What's really behind Juan Soto's slow start?

Contrary to popular opinion, Juan Soto isn’t coming off the two worst months of his career. Up to his usual standard – well, no, perhaps not, but neither his .752 April OPS nor his .792 May OPS rate among his three weakest months, thanks to some occasional struggles in San Diego and Washington over the years. If he hasn’t been great, then he hasn’t been bad, either. In May, he hit similarly to Francisco Lindor, Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll and Jackson Merrill. If this is disaster, then the first-place Mets are still living a charmed life.

Still, “not the worst you’ve seen of him” is, understandably, not exactly the recap Mets fans were hoping for when they learned their team was signing Soto to a $765 million contract, the richest in baseball history. He’s now been booed on both sides of New York City, his hustle has been called into question, there’s been drama about no longer having Aaron Judge behind him, and “what’s wrong with Soto?” is now a question team executives are regularly asked. To say it’s been a bumpy start feels like an understatement.

More than a third of the way into the season, it’s not just a slow start. So, consider this your regularly scheduled “what’s going on here” update. What is wrong – and are we yet seeing any signs of breaking out?

1) Maybe nothing is wrong!

"I honestly don't have a 'this is the issue he needs to fix to get better,’” said David Stearns, Mets president of baseball operations, recently.

“He’s human. He’s 26, man,” said manager Carlos Mendoza. “He’s going to be fine. He’s Juan Soto.”

Maybe that’s just protective speech from men who really, really need this marriage to work out, but it’s also reflective of the truth. There’s not One Big Shiningly Obvious Issue at play here. There’s not an injury we know of. There’s not an obvious decline in skill apparent. It’s what makes the whole situation so frustrating, both internally and externally.

You’ve probably been hearing a version of this for two months: the underlying metrics say it’s fine and everything will sort itself out. That can best be summed up in this table taken from the Statcast metrics on Soto’s Baseball Savant page, and while we won’t go through each and every one of those acronyms here – feel free to peruse the MLB.com glossary for that – the point here is that you can read these like video game ratings, where the scale is 0-100, and red is very, very good. There’s so much red here. Nothing stands out as “being a problem,” or even close to it.

But, the retort accurately goes, underlying stats don’t win games – and going 1-for-4 while hitting into a double play every night might help lose them. That’s completely fair, and not wrong.

Yet it’s still important data, because this is different from other underperforming stars like Jose Altuve, where you can easily see that the quality of contact is meaningfully worse, or like San Francisco’s LaMonte Wade Jr., who has suffered the largest year-to-year drop in hard-hit rate in the game. It’s not Marcus Semien or Anthony Santander, who have shown large increases in strikeouts as part of their hitting struggles. From this view, Soto looks like Soto.

If you were to see a meaningful drop in skill, you’d see at least some of that here. Even the one thing that might stand out – the 2 mph decline in bat speed – merely takes him from “elite” to “considerably above-average.” (It might also be partially, though not fully, explained by Soto’s decrease in pull rate, from 45% to 38%, since bat speed reaches its peak out front, and Soto is making contact 2.5 inches deeper this year.)

No one wants to hear “it’s just bad luck,” because that’s too easy and rarely the full story – and it’s not entirely that. But we can acknowledge some of the things that have happened, too, right?

Like on May 4, when he hit a homer in St. Louis … until Victor Scott II decided that he didn’t.

Or just this past week, when he roped a ball at 110 mph off the bat for a hard-hit single into the outfield gap … or least it would have been, had there not been confusion about whether the ball was caught (it wasn’t) and Brandon Nimmo, the runner on first, turning around to repass Soto, leading to one of the oddest “groundouts” in baseball history. (Yes, really.)

Or the time in April when he became one of an ever-growing list of victims of Cubs outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, an elite outfielder making a big reputation for making incredibly difficult plays look extremely easy, as he did when an incredible jump before the camera even turned to the outfield helped him convert a 35% Catch Probability (likely for extra bases on a 101 mph hit) into a seemingly routine out.

Sometimes, all you can do is tip your cap to the other guy – like the afternoon in Sacramento when Soto smashed a line drive at 112.4 mph right back up the middle … only to have A’s shortstop Jacob Wilson leap to tip it to himself.

Again: it’s not all bad luck, as we’ll get to. But also, when there’s not a single player in the game with a larger gap between his expected slugging and actual number than Soto, and only one with a larger gap between expected batting average and actual than the 69-point deficit that Soto is seeing, it’s also something you can’t ignore.

“I’ve felt good since day one,” Soto said on Sunday. “Just the results haven’t been there. For me, finding … some holes or some gaps, we’ve just got to keep working on it.”

