Phillies

Juan Soto Casually Catches a Fly Ball While Complimenting the Crack of Bryce Harper’s Bat

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jun 17th, 2024 · 9:39 AM EDT

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This was pretty sick:

Juan Soto answered the question while running for a fly ball 🤣 pic.twitter.com/SuNtEtFqD9

— MLB (@MLB) June 17, 2024

“Oh my God, that’s extremely power right there. Well, <stops to catch a fly ball>… definitely Harper. It’s a different sound when you’re coming from the minor leagues to the big leagues.”

Kinda surprised by that answer initially, but Soto is saying that when he came up from the minors in 2018, and he and Bryce were teammates for a short time, the crack of the bat had an impression on him. That was a “welcome to the majors” type of a moment. For what it’s worth, Aaron Judge is #1 in hard hit percentage and Stanton is #10 this year. Both are top six in exit velocity. Bryce is lower in both categories, but they all hit the stuffing out of the ball.

Is anybody else a fence sitter like me when it comes to mic’d up moments? On one hand, leave these guys alone and let them play. They do enough media on a daily basis. On the other hand, that was cool. And if we didn’t mic up the players, how else would we know that Bryson Stott refers to Alec Bohm as “giraffe?” The complaint over the years is that baseball hasn’t done enough to market the athletes and the product, and when you do stuff like this it ends up on social media and award-winning websites like Crossing Broad.