Juan Soto Is Perfect for the Yankees; What About Yankee Stadium?
The Short Porch, Pulled Fly Balls, and Soto's Hitting Philosophy
The Perfect Fit
The Yankees were bad on offense in 2023. Injuries played a big role, but that doesn’t make it any easier for fans to stomach. New York hit homers and drew walks at some strong clips, but they also struck out a lot and didn’t steal many bases. Overall, they ranked 19th in wRC+.
(note playoff teams are highlighted in yellow).
The Yankees finished last year with a .304 OBP, which ranked 27th in the majors (and barely ahead of the A’s/Royals).
Enter Soto, who has posted an OBP over .400 in every season of his career, including some outrageous marks in 2020 (.490) and 2021 (.465). The former World Series champion also has the most walks of any player through an age-24 campaign.
He’s a fit on any offense, but especially for a roster who gave far too many plate appearances to quad-A hitters in 2023. Look at the Yankees’ PA leaders from last year!
Things get even worse from a team-level perspective when zooming in on New York’s outfielders in 2023. Even including Aaron Judge they ranked last in batting average, 28th in OBP, and 24th in K%.
The other black hole from the Yankee lineup last year was left-handed hitters. Anthony Rizzo was off to a strong start before suffering a concussion in late-May, and aside from him the most playing time for lefty bats came via Jake Bauers, Willie Calhoun, and Billy McKinney.
The group ranked 29th in AVG and OBP. They were bottom-7 in SLG, K%, and wRC+. Outside of a healthy Rizzo, an aging Brett Gardner, and a memorable half-season from Matt Carpenter in 2022, the Yankees have gone years without sufficient offensive production from the left side — failing to take full advantage of the short porch in right field, which brings us to….
Ballpark Boost?
Juan Soto in Yankee Stadium. The short porch. A venue that’s also known as a little league park. Surely we can head over to Baseball Savant and see that he would’ve hit a ton more homers had he played all his home games in the Bronx, right?
Quite the contrary. Soto popped 35 homers in 2023, and Statcast tells us he would’ve hit 27 if every home game was played in Yankee Stadium, which is his second-lowest total of any ballpark according to the metric. Only Pittsburgh would’ve been lower.
The above image shows Soto’s 2023 batted balls sprayed over Yankee Stadium, and you might find yourself counting how many more homers he would’ve had over that short porch. Without getting too into the weeds I’ll note that Savant’s xHR metric considers environmental factors not shown on the graphic. Regardless, even if you’re only considering Yankee Stadium’s park dimensions, Soto’s homer total with every game in the Bronx would’ve only been 30 — still lower than the 35 he actually hit.
How can this be? The reason is that Yankee Stadium is so deep out to left and left-center field, especially relative to where the right field fence sits. While lefties do typically hit a lot of pulled homers in the park, the overall environment is actually one of the weakest for left-handed bats.
The issue is worsened for Soto, who pulled just 18.9% of his fly balls in 2023, which ranked 163rd out of 196 hitters with at least 100 fly balls.
That means a whopping 4 out of every 5 fly balls Soto hit last year went to left or center field, which are the last places you want to be hitting them in Yankee Stadium (which then explains the xHR metric).
For comparison, Soto’s career pulled fly ball rate is just 17.8%, and he hasn’t been above last year’s mark since 2020.
To me, the question isn’t if Yankee Stadium is a perfect fit for the to-date version of Juan Soto, because it isn’t. The question is “can this generational hitter shift his approach to pull more fly balls, especially given his new home park context?” And also, does he WANT to change his approach? For years Joey Votto seemed to sacrifice maximum power output in order to trust his process of only swinging at perfect pitches.
Soto has massive homer upside in New York, but will he reach it? I think he also has big upside when it comes to runs scored, if he hits in front of Aaron Judge and sticks to his OBP-focused ways, but that won’t get as much attention as his power ceiling.
I definitely don’t want the takeaway from this piece to be “Yankee Stadium isn’t good for Juan Soto”, because he could run hot with short porch homers or decide to start aiming for it. But the move isn’t as much of a guaranteed homer boost as one might expect, and that’s worth factoring in to our Soto valuations throughout draft season.