Juan Soto’s Brief Walkless Run

Look, Juan Soto is going to be fine. In fact, he’s probably fine already. At some point during every season, we start worrying that Juan Soto isn’t performing like Juan Soto anymore, and then he starts performing like Juan Soto again. You know why? Because he was Juan Soto the whole time, and as we all know, Juan Soto was built by robo-umpires from the future and sent back in time to teach us the exact parameters of the strike zone. The robo-umps also gave him the ability to hit dingers and do a little dance in the batter’s box to help him blend in with us humans. Point is, Juan Soto will be fine.

I pitched this article on Monday afternoon, when Juan Soto was definitely not fine. He was in a bit of a slump, batting .121 with a -14 wRC+ over his last eight games. We’re talking about a very small sample here, but once there’s a minus sign in front of your wRC+, it’s not just bad for a time-traveling strike zone robot. It’s bad for a regular human, too. Still, that’s not what made me want to write about Juan Soto. This is what made me want to write about him:

That’s Soto’s 15-game rolling walk rate over the course of his entire career. This year, Soto is the big league leader with 102 walks and a 19.4% walk rate. Since 2018, when he made his debut, he’s the big league leader with 610 walks and a 19.1% walk rate. But look all the way to the right of that graph. From July 29 to August 14, Soto walked just four times in 57 PAs. That’s a 6% walk rate, the lowest of his entire career over a 15-game span. That stretch included an eight-game walkless streak, tied for the longest streak of his entire career.

It also included a 10-game stretch where he walked just once. That’s what got my attention in the first place. One walk in 10 games. It had never happened before! It was a fun fact. Over the course of his career, Soto has walked an average of 8.3 times every 10 games. Until this month, over every single 10-game stretch of his entire career, he had walked at least twice. In fact, even walking just twice over a 10-game period was rare. He’d only done it four times until this season.

So what’s going on with Juan? Is his plate discipline totally gone? With yet another reminder about the small sample size, the short answer to that haiku is yes:

See that spike at the far right of the graph? Soto’s 15-game rolling chase rate is above 22% for only the second time since September of 2019. He’s hacking like he did back when he was an impulsive 20-year-old. That’s the short answer.

The long answer is yes, but who cares? You know and I know that back when he was a 20-year-old, Soto wasn’t an impulsive hacker. He was preternaturally patient, already the second coming of Ted Williams. The league as a whole is chasing 28.5% of the time this year, so that spike at the far right still puts him in elite territory. Ronald Acuña Jr.’s 22.1% chase rate this season puts him in the 86th percentile. Soto’s plate discipline might be slipping in relative terms, but it’s still awfully good.

In the month of August, 15 of the 21 pitches he’s chased were in the shadow zone, meaning they were close enough that a swing wasn’t a terrible idea. That leaves six chases on pitches further away from the plate. Three of those pitches ended up as strike three. Another ended up as a foul ball. The last two went for a single and a homer. That’s a wOBA of .579:

If I worked for the Padres, I don’t think I would advise Soto to lay off that pitch. In fact, he’d also hit a homer on a pitch above the strike zone just the day before.

As I mentioned, I started working on this article on Monday. Soto’s walkless drought is now over. He walked once Monday night and twice last night. He’s still batting just .114 over his last nine games, but his wRC+ is back in the black at a nice juicy 1. In the second inning of last night’s game, he watched Jack Flaherty’s first four pitches, fouled off the next four, then took a hanging curve that started outside and never came particularly close to the plate for ball four. In the sixth inning, he had the classic Shintaro Fujinami experience: a six-pitch at-bat where he whiffed on two absolutely filthy pitches in the zone, but walked due to four pitches that were nowhere near it:

Naturally, Soto’s walkless streak came partly because he was chasing more and partly because he was unlucky. That’s how things work. Last night, when he walked twice, he still had a chase rate of 23%.

I’m now going to bring in two graphs from our friends over at PitcherList. The first shows Soto’s swing aggression in 2023. That is to say, it analyzes his swing decisions on a pitch-by-pitch basis, based on the probability that each pitch he saw would earn a swing, then shows how his decisions differ from an average batter’s:

This graph looks a lot like the chase rate chart above, with Soto getting so aggressive that he’s venturing out of Juan Soto territory and into normal human territory. However, as you know, there’s a lot more to plate discipline than swinging at any strike and taking every ball. Up next we have a graph of Soto’s decision value. Alex Eisert wrote an excellent, detailed breakdown of decision value yesterday, so I will very quickly tell you that it analyzes the expected value of a swing or a take based on the characteristics of each pitch, then sums the value of the batter’s actual swing/take decisions.

As you can see below, Soto’s current decision value, while below his average, is far from the worst it’s been all year. It’s still very much in Juan Soto territory, far above the realm of mere mortals. He’s more chase-happy than usual, but he’s still swinging at hittable pitches and spitting on the rest:

That’s my real takeaway from all of this. Even when Soto is running a -14 wRC+ with his highest chase rate in years, he’s still at the very top of the league.

That said, Soto definitely looks different this year. After running a 14.3% strikeout rate over the last three seasons, he’s back up to 20.3%, where he was in 2018 and ’19. That’s an enormous jump. But he’s still running a 149 wRC+ on the season. Soto still has the best eye in the game, and his career-best 57.8% hard-hit rate is just one-tenth of a point behind league-leader Matt Olson. The real arc of his career looks something like this:

That peak in 2020 is exaggerated due to the pandemic-shortened season, but you can split up the first six seasons of Soto’s career into three fairly clean categories. He’s always been excellent, but he reached a new plane of existence in 2020, then came back down in 2022:

Even when he was at his absolute peak, Soto always hit a ton of groundballs, but he’s pulling more than ever and going to the opposite field less than ever. It’s plain to see that it’s affecting his performance when he makes contact. Or at least it was.

Back in May, Robert Orr wrote about that exact phenomenon for Baseball Prospectus. At the start of the season, Soto was looking to pull the ball, and pitchers started catching him way out in front with breaking stuff. As a result, he was rolling over tons of balls for groundouts to the right side. I don’t know how big a Robert Orr fan Soto is, but he clearly got the memo. Look what happened a couple weeks after Rob’s article came out:

That’s an enormous drop. He pulled it back and then some. At this point, Soto’s 2023 pull rate is only two percentage points above his 2022 pull rate. He clearly made a midseason adjustment, the kind of thing that you can do when you’re Juan Soto.

That pull-happy start to the season coincided with a rise in Soto’s chase and strikeout rates. As you can see from the chart above, Soto’s pull rate has been rising over the last couple weeks as well. This latest blip might just be Soto backsliding into the same pattern he was following in April and May. He’s already shown that he can turn this problem around once, so we probably shouldn’t worry too much. Say it with me: Juan Soto is going to be fine.