Juan Soto is good at baseball. The 20-year-old phenom made the jump from Double-A ball to the majors early in 2018, and he has yet to miss a beat. Soto’s counting stats ooze productivity. At time of writing, Soto has 51 home runs and 160 runs batted in in 238 games played. Over the course of a 162-game season, he would pace for 35 homers and 109 RBI; those are MVP-like numbers.
As great as the basic metrics think Soto is, a dive into the advanced metrics places Soto among the greatest to ever play the game.
That is not a typo: Soto is doing things that have only been done by the 0.0001% of baseball’s greatest players.
Soto sports a career .292 average. That is exceptional, especially considering that batting average has become less important in the era of home runs and strikeouts.
A .292 batting average is nice, but Soto has a career .404 on-base percentage. Soto is on a lengthy list of 20-year-olds who have 500 plate appearances and a .400 on-base percentage. Since 1947, Soto joins the emptiness of zero contemporaries.
Juan Soto is the only new member to the .400 OBP through age-20 club since 1947. That is extraordinary.
Since 1901, the list grows to four: Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Ted Williams, and Juan Soto. Soto’s contemporaries are not wunderkinds like Ronald Acuna, Mike Trout, or Bryce Harper. Soto’s contemporaries are three giants of the game. He shares a spot in an exclusive club with three Hall of Famers and three members of the 500 home run club.
Plate discipline is generally regarded as a trait one develops over the course of their career. Soto walked into the Majors with high-level plate discipline, walking 79 times in 116 games as a rookie.
In 2018, Soto finished fourth in on-base percentage in the NL (behind a pair of MVPs in Joey Votto and Christian Yelich as well as Brandon Nimmo of the Mets). In terms of on-base plus slugging, Soto slid into seventh place alongside the aforementioned Yelich plus some of the 2010’s best hitters in Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Anthony Rendon. Despite not playing the whole season in the Majors, Soto managed to finish tied for 10th in terms of walks. He was 19 years old.
Side note, Soto would have finished second and fourth in those stats but he did not reach the statistical minimums. His placement comes from the inclusion of extra at-bats without hits.
In 2019, Soto dominates stats both counting and advanced. Soto is in the top-five in walks while being tenth in adjusted OPS+. He is also top ten in RBI, offensive WAR, runs created, and runs scored. Soto is as good as it gets in the batter’s box, and he is still only 20 years old.
Soto is not the ridiculous athlete that the likes of Ronald Acuna and Fernando Tatis are, but he has far exceeded them in terms of discipline at the plate. Tatis has an enormous strikeout rate while Acuna leads the NL in strikeouts. In a similar vein, Acuna and Tatis have average to below-average walk rates while Soto is in the same ballpark as former MVPs Bryce Harper and Josh Donaldson in terms of being walked.
Soto will only continue to improve as a batter, fielder, and baserunner. The sky is truly the limit to Soto’s success. However, it seems likely that Soto will continue to walk past any obstacles on his way to a Hall of Fame career.
