League Beginning to Adjust to A's Tyler Soderstrom Already

Jun 13, 2024; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; Oakland Athletics first base Tyler Soderstrom (21) celebrates his home run against the Minnesota Twins in the second inning at Target Field. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports | Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports

It may be too early to declare that Tyler Soderstrom needs to make an adjustment, but it appears as though the league has taken notice of his recent uptick in production. On the year the 22-year-old Oakland A's first baseman is batting .224 with a .337 on-base, along with four homers and 11 RBI in 76 plate appearances. This month he has started to show some of the promise that has made him a top prospect in years past.

Soderstrom has recorded a hit in eight of his last nine games, going 9-for-30 during that stretch, and is hitting .286 with a .378 OBP in June. However, Friday night in MInnesota the league may have made an adjustment.

The A's first baseman went 1-for-5 at the dish with three strikeouts. It was his first mulit-strikeout game since May 25 against the Houston Astros. Typically one game's results are nothing that draw attention, but it's the strikeouts paired with how the Twins attacked Soderstrom that raised an eyebrow.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a young hitter has been proving that they can handle a big-league heater and now they're going to see more of what the league has to offer. That's what happened last night.

In the first inning, starter Simeon Woods Richardson threw six pitches to Soderstrom. Four of them were sliders, one was a four-seamer, and the other was a changeup. Soderstrom was 1-for-9 against sliders this season with a 52.4% whiff rate heading into the game. After a steady diet of sliders in the first, Soderstrom was ready for the one he got in the third, collecting a single on the one pitch--a slider--he saw.

That was also the last time he saw Woods Richardson in the game. From then on, it was different looks from the bullpen each time up.

Cole Sands had the fifth and threw three cutters, getting Soderstrom to fly out to center. The ball had an exit velocity of 95 miles per hour, which is good, but he also got under it and gave it a launch angle of 48 degrees.

In the seventh reliever Griffin Jax had a turn, throwing two sweepers, a four-seamer, and two curveballs. The curve is a pitch that Jax has used eight percent of the time this season, and is also a pitch that the A's first baseman is hitting .286 against with a .190 expected batting average and a 52.9% whiff rate. Both curves were out of the zone, but the last pitch of the AB was a sweeper that got Soderstrom looking.

The final at-bat of the evening is tough to blame anyone for, because it came against one of the game's best closers in Jhoan Duran and resulted in the third strikeout of the game. Duran typically mixes his three pitches (four-seamer, splitter, and curve) with the heater getting 40% of the action. Last night it was the curve that he threw in three of the four pitches Soderstrom saw, with the splitter accounting for the other offering.

This isn't to say that Soderstrom's hot streak is over by any means, but more so to point out that there are still some areas that he needs to work on to become the player that the A's saw when they drafted him. No baseball player is ever a finished product because the game is all about making adjustments to the opposition's adjustments. He's been putting in extra work with the team's hitting coaches, so we'll have to see what happens if this trend of breaking pitches continues past one game.