As Juan Soto embarks on $765M future, Ted Williams’ shadow lingers: Where could he end up?

DALLAS — So perhaps you’re wondering this week: What would I have to do to get some baseball team to pay ME $700 million?

Hey, excellent question. And I think we’ve figured that out.

On one hand, you could be a unicorn — a once-in-a-lifetime home run hero/Cy Young starter/make-the-impossible-seem-possible kind of guy. Like Shohei Ohtani, for instance. Or …

You could just be Ted Williams.

All right, let’s take a deep breath now. It always seems sacrilegious to call Juan Soto — or anyone else — a modern-day Ted Williams. But this is the story where we let you know that it’s not as crazy as you want to believe it is.

The Mets obviously think so, since they just agreed to deposit $765 million in Soto’s money market account over the next 16 years. But you should know that they’re not the only team that sees this Juan Soto/Ted Williams thing. Far from it.

Consider the response from one big-league coach this week when we asked for his reaction to Soto’s staggering new contract.

“What it says to me,” he replied, laughing, “is that Ted Williams would make a hell of a lot of money if he was playing today.”

True!

Then there’s this story, told by an executive of a team that had interest in trading for Soto in 2022, when the Nationals were dangling him. Just to make sure he had the go-ahead, this exec and another high-ranking member of his front office decided they’d better run it past their owner first. This is how the exec remembers the conversation going:

“He (the owner) said something like: ‘I understand he’s great. But can you put in context how great he is?’

“And I said: ‘I think he’s Ted Williams.’

“And he just gave me a look like: ‘You’re a freaking lunatic.’ But I just said, ‘No, that’s kind of what he is.’”

We couldn’t have said it any better. That’s kind of what he is. He’s not Ted Williams 2.0 because nobody is. That isn’t possible. Williams finished his career with a 1.116 OPS and a .344 career batting average. Nobody is doing that in this era. Nobody.

But is Juan Soto kind of the 21^st-century version of Ted Williams? There’s no getting around that.

If the question is more like — What hitter in the history of baseball is the most comparable to Soto through age 25? — there is only one answer. And you guessed it, Ted Williams is that answer.

Let’s show you why. It starts with …

On-base IQ at a young age

In the history of this sport, only two hitters have ever had a walk rate above 18 percent through their age-25 seasons (with at least 2,500 plate appearances). Guess who?

Ted Williams — 18.9 percent
Juan Soto — 18.8 percent

(Source: Baseball Reference)

Or we could look at the full array of on-base skills. To do that, let’s use a metric from Baseball Reference called OBP+ — which takes on-base percentage and adjusts it to the context of a player’s hitting environment in his era. Here’s that leaderboard through age 25:

Ted Williams — 137
Juan Soto — 131

In other words, the only two young hitters who were on-base machines at a rate that was at least 30 percent better than league average were … Williams and Soto. (Next on that list: Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson, tied at 129.)

Or we could just consider the early-career narratives of these two guys — minus the part where Williams went off to war at age 24 and became a war-hero fighter pilot.

Before he turned 26, Williams led his league in walks twice and OBP three times, despite missing two seasons during that span in the service. Since then, only one left-handed hitter has led his league in both of those departments at least twice by age 25. Hmmm, who might that be?

Juan Soto would be a great guess.

There’s more, of course. But what do you think? Are we authorized to go on? Do we at least have the go-ahead to mention Soto and Williams in the same breath? We asked Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo for permission to do so this week, since he’s a history lover and once coached in Boston. In retrospect, he might not have been the right choice.

“I mean, Ted Williams?” Lovullo said. “My dad taught me everything about Ted Williams. That’s a tough one for me. He’s probably the greatest hitter of all time.”

So Lovullo wasn’t ready to apply that Ted Williams stamp of approval. But once he got that out of the way, Lovullo began painting the portrait of what he does see in Soto, from the perspective of a manager who has been trying to figure out how to contain him since Soto arrived in the big leagues.

“The first time I saw him, he was 20 years old,” Lovullo said. “I could not believe he was 20 years old. He carried himself like he was 30, like he had been around the league for a long time.”

