Juan Soto career milestone projection analysis

Juan Soto will receive a record-breaking contract for a very simple reason: He’s been one of the best hitters in the game since the day he arrived in the Majors, and having only turned 26 in October, he’s highly probable. to continue to deliver elite performance for many years to come.

Wherever he signs, he’ll help his club win more ballgames per year than if they didn’t have him in the lineup, just as he helped the Yankees get to the World Series in 2024. Sometimes is as simple as that.

But it’s more than just getting a ball player, right? In a case like this, it is also about acquiring an inheritance. It’s about getting your team’s logo on his cap when he’s inducted into Cooperstown one day, as he almost certainly will be. It’s about, if it goes well, timeless videos of him wearing your uniform and being cheered on your fans when he reaches historically notable benchmarks or finishes his career challenging some records.

Instead of looking back, let’s look forward. Let’s think how much more is yet to come.

Soto has accomplished that much in his seven years in the Majors, slugging 201 home runs and compiling a 36.3 WAR (via FanGraphs). He has been so good before so long that it’s easy to forget that he’s younger than relative newcomers like JJ Bleday (who just finished his first full season) and Tyler Fitzgerald (who was still rookie-eligible in 2024). It’s not just that he’s a great player; it is that he has done so much at an age when e.g. Justin Turner still looking for his first Major League homer; where JD Martinez was released by Houston.

Did we pick any late blooming cherries there? Sure did. But we are more interested in historical context. Given what we know about Soto’s career so far, about how much he’s accomplished at such a young age, about how many productive years he likely still has … where will all this go? Is Soto “just a Hall of Famer,” or will we remember him as an inner circle type with one-name legends like Ted, Babe and Mickey?

Where could it all end for Soto’s next team and their fans? We could try to build a fancy modeling system that plays out what his forecasts will be in the coming years, but it’s just as satisfying – and far simpler – to look at what his historical comparability is over 25 years in some pretty important statistics.

Even if you don’t think of Soto as being an Aaron Judge-level slugger — who is, really? — he hit just 41 homers and posted a 99th percentile hit rateso he is not exactly easy on snails.

To that end, he is one of only nine players to hit at least 200 home runs over 25 years. One of them, Mike Trout, is still active, so put him aside for now. Each of the other eight career hitters — Alex Rodriguez, Jimmie Foxx, Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott, Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson and Albert Pujols — reached 500, and in some cases well past it. (Pujols, for example, finished with 703; Rodriguez hit 696.)

That’s a 100% success rate. A good place to start — and it’s even more stark if you look at every player in history with at least 1,500 plate appearances and see how quickly he reached the 200-homer mark.

For Soto, that’s 299 homers away or 30 homers annually for 10 years. That’s both “very reasonable production,” considering he’s averaged 35 homers per game. 162 games so far and also – and this is key – takes him only through his age-35 season.

Will he do it? Extremely likely. It would almost be a disappointment if he didn’t. Also, imagine if he’d had the 25 or so homers he likely missed due to the shortened 2020 season.

Did you know, because we didn’t, that Soto already has most walks in Major League history to 25 years? Not a little either — with nearly 100, ahead of some legendary names, and Eddie Yost too.

But perhaps shows a more entertaining all-time list highest walking speedor what percentage of your plate appearances end in a walk. With a minimum of 1,000 record appearances over 25 years, we get …

Williams finished fourth all time walking listthough he would almost certainly be second if not for the time he missed serving in two wars. Mantle, Ott, Yost, Ruth and Thomas all finished in the top 11, meaning there’s a pretty clear path here for Soto. However, none of them reached the finish line first. That’s because of Barry Bonds, who had his first 100-hit season at age 26, then did it 13 more times and set some of baseball’s most unbroken records with his 232 free passes in 2004, of which 120 were intentional.

Soto needs 1,789 additional walks to catch Bonds. It is a number that only one person has ever accumulated from the age of 26 (Bondsobviously). He would need an average of 150 walks annually for the next dozen years. It’s not going to happen. Could he catch Rickey Henderson, 1,421 ahead, for second? Perhaps – although Rickey hung around at the age of 44 to do so. The more achievable goal might be walking speed, with Williams’ 20.6% being the gold standard.

Will he do it? He will not capture bonds for raw total. However, he is already 40% of the way to catch Joe Morgan for fifth. Top-five in raw total – and top-three in rate – both are on the table.

Soto seems like a pretty safe bet to get to 500 HR and a top-five walk total – making him Bonds, Ruth or Williams. What’s next?

Soto won’t set any records for hits, partly because of all the walks and partly because it’s just a lot, very harder to get a hit now than it was when Ty Cobb hit .366 through his own age-25 season, way back in 1912. Soto is 47 in hits (934) through age 25, and tied for 247 in batting average (.285, min. 1,500 plate appearances). The batting average is not what it once was. This is the way the game works now.

