Juan Soto’s Defense Is Quickly Declining

Juan Soto is going to hit. This year, his first of many in Queens, his bat has come around nicely after a rough start; he’s slashing .251/.385/.495 for a 146 wRC+. That line is good for 10th in the majors, even if it’s a bit light by his standards. Offense is the main and most important part of Soto’s game, but it’s not the only thing. He has also played 120 games and 1,053 innings in right field for the Mets. On that end, he has struggled, and the most concerning part is related to his speed.

Soto has never been more than an average runner. Even in his early 20s, he peaked at only a 60th-percentile sprint speed, and from 2020-2024, he hovered around the mid-30s. Not the slowest in the league, but not speedy by any means. That’s not necessarily a problem; there are plenty of not great runners who are above average in the outfield. But when you’re near the bottom of the speed spectrum, you have very little room for error. Your reads, routes, and footwork have to be precise in pretty much every direction, and, well, Soto’s are not.

With -10 Outs Above Average and -10 Fielding Run Value, Soto has been the second-worst right fielder in baseball this season, behind only Nick Castellanos (-11). Overall, Soto falls into the first percentile by both OAA and FRV. He grades out a little better according to Defensive Runs Saved; with -3 runs, he is tied for 19th among the 25 players with at least 400 innings in right field.

To be clear, Soto has had rough defensive seasons before — he was even worse than this in 2022 — but he’s typically rebounded the following year. Defensive metrics can be quite volatile because of the small sample of opportunities in a given season, particularly for outfielders. The difference this time, though, is his declining speed. Combine that with his already-shoddy footwork and you’ve got a recipe for poor defense. Here is a summary of his defensive metrics and speed in recent years:

In the past when I’ve looked at outfield defense, I hadn’t considered coupling the data with a player’s sprint speed splits as a baserunner. In the outfield, the first 10 feet of your route are the most important, especially if you don’t have the top-end speed to make up the ground you lose at the start of the play. This season, it is taking Soto longer to accelerate into his sprint than it did before:

It makes sense, then, that Soto’s outfield jumps have also gotten worse. Statcast has Jump metric that measures how much ground outfielders cover above or below average in the correct direction within the first three seconds that a pitch is released. It is made up of three components: reaction, burst, and route. Reaction measures the amount of feet an outfielder covers in any direction within the first 1.5 seconds, while burst tracks the distance covered over the next 1.5 seconds. Route compares this with the amount of ground the outfielder covers in the correct direction during the full three-second span. Like the overall Jump metric to which they contribute, reaction, burst, and route are also measured in feet above or below average in the correct direction.

This season, Soto’s overall Jump is 1.6 feet below average, down from his mark of 0.9 feet above average last year. He ranks 79th out of 88 outfielders in Jump, after he was 34th out of 101 in 2024. Here are his annual Jump metrics since the start of 2021:

Aside from 2022, the reaction and burst components have been relatively consistent for Soto. Last year, his slight improvements across the board added up to his fielding performance best in recent seasons, but that clearly didn’t last long. It’s possible that at least some of this decline could be the result of Soto regressing to the mean following his best defensive season since 2021. However, such a simple explanation doesn’t account for the deterioration of his reaction and burst, which are so drastic that, even as his routes have improved, his Jump has gone from slightly above average in 2024 to bottom of the league this season. All of this is related to his diminishing speed.

Soto’s defensive downturn can also be attributed to his poor reads of batted balls from right-handed hitters, against whom most of his struggles have come this season. He entered this year with -5 OAA for his career as a right fielder on right-handed batted balls, compared to -10 on balls hit by lefties. This season, though, he’s been worth -7 OAA on righty batted balls and -2 against lefties. Right-handed batted balls can be difficult plays for right fielders because the ball tends to slice toward the line and spin both horizontally and vertically. Here’s an example from this season:

This ball was 104 mph off the bat with five seconds of hang time. It was struck right into the area at Citi Field in right field where the fence is slightly deeper. And you can see that Soto’s read was messy. He took off with a turn over his right shoulder, sprinted backwards for a few steps, then switched to the other direction after he realized the spin of the ball would carry it toward the foul pole.

