Juan Soto’s Hot Streaks Are Delightful

It’s generally bad process to evaluate a player based on a hot or cold streak. Everyone has them, and if you only look at a guy’s best or worst stretches, you’re liable to see things that aren’t really there. That’s just how baseball works; no one plays at the same level all the time. Sometimes the ball looks like a grapefruit, sometimes it looks like a grape. Sometimes pitchers dot the corners with aplomb; sometimes their 3-0 offerings fly wide. No one’s ever as good as they look when they’re on top, or as bad as they look when things aren’t landing. But just because hot streaks are resistant to analysis doesn’t mean they aren’t fun. And for my money, there’s no player who’s more enjoyable to watch when he’s firing on all cylinders than Juan Soto.

In the aggregate, Soto is on track for another successful year, with numbers that look roughly in line with his career marks. His .414 OBP is a hair lower than his career number, but he’s hitting for a bit more power than normal, and striking out less, hence a .570 slugging percentage that would be one of the highest of his career. An early-season injury means he won’t hit his normal 700 plate appearances, and of course the Mets are a dumpster fire, but if I put a bunch of years of Soto’s rate statistics up, you’d struggle to separate this season’s numbers from the pack. That’s basically the idealized pitch for Soto: He can roll out of bed and post a 160 wRC+ with a .400 OBP.

That’s just in the aggregate, though. In the last 30 days, he’s batting .325/.472/.578, good for a 190 wRC+, and walking nearly three times as often as he strikes out. Are these arbitrary endpoints? Of course, and Soto’s not even the best hitter in baseball over that stretch. Batters can do almost anything for a month at a time. Pete Crow-Armstrong is slugging nearly .800 over the last 30 days. Heck, Soto is flanked by Luis García Jr. and Kyle Karros on the wRC+ leaderboard over the last month. It’s not about the raw production. But the way he does it? Man, I can’t get enough.

One June 15, Chase Burns fooled Soto with a 90-mph slider below the strike zone:

That’s a pretty normal looking play, a well-placed strike in a count where Soto was protecting the plate. It’s also one of three (?!) times that Soto has swung and missed on a pitch in the chase or waste zones in the last month. One of the other two came earlier in the same at-bat. It’s partially that he doesn’t swing at bad pitches – he’s offered at just 14 of the 170 chase/waste pitches he’s seen over this span – but even when he takes bad cuts, he makes contact.

On pitches just off the plate, Soto hasn’t been quite so unstoppable. No one’s good at hitting those pitches, of course, and Soto isn’t immune. But his plan of simply not swinging at them is excellent, and he manages to do a ton of damage if he does connect with them. His 36% swing rate on shadow-out pitches (those out of the zone, but only barely) is one of the lowest in the league. All in all, Soto has seen 251 pitches outside the zone, and swung at just 43. That’s a 17.1% chase rate, second-lowest in baseball, with only the precocious Kevin McGonigle chasing less often.

That isn’t what makes Soto’s hot streaks so ridiculous, though. He’s always good at spitting on tough pitches. He never chases too much. The magic comes when pitchers start to get frustrated and attack the zone to punish him for his patience. You’d expect a hitter who devotes so much energy to dodging the tough pitches to be vulnerable in the zone. But Soto both ups his swing rate and maintains his contact skills, and it’s frankly unfair that he can do both.

During this streak, Soto is coming up empty (swinging strike or foul tip) on 11.6% of his in-zone swings. That’s in the top third of the league, sandwiched between Jacob Wilson and Bobby Witt Jr. on the leaderboard. You know the kinds of hitters who post better numbers here; Luis Arraez and Mookie Betts are probably the first names that come to mind. But those two are playing different games than Soto. Arraez is trying to hit a low line drive in a gap. Betts is trying to work a walk or yank one past the pull side foul pole. Soto is hitting for colossal power to all fields, with 10 extra-base hits and a .253 ISO.

It doesn’t sound like you should be able to do all of this at once. The way to draw a ton of walks is to swing at almost nothing. The way to make a ton of contact is to swing slowly. The way to hit for power is to take big rips at whatever you think you can drive. These skills are all mutually exclusive, or at least mutually unlikely. For instance, take a look at the nine hitters with single digit strikeout rates in the last month:

You can see two archetypes of hitters here: the Arraezes and the Martes. Either you choke all the way down to try to spray the ball, or you swing early and often with power. Obviously you’d prefer to be Marte to Arraez all else being equal, but the equation seems pretty simple: If you strike out this rarely, you’re sacrificing walks. Unless you’re Soto, apparently.

Take the flip side of the coin. Let’s say you walk a ton, like the seven hitters with a walk rate of 16% or higher over the same time span:

It’s just silly. You’re not supposed to be able to play baseball this way. Choosing between a Perdomo-style approach and a Schwarber-style approach is a real decision. There are tradeoffs. Even among guys with a high walk rate, hitting for tremendous power entails swinging and missing often. Conversely, keeping your strikeout rate down means limiting your power production. Unless you’re Soto, who just does it all when he’s seeing the ball well.

How does he do it? If I could give you the exact method, I wouldn’t be writing for FanGraphs; I’d be collecting giant checks as a hitting instructor. But one thing Soto is doing differently this year is an obvious improvement: He’s swinging a lot more at pitches he thinks he can drive, notably fastballs thrown right down the middle while he’s ahead in the count. Those are the kinds of pitches hitters salivate over. But from 2022 to 2025, Soto swung at just 64% of them, about 10 percentage points below league average. This year, he’s swinging at 74% of them, bang on the league’s rate as a whole. And remember, he’s doing that while chasing at one of the lowest rates in baseball. “Swinging as often as the average hitter at meatballs” works better when you get ahead in the count often and rarely get fooled.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. It’s one thing to do damage when you get ahead in the count and get a pitch to drive. It’s another to maintain that controlled aggression without getting too aggressive when you fall behind. And when he’s in fine form like this, Soto does that better than anyone else. He’s swinging at fastballs down the middle 93% of the time when he’s behind in the count – that’s essentially “all the time.” In fact, he’s swinging at all of anything down the middle in a pitcher’s count about that often, 91% of the time in the last month. But he’s offered at a mere 8.1% of pitches in the chase or waste zones in those counts. That’s something like 90th-percentile in-zone aggression when behind in the count, and a 99th-percentile ability to avoid chasing when down in the count. It’s just ludicrous.

Mere mortals can’t do that. But even if they could, they’d be swinging at half speed to be able to make such good swing decisions. Soto has put 19 balls in play while behind in the count in the past month. He’s hitting .421 with a .789 slugging percentage on those, and his .745 xSLG tells me that’s no fluke. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Sure, you can slug while behind in the count. Junior Caminero is hitting .360 with a 1.000 slug in the last month when he puts the ball in play while behind in the count. But the cost of doing business like that is that you’re going to swing and miss some. Soto just… doesn’t.

Even for Soto, this level of plate discipline mastery is fleeting. No one’s this good for that long. The truth is, he’s probably displaying too good of plate discipline even for his own good; he’s had plenty of hotter streaks in his career, and they’ve involved hitting for more power even as he strikes out a bit more. But in terms of how much enjoyment I get from watching his game, give me this version of Soto every time. What he’s doing is just silly in a good way, and that’s not something I’ve gotten to say about the Mets very frequently this year.