Juan Soto and the Mets Serve Up a Little League Home Run to George Springer in Toronto
The New York Mets have found a new way to embarrass themselves, and Juan Soto is the face of it.
On the first batter of Monday’s game at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Blue Jays leadoff hitter George Springer lifted a routine fly ball to left field. Soto misjudged the ball entirely, letting it drop and roll to the wall. Center fielder AJ Ewing sprinted over, retrieved it, and then compounded the mistake with a fielding error trying to fire it back to the infield.
Springer, 36 years old, never broke stride. He circled the bases untouched. It was scored a triple with an error charged to Ewing, but the entire sequence looked exactly like what you would see at a Saturday afternoon Little League game.
MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo captured it perfectly on social media, calling it a “Little League home run.” He was not wrong. It was two Mets outfielders taking turns making a routine fly ball into a four-bagger.
The worst part is that the run mattered. The Mets lost 2-1. New York has now dropped nine of its last ten games. This is a team that entered the season with World Series expectations and is looking every bit like a franchise in freefall.
Soto is the story here whether he wants to be or not. The Mets gave him a 15-year, $765 million contract. He is playing left field, which was never his strongest defensive position, and Monday’s play is going to run on a loop for the rest of the summer. He deserved an error on the play just as much as Ewing did, and a strong argument can be made that the misjudgment started with him.
To Soto’s credit, he is still producing at the plate. His slash line entering Monday was solid, his walk rate is elite, and his home run pace is more or less what New York paid him to deliver. Defense was always going to be the concern with this signing. Monday just confirmed the worst-case scenario for anyone who worried about it.
The Mets’ bigger problem is that Soto’s Little League moment fits a pattern. The starting rotation has been decimated by injuries. The bullpen has cracked open more than once. Marcus Semien is now expected to miss 4 to 6 weeks with a Grade 3 hip flexor strain. Manager Carlos Mendoza is running a lineup card with duct tape at this point.
George Springer’s Little League trip around the bases will be shown at Blue Jays home games for the next month. Toronto fans loved every second of it. New York fans are already fed up.
The Mets need to fix the defense. They need Soto to be sharper in the outfield. And they probably need a couple of pitchers by the August 3 trade deadline if they want to salvage a season that is quickly turning into a disaster movie. Monday’s game was another chapter of the wrong kind of movie.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
