Juan Soto's history-making and record-breaking free agency is over. Sunday night, the superstar outfielder reportedly agreed to terms with the New York Mets on a 15-year contract worth $765 million. The deal includes no deferred money, an opt-out clause after five years and the chance for the total price to end up north of $800 million. If we weren't only one winter removed from Shohei Ohtani's $700 million pact with the Dodgers, all of this would be nigh unthinkable. Thinkable it is, though. That's what happens when two spending heavyweights like the Yankees and Mets -- plus supporting roles from the Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Dodgers -- get in a bidding war over the most coveted free agent ever.
This brings to mind many things, chief among them: What makes Soto so valuable even compared to prior superstar free agents?
Broadly speaking, two things make Soto such a singular talent: his relentless excellence at the plate and his youth. Soto, you see, is not only one of the best hitters in all of baseball, but he's also exceptionally young as frontline free agents go. He made his major-league debut for the Nationals back in May of 2018 at the age of 19 years and 207. Most players at such a young age are toiling away in the lowest rungs of the minors. Soto, though, put up a 3.0 WAR season in that age-19 campaign and began accruing major-league service time. Since he topped six years of MLB service time earlier this season with the Yankees, he's a free agent despite not turning 26 until late October of this year, which means he's coming off his age-25 season. In other words, the Mets figure to enjoy him at the peak of his skills for years to come. That foundation of excellence means he's going to remain a highly productive hitter even after, many years from now, his decline phase sets in.
Those kinds of players -- excellence in tandem with youth -- don't come along very often, to say the least. Nothing puts a finer point on the strength of Soto's market like a list of historical comparables. Dig up the few players who have done what he's done at the plate and done it by age 26, and you find he's in the company of baseball greatness.
Speaking of which, let's put names to that idea by looking at Soto's fellow travelers throughout baseball history according to certain insightful statistical measures. To capture that other essential component of Soto's market appeal, we'll be tailoring our leaderboards to players up through their age-25 seasons. Let's jump in.
WAR
WAR, or wins above replacement, is the best public-facing measure of total on-field player worth that we have. WAR is an all-encompassing stat that attempts to measure a position player's or pitcher's total value. For position players, this means hitting, base-running and fielding are taken into account. Soto through his age-25 campaign of 2024 has a career WAR of 36.4. Yes, he has given away some value in the field and on the bases, but his overwhelming offensive accomplishments more than make up for those deficits. As well, Soto is uncommonly durable. He played in 157 games this past season, all 162 in 2023, and he's topped 150 games played in each of the last four seasons.
According to the very excellent Stathead tool at Baseball-Reference, just 20 position players in the Integrated Era of MLB (i.e., since 1947) have put up a WAR of at least 30 through their age-25 campaigns. Soto ranks 10th on that list in WAR. Peruse that list, and you'll find names like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Mickey Mantle, Mike Trout, Ken Griffey Jr., Rickey Henderson, Cal Ripken Jr., Al Kaline, Mookie Betts, and others. Even at the bottom end, it's a deeply encouraging set of names when it comes to the kind of career value Soto will probably wind up amassing.
OPS+
Here's another area in which Soto shines. OPS+ is a hitter's OPS adjusted to reflect home ballpark and league environment. It's scaled so that a mark of 100 is league average, and the higher the mark the better from the hitter's standpoint. An OPS+ of 110 means that the hitter's park- and league-adjusted OPS was 10% better than the league mean. Likewise, an OPS+ of 90 means that the hitter's park- and league-adjusted OPS was 10% worse than the league mean and so on.
Soto presently has a career OPS+ of 160. Among active players, just Mike Trout and Aaron Judge at 173 have higher career marks (minimum 3,000 plate appearances). As for age-appropriate comparables, just 11 hitters in the Integrated Era have managed an OPS+ of 150 or greater through their age-25 seasons (minimum 2,000 plate appearances). Soto ranks sixth among those 11 hitters, and the five ahead of him are Frank Thomas, Mantle, Trout, Pujols, and Dick Allen. That, to say the least, is enviable company.
