The Giants accomplished two very important things when they inked free agent outfielder/DH Jorge Soler to a three-year deal earlier this week. First—and most importantly—they added the kind of home run threat they just haven’t had in…well, decades really. They famously haven’t had a hitter with 30+ home runs in a season since Barry Bonds was regularly making deposits into McCovey’s Cove.
Much of that drought can be attributed to their infamously unforgiving ballpark—over the last three years, Oracle Park has been the fourth most difficult park to hit a homer, according to Statcast. But it’s not just the park. San Francisco has also suffered through a frightening shortage of hitters who truly impact the ball at an elite level during that time. In many ways the talisman of their post-Bonds era, Buster Posey, embodies exactly the type of hitter the Giants have often filled their rosters with: an effective hitter, but his greatest home run tally was 24. Posey played half his career in front of Trackman cameras and still hit a grand total of two balls harder than 110 mph in that time.
The 2023 Giants were built following that same blueprint; they hit just 24 batted balls with an exit velocity over 110 mph, the second-fewest in baseball (ahead of only the Nationals’ 17). Jorge Soler—by himself—cleared the bar 25 times last year. That’s a serious injection of raw power into what had been a mostly punchless offense.
We can visualize that by comparing Soler’s batted ball distribution (the pink in the plot below) to last year’s Giants (the orange). There’s a whole swatch of high-end exit velos that Soler is bringing to the table that last year’s Giants just did not have the ability to tap into. These are the kinds of scorchers that go for extra bases or get out of any park, even one as hostile for hitters as Oracle Park.