Juan Soto’s Hall of Fame track

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Juan Sotos Free agency was the biggest storyline of the offseason, and for good reason. It ended Sunday night with a whopping 15-year, $765 million contract with the Mets now official. Soto brings a resume that will almost certainly send him to Cooperstown in a few decades.

Soto wouldn’t be a Hall of Famer if he retired tomorrow. He doesn’t have the requisite 10 major league seasons to consider, and he obviously hasn’t achieved HOF-level counting stats in just seven years. Still, at 26, he’s about as good a fit as possible for future inclusion.

The awards are already piling up. Soto has yet to win an MVP award, but has finished in the top 10 in five of his six full seasons. He has three top-five finishes. He was named to the All-Star Game four years in a row and would have received a fifth nod had the Midsummer Classic been played in 2020. Soto has an unbroken streak of five consecutive Silver Slugger awards.

The statistical profile is breathtaking. In his first 936 career games, Soto was a .285/.421/.532 hitter. The .953 OPS puts him in thinner air. Soto is on par with Todd Helton for 23rd in career OPS rankings. That was enough to bring Helton, who played his home games at Coors Field, to Cooperstown at a time when the offense was much higher in the league. Helton had a career 133 OPS+ after adjusting to the park and league setting. Despite the identical raw slash line, Soto rocks an OPS+ of 160.

Players with that kind of quota production will be inducted into the Hall of Fame unless they taint their case with ties to performance-enhancing drugs. 19 of the top 25 hitters in career OPS are Hall of Famers. Aaron Richter, Mike Trout and Soto are still playing. The only retired hitters from this group not in Cooperstown: Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez And Mark McGwire. It goes without saying that they are not excluded because their numbers were not high enough.

A .953 OPS is So above the general bar for induction. Most of the players in the top 100 are Hall of Famers. Landing in the top 75 makes a hitter a near lock (except for PED connections). Even if Soto were to lose a .050 OPS over the course of his career – which seems unlikely – he would still be ranked above other players such as: Miguel Cabrera, Freddie Freeman And Mookie Betts.

There shouldn’t be a precipitous decline anytime soon. There are many Hall of Famers whose production dipped in the final three to five seasons of their careers. Even if Soto doesn’t escape this fate, the short-term numbers are more likely to continue rising rather than falling. He is probably at the beginning of his heyday. Last season was probably the best full season of his career. He hit 40 home runs for the first time, finished one RBI shy of his career high, and set a new best with 7.9 wins above replacement (bWAR). Soto’s rate stats were undoubtedly better in the shortened 2020 season, but this was more effective than any other 162-game schedule.

Youth was one of the biggest selling points on his record-breaking free agent journey. Very few batsmen have been this productive in their mid-20s. Soto has 201 career home runs, ranking seventh all-time in single-season hits by a player age 25. He is 15th in races held at the same age. Soto ranks 12th in on-base percentage among hitters with at least 2,000 plate appearances before their 26th birthday. Only of the 11 players above him Frank Thomas has played for the last 50 years. This type of plate discipline so early in a hitter’s career is truly generational.