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Geovany Soto: the Cubs' Bronx Bomber
In Friday's New York Times, Alan Schwarz profiled Geo
Soto, and we learn that despite being born in Puerto Rico and attending
high school there, Soto played his first "significant game" in New
York. The Cub catcher lived with his family in the Bronx from the time
he was four until age eight.
Soto remembers it very clearly. It might have been just below the reservoir. Or maybe down near that ice rink. But it was definitely in Manhattan's Central Park.
"It was awesome," said Soto... "You go with your dad to the practice field, but never in my life I'd ever put a uniform on and played with other kids. I felt like, 'Wow, it's really happening—I'm going to play baseball.'"
Schwarz also writes about Soto's rapport with the Cubs pitching staff.
In part of because of his excellent English, Soto handled the veteran pitching staff with such aplomb that many Cubs considered him the team's backbone and most valuable player—despite the presence of established stars like Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano. Soto knew when to talk and when not to.
Regarding Soto's hitting prowess, Schwarz mentions Soto's significant weight loss leading up to his monster offensive season at Iowa (.353-26-109) in 2007.
[Soto's weight] ballooned to as much as 250 pounds. It was only after losing weight that he began to emerge...
"Nobody was high on him after 2006, myself included," said Gary Hughes, a special assistant to the Cubs' general manager, Jim Hendry. "But there was a different Geovany Soto out there."
The new Soto had more flexibility through his midsection, allowing him to turn on pitches, and the stamina to keep calling them deep into games and seasons.
Soto is hardly the first player to see a correlation between his weight and his baseball numbers. Still, with all the stats sites and baseball reference books out there, I can't ever recall seeing one that tracked changes in a player's weight from season to season. Maybe it's not possible to get legitimate numbers anyway: teams in all sports are notorious for fudging those figures to effect. (Basketball teams, of course, are also known to misstate their players' heights.)
But if it was possible to gather this data, I think we would be able to establish some interesting connections between particular players and particular performance levels.
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