Soto hopes Derby precedes another dominant second half

Juan Soto could’ve skipped the Home Run Derby, and nobody would’ve batted an eyelash. He already put on a show last year at Coors Field, and given most sluggers’ reluctance to partake in the annual pre-All-Star Game competition, he would’ve been excused had he said no this time.

Soto, though, embraces the idea of going head-to-head with some of baseball’s best power hitters, especially on this stage. And then when you consider the positive effect last year’s Derby seemed to have on his second half performance, there was no way he was going to decline the invitation for Monday’s big show at Dodger Stadium.

“I mean, for me, it worked last year,” he said with a laugh this afternoon. “You see the second half that I had. I’m just going to try and see how it feels in there, and try to enjoy the show. At the end of the day, it was really good. It was really fun. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m going to try to do the same thing. Being around all those stars, being a part of it, even if I don’t win I’m going to try to enjoy it as much as I can.”

Soto joins an already impressive field, with back-to-back defending champion Pete Alonso, Ronald Acuña Jr., Kyle Schwarber and Albert Pujols having committed so far, and three more names still to come.

“I would love to see Albert hitting bombs,” Soto said of Pujols, whose first Derby appearance came in 2003 when Soto was 4. “He was amazing when he was in his first Home Run Derby, and I want to see how fun it can be. It might be his last Home Run Derby.”

Soto already has a memorable Home Run Derby performance on his resume. Though he was struggling to hit the ball in the air through the first half of the 2021 season, he decided to take part in the Derby, hoping it might actually help his swing.

Did it ever. Soto upset crowd favorite Shohei Ohtani in the first round and wound up hitting 46 total blasts (including an event record 520-foot blast into the upper deck at Coors Field) before getting eliminated in the semifinals by eventual champion Alonso. He then went on to hit a gargantuan .348/.525/.639 with 18 homers during the season’s second half and often attributed the Derby for making a positive difference.

This time around, Soto enters the All-Star break feeling better about his swing. Though he struggled to hit for average for three months, he’s batting .444/.615/.750 over his last 13 games and homered twice over the weekend in Atlanta.

“You can tell my last couple weeks, I’ve been feeling really good at the plate,” he said. “I’ve been hitting the ball to where I want, hitting to the other side of the field. It’s been working for me, and I hope it keeps working the whole second half.”

Soto shared his 2021 Derby glory with former Nationals hitting coach Kevin Long, who served as his pitcher for the event. With Long now coaching in Philadelphia (and potentially pitching to Schwarber), Soto has selected Jorge Mejía, a former minor league hitting coach for the Nats’ rookie ball team who works with him every winter in the Dominican Republic.

“He was my hitting coach my first year, in rookie ball,” Soto said. “Now he’s back in the Dominican, and when I go back to the Dominican, I still hit with him and everything. So he knows a lot of me, and he knows my swing very well.”