On opening day 2024, Juan Soto is going to be on his third team within the last three seasons.
Think about that. Like, really think about it, because it comes close to defying the laws of nature. Juan Soto is as close to a unicorn as you get in Major League Baseball and somehow two different organizations have capitulated to external forces to such a degree that they made their unicorn available to the highest bidder.
Soto deservedly earns comparisons to Ted Williams. He’s not yet 25 and is (somewhat literally) walking not just a Hall of Fame path, but a relatively inner circle one. In the post-integration era, no current Hall of Famer played for three different organizations through their age-25 season. None. Gary Sheffield and Sammy Sosa would qualify, if elected. The difference? Sheffield and Sosa barely cleared 9.0 rWAR through their age-25 seasons; Soto is at 28.6, and hasn’t started his. It’s not that there haven’t been players this good or better this early in their careers. It’s that their original team (or even one other one) knew exactly what they had and that it was worth holding onto.
Soto is the epitome, the apex, the zenith, the…whatever word you like for tippy-top guy when it comes to executing the modern offensive strategies of the game. Just last week Robert Orr took a look at the Padres and Astros 2023 offense through the lens of the selective-aggression metric he created named SEAGER. Let’s take a gander at where Soto checked in:
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