The Myth of Luis Arraez

“One of the best hitters in baseball – last three years, batting titles with three different teams.” That’s the first thing viewers heard about Luis Arraez this postseason, a quote from the bottom of the first inning of the Padres-Braves Wild Card series. Arraez singled and promptly scored on a Fernando Tatis Jr. home run. It was just how you’d draw it up, and San Diego won a 4-0 laugher. That’s the promise of Arraez – a near-automatic baserunner completely immune to strikeout pitching.

“He’s a tough dude to face… He could set the tone just like Ohtani could set the tone for their respective clubs.” That one comes from the last game Arraez played this postseason, as he was mired in a deep slump. After that first single, he went 2-for-8 with two more singles the rest of the Atlanta series. Then he went a desultory 4-for-22 (all singles) in the NLDS against Dodgers. He fulfilled plenty of the Arraez-ian promise we expect – just one strikeout in 31 plate appearances – but he simply couldn’t buy a hit.

It’s hard to learn much from a down series like that. Obviously, Arraez wasn’t contributing to the Padres offense – no one contributes when they post a 27 wRC+. But hidden in that statement is an unstated counterfactual: When Arraez goes, it is implied, the Padres go. His single-hitting prowess is the straw that stirs the drink for a fantastic offense that ranked eighth in the majors in runs scored this year despite playing in one of the toughest offensive environments out there.

There’s just one problem with that statement: It’s not true. Arraez didn’t stir the drink for the Padres this year, even as he cruised to his third straight batting title. That sounds crazy, but it’s true. There’s just something about that shiny batting average that messes with our ability to evaluate players.

What’s the point of hitting in baseball? It’s to score runs, obviously. There’s a wonderful statistic, RE24, that measures this directly. RE24 is quite simple. It takes the run expectancy of an inning before each plate appearance and compares it to the run expectancy afterward, with the difference credited or debited to the hitter. It’s context-dependent, which is clearly important when you’re talking about scoring runs. Men on second and third with two outs? A single is way better than a walk, and RE24 tells you that: A two-RBI single counts for 1.63 runs above average in that situation, while a walk counts for 0.22 runs. Bases empty to lead off the inning? A walk and a single are the same, 0.4 runs.

Batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, even OPS+ and wRC+ — none of them really capture this. RE24 measures it quite well. It’s not perfect, of course. It doesn’t take team composition into account, so getting on base in front of Juan Soto and Aaron Judge is undervalued. That’s a mark in Arraez’s favor, for the record — his team has some really good hitters batting after him, so getting on base is worth a hair more than a league average measure would suggest. RE24 is also extremely noisy, because batters have little control over the situations they’re put in, so plenty of what we’re measuring is context rather than talent. But if you’re looking for hitters who helped their teams score more runs — not theoretical runs or “in the long run this skill set is preferred” runs, but actual runs — it’s a great metric. It even gives a bonus for outs that let runners advance, the cherished “productive out,” while subtracting points for hitting into double plays.

So who was the best hitter in baseball by RE24 this year? That would be Judge, and by a wide margin. He added a whopping 95.7 runs of value in 2024. Shohei Ohtani finished second with 79.6 runs, while Soto was third with 69; Tatis leads for playoff RE24. If you were explaining baseball to someone who had never heard of it before and had no concept of any statistics at all, you’d use something like this to point out who the best offensive players are. It’s simple: They’re the ones who help their teams score the most runs.

The leaders of this list absolutely pass the intuition test. Watch their games, and you’ll sense how much they matter. They’re constantly either amping up the pressure or cashing in runners on base. They’re the highest-stress plate appearances for opponents. No one is getting a soda during their at-bat because the game might turn on what happens during it.

You can ascend to the top of this leaderboard in more ways than one. Jurickson Profar features highly on the chart without being a fearsome home run hitter; he gets on base frequently and also sends runners on the basepaths home with a boatful of singles and doubles. Jackson Chourio, Mookie Betts, and Jarren Duran are in the top 25. Power hitters, strike zone wizards, and doubles merchants all get their due.

Arraez’s RE24 clocked in at negative 3.34 this year. Now, that’s not as bad as it sounds. We calculate RE24 based on last year’s run scoring environment and true it up at year’s end (we update it after the conclusion of every season in our normal end-of-year updates). There were roughly 900 fewer runs scored this year than last, and league-wide RE24 checked in at -946 – this will balance out (we also have some extra-inning adjustments to make). You can assign each plate appearance a slight positive adjustment to make up for that and recenter it around zero. That would add 3.5 runs to Arraez’s total – and make him almost exactly average.

