Luis Arraez Has Entered the Contact Rate Death Spiral

One of the many common themes in mythology, across myriad cultures, is the tragic tale of a protagonist who is undermined and ultimately defeated by the original source of their strength. Oedipus was brought down by his search for truth, Karna by his generosity, and Cú Chulainn by his obligations to his code of honor. Luis Arraez isn’t the hero in an ancient tale, but his ability to hit baseballs at will is the stuff of a modern baseball legend. And like those heroes and heroines in lore, his greatest strength is contributing to his downfall.

Arraez is so fun because he defies an unfortunate aspect of today’s game, what I’ve referred to in the past as its “Anna Karenina problem.” Every lousy lineup seems similarly incompetent, while most great lineups are nearly indistinguishable from the others. It certainly feels like there’s less run-scoring variety than there was when I was young, a concerningly long time ago. Nobody could possibly mistake Arraez for the greatest player in baseball, but he has won three straight batting titles despite being so very different than the type of player you would see on the cover of a Modern Hitter magazine. He doesn’t work counts to draw walks or pull a bunch of barrels into the stands. Instead, he can turn nearly any pitch into a line drive hit, leading to high batting averages in an era when that has become a relative rarity. In 2025, Arraez has struck out only five times; there are five players this season who have done that in a single game, including former MVP Jose Altuve and two young phenoms, Dylan Crews, Jackson Chourio.

Without boasting the traditional markers of a valuable offensive player, Arraez has nonetheless been one since he broke into the league with the Twins in 2019. He entered this season with a career 120 wRC+ across nearly 3,000 plate appearances, even though he’d hit just 28 home runs. Still, that doesn’t mean Arraez has maintained the same level of nonconformity throughout his career. He remains a contact extraordinaire without much power, but some of his defining characteristics have become more extreme as his career has progressed. With a 103 wRC+, Arraez is having his weakest offensive season, and it’s largely because his signature formula for success isn’t quite mixing the way it did before.

Arraez is an aggressive hitter at the plate, but he wasn’t always as trigger happy as he is now. Over his first four seasons, he swung at 23.7% of the pitches he saw out of the strike zone. Then, upon joining the Marlins after the 2022 campaign, there was a sea change. Since the start of 2023, he has swung at 33.7% of the out-of-zone offerings he received, an increase of 10 percentage points in the likelihood that he’d go after one of these pitches. It wasn’t a simple general change in his level of aggression either, as his percentage of pitches swung at in the zone only went up by a couple of percentage points (62% to 64%). For many hitters, this would spell instant disaster. For Arraez, it didn’t, and he spent much of that first season with the Marlins threatening to become baseball’s first .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1941.

This season is the most extreme manifestation of this characteristic. Arraez’s contact rate of 95.9% against out-of-zone pitches this year is a career high, and represents an almost ludicrous level of performance compared to the league average, which this season stands at 55.3%. The difference between Arraez’s in-zone and out-of-zone contact rates are the smallest since these metrics have been consistently tracked.

As Arraez has become an even more extreme version of himself, his performance has dropped considerably. Last season, which he spent mostly with the Padres after the Marlins traded him in early May, he shed 40 points of batting average from his marvelous 2023 campaign. Entering play Wednesday, he’s down 33 more points this year. We know power has never been part of Arraez’s game, so his low exit velocities on their own aren’t necessarily a problem. Nevertheless, the trends in his batted-ball data are concerning. He’s making contact with less and less authority, with his hard-hit rate dropping for the fourth consecutive season, from 30.6% in 2021 all the way to 14.8% this year. He has only a single barrel in 2025, which works out to a 0.4% barrel rate. Just by comparison, the barrel rate of pitchers at the plate during the pitch tracking era is… 0.4%.

