SNY booth implores Juan Soto to clean up his game after latest lazy baserunning

The SNY booth did not let Juan Soto off the hook.Gary Cohen nor Keith Hernandez took too kindly to Soto’s hustle out of the box on his long fly-ball single off the Green Monster in Monday’s 3-1 loss to the Red Sox on Boston — especially after a situation in Sunday’s loss to the Yankees, where Soto didn’t run hard on a play in which many people thought he could beat out the throw. “Didn’t run hard out of the box might have cost himself a base,” Gary Cohen said during Monday’s broadcast of the play the previous night, before turning the focus onto the current situation. “He and [Pete] Alonso both have been guilty of thinking that the ball was going out to left field and not running hard to first base,” Cohen said.“Alonso got thrown out at second and Soto barely got to first.” Just before Cohen made that comment, Keith Hernandez said that “he’s played here enough” to know that he didn’t get enough of the ball for it to be a home run. Soto did reach second base on a stolen base, which Cohen joked was because “he knew he was supposed to be on second.” “But it is part of a larger pattern with Soto,” Cohen added.

“He’s not running hard all the time and this is something he really needs to clean up.” Soto has been facing greater scrutiny since the end of the weekend’s Subway Series series, after he was more or less a non-factor in his first trip back to the Bronx after leaving in the offseason for the Mets. Soto had a walk and a stolen base to start the series before going 1-for-10 through the rest of the three-game set. To add to that, Soto drew the ire of Mets fans when he was seen very blatantly not running hard on the eighth-inning hit that could have helped change the course of the 8-2 loss to the Yankees. The game was tied at 2 at the time....