Geovany Soto’s Sophomore Jinx

by
September 2, 2009

Geovany Soto is struggling and he doesn’t know why. The reigning NL Rookie of the Year has scraped together a measly .212/.318/.371 line and is now losing playing time to his illustrious backup, Koyie Hill. Lining up this season’s stats to his ROY campaign, I can see why he’s baffled.

First let’s take a look at his batted ball types.

3707_C_season_blog_9_20090831

(Blue is fly balls)

Uh-huh. No major changes, really. He’s hitting just a few more fly balls, but less are leaving the yard – down to 10.2% compared to 14.7% last year. That says something about why his power production is down, but it doesn’t explain why his batting average is hanging around the Mendoza line. Consider also his plate discipline numbers. Soto’s walks are up and his strikeouts are slightly down. He’s swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone – 20.1% last year, down to 18.1% this season – and he is making more contact when he does swing –74.7% last year, 77.4% this year. So he’s being more selective and making more contact when he does pull the trigger. It’s just as if he is almost always hitting the ball right at someone.

Soto has had some issues with his shoulder and oblique this year, which could be the culprit at least in part, but listening to Soto talk, he doesn’t seem to think that’s the case. Soto seems to attribute his woes to good old fashioned bad luck, and I’m not quite sure I can blame him.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

3707_C_season_blog_7_20090831

Playing around with THT’s xBABIP calculator, Soto’s expected BABIP is .314. His actual BABIP: .245. Last year Soto was playing a bit over his head. This year he appears to be suffering some sort of horrid luck that Billy Sianis wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy.

There may be more to it than luck, of course. Feel free to fill me in, someone.





 

Erik Manning is the founder of Future Redbirds and covers the Cardinals for Heater Magazine. You can get more of his analysis and rantings in bite-sized bits by following him on twitter.

13 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Michael
16 years ago

Solid stuff Erik, but it may be helpful to label the batted ball type chart with the batted ball types for each color. I can tell fairly easily that the red is line drives, but without looking Soto up there’s no way I can figure the other ones out.

0
Erik Manning
16 years ago
Reply to  Michael

Sorry. Blue is fly balls, green-grounders.

0