Juan Soto is back on baseball’s biggest stage, where he’s a perfect fit

<p>Five years and three days before his second World Series, Juan Soto announced himself to the nation at his first. He faced Gerrit Cole, now his teammate with the New York Yankees but then a Houston Astro who entered Game 1 of that Fall Classic having given up one run in three postseason starts.</p> <p>Soto was three days shy of his 21st birthday. His Washington Nationals trailed the Astros 2-1 in the fourth. Cole missed with a slider. He followed with a fastball up in the zone.</p> <p>“He might not know this,” said Adam Eaton, a retired right fielder and Soto’s former teammate. “But we all talked about it constantly. Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon, Ryan Zimmerman. We’re all competitors. We’re all professionals. But we’d look at each other when he’d hit a ball, and we’re like, ‘That’s not normal.’”</p> <p>As he enters his first World Series since that 2019 championship, Soto has long been established as not normal. He turns 26 on Friday, the day his Yankees face the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 of the 120th World Series, and he’s a full-blown star in a series chock full of them, awaiting a free agency that should yield something north of $550 million.</p> <p>But as Soto shuffles into the national spotlight again - joining Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts and his old foe Cole - it’s instructive to remember what he is doing now is just an extension of what he has always done. Not just in this postseason, in which he is hitting .333 with a .439 on-base percentage and a .667 slugging percentage while leading the Yankees to their first pennant in 15 years. But since he arrived in the majors as a 19-year-old - and even before.</p> <p>“I have never seen - not even a veteran - with that mentality at the plate, with that approach,” said Jorge Mejia, who first worked with a 17-year-old Soto as a hitting coach in rookie ball with the Nationals and continues to tutor him to this day. “Every single pitch counts for him.</p> <p>“He used to miss an at-bat or hit a homer or whatever it might be. He’d come sit next to me and ask, ‘What could I do better? Where was this pitch? What was that pitch? I think it was a cutter. You think it was a slider?’ He’s on top of his at-bats, every single pitch, since day one.”</p> <p>Which is one reason the Nationals felt comfortable bringing Soto to the majors from Class AA in 2018, when he had only 512 minor league plate appearances spread across a little more than two full seasons. On May 20 against the Dodgers, Manager Dave Martinez granted Soto his debut as a pinch hitter - and he struck out in the eighth. The next day, Martinez started him in left field against San Diego and hit him sixth, sandwiched between Pedro Severino and Wilmer Difo. Soto hit a three-run bomb in his second big league at-bat. The next day, Soto singled and walked three times - the last to lead off the ninth inning, when he scored the winning run in a walk-off win.</p> <p>“We always talk about people that had the ability to slow the game down and not panic,” said Zimmerman, the veteran corner infielder whose oblique injury and subsequent trip to the injured list led to Soto being called up. “For him to be able to do that basically from day one, at the age he was, you could tell from the beginning that he was pretty special.</p> <p>“I don’t know if we would have thought he’d be this good. I don’t know if you ever think anyone’s going to be as good as he is now.”</p> <p>Not that there weren’t bumps. Early in that 2018 season, Eaton noticed Soto showed up a little late for hitting in the cages under the stands for two or three days in a row. Those Nationals teams were loaded with veterans - not only plenty of cops to police the clubhouse but some creaky bodies who needed their time to get ready. Eaton pulled him aside: “You have to get in here a little bit earlier because these older guys, they’re slow to ramp up.”</p> <p>Soto’s response: “Yes, sir.”</p> <p>“The next day, he came in at like 1 o’clock,” Eaton said. “We never saw him again. He always hit early, and he never said anything about it. He didn’t get defensive with me. He was an absolute pro.”</p> <p>By the time Soto dug in for the second time against Cole in Game 1 of the 2019 World Series, he had 1,197 major league plate appearances across the regular and postseason. He knew how to control an at-bat. He knew not to overcomplicate things.</p> <p>“He always tried to stay in the middle of the field against the fastball and then react to any other pitch,” Mejia said. “And at that moment, he was so young that he was keeping it basic. He was just trying to put the ball in play, really. But he has so good a swing …”</p> <p>A swing that, then and now, is old school. Soto does not search for launch angle. He generates power naturally - to his pull-side, right field as a left-handed hitter, sure. But also to left-center, where maybe he’s most impressive.</p> <p>“When you have the ability to hit the ball the other way, you can let the ball travel in the strike zone,” Zimmerman said. “You’re not jumpy. For me personally and a lot of people, when I would swing at pitches out of the zone, it was when I felt like I needed to speed up or needed to go get the ball. And it doesn’t seem like much, but your head moves a little forward, and then that slider that’s off the plate down in the dirt looks like a strike.</p> <p>“Whereas he just sits on that back leg and lets the ball travel, and you take those pitches because you’re sitting back. And I think you could argue he does that more consistently than anyone in the big leagues.”</p> <p>Soto’s moment this postseason - so far - came in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series against Cleveland’s Hunter Gaddis: 10th inning, two on, two out. As he fouled off four straight off-speed pitches, Soto seemed to be stalking Gaddis.</p> <p>“With each pitch he fouls off,” Zimmerman said, “I’m literally texting my buddies, ‘This is not good for this pitcher.’”</p> <p>It wasn’t. Soto finally got a fastball. He launched a moonshot to center. When he talked about it days later with Mejia, he told his old hitting coach: “I was ready to eat.”</p> <p>He was born ready. Back to Cole those five years ago and the 96-mph heater out over the plate. Soto let it travel. He didn’t try to pull it. The ball screamed toward left-center.</p> <p>“I could have done that, but I would have popped that ball out to center field,” Eaton said. “But he’s just an unbelievable athlete, and he put in the work. It was uncommon stuff, but I’m not surprised just because of who he is and what he puts into it.”</p> <p>That was Juan Soto’s introduction in his first Fall Classic, a titanic blast onto the railroad tracks in left-center field at Minute Maid Park. He went on to homer twice more and hit .333 with a 1.178 OPS in that World Series.</p> <p>He will certainly have a say in this World Series. Free agency awaits. His moment is now. For years, he has shown that such moments are not too big for him. In a series of stars, Juan Soto fits right in - and has the uncommon ability to outshine them all.</p>