Introducing the HOF Class of 2024: Why Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer are Hall of Famers
-
David Schoenfield, ESPN Senior Writer
We have a new group of Baseball Hall of Famers: Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer and Todd Helton all exceeded the 75% threshold required from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to gain entry to Cooperstown.
While Beltre was the only slam-dunk selection of the class, it’s still a fun group, with Mauer and Helton both spending their entire career with one team and becoming franchise icons for the Minnesota Twins and Colorado Rockies. Beltre, meanwhile, aged so wonderfully that he became one of the most popular players in the game during his time with the Texas Rangers, his fourth MLB team.
How and why did they get elected? Let’s take a look at each player.
Why Adrian Beltre is a Hall of Famer
When Beltre became a free agent after the 2009 season, following five seasons with the Seattle Mariners after starting his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he hardly looked like a future Hall of Famer. He had just finished his age-30 season, hitting .265/.304/.379 and missing six weeks after surgery to remove bone spurs in a shoulder and another two weeks after a bad hop left him with a swollen testicle. He had been a good player in Seattle, and he had enjoyed a monster 2004 season when he finished second in MVP voting in L.A., but he wasn’t exactly in high demand coming off that rough walk year and settled for a one-year contract with the Boston Red Sox.
His career turned around in Boston, however. He hit .321 with 28 home runs and 49 doubles and signed a big deal with Texas, where he would spend his final eight seasons and build his Hall of Fame résumé through a remarkable run of production in his 30s. Through age 30, Beltre ranks 91st in WAR among position players (still impressive, although he did reach the majors at age 19); from age 31 onward, he ranks 14th. He finished with 3,166 hits, 477 home runs, 1,707 RBIs and five Gold Gloves. He ranks 26th among position players in WAR (93.5), between Roberto Clemente and Al Kaline, and third among third basemen, behind Mike Schmidt and Eddie Mathews.
What happened in his 30s? Here are three reasons Beltre turned into a Hall of Famer:
1. He left Seattle.
In his five seasons with the Mariners, he hit just .254/.307/.410 at home, while hitting .277/.326/.472 on the road with 40 more doubles. “It’s a beautiful ballpark,” Beltre said when he returned to Seattle’s Safeco Field for a series in 2010. “But it’s no secret that offensively when you try and hit in this ballpark, it’s a little tough on you.”
It wasn’t just leaving Seattle. Beltre did become a better hitter, with help from then-Red Sox hitting coach Dave Magadan in 2010. Beltre’s strikeout rate with the Mariners was a low 16.2%; over the rest of his career, even as strikeouts rose across the majors, it was just 12.3%. He also became a little less pull-centric. Through age 30, his OPS+ was 105; after age 30, it was 130.
But he also went to home parks where he thrived. In his final nine seasons with Boston and Texas, he hit .330/.385/.555 at home; on the road, he hit .284/.332/.476 (not much different than his road numbers when he was with the Mariners).
2. He remained a strong defensive player.
Beltre already had an elite defensive reputation when he left Seattle, although he had somehow won just two Gold Gloves. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” his former Mariners teammate Raul Ibanez told the Boston Glove in 2010. “He’s blessed with some great instincts at third,” then-Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “But he takes more ground balls than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
While many third basemen eventually move to first base — assuming their bat is good enough — or even DH, Beltre remained at third and added three more Gold Gloves. Baseball-Reference credits Beltre with 216 fielding runs above average in his career, the fifth-highest total at any position (and second behind Brooks Robinson among third baseman). That continued defensive excellence helped fuel Beltre’s high career WAR total.
3. Durability.
Beltre averaged 148 games per season from age 31 through age 37, with only a leg injury that limited him to 124 games his first year in Texas cutting into that average. Since he reached the majors at such a young age, he ranks 15th all time in games played, second in games at third base and 18th in plate appearances. WAR is a cumulative stat, so the simple act of showing up and playing well creates value. Maybe Beltre isn’t quite an inner circle guy — certainly, at their best, I’d take Schmidt, Mathews, George Brett and probably Chipper Jones above Beltre among third basemen — but he is a slam-dunk Hall of Famer, and the vote totals reflect that.
