2024 stats: 93 G, 392 PA, .240/.330/.419, 11.2% BB%, 24.7% K%, 12 HR, 40 RBI, 0.6 fWAR
It was 49 weeks ago that Susan Slusser reported the San Francisco Giants had signed slugger Jorge Soler to a 3-year deal and it didn’t take more than, what, four weeks before a decent chunk of the fans turned on the guy for not being the slugger that was promised? His time with the Giants lasted all of 25.5 weeks, when Farhan Zaidi decided that the season was lost and made a series of salary dumps at the trade deadline.
Now, was Jorge Soler so valueless that he was worthy of a salary dump or valuable enough that a team wanted to trade for him? If you’re a fan of the Giants, chances are, you think the player had no value and that any team taking him on is a sucker. That’s because he didn’t sock dingers when he was explicitly signed to sock dingers.
On April 27, Andrew Baggarly posted to the site formerly known as Twitter:
“The strange, strange Jorge Soler RBI stat: He’s come to bat with 87 runners on and driven in just 3 of them, including the automatic runner in the 10th tonight (on a 433-foot homer). It wasn’t enough in the Giants’ 4-3 loss. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Soler said in Spanish
He basically never recovered from this stat, in the eyes of the fans and then the organization. A little less than a month after the Baggarly note, I wrote about Soler’s concerning situation:
The Giants’ biggest on-paper power threat has been a powerless presence so far this season.
[…]
His hard hit rate is down to 39%, which would be his lowest figure since 36% in 2016 and 34.4% in 2017. He managed a 103 OPS+ in 2016 with that rate but he played in just 35 games in 2017, so we’re basically dealing with a different version of Soler from his early days.
His walk rate and strikeout rate are right in line with his norms, so, it’s a reasonable conclusion to reach that he’s simply not hitting the ball as hard as he has in the past. Does that mean he’s unlikely to again? Hard to say. A shoulder strain seems like a really bad injury for a hitter, age decline is very real, but there are several successful DH types who persevere and have good track records into their 30s. His season hasn’t been written, but his first 38 games have been a very ugly rough draft.
What’s remarkable is that he really started to pick things up in a different facet of the game: as the leadoff guy. His final 24 games with the Giants (109 PA) had him DHing from the leadoff spot. The Giants went 13-11 and he slashed .290/.395/.516 (.911 OPS) with 3 home runs, 11 RBI and even a stolen base. His Win Probability Added was +0.926 as well. So, he and the team figured some things out before they saw an opportunity to move him.
Personally, I never got the enmity. A player on a new team and switching divisions — switching geography, even (he’d never lived west of Chicago) — was bound to include a learning curve or period of adjustment. A 3-year deal basically invited this, too, but people wanted a Giancarlo Stanton-type from day one and when they didn’t get that and he only managed to get it going from the leadoff spot, the traditionalists who have veto power over the team’s decision-making gave him a thumbs down and he had to go.
I have a hard time squaring that reaction with the actual results, but we’re also at a point where it’s not really worth breaking it down too much. Soler is gone — and after being traded to Atlanta to finish out their season (and did quite well, by the way: .849 OPS with 9 home runs and 24 RBI in 182 PA, hitting leadoff, 2nd, and 5th), they traded him to the Angels to live out the rest of his career, presumably — and his lasting contribution might be the prospect they got in exchange for him (along with Luke Jackson), infielder Sabin Ceballos, who is the #18 prospect, according to the McCovey Chronicles community.
But Soler’s season rebounded to a decent degree. His Hard Hit with Atlanta jumped to 53% and average exit velocity was 92 mph. He might just needed time to recover from injuries or was simply more comfortable playing and hitting in Atlanta. We’ll see how he does with the Angels in 2025. He had an interesting season on a personal level but one that demonstrated to the sport that he still has plenty in the tank. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the player the Giants needed him to be.