On Tuesday night, as I watched Luis Arraez, sparkler in hand, chat with Otto Lopez outside the National League stadium, I couldn’t help but think about how he ended up in Philadelphia. This is Arraez’s fourth All-Star selection, but also his first in four years. Even though we are only 90 games into the season, his 3.7 WAR is already high. As you surely know, the biggest improvement in his game came with the glove. Michael Rosen put it perfectly in May, with the headline “Luis Arraez Is Good at Defense Now.” During that time, Arraez had posted 5 FRV over 30 games. In the next 61 games, he got 3 more FRVs. The speed is down, but he still comes off as a top-notch defender (even if some defensive metrics don’t agree).
Today, however, we are interested in Arraez’s offensive development. Arraez won his first batting title in 2022, and he did more than just post the highest batting average. He also walked more than he struck out, earning a 130 wRC+. He followed it up with 131 marks in 2023, though he did it a little differently. Both his walks and strikeouts dropped below 6%, but he ran a .362 BABIP, which led to a .354 batting average. Actually, he leaned in the way, he got into his form as a contact god, and BABIP high in the sky made it all work.
But Arraez took things too far. In 2024 and 2025 combined, his walk and strikeout rates dropped below 5%, and his .307 BABIP, while above the league average, wasn’t good enough to handle an offensive profile with no walks and no power. He ran for a combined wRC+ of 107, and because he put up terrible value in other parts of the game, he ended up with just 2.0 WAR. That puts his value roughly between an average player and a replacement level.
If all Arraez did this year was get back to second base and play well defensively while maintaining the same, above-average batting line, it would be enough to make him an above-average player again. But his bat has also stopped. He went into the break with a 127 wRC+, the third-best mark of his career. If not for Lopez’s .334 batting average, Arraez’s .330 mark will put him in a position to win his fourth title. Maybe that’s what the two of them were talking about during the shine break. We’re here to talk about what, if anything, Arraez does differently.
Three things stand out when we look at the usual suspects of statistics. Arraez is sporting a 6% walk rate, his best mark since 2022, and his 4% strikeout rate is the second lowest of his career. Second, his BABIP is back to .330, his highest mark since 2023. Finally, Arraez is sporting a .130 individual slugging percentage, still below league average, but the highest ISO of his career by far.
It’s close, but this is the largest gap Arraez has ever run between his walk rate and strikeout rate. Because he almost never turns and misses, the two often go together. When he swings hard, he doesn’t walk and he doesn’t hit. His 32% rushing rate is the lowest in three years, and his 64% swinging rate is the highest in three years. Swinging more in the area and less outside of it is a good combination. However, Arraez is using his lowest contact rate since 2021, and that’s probably a good thing.
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Plate discipline is important to Arraez in a different way than most hitters. He can hit absolutely anything. He almost never spits, and that’s not always a good thing. If you swing high in your eyes, you’d rather find yourself with a swinging strike than a weak pop-up from the opponent. This year, Arraez’s contact rate is low outside the zone. Again, this is related to his performance last year; he has more contact than anyone else in baseball, and more than enough contact to avoid a breakout. And the bat tracking data shows that when he makes contact, he rides the ball as high as he did before. It’s just that you’re making less contact with him, which helps, because even great hitters tend to suffer from bad swings. When he puts the ball on a pitch that isn’t over the heart of the plate, Arraez has a career wOBA of .320. On heart maps, that number is .356, so it’s good that 48% of Arraez’s balls in play have come on pitches over the heart of the plate, a career high by more than three percentage points. Not surprisingly, Arraez’s average exit velocity has reached its highest mark since 2023, and not surprisingly, his BABIP is back.
But let’s back up for a moment. If Arraez is more selective at the plate, why does his contact rate drop? Are you struggling to keep up because you’ve lost your bat speed? That’s not it. Instead, he increased his average bat speed from 62.6 mph in 2025 to 63.3 mph in 2026. I’m not sure he throws much, though. I think it has to do with pitch selection. Arraez doesn’t just swing slower, he keeps swinging slower in the outer part of the plate:
As we learned when bat tracking data started coming out a few years ago, bat speed increases throughout the swing. Even if your swing is the same, swinging on the inside, which you have to meet far in front, will result in more bat speed at contact, which is what Statcast does. The numbers back that up too. Arraez’s average interception has increased nearly two inches, and he is running at the highest rate of his career.
Another thing we were able to confirm when the bat tracking data came out is that the launch angle tends to increase over time in your swing. Your bat path lowers at the beginning of your swing, then starts to rise again as it crosses the hitting surface. Not only does Arraez pull the ball the most, he has the lowest ground ball rate and the highest fly ball rate of his entire career. For the first time in his career, the Pull Air section of his Statcast page is not colored blue. In a small, small way, Arraez made his launch angle revolution. No wonder he backs down so much!
Now, all of this may surprise you. It really surprised me. As I wrote a while back, I expected the exact opposite from Arraez this season. I thought that playing in San Francisco, where it’s hard to hit a run to right field, would encourage Arraez to lean more in his approach of letting it go deep and shooting it the other way. Indeed, all four of his adventures have come home. However, the effects of Oracle Park are more complex than that.
Oracle is usually the death knell for left-handed hitters, but Arraez is no ordinary lefty. Lefties’ numbers are bleak because they hit more home runs than any other park. Guess who stays untouched by that: Someone who almost never hits homers. It’s true that Oracle stole a few home runs off Arraez — three of them, by my count — but all three turned into triples:
And Oracle’s odd size provided another triple for Arraez, who has a career-high seven this season. That’s the thing about playing in San Francisco. The fact that it suppresses homers dramatically against lefties overshadows the fact that it increases the number of other hits. On the left, the sheer size and bonkers front wall of McCovey Cove makes Oracle the sixth friendliest park for triples, the seventh friendliest for doubles, and the 10th friendliest for singles. The depth helps the singles, because they force the outside players to play deep. With Arraez at the plate this season, the outfielders are on average four feet deeper in left, two feet deeper in center, and one foot in right than last year. Since his signature ability is throwing singles in front of outsiders, it is a boon for BABIP development. All of this means that Arraez may be the rare lefty that Oracle is actually a very popular pitcher.
There is a sabermetric slant to all of this as well. I’m not sure how much of Arraez’s wRC+ (and therefore his WAR) he gets from playing at Oracle, but he does. It’s a strange situation. His wRC+ gets that boost because he’s a lefty, but because he’s not a typical lefty, this park is likely to increase his actual production.
So those are all the changes I noticed. I don’t want to give the impression that Arraez has drastically changed who he is, or to say that there is no hot air in his BABIP. Two of his three hits have come on potential hits, and his .308 xwOBA is only five points better than his 2025 mark. And, in my experience, a sudden drop in off-site connectivity doesn’t always stick, so Arraez may end up giving back some of those gains. Most importantly, all the changes I just described are very small. Although Arraez’s strikeout rate rebounded from a career low in 2025, the increase in bat speed and average exit velocity was less than a mile per hour.
However, DRC+ buys what Arraez sells. He is currently at 113, his highest mark since the 118 he set in 2023. It’s also mildly surprising in terms of xwOBA not being impressed with Arraez’s improved pull rate, because it’s deliberately ignoring the pull rate. And the change in his approach is real. Arraez lays down the outfield and opens up the infield like never before. I can’t say for sure if this will continue, or why Arraez is just shying away from the outfield. It makes him a little less of an outlier, a little less Luis Arraez-y, but it’s certainly working for him so far.