Why Todd Helton is a Hall of Famer
Helton was a two-way baseball star at Tennessee and once started at quarterback on the football team ahead of a freshman named Peyton Manning. The eighth pick in the 1995 draft, Helton reached the majors in 1997, and over his first seven full seasons, he hit .340/.434/.620 while averaging 35 home runs and 118 RBIs. Along the way, he joined Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig and Chuck Klein as the only players with two seasons with 100 extra-base hits.
Of course, those seasons came at Coors Field in the peak of the steroid era, when many hitters were putting up absurd numbers. At the time, it was difficult to make sense of it all, even from those first-generation statistical analysts. Comparing Helton to Sandy Koufax, Baseball Prospectus once wrote, “Both players are very good, among the best in the game, but it’s easy to overestimate how good, because their stats are wildly distorted. There are people who have an emotional attachment to the idea that Sandy Koufax was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, rather than a good one with a high peak and some fortuitous timing. It would be interesting to ask those people how they rank Todd Helton, because Helton 2000-03 is going to have a lot in common with Koufax 1963-66.”
While Helton would play 17 seasons and finish with a .316 lifetime batting average, back problems slowed him considerably in the second half of his career, leaving him short of 3,000 hits (2,519) or even 400 home runs (369). His Hall of Fame case was a difficult one to analyze on several fronts, and he received just 16.5% of the vote his first year on the ballot, in 2019. In his sixth year, however, he made it. Here’s why:
1. The crowded ballot cleared up room for Helton.
Timing can be everything for a candidate; it can sometimes come down to who else is on the ballot, especially at your position.
The Hall of Fame ballot logjam that existed throughout most of the 2010s had cleared up some by 2019, but it still featured a lot of strong and borderline candidates. In 2019, four players got in: Mariano Rivera, Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez and Mike Mussina. Helton’s former Rockies teammate Larry Walker was still there. Fred McGriff was there in his final season. Curt Schilling, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were on their seventh ballots. Helton finished just 15th in votes.
When Walker made it into the Hall the following season, it clearly helped: Walker had overcome the Coors Field stigma, so maybe Helton could, as well. Then the ballot thinned out. In 2021, the BBWAA threw a shutout, but Helton’s vote total climbed to 44.9.%. There was a lack of strong new candidates entering the ballot (David Ortiz made it in 2022), and when Schilling, Bonds and Clemens left the ballot after 2022, it was the weakest it had been in decades. Helton’s numbers or value didn’t change, but the perception of him did in comparison to the other candidates.
2. An appreciation of his peak.
Coors Field or not, Helton’s five-year run from 2000 to 2004 was remarkable: .372, .336, .329, .358, .347. Those are Tony Gwynn-like averages, with way more power and walks. With WAR, we can make the appropriate Coors Field adjustments and Helton still shines. Among first basemen, Helton’s best five seasons total 37.6 WAR, ranking fourth all time behind only Gehrig, Albert Pujols and Jimmie Foxx, and accounts for much of his career 61.8 total.
Over his career, Helton hit .345 at Coors Field. But he still hit an excellent .287/.386/.469 on the road. And during his dominant five-year stretch from 2000 to 2004, he hit .314/.418/.556 away from altitude, the ninth highest OPS over those years. Only Bonds, Jason Giambi and Manny Ramirez had a higher road OBP during that stretch, and nobody hit more doubles. Factor in the Coors Field penalty that Rockies players have to deal with — the brain has to readjust to pitches that move more on the road — and Helton still comes out as one of the best hitters of his era.
3. A .316 lifetime batting average looks awesome in 2024.
Yes, voters pay more attention to analytics than ever. But the BBWAA bloc still features old-school stats voters who don’t care about a player’s WAR — and a .316 career average looks more impressive with each passing season. The only player since 1900 with at least 6,000 plate appearances and a higher lifetime average than Helton who is not in the Hall of Fame is Babe Herman. In essence, the young, analytical voters appreciated Helton’s high peak value, and the older, less-analytical voters couldn’t ignore that .316 average.