Home runs
What makes Soto an elite batsman? It's his power and patience, meaning he's adept at the two most important things a hitter can do -- hitting home runs and getting on base. On the power front, Soto went into free agency with 201 career home runs, which comes to 35 homers per 162 games played. As with the above, we won't make our bottom end point overly kind to Soto. In this instance, we find that just 25 players in the Integrated Era hit at least 150 home runs through their age-25 seasons. Soto's 201 is tied for fifth on this list, alongside Trout and Pujols and behind Alex Rodriguez (241), Eddie Mathews (222), Mantle (207), and Frank Robinson (202). He's ahead of pantheon-dwellers like Griffey Jr., Aaron, Mays, and Johnny Bench.
Walks
On the subject of Soto's best-in-class plate discipline, we have the matter of his walks. Once again sorting by hitters through their age-25 seasons, Soto is one of just seven who logged 500 or more walks over that span. Soto's 769 free passes tops the list by a comfy margin. The second-place "walker," Mantle, is a tidy 99 walks behind Soto. The other pitch-takers on the list are Eddie Yost, Bryce Harper, Trout, Mathews, and Rickey Henderson. Also, let's give Soto his flowers for, it says here, being the first hitter in baseball history to make taking pitches good television. That's of course thanks to the peerless "Soto Shuffle" he demonstrates when taking a pitch outside the zone.
All of this is to say, at some length, that Soto went into the free-agent market as a historically rare and historically excellent kind of hitter -- one who thrives at the essentials like few others have at such an age and one who should continue thriving for many years to come. That's why his his contract with the Mets is such a sky-scraping one. More amazing still is that he's almost certainly going to justify the investment.
What it means for Juan Soto's future
Something else that makes Soto so special is his ability to swing fast and hit the ball hard while also limiting his strikeouts. As power hitters go, particularly in this current high-strikeout era, being able to make contact consistently while also crushing the ball is an elusive combination of skills. Soto, though, has it. This past season, for instance, he ranked in the 94th percentile in bat speed and the 98th percentile in average exit velocity. Even so, he managed to rank in the 79th percentile in strikeout rate. Being able to do all that is part of why he projects so well moving forward into the long-term future. The rare hitters who can blend batted-ball authority with contact tend to age very well.
On that front, Soto for his career has clocked more walks (769) than strikeouts (696). Remove the intentional free passes from his total, and he still has more walks than strikeouts. Of those 25 hitters in the Integrated Era who stacked up at least 150 homers through age 25, just five hitters -- Mathews, Mantle, Pujols, Mays, and Soto -- had more walks than strikeouts at that point in their respective careers. Limit it to unintentional walks, and Soto is the only one to have more bases on balls than strikeouts. That's remarkable in any context. Making Soto's combination of discipline and power even more astounding is that since he's been in the league, MLB hitters have racked up 265,613 strikeouts against just 95,023 unintentional walks. That comes to a ratio of 2.8 strikeouts for every unintentional walk. So Soto is achieving this at a time when league trends are thoroughly hostile to such efforts.
Soto's 15-year deal with the Mets will run through his age-40 season. Of the four hitters keeping company with him on the power-and-plate discipline front, just two of them, Mays and Pujols, lasted at least through age 40 in the majors. Mays is the encouraging one. From age 36 through 40, he put up a 141 OPS+ and a 25.2 WAR. Pujols fared much worse over that span, but of course he rallied at age 42 to have one of the great final campaigns in MLB history.
On other levels, Soto also projects to age well because he hits with power to all fields. Often, hitters in decline will sell out for pull power as a last measure, and Soto thanks to his foul-pole-to-foul-pole excellence still has that available to him. In the end you have a a hitter who punishes the ball without whiffing and can do damage to every single part of the ballpark. Telling the future is impossible, but everything about Soto says the back end of his contract won't be a burden for the Mets. Heck, it may even be the opposite of that -- so singular is the hitter named Juan Soto.
