Why Did Scouts Whiff on Luis Arraez?

So, no, Luis Arraez won’t hit .400 this season. Or, in all likelihood, any season.

Still, he made us look, right?

Arraez, who’s currently batting .367 for the Miami Marlins, sustained a .400 average through 78 team games, the longest run of this century. That his Wile E. Coyote act continued for even that long was almost inconceivable, because this century has been a bad one for batting average—not just for its decreasing importance to teams and fans, but also for how low it is leaguewide. Arraez, whom the wild-card-contending Marlins acquired from the Minnesota Twins in January, ended July batting .381, the highest mark for a qualified hitter entering August since Nomar Garciaparra in 2000. The year Nomar made his run at .400, the MLB batting average was .270. This year, it’s .248.

There’s a long list of factors that have made it harder to hit for high averages: nastier pitches, optimized pitcher usage, data-driven defensive positioning, an offensive emphasis on power over contact, an overall increase in the quality of competition. Arraez isn’t even the ideal candidate to beat the steep odds. He has baseball’s best strikeout and contact rates, but he doesn’t hit many homers, and historically, he’s walked at roughly a league-average rate (enough to make him one of only two hitters this year with more walks than strikeouts). That constant contact means he’s much more dependent on balls in play than, say, the powerful, patient Ted Williams was when he hit .406 in 1941—and Arraez is slow, so he’s hardly an infield-hit machine. Yet in his fifth major league season, the 26-year-old Arraez—who led the American League with a .316 average last year—has forced people to contemplate and calculate the possibility of .400, which previously seemed too remote to entertain.

Even though most fans (if not most fantasy players) have followed the leads of F.C. Lane, Branch Rickey, and Bill James in accepting that batting average isn’t the be-all and end-all of offense, there’s a difference between efficiency and fun, productivity and impressiveness. Home runs are worth way more than singles and doubles, but Arraez’s preternatural, metronomic capacity to turn seemingly unhittable pitches into hole-finding grounders and gap-seeking liners is as breathtaking as tape-measure slugging. And when you hit for a high enough average, you’re also, by default, an on-base machine. When Arraez’s average was over .400 in late June, he wasn’t just lapping the National League in a quaint baseball-card category; he was also the NL leader in wRC+. In the land of three-true-outcome mashers, the contact artist was king.

Arraez’s current 28-point lead over Freddie Freeman, whose .339 average ranks second in the NL and in all of baseball, would be the biggest gap between an MLB batting leader and his closest competitor in either league since George Brett’s 38-point lead over Cecil Cooper in 1980. Arraez’s average is 47 percent higher than the league’s—identical to Williams’s relative figure in 1941, and the best for any hitter with at least 350 plate appearances in a season since the Splendid Splinter’s 48 percent outperformance in 1957. (Arraez’s relative strikeout rate is the lowest since Juan Pierre’s in 2001—or, if we stick to seasons at sea level, Tony Gwynn’s in ’98.) Taking the context into account, Arraez doesn’t have to hit .400 to perform a batting average feat that’s just as extreme as Williams’s was.

Nor does Arraez need to hit .400 to have vastly exceeded the industry’s expectations of what he could accomplish. That much, he’s already done. By earning an All-Star berth in consecutive seasons, by winning one batting title and being a heavy favorite for a second, by outproducing the average MLB batter by 25 percent and amassing roughly 3 to 5 wins above replacement (depending on the flavor of WAR) per 162 games—hell, just by establishing himself as a starter at all—Arraez has defied all forecasts for his career. In the process, he’s highlighted how hard it is to appreciate unproven outliers. In this era, it’s ridiculously difficult to do what Arraez does. It’s not that much easier to spot the potential to do it. And as conditions become less conducive to contact, teams may be less likely to look for the next player like him. Which means that more than the Marlins’ success may be riding on whether Arraez continues to command the sport’s spotlight.

“If you sign Arraez today, he might not make it out of rookie ball, just the way that everybody’s evaluating,” says Twins scout Rafael Yanez. “They’re expecting power out of these kids, and it seems like the patience is not too much for guys like that. So hopefully he can still do better and then the industry changes a little bit more because of him.”

