Which all-time marks will Soto challenge before his career is done?

Juan Soto was the recipient of a record-breaking 15-year, $765 million contract with the Mets for one 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 likely to continue providing elite performance for many years to come.

He’s going to help the Mets win ballgames, several more 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 it is as simple as that.

But it’s more than just acquiring a ballplayer, isn’t it? In a case like this, it’s about acquiring a legacy, too. It’s about getting your team’s logo on his cap when he’s inducted into Cooperstown someday, as he all but certainly will be. It’s about, if things go well, timeless videos of him wearing your uniform and being cheered by your fans when he reaches historically notable benchmarks or finishes his career challenging some all-time records.

When we talk about Soto, we spend so much of our time looking back, about what he’s done since he arrived in the Majors at age 19, about the start that was so good so fast that even at age 20 we were talking about how the path to the Hall of Fame seemed clear. All he’s done since then is to entirely live up to the hype, culminating with a career year in 2024 that had little to nothing to do with Yankee Stadium’s short porch.

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

Soto has achieved so much in his seven years in the Majors, slugging 201 home runs and compiling 36.3 WAR (via FanGraphs). He’s been so good for so long that it’s easy to forget that he’s younger than relative newcomers like JJ Bleday (who just completed 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’s that he’s done this much at an age where, say, Justin Turner was still looking for his first Major League homer; where J.D. Martinez was getting released by Houston.

Did we cherry-pick some late bloomers there? Sure did. But we’re 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’s very likely to still have … where does all this go? Is Soto “just a Hall of Famer,” or will we remember him as an inner-circle type with the one-name-legends like Ted, Babe and Mickey?

Where might this all end, for the Mets and their fans? We could try to build a fancy modeling system that games out what his projections will be for years to come, but it’s just as satisfying -- and far simpler -- to look at what his historic comparables are through age 25 in some pretty important stats.

Will Soto hit 500 homers?

While you don’t think about Soto as being an Aaron Judge-level slugger -- who is, really? -- he did just hit 41 homers and post a 99th percentile hard-hit rate, so he’s not exactly light on slug.

To that end, he’s one of only nine players to hit at least 200 home runs through age 25. One of them, Mike Trout, is still active, so set him aside for now. Each of the eight others who played full careers -- Alex Rodriguez, Jimmie Foxx, Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott, Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson and Albert Pujols -- got to 500, and in some cases well past that. (Pujols, for example, finished with 703; Rodriguez hit 696.)

That’s a 100% success rate. 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 just 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,” given that he’s averaged 35 homers per 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’d be almost a disappointment if he didn’t. Imagine, too, if he'd had the 25 or so homers he likely missed out on due to the shortened 2020 season.

Will Soto set the all-time record for walks?

Did you know, because we did not, that Soto already has the most walks in Major League history through age 25? Not by a little, either -- by nearly 100, ahead of some legendary names, and also Eddie Yost.

• 769 // Soto <<--
• 670 // Mickey Mantle
• 622 // Mel Ott
• 620 // Eddie Yost

But perhaps a more entertaining all-time list is showing highest walk rate, or what percentage of your plate appearances end in a walk. With a minimum of 1,000 plate appearances through 25 years old, we get ...

• 18.9% // Ted Williams
• 18.8% // Soto <<--
• 17.9% // Frank Thomas
• 17.5% // Babe Ruth
• 17.0% // Charlie Keller

You may not remember Keller, a five-time All-star who played left field for the Yankees next to Joe DiMaggio, and who had a .944 OPS through age 30 before a back injury essentially ended his career. But if you’re wondering why Soto draws Williams comparisons, this is a big part of it.

Williams ended up fourth on the all-time walk list, though he’d 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. None of them, however, finished first. That’s because of Barry Bonds, who had his first 100-walk season at 26, then did it 13 more times, setting some of baseball’s most unbreakable records with his 232 free passes in 2004, of which 120 were intentional.

