Miami Marlins: Luis Arraez drives the statheads nuts

Luis Arraez of the Miami Marlins must be driving the stat geeks crazy right now with his old school approach.

As you are almost certainly aware, Arraez is carrying a .403 batting average into the depths of June. That doesn’t mean he’ll bat .400 for the season, or even make a hard run at it. The only players in the last half century who’ve done that were Tony Gwynn (.394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season) and George Brett (.390 in 1980).

But he could. Arraez is, after all, the defending American League batting champion, coming off a 2022 season in which he hit .316 for the Minnesota Twins. Traded to Miami during the offseason, he’s at .403 63 games into his National League experience.

But it’s not the .403 average that must have the stat geeks sideways; it’s how Luis Arraez of the Miami Marlins has gotten there.

Give any devotee of the new stats a blind resume containing the actual “new stat” numbers Arraez has produced to date, and they’d immediately identify him as a player of marginal value, probably a hanger-on, with swing deficiencies suggesting a candidate for benching.

Start with his batted ball profile. Arraez has seen 839 pitches through games of June 7, but only 207 of them have been outside the strike zone. That’s a 75 percent challenge rate. The MLB average is around 60 percent. Plainly, whoever this guy is, pitchers aren’t afraid of him.

But, based on the peripheral data — which modern teams place great faith in — why should they be? Here’s a look at how Arraez compares against the Major League average in several other offensive categories that stat geeks study closely.

Category                            Arraez               MLB average

Barrel rate                           2.9%                      6.8%

Exit Velo.                             88.2 mph             88.4 mph

Launch angle                    11.5                       12.1

Hart hit %                           22.7%                    36.0%

Walk rate                           7.9%                       8.4%

Here, in short, we have a player who rarely barrels up the ball, who hits grounders, who is below average at taking bases on balls, whose exit velocity is middlin’ at best, and who very rarely hits the ball hard.

That last one is the grabber. The 22.7 percent hard hit rate puts Arraez virtually at the bottom of MLB players in that category. Only about 2 percent of current players hit the ball hard less frequently in 2023 than Arraez.

Yet there he sits at .403 60 games into the season. How?

The answer, as you might guess, is old school.

Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, Arraez bats like he has a personal grudge against striking out. He’s only fanned 11 times in 239 plate appearances, and only once since May 28. A rookie named Hogan Harris, pitching for Oakland, got him on June 2. That was 23 plate appearances ago.

His strikeout rate is 4.6 percent, which runs laps around the MLB 22.1 percent average. Nobody with fewer actual strikeouts this season than Arraez’s 11 has batted even half as many times as his 228 official trips to the plate.

Arraez is also extraordinary or, if you prefer, extraordinarily lucky, when he makes contact. Depending on how you look at it, his Expected Batting Average – what the stats say he ought to hit – is either proof that he is a great hitter or proof that his average will soon crash and burn.

Proof that he’s a great hitter? His XBA is .335, which is right up there with the game’s best. Only Ronald Acuña Jr. (.347) and Freddie Freeman (.337) have a higher XBA right now.

Proof that a crash is coming? Arraez’s actual batting average is a massive 68 points above his XBA. For comparison, Acuna’s actual batting average is 16 points below his XBA, Freeman’s actual is nine points better than his expected.

In fact of the top 10 players right now in XBA, only Arraez’s actual batting average varies by more than 30 points.

Arraez’s average probably benefits from his unpredictability. There’s no way to play him other than straight up. He pulls 27 percent of his contacts, sends 40 percent back up the middle, and takes 33 percent the other way. He is, in some respects, the reincarnation of Wee Willie Keeler, except that at 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, Arraez doesn’t quite qualify as Wee.

He does, however, seem to have the inherent ability to hit ‘em where they ain’t.

Back to the original point. This is a player who doesn’t barrel the ball, who pokes it politely off his bat, whose sole focus is putting it in play, and who can drop it anywhere on the playing surface. On a blind resume test, stat geeks wouldn’t be impressed.

Until, that is, they looked at his .403 average. Then even they might have to admit there’s something to this old school stuff.