Facing elimination and Verlander, the Nationals are
tied with the Astros in the fifth inning of Game 6 of the
2019 World Series. Soto is at bat with two outs and the
bases empty.
Verlander misses his spot high on three straight fastballs,
the last one barely so. Soto fouls it straight back. Soto says
to catcher Robinson Chirinos, “He throws that pitch a few
inches lower, I’m hitting a home run.”
Verlander misses with another high heater, although
it’s close enough to the upper inside corner of the zone that
Verlander flinches in disgust when umpire Sam Holbrook
calls it a ball. Soto notices Verlander’s pique as he shuff les
his feet in his leonine, menacing manner. He sees something.
Then he nods his head 13 times. And when Chirinos says
something to him about the borderline nature of the call,
Soto, with a smile on his face, replies, “Ball.”
Soto smiles not just because he was right about the pitch’s
location. He smiles because he knows what is coming next.
THE ANTEDILUVIAN battle between pitcher and bat-
ter, in which one tries to keep the other from reaching
base, is not a fair fight. Pitchers have won 65% to 69%
of the time in every decade over the past hundred years.
So sublime a hitter is Soto that he f lips that century-old
equilibrium. Soto seized the mathematical advantage
over pitchers in the second half of last season. He won
more than he lost. He became only the fourth player to
post a .525 on-base percentage and hit 18 home runs
in the second half of a season. The others: Babe Ruth,
Williams and Barry Bonds.
“Do you know when you have a pitcher in trouble,
when you’ve f lipped the odds?” I ask him.Soto says nothing. He smiles and nods mischievously.
“When does that happen?”
He smiles even more broadly.
“When you see the shuff le.”
The shuff le began, he says, to keep his spikes clean.
“I was in Low A,” he says. “It was a really bad day. It
was raining and everything. All the mud was getting in
the way. I just tried to clean it up and put my feet in the
dirt and that’s when I started shuff ling. Every pitch I took
I just tried to clean it off, and pitchers started taking it
personally. I was like, Are you taking this personally? Well,
I’m going to keep doing it. If you get mad, I don’t care.
“Sometimes you try to find a way to get the pitcher out
of his mind and try to get him out of his game. That’s
when it started, and I kept doing it.”
He has since removed the crotch-grabbing part (“Yeah,
I cleaned it up. I made it better.”), but the steely stare, the
spread haunches and raised shoulders remain unmistak-
able kinesics. Soto is claiming territory. The territory is
the approximately 3.3 square feet of the strike zone, and
he is not going to be fooled into swinging at somethingSPORTS
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MAY 2022
53Asked when he knows that he has a pitcher in
trouble and the odds flip in his favor, Soto says,
“WHEN YOU SEE THE SHUFFLE,” with a smile.
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