Mets are failing Juan Soto with a historically bad supporting cast

Is Juan Soto the best hitter on the New York Mets? Yes. But is he so-absurdly-by-far the best hitter on the Mets that relative to every other Mets season ever he is actually the least supported offensive player in Mets history? Get this: also yes. 

This Mets season hasn’t been much fun, with Bo Bichette and Francisco Lindor, the guys most likely to help Soto out offensively, being injured or terrible for most of the season so far. That has led to a relatively unique situation in MLB history: a player having an incredible hitting season on a team having arguably the worst hitting season in the sport. So how much better is Soto than his teammates? Short answer: a lot better. Like a historically notable amount better. 

All the data that follows is courtesy of FanGraphs, and many of the calculations were done with my wonderful friend Rhys who I probably owe a drink for his excel skills. 

Juan Soto is the best hitter on the Mets by a historic margin

Soto is a remarkably consistent hitter, and 2026 has been yet another banner year. Defensively he’s always going to be just decent, and he doesn’t exactly bring speed to the basepaths, but in terms of wRC+ (weighted runs created, a nice catch-all offensive stat), Soto is a monster. He’s fourth in Major League Baseball among qualified hitters at 161 wRC+. His Mets teammates, on the other hand, probably couldn’t be doing much worse if they tried. 

Carson Benge is the closest guy to Soto at 98th place and 102 wRC+, a massive difference of 59 absolute wrC+ and 94 entire spots on the leaderboard. For this exercise, we care about how close your teammate is on the leaderboard, because I want to know how unsupported everyone is relative to each other, not if Barry Bonds in 2002 had so much wRC+ that it blew poor Ray Durham completely off the map (even though it did).

The Mets have been having a pretty awful offensive season, but when writing about the NL MVP race yesterday, I was confronted with the reality that Soto is just as good as ever. He’s still hitting for high average, power and getting on base at his singularly high clip. When I noticed he was fourth in wRC+, ahead of Shohei freaking Ohtani, I was curious just how bad the rest of the Mets were. Upon realizing it was the worst in the league, I wanted to know if it was the worst in Mets history or potentially in MLB history.

We could have chosen any number of stats to demonstrate this point, but I wanted to keep things simple with a runs-created metric like wRC+. 57 FanGraphs exports and 12 spreadsheets later, we return the following factoid: Juan Soto has the largest gap between his ranking and that of the second-best hitter on the team in Mets history (1962-present). Ouch.

It’s not even particularly close. The second-most egregious difference between the number one and two hitters in Mets history came in 1998, with John Olerud’s third-place wRC+ finish counterposed with Brian McRae’s 56th place. Soto versus Benge is over 40 spots worse. 

Soto is among the least supported offensive players in MLB history

It gets even sadder. Based on this obviously limited and over-simplified model, Soto is, in fact, actually the 13th least-supported hitter in any season across all of Major League Baseball since 2000. 

This chart, like all our charts, runs into the issue of qualified hitters — you’ll notice that Giancarlo Stanton in 2013 didn’t necessarily post a legendarily high wRC+ but that Adeiny Hecheverria is second best on the team with a 55.5 wRC, so horrible that it’s good for second worst ranking difference. That is because he was the only other hitter who was qualified; there were better hitters than Hecheverria on the Miami Marlins in 2013, but none that made it to 500 plate appearances. It’s a limitation, but it’s consistent enough to actually even out quite well becuase we suddenly unlock a bunch of better and worse wRC+ scores; for example, if we dropped the plate-appearance qualification down, Soto’s gets even less supported, outranking Francisco Alvarez by over 100 spots. 

A complete study of the most “you’re on your own” hitter situations in MLB history would take a number of factors into consideration, such as, say, contact quality metrics and more underlying batted ball data. Consider this a jumping off point for the Unsupported Hitters community, a field ripe for more research and analysis. We should also maybe create a support group and send Juan Soto an invite. Because this is tough. 

More MLB news and analysis:

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow