An examination of the remarkable consistency of Juan Soto

Juan Soto is on track to have his best season of his young career, and it has somehow been a relatively quiet storyline of the Yankees’ season. The hitting prodigy has been overshadowed a bit by his protection in the lineup. Aaron Judge is carrying a dizzying 214 wRC+ and chasing his second 60-homer season in three years. That is a tough act to compete against, even when you rank second in most weighted statistics including wRC+.

However, I believe there is another factor at play: Soto’s steadiness has made his season feel ordinary. He was great in his Yankee debut in Houston back in late March and has essentially been a consistent drumbeat since. It hasn’t been necessary for our Pinstripe Alley team to do a video breakdown to figure out what might be wrong with his swing, and there has never been the excitement of a “Juan Soto is back” moment this season because his bat has never left him.

On a team full of players that have gone through extreme peaks and valleys—even including Judge—Soto has delivered week in, and week out. FanGraphs’ split tool lets you break down players by week, operating on a Monday-to-Sunday schedule. Here is his weekly wRC+ for his 20 weeks as a Yankee:

It’s been a long season!

Along with his ability to produce in big moments, reliability has been the defining characteristic of Soto at the plate this year. While there have been some variation and flows in his weekly performance, the range has mostly sat between great and beyond elite. Not counting this current incomplete week, he has had only one week this year where his wRC+ was lower than 97.

To see if this weekly consistency is typical for top hitters, let’s compare him to the other four qualified players who are top-five in wRC+: Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Bobby Witt Jr., and, you guessed it, Brent Rooker. The first thing I wanted to check, inspired by a FanGraphs analysis by Justin Choi, was the standard deviation of their weekly wRC+ numbers. A lower value indicates that the data set is more tightly clustered to the player’s mean wRC+. Aaron Judge’s wRC+ ranged from -19 and 15 in the weeks of March and early April to 374 and 373 late July and early August, giving him the highest standard deviation of the group at 114.6.

In addition, to attempt to capture how bad the star player’s weekly “floor” has been this season, I calculated the mean of the bottom five wRC+ weeks for each player.

*I set a minimum for 16 plate appearances, figuring it shows they played at least more than half the games that week.

To demonstrate that the consistency is not just with outcomes but with quality of contact, I’ve also included Soto’s rolling numbers, per 25 plate appearances for his expected wOBA.

As a brief explainer, rolling charts show how the player has done in the past X amount of plate appearances (in this case, 25). Soto had one slight moment in early April where it dipped below league average. The graph is not a straight line, but it shows his floor is still really high for making good contact.

Soto currently has the second-best xwOBA since Statcast began tracking in 2015, excluding the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, with only this year’s Judge ahead of him. To give a frame of reference of his xwOBA, Corey Seager has a .399 xwOBA, which is in the 96 percentile of players. Soto, as you can see, clears that marker in his rolling graph for the majority of the time.

Looking at other time frames, like game logs, it tells a similar story. On a per-game basis Juan Soto has reached base 101 times out of his 112 games. His monthly splits are, as expected, all extremely productive. Even in his weakest month, May, he produced a .985 OPS.

Looking at other splits, there don’t seem to be many variables that impact him. He has been the same hitter at home and on the road (with a wRC+ of 186 and 185, respectively), and he’s now more balanced in platoon splits, with only a 10-point difference in wRC+, closing the career gap where he had previously favored righties by 37 points. Whether it’s the city, month, or the throwing hand of the pitcher, there haven’t been any factors that have slowed him down.

Soto has had stretches in his career where he wasn’t hitting like himself, particularly at various points during the past two seasons with San Diego. And yet his lowest monthly wRC+ was 101 in July 2021. Given his ability to consistently draw walks, he maintains a solid statistical floor even when his slugging dips.

For a team that has seen all three units run hot and cold this year, Soto has provided much-needed stability. Here’s hoping that I didn’t just jinx him with my magical blogging powers.

All cited statistics within this article are active as of the morning of August 8th.