The walk in the eighth inning masked everything a little bit.
It prevented a restless crowd — not unsettled by the Mets’ result, but more so their $765 million man — from being restless again, from a battle between cheers and slight groans breaking out in the Citi Field stands again during their 4-1 win over the Cardinals on Thursday.
Juan Soto, coming off an 0-for-5 night and with just three homers through 19 games, struggled again.
He went 0-for-3, grounding into a double play, striking out and grounding out before reaching base in his final at-bat of the series opener.
Soto didn’t hear the restless crowd, he told The Post.
He was focused on the Mets, on his at-bats, on the “couple rockets right in front of people” that turned into outs.
Any frustration Soto — in the first season of a 15-year deal — has over his .221 average gets balanced by knowledge that struggles are just “part of the game.”
“Definitely know how to handle it,” Soto said. “I’ve been growing as a man through my whole career, and I just know things are gonna change. I just gotta keep grinding.”
When Soto grounded into a double play, the ball left his bat with a 106.7 mph exit velocity.
Then, in the fifth, Soto was retired off a ball he hit 97.7 mph.
The hard contact was present again, and Soto — who told The Post’s Mike Puma earlier in the week that he has been pitched to differently without Aaron Judge behind him — found a way to generate his 15th walk of the season.
Soto has still collected a .773 OPS and homered during two of the Mets’ three games against the Twins earlier this week.
But his start still pales in comparison to the one from 2024 with the Yankees — when, after an April 17 game, his average settled at .352 and his OPS climbed to 1.055.
Even with those numbers, he’d still launched just four homers at this point.
If anything, this start has resembled the one from 2023, when his Padres average was just .164 at this juncture of the season.
So Soto has navigated different types of starts before, though they all happened in different places, he said. In this current one, after another hitless night, it appears that at least some of them have started to become restless, too.
“It’s just baseball,” Soto said of his 2023 slow start and this current one. “There’s nothing I can do. Definitely I’m trying my best to get going and help the team … but things happen timing-wise and swinging-wise. It’s just weird. It’s baseball.”