The most in-demand international prospects usually sign on or around the day the international signing period starts, which used to be July 2. Any delay after that date is often just for show; historically, the top talents have made verbal agreements with teams years before they can ink contracts. In 2013, the then-16-year-old Arraez became eligible to sign on July 2, but he wasn’t signed until November 6, when the Twins took a flier. In the interim, the team’s local scouts and coaches had kept him at their academy in Bejuma, Venezuela, for as long as they could, watching him play and practice as they tried to persuade the brass that he was worth signing. Arraez was there so long, Yanez says, “that the rules didn’t allow us to keep him more, and the money wasn’t coming to get him signed. So we had to tell him, ‘Hey, I don’t have money right now. You got to go home.’ And he almost quit.”

Ask a Twins scout or player development person about Arraez, and they’ll almost invariably bring up what happened next: the iguana story. Here’s how Arraez told it when I asked him (via the Marlins) last month.

“José León told me, ‘I don’t have money for you,’” Arraez said, referring to the Twins’ coordinator of scouting in Venezuela at that time. “I told my mom, ‘I don’t want to play any more baseball. I’ll go to school.’ I went out with my brother on a horse for a few hours, and we were slinging rocks at iguanas. I threw [them] with my arm, too. But I never hit any. I told my brother I was going to go to school and give up on baseball. He told me how great I was at hitting the ball and [that] I shouldn’t give up. We got home, and I told my mom, ‘No more baseball for me.’ A few minutes later, José León was at my house, and he asked me, ‘Do you want to sign now? I have $40,000 for you.’”

Arraez did want to sign, despite the tiny bonus; León, now the team’s senior adviser to international scouting, recalls, “The mentality of Luis was never about money. His mentality was about getting signed.” It’s not as if he would get a better offer: A few other teams sniffed around, León says, but contracts weren’t forthcoming because Arraez wasn’t tall, was “really thin,” and wasn’t fast enough to profile as a shortstop.

Four years and 30 pounds later, Arraez remained underrated. The left-handed hitter wasn’t considered a total non-prospect during his time in the minors, but he never made an overall top 100 list. In November 2018, the Twins added him to their 40-man roster, preventing other teams from taking him in the Rule 5 draft. But in the lead-up to the 2019 season—when Arraez was months away from earning a mid-May call-up to the Twins and batting .334/.399/.439 as a rookie—no prominent public sources saw him as one of the Twins’ top 10 prospects, let alone one of the best prospects in baseball.

Twins Daily didn’t deem Arraez one of the Twins’ top 20 prospects (though he earned an honorable mention). Keith Law, then of ESPN, ranked him 20th, as did Aaron Gleeman. (“And people thought I was too high on him,” Gleeman recalls.) MLB Pipeline had him 17th. Baseball Prospectus left him off its top 15. John Sickels of Minor League Ball put him 13th, gave him a B-minus, and called that a “somewhat aggressive grade.” FanGraphs gave him the 12th spot.

Baseball America was the highest on Arraez, slotting him 11th. That was an improvement on his BA ranks in 2018 (12th) and 2017 (15th), but it still left him sandwiched between Yunior Severino (who, four years later, has only recently reached Triple-A and barely cracks the Twins’ current top 30 prospects) and Misael Urbina (this season’s worst hitter in the High-A Midwest League). BA awarded the title of best hitter for average in the Twins’ system to Alex Kirilloff, who’s since batted .258 in 173 injury-interrupted big league games. None of the Twins’ top 10 prospects from that list have accrued even a third as much Baseball Reference WAR as Arraez has.

The consensus seemed to be that Arraez—who fit best at second base but had also played a little third, short, and left field—might have a future as a utility type. It’s not that unusual for scouts to underrate someone, which isn’t an insult to scouts; projecting young players is hard. One FanGraphs study found that it’s typical for a third of the players worth 3 or more WAR in any given year—those solidly above average or better—to have never appeared on a Baseball America top 100 list. But it’s rarer for a player like Arraez, who’s exceeded 3 bWAR three years in a row, to have not made a cameo on a team top 10 list, even on the precipice of a strong big league debut.

