Soto still trying to find himself at the plate

Juan Soto is on the clock. His team needs him. Losses like Sunday night’s series clincher against the Dodgers will be less likely if Soto can get back to being Soto.

The lefty slugger is one Padres player who should be expected to perform a lot better.

It’s fair to expect a surge in batting average and slugging percentage in the months ahead from Soto, 24, just because his career track record far exceeds his performance through 35 games.

Both Soto and manager Bob Melvin reported progress Sunday although the results in the 5-2 extra-inning defeat showed one single in five at-bats to go with a fielding error that led to an unearned run.

“I’ve been seeing the ball better,” Soto said, answering all questions afterward, looking a reporter in the eyes. “I’ve been swinging the bat better so I think I’m in a good spot now.” He added: “I feel great now.” Melvin noted that Soto heated up before the Dodgers came to Petco Park. In a series at hitter-friendly Mexico City followed by a series against the Reds, the lefty went 8-for-17 with eight walks. He lifted his batting average from .178 to .227 and reach based in 64 percent of his chances.

The Dodgers raised the bar. Soto seldom cleared it, going 2-for-13 with a walk in the series.

Melvin said he believes Soto will show hungry Padres fans the same production he lent the Washington Nationals in becoming one of MLB’s top five offensive players.

The manager detected recent improvements that bode well.

“Until the last couple of games he’s been hitting his stride a lot better, been getting consistent ABs,” the manager said. “He moved his average up quite a bit. It’s not always the easiest thing to do to carry it on against good pitching every game.”

Soto agreed the Dodgers have good pitchers. He pointed out he hit a few balls hard in the series.

“We’ve just got to make the adjustments,” he said.

One change Soto may need to pull off is return to his Nats form of driving the ball the other way more often than he has since joining the Padres in the August blockbuster.

He’s become a pronounced pull hitter. Think Eric Hosmer, only with a lot more bat speed to go to with the league’s best walk total.

If he were an established pull hitter like Ted Williams back in the day or Dodgers slugger Max Muncy today, it would be OK.

Go ahead and do what you do

best.

But it would seem awfully tough for a hitter to reinvent oneself as a pull hitter several years into a career.

Soto himself has said that he’s at his best when

he’s hammering pitches beyond the shortstop. It was encouraging, then, that Sunday night he banged a fly out to the warning track. Then again, he’s had similar strokes, only to fall into a semi-slump.

Soto is on the clock in another respect, and not a good one.

The new pitch clock, he

said, has messed up his game on occasion. He was one of the sport’s most deliberate hitters, often taking close to 30 seconds to situate himself between pitches,

“It’s really tough,” he said of the adjustment, which has condensed to about a third of his former pace. “It’s really uncomfortable sometimes.

You’ve just got to rush. Sometimes you even feel like you’ve got to give one pitch away. It was just like you can get yourself comfortable in there.”

On defense, Soto said he aimed wrong on a warning track fly ball that went off his glove Sunday good for two bases in the sixth inning for Freddie Freeman, who eventually scored.

For his career Soto has a statistical line of .283/.422/ .521, so given that he’s currently at .220/.381/.398 there’s reason to expect major contributions from him.

If, that is, he can figure out the clock and his swing.