And Lovullo means that in a way that explains why the free-agent bidding for Soto reached another orbit this winter.

“I think Soto is on a different level than the rest of the league at times,” he said. “I mean, 41 home runs, the OPS, the numbers that he has, are not lucky. It’s because he has an incredible ability to impact the baseball, and he understands what each at-bat is asking for.”

He understands what each at-bat is asking for.

With those words, Lovullo is telling us this is not a hitter who is prepared for each at-bat in the sense that he knows the pitcher has a fastball, sweeper and cutter in his arsenal. This is a hitter who prepares on “a different level.”

Kind of like a modern-day Ted Williams. That, you see, is because they both had the unique ability to see …

The hidden part of the game

Davey Martinez was the first manager of Juan Soto’s big-league life, for five spectacular seasons in Washington. Now that Soto is back in the NL East, Martinez will get to manage against him in four series a year. He’s not looking forward to that part — but he never gets tired of watching Juan Soto, bat artist.

“Like I’ve always said,” Martinez told us, “this guy, for as young as he is — and he’s still young — he understands the hidden part of the game better than anybody I know. He really does.”

Again, we stop to point out the terminology these managers use to describe a guy who two months ago turned 26 — meaning he’s younger than the likes of Josh Jung or Spencer Horwitz or Josh Lowe. It’s not: He understands the strike zone. It’s: He understands the hidden part of the game.

And by that, Martinez said, he means: “He has a plan every pitch. Not just every at-bat but every pitch. He has a plan of what he wants to do, and you can see it.”

Rockies manager Bud Black can also see it. And he, too, described The Juan Soto At-Bat in ways that are never used to describe anyone else’s at-bats.

“When you use the words, plate discipline, that encompasses a lot of things,” Black said. “But for me, it’s how he conducts the at-bat, where it’s patience, but yet, you sense that he’s ready to hit. It’s sort of an instinctual thing. It’s an intangible that I think pitchers feel, and catchers feel. And the opposing manager. And the opposing pitching coach.

“There’s just something about the at-bat when it’s him up there. It doesn’t matter, it’s the same, whether it’s 7:05 (p.m.), hitting in the first inning, or at 9:30, hitting in the ninth. There’s not a difference in the quality of the at-bat.”

Like Lovullo and Martinez, Black is describing a hitter whose level of focus — on every pitch of every at-bat, of every inning, of every game, of every season — is just different. So what happens when the eye, the brain, the plan, the focus and the extraordinary bat-to-ball skills seem to be always working in sync?

You get Juan Soto … or Ted Williams.

Consider these quotes. They come from the Splendid Splinter. They could easily be his review of Juan Soto.

“Baseball is 50 percent from the neck up.”

“Think. Don’t just swing. Think about the pitcher — what he threw you last time up, his best pitch, who’s up next. Think.”

Sound familiar? If you’ve paid any attention when Soto is working his batter’s-box magic, it’s almost as if he’s a hitting robot, programmed by Ted Williams himself.

Said Martinez: “I tell our pitchers all the time: When you’re facing him, you need to know he’s smart. He knows what he wants to do. So if he takes a fastball, he’s looking for something. Don’t think you’re going to sneak something by him, because he’s smart. So you’ve got to be smart.”

But really, there’s more — because the Soto/Williams comparisons don’t end with this singular combination of patience, prep and focus. There’s also …

The power play

John Schneider also dreamed the Juan Soto dream. He is the manager of the Blue Jays, a team that pursued Soto all the way to the finish line. He had no trouble explaining exactly what they hoped they’d be buying.

“He’s a unique blend of plate discipline and power,” Schneider said. “I mean, you do not like facing it when you’re an opposing team.”

Plate discipline and power. When you combine them, and then apply them to all the young hitters in history, it once again connects the same two names: Ted Williams and Juan Soto.

Walk percentage and home run percentage through age 25

(Source: Baseball Reference; minimum 2,500 plate appearances)

So there it is. There is patience. There is power. There is focus. There is damage. And there is one more thing.

The flair

It’s no secret that Ted Williams did everything — on the field, off the field — with an attitude. But Juan Soto has more than just an attitude. He has The Shuffle.