More surprising still is that Arraez was widely snubbed even though his abilities yielded results right away. Players who slip past top-prospect lists may surpass scouts’ expectations for any number of reasons, some of which are impossible to anticipate. After Elly De La Cruz signed with the Reds for $65,000, he grew 5 inches and 65 pounds, topping out at 6-foot-5 and towering above his parents and siblings, who are all of average height. How was a scout supposed to see that coming? Other players may master new pitches, reinvent their swings—essentially, morph into more promising players with commensurate ceilings.

Arraez didn’t do that much morphing: At a listed height of 5-foot-10, he’s shorter than De La Cruz was before his growth spurt. Judging by his stat lines, one would think he was fully formed from the start. In his first taste of pro ball, he hit .348 in the Dominican Summer League. The following year, he hit .309 in the Gulf Coast League, and the year after that, he won his first batting title with a .347 average in Low-A ball. Arraez has always been years younger than the average ages in his leagues, but even against older competition at the upper levels of the minors, his averages didn’t wilt: He batted .324 at High-A, .318 at Double-A, and .338 at Triple-A. “Arraez has done nothing but hit,” BA conceded in 2018.

In fact, Arraez has hit so consistently at all levels that in his case, the oft-deceptive practice of “scouting the stat line” would have worked. His career minor league slash line (.331/.385/.413) is a dead ringer for his career big league line (.327/.383/.423). Baseball Reference has records of almost 3,500 players who’ve made at least 1,000 plate appearances in both the minors and majors. Arraez is tied for the 25th-smallest difference between major and minor league stats, as measured by the combined absolute values of the differences between major and minor league batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. The most recent players to put up major and minor league lines as closely matched as Arraez’s are Willy Aybar and Chase Utley, who made their pro debuts in 2000.

If Arraez’s minor league stats were a more accurate indicator of his future major league stats than any other player’s in decades, then why was he so underestimated?

For one thing, no one knew he wouldn’t miss a beat in the big leagues until after the fact. The average player with 1,000 PA in both the minors and majors loses roughly 52 points of OPS post-promotion. To this point, Arraez has gained eight points, which wasn’t something scouts could count on. Especially because the eye test was working against him.

“When you saw the guy the first time, he didn’t look like a prospect,” Yanez says. “The body wasn’t good. He was a below-average runner, most likely second base only. The arm was kind of weak, and the bat—the contact rate was great, but not a lot of power, and he had issues handling the pitch inside.” The Twins were higher on the likes of Jermaine Palacios, Travis Blankenhorn, and Trey Cabbage. “I’m not blaming anybody,” Yanez says, “because all those guys, tool by tool, body-wise, they looked better than him.” As Twins scout (and former Baseball America editor in chief) John Manuel puts it, “He didn’t check a lot of boxes. He just checked one box over and over and over again.”

If you check one box, though, the hit tool box is the one you want it to be. And Arraez didn’t just check it; he colored it in.

That talent was apparent to some who saw him up close. León first scouted Arraez in a game in Valencia, Venezuela, when Arraez was 15. In the play that caught León’s eye, Arraez wasn’t getting a hit, but taking one away: He barehanded a bunt at third base and slung it off-balance from a low three-quarters slot, in time to get the runner. After that, León kept track of Arraez, whose hitting soon overshadowed his glove work. “He had the ability to get the bat in front of 88 to 90 mph fastballs and to get the bat in front of the ball in different parts of the strike zone,” León says. “That caught my attention. … Since he was a teenager, he was able to enjoy every at-bat. … Something that is not usual in a young hitter is to keep balance [against] different quality pitches, and he showed that.”

León says he tries to avoid overhyping players by likening them to legends, but he couldn’t resist when Arraez was still in the academy and he was selling him to his boss at the time, the late vice president of player personnel Mike Radcliff. “I compared him to Tony Gwynn with a smaller frame,” León says. It was far from the last time Arraez would be linked to Gwynn, the seventh-most similar batter through age 25 according to Baseball Reference’s statistical similarity scores.

