Soto blasts away all Astros data
Nats phenom solved Cole and there’s no tough lefty in the Houston bullpen
HOUSTON — In their video-heavy scouting reports and their pitchers’ meetings ahead of their World Series matchup with the Washington Nationals, the Houston Astros were preoccupied with one Nationals hitter: left-fielder Juan Jose Soto. The Nationals’ precocious, 20-year-old slugger was That Guy, the batter the Astros were determined not to let beat them over the course of the best-ofseven series.
“I feel like in the last 24 hours,” Astros catcher Martin Maldonado said following his team’s 5-4 loss to the Nationals in Game 1 on Tuesday night, “I’ve seen Soto more than my wife.”
That is unlikely to change any time soon, now that the Astros have seen Soto in person — and watched him go three-for-four with a homer, a decisive tworun double and a stolen base in a historic World Series debut. If anything, it will be even more difficult for the Astros to escape Soto’s image, because he is certain to be a fixture in their dreams — a nightmare of a hitter, blasting screaming drives to all parts of Minute Maid Park. “He was the key guy we couldn’t control tonight,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said. “His bat-speed is electric . ... He’s calm in the moment. Clearly, this is not too big a stage for him.”
The outlook for the Astros, who don’t even have a lefty to face him late in games, is less than brilliant. If Soto could destroy the consensus best pitcher on the planet at this moment, Astros ace Gerrit Cole, the way he did Tuesday night, what is he going to do to the rest of their pitchers?
The Astros, among the most data- and video-driven organizations in the sport, thought they had a solid game plan for pitching to Soto — getting a measure of confirmation in the first inning, when Cole struck him out on a 99-mph four-seam fastball, his hardest of the night, at the upper edge of the strike zone.
But in the fourth, Cole went back upstairs with a 1-0 fastball and Soto crushed it. The drive sailed atop the train tracks high above the facade of the stadium in left-centre, Soto’s opposite field, an estimated 417 feet away.
Cole’s four-seamer was literally the best pitch in baseball in 2019, at least as measured by FanGraphs’ pitch-values metric, which values that pitch as having saved 36.2 runs above average this season. According to Statcast data, Cole got 253 swings-and-misses with his four-seamer this season; no other pitcher in the majors got more than 200 with that pitch.
“Gerrit Cole throwing a high fastball up and away — that’s not easy to (hit),” Hinch said.
The next time Cole faced Soto, with runners on first and third in the fifth inning and the Nationals leading 3-2, the at-bat evolved, into an epic confrontation with an equally epic result.
Having been burned on his fastball by Soto’s massive homer the inning before, Cole conspicuously stayed away from it this time — and also stayed away from the strike zone, throwing three straight breaking balls, a slider and two curves, for balls. Twice, Soto performed his patented “Soto Shuffle,” sweeping his spikes through the dirt of his batter’s box with theatrical force and glaring out at Cole.
On the fourth pitch, Cole threw another slider that Soto, who appeared to be taking all the way on 3-0, took for a strike, and on the fifth, he unveiled for the first time his changeup. Soto swung through it, then nodded slowly toward the mound.
By this point, Cole had shown Soto every pitch in his repertoire, and when he went back to the slider, throwing it on the lower third of the plate, Soto lashed it into left for a two-run double.
It might have made sense for the Astros to add a lefty to their roster for the World Series specifically for the purpose of facing Soto late in games — as the Los Angeles Dodgers did with specialist Adam Kolarek and the St. Louis Cardinals did with Andrew Miller, with varying degrees of success.
But the lefty relievers who finished the regular season with the Astros, Framber Valdez and Cionel Perez, were not seen as legitimate candidates for the post-season roster and were sent home after the regular season ended. Wade Miley, a veteran left-handed starter, struggled down the stretch and wasn’t seen as possessing the skill set necessary to serve as a lefty specialist to face Soto.
“We have our roster, and I love our roster,” Hinch said before the game. “And I love the fact that we have some righties who do very, very well against lefties ... When you look at Soto as an example, he handles left-handed pitching and he handles right-handed pitching. Giving him different looks at critical moments in the game is a challenge in its own right. The fact that we don’t have a lefty to give them one of those looks is just a reality that we’ve dealt with for a long time.”
But one can only wonder what the Astros are thinking now.