Jorge Soler Came Back to Haunt Anaheim

On October 26, 2021, Jorge Soler hit a baseball 446 feet off Charlie Morton into the left-field seats at Minute Maid Park. It was the third inning of Game 6 of the World Series. The Braves won that game 7-0. They won the Series in six. Soler, who had been acquired from Kansas City at the trade deadline for virtually nothing, was named the Series MVP after hitting three home runs, including that one — the one that cracked Houston open and handed Atlanta its first championship since 1995.

Tuesday night at Angel Stadium, a man wearing No. 12 in Halos red led off the first inning and hit Reynaldo López's second offering into the seats for a solo home run. It was Soler's fifth career home run against López in 23 at-bats — a ratio that works out to one every 4.6 plate appearances, which is the kind of number that tends to stay with a pitcher. Whether it stayed with López is a question the fifth inning would answer.

The Braves, for their part, were playing well before any of this. Drake Baldwin hit his own solo shot in the first — his fifth of the young season — extending what has become one of the genuinely pleasant early-season storylines in Atlanta. Baldwin is hitting .300/.378/.625 through the first two weeks, a slash line that will regress because everything regresses, but that shows all the structural signs of being real: the OBP is built on walks, the slugging is built on quality contact, and the swing hasn't changed from the one that made him a legitimate Rookie of the Year candidate last year. His home run came in the same inning as Soler's. It was immediately eclipsed.

López was sharp. Through four innings, he had struck out seven and allowed only the one Soler homer, the kind of start that suggested he'd fully recovered from the shoulder surgery that cost him most of 2025. He entered Tuesday at 1-0 with a 1.64 ERA. The peripherals backed it up. He looked like a pitcher who had come back from something and was better for the experience.

Then came the third inning. A 96-mph fastball high and tight hit Soler in the shoulder. Soler took his base. The crowd did not react much. Baseball is full of hit batsmen, and high-and-inside fastballs from a pitcher who has already allowed a home run to this exact hitter are not, strictly speaking, suspicious.

But baseball has a long memory. And so, apparently, does Jorge Soler.

In the fifth inning, López's first pitch to Soler was another fastball up and in — wild, not intentional in any demonstrable way, but close enough, and one pitch too many in a sequence that already had a particular shape to it. Soler did not take his base. He took three steps toward the mound.

What followed was a bench-clearing brawl, which is to say: a great deal of running and shouting and very little actual contact, except for one memorable image. Walt Weiss, the Braves' manager, who is approximately 62 years old and spent his playing career as a shortstop rather than a bouncer, physically tackled Soler to the ground. It is the kind of moment that looks different depending on how you feel about it: if you manage the Braves, it was heroic. If you watched Soler hit that 446-foot World Series bomb, it is merely very funny.

Both Soler and López were ejected. Soler, whose statistics against López had given the situation its backstory, left the field having gone deep once and charged the mound once — a strange kind of bookend for a seven-inning appearance.

The Braves, briefly inconvenienced by the chaos, went back to playing baseball.

Ozzie Albies hit his third home run of the season in the eighth inning, a swing that finished with four RBI on the night and, more quietly, reminded the box-score reader that Albies is hitting the ball harder than he has in two years. When healthy and right-side-up mechanically, Albies is one of the better contact hitters in the National League. The spring has looked like someone who has sorted something out. One game in April does not confirm that. But it matches.

Mauricio Dubón added a solo shot in the ninth. Raisel Iglesias — who played beside Soler in Atlanta during the 2021 season, which the Braves won, which you may have heard about — closed things out with 1 2/3 innings and three strikeouts for his second save. It was a strange and complete circle: the man who took Soler's championship run in the Braves bullpen was now recording outs for the team that defeated him.

Final: Braves 7, Angels 2. Atlanta improves to approximately 7-5.

There is a storyline this Braves team keeps writing, and it is not quite a revenge narrative and not quite a reunion — it is something more specifically bittersweet. Two weeks ago, Mike Soroka threw scoreless innings against his former club from the other mound, and I wrote about how odd it was to root against someone who spent five years fighting just to pitch again. Soler's situation is different: he was traded, not hurt, not forgotten by the fanbase. The Braves sent him to Anaheim on October 31, 2024 in exchange for Griffin Canning, a deal that made reasonable baseball sense and still registered as a small letting-go.

What Tuesday confirmed is that the league has not gotten over Jorge Soler either. He has hit Reynaldo López five times in 23 at-bats. He hit a home run, took a pitch off the shoulder, and then charged the mound in the same game. He is not coasting. He is not playing out a contract. He is, apparently, still the player the Braves once built a World Series run around, now doing it in different colors and occasionally landing on the wrong side of a 62-year-old manager's tackle.

Atlanta will close the series with the Angels today at 4:07 PM — Holmes against Detmers. By next week, the Angels series will be one data point among dozens, something for the season-summary writers to note in passing. But the fifth inning on Tuesday will not disappear from memory so quickly. The best baseball moments rarely survive the box score. This one already has.

The 2021 World Series MVP does not go quietly. File that under 'already knew it,' and check back in October.