There are so many factors that will go into where Juan Soto decides to play in 2025 and for many years after that, and a few of them are extremely obvious.

Those include, but aren't limited to: He’s going to want to play for a team that will offer him a record-setting contract, and he’s going to want to play for a franchise that is likely to be playing competitive baseball every single year. He may or may not have additional preferences about climate, state taxes, regional culture or geography. He’s a free agent. He’s earned the right to have those opinions and decide his own future.

But there’s one other aspect of all this that comes up now and then, which probably won’t have very much of an impact at all: How will a new team’s ballpark affect his hitting? After all, didn’t he just post a career year playing in hitter-friendly Yankee Stadium, home of the short right-field porch that has fueled plenty of left-handed hitters?

Sure. But also, no.

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It’s the popular narrative. It’s just also not really accurate at all. It’s not that the short porch in the Bronx hasn’t helped a particular brand of lefty, as Didi Gregorius would be happy to tell you. It’s that Soto, obviously, isn’t a typical anything. Yankee Stadium didn’t help him at all, actually, and because of the kind of all-around, historically great hitter he is, any particular ballpark effect isn’t likely to have any sort of major effect on his production.

If this all sounds familiar, it should, because we’ve been harping on it for a while. When he was first traded to the Yankees last December, we pointed out that based on the way he’d hit in 2023, Yankee Stadium wasn’t terribly likely to provide him with a boost. Since he’s an all-fields hitter with outstanding power -- not an extreme pull hitter with warning-track power – any gains he’d make in right would probably be equaled or overshadowed by lost homers to the big left-center-field gap. We reiterated it in early August, as that career year was in full swing.

So what actually happened in 2024?

• Home: .960 OPS // 20 HR
• Away: 1.017 OPS // 21 HR

Right. Exactly. It’s not that Soto didn’t hit well in Yankee Stadium, where for his career (including a few road appearances) he has a line of .283/.400/.579 (.979 OPS), which in terms of on-base and slugging is basically what Bobby Witt Jr. just did in 2024.

It’s that he hits well pretty much everywhere – over the last six seasons, only Aaron Judge and Yordan Alvarez have a higher road OPS than Soto’s .988.

Consider this: Soto has taken at least 60 plate appearances at 16 different ballparks. At 11 of them, or just more than two-thirds, his OPS has been at least .940, which is a truly elite level of production. So yes, Mets fans, you can accurately say that Soto has posted an outstanding 1.175 OPS (.321/.466/.709) in 35 games in Queens. But Reds fans can say the same (1.186 OPS), and Phillies fans (1.086 OPS), and Pirates fans (.998 OPS), and eventually you’re realizing that it’s not the ballpark, it’s the man.

This isn’t even really the world’s most serious analysis, to be sure, because 60 scattered plate appearances over eight seasons of play can lead to more than a little bit of randomness. For example: it’s not clear if Soto’s relative underperformance in Petco Park was anything specific to the park itself, or just a tough settling-in period after a midseason trade from the only team he’d known. (It’s worth noting that even just on the road, 2022 was Soto’s weakest year.)

Soto hit 45 homers this past season, playoffs included, and according to Statcast metrics that adjust not only for the different wall heights and dimensions of the various parks but also the environmental effects that impact how well the ball carries, we can see how few of those came simply because of Yankee Stadium. It was: one, and it came at a cost.

• 1 was out in Yankee Stadium and nowhere else, the classic short-porcher, coming on Aug. 20 against Matthew Boyd.
• 3 non-homers in other parks would have been out at home, including, perhaps ruefully, a ninth-inning single in Game 2 of the World Series.
• On the other hand: 3 of of his non-homers would have been out in at least 25+ parks … yet were not because he hit them to left or center in Yankee Stadium, where they became outs or doubles.

As much fun as it would be to consider what it would look like if Soto called Coors Field home, it seems like there’s a six-team list of main suitors for his services. If you look at the same Statcast environmentally adjusted list of batted balls from last year, and asked what would happen if he played all his games in that team’s home park, the 45 homers would become …

• Phillies 54
• Dodgers 51
• Blue Jays 49
• Yankees 46
• Mets 46
• Red Sox 45

That’s on a scale of “only 38, in Detroit,” to “63, in Cincinnati, baseball’s best home run park,” and for all the arguments for those teams to go after him, they're not terribly likely landing spots. For any team likely to sign him, this matters a little, not a whole lot, maybe not at all.

Which is to say: it might matter for a different hitter with more specific batting tendencies, like Alex Bregman. But it didn’t really matter that much for Soto, not in the Bronx. The ballpark didn’t make Soto a great hitter, and it’s not why he had such a great year. Soto has been hitting pretty much everywhere since he arrived in the Majors as a 19-year-old in 2018. He’ll hit wherever else he goes from here, too. Given his age and production, there’s hardly been a safer big-ticket free agent in recent history.