It’s open season on Mets’ slugger Juan Soto.
Soto has illustrated everything that has gone wrong with the Mets lately. He has been scuffling at the plate. In the last seven games, he has hit .120 with three hits and one RBI with eight strikeouts to show for it.
Soto went 0-for-5 with a strikeout on Friday night at Citi Field, in the Mets’ 7-5 13-inning loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. His moment to turn boos into cheers came in the 10th inning with Starling Marte at first and Luisangel Acuna at second with one out. But he grounded out instead.
There has been a conversation about him being unhappy. He didn’t seem to hustle to first after not hustling to first in recent games, and struck out looking a couple of times against the Red Sox this week. That’s where we are now, psychoanalyzing Soto to figure out why he’s struggling, and (you guessed it) some of this nonsense is coming from journalists and a Yankee play-by-play man.
My take is that the situation happens in baseball: he’s pressing. Batting .236 with a slash line of .369/.418/.787 with eight home runs and 21 RBI in 50 games is okay for a “regular player,” but not for a player of his ilk. He knows it, too, and that’s why he is unhappy.
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza felt the need to give his struggling star a vote of confidence, which he or anyone else did not envision happening this soon. So, yes, Soto’s confidence is fragile at best.
Part of Soto’s struggles come with making adjustments to being a Met. He plays 81 games at Citi Field, where it’s hard to hit home runs. Remember, it took a while for Francisco Lindor to make an adjustment playing in New York. Last year’s World Series MVP hero Freddie Freeman needed a year to adjust in Los Angeles after spending most of his life with the Braves. We can even go back to Carlos Beltran’s first year with the Mets and Mike Piazza coming to the Mets in a 1998 trade midseason. Another reason why the Mets slugger is struggling is the weather. It’s been unseasonably cold in New York as we head to the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day. It’s hard to judge hitters until the weather gets warmer. Consider, too, that this is New York, where there’s never a grace period for any athlete in any sport.
But before we panic, remember what former Mets manager Buck Showalter once said: “Always trust a player with a good track record at the back of his baseball card.” The Mets slugger is too good to be this bad, so it’s important to let this season play out.
It’s surprising to see Soto beating himself up with every at-bat. He’s a professional hitter who knows how to handle ups and downs. It could be that he has not been used to being this bad by his standards.
And to be fair, his Met teammates haven’t been great lately with runners in scoring position either. The Mets entered Friday night’s game 7-for-55 with runners in scoring position, and they went 2-for-14 in runners in scoring position against the Dodgers on Friday night–and that includes not scoring with the bases loaded in the 11th and 12th innings.
The Mets make adjustments, like moving Soto to third in the lineup, but in the end, it’s up to him to turn things around. Smart money says he will. This is Juan Soto after all.
