Best of BP: An At-Bat Only Juan Soto Could Have

“Command” is a verb usually reserved for pitchers. They’re the ones who determine how the ball moves and where it ends up. Juan Soto is the exception—there’s no other word to describe his supreme authority over the strike zone. Pitches bend to his will.

Soto commanded the plate better than Hunter Gaddis did in the 10th inning of ALCS Game 5, and that’s the reason why the Yankees are going to the World Series. He has singularly unique skills, and there isn’t another hitter in the world who could’ve won that particular plate appearance against the filth Gaddis was dealing. Let’s take it one pitch at a time.

Pitch One: 89.1 MPH Slider, Ball (1-0)

Gaddis started Soto off with a slider that missed down and in. It wasn’t an especially close pitch, and Soto is going to spit on those every time. His 129 walks and 18.1% walk rate were both second in MLB behind Aaron Judge. They batted second and third in the New York lineup all year and Judge accrued 20 intentional walks while Soto got four fingers just twice, so Soto’s unintentional walk rate led the league.

This pitch was well inside, located more than 4.8 inches off the plate (Savant classifies this as the chase zone, for those familiar). He faced 64 pitches in his kitchen like that this season and he only swung at two of them—both of which were from low-slot lefties with two strikes. Incredibly, he fouled them both off! Every professional hitter is expected to lay off those pitches that far inside, but everyone makes a bad choice from time to time. Hardly anyone has as pristine a record on them as Soto.

A righty like Gaddis has no chance of getting him to swing at that pitch, especially with fewer than two strikes. This was the only noncompetitive pitch he threw.

Pitch Two: 89.8 MPH Slider, Called Strike (1-1)

Soto disagreed with this call, but it was a great pitch by Gattis, just clipping the bottom of the zone. Alan Porter was calling those low strikes on breaking pitches all night, and Tanner Bibee exploited that to locate curveballs at the bottom of the zone when he was untouchable in the early innings.

This was Soto’s fifth plate appearance of the game, so he undoubtedly knew what Porter’s strike zone looked like that day. More importantly, he recognized there wasn’t anything he could do with this pitch other than ground out to end the inning. On a 1-0 count, he made the wise choice to keep his bat on his shoulder and live to see another pitch, even though it meant taking a strike.

This is what SEAGER looks like in real time. This pitch was a strike and he chose not to offer at it, so his z-swing% dropped. It wasn’t a hittable pitch though, and with fewer than two strikes, it’s counterproductive to swing when there’s a low outcome of doing damage. True plate discipline is situational and count-dependent.

Pitch Three: 89.2 MPH Slider, Foul (1-2)

Unlike the previous pitch, this is not Gaddis’ finest work. He threw a third consecutive slider, but this one was a hanger, middle-up. Fortunately for him, Soto was looking for a fastball, so when he got a pitch in a fastball location, he could only get a piece of it to foul it off. Even though it was more or less the same speed as the previous two sliders, it functioned as an offspeed pitch since the batter was looking for something 95 mph.

Soto’s 16.7% strikeout rate is good, but it’s not elite—and that’s for the best. He has exceptional bat control, and it could probably be even better, but he’s not willing to compromise how hard he swings. As a result, his z-contact% is just in the 55th percentile. On a 1-1 pitch, there’s no reason to shorten up to make contact. 59.8% of his swings this season were at least 75 mph, good for 12th in MLB, and his contact rate on competitive swings was 40.0%, which was ninth-best in the league. Of the eight players who ranked above him on competitive swing contact rate, none of them swung 75 mph more than 10.8% of the time. Simply stated, there’s no one else in the game who swings as hard as he does, while making as much contact when swinging his hardest.

All of this goes to show that his 1-1 swing on a hanging breaking pitch wasn’t intended to dink a single over the shortstop’s head. He correctly swung as hard as he could, but he guessed wrong on the pitch speed, which is fine because he had a spare strike to use up.

Pitch Four: 82.0 MPH Changeup, Foul (1-2)

Gaddis finally went away from his slider and threw a beautiful changeup. He located it in the same area as the second pitch, which was a called strike piercing the bottom fringe of the zone. Porter would’ve likely called this the third strike if Soto didn’t take a hack and foul it off. The rules governing swing decisions change with two strikes, but this still wasn’t a pitch Soto could drive. A foul ball was the best possible outcome, and he achieved it.

This was the fifth time Gaddis and Soto faced each other this year—twice in the regular season and three times in the ALCS. It was the 20th total pitch he had seen from him and the 13th in the postseason. The previous 12 in this series included nine sliders and three fastballs. The last time he threw him a changeup was on April 14 when he gave him two of them, but both were outside the strike zone. Having not seen Gaddis’ A-grade change before and not seeing his cambio at all since April, he was able to spoil it when it was tailing away from him and located precisely where Cleveland pitchers had enjoyed success all day long.

Pitch Five: 82.9 MPH Changeup, Foul (1-2)

Let’s talk a little more about Gaddis. In his first full year of relief work, he authored a 1.57 ERA and 0.76 WHIP. His underlying stats aren’t as sparkly—his DRA- was a pedestrian 98—but one way or another, he has kept runners off the basepaths all season. His platoon splits were remarkably identical, as he had a 33:7 strikeout-to-walk ratio in exactly 139 batters faced against both righties and lefties. Opposite-side hitters managed a slash line of .172/.237/.320 against him.

His changeup is a devastating weapon, and lefties hit .077 with a .115 slugging percentage against it. When he spotted it in the upper-outer part of the strike zone to opposite-side hitters this season, it produced either a called or swinging strike every single time—until Soto fouled this one off to stay alive. He became the first left-handed batter to touch his change in that location all year long.

Pitch Six: 90.4 MPH Slider, Foul (1-2)

Gaddis went back to the slider, and he put some anger into it, firing it a tick harder than the first three sliders he threw. It was another fantastic pitch, right on the outside corner. It was the fourth pitch of the at-bat spotted on the lower or outside edge of the zone, and just like the others, it was completely unsmashable. If Soto didn’t want to settle for weak contact, the best he could do is fight it off yet again.

Gaddis’ slider is actually his best pitch, registering a -0.7 PitchPro. Even though it moves in toward lefties, he uses it as his primary offering against them, throwing it 40.4% of the time. Despite throwing 219 of them to left-handed hitters, he only gave up three singles and three doubles and accrued 36 swings-and-misses.

Overall, Gaddis had an 11.5% swinging strike rate this season, which is slightly higher than the MLB average of 11.1%. This slider was the 22nd pitch he had thrown to Soto all year, and he didn’t get him to whiff even once. He was throwing highlight-reel changeups and painted sliders, but he just couldn’t put him away. With his frustration mounting, he decided to give the fastball a try.

Pitch Seven: 95.2 MPH Fastball, Pop the Champagne

This is how a hitter can command the plate—well, it’s how one very special hitter commands the plate. Soto refused to let the at-bat end without the heater he desired, and he wasted four sliders and two changeups to force Gaddis to throw it. When he got what he was looking for, he swung with a degree of violence that no one else can harness as well as he does. Giancarlo Stanton swings with the greatest ferocity and Luis Arraez has the most surgical precision, but no one marries those two traits like Soto, and he does so with baseball’s most discerning eye too.

The ball traveled 402 feet with an exit velocity of 109.7 mph, just a smidge under his 90th-percentile exit velo of 109.9. He might not be the absolute greatest hitter on Earth—though he’s easily in the top five—but no one else could’ve withstood the onslaught of nasty secondaries Gaddis flung at him, then drove his fastball out of the park—not Judge, not Ohtani, not anyone.