Even wRC+, which has a lower opinion of Arraez than the batting average apologists singing his praises, thought of him as above average this year. “A hit is better than a walk” is one of the central arguments that those folks make in advancing batting average over more holistic measures of offensive production. There’s a disconnect here somewhere.

The thing is that Arraez, like all hitters, bats with the bases empty a good bit of the time. We can compare how Arraez does in those situations to the average hitter quite easily. The important numbers are on-base percentage (because here, a walk truly is as good as a single) and extra bases per plate appearance. With no runners to advance, it only matters where the batter ends up.

In these situations, Arraez acquits himself well when it comes to reaching base. He posted a .328 OBP with the bases empty, meaningfully better than the league mark of .302. What does that mean in terms of run expectancy? I wanted a more precise answer than a blanket adjustment, so I created my own run expectancy table using data from every regular season game this year (excluding the ninth inning and extra innings, where run scoring gets abbreviated thanks to walk-offs). Here’s that matrix, just for posterity’s sake:

With that in hand, I plugged in the numbers, and shockingly, Arraez’s on-base skill doesn’t make him a valuable hitter with no one on base. That’s because Arraez is only ever getting you first base, more or less, and that’s just not as valuable as you’d think. With no one out, you could get on base at a .360 clip with no extra-base hits whatsoever and be value-neutral. I got that number by comparing the difference between what you gain by putting a runner on first with no one out (.399 runs) and what you lose by going from no outs to one out with the bases empty (-.226 runs).

That breakeven on-base percentage gets higher as the outs tick up, naturally – a runner on first gets less valuable as the likelihood of driving him in before the inning ends goes down. It’s .387 with one out and .421 with two outs. If you’re just going to first, you have to do it a lot to make the math work. We all know this implicitly; when your team’s pitcher walks someone with no one out, it feels like a disaster. When they walk someone with two out, it’s a minor misstep.

Those OBPs are really hard to attain. But run expectancy sums up to zero by default. How can that be the case? It’s because you’re allowed to get extra bases too. Doubles, triples, and homers add far more to run expectancy than singles. Across the league, roughly 25% of on-base events (walks, HBPs, and hits) produce extra bases. Arraez is down at 17% – and as a result, despite a .328 OBP with the bases empty, he’s cost the Padres 2.7 runs with the bases empty this year. Now, it’s probably slightly less than that, because the guys after him are pretty good at hitting home runs, and those will drive him in from first just as surely as they will from second. But among Padres with 200 or more plate appearances this year, Arraez was eighth in runs per plate appearance, even leading off and batting in front of the power hitters. If his job is just to score a ton of runs, it’s fair to say that he didn’t knock it out of the park this year.

Another way of thinking about this puzzle? We know that Arraez was a slightly above-average hitter by wRC+ this year. That statistic, and others like it, treat a single as better than a walk, as of course they should. They’re holistic measures of context-neutral production, and there are plenty of spots where a walk isn’t as good as a single. But with the bases empty, there’s no difference. Arraez is getting over-valued in those specific situations. The constants in wRC+ will tell you that on average, five walks and four singles (plus an out) provide equal value. But that’s on average, not with the bases empty – there five equals five.

There’s a further issue at play here. One of the reasons people extol Arraez’s skill set is that he puts the ball in play. You can’t advance a runner with a strikeout – or you can, but it’s much less likely than doing so with a ball in play. But with the bases empty, that advantage is completely gone. There are no runners to advance. You either reach base or you don’t.

So let’s accept that Arraez isn’t helping his team in this situation. Unfortunately, he’s batting with the bases empty far more frequently than your average hitter. Two thirds of his plate appearances came with the bases empty, as compared to 57% for all batters. That’s exclusively a function of batting him leadoff – his bases empty plate appearance rate is dead average for leadoff hitters.

To his credit, Arraez’s singles do carry extra weight in some obvious situations: runners in scoring position with a base open. The reason singles are better than walks is because they can advance runners already on base. Arraez was awesome in these situations in 2024. I count 84 of them (first and third, second and third, just second, just third) in his game logs, and he hit a bonkers .434/.476/.487 in those plate appearances. Yeah, that’ll do, to the tune of 9.36 runs above average. Juicy!