If and when Soto turns it around, this is what you’re pointing to – that it never seemed like it should have gone away.

2) Is it really ‘lack of hustle?’

Well, any time the manager openly says he plans to talk to you about hustling, as Mendoza said he would on May 19, the answer can’t be “no.” The data backs this up to some extent, too; not that Soto has ever been a burner, but his sprint speed (20th percentile) and home to first time (4.58 seconds) are each career lows.

That’s enough that you can’t hand-wave this aspect away. On the other hand, speed was never really part of his game; beating out an infield hit here and there is hardly the difference between great production and just-OK performance. On yet another other hand, his seven steals already match his full-season 2024 total; advanced Statcast baserunning metrics have him as a mild positive this year, after being a negative last year, and he’s got nearly as many infield hits (four) this year as he did all last year (six).

File this under “not a great look for a new player,” probably, and it’s great talk radio fodder – but it’s mostly not an issue.

3) What's real that's changed?

“He's hitting the ball on the ground a little bit more than he has in the past,” Stearns said. “I think that's something he's aware of.”

Sure. Soto’s grounder rate has gone up from 45% to 52%, though that’s regularly bounced around in that range over his career. The larger issue is that combined with his lower pull rate, he’s pulling it in the air – the most valuable kind of contact, when hit hard – only 11% of the time, down from 19% last year. But it was last year that was the outlier, not this year, and even when he’s hit those high-value balls this year, he’s getting less production out of them.

“In the eyes of many around the team,” wrote MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo this weekend in regards to Soto’s May, “[he] had become too passive at the plate, allowing himself to fall into too many pitcher’s counts.”

Now we’re talking. Soto in May offered at only 53% of pitches in the zone, tied for the third-lowest rate of any month of his career – and among the three other months at the bottom of the list, two of them (September 2024 and August 2018) were his weakest month of that season. When he doesn't swing enough, he can't do damage enough.

It’s obviously good to lay off bad pitches, and no one does that better than Soto – not only does he have the lowest chase rate of 2025, his May was one of the lowest chase-rate months anyone’s had in the last decade – a skill which clearly hasn’t waned, as this image shows clearly.

But when you have a swing like his, there’s such a thing as being too patient, too. In May, Soto took 0-0 pitches in the zone 74% of the time – the second highest in a month of his career, and the highest month, May 2021, was one of those “months where he was hitting worse” mentioned at the very top of this story.

4) Is anything changing?

Soto reached base seven times in three weekend games against the Rockies, and while Colorado doesn't exactly offer the toughest opposition, it’s not like performance against last-place clubs is removed from end-of-season stat lines, either.

After a flyout to left on an in-zone sweeper in his first at-bat Friday, Soto did not let a middle-middle Kyle Freeland go by in his second AB, turning it into a double.

The next time he saw Freeland, he hit a low-and-away cutter – but still one within the zone – for a single.

While he ended the day grounding into a double play against flamethrowing reliever Seth Halvorsen, he did hit it hard (101 mph) and all four of his plate appearances ended with him swinging in the zone.

On Saturday, he drew a first-inning walk, given nothing good to hit, then after popping out on a hanging slider (in the zone, of course), he jumped on a middle-middle low-life 90 mph sinker from Antonio Senzatela and hit it about to the moon.

It was more of the same on Sunday: After flying out and being hit by a pitch, he saw this Zach Agnos splitter that didn’t split very much and hit it off one knee over the right-center-field fence.

“Everybody from the outside keeps saying, ‘Where’s Soto? Where’s Soto?’ We have seen it. He has had good at-bats weekly,” shortstop Francisco Lindor said on Saturday. “I think today, the ball fell for him.”

It sure did. Into the seats, anyway.

Of the 21 pitches in the zone the Rockies offered him, Soto swung at 14, a 67% in-zone swing rate that was tied for his second-highest in any series this year. (The highest came in St. Louis, when he reached base five times and, again, had a homer taken away by Scott.) He did so while swinging at exactly one out-of-zone pitch.

There’s no real evidence Soto is getting pitched differently. There’s no real evidence there’s a meaningful skill decline. The main evidence is that this feels for all the world exactly like what Lindor went through in his first year as a Met, which is to say a rough adjustment, except all the underlying metrics say there’s no adjustment at all, other than perhaps letting his truly elite plate discipline keep him from unleashing swings at enough pitches he can damage.

The Rockies series doesn’t alone change that. Then again, it might just have been the start of what we all figure is coming: A quick return back to the level where it seems laughable anyone was ever questioning his fit in the first place.