Soto’s skill at the plate giving Astro’s pitchers nightmares
Nationals outfielder takes rightful place among baseball’s greatest young sluggers
HOUSTON On Friday, Juan Soto will be able to legally buy a drink. At this rate, all of Washington will line up to purchase one for him.
Nationals fans, on the morning after the town’s first World Series game — and victory! — in 86 years can be excused for wanting to puff out their chests.
The strategic take-away from Tuesday night’s 5-4 victory for the Nationals over the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the World Series is that the 20-year-old Soto can’t be pitched to, and that’s a series-altering notion.
The first four at-bats of Soto’s World Series career produced three hits, including an opposite-field homer off previously unhittable Gerrit Cole that has established permanent residence on the railroad tracks that sit atop the Crawford Boxes in left field at Minute Maid Park.
Six-day layoff, a problem for the Nats’ hitters? Soto’s 3-for-4, three-rbi day led an unprecedented roasting of Cole, who allowed one run in 222/3 innings over three previous starts this October — and five in seven innings against the Soto-led Nats.
The World Series. Twenty-first birthday still a few days off. Gerrit Cole on the mound. The approach?
“I forget about everybody around,” Soto said. “It’s just you and me.”
For Washington, that’s a watered-down version of Soto’s remarkably advanced approach, which we’ll get to. For Houston, he’s the most significant problem in navigating the rest of this series, because if Cole can’t get through Soto, who can?
“He’s a dog that plays checkers,” said Johnny Dipuglia, the Nationals’ vice president of international operations.
A what?
“You don’t see dogs playing checkers,” Dipuglia said.
No, you don’t. And you don’t see Juan Sotos.
So what, exactly, do we have here? Statistically, the hitters through age 20 who most resemble Soto, according to baseball-reference.com, are the following: Tony Conigliaro, Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout and Ken Griffey Jr.
Blink your eyes clear, read those names again, and smile about the future. General manager Mike Rizzo pointed out he has brought four 19-year-olds to the big leagues over his career in Arizona and Washington — Justin Upton, Harper, Soto and Victor Robles.
“You guys rank them,” Rizzo said. “He’s up there.”
What Soto has is a rare combination in a 32-year-old with 5,000 major league plate appearances, let alone a 20-year-old who began last season with Hagerstown, the Nats’ affiliate in the low Class A South Atlantic League. From a teenager riding the buses in the bushes to this absolute monster.
“He’s one of the top five players in all of baseball, really, for me,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Note: Roberts said that before Soto absolutely clobbered a pitch from Dodgers legend Clayton Kershaw to tie the fifth game of the division series in the eighth inning.
Maybe that moved him into Roberts’ top three?
Whatever the ranking — let’s discuss that in the off-season — there are obvious physical gifts that contribute to Soto’s production. The strength needed — forearms, wrists, legs — to do what Soto did to Cole’s fourth-inning fastball is obvious, raw and pure. The pitch, at 96 m.p.h., was up and away, and Soto attacked it with a movement that’s simultaneously violent and smooth.
“Hitting, and hitting off that guy, are two different things,” Rizzo said.
So to get to the level Soto has reached at this age — with just 1,665 professional plate appearances, not counting the post-season — it can’t just be physical. And it’s not.
“He understands the game at a really high level,” said Max Scherzer, who earned a win in Game 1. “Has a very good baseball IQ and has a really, really good hitter’s IQ.”
This is manifesting itself in the post-season, as Soto works counts and takes pitches with his special, I-see-what-you’re-doing-to-me shuffle in the batter’s box on baseball’s biggest stage. But it also showed up on the back fields at the Nationals’ West Palm Beach, Florida, spring training complex, before anyone knew who Juan Soto was.
Dave Martinez, his manager, likes to tell the story about the first time he saw Soto, at spring training last year. First at-bat, he badly missed a slider in the dirt, typical for a 19-year-old facing big league pitching, just flailing. But Soto followed by stepping out of the box, shaking his head a bit, resetting, stepping back in, getting the exact same pitch — and taking it. There’s maturity in that moment.
“Next pitch, same pitch, got it up a little bit,” Martinez said, “and he hit a rocket off the left-centre field wall.”
That’s a preternatural ability to learn and adjust from pitch to pitch, and he has carried that to the majors.
Now he’s up against an Astros organization that considers itself the smartest in baseball. Can it figure out a way to pitch to him?
The truth is, he hasn’t been the best version of himself this post-season. Before Tuesday, he was hitting just .237 (9 for 38) with only four walks in 10 games. Don’t tell the Astros that.
“Nothing seems to bother him,” Martinez said.