But we’re doing some cherry picking there by slicing things up into small samples. Arraez was much worse with either a runner on first, first and second, or with the bases loaded. He hit .316/.321/.404, which doesn’t sound awful, but OBP and slug are the relevant numbers when there’s a runner on first. That’s because a walk does plenty of work on the runner advancement front, while extra-base hits can set the merry-go-round going and break the station-to-station game wide open. But Arraez didn’t excel at getting on base (his OBP was only five points above league average with runners on) or hitting for power (his slug was 20 points below average) in those moments. He also got unlucky; he hit .250 with no walks when I add a “two out” filter to the above, and keeping the inning going is the key part of batting with two outs. In all, he lost 9.2 runs here.

A lot of that comes out in the wash, as you might expect when I’m arbitrarily separating base/out states. With runners on base and two outs overall, as compared to separated into base open/base not open subcategories, Arraez batted .326/.360/.431 and had a positive run value. This feels like noise to me – I don’t think there’s any true talent reason for Arraez to struggle with two outs in some runners-on situations and excel in others.

Here’s another way of putting it: In total, Arraez was a better-than-average hitter with runners on base. He happened to get unlucky in terms of when he scattered those hits; he hit .311/.333/.333 with two runners on (48 PA), and .154/.214/.154 with the bases loaded (14 PA). Meanwhile, he hit .390/.407/.487 with only one runner on (162 PA). Even those out, and we’d be looking at a positive run value, around four runs if I force the same batting line in every situation. His gains here don’t just come from his singles – they also come from him putting the ball in play, where the extra advancements he creates outnumber the double plays he hits into.

But Arraez bats with runners on base less than the average hitter. He bats with the bases empty far more than the average hitter. And those singles just don’t help as much as you think. Extra-base hits are the true run-scoring currency. Singles only sometimes produce more advancement than walks, and they almost never advance the runner past first. Doubles and up always do both.

(As an aside, this is an argument for why he should bat third, with some runners to drive in with all those singles. People should appreciate him for his unprecedented contact skills in an era of strikeouts and homers. But somehow, because he keeps winning batting titles, he’s typecast as an elite leadoff hitter, and I just can’t wrap my head around it.)

In past years, Arraez has chipped in his fair share of extra-base hits thanks to some line drive doubles in the gap. But this year, he batted 55 more times than he did last year and accumulated four fewer extra-base hits. He batted 69 more times than he did in 2022 and had one fewer extra-base hit. The only year his rate of extra bases per plate appearance has been only lower was in 2021, his worst offensive season. It’s hard to perceive a power outage in a singles hitter, but Arraez had one this year, and it absolutely affected his overall production.

This would be glaringly obvious if you only looked at holistic measures of offensive production. Arraez’s wRC+ is down sharply, from a 130 mark in 2022 and 2023 to 109 this season. His OPS+ fell from 128 to 106. His wOBA, xwOBA, DRC+, batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage all pointed one way. It’s pretty clear that he was a meaningfully worse hitter this year than in years past. He got on base 22% more than average and slugged 13% above average in 2023; this year, he got on base a mere 10% more than average and slugged 3% below average.

Batting average sticks in our head because it’s one of the first baseball statistics we learn. But in the same way that barrel rate and maximum exit velocity don’t paint a perfect picture of value, batting average is missing tons of useful inputs. It’s often correlated – Ted Williams and Barry Bonds hit for average because they hit for everything – but it’s just a simple statistical marker, and those can be misleading without the proper context.

“This guy is a three-time batting champion” is undoubtedly true. But it’s also true that this version of Arraez wasn’t a difference maker for San Diego. Twelve different Padres hitters produced more RE24 than Arraez. It’s a real shame. I appreciate Arraez as a player. He’s a complete anachronism, and when he’s at peak form, he’s a valuable hitter. But because he happens to have a high batting average, people who claim they’re “anti-statistics” and “old school” think he’s a star. A high batting average doesn’t make you a star any more than a high barrel rate does. They’re both good. I’d prefer either to the opposite. But neither is some kind of guaranteed marker of success.

I assume that the people who only care about batting average won’t find this position very compelling. They’re probably beyond convincing at this point. But I hope that I’m wrong, because I really do believe in my argument. When I trot out whomps per whiff or some kind of barrel-rate leaderboard, I’m not trying to say that these guys are all necessarily stars. I’m merely pointing out a component of good hitting, and saying that these players are good at it.

Batting average is like that too! It measures exactly what it says it measures. Using it as an all-purpose offensive statistic is missing the point. If you’re trying to understand why, you don’t have to look further than Luis Arraez, the 2024 National League batting champion – and a miscast leadoff hitter who cost his team 2.6 runs relative to average at the plate this year, by far the worst full season of his career.