Soto needs 1,789 additional walks to catch Bonds. That’s a number only one person has ever accumulated from age 26 on (Bonds, obviously). He’d need to average 150 walks annually for the next dozen years. That’s not going to happen. Could he catch Rickey Henderson, 1,421 ahead, for second? Maybe – though Rickey hung around through age 44 to do it. The more attainable target might be walk rate, where Williams’s 20.6% is the gold standard.

Will he do it? He won’t catch Bonds for raw total. He’s already 40% of the way to catching Joe Morgan for fifth, though. Top-five in raw total – and top-three in rate – both are on the table.

Will Soto set the record for on-base percentage?

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

Soto won’t set any records for hits, in part because of all the walks, and in part because it’s simply much, much more difficult to get a hit now than it was when Ty Cobb was hitting .366 though his own age-25 season, way back in 1912. Soto is 47th in hits (934) through age 25, and tied for 247th in batting average (.285, min. 1,500 plate appearances). Batting average isn’t what it once was. It’s the way the game works now.

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

That .421 is good, though it’s not going to come anywhere near Williams’s .481. Again, though, it’s much, much harder to get on base today -- no one is hitting .406 in modern baseball to fuel that .481 OBP. Barely anyone even hits .300.

One way to get around that issue is to look at an era-adjusted version of the stat, where 100 is set to average for the time, just like OPS+ or ERA+. It’s important because the Major League average OBP in 1941, the year Ted hit .406, was .331 -- but in 2024, it was only .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 isn’t that far behind – lumped in with some wild names. Read this as 100 being league average, and so a 130 mark is 30% better than average.

• 137 // Williams
• 133 // Thomas
• 131 // Soto <<--
• 131 // Ruth
• 129 // Cobb
• 129 // “Shoeless” Joe Jackson
• 128 // Trout
• 128 // Stan Musial

That sure is a list you’d like to be a part of. Only four players have ever been 30 percent better than the rest of the Majors at getting on base, through age 25. Two of them are Literally Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. That Thomas guy was pretty feared, too.

Now, we’ll be the first to admit 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 phoned to speak to Aaron while the game was still happening. No one’s going to be stopping to have a ceremony if Soto manages to get to “40 percent above average in an era-adjusted stat, topping Williams’s 39 percent.” But even right now, Soto is fifth on the all-time list, for any age, where 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 about, isn’t it?

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

Will Soto set a record for batting runs?

This is different from Rickey Henderson scoring 2,295 runs. We’re not talking about the physical act of touching the plate. We’re talking about the batting component of Wins Above Replacement. You get a little value for each positive thing you do, and a little value taken away for each 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 on defense, so while he’s an all-time great hitter, he’s not exactly the Willie Mays or Alex Rodriguez archetype of value added everywhere. (Soto’s 36.3 WAR through age 25 ranks 17th, which at least tells you a little about how wonderful his bat is that he can get there without adding speed or defense. It’s also well behind the trio of Cobb, Trout and Mantle, who topped 50 WAR by 25.)

Batting runs require both high performance and lots of it, since it’s a counting stat. Since 2018, Soto has compiled 291 batting runs, second to Judge. That’s essentially tied with Pujols and Williams for sixth best on the through-25 list, and 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, sits 124th on the all-time list. He’s added as much value with the bat through age 25 as players like Joe Torre, Jackie Robinson and Tony Pérez did their entire careers, though of course he hasn’t hit that end-of-career decline yet. That, alone, tells you a lot about what he’s done to date -- though the top of the all-time list is still very, very far away.

• 1,374 // Ruth
• 1,143 // Bonds
• 1,068 // Williams
• 985 // Gehrig
• 977 // Cobb

When Ruth is that 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. It’s essentially Stan Musial’s career from 26 on. It’s less than Gehrig had. It’s doable.

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

Which means …

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

Barring serious or repeated injury (as we’ve seen happen to Trout), Soto’s 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’s going to be in the top 10 and possibly high up within it for batting runs.

Soto won’t hit .300 for his career. He won’t wow with incredible defense. It won’t matter. With any reasonable health, he'll be one of the 10 best hitters -- not players, but hitters -- to ever play. That's what the Mets are signing up for.