Why Joe Mauer is a Hall of Famer
When the Twins selected Mauer with the first pick in the 2001 MLB draft, it was viewed as a bit of a compromise choice: They were selecting the local high school hero over USC right-hander Mark Prior, who was considered the greatest college pitcher ever after a dominant junior season, just to save money. The Twins, after all, had failed to sign first-round picks Jason Varitek in 1993 and Travis Lee in 1996.
“Twins did not draft best player,” read the headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “The Twins passed on the best player in the amateur baseball draft,” columnist Dan Barreiro wrote. “They blinked, they surrendered, they choked, they conceded. … Understand that money is the one and only reason the Twins went the direction they did.” And this was Mauer’s hometown newspaper criticizing the selection.
Indeed, while Mauer signed for a hefty $5.15 million signing bonus, the Chicago Cubs took Prior with the second pick and signed him to a five-year, $10.5 million major league contract. The Twins insisted Mauer was a worthy No. 1 overall choice, while Prior’s father blasted the franchise after a team official claimed the Prior camp had asked for $20 million.
While we’ll never know if Prior would have become a Hall of Famer had he stayed healthy, Mauer is now heading to Cooperstown. Here are three key reasons:
1. Tremendous peak value as a catcher.
While Mauer played just nine full seasons behind the plate before concussions necessitated a move to first base, it was a tremendous run. His seven-year peak WAR of 39.0 ranks fifth all time among catchers, behind Gary Carter, Johnny Bench, Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez. Mauer won three batting titles along the way, including posting a .365 mark in 2009 that no hitter has reached since. One under-the-radar factor that helps a player get elected is the idea of being the best in his league at his position. While the National League had Buster Posey and Yadier Molina, Mauer was clearly the best catcher in the American League during his time. Even the voters who might not pay attention to WAR can appreciate that distinction.
2. His MVP season in 2009 was one of the best ever for a catcher.
Given that Mauer’s career counting stats don’t stand out — 143 home runs, 923 RBIs, 2,123 hits — it helped that he had that astronomical MVP season in his bio (and three other top-10 MVP finishes). He hit .365/.444/.587 with 28 home runs and 96 RBIs while winning a Gold Glove. He led the AL in all three triple-slash categories, and his adjusted OPS trails only two Piazza seasons among catchers, while Mauer’s 7.8 WAR ranks as the fifth highest ever for a catcher. Best in the game — even if for only one season — is a nice argument for your Hall of Fame consideration.
3. His career WAR is high enough.
With 55.2 WAR, Mauer ranks ninth among players who were primarily catchers — meaning the top 11 catchers in WAR are now all Hall of Famers. Yes, some of Mauer’s value was earned after his move to first base, but in combination with his peak value, it was enough to get in. Consider his ranking among those 11 catchers:
-
Batting average (.306, fourth)
-
OBP (.388, second)
-
OPS+ (124, seventh)
-
Hits (2,123, sixth)
-
Doubles (428, third)
-
Batting runs above average (239, fifth)
He wasn’t a power hitter, and he didn’t last long, but the voters got it right: Mauer compares favorably to the other Hall of Fame catchers.
It all comes down to this for the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Florida Panthers. Sunday’s game marks the conclusion of a wild roller coaster of a series that included two wins to start for Toronto, then three straight for Florida, followed by a hard-fought win in Game 6 by Toronto that provided one more matchup.
Who moves on to face the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference finals? Who begins their offseason vacation a bit earlier than they’d hoped?
Read on for a game preview with statistical insights from ESPN Research, a roundtable debate with key players in Game 7 and final score picks, a recap of what went down in Saturday’s game and the three stars of Saturday from Arda Öcal.
Matchup notes
Florida Panthers at Toronto Maple Leafs
Game 7 | 7:30 p.m. ET | TNT
The Maple Leafs have lost six straight Game 7s and are 12-15 all-time in Game 7s. The Panthers are 3-1 all-time in Game 7s, including a win in last year’s Stanley Cup Final.
Auston Matthews‘ first goal in 11 career postseason games against the Panthers came at an important time, technically serving as the game-winner of Game 6. He became the second Maple Leafs captain in history to score the winning goal in a contest when facing elimination, joining Darryl Sittler in 1976.
