Wait, Gabriel Arias Is Standing Where in the Box?

Do you remember the scene from The Benchwarmers when Clark is up to bat, except that he is absolutely nowhere near the plate? Back when I used to catch and would see hitters set up way off the plate, that was always the image that popped into my head. After an internal laugh, I’d give my sign, then take one big side step to the opposite side of where the hitter was standing to make sure my pitcher didn’t come close to fixating on the inner half. Unless you’re swinging a 40-inch bat and simultaneously have the strength of Giancarlo Stanton, you’re not making good contact on anything away. Gabriel Arias is a prime example of this.

In 2025, there hasn’t been a single hitter who stands farther from the plate than Arias. This is a relatively new extreme. Since 2023, Arias has moved farther and farther from the plate, starting at 31.9 inches in 2023, to 33.0 in 2024, to a league-leading 35.4 this season. For context, let’s take a snapshot of the 2025 leaders:

Most of these players are on the very tall side. That’s not to say you have to be tall to stand off the plate, but if the goal is to make sure your barrel aligns with the heart of the plate, it would make sense that the taller players are the ones who, generally, would benefit from having more space between the plate and where they set up. Conversely, when shorter players set up far off the plate, they increase the area they need to cover with their swings while lacking the length to do so.

That seems to be what’s happening with Arias, who despite being among the shorter players on this list, is standing nearly two more inches off the plate than the next guy, Paul Goldschmidt, and nearly three more inches off it than Aaron Judge, who is six inches taller than the Guardians infielder. How can Arias possibly reach pitches on the outer third of the plate? Here is an example from a game last week:

If I had any video editing skills, I’d overlay Clark as a comparison to highlight just how far this is. It’s an interesting strategy that needs to be reasoned out. Despite his power potential, Arias entered 2025 with a career 74 wRC+, so it’s understandable he would want to make some changes. Setting up even farther away, though, seemed like a bizarre choice, given his average height for a ballplayer and the way it would expose him to outside pitches. Initially, I thought the new setup would hurt him more than it would help. I mean, why would pitchers ever throw him a pitch over the inner third? But then I noticed Arias’ wRC+ is higher this season than it was in 2023 and 2024, up to 88 as of Thursday morning, which is still quite bad but represents a sizable improvement nonetheless. Maybe he was on to something after all.

To see what’s going on here, let’s first zoom in on how this change is playing out on a zone-by-zone basis. In 2023 and 2024, Arias’ xwOBA against pitches on the outer third was .224 and .248, respectively, putting him near the bottom of the league. That number is nearly the same this year, at .235. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten worse. Where he’s standing, the outside corner might as well be Narnia.

My best guess for why he’s setting up farther away is he wanted to have a better shot at damaging inside pitches. Perhaps he often felt handcuffed and thought moving off the plate would give him more space to get his barrel on plane and make it easier for him to elevate pitches. How’s that working out for him?

OK, now we’re talking. In his previous two seasons, he was not competitive against pitches on the inner third. He was both whiffing a lot and not balancing it out with a ton of hard-hit balls. This year, he’s flipped the script by whiffing less and hitting the ball hard more often.

On top of that, he’s making sweet-spot contact at an impressive rate, helping him pull off a .436 xwOBACON on the inner third. Of course, that only accounts for his performance against pitches to one-third of the zone, but it’s still an improvement that has propelled his offensive performance from unplayable to bearable.

At some point, though, pitchers are going to have adjust, right? They can no longer beat him inside like they did before, but there’s a large chunk of the zone still available to them. And that area might be larger than just the outer third. Because Arias is standing so far off the plate and looking to turn on inside pitches, he might also have a tough time covering at least some pitches over the middle, too.

Hitters who shift farther away from the plate should still be able to crush middle-middle pitches, but depending on how their swing works, it could be difficult for them to reach either high or low pitches over the middle. Before diving into how Arias’ swing works, let’s see if the data tell us a bit more about that:

As expected, Arias’ new location in the box has created another hole over the middle third of the plate. His .053 wOBA and .182 xwOBA up top are absolutely brutal under any circumstances, but they’re especially jarring compared to his .366/.394 from last season. The drop-off alone isn’t entirely uncommon because of the small sample sizes when looking at one-ninth of the zone, but to go from above average to fourth worst in baseball is tough. His numbers have also declined on middle-middle pitches. The .123 margin between his wOBA and xwOBA says bad luck may be involved, but there are many hitters with much wider gaps between their actual numbers and their expected one. However, it’s also interesting to see Arias’ improvement on low-middle pitches. He’s always been good against these pitches, but now he’s demolishing them far more frequently than before.

Even so, that leaves a massive area for opposing pitchers to target, and their pitch mix to get Arias out should be fairly simple: Overwhelm him with heaters up, then put him away with soft stuff outside. He has a .177 xwOBA against offspeed pitches and a .234 xwOBA against breaking balls this season. Those numbers are even worse on the outer third, with a .127 xwOBA against offspeed and a .128 xwOBA against breakers. So far, pitchers don’t seem to be giving him a noticeably different pitch mix compared to how they attacked him in other seasons, or even earlier this year, but they are definitely starting to throw more offspeed pitches to locations that are farther away. Maybe they’re catching on, maybe not. Time will tell.

Here is some video of swings he’s taken against outer-third pitches:

Almost everything is off the end of the bat. Any right-handed pitcher that can locate away is going to have a good shot at beating Arias. In almost all of these clips, he’s making contact off the end of the bat and/or swinging off balance. His closed stride helps him cover pitches that are closer to the middle — like the one from Carlos Rodón in the final GIF above — because his swing path is moving more toward the heart of the plate, but his barrel doesn’t stay in the hitting zone on an upward trajectory long enough to have much room for error. So unless he perfectly times his swing to connect with these pitches over the middle, he’s either not going to square them up or he’ll miss them altogether.

It’s clear Arias is trying to maximize his strengths, damaging inner-third and low-middle pitches, even if it means making his weaknesses even worse. So far, that trade-off is working for him. Although he remains below average at the plate, he’s a better hitter now than he was before; that improvement is enough for him to be a valuable player overall because he’s a good defender at multiple infield positions and he runs the bases well. But we’re only a third of the way through the season, and I have my doubts about how sustainable this will be for him. The holes in his plate coverage should be large enough for major league pitchers to exploit. If (read: when) that happens, Arias is going to have to punish every location mistake they make, which is difficult for even the most talented of hitters, or he’s going to have to continue to refine his game. Maybe that means closing off his stride even more to get to more pitches over the middle, or altering his swing to remain on an upward trajectory through the zone for a longer period of time. If his current setup proves to be too extreme, he can always slide ever so slightly closer to the plate. Not too much, just enough to cover a bit more of the zone without compromising his ability to turn on inner-third pitches.

But we’re not there yet. The most important thing to take away from this is Arias has shown he can make a fairly drastic adjustment and have it work as intended. So when pitchers inevitably adjust to him, perhaps he can do it again.