Baseball Bytes: How Juan Soto Adapted His Swing to Yankee Stadium
Baseball Bytes: How Juan Soto Adapted His Swing to Yankee Stadium
Plus, the A's go out of Oakland on a more-than-respectable note.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new-ish column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ The Bronx Brings Out Soto's Pull Side
Right after the New York Yankees snagged Juan Soto in a trade last December, I wrote a story with the following headline:
The Pull of Juan Soto Was Irresistible for the New York Yankees. Too Bad He’s Not Really a Pull Hitter.
The premise was simple: Soto theoretically restored a Yankees lineup that had become increasingly reliant on righties in recent seasons back to its roots of left-handed power. But in practice, New York would really only maximize Soto’s potential if he changed who he was as a hitter. Because, unlike the Babe Ruths of yesteryear, Soto had not been taking advantage of his teams’ right-field porches in the past.
As it turns out, though, Soto did adapt to the Bronx — and it’s helping him have the best season of his career.
Let’s dive into the data I was looking at last winter. FanGraphs has a measure that scales a batter’s hit direction rates (pull %, centerfield %, opposite-field %) where the league average is 100. Out of Soto’s first six MLB seasons, he had never posted a pull rate at the league average, and sometimes he wasn’t even close:
Instead, Soto’s penchant was to hit the ball with power to the opposite field or up the middle — an approach that was extremely productive, and impressive for a hitter of his young age, but not necessarily one that would make full use of Yankee Stadium’s high power boost to lefty batters.
The amazing thing in the chart above, however, is that Soto did change his batting style to suit Yankee Stadium. His opposite-field hit rate, which had been falling already, is now 16 percent below league average, the lowest mark of his career. And his center-field tendency dropped from 17 percent above average to 2 percent below average. That made room for a massive jump in his pull rate — from 10 percent below average in his career pre-2024, to 11 percent above average as a Yankee this season.
And just as interestingly, Soto’s Yankee Stadium-centric change has carried over from the Bronx to other ballparks across the league as well. After directing 36.6 percent of his batted balls to the pull side in his career before 2024, he’s upped that rate to 44.3 percent on the road this year, in addition to his 46.5 percent pull rate at home:
Has all of this been a positive trend? Certainly, Soto has never been more productive as a player. He’s tracking for a career-high 8.0 Wins Above Replacement, and Soto’s 177 Weighted Runs Created+ is his highest ever in a full season. But even after taking better advantage of Yankee Stadium with his new approach, Soto still has a slightly higher OPS when hitting to the opposite field (1.269) than when pulling the ball (1.188) this season. You can put him in a new park, but you can’t take the all-fields mastery out of Soto completely.
⚾ Lawrence Butler And The A’s Say Goodbye In Style
Last year’s Oakland A’s were a trainwreck, going 50-112 and setting what we thought was the recent standard for intentionally horrible teams until the 2024 White Sox came along. This season’s version wasn’t supposed to be much better — and it seemed well on its way to another miserable year during its swan song in Oakland (we think) when the team started the season 30-56 through the end of June.
But, perhaps sensing that Oakland fans deserved better memories than that on the way out, the A’s have spent the time since making a midseason turnaround nobody saw coming.
Oakland went into Sunday — yes, a loss to those miserable ChiSox — with a 35-28 record since July 1, easily the club’s best stretch since they blew up the team that went 316-230 and made three playoff appearances from 2018-2021 (what will henceforth be known as the last good Oakland A’s team).
And they’re fun, too. Second-year RF Lawrence Butler had a 3-homer game a few weeks ago, then last week made a catch that even he didn’t believe he made:
Closer Mason Miller has a Statcast percentile chart that is almost entirely maxed out:
CF JJ Bleday has been one of the league’s most pleasant surprises, tracking for 3.1 WAR, and DH Brent Rooker (5.5 WAR/162) is building on last year’s breakout with his finest season yet.
The point is, these A’s are a lot more enjoyable — and a lot better — than the crew that was losing so much when the team first announced its plans to leave Oakland. The whole vibe around that time was so negative that the team had one its best home attendance figures of the year in a “reverse boycott” designed to show out in protest of ownership.
This year’s team, by contrast, is all about appreciating the end of a special era and the memories it contained — while making a few new ones for the road.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.