Juan Soto’s Patience Is a Virtue

“Juan Soto hates swinging.” That’s a takeaway you’re sure to hear if you follow baseball this winter. His free agency is the biggest story of the next few months, and his offensive approach drives fans to distraction. Walks aren’t all that fun, and Soto feasts on them. How could you not bring it up when your team is pursuing him for a record-breaking deal?

From a certain standpoint, it’s true that Soto hates swinging. Of the 101 batters who saw at least 1,500 pitches with zero or one strikes this past season, Soto ranked 99th in swing rate on those pitches. When he isn’t defending the plate with two strikes, he spends a ton of time with the bat on his shoulder.

That’s not a specific enough way of looking at it, though. For an example, let’s chop the strike zone up into pieces. Soto saw 675 pitches that weren’t in the strike zone or even near it – what Baseball Savant defines as the chase and waste zones. He swung at 6.5% of those, 42nd out of the 44 batters who saw 500 or more such pitches. He was almost never fooled into swinging at awful pitches, in other words.

Next consider the edges of the zone – pitches that are either barely strikes or barely balls. There aren’t a lot of good options on these pitches. Hitters don’t generally crush the ball when it’s located on the corners, unless they’re sitting on either a pitch or a location. Sure, if you’re looking high and away, you might tag it, but more likely you’ll swing and miss or make weak contact. Soto swung at 31.3% of these pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball.

Those pitches in the chase and waste zones? You shouldn’t swing at them. There, Soto’s patience is an obvious asset. The ones on the borderline? It’s less obvious. There are great hitters who take an expansive approach to borderline pitches, like Bobby Witt Jr. and Yordan Alvarez. There are awful hitters who do it too, as you’d expect. Swinging too much at offerings we call “pitcher’s pitches” is pretty clearly not going to pan out every time.

Likewise, discretion is no guarantee of valor. There are great hitters who, like Soto, mostly let these pitches go. Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber fit the bill. It’s not just high-walk-rate sluggers, either; Matt Chapman, Adley Rutschman, Nolan Arenado, and even Randy Arozarena behave this way. On the other hand, plenty of bad hitters take borderline pitches and are still bad.

That just leaves us the white hot center of the strike zone. You should swing at these! Guess what? Soto does. He’s middle of the pack here, swinging at 60% of pitches over the heart of the plate. He’s a devastating hitter when he takes a cut at those pitches, too. He barreled up 29.8% of his balls in play, the third-highest rate in baseball — Judge and Shohei Ohtani were tied at 33.8%. Soto swung and missed far less frequently than those guys, and less than league average. That’s not to say he’s a perfect hitter – he still hits too many grounders, for one thing – but it’s hard to knock his approach.

Think of it this way: Swings before two strikes are offensive weapons. Two-strike swings are complicated. Many of them are defensive, desperate stabs at preventing a strikeout. But you shouldn’t take a defensive swing before that. What’s the point? And if you’re looking to do damage, you should swing at pitches right down the middle. That’s just simple logic.

More than half of Soto’s swings before reaching two strikes came on pitches over the heart of the plate. That’s exactly what you’d want if you were designing an approach from scratch. Soto doesn’t swing at bad pitches. He does swing at good pitches, and he smashes them when he connects; he slugged .903 on those balls. The only hitter in all of baseball to do more damage over the heart of the plate and take a higher percentage of his swings at crushable balls was Judge, who just had the best non-Bonds season of the 21st century.

It’s not exclusively about location. Soto is looking for fastballs, and he’s looking for fastballs up. Since the start of his career, he’s been the fourth-best hitter in baseball when dealing with fastballs up in the zone. Not the fourth-best player when he swings, mind you: the fourth-best overall. Only Judge, Ohtani, and Corey Seager have been better. He’s batting .366 and slugging .813 against them. That’s the same batting average Luis Arraez has on those pitches – and a slugging percentage 350 points higher. Is that something you might be interested in?

Sure, Soto is taking some hittable pitches, but it’s hard to argue with the results here. We’re not talking about Lars Nootbaar, who swings at fastballs over the heart of the plate less than pretty much everyone else. We’re not even talking about Schwarber, the archetypical discerning slugger. Over the past three years, Soto swings more often, makes more contact, hits the ball harder when he connects, and barrels the ball up more frequently.

Truthfully, that’s exactly the approach I’d look for in an ideal hitter: Swing a good amount at the ones where you tend to do damage and take ones that aren’t to your liking. The problem with this approach is that you can’t just keep taking pitches forever. Eventually you hit two strikes, and the game changes; now, if you let those pitcher’s pitches go by, you’ll strike out.

Soto makes the obvious adjustment: He swings a lot more with two strikes. He swung at 85.7% of the two-strike pitches he saw in the zone, roughly league average (88.5%). Meanwhile, he spits on bad pitches – he swung at only 14.3% of chase/waste pitches with two strikes this year, the third-lowest mark in baseball. The only two guys better? Judge — he was truly outrageous this year — and Jesse Winker. Winker was dead last in zone swing rate with two strikes, though, and got a bundle of called strikeouts for his trouble. Winker struck out looking 50 times to Soto’s 33 despite batting 200 fewer times.

In fact, Soto is one of the best hitters in baseball with two strikes. This year, he batted .194/.324/.362 in two-strike counts. That might not sound good. In a vacuum, it’s not. But the league bats .168/.244/.264 with two strikes. Soto’s batting line was good for sixth in baseball in such situations, and that probably understates it; he underperformed his contact quality and ran one of the lowest BABIPs in baseball in those counts despite hitting a ton of line drives.