.@JuanSoto25_ does the shuffle to pump himself up. Looks like it works.

📰: https://t.co/c2QKA4hpjl pic.twitter.com/8HJvoTO3ZZ

— MLB (@MLB) March 27, 2021

Don’t feel as if you have to take a four-minute break from this piece to watch the full, epic Soto at-bat against Hunter Gaddis in Cleveland this October. But if you do, you’ll see something that makes up the full Juan Soto Experience.

The whole Juan Soto at-bat vs. Hunter Gaddis. An artist at work. Just fouling off pitches until he got a fastball.

Then he sent the Yankees to the World Series. pic.twitter.com/2C6lSIpD45

— Jeff Eisenband (@JeffEisenband) October 20, 2024

It isn’t merely that he knows what you’re trying to do to him on every pitch. He’s also going to tell you about it after every pitch … and demonstrate it, via some version of the Soto Shuffle. There is honestly nothing like this going on anywhere else in his sport.

“For me, it’s his way of keeping engaged,” Martinez said. “It really is. That’s how he gets back in the box and gets engaged.”

And it brings Martinez back to his favorite Soto story ever. It happened in a 2019 game at Citi Field, when Marcus Stroman, then a Met, struck out Soto in the first inning, then did an imitation of The Shuffle.

“So he comes back (to the dugout), and I said, ‘Did you see what he just did?’” Martinez reminisced. “And he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got him.” Very next at-bat. He hit one a mile — and he kind of looked at Stroman like, ‘Don’t do that again.’”

Was there a Ted Williams Shuffle? Not that we know of. But there was a Ted Williams edge. And it is an unmistakable part of the Soto-Williams connection. Don’t take our word for it. Take the word of Charlie Manuel, former manager of the Phillies and a guy who played against Ted Williams early in his career.

“He’s kind of a flamboyant player,” Manuel said of Soto in 2021. “He’s very interesting. He calls attention to you with his talent. … At the same time, he’s cocky. But to me, it comes in a good way. You know, Ted Williams was very cocky, too.”

But you know what else Ted Williams was? A guy who played in the big leagues until he was 41. So it’s worth asking:

Where does Juan Soto go from here? 

Since he’s now under contract until the year 2040, it’s worth asking: Do hitters with Juan Soto’s skill set tend to age well?

“Oh yeah, I think so,” Schneider said. “You’re only as good as what you swing at, right? And he’s pretty darned good at that.”

The truth is, history shows us he’s right. As far back as 2012, Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman of FanGraphs studied this very concept. They found something we should take note of — that almost no skill has tended to age better through the years than plate discipline.

Guess who looms as the ultimate example of that? Right you are. Ted Williams.

Even though he left baseball to head off to war two times, Williams returned — first at age 27, then at age 34 — as nearly exactly the same hitter he was before.

Take a look at his walk and home run rates through the years — since those are the rates that most resemble the profile of the young Juan Soto — and ponder whether they lay out a blueprint for what Soto might become.

(Source: Baseball Reference)

You’ll notice that Williams played until exactly the same age as when Soto’s Mets contract expires — at 41. If Soto ages with even remotely similar rates … um, wow.

After his age-25 season, Williams added 394 home runs and 1,526 walks. If Soto ages like Williams, he’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 career homers and 2,300 career walks by the year 2040. And how many players in history have ever reached those two plateaus? Just one.

Barry Bonds.

So is that what’s out there for Soto with the Mets? Sorry. We forgot to pack our crystal balls for the Winter Meetings. But with a hitter this gifted — and this different — can we rule anything out?

“I don’t know what he’s going to do when he’s 40,” said Martinez. “But I know what he’s going to do come Opening Day.”

Hey, don’t we all. Power. Patience. And $765 million worth of Soto Shuffles — and the best Ted Williams imitation on Earth.

GO DEEPER

What does history tell us about how Juan Soto will age?

GO DEEPER

What does Juan Soto’s record contract mean to the Mets’ payroll?

(Top image: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Williams swinging: Diamond Images / Getty Images; Williams close-up: Getty Images; Soto close-up: Kyle Rivas / Getty Images; Soto swinging: Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)