In Appreciation of Juan Soto

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that, to put it lightly, Juan Soto is incredibly good at baseball. Still just 25 (26 later in October), Soto is all but certain to sign a record-setting contract this offseason upon hitting free agency. Soto’s gaudy batted ball metrics underscore the high ceiling of his capabilities while his approach at the plate foreshadows a skillset that will age gracefully. However, what follows is not about the substantial contract Soto is soon to sign, but rather about one key aspect of his production and how he stacks up against his peers, past and present.

The issue with writing about Juan Soto is that there is no shortage of accolades to choose from. However, for the sake of brevity, one must choose. As this is an appreciation post, it makes some sense to look specifically into what perhaps is Soto’s defining characteristic and strength, his patience. Even looking specifically into Soto’s patience, there is a lot of latitude to laud him. His BB% is in the 100% percentile of Statcast; his Chase% in merely the 98th. Soto’s Swing% by Zone is equally impressive, and highlights his elite blend of patience and selectivity.

Here, the focus is as simplistic as possible: his ratio of walks to strikeouts. For his career, Soto has walked more than he has struck out, a fact that gets seemingly overshadowed even when considering it in the context of the era he plays in. Put simply, walking more the striking out has become something of an endangered occurrence as the following chart illustrates.

Since the mound was lowered following the 1968 season (the Year of the Pitcher), the number of players who have drawn more walks than struck out annually has been in sharp decline. Within that broader trend, there have been a couple key inflection points. In fact, such player-seasons were only in modest decline from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s; from there though, the prevalence of these types of seasons plummeted. By 2010, another season sometimes referred to as the Year of the Pitcher, 1+ BB:K ratio players were so rare that the league-wide trend couldn’t decline anymore without disappearing entirely.

In fact, just one player had a 1+ BB:K ratio in 2021, keeping the string of seasons with at least qualifying player alive: Juan Soto.

It’s additionally worth noting that, among those players with 1+ BB:K ratios on any given season, the quality of those BB:K ratios has been decreasing as well.

While the qualifying player-seasons of decades past have typically included players with considerably more walks than strikeouts —roughly 1.3 walks per strikeout— more recently qualifiers are only just eking out a ratio greater than 1:1. That degradation in average BB:K ratios among even the elite players is driven by a rise in walks as well as strikeouts among qualifiers. However, average strikeout totals have been rising at a faster clip.

The inclusion of these charts is intended to provide context. This era of pitching is largely prohibitive of players who manage to walk more than they strikeout and, despite that, Juan Soto has managed to walk more than he has struck out in his entire career. In fact, despite having only just wrapped up his age-25 season, Soto has walked more than he has struck out in each of the last 5 seasons. This streak means Soto has the most such seasons among all active players.

That quantity hasn’t come at the expense of quality either. Soto’s average 1+ BB:K season features a higher ratio (1.24) than any other active player with more than one qualifying season, again putting him at odds with the broader trend.

Given Soto’s age and track record, it is fair to project Soto to tack on more 1+ BB:K seasons in the coming years. Whether or not he is able to reach a top-15 list —pictured below— from the lowered mound era is another question, but the pace he is setting is an impressive one (The leader since 1969, Rickey Henderson, had four 1+ BB:K seasons through his age-25 season, one less than Soto).

This post is as much about the state of baseball as Juan Soto. Still, players —and people more generally— are heavily influenced by their environments. And in MLB’s current swing-and-miss heavy environment, Soto has bucked the overwhelming trend and thus illustrated the durability of arguably his most distinctive skillset. While his power is the louder —and more prized in this era— skill, Soto’s profile is bolstered and rounded out by an elite ability that is something of a throwback.