Juan Soto Is Getting Pitched the Same Way as Always (Carefully)

First impressions are everything, the expression goes, and a poor one could have doomed Juan Soto’s 2024 season. The Yankees dealt five quality players for one year of his services; a slow start in the Bronx would have invited the wrath of tabloids and fans alike. But Soto started with a bang, gunning down a runner at home plate to preserve a ninth-inning lead in his debut and going on to hit .325/.438/.561 in his first month as a Yankee. From day one, he was undeniable.

This time around, he hasn’t been as lucky. Soto remains in New York, albeit in a different borough, and he’s fresh off signing the largest contract in professional sports history. By those standards, his start this season is underwhelming. His batting line is 25% above league average, but the shape of his production is essentially Soto at his least productive: tons of walks, a few too many groundballs, and not much extra base damage. The quasi-slow start prompted a story written by The New York Post’s Mike Puma headlined “Juan Soto opens up to The Post about pitchers’ new approach without ‘the best hitter in baseball’ behind him.”

“It’s definitely different,” Soto told Puma prior to last Monday’s game. “I had the best hitter in baseball hitting behind me. I was getting more attacked and more pitches in the strike zone, less intentional walks and things like that. I was pitched differently last year.”

This quote led to a lot of silliness, including a follow-up column in The Post headlined “Juan Soto should have kept his comments about Aaron Judge, Mets’ lineup protection to himself,” as well as unhinged segments on local sports talk radio. But I also wondered to what extent Soto’s assertion was true.

In theory, it makes sense: Judge is probably the best hitter of the post-integration era. Pete Alonso, who generally hits behind Soto in the Mets’ lineup, is a mere mortal by comparison, albeit a mere mortal having a great year. It follows that the change in protection from Judge to Alonso would lead to Soto seeing fewer competitive pitches.

So is it true? As far as I can tell, not really. Last season, Soto was in the fifth percentile for pitches seen in the strike zone. This season, he is in the fifth percentile for pitches seen in the strike zone. His overall zone rate has dropped slightly, but given the size of the sample, we’re talking about a difference of two or three pitches. The bit about intentional walks is true — Soto has already been intentionally walked twice, equaling his total from last year — but a handful more intentional walks doesn’t reflect an overhauled approach.

The pitch usage patterns from right-handers show little change between 2024 and 2025. The only significant difference relates to the size of the sample; for example, Soto has seen twice as many splitters from right-handed pitchers so far this year, but that’s largely a function of facing splitter-wielders like Kevin Gausman, Bowden Francis, and Cal Quantrill in the early season.

Soto has only seen 83 pitches from left-handed pitchers so far, but there are some potentially interesting patterns. Of those 83 pitches, 42 (50.6%) have been sliders or sweepers. Amusingly, two days before The Post interview, JP Sears threw 15 pitches to Soto, and every single one was a slider or sweeper. Perhaps this could hint at a new strategy from left-handed pitchers — in 2024, a little more than 30% of lefty pitches he saw were sliders or sweepers — but because there are just so few pitches overall, and so many of them are from Sears, I’m not yet convinced this represents a new plan.

But Soto’s quote wasn’t about seeing more sliders; he was commenting on the frequency of hittable pitches. And in another quote from the interview, he also suggested that it isn’t every situation. “I would say I am getting a decent amount of strikes, but there’s some specific situations where pitchers don’t attack,” Soto said.

What could those specific situations be? I decided to take a closer look. Using the Statcast definition of pitches in the heart of the zone as a proxy for aggressiveness, I compared Soto’s 2024 and 2025 seasons in a series of count contexts: early counts, even counts, pitcher ahead, and pitcher behind. In three of those four situations, Soto is seeing marginally fewer pitches over the heart of the plate; the biggest gap between 2024 and 2025 settles in at a couple of percentage points of difference.

Curiously, in the situations where Soto would be most primed to attack — the pitcher behind counts, so 2-0, 2-1 and 3-1 — he’s actually seeing more pitches in the heart of the plate compared to last season:

Any way it’s sliced, it looks like it’s the same old Soto: He’s seeing lots of pitches outside the zone, and he’s taking most of them. In this, Soto remains an anomaly — generally, there’s an inverse relationship between a hitter’s zone rate and his chase rate. Soto defies this relationship — he’s that red dot on an island on the plot below:

Taken together, Soto’s quote and the resulting news cycle feel like a product of signing an enormous contract for a team playing in the sport’s largest media market. Or maybe Soto was still stewing about Sears spamming sweepers two nights before. In any case, there’s not really anything to see here. The null hypothesis can sometimes be the most satisfying.

All stats are current as of Saturday, April 19.