Teammate Mitch Marner assisted on Matthews’ goal and is the second player in Toronto franchise history with 50 playoff assists — Doug Gilmour has 60.
Joseph Woll had his first career playoff shutout, becoming the first Leafs goaltender to register a shutout when facing elimination since Curtis Joseph in the 2002 Eastern Conference finals.
Florida’s Brad Marchand will appear in his 13th career Game 7, which will be most among active players. He’s the fifth all-time to hit that benchmark, joining Scott Stevens (13), Patrick Roy (13) and his former Bruins teammates Patrice Bergeron (14) and Zdeno Chara (14).
Sergei Bobrovsky has a 2-0 career record in Game 7s, including last year’s Cup finals win over Edmonton. He is looking to join a group of eight goaltenders who have won their first three Game 7s.
Who is the one key player you’ll be watching?
Ryan S. Clark, NHL reporter: Joseph Woll. There are a few reasons here. It starts with the obvious: whether he can replicate what he did in Game 6, or at least carry several elements of that performance over into Game 7. Another reason stems from the conversation around tandem goaltenders, and the need for depth at that position. We’re so used to seeing teams have one primary option in net who’s expected to play every second. But this postseason has shown the value of having at least two — if not three — goalies who can be trusted. Woll getting a Game 7 victory would further emphasize that reality.
Victoria Matiash, NHL analyst: William Nylander. The most productive player for the Leafs this playoff run, Nylander has been scoresheet-silent this past week. After posting six goals and nine assists through nine games against Ottawa and Florida, Toronto’s most dynamic performer all regular season long has posted an egg in three straight.
If one of the coolest cucumbers in the game manages to break loose and rifle one past Bobrovsky, he’ll give his side an excellent chance to clear a hurdle not enjoyed by Leafs fans for many, many years.
Arda Öcal, NHL broadcaster: Auston Matthews. The Leafs captain scored his first career playoff goal against the Panthers in Game 6, which was also his first career goal beyond the first round of the playoffs. We hear it all the time: The superstars need to show up and show out when it matters the most. He got it done in Game 6. Can he do the same on Sunday when it’s winner takes all?
Kristen Shilton, NHL reporter: Mitch Marner. Now that Matthews got the monkey off his back with that critical goal in Game 6, it’s time for Marner to have his own series-defining moment in Game 7. Marner had four points in the Leafs’ first three games against Florida, but he has registered just one assist since then. And after that ill-fated spin-o-rama turnover move Marner pulled in the Game 5 debacle, this is his opportunity for a little redemption on home ice, too.
Marner is, like Matthews, among the most criticized players in the league for poor postseason performances when it matters most. Well, the stakes have never been higher. It’s now or never for Marner to put his mark on this one.
Greg Wyshynski, NHL reporter: Brad Marchand. Even in a moment of pure elation — a Game 6 victory on the road, with your two most maligned players combining for the winning goal — the prevailing thought among Maple Leafs fans is whether this is just another mechanism to eventually deliver maximum anguish. Marchand powering the Panthers to a Game 7 victory on Toronto’s home ice would be maximum anguish.
It has to be Marchand who twists the dagger. He has a 4-0 record against Toronto in Game 7s, all with the Boston Bruins, and can become the first player in NHL history to defeat the same opponent in at least five winner-take-all games. Factor in that the Leafs wanted to trade for Marchand before he chose Florida as his deadline destination, and now we’re talking an ironic level of pain. Brad Marchand being the reason that the Panthers win this Game 7 would cement his status as the Toronto Maple Leafs‘ greatest tormentor — perhaps second only to themselves.
The final score will be _____.
Clark: 4-3 Panthers in OT. Think about how this current iteration of the Panthers really started making its mark. It was that Game 7 win against the Boston Bruins back in 2023 that set the stage for the Panthers to become one of the NHL’s preeminent powers.
They have shown a comfort level with playing in Game 7s, which was the case last season when they won the first Stanley Cup in team history. Tapping into that experience in Game 7 could be the difference between a third consecutive Eastern Conference finals appearance or starting their offseason earlier than they would like.