Soto’s two-strike excellence is partially batting eye, it’s partially feel for contact, and it’s partially his ability to hit for power without sacrificing either of those other things – no one in baseball ran a higher barrel rate combined with a higher contact rate. Out of 184 batters to see 500 or more pitches in two-strike counts, Soto’s slugging percentage was 15th. His on-base percentage was eighth. Only Judge and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. outdid him by both measures.

Knowing that Soto is an elite two-strike hitter informs a lot about his behavior earlier in the count. As we’ve already covered, he’s patient early, hunting for good pitches to drive and mostly ignoring everything else. For someone like Tyler O’Neill or Cal Raleigh, to name two perfectly good hitters, this would be a bad plan. They’re both prone to two-strike heartbreak; they strike out a ton and put up poor numbers after falling behind in the count.

For high-strikeout hitters, letting hittable pitches pass by comes with huge downsides. Imagine a fastball on the low and outside corner. Batters do quite poorly when putting those in play; batters posted a .300 wOBA in that location in 2024, miles below their mark overall (.363) and on pitches in the strike zone (.381). There are a lot of rolled-over grounders, weak flares, and popups to be found when you swing at something down and away. It’s a bad way to do business.

If you’re a hitter in the O’Neill or Raleigh mold, though, taking the pitch is no walk in the park either. If you can’t defend the plate like Soto with two strikes, the best defense is never getting into that situation. Given that, taking a hittable pitch is a cardinal sin for those guys. Even letting a marginally hittable pitch go by is probably a bad idea. The worse a given hitter is with two strikes, the more important it is for him to make contact before then.

That’s the whole deal with Soto. It’s less disadvantageous for him to reach two-strike counts, so he can afford to let low-upside pitches go, even if they’ll lead to a pitcher’s count. What’s more, the upside of hitting a pitch is phenomenally high; he had the fourth-highest xwOBA on contact in the whole game this year. He’s not a slap hitter looking to draw walks; he’s a power hitter looking for fastballs to unload on. Swinging at a bad pitch could undo all of that, so he’s rightly choosy about when he swings when his back isn’t against the wall.

I came up with a stylized scenario as an example of why Soto’s two-strike prowess leads him to be more patient early in the count. Let’s say Soto and O’Neill are each in a 1-1 count. They’re trying to decide whether to swing at a pitch. Let’s further say that pitch is borderline – their eyes tell them it’s probably, but not definitely, a strike. For the sake of math, let’s say the pitch has a 70% strike probability and a 30% ball probability if they don’t swing. We have a few relevant variables here: whiff rate, foul ball rate, and production after 2-1 and 1-2 counts. If we fix foul ball rate at 40%, we can approximate our players like so, using career numbers for their splits to account for the sample size:

That leaves us a simple equation. On one side, we have the result of not swinging: strike probability times wOBA in 1-2 counts plus ball probability times wOBA in 2-1 counts. On the other side, we have the result of swinging: whiff rate times 1-2 wOBA plus foul rate times 1-2 wOBA plus (one minus those two) times wOBA on contact.

Let’s use O’Neill’s numbers to see how this works. If he takes, he’s looking at 70% times a .221 wOBA plus 30% times a .367 wOBA, or a net .265 wOBA expectation. On the other side of the equation, we’ve got 24.4% times that .221 mark, 40% also times that .221 mark, and then 35.6% (100% – 24.4% – 40%) times his wOBA on contact. We’re solving for that required wOBA on contact to make things even. That comes out to .344 for O’Neill. In other words, if he’s producing a .344 wOBA when he makes fair contact, he should be indifferent between swinging and taking. If he thinks he can do better than that based on the pitch type and location, he should always swing. If he thinks he’ll do worse, he should always take.

O’Neill’s breakeven wOBACON is .344. The league average is .315. This makes sense to me. He’s Tyler O’Neill. His special skill is power on contact. He can’t accept some weak expected contact, even if the alternative is ending up in a 1-2 count where he struggles. Someone like Paul DeJong, with strikeout issues but less power, checks in right around average at .316. Patrick Bailey, to pick someone I’ve watched quite a lot of over the past two years, notches a .284 breakeven wOBACON. In other words, two-strike counts are so bad for him that he should be willing to accept even some bad swings early if they help him avoid falling too deeply in the hole.

Then there’s Soto. Getting into two-strike counts has never affected him as much as your average hitter, as we already covered. The worst thing he could do is make some weak contact; for him, a grounder or popup is miles worse than falling behind 1-2. His breakeven wOBACON is a whopping .381. In other words, he shouldn’t swing if he isn’t expecting to clobber the ball, which is exactly what he does.

I don’t think this exact math is going through his head every time he swings. There’s no way hitters are doing equations and matching them to their own behavior. But the point remains: Soto’s skills make him particularly suited to a wait-and-pounce approach. He’s behaving just that way, and I don’t think that’s an accident.

So when you hear that Soto doesn’t swing enough, that he’s chasing walks at the expense of overall production, remember this article. Soto’s approach isn’t cowardly. It isn’t taking the easy way out. He’s just so good at escaping two-strike counts that he shouldn’t settle for so-so swings early in plate appearances. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but Soto did it perfectly in 2024.