Yankees Magazine: The Comforts of Home

It was the first full day of a new baseball year, and Aaron Boone’s brain was straddling two eras. Asked to suggest a comparison for the sensational slugger who would make his home in the top third of the 2024 Yankees’ lineup, the manager, who played in the Majors from 1997 to 2009, offered up an all-time great: Barry Bonds.

Your thoughts on Bonds may vary in 2024, and we’re not about to litigate that argument. But in the batter’s box, he was the archetype of intelligence, ability and intimidation. Bonds was an impossible at-bat, unwilling to chase bad pitches. He had unmatched power, retiring with the single-season and career home run records. He existed to make opposing pitchers and managers uncomfortable.

So, when a present-day skipper compares one of his guys to Bonds -- indeed, does so without so much as a beat to think -- it’s no small compliment.

There’s just one question when it comes to Aaron Boone and the 2024 Yankees: Who was the manager speaking about? “I mean,” says Anthony Rizzo, “we have two of those guys.”

The Yankees once again this year will deploy Aaron Judge, who owns the AL single-season home run record; who would inspire boos as he regularly trotted to first after yet another walk in his record-setting season; who even heard some derision when he doubled, so desperate were the New York faithful to witness history. Although right-handed and free from any whiff of scandal, Judge definitely hits some familiar notes there.

“Barry Bonds would get pitched around all weekend long, and the one pitch that would show up in the strike zone, he’d hit it into McCovey Cove,” Boone said on the day that position players officially reported to spring training. “I think that’s probably the comp you’re talking about.”

Except, Boone wasn’t talking about Judge. He was referring to the newest offensive wizard in pinstripes -- Juan Soto.

Like Bonds (and Judge), the 25-year-old Soto is a menace in the box (some might even say a savage). He knows the strike zone as well as anyone in the game, having walked at least 130 times in three seasons (Bonds did it eight times in 22 years; among other active players, only Joey Votto has done it more than once). Soto’s career on-base percentage entering 2024 is .421, the best mark among active hitters (Judge stands fourth at .396). And Soto, while not likely to crack 60 homers, still has elite pop; add slugging to his OBP, and you get a .946 career mark, third among active players. Judge’s OPS is second, at .982.

“You’re talking about, arguably, the two best hitters in the sport,” Boone said. As Spring Training rolled on and the regular season neared, the manager looked like the luckiest guy in the world, able to write Soto and Judge back to back on his lineup card. And as he spends this coming year getting to watch the interplay between Yankees stars -- one old, one new -- the manager, his players and baseball fans all over the planet will learn how Soto, and the balance between comfort and discomfort, could tell the tale of the 2024 New York Yankees.

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Memorial Day Weekend is kind of a big deal around New York City, with locals shipping off to long-forsaken beaches, while tourists take over the avenues and entertainment districts. In 2023, with the worst of the pandemic seemingly in the past, some traditions fully returned to pre-2020 levels, among them Fleet Week.

Conveniently coinciding with the week’s nautical focus, the Padres -- hailing from the city that houses nearly 20% of U.S. Navy personnel -- visited Yankee Stadium for the weekend, and fans packed the house, selling out all three games. One of the main draws that weekend was Soto, who opened the scoring in the first game with a fifth-inning two-run bomb for San Diego.

“Usually in Yankee Stadium, when you play the Red Sox or you play the Mets, you’re going to have the opposing team’s fans that stand out,” says Omar Minaya, a senior advisor to Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. “It was the Padres, and the opposing fans stood out.”

But Minaya, born in the Dominican Republic, wasn’t implying that it was just guests from California rooting on their Friars. Rather, he saw an entirely different connection, a bond that should strengthen over the course of the next six-plus months. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed it.

“I sensed that, too, coaching third,” says Yankees coach Luis Rojas. The son of Felipe Alou -- making him a member of Dominican baseball’s first family -- Rojas had no question as to why the Padres were getting so much love. “When he was coming off the field to the dugout, you could hear the chants. They were chanting his name -- people with Dominican flags out in the stands.

“I think the people from New York, they were really happy to see Juan Soto playing in Yankee Stadium.”

According to data from the 2020 U.S. Census, there are nearly 2.4 million people of Dominican descent in the United States; of that number, about 702,000 call New York City home, nearly 335,000 of them in the Bronx.