Matiash: 4-2 Maple Leafs. Never mind the Leafs’ depressing losing record in Game 7s with the Core Four in action. Disregard Paul Maurice’s impeccable history in carbon-copy essential winner-take-all contests. Losers are only losers until they win.
If Toronto adheres to Berube’s system, utilizes its advantage in speed, counters Florida’s physicality reasonably enough, and doesn’t commit ridiculous infractions — silly penalties, dumb giveaways — they can finally flip the script on what’s been a tired and gloomy narrative in a town that’s craved better for much too long. If this central crew of bona fide stars truly wants to keep the elite band together for years ahead, this victory is essential. Marner scores the empty-netter to seal it.
Öcal: 3-1 Leafs. Here’s how I see it going: Toronto gets the first goal in the first period from Marner, then weathers the Cats’ onslaught in the second. Marchand scores early for Florida in the third, followed by a John Tavares quick response, then Auston Matthews pots home the empty-netter. The Leafs head to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2002. And then 300,000 people celebrate this second-round victory at Nathan Phillips Square.
Shilton: 3-2 Leafs in OT. If not now … when? Toronto knows exactly what to do in order to shut Florida down. It won’t be easy. Paul Maurice is 5-0 in Game 7s. The Panthers know how to win big games. But the blueprint to beating them is also there for the Leafs to execute.
Joseph Woll was at his best in Game 6. Toronto’s top line got rolling. The Leafs look stout defensively, and there’s a collective effort there that’s been lacking before. This chance to reach a conference finals for the first time since the early 2000s is too good to let slip away and for once, Toronto won’t let it. And that last appearance in 2002 came off a Game 7 win over Ottawa — with a chance to play Carolina. Coincidence? Maybe not!
Wyshynski: 2-1 Panthers. Auston Matthews has been eliminated from the playoffs eight times. Three of the past four eliminations were by one goal, with two of the games going to overtime. This is to say that even when they fall short, these Leafs usually don’t go out with an effort like their Game 5 embarrassment at home.
But they will go out. Florida just has too many guys that have done this before. Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Reinhart have been huge in Game 7s. Sergei Bobrovsky is 2-0 in them. Another team might be rattled by squandering a chance to close out their opponents. Florida squandered it three times in the Stanley Cup Final last season against Connor McDavid — and still pulled it together to win the Cup in Game 7. The Panthers win, the Leafs finish the series valiantly and another offseason of critical decisions begins in Toronto.
Öcal’s three stars from Saturday
Upon hearing of the unexpected death of Winnipeg forward Mark Scheifele‘s father, the Stars’ fan base mobilized online and began a campaign to donate $55 (Scheifele’s jersey number) to charities that the veteran supports. Add that to the list of reasons why hockey fans are the best.
The overtime hero who sends Dallas to the Western Conference finals for the third straight year — a rematch from 2024 against the Edmonton Oilers. Harley became the fourth defenseman in franchise history to score an OT winner in the playoffs, joining John Klingberg (2019), Mattias Norstrom (2008) and Paul Cavallini (1994).
Scheifele had an incredible game, including the opening goal, hours after finding out his father had passed away. It was Scheifele’s first road playoff goal in the past 13 games.
0:34
Mark Scheifele strikes first for Winnipeg
Mark Scheifele scores the opening goal of the game for Winnipeg just a day after his father’s death.
Saturday’s recap
Dallas Stars 2, Winnipeg Jets 1 (OT)
DAL wins 4-2, plays EDM in conference finals
Multiple games of this series ended with multi-goal victories. That was not the case on Saturday, as these two heavyweights played a tight contest that would eventually go to OT. Winnipeg’s Mark Scheifele scored the game’s opening goal 5:28 into the second period (the day after his father unexpectedly died), followed by the equalizer by Dallas’ Sam Steel. That’s where the score would remain until the end of regulation. It did not take long in OT for Thomas Harley to send the fans in Dallas into a frenzy and his team into the Western Conference finals for a rematch from last year with the Edmonton Oilers. Full recap.
