Luis Arraez Has Stopped Striking Out

The last time Luis Arraez struck out was August 10, a full month ago. He struck out the day before that as well. As of Tuesday morning, Arraez has played in 42 of the Padres’ 46 games during the second half of the season, and he has struck out exactly twice. No other qualified player has struck out fewer than 15 times since the All-Star break. Please take a moment to think about that. It means that the player with the second-fewest strikeouts has struck out 7 1/2 times more than Arraez. Nearly 75% of qualified players have struck out at least 30 times. Arraez, once again, has done so twice. Here’s what that looks like in a graph. Each bar represents a qualified player and Arraez is the tiny green one all the way to the right. I’ve added a dashed line to give you a sense of how far below everyone else he is.

Arraez currently has 26 strikeouts over the entire season. If he can stay below 30, he would be just the ninth qualified player in this century to accomplish the feat, and the first since Jeff Keppinger did so in 2008. Even if you do count 2020, despite the fact that Arraez has made 340 more plate appearances (and counting) than any player in that season, he currently has fewer strikeouts than all but five of the 142 qualified players. Here’s a chart of the whole 2024 season, just for good measure.

But let’s focus on just the second half again. The Padres had 17 games left to play as of Tuesday morning, when I ran a Stathead search to see which players have had the fewest second-half strikeouts in AL/NL history. Although the first All-Star Game was played in 1933, the data goes back to 1901, and I set a minimum of 180 plate appearances. (With no break, I’m not sure how exactly Stathead divides those first 32 seasons, but we’re more interested in the spirit of the thing anyway.) Including Arraez, 32 players have struck out no more than two times, 67 players have struck out no more than three times, 127 have struck out no more than four times, and 219 have struck out no more than five times. (All the stats I use in this piece are as of Tuesday morning, but before I continue, it’s worth mentioning that Arraez went 3-for-5 and didn’t strike out in Tuesday night’s game against the Mariners.) Arraez has the chance to join a very, very short list. At the top is John Dobbs, who in 1905 became the only player to go without striking out at all in the second half. More importantly, he really knew how to rock a fisherman’s sweater.

Could you look into those eyes – those strong, soulful eyes that have peered into the depths of so many cold and lonesome nights and seen only the haunting shadow of despair – and manage to throw strike three? Nobody could during the second half of the 1905 season.

The other takeaway from the list is just how old the names on it are: Wee Willie Keeler, Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Shoeless Joe Jackson. If Arraez can avoid striking out four more times over the next 17 games, he’ll be just the second player to join this list since 1979. The first player? Tony Gwynn, who in 1993 struck out four times over 208 second-half plate appearances while batting a crisp .400. Right now, Arraez has a career K%+ of 30, meaning that over the course of his career, he has struck out 70% less often than the average player. Our all-time lists show a few players ahead of him, but we don’t show actual strikeout totals for nearly all of those players, so I don’t trust their numbers too much. Of that group, the only number I really trust is Gwynn’s 29. Perhaps you remember some talk-radio screeching from earlier this season, when Arraez got traded to San Diego. Some remarked that Arraez’s ending up a Padre was a fitting tribute to Gwynn, while others took offense at the comparison.

It’s undeniable that Gwynn was a better player. Arraez put up a 131 wRC+ in both 2022 and ’23, the best marks of his career. Gwynn surpassed that mark in eight different seasons, and ended his career with a 132 wRC+. He put up a 126 wRC+ in his age-41 season, while the 27-year-old Arraez has yet to hit his decline phase. Lastly, Arraez has never really had a defensive position, whereas Gwynn was a baserunning threat and a solid defender until knee issues slowed him down. However, I would remind you of the differences in their eras. The other plus stats make an eloquent argument for Arraez as Gwynn’s rightful heir.

