If you only tuned into the biggest headlines about him, you might be convinced that Juan Soto’s first quarter of a season with the New York Mets has been a complete flop.
Last December, the Mets guaranteed Soto $765m on a 15-year contract, the most lucrative deal in professional sports history. In the early going of his time with the Mets, Soto has been the subject of a handful of viral stories, ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. None of them have been positive. Last Sunday, Soto did not hustle out of the box on a ground ball up the middle, and his casual trot to first base cost him a chance at an infield hit, in the eighth inning of a tied game against the crosstown rival Yankees. The very next night, Soto jogged out of the box on a fly ball at Fenway Park that he thought was a home run. It was not, and another news cycle about Soto’s effort followed. “I think I’ve been hustling pretty hard,” he told reporters.
Elsewhere, rumors flew around the internet last week that Soto had an arrangement with the Mets to fly to road games on a private plane, separate from his teammates. That was made up; Soto flies with his teammates, just like every other player in the league. Michael Kay, a broadcaster for the Yankees – who Soto ditched for the Mets in free agency after one year – added fuel to the fire on his radio show. Kay, citing conversations with “people on the Mets side” of the rivalry (Grimace?), said that Soto had been “very, very glum around the clubhouse” in Queens. He had wanted to remain a Yankee, Kay said, before family pushed back and urged him to sign with the Mets. (Nobody has substantiated any of Kay’s reporting.)
Soto’s results in the batter’s box have induced a bit of anxiety, too. In mid-April, Soto was so downtrodden that Mets fans greeted him for a run-of-the-mill at-bat with a standing ovation, hoping their support would lift him up. How bad had Soto been to that point? Well, his adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS+) was 118, meaning he was “only” 18% better than the league average hitter to date. In Soto’s career up to this year, his adjusted OPS was 60% better than average.
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For Soto, those few weeks of being a well above-average hitter rather than a great one must have been like torture. Even now, Soto’s OPS+ of 134 through Tuesday’s game has not quieted much of the anxiety around him. Soto’s first 49 games haven’t felt like a fairytale, even as the Mets have raced to one of the best records in baseball (their form, and batting, have slumped in the last week). But perhaps anyone feeling tense about Soto should take a wider lens: Soto’s first seven weeks with the Mets have been good, not great, but he had dozens of less productive spans over his first seven big league seasons. 2025 hasn’t even been his slowest start by OPS; that was 2022, when Soto posted a .795 OPS (compared to this year’s .815) over the season’s first 48 games.
And what did Soto do that year? Well, what he does every year: He made the National League All-Star team and won a Silver Slugger in the outfield, putting up a typically elite year split between the Washington Nationals and San Diego Padres. In other words, the solution to any anxieties about Soto’s opening stint as a Met is simple: Everyone should just calm down for a few months. As the club’s owner, Steve Cohen, posted this week on X: “Welcome to the ups and downs of a baseball season.”
Soto has damned himself to a lifetime of enormous expectations, and he has 765m reasons to suck it up and deal with it. But Soto has been so consistently good for so long – and is still so young – that he is graded on an outrageous curve. Soto posted at least an OPS+ of 140 in each of his first seven big league seasons, something that only Albert Pujols and Ted Williams have done while qualifying for the batting title in each of those years. (Soto missed qualification by a few at-bats as a teenager in 2018.)
It isn’t just that Soto delivers year in and year out, but that his 26-year-old body and his approach to hitting make it seem so implausible that he would ever struggle. Soto has never played fewer than 150 games in a full major league season, save for his rookie year (when he was a midseason callup) and the shortened 2020 campaign. Soto has a slugger’s frame but not such a big one that he looks like he is likely to break down anytime soon. And so little of his success at the plate owes to luck or variance. Soto may have the keenest eye for pitches of any hitter who has ever lived. Plate discipline isn’t just about letting unfavorable pitches go, but about destroying meaty ones, and Soto has mastered both of those skills.
And, indeed, a look under the hood suggests that Soto will soon revert back to his normal, elite self, instead of being the merely very good hitter he has been so far as a Met. Soto’s batted-ball statistics, tracked in Statcast, look a lot like they do every year: He’s hitting the ball hard, laying off balls better than practically anyone else, and holding a top-five walk-to-strikeout ratio in Major League Baseball.
Soto is also playing in New York, an atmosphere for athletes only a little less hostile than the surface of Venus. The rumors and behindbacks that have circulated around him are also part of playing in the city, where the slightest dip in form will be endlessly debated in the press. That wasn’t really a problem when Soto was with the Yankees and everything was going well. But now he is struggling a little, all while walking away from a team who are not used to being jilted, and signing a contract worth nearly $1bn. It would be understandable if he’s feeling the pressure a little, all while adjusting to a new clubhouse and teammates.
Does that mean any concern about Soto is fantastical? Certainly not. He has looked uncharacteristically unsure of himself at times at the plate this season – on Wednesday against the Red Sox he struck out twice in his first two bats without offering a swing, his excellent eye seeming to desert him.
While he’s nowhere near there yet, even the greatest hitters will eventually decline, and Soto won’t be an exception. His defense in right field has drawn mixed reviews from various metrics during his career. This year, numbers place Soto somewhere between “very bad” and a bit below average in the field. He’s dead last among right fielders in Outs Above Average and has posted a Defensive Runs Saved total of negative-1. Yankees fans surely enjoyed Soto failing to get to a sinking fly ball off Aaron Judge’s bat last weekend. It’s possible that as Soto ages further into his contract, his defense will become a more substantial liability and cut into his value.
That’s not likely to be a major 2025 problem, however, and it speaks to Soto’s excellence that a solid start by almost anyone else’s standards has prompted doubts. The Mets are just a shade behind the Philadelphia Phillies in the NL East, and their early success has come despite a handful of difficulties – an injured starting rotation, a slow start for now-rounding-into-form closer Edwin Díaz, and Soto not yet operating to his usual standard. Soto is only 2% of the way into his 15-year contract. It’s just a matter of time until he shows why the Mets invested their future in him.
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