Greg Amsinger predicted pitch to Juan Soto in ‘greatest at-bat I’ve ever seen’: ‘You’re going to have to throw the fastball!’

New York Yankees’ star Juan Soto’s epic seven-pitch at-bat with the score tied at two in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the ALCS Sunday ended with a go-ahead three-run home run. That would prove decisive in giving them a 5-2 win and sending them to the World Series for the first time since 2009. But it’s how Soto got to that seventh pitch from Hunter Gaddis that was so fascinating, and multiple MLB analysts saw at least part of the eventual outcome coming from how that at-bat progressed.

After the game, that at-bat drew detailed pitch-by-pitch breakdowns from Joe Posnanski, MLB.com’s Paul Casella and Manny Randhawa, CBS Sports’ Mike Axisa, NJ.com’s Max Goodman, and more. And it deserved those. It was an epic duel, seeing Soto declining to swing at a down-and-in slider, taking a slider for a strike, then fouling off a slider, a change-up, a slider, and another change-up before smashing a fastball out of the park.

But this at-bat was recognized as special, and as likely to lead to this outcome, even while it was going on. On the set of the MLB on TBS studio show The Closer, Pedro Martinez predicted Soto’s “three-run Ding Dong Johnson” to his fellow analysts (TBS later showed this prediction during the actual post-game show). And on the set of MLB Network’s pre- and post-game show MLB Tonight, while waiting for the game to end, host Greg Amsinger predicted to analysts Harold Reynolds and Cliff Floyd that Gaddis would throw the fastball that Soto eventually smacked an estimated 402 feet to dead center.

“Look at him, he’s literally spoiling every pitch. Like, you’re going to have to throw the fastball! …He got the heater! He got the heater! He got the heater! What did I tell you? What did I tell you? What did I tell you? That might be the greatest at-bat I’ve ever seen.”

The fastball was definitely the pitch Soto wanted here, but also the one Gaddis didn’t want to throw. As Posnanski wrote, “Soto slugged .714 against fastballs this year. He slugged less than .400 against everything else. He wants a fastball the way your congressperson wants just one more donation, but, see, everybody in baseball knows that Soto destroys fastballs … so why would they throw him one?” And as Casella and Randhawa noted, “Gaddis allowed just four home runs during the regular season, but three of them came against his fastball, and all of those were versus left-handed hitters, like Soto.”

But Soto’s ability to hang in there and keep fouling off Gaddis’ preferred sliders and change-ups (he said afterwards “I was all over him“) led to the Guardians trying to get tricky with a fastball call there. And the eventual 95.2 mph four-seamer on the high-outside corner was just what Soto wanted. And Amsinger saw it coming.

Interestingly enough, this sets up some history for Amsinger and MLBN. That last Yankees’ World Series appearance in 2009 was also the year the network launched, and Amsinger has been there since the start. The network was on-site to cover that first World Series, and will be again, with MLB Central, High Heat, and Intentional Talk part of their World Series coverage in addition to MLB Tonight. We’ll see if we get any more predictions from Amsinger, but he certainly got this one.

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