☀️ Good Morning:
NOTE: My daughters have the week off from school, so we are taking a mini vacation to visit friends. Therefore, the newsletter might publish a bit later than usual this week.
Juan Soto stepped to the plate in front of a crowd more fit for my daughter’s lacrosse practice than a major-league baseball game.
He looked cold. He seemed a bit off. He wore a hoodie under his jersey, dressed like a college kid who had found just enough energy to put on their sweats and roam to an early-morning class.
Given another chance to drive in a run from second base, he struck out.
The dangerous hitter Steve Cohen had signed to the richest contract in sports history has been anything but that in clutch situations over the season’s first 2.5 weeks.
And one swing changed that. Or at least Mets fans hope it got the monkey off his back, replaced by a blue & orange hood dangling over his shoulders. How quickly it went from looking like a sign of indifference to appearing like a cape on a superhero.
The Mets met another opponent that wasn’t up to the task to try to beat them by playing clean baseball, and they took advantage. They have won nine of the past 11 games to build an early two-game lead in the division.
It wasn’t all good news on Monday — Jose Siri was diagnosed with a fractured left tibia that will place him on the injured list for a prolonged period. However, replacing him might be a bit easier than one might think, which we will talk about in a bit.
☕️ Grab your *second* coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!
⛑️ Protection
Don’t let Juan Soto’s home run distract you from the fact that Pete Alonso reached base four more times, raising his average on the season to a John-Olerud-ish .345. His 1.137 OPS ranks tops in the National League, and only two players across baseball have driven in more runs (Wilmer Flores, believe it or not, being one of them).
Opposing pitchers better read the memo that 2025 Pete is a different kind of polar bear.
For Soto, this is extremely important. His patient approach doesn’t let him force swings on too many bad pitches. He will take his walks and trot to first base.
But the offense needs more than that. It needs him to do damage. Something he has struggled to do based on the pitches he has been seeing over the first few weeks, a key difference he has noticed batting in front of Alonso instead of Aaron Judge.
🗣️ “It’s definitely different,” Soto told The Post before the Mets faced the Twins. “I had the best hitter in baseball hitting behind me. I was getting more attacked and more pitches in the strike zone, less intentional walks and things like that. I was pitched differently last year.”
Is this true? Soto appears to have a point. He has seen fewer pitches in the zone this season than he has averaged in any other season over his career. Sample size plays a role in that. You can see in the chart below how he has had stretches, even while batting in front of Judge, when pitchers were reluctant to throw him a strike.
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