This was the exact moment Juan Soto was acquired by the New York Yankees for. Game 5 of the ALCS, 10th inning, tied at two apiece, two men on, two outs.
Against one of the Cleveland Guardians’ top relievers, Hunter Gaddis, the 25-year-old did what he has done for what feels like a decade already. He controlled the zone and chipped away until he got his pitch. After going up 1-0 by spitting on an inside slider, he watched another one fall in at the bottom of the zone for a strike.
He tried to jump on another one at the top of the zone but fouled it off. Strike two.
Soto proceeded to foul off three more pitches in succession, two changeups, and one more slider — sporadically nodding his head and smiling between pitches as though he was signaling to his teammates and the entire baseball world, “I got this.”
“I’m all over it. I was ready for it,” Soto said. “He made great pitches, but I made really great swings. I was waiting for his mistake. He finally threw it, and I made the contact.”
That mistake was Gaddis trying to climb the ladder again with a 95-mph four-seam fastball. That was Soto’s pitch, and he got it.
The lefty cracked what is now the most famous Yankees home run of the last 15 years, 402 feet — 109.7 mph off the bat — to dead center to complete New York’s comeback from 2-0 down and clinch their 41st American League pennant
“I was just ready,” Soto said. “I had already faced him a couple of times in this series. I know everything that he has, so I was just trying to focus, wait for the mistake, and try to do damage.”
Still in his first season in the Bronx after being acquired from the San Diego Padres over the winter, Soto has his all-time Yankees moment in a year in which he hit a career-high 41 home runs to go with 109 RBI and a .989 OPS.
Before Saturday night’s Game 5, there was not much doubt that he had to be a Yankee for life, but now it needs to be a foregone conclusion: Hal Steinbrenner needs to slide Soto a blank check this winter.
Soto will be a free agent when the Yankees’ season ends, which will officially come in some capacity during the World Series — the first time since 2009 that they will be in the Fall Classic. As one of this generation’s very best young hitters — he conveniently turns 26 on Game 1 of the World Series this Friday — this season and that home run will only add millions to a contract that is expected to blow past the $500 million mark.
Such a deal goes against what Steinbrenner was preaching just five months ago. In May, he mentioned that the Yankees’ current payroll situation is not sustainable, thus teasing a lower payroll.
A mega-deal for Soto does not jive with such beliefs, but locking down a generational talent and a future Hall of Famer certainly seems as though it will sustain the Yankees’ prospects of winning consistently in the future.
Yankees infielder Jazz Chisholm appears to be leading that movement, already campaigning for Steinbrenner to lock Soto down for the long term.
“Pay my guy, pay Juan Soto,” Chisholm said during the Yankees’ champagne celebration in the locker room at Progressive Field. “$700 million.”
