Soto gives ‘em exactly what they needed, just like Reggie once did
Joe Torre’s Yankees, as great a Yankee team as there has ever been because of the degree of difficulty in October that the other great Yankee teams never had to face, never needed a Reggie Jackson. They had the Core Four, and Bernie Williams and Paul O’Neill, too. There was no missing piece for them, and sometimes no weaknesses. They won four World Series in five years and we will always remember how close they came to more than that, before the bottom of the 9th in Game 7 in Phoenix one night in 2001.
But even after making it back to the Series in ’76 for the first time in 12 years, the 70s Yankees still needed a difference maker, and the difference maker was Reggie, who really did turn out to be the straw that stirred the drink. Of course, he should have stopped right there when he said that, not talked about how Thurman Munson could only stir it bad. But the fact of things is that Reggie was exactly what those Yankees needed.
Aaron Judge is still The Man with these Yankees. So was Thurman once. Both former MVPs. The ‘24 Yankees need Soto to be their Reggie.
Reggie had been part of three straight World Series champs in Oakland before he made a one-season pit stop on his way to the big, bad city. He knew how to do it. So does Juan Soto, who already has one World Series in the books with the Nationals, one he helped win when he was still just 20.
The only current Yankee of note who can say the same thing about winning it all is Anthony Rizzo, who did that when the Cubs ended 108 years of waiting for another Series title in 2016. The Yankees haven’t won in 15. But it is starting to feel like 108 for Yankees fans.
That is where Soto comes in. The Yankees had gone 15 years without winning the Series when Reggie hit town. Then went 15 years before making it back to the Series after Reggie left town. Now, of course, the Yankees are trying to end the long wait since 2009. And it’s not just that they haven’t won the Series since then. They haven’t played in one.
So, they went out and made the trade for Soto and gave up a lot of young pitching to do it even though Soto is in the last year of his contract and has the right to leave when the season is over. He might not be looking to get Ohtani-like money, $700 million over 10 years, if he elects to become a free agent. But he will certainly be looking for more than Judge got from the Yankees after he placed a huge bet on himself, and then cashed in to the tune of $360 million when he hit 62 home runs in his own walk year, one for the ages.
On Friday, Soto officially introduces himself to New York and to Yankee Stadium after an almost dream first week of the season for the Yankees, six wins in seven games on the road against the Astros and then the Diamondbacks. One team, the Astros, has stopped the Yankees from going back to the Series three times in the past seven years. The other, the Diamondbacks, was in the World Series just last year.
It has been Soto alone doing this on offense for his new team. The fact is, the Yankees, in this extremely small sample, have looked more like a real team for the first time in a while. It’s not just Judge and Gerrit Cole and everybody else. On the short road trip that just ended, it looked like just about everybody on Aaron Boone’s team did something to help the Yankees get to 6-1.
In the middle of it all, though, was Soto, hitting the ball and working counts and getting walks, and even saving the first game of the season with a throw from right field to Alex Trevino. That play even caught the eye of Dave Winfield, who was signed by George Steinbrenner to replace Reggie as the straw that stirred the drink for the Yankees of the 1980s, but who never did that, even before George started calling one of the best all-around ballplayers of his time “Mr. May.”
“I saw that play (in the outfield), aggressive defense, charged the ball, caught it on a good hop, fired to home, saved the game. I thought I was watching me,” Winfield said the other day.
Winfield was brought here to start the Yankees winning the World Series again. He never did, though he would win one with the Blue Jays after he left New York. While he was here, he was the wrong player at the wrong time at the old Stadium. It might turn out to be different for Juan Soto, still just 25, who is perfect for these Yankees the way Reggie was perfect for the old Yankees.
Reggie joined a team that had just been swept by the Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine, in the 1976 World Series. Soto joins a Yankee team that got swept in the American League Championship Series by the Astros the season before last. But he is exactly the kind of player they need. The kid who was known as the Latin Mamba in Washington, not only is the lefthanded-hitting star the Yankees desperately needed, he is the kind of glue guy in the batting order who seems to organize the whole thing around him.
It is early, despite the fact that some people in town have the first floats on their way to the Canyon of Heroes. But for now, you can’t break in much better than Juan Soto has. And, for now, he is like Reggie in one other big way: He seems to have brought his star with him to New York, same as Mr. October once did.