ARRAEZ ARRIVES ON THE NATIONAL STAGE...

YES, we mentioned Luis Arraez for the first time here about 10 days ago...suggesting that MLB needs more of his type of hitter. (We also mentioned the need for fewer analysts of a certain type as well, but we'll bypass that for now.) Lo and behold, it's two days past D-Day and here is Arraez hitting .403, the highest June batting average since Chipper Jones took wing back in 2008.

Now let's be honest: Arraez is wonderful, but he's a two-dimensional player in his own right, and one might rightfully claim that it's really a dimension and a half. His knees are a bit suspect, so he has no speed. He has little power (not even a robust number of doubles). He doesn't work especially hard at selecting pitches, so he doesn't add an outsized number of walks to his arsenal. 

All he has done is hit--and he's done it since the age of 17, when he first showed up as a scrawny kid with the barest trace of a stubbly beard in the Dominican Summer League (the year was 2014--a veritable lifetime ago). He hit .347 there and kept on hitting at every stop in the minors, overcoming a knee injury that cost him most of 2017. In 2019 he jumped into the majors, hitting .334 for the Twins as arguably the most anomalous player anywhere thanks to the homer-happy environment he joined (and summarily ignored).

Now he's in Miami, in a trade that many dismissed/disdained. (The fact that Arraez won the AL batting title in '22 actually seemed to goad many "analysts" to downgrade their estimation of him.) Somehow Florida in the midst of the culture wars, on a team that rather openly defies the so-called tenets of the state's other Il Duce wannabe, is a perfect place for a now-chunky but still wispily-bearded post-modern baseball misfit to magically fit in--and flower. 

SO how the heck is he doing it, given that a cadre of twelve-ounce curl intellectuals suggest that the game has changed so utterly that no one can simply try to get base hits anymore? (Even the best of these guys, Eno Sarris, is still a couple bottles short of a six-pack.) The possibilities of "see the ball, hit the ball" have been so orphaned by these folk that they pretty much sidestep their knee-jerk approach to characterizing the "science of hitting" when they look at Luis--and then they simply avoid him altogether, in one awkward goose-step.

Of course, a .400 BA (even though it's "meaningless"...) is hard to ignore. 

Looking at the normal data we have readily available (as opposed to the Statcast balsamic vinaigrette honeytrap...) we can see it plain as the stubble on Luis' face: he's hitting lefties with a level of authority well beyond what he's done in the past (.382 against them this year, as opposed to .261 from 2019-22). 

It's also likely that the death of the shift--which hasn't produced more singles overall in MLB (for reasons that require a longer discussion than we'll be giving it here)--is, in this case at least, working in Arraez' favor: he's hitting .362 in 2023 on ground balls, which is almost exactly a hundred points better than what his lifetime BA on grounders was from 2019-22 (.263). 

There's more, but we'll save it for a future installment should Luis manage to keep .400 in view for any significant amount of time. (BTW, our YEPS projection tool is not optimistic in that regard; but it does suggest that Arraez will hit a bit upwards of .350 this year--.354, to be exact. That would be the highest full-season batting average in MLB since Josh Hamilton hit .359 in 2010.)

Let's close by reminding you that we are not against home runs: we just want fewer of them. And we want a greater diversity of hitting styles, regardless of whether "singles hitters are overrated due to batting average" or other such epithets that simply fetishize the home run to the point where Joey Gallo is defended by "sabermetricians" as a legitimate role model for hitting. (Gallo is rather cool, to be honest, but trust us when we say that one of him is enough. A few dozen Luis Arraezes, however, would be a Godsend for the sport. If you're the prayerful type, feel free to drop to your knees and clasp your hands together...)