Much ink has been spilled (do they still spill ink these days?) and many sports talk hotlines blown up about Juan Soto's sluggish start to his New York Mets career. The outfielder was slashing a paltry .241/.368/.384 with just three home runs across his first 31 games, the 40-homer power he'd displayed with the New York Yankees last season suddenly nowhere to be found. In fact, Soto had yet to go deep in front of his home crowd at all — hardly what Mets fans had in mind when he signed that $765 million deal back in December.
Of course, for a player as prodigiously talented as Soto, it was just a matter of time before that all changed. And it did so in a very big way on Thursday afternoon against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Soto finally broke the dam in the bottom of the sixth, taking Zac Gallen out to left-center for a solo shot that cut Arizona's lead to 2-1.
After that, it was as though a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. While the rest of New York's lineup struggled to get anything going against Gallen and Co., Soto tried to win the game all by himself, taking Kevin Ginkel out to nearly the exact same spot in his next at-bat.
Alas, those heroics weren't quite enough; New York managed just three other hits on the day and eventually fell, 4-2, just the second time all year the team has lost consecutive games. But while the loss was disappointing, it came with one heck of a silver lining: Soto seems ready to erupt, and remind everyone just how special a player he really is.
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Juan Soto's huge day reminds Mets fans or just how special he is
Amid all the furor around his signing with the Mets and his (very relative) lack of production so far in 2025, it can be easy to forget just how singular a player Soto really is. Baseball has been played for a very long time, and it has rarely seen a player so successful at such a young age. Case in point? With his two-homer game on Thursday, Soto tied Ralph Kiner for the third-most multi-homer games in MLB history before turning 27. The names in front of him? Foxx, Ott, Mathews and A-Rod.
Soto's 27th birthday won't be until late October, giving him plenty of time to at least pull even with Foxx. (He recorded six multi-homer games in the Bronx last season, so two more over the next few months should be plenty doable.) And now that he's gotten the Citi Field monkey off his back, the sky is the limit.