Any player wants to feel comfy and cozy in his team’s ballpark, and unless Major League Baseball adds a team in Santo Domingo, Juan Soto will never feel closer to home than at Yankee Stadium. And if Dominican baseball fans came out in force to celebrate Soto visiting New York as a Padre, just imagine the reception he’ll get in Yankees pinstripes. Soto says that he expects a vibe reminiscent of the spring when he repped his home country in the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

“I think the energy that Dominicans bring all over the place is just amazing,” Soto says. “We always love each other. We feel like family every time we go out.”

The newest Yankees slugger won’t have to go far to find great sancocho or mangú. Even as a visitor, Soto marveled at the Dominican food the Yankee Stadium clubhouse chefs would cook up. Now he’s going to get it on the regular, just as his baseball idol, Robinson Canó, did during his nine years in the Bronx. (And if it sounds crazy to think of a modern-day superstar talking about the 41-year-old Canó as a hero from his youth, then you’re probably still coming to terms with just how young Soto -- born four days after the Yankees completed a World Series sweep of the Padres for their 125th victory of the 1998 season -- really is.)

Canó and Manny Ramírez are the first names Soto offers when thinking about the legends from his home country. Albert Pujols, too. But Jasson Domínguez, one of just three other Dominican players on the Yankees’ roster during this year’s Spring Training, stops short of historic hero-worship when considering his new teammate.

“Those guys,” the 21-year-old Domínguez says, “they already did what they did in the past. But I think Soto, he has a really, really special future coming up.”

Minaya, in turn, defers to the popular adjective for Soto, one so ubiquitous that the outfielder wore it on his shirt at his first spring press conference. “He is what we would call a generational hitter,” Minaya says. How so? Well, the executive and former general manager says that Pujols is the best Dominican hitter ever. As for Soto, six years into a career? “He’s in the conversation.”

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During Spring Training in Tampa, Fla., Soto lockered a few stalls down from DJ LeMahieu, the player known around the Bronx as “The Machine.” But to Soto, that nickname belongs to Pujols, who did everything on the field with programmatic precision. He mashed. He walked. He barely struck out. The goal -- for any player, but certainly for Soto -- is to replicate that as best as possible.

It’s part of why nearly every Yankee in Tampa, asked to describe what most impressed them about Soto, immediately turned to his routine, the intense and intentional repetition and the consistent drive toward excellence. Nothing with Soto is an accident; it’s all a product of building muscle memory and a mental scrapbook of everything he has seen, the better to prepare him for anything that comes his way.

“This is arguably the best hitter in the game,” says new Yankees hitting coach James Rowson. “A complete hitter. He can do things that are phenomenal with the bat. But his approach to hitting and his approach in the cage and the precision with which he does his work is really amazing. You watch him, every swing he takes has a purpose. He doesn’t take a swing without a purpose.”

But it’s not just about when he swings. Over the course of six big league seasons, what has made Soto a superstar is probably even more tied up in when he doesn’t swing.

“What you don’t swing at is oftentimes what makes you,” Boone says. “You’ve got to be able to lay off pitches and in some way, shape or form, control the strike zone on that level. Because the guys up here are simply too good at exposing weaknesses.”

Considering that Soto has walked in 19% of his career plate appearances, you might think that his batter’s eye came naturally. But he admits to being a free swinger before he reached pro ball. That’s not terribly uncommon among Dominican players. There’s an old notion, however retrograde and probably offensive, that “You can’t walk off the island.” Rojas, the Yankees’ third-base coach, says it’s part of how baseball is taught there, where skills that can attract attention are honed to a much greater degree than things such as knowledge of the strike zone. “You’re taught to hit the ball hard,” Rojas says. “Run fast. Have a very strong arm. We teach those things in the Dominican Republic. So, we create a lot of players that are going to crush it in a tryout.

“To have the swing decision skill, that’s different. There’s very few programs down there where you play a bunch of games or tournaments. When I say very little, I’m probably overselling it. So, there’s not a lot of competition.”

And despite the long list of great Dominican players who emerged in the majors with sensational strike zone discipline, Soto acknowledges that as recently as a bit more than a decade ago, it was still how he was being taught.