As he adjusted, he took his eyes off the ball for an extended period of time, and upon picking it up again, he then had to consider where he was in relation to the outfield wall, which he was quickly approaching. Still, even with the wall nearby, if he had gotten a better jump in terms of directionality and taken a more efficient route, he probably would have camped under this fly ball instead of scrambling and spinning while going after it. The ball was hanging up there for enough time for Soto to grab it – even with his lack of speed – if his first step took the spin into consideration. I’ve included only the Soto portion of the same play below so you can watch just his footwork and route:

These miscues of footwork and first-step pace and direction when going back have been a key problem for Soto over the years; on his fielding opportunities when going back on balls this season, he has posted -5 OAA, after finishing with -3 last year, -2 in 2023, and -9 in 2022. This becomes more interesting when you break it down further, by the lateral direction of the balls hit behind him. In the past, his struggles going back on balls have come on those hit more directly overhead rather than to one side or the other; these plays can be more difficult because the outfielder has to turn all the way around, making it tough to pick up the ball and determine just how far it is traveling. This year, though, he’s run into even greater trouble on batted balls hit back and toward the right field line, like the one in the clip above. It’s worth mentioning that he has gone from playing home games at Yankee Stadium, with its short porch in right field, to doing so at Citi Field, where right field is spacious and oddly shaped. This is probably exacerbating the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be the cause, as he’s also had trouble in other parks:

The first of the two clips above shows Soto looking uncomfortable on a ball hit straight behind him rather than toward the right field corner, while the second one features him going after a deep fly ball in the right-center gap; he gets there in time, but because he is hesitant as he approaches the warning track, unsure of where he is relative to both the ball and the wall, he just misses it.

Taking the correct first step is just as important when coming in balls. On that end, Soto has also been worth -5 OAA. The evidence once again points to subpar reads against right-handed batted balls. Let’s go through the two examples, both of which take him toward the line:

Soto is going the wrong direction right off the bat. You can tell by his momentum as soon as the camera pans to the outfield. With a full extension, off-balance swing out of the zone, the odds of this ball going over his head aren’t great. That slight misstep to start is the difference between an out and a hit, but he still has to do better recovering after the misread. Here’s another example:

On this relatively low and flailed liner, Soto’s first steps are back. I’m actually OK with that, but as soon as he realizes the ball is in front of him, he doesn’t charge hard; instead, he continues his roundabout route and the ball drops in front of him, as if he knows he won’t get to it. This all goes back to his decreased speed. It looks like he doesn’t want to risk overrunning the ball, which would turn a single into a double, and decides to play it safe. The thing is, these soft batted balls are precisely the ones Soto should risk going hard for, because even if he misses it, it isn’t likely to get too far behind him. If he’s going to be passive because he’s losing speed, his first steps are going to be all the more important.

I’m not exactly sure what this means for Soto. He’s still only 26, he’s only made two non-COVID trips to the IL as a major leaguer — 10 days for back spasms in 2019, 14 days for a shoulder strain in 2021 — and his body composition is about the same as it’s always been, so it’s hard to explain why his speed has suddenly declined. He has missed a game or two here and there over the years with right knee or calf soreness, or a minor contusion of some sort, and there are times when he appears to be in agony after fouling a ball off his foot; otherwise, though, he is in the lineup pretty much every day, mostly playing through his aches and pains. Late last season, he had an injury scare when he banged his left knee against the right field wall in foul territory while making a sliding catch in Seattle. It looked bad, and maybe it was bad, but he stayed in for the rest of the game, came in off the bench the next day to hit an RBI double, then started the following game. Ultimately, he was fine. Perhaps these various day-to-day ailments are adding up, but there’s no indication that he’s been hurt for the bulk of this season in a way that could be compromising his speed or defense. In fact, he’s been way more aggressive as a basestealer this season, and usually when players are hurt, they attempt fewer stolen bases. We’ve established that his diminished speed is one of the leading factors of his fielding woes, but we can’t really answer the question of why he is running so much slower.

It’s possible that there’s something wrong with Soto that we don’t know about, something that he and the Mets are keeping to themselves, and if that’s the case, maybe both his speed and his defense will rebound some. But until that happens, I am going to be concerned that what we’re seeing is a permanent decline in ability rather than a temporary blip.