But he simply gets on base a lot — he’s the hardest batter to get out of, is another way of looking at it — and since his 2018 debut, Soto’s .421 on-base percentage. best in baseball. Going back to our all-time top-25 list, it’s tied for 17. best and hey, there’s Keller again.

That .421 is good, although it doesn’t come close to Williams’ .481. Again, though, it’s much, much harder to get on base today – nobody hits .406 in modern baseball to burn that .481 OBP. Hardly anyone even hits .300.

One way around this problem is to look at an era-adjusted version of the stat, where 100 is set to average for the time, like OPS+ or ERA+. That’s important because the average Major League OBP in 1941, the year Ted hit .406, was .331 – but in 2024 it was just .312.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Compared to their own contemporaries, with a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances through 25, Williams is still no. 1 in what we’ll call OBP+, but Soto is not that far behind – lumped in with some wild names. Read this as 100 as league average, and so a 130 grade is 30% better than average.

It’s definitely a list you’ll want to be a part of. Only four players have ever been 30 percent better than the rest of the Majors at getting on base by age 25. Two of them are literally Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. That Thomas guy was also quite feared.

Now, we’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t exactly a hallowed baseball number like .406 or 755 or 2.130. When Aaron topped Ruth with his 715th homer in 1974, fans stormed the field and President Richard Nixon called to speak to Aaron while the game was still going on. No one will stop to hold a ceremony if Soto manages to reach “40 percent above average in era-adjusted statistics, topping Williams’ 39 percent.” But even right now, Soto is fifth on the all-time listfor any age where the names 1-4 are Williams, Ruth, Bonds and Josh Gibson. Memorable number or not, “making outs less often than your contemporaries” is what hitting is all about, isn’t it?

Will he do it? He won’t catch Williams. But could he stay in the top five? Looking at the split before and after 25, Williams was exactly the same; Thomas was also in the next decade, before a drop-off in the late 30s. Ruth was betterand so was Cobb. Aging matters, but the eyes of the elite tend to age well. Since this is a stat comparable to the league average, it would benefit him if Soto holds steady and the league continues to decline. We say: Yes! Top five.

This is different from Rickey Henderson who scored 2,295 runs. We are not talking about the physical act of touching the record. We talk about the batting component of wins over substitutions. You get little value for every positive thing you do, and a small value deducted for every negative thing you do.

In 2024, Soto compiled 65 batting runs, the third most in the Majors behind Judge and Shohei Ohtani, and we’re looking at batting runs as opposed to WAR, simply because Soto adds relatively little value on the bases or defensively, so while he’s an all-time great hitter, he’s not exactly the Willie Mays or Alex Rodriguez archetype of value addition everywhere. (Soto’s 36.3 WAR through age 25 ranks 17which at least tells you a little about how wonderful his bat is that he can get there without adding speed or defense. That’s also well behind the trio of Cobb, Trout and Mantle, who topped 50 WAR with 25.)

Batting runs requires both high performance and much of it as it is a counting state. Since 2018, Soto has accumulated 291 batting runs, other to judge. That’s essentially tied with Pujols and Williams for sixth best at through-25 listand it’s the same old names again: Foxx, Mantle, Cobb, Ott and Trout. Behind him: Jackson, Lou Gehrig and Mathews. We’re starting to sense a pattern here.

Soto, right now, if he never played again, is sitting 124 on the all-time list. He’s added as much value with the bat through the age of 25 as players like Joe Torre, Jackie Robinson and Tony Pérez did their entire careers, though of course he hasn’t hit that late-career slump yet. That alone tells you a lot about what he has done to date – although the top of the all-time list is still very, very far away.

When Ruth is to far ahead of Bonds, you know it’s probably not an attainable thing; Soto is only 20 percent of the way there. But to get into the top five, to catch Cobb? Soto needs +687 more batting runs. That’s basically it Stan Musial’s career from 26. That’s less than Gehrig had. It is feasible.

Will he do it? He won’t reach Ruth or Bonds. But he is already halfway to Tris Speaker’s 10th best total. Top 10 seems very likely; top five is on the table.

Soto has done everything possible to date to end up with an all-time legendary career, both performing at an elite level and reaching the Majors at a very young age. Only 13 hitters ever had an average or better batting performance as a teenager; five are in the halland it will be seven when Soto and Harper get there.

Barring serious or repeated injuries (as we’ve seen happen to the Trout), Soto is going to hit 500 plus homers. He’s going to set or challenge the all-time record for walks and walk rate. He’s going to be in the conversation for era-adjusted on-base percentage; he will be in the top 10 and possibly high up there for batting runs.

Soto won’t hit .300 for his career. He won’t impress with incredible defense. It doesn’t matter. With any reasonable health, he will be a top 10 hitter – not players, but hitters — ever to play. That’s what his new team signs up for.