You may be surprised to learn that, relative to his era, Arraez is actually better than Gwynn at hitting for average. The biggest difference between the two is that Gwynn was more of a slugger. Just like Gwynn, Arraez is undoubtedly the premier contact hitter of his era. However, contact is much, much harder to come by in this era. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that in order to hit for a comparable average, Arraez has had to sacrifice more power than Gwynn did.

Here’s where things get tricky. You could argue that the root causes behind Arraez’s declining strikeout rate are also the root causes behind the step back in his performance this season. First of all, in each of the past two seasons, his chase rate has made an enormous leap. From 2019 to ’22, his chase rate was steady at a hair above 24%. Last season, it increased to 31.8%, and this season it’s up to 35.6%. In two seasons, Arraez has dropped from the 78th percentile to the 10th. Normally, chasing more would lead to more strikeouts, but Arraez isn’t normal, and his contact rate has gone up enough both inside and outside the strike zone that he’s still making more contact overall. Sports Info Solution has been tracking plate discipline since 2002, and the scatterplot below shows the data for all 3,366 qualified player seasons since.

Those two dots in the red circle represent Arraez in 2023 and ’24. Just six other players have ever made that much contact, and no one has done so while chasing anywhere near as often. As a result, Arraez is on pace to put the ball in play 616 times, the most since Statcast started tracking batted ball events in 2015, and his walk rate has fallen even more dramatically than his strikeout rate.

That’s not all. Because more of the balls he puts into play are coming on pitches that are outside the strike zone, he’s not hitting the ball as hard as he used to. Last year, a .362 BABIP masked the difference, but this year he’s at .325. It’s not hard to see why. When he swings at pitches in the zone, his exit velocity is 88.8 mph. On pitches outside the zone, it’s 80.9, nearly 8 mph lower. As a result, Arraez’s .332 xwOBA is the lowest of his career. Striking out less is great, but if you walk less too and produce less on balls in play, it doesn’t matter much. I have no idea whether the Marlins or the Padres have tried to get Arraez to be a bit more selective. His talent for squaring up the ball makes him such an outlier; I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that they just let him do his thing because they don’t want to get in his head and mess up his one weird trick.

However, Arraez hasn’t just stopped striking out. Even though his chase rate has increased from 34.6% in the first half to 37.8%, he’s finally hitting enough to turn his season around. He’s running a 119 wRC+ in the second half, lifting his season mark from 104 to 109. This will almost certainly be the third straight season in which Arraez runs baseball’s lowest strikeout rate, and it will very probably give him his third straight batting title. Also, he’s struck out looking just twice all season. So far, 34 different players have struck out looking at least three times in one game.

Let’s end by looking at one of Arraez’s two second-half strikeouts. Both came against the Marlins, with whom Arraez started the season and who therefore probably had a pretty good scouting report against him. I’m going to show you the August 9 strikeout, because it’s a doozy. It came in the top of the eighth inning against George Soriano. Home plate umpire Scott Barry had a high strike zone all game, and it seems like Soriano was aware of it. Here’s strike one:

That’s a four-seamer that catches the very, very corner of the zone up and away. It’s a borderline strike, and when the pitcher gets the call, there’s not much you can do but tip your cap. Here’s the second pitch:

That’s no longer borderline. That’s a slider, and according to both Statcast and the on-screen strike zone it missed high. How often do pitchers miss above the zone with a breaking ball and earn a called strike? Not often. As you can see, Arraez is not particularly happy about ending up in the hole 0-2 thanks to a borderline call followed by a blown call. At this point, he almost certainly feels like he has to swing at anything, because there’s absolutely no reason to trust the umpire’s strike zone. Here’s strike three:

That’s a check swing on a perfectly executed back foot slider. Personally, I would argue that Arraez didn’t go, but it’s a close call either way.

Just to recap, we’ve got a borderline strike on the corner, a missed call above the zone, and a borderline checked swing. That’s a hard luck strikeout if ever there was one. Arraez would strike out once more the next day, then decide that he was done with such things, possibly forever.