the benefit of something more closely resembling a full season and forgetting about all that small sample noise of the first two months, Juan Sodto’s 2025 stat line is going to look about what you’d expect to see from Juan Sto. Who would have thought it? Again, for the year, Sodto has definitely produced better with the bases empty than with the bases occupied. But let’s be careful not to run away with that narrative. After all, Sodto’s so-called clutch stats, his OPS plus with two outs and runners in scoring position, with the game late and close or tied or with the Mets within one or two runs of their opponent are all well above the league average of 100. Sodto entered the week with the highest offensive war in the National League, according to Baseball Reference. And though his doubles tally is one of the lowest of his career, he’s turning more singles into doubles than ever before. He had never stolen more than 12 bases in a season prior to 2025, but this year he’s closing in on 30 stolen bases. This is all a long- winded way of saying that 162 game seasons often require patience, and Sodto wasn’t lying to us in those first seven MLB seasons when he was doing historic stuff at the plate. Turns out this Juan Sodto guy is an elite hitter after all, even in a quote unquote down season.

Juan Soto obviously got a lot of attention after his HUGE deal with the Mets in the offseason. And expectations came with that. A slow start for him and some other full season metrics might lead you to believe he hasn’t lived up to the hype, but he has lived up to the billing more than you realized in 2025.

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