“When we were kids,” Soto says, “they would say, ‘They pay you to hit, not to take walks.’ And that was the mindset when we came into the league. We have to swing the bat. We have to make contact. We have to put the ball in play and see what happens. That was the mentality all the way until we made it to the pros. And then when I started to play professionally, they were telling me that I have a good hand-eye coordination, but that I’ve got to take a couple of pitches. Pitches out of the strike zone, I was getting myself out, instead of seeing it and letting it get to me and taking a good chance on a good pitch.

“I’m still learning about the strike zone and everything. I’ve been putting in the work to keep grinding, keep getting better at that.”

That work helps make Soto comfortable in the batter’s box. As for pitchers … well, they’re not having such a good time.

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Spring Training is long, probably too long for most players. The schedule is built for pitchers and catchers who need to stretch out their arms, build game plans, learn each other’s tendencies and those of all the hitters in the league. Among all the stresses Yankees batterymates had to deal with this past spring, there was at least one ray of sunshine: They wouldn’t have to face Soto and Judge in real games.

Two of the best hitters in baseball, back to back. As Anthony Volpe says, “It’s video game cheat code stuff.” Most pitchers only have so many weapons. Soto and Judge will require all of them. Oh, and one will do it from the left side, the other from the right.

“It’s about as taxing as,” Gerrit Cole says, pausing in thought, “I can’t really think of anything more taxing than that.”

Imagine trying to work through a Soto at-bat. You know that he’s going to crush any mistake. You know that he won’t give an inch, that he’ll never chase. You know that he’s not going to mess up his swing by aiming toward the short right-field porch at Yankee Stadium, that he’s happy to pound a ball into the cavernous gap in left-center.

Faced with such a situation, a walk isn’t a terrible outcome, right? Better to issue a free pass than to irresponsibly miss in a slug zone. Except … now you get Aaron Judge. With a guy on base.

“It’s an AB that you have circled throughout the lineup,” says Yankees pitcher Clarke Schmidt, relieved to be discussing someone else’s problem. “But it’s also one of those things where, he’s such a good hitter that you can’t exhaust yourself too much trying to get him out. Sometimes you’ve got to tip your cap and just take your losses, whether that’s a single or whatever it may be, and go on to the next guy. But unfortunately for other pitchers, the next guy’s Aaron Judge.”

And Judge? He’s not going to back down either. So now you’re looking at Rizzo, at Gleyber Torres, at Giancarlo Stanton, Alex Verdugo, Austin Wells, Volpe. … There’s not an easy out on the list, and certainly not with runners on base. And especially not on the heels of one high-pressure at-bat after another. Talk about uncomfortable.

“Stress adds up,” Stanton says. “We have a lineup full of stressful at-bats, and it’s only a matter of time before you’ve got to make some mistakes.”

When Bonds was demolishing baseballs in San Francisco, Jeff Kent had the privilege of hitting next in the order. A five-time All-Star who maxed out at 46.5% in Hall of Fame voting, Kent clearly was an excellent player, but never better than when he was hitting behind an all-time great. Pitchers, who scratched and clawed their way through the greatest offensive threat the game has ever seen, had to have lost a bit of their edge by the time the next at-bat started (and this was before pitch timers).

Replace Kent with Judge. The possibilities are enough to make Yankees fans -- and players -- ecstatic. Perhaps even to dream a bit about the future.

Because the uncomfortable fact is that Soto is in town on an expiring contract, ready to enter free agency and see what the league will throw his way. The numbers should be astronomical, representative of a stratospheric career arc. Soto has already learned that baseball is a business. Getting traded to San Diego from Washington, where he won a World Series, broke his heart. This time around, it was a lot simpler: The Padres told him that the team had to move in a different direction and, as he remembers it, he never even heard about a potential match with any team but the Yankees. One day he was a Padre, the next day he was a Yankee. For at least one year.

Yankees fans, though, don’t seem to enjoy the idea of dating. They want to give Soto a ring, and they want him to bring them a bunch more. The Dominican superstar is a generational talent who will hit the free-agent market at 26 years old, something almost unheard of in this era. “To be at the age he is and to already have the resume that he has is pretty remarkable,” Boone says. And if the fans can’t be around the conference room table during any negotiations, they’ll spend the year doing the only thing they can. They’ll work to make a newcomer comfortable enough to make all opponents nauseous.

“It’s going to be fun,” Soto predicts. “That’s the only thing I’m thinking about is how fun it’s going to be hitting back to back there.

“It’s going to feel like home.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the April 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.