Arraez’s propensity for line drives has been the key to his success, but they have lost their potency. The league is hitting .634 and slugging .872 on line drives this season, while Arraez is batting .514 and slugging .681 on line drives, both his career-worst numbers. Three years ago, he had an average exit velocity on line drives of 92.5 mph, but that’s declined each year. His line drives are coming off the bat at 88.4 mph in 2025.

In complete fairness, Arraez has done some of his damage on some of the worst pitches he’s swung at, including a dead-pulled homer on a .091 xBA hit, but the inputs are mostly getting worse. Even for a player with Arraez’s unusual set of skills, trying to get value on pitches well out of the strike zone is a dangerous game to play.

Moreover, Arraez’s performance against crushable pitches has diminished as he’s become less selective. For example, players typically salivate when they see fastballs down the middle, with the league hitting .349 with a .589 slugging percentage against such pitches this season. Arraez used to punish these pitches as well, hitting .374 and slugging .505 against them from 2019 through 2023. That dropped to .337/.421 last year and to a positively anemic .233/.317 this season with, as is the pattern, a steadily declining exit velocity.

When Arraez hits .330, in addition to being one of the most entertaining players in baseball because of his novelty, he’s a solid contributor. At .281, he just isn’t, since batting average basically represents nearly the entirety of his contribution. He doesn’t get on base by other means, he has little power, he’s neither fast nor a particularly good baserunner, and he’s a mediocre-at-best defensive player even at first base. So he’s at -0.2 WAR currently, and his long-term outlook looks increasingly foggy.

These projections are for Arraez in a neutral park, and given his lack of positional flexibility, these aren’t the numbers of a player who is anything more than a stopgap starter. The Padres are only one game back in the NL West as of Wednesday morning, so there’s a very real question as to whether they should be looking for an upgrade over him. Otherwise, Arraez will need to figure things out soon. Maybe we’ll look back on his 3-for-5 performance with two doubles in Tuesday night’s win over the Dodgers as the start of his breakout. At the moment, though, things are looking rather bleak.

For as pessimistic as this article has been, there are a few reasons to be optimistic if you’re willing to look for them. First, Arraez has been banged up a bit this season. The most serious injury was his April concussion, and while you’d hope teams would hold off from bringing back players before they are ready, we saw how post-concussion symptoms wrecked Anthony Rizzo’s production in 2023 after he returned to play too early. I don’t think that’s the case here because Arraez’s plate discipline and batted-ball data were trending in the wrong direction before this season began. I also don’t think we can attribute his 2025 woes to his minor knee injury from last week, as that’s too fresh to have had much of an impact. However, it’s possible the two injuries have had some combined effect on his performance, especially if his approach requires taking some amount of consistent at-bats in order to get into a rhythm. Also, Arraez’s .274 BABIP is down 50 points from last year and is nearly 60 points below his career mark. Some of this could be explained by his worsening batted-ball metrics, but maybe we should expect at least a bit of positive regression here.

Finally, Arraez is running his highest isolated power of his career. That feels more like a testament to his low batting average than an indication that he’s attempting to hit for more power, but perhaps there’s something to work with here as he tries to get back on track. If this is the tact he takes, he can follow the example of franchise icon Tony Gwynn, to whom he’s often been compared. After brainstorming with Ted Williams in the early 1990s, Gwynn made adjustments of his own to pull the ball more often and go after more power. These changes didn’t require Gwynn, the greatest bat-control player of at least my lifetime, to abandon what worked for him during the first half of his career. Instead, they allowed him continue to be productive as he aged.

Like Gwynn, Arraez is never going to be primarily a lift-and-pull power hitter. He shouldn’t reject the part of his skill set that has brought him success, but there’s clearly cause for him to adopt a less extreme version of his approach at the plate. If he shows more discretion about which pitches he goes after and applies a little more aggression to his slow, compact swing, even at the cost of missing a few more pitches, he could return to making his elite contact ability actually matter. Baseball is a game of constant adjustment, and if Arraez doesn’t adjust to make contact a means to an end rather than the end itself, he risks becoming a cautionary tale.