0:24
Jake Oettinger makes remarkable save to keep score level
Jake Oettinger does his best attempt at acrobatics in the crease, making a lights-out save for the Stars in the third period.
Sports
‘He turned his back on us’: What it was like watching Juan Soto’s Bronx return with the Bleacher Creatures
-
Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — The first sustained jeers of the 2025 Subway Series, a raucous and crude chorus of pent-up resentment, were unleashed 20 minutes before first pitch of Game 1 on Friday, when Juan Soto emerged to stretch in center field in his New York Mets grays.
“F— Juan Soto!” reverberated from the bleachers beyond the right-field wall amid boos all around Yankee Stadium. Soto, ever the showman, did not directly acknowledge the greeting. But he subtly tugged at the bill of his cap toward the bleachers, surely in the direction of at least some people who had showered him with love last summer into autumn as the New York Yankees rode Soto and Aaron Judge‘s historic tandem production to the franchise’s first World Series appearance in 15 years before Soto ditched them during the winter.
This was a battle between first-place teams 10 miles apart, a fact that alone would have provided more juice than usual to the weekend series. The addition of Soto’s perceived betrayal, one of the sport’s biggest storylines, made it perhaps the most anticipated meeting between the clubs since the 2000 World Series.
Marc Chalpin took his usual bleacher seat in Section 203 behind right field, surrounded by his Bleacher Creature brethren, at approximately 6:30 p.m., anticipating the inevitable. If he had it his way, fans wouldn’t have greeted Soto in his return to Yankee Stadium with vulgarity. “F— Juan Soto!” was, to Chalpin, both over-the-top in its obscenity and underwhelming in its creativity.
Chalpin, tasked to initiate the Bleacher Creatures’ famous Roll Call since 2016, didn’t believe Soto warranted the vitriol, because he was a Yankee for only one season and, above all, didn’t win a championship. But he knew the three-word melody was coming for the man who spurned the home team for the — gulp — Mets.
“You’ll hear it from non-regulars,” Chalpin said, “but it won’t be us.”
Daniel Cagan was one of the non-regulars in attendance Friday. A die-hard Yankees fan from Los Angeles, Cagan happened to be in town for work, bought a ticket and attended the sold-out group therapy session by himself. Wearing a No. 68 Dellin Betances jersey, with a beer in hand before getting to his seat in Section 204, he predicted what he expected to ensue.
“Mayhem.”
With Soto’s decision to spurn the Yankees for the Mets over the offseason, the “Re-sign Soto!” pleas he heard from the bleachers in 2024 morphed into the crude taunt repeated dozens of times over the next three-plus hours. They were interspersed with rounds of boos and occasional fresh, less crass chants. It was a reaction stemming from Yankees fans’ introduction into how other fan bases have often felt about their ballclub.
For years, the big, bad, richer-than-everybody-else Yankees snatched stars, via free agency or trade, from other teams. This time — and probably for not the last time — the roles flipped: Mets billionaire owner Steve Cohen, refusing to be outbid, lured Soto from the Bronx to Queens after the Yankees offered a 16-year, $760 million contract. Soto opted for the Mets’ 15-year, $765 million deal, which includes an option to increase the total value to $805 million, free use of a luxury suite at Citi Field, up to four tickets behind home plate for all home games, and personal security for him and his family for both home and away games.
“Seeing him go to the Mets, it’s just, like, it rubs you the wrong way,” said James Roina, a 22-year-old Yankees fan who was sitting in Section 204.
Roina wore a white pinstriped Soto No. 22 Yankees jersey that he customized to read “SELLOUT” on the back using packing tape and a marker. A few brave Mets fans were sprinkled throughout Sections 203 and 204 behind Soto, proudly wearing his No. 22 in blue and orange. Fans of both teams wore Dominican-flavored caps and jerseys.
“F— Juan Soto” chants and middle fingers flew every few minutes as fans from the two sides sporadically exchanged pleasantries over the nine innings. It was so boisterous during the first inning that the Bleacher Creatures were drowned out for some of the Roll Call. Most interactions were light-hearted. On occasion, a security guard intervened to defuse a situation. Nothing escalated to a physical altercation.
