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Juan Soto’s free agency was the offseason’s biggest storyline for good reason. It concluded Sunday evening with a colossal 15-year, $765MM deal with the Mets, which is now official. Soto brings with him a résumé that’ll almost certainly send him to Cooperstown in a couple decades.
Soto wouldn’t be a Hall of Famer if he retired tomorrow. He doesn’t have the requisite 10 seasons of major league action for consideration and he obviously hasn’t accrued HOF-caliber counting stats in just seven years. Yet he’s about as much of a lock for future induction as a player can possibly get by the time he turns 26.
The accolades are already beginning to stack up. Soto has yet to win an MVP award, but he’s finished in the top 10 in five of his six full seasons. He has a trio of top five placements. He’s been named to the All-Star Game four years running and would’ve gotten a fifth nod had the Midsummer Classic been played in 2020. Soto carries an ongoing streak of five consecutive Silver Slugger awards.
The statistical profile is eye-popping. Through his first 936 career games, Soto is a .285/.421/.532 hitter. The .953 OPS puts him in rarified air. Soto is tied with Todd Helton for 23rd on the career OPS leaderboard. That was enough to get Helton, who played his home games at Coors Field at a time when offense was much higher around the league, into Cooperstown. Helton had a career 133 OPS+ after adjusting for the park and league setting. Soto is rocking a 160 OPS+ despite the identical raw slash line.
Players with this kind of rate production are locks for the Hall of Fame unless they taint their case with performance-enhancing drug ties. 19 of the top 25 hitters in career OPS are Hall of Famers. Aaron Judge, Mike Trout and Soto are still playing. The only retired hitters among that group who aren’t in Cooperstown: Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez and Mark McGwire. Needless to say, they’re not excluded because their numbers weren’t good enough.
A .953 OPS is well above the general bar for induction. Most players who are in the top 100 are Hall of Famers. Landing among the top 75 makes a hitter a near-lock (barring PED connections). Even if Soto lost .050 points of OPS over the rest of his career — which seems unlikely — he’d still be above the likes of Miguel Cabrera, Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts.
Any kind of precipitous drop shouldn’t happen soon. There are plenty of Hall of Famers whose production plummeted in the final three to five seasons of their careers. Even if Soto doesn’t avoid that fate, the short-term numbers are more likely to continue climbing than fall. He’s arguably at the beginning of his prime. This past season was probably the best full season of his career. He topped 40 homers for the first time, finished one RBI off his career high, and set a new best with 7.9 wins above replacement (bWAR). Soto’s rate stats were unquestionably better in the shortened 2020 season, but this was as effective as he’s been over any 162-game schedule.
Youth was one of the biggest selling points in his record-setting free agent trip. Very few hitters have been this productive through their mid-20s. Soto has 201 career homers, tied for seventh all time through a player’s age-25 season. He’s 15th in runs batted in through the same age. Among hitters with at least 2000 plate appearances before their 26th birthday, Soto is 12th in on-base percentage. Of the 11 players above him, only Frank Thomas has played in the last 50 years. This kind of plate discipline so early in a hitter’s career is truly generational.