Speaking of similarity scores: Baseball Reference displays the 10 most similar batters on each offensive player’s page. Gwynn is one of only two of Arraez’s most similar selections who have headshots in color, an indication of how anachronistic Arraez’s game is. Scouts and statistical models that project players rely to some extent on comparisons to past players, so it’s tough to prophesy the path of a hitter whose top 10 comps were mostly born before the first “modern” World Series was played. As Manuel says, “He’s just such a different player. … He’s so weird, so wonderful. … And those are the hardest ones to scout.”

The median birth year (1902) and MLB debut year (1923) of Arraez’s top 10 are the second oldest, behind only the top 10 of Cleveland’s light-hitting center fielder, Myles Straw (1894 and 1915, respectively). Many of the other hitters with ancient comp cohorts (Steven Kwan, Wander Franco, Yandy Díaz, David Fletcher) are high-contact types, whereas many of the hitters considered similar to players of recent vintage are low-contact sluggers (Joey Gallo, Kyle Schwarber, Cal Raleigh, Tyler O’Neill). The game done changed, and it doesn’t favor Arraez’s group. “The trends in the sport are so antithetical to what he’s done and how he plays,” Manuel says.

Arraez is a fish out of water, but he’s evolved to live on land. One reason scouts undersold him, despite fairly accurately appraising the shape of his production, is an ingrained reluctance to use the full range of the 20-80 scale. The scouting scale is designed to capture a normal distribution of baseball talent, and given a sufficient sample of players, some 20s and 80s should appear. In practice, though, scouts tend to be conservative, and grades get compressed. When I went to Scout School right around the time of Arraez’s iguana episode, the MLB Scouting Bureau equated an 80 hit tool to a .315 batting average or above, basing its scale on the offensive environment over the preceding decade. If anything, that threshold should be lower now. Arraez has a .327 career average and a ZiPS true-talent estimate of .331, so if he isn’t an 80 hitter, nobody is. Even an 80 might not do him justice: The scouting scale is designed to encompass players within only three standard deviations of the mean, or 99.7 percent of players. As Manuel says, “He’s off the scale. … He’s the 0.3 percent.”

Again, it’s not as if Arraez learned this neat trick only upon making the majors. Only 10 hitters whose pro careers started this century have batted .330 or higher in at least 800 career minor league plate appearances. Arraez is the most recent to do it. An 80 hit tool makes up for many secondary deficiencies, so Arraez’s lukewarm prospect rankings suggest that there were understandable doubts about his capacity to keep up that pace against the best pitching on earth.

Teams know their own players better than anyone else does, and Arraez had his staunch supporters with the Twins, including León, Yanez, minor league manager Ramon Borrego, and Radcliff, the longtime Twins scouting executive who was reputed to have a particularly keen eye for hitters. There were doubters, too: One former Twins coordinator advocated for converting him to catcher, and when Arraez wasn’t invited to join the other prospects in instructional ball after his GCL season, Borrego and Yanez compiled all his stats in the States and overseas to convince their superiors that the youngster deserved a spot. A few internal reports put 60s or 70s on his hit tool, but no 80s. And even the rosiest reports didn’t peg him as more than a 50 future value player overall—an average major leaguer.

Clearly, Arraez has been a good deal better than that, though the prospect prognosticators weren’t wrong about his flaws. “Even if you fully bought the elite hit tool, he wasn’t going to have the same ceiling as Bo Bichette, who hit .320 in the minors himself,” says Jeffrey Paternostro, lead prospect writer for Baseball Prospectus. It’s true: Arraez is sure-handed in the field, but his range is limited, and he doesn’t have an especially strong arm even by second-base standards. (Remember, he missed those iguanas.) Defensive runs saved indicate he’s a decent second baseman, whereas Statcast says he’s one of the worst in the league. (If you go by FanGraphs WAR, which uses Statcast stats for defense, fellow All-Star Pablo López, for whom Arraez was traded, has had the better season.) He’s a net negative on the bases, and he rarely leaves the yard. His offensive stats this season are still likely a little inflated.