“[Soto] was only here for one year,” Chalpin said. “It was a very, very good year, but it was just one year. So he’s not an all-time Yankee great or anything like that. This isn’t Paul O’Neill. He never won here. He had a great year. But there is a distinction between a guy who won here and a guy who didn’t.”
In the days leading up to the game, Chalpin knew how he wanted the Bleacher Creatures to welcome Soto.
“You know, he turned his back on us,” Chalpin said. “My attitude is we should turn our backs on him. I don’t wish him harm, but I don’t wish him success either.”
So Chalpin and dozens of Bleacher Creatures in Section 203 turned their backs on Soto when he ran out to take his spot in right field for the first time. After the game, Soto said he didn’t notice the gesture.
Joe Lopez, a Bronx native and Bleacher Creature regular since 1987, joined in on the silent treatment.
“I knew he wasn’t coming back,” Lopez said. “Because the idea is to make as much money as you can. So how are you gonna dog Soto for going after the money? I mean, come on. He got everything he wants. He got the money. He got the suite. So you’re going to hate him for that? He’s not Aaron Judge. Aaron Judge could’ve gone home to San Francisco for more money. But he wanted to be here.”
Other chants occasionally surfaced. “MVP” chants for Judge were louder than usual, an effort made to remind Soto he wasn’t even the best player on the Yankees anyway.
Another favorite was “We got Grisham!” in reference to Trent Grisham, the other player the Yankees received with Soto from the San Diego Padres and who was buried on the Yankees’ bench last season but is now enjoying a breakout campaign. Fittingly, the praise came almost a year after they chanted “We want Soto!” when Grisham replaced an injured Soto in a weekend series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Yankees fans yelled, “You can’t field!” at Soto in the first inning. They called him, in rhythmic unison, an “a–hole”. With his monster contract in mind, they chanted, “Soto, greedy!” Later on, they unearthed the classic “Overrated” chorus.
All along, Soto did his best to ignore them. He jokingly acknowledged the sentiment at-large before his first plate appearance when, smiling, he took off his batting helmet, tipped it to the crowd, tapped his chest twice and mouthed, “Thank you.”
The bleachers, however, did not get that level of acknowledgement — until the eighth inning, when a “you miss Judge!” taunt erupted and Soto appeared to outline a heart toward the bleachers. Moments later, Soto caught the inning’s final out and threw the ball into the bleachers behind him without looking. A fan, after some peer pressure, threw the ball back, igniting another roar from the crowd.
“We finally got to him,” said Milton Ousland, another Bleacher Creature staple. “He knew the F-him chants were coming. We had to do something different.”
Ousland has been sitting in the bleachers since the 1980s, back when home games were at the old Yankee Stadium and the Mets were, in a blip in the franchise’s 63-year history, the best team in town. He became the section’s cowbell man in 1996, in time for the first of four Yankees championships in five seasons. Back then, Ousland insisted, Friday’s reaction to Soto would’ve been G-rated.
“This is nothing,” Ousland said. “We used to be so bad that [opposing right fielder Jose] Canseco used to DH. We used to look up bad words in Japanese. We used to chant curse words at Ichiro [Suzuki] the whole game in Japanese. We would look it up and hand out a paper to everybody, as they walked in, that had all the curse words in Japanese.
“We’ve really been on top of players before. This is nothing new. The only thing that’s new is that a guy chose the Mets over us.”
There was a point late in Friday’s game, with the Yankees holding a five-run lead, when the two fan bases momentarily coalesced to become one. It happened when the score of Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, played at Madison Square Garden, was shown on the video board. The hometown New York Knicks were thrashing the Boston Celtics 46-27 en route to an easy series-clinching win.
Ousland, who wore a Knicks cap, banged his cowbell in celebration as the bleachers went wild around him. Pinstriped people high-fived the brave blue-and-orange souls. A light “Jalen Brunson!” chant broke out. But the truce was fleeting. It was quickly back to business until Soto, who finished 0-for-2 with three walks in a 6-2 Yankees win, made the game’s final out.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway