Juan Soto's hustle in Subway Series return to Yankee Stadium was surprisingly awful

We can litigate whether Juan Soto's motivations were pure or cowardly when he left the Yankees for the Mets prior to the 2025 season another day. It's well-trod territory. Mets fans want Yankee fans to shut up about it. Yankee fans, who root for a better team than Mets fans do these days, are also totally cool to shut up about it. What's done is done. Mistakes were probably made, but the Yankees have survived and advanced.

But what we can talk about, freely, without concern that someone might jump down someone else's throat and attempt to decide what we are and aren't allowed to care about is this: Soto was really quite bad in the opening game of this Subway Series, huh?

That, naturally, sets Soto up to be quite good in future Subway Series games. He's quite a talented player. Not a single soul in the stadium should've felt secure when he came to the dish against David Bednar as the tying run in Bednar's second inning of work. But Soto grounded into a double play. He did so to end the game after whiffing over two splitters. He had another bad at-bat in a remarkably bad game. Everything he did in this game was bad, each thing somehow worse than the previous thing.

Wow, quite bad! At no point in this play did it appear to be a double play. Until it was. Inconceivable outcome.

Soto went 1-for-5 in this game, but I dare you to remember the "one" (two-out single in the third before Carlos Rodón locked in and retired the next 10 batters). He struck out in the first. He struck out in the sixth. Both swinging. Both involved being diced up by pinpoint Rodón cutters. He smoked a groundout to begin the eighth, making him one of only two men retired by Brent Headrick over the course of 30 pitches; the other was Francisco Lindor on a liner that can only be described as "Holy shit, a complete and total accident".

Juan Soto's defense in left field was also quite bad in Yankees vs. Mets opener

It's possible that Soto came back too quickly and unnecessarily from his second calf strain of the season. If so, he should not be playing left field at Yankee Stadium, a notoriously tough assignment. With one on and nobody out in the bottom of the eighth, Spencer Jones looped a dunker and lost his helmet in front of Soto. The effort was lacking.

One batter later, after both runners shuffled up one bag on a bunt, Ryan McMahon laced what looked like a fly ball too shallow to score a run into left field. Nope. Single. Soto's effort level somehow sagged even further. It was a masterclass ... in situating himself as far away from the Bleacher Creatures as possible, and nothing else.

The Yankees would benefit from Soto's presence in the lineup. Who wouldn't? The Mets looked like a legitimate collection of young talent with a battling ethos on Friday night. Their future is bright. For about an hour and a half at the end there, quite literally nothing went wrong for them - unless Soto was involved. The rest of the series has to look better for him. It cannot look worse.

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