Juan Soto and the Mets' hitting with runners in scoring position

The 2025 Mets have had games where they’ve been atrocious hitting with runners in scoring position. But much like with any other statistic, you can’t remember the outcomes of three or four specific games and extrapolate from that. Just because Wilmer Flores had a handful of RBIs in key spots didn’t make him a clutch hitter. On that same wavelength, just because the Mets have had a handful of games where they had two or fewer hits while amassing double-digit chances with RISP doesn’t mean they’re bad when it comes to hitting with RISP.

Thru games of 5/10, the MLB average is a .728 OPS with RISP. Any guesses as to what the Mets’ results are in this split? They have a .724 OPS or essentially a league-average total. It feels bad because the average results for the league are a bit better with runners in scoring position than they are overall. MLB hitters have a .708 OPS overall and, as noted above, it’s 20 points higher with RISP. However, the Mets have a .760 overall OPS and that drops 36 points with runners in scoring position.

A 36-point drop in OPS seems bad. And it is. But if you lived thru 2016, it’s nowhere near as bad as it was that year. If you recall that season, the majority of the year, the Mets were neck-and-neck with the expansion 1969 Padres for worst-ever results with runners in scoring position in the previous 47 seasons. It’s not easy to pick an exact date where things either bottomed out or got better. But because it was written about here at 360, we know that thru games of August 13^th in 2016 – 116 games – the Mets had a .605 OPS with RISP.

Sometime in August, things turned around for the Mets. They finished with a .676 OPS with runners in scoring position, meaning that they raised their team average 71 points in their final 46 games. When what you do in less than one-third of the season raises a season-long rate stat 71 points, you know a team was cooking in that stat. The Mets were 58-58 thru games of 8/13. In their final 46 games, they went 29-17. Hitting with RISP drives scoring and, generally speaking, more runs equal more wins.

As we saw in 2016, what a team does thru a certain period of time does not have predictive value for what comes next when it comes to hitting with RISP. The quality of hitters that you have on your team makes a bigger difference than the previous results in the most-recent span. The Mets’ disappointing results with runners in scoring position here in 2025 is being driven by the poor results by Juan Soto and Luisangel Acuna.

Here are their overall OPS numbers, followed by their production with runners in scoring position:

Soto -- .863 OPS overall, .527 with RISP
Acuna - .683 OPS overall, .389 with RISP

The jury is still very much out on what type of hitter Acuna is or will be. He’ll either improve or get fewer chances going forward. Yet we know that Soto is one of the top hitters in all of MLB. Lifetime, he has a .949 OPS overall and a .978 OPS with runners in scoring position. He’s simply not going to finish the year with a mark over .400 points worse than his lifetime numbers in the category.

And when Soto starts hitting with RISP, we should expect the Mets’ runs scored numbers to increase, too. Currently, the Mets are eighth in the majors with 193 runs scored, 70 more than the last-place Pirates. Part of the reason they rank so high in runs scored is that while their production is down with RISP, they’re still doing better than average with runs scored in that category. They have 135 runs scored with runners in scoring position, the 12^th-best mark in the majors.