Juan Soto's bat speed is down with Mets. How much? And will it matter?

New York Times

16-05-2025

When Juan Soto steps to the plate this weekend in the Subway Series, he'll be missing something. Not the camaraderie of his former New York Yankees teammates, or the protection of any legendary right-handed hitters — research suggests that protection comes from people being on base in front of you more than who's hitting behind you — and certainly not any zeroes in the bank account. What he'll be missing is some bat speed.
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Soto's bat speed is down more than almost any other major-league hitter. Among qualified batters, only Josh Naylor (minus-2.6 mph) has lost more.
As much as some would like to point to the bottom of the bat speed list and some of the good hitters down there (Luis Arraez and Jacob Wilson, among others), bat speed is tightly correlated to power. It takes good bat speed to meet all that pitch velocity coming in, after all.
WE ALL KNOW BAT SPEED MATTERS BUT MY GOODNESS Home Run Rate vs. Bat Speed (MPH) Over half a million swings via Statcast pic.twitter.com/w5xFXnkYQV
— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) May 8, 2025
But the very top of the bat speed list is not a list of the very best hitters in the league, even if it does contain some of the very best hitters in the league (Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso are all in the top 10). And this list of the biggest bat speed losers in the league is not a list of hitters who are all uniformly struggling.
Willy Adames, Michael Harris and Mark Vientos have indeed seen relative power outages so far this season, and this may be part of their struggles. But Francisco Lindor and Josh Naylor seem to be humming right along. But if you look closer at Lindor and Naylor's batted-ball stats, you'll see that they, too, aren't hitting as many Barrels or reaching the upper levels of exit velocity like they did last year.
Heliot Ramos is really the only big bat speed dropper who has seen almost no drop in his power as a result of his decrease in bat speed, and he provides our first clue that maybe this isn't the end of days for Soto. Both Ramos and Soto went from 75-plus mph bat speed (top-25 type bat speed) to 73-plus mph bat speed (still top-75 and well above the league's 71.6 mph average). Soto has premium bat speed even after the drop.
Still, a 2 mph drop in bat speed, at age 26, would be an anomaly when you look at how bat speed ages. Tom Tango, lead data architect at MLB, showed this aging curve, which suggests that Soto should barely have lost any quickness to age this offseason.
#Statcast Aging Curve for Swing Speed
I wouldn't pay too much attention to very left of chart. I'd just treat it swing speed is roughly flat until roughly age 31. After that, drop is quick
Which makes sense with everything we know. We didn't know the magnitude. Now we do. pic.twitter.com/Nh4p5jKmdL
— Tangotiger 🍁 (@tangotiger) April 22, 2024
Here's a weird thing, though, that doesn't seem like it might matter, but has outsized importance given how bat speed is measured: Soto, last year, pulled the ball more than he ever had before. He has a natural opposite-field swing, and perhaps because of that short porch in Yankee Stadium, he made a tweak to his approach and had a great season. His pull percentage went up 6 percentage points over his career norms, to a career high, which was the culmination of a career spent trying to pull the ball more.
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'I started with middle-away power, and now I'm starting to pull more,' Soto told me in 2019. 'It's a little bit tougher for me, but I'm getting it now. Since I was a little kid, I always hit the ball that way.'
Soto was getting the ball out in front more in 2024. Bat speed is measured right before the point of contact (or where the ball and bat would've met on misses). Giving the bat more time to get up to speed means that bat speed will be higher the more out in front of the plate contact is made. The list of the fastest swings in baseball is generally a list of the longest swings in baseball. Check out the relationship between Soto's bat speed and his point of contact, which in the table below is measured from the front of Soto's center of mass.
In 2023, he had a longer swing (for him, not for the league), but let the ball travel a little. In 2024, he had that same swing length, but got the ball out in front. This year, Soto has a shorter swing, and he's letting the ball travel a little again. Both of those things would reduce his reported bat speed — without necessarily reducing his actual bat speed.
With current metrics, we aren't certain that Soto has actually lost a lot of ability to accelerate the bat quickly. Maybe he's lost a little, but probably not as much as that first table suggests. Just looking at swing length alone, Harris II, Contreras, Ramos, Langeliers, Soto and Naylor have all shortened their swings by more than 2 inches, and Vientos and Lindor have shortened them by at least an inch. That would reduce their reported bat speeds just by changing their contact points, and thereby changing how long their bat had to get up to full speed.
Over at Pitcher List, Kyle Bland has focused on bat acceleration, a look at bat speed that adjusts for contact point and swing length. Using that metric, Soto is down, but not too much: he's spent most of this month north of the 90th percentile in bat acceleration, while he finished last year north of the 95th percentile. A drop, but not out of elite territory.
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Some poor batted-ball luck may be making the problem seem worse than it is. Given how hard he is still hitting the ball and the angles at which he is hitting those balls, his expected slugging percentage is 150 points higher than the one he's showing. Only six qualified hitters have had it worse in that regard. It's true that, throughout his career, he's almost always had larger expected slugging than actual slugging numbers. He hits the ball to the opposite field, and the spin on those hits robs distance, resulting in slugging percentages that are 200 points lower to the opposite field than the pull field across baseball. But this would be the biggest gap between the two numbers he's ever seen.
Lost in all of this discussion, of course, is the other area where Soto is elite: discernment. It doesn't matter what time frame you put on it; Soto swings at fewer pitches outside the zone than anyone else in baseball.
'I used to swing at everything at 16, 17,' he told me once. 'Then I started to get to know the strike zone. Then I started getting to know that if you swing at balls, you're not taking your 'A swing.' That's why I've been learning the zone since I was in rookie ball, I've been training ever since.'
Because the slugging percentage on balls outside the zone is more than 200 points lower than it is on pitches inside the zone, and because the ability to hit pitches outside the zone ages terribly, Soto has put himself on a great path to provide value long into his contract even if the power ceiling is a little lower this year than it was last year.
Soto hit 41 homers in a career year last season with a slightly tweaked offensive approach that fit his home park. Now that he's settled into a new situation, he looks more like he used to during the early stages of his career: a guy who will get on base with the best of them, knock 30-plus homers and spray the ball around the field … a guy who compared favorably with Ted Williams. Even in a relative slump, he's been a top-40 hitter this year, and even if you believe his worst projections, he'll be a top-10 hitter the rest of the way.
So, yeah. Soto has maybe lost a little bat speed. But not as much as a certain number might suggest, and certainly not enough to take away from the entire package at the plate, which is still elite.