In 2023, you almost never see Rod Carew style singles hitters who don’t worry about exit velocities and launch angles and simply just hit the ball where they ain’t. Note the word almost. There are still a few guys who play in the Wee Willie Keeler mold of scientific baseball. None is better than San Felipe, Venezuela product and 2022 American League batting champion Luis Arraez. A trade to Miami means he can become the second man (D.J. LeMahieu is the other) to win both an AL and an NL batting title. To say Arraez is well on his way would be to put it rather mildly. As I write this, Arraez sits at .402 as second place Freddie Freeman sits a whole continent away at .336 (as of June 11th).
Not only is Arraez the first viable candidate since 1994 to reach the .400 milestone for a full season, something not achieved since just before Pearl Harbor by future WW2 and Korean War veteran Ted Williams in 1941, he is doing it in an era where strikeouts are increasingly prevalent, pitchers routinely throw upper nineties with their fastballs and hitters are increasingly encouraged to prioritize launch angles (Jordan Walker was demoted for this reason) and high exit velocities (Arraez has been criticized on this front). How does Arraez hit? The strategy is almost insultingly simple and yet a look at the record book is all it takes to see how hard it really is to do what he does. Arraez is hitting “a la antigua”; see ball, hit ball and just focus on finding a hole. He ranks in the 2nd percentile in hard hit rate, in the 7th percentile in maximum exit velocity and in the 30th of average exit velocity. To top it off he’s in the 3rd percentile in barrel rate. Most baseball savant pages where a guy ranks that low in those metrics relative to his peers are pages of guys shuttling back and forth between MLB and AAA levels. Not Arraez.
Instead, Arraez is an All-Star caliber player who was also selected to a stacked Venezuela squad for the 2023 WBC. He is a batting champion. Why? He plays to his strengths. He knows that if he goes up there to try to murder the ball, it will backfire. Yordan Alvarez and Aaron Judge are meant to go up there and murder a ball and it works for them. But many guys in MLB today struggle trying to play a game that doesn’t suit them. Arraez instead actively looks for contact and prioritizes bat control. How good is he with bat control? He is the hardest man to strike out today or even get to whiff. He is not an especially patient hitter, (37th percentile in walk rate, 22nd in chase rate) but he’s so adept at spoiling pitches that you continually see him have ten pitch or longer at-bats. He has more multi-hit games (151 at the time of writing) than career strikeouts (142). That’s how tough an out Arraez is.
The point of this is not to rip analytics or pit new school against old school. The point here is to show that analytics so often serve to confirm the ancient wisdom of our game. The ancient wisdom here is that a 5’10”, 175 pound man can have astonishing success hitting with excellent bat control and a straightforward, “hit it where they ain’t” approach. Arraez can show pop too. He hit two homers in one WBC game against the USA, but like Ichiro, he knows sustained success for him looks a lot more like what it did for Ty Cobb than what it did for Babe Ruth and that’s totally fine, even in 2023.
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