But if all of that adds up to an off-brand Gwynn or “a poor man’s Rod Carew,” Arraez will still have broken the baseball mold, provided more measurable value than evaluators envisioned, and tacked on intangibles in terms of entertainment, energy, and good vibes behind closed doors. “Luis is a really good leader in the clubhouse,” Borrego says, which Manuel seconds: “I do think he brings that nonquantifiable element consistently to the ballpark.”

This season, he’s bringing that element to LoanDepot Park. The Marlins finished fifth in strikeout rate last season, and they entered the offseason intent on collecting contact hitters. In Arraez, whose arrival caused incumbent second baseman and MLB the Show cover model Jazz Chisholm Jr. to move to center field, they secured the contact ne plus ultra (and the franchise’s first cycle). It cost them two prospects plus pitcher López, Arraez’s countryman and future friend. The trade, a classic swap of surpluses for deficiencies that has paid off for both sides, has helped reshape the two teams’ offensive identities. Relative to last season, the Marlins are tied for the majors’ biggest boost in batting average and have made the second-greatest strides in strikeout rate; the Twins have seen their batting average fall third most and their strikeout rate rise more than any other team. (Lest we overlook the virtues of the other two true outcomes, though, the Twins have a better overall offense than the Marlins, even with the majors’ most Ks.)

Marlins manager Skip Schumaker talks about Arraez as if he’s Wee Willie Keeler crossed with Babe Ruth. And when the All-Star starter made his appearance in Seattle—naturally, he singled on both of the pitches he saw—baseball’s best players seemed as psyched and awed to see him as they were to see anyone other than Shohei Ohtani. Maybe that’s because they know better than anyone what a savant Arraez is. As Manuel says, “The closer you are to the field and the more you’re at the field, the more you appreciate someone who has his skills, because you see how truly hard that is to do.”

Borrego, the Twins’ current Double-A manager, became a believer when he got a close-up look at Arraez while serving as skipper of his rookie ball team in the teen’s first season stateside. “I remember seeing him taking two strikes very fast and thinking, ‘Why are you taking two strikes?’” Borrego recalls. “And then he started to foul it off, foul it off, foul it off—base hit to left field. Every at-bat was almost the same. He took one strike and then base hit. … By that time, most of his base hits were oppo. He was having tough times with the inside pitch, because he was a natural inside-out [hitter]. But then he started to face left-handed pitchers, and it was almost the same—he started to take strikes and foul it off and base hit to left field, and I remember thinking, ‘This kid is special.’”

On the whole, hitters barely foul off a higher percentage of pitches they swing at with two strikes than they do with zero or one. Arraez fouls off fewer. Even so, his prodigious bat-to-ball skills and commitment to well-controlled swings seem to free him from two-strike anxiety. “Every at-bat, he fights, he goes to two-strike counts, and he knows that nothing bad is gonna happen,” Borrego says.

Arraez is still a special hitter when he’s in a hole, as he was when Borrego first managed him. Before his 3-for-5 performance on Sunday, which included a game-tying 0-2 triple in the ninth, he was batting .296 on plate appearances that started out 0-2, .350 after 1-2 (third highest on record dating back to 1988), .393 after 2-2 (fourth highest), .319 on two-strike counts combined (ninth highest), and .337 when he was behind in the count (eighth highest). He’s not trying to pull pitches, so he’s content to wait and flick them the other way. “My dad taught me when I was very young that if I hit the ball to left field, I’ll make a lot of money,” Arraez told me last month. “I never thought about anything other than hitting the ball to left field.”

Eric Longenhagen, lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs, recorded Arraez in pitch-spoiling mode in instructs late in 2016:

“I remember him spoiling so many pitches and peppering the Twins complex offices with foul balls,” Longenhagen says, adding, “In retrospect, his best swings in that video are much more explosive than I recall, and the weird ones were actually evidence of all-world skill, not that he had a weird, imbalanced swing.” At the time, Longenhagen gave him a future 40, which corresponds to a bench player. That the grade wasn’t a 55 or 60, he says, was “a failure to identify an outlier.”

Twins fans witnessed the foul power of a fully armed and operational Arraez soon enough. Not much longer than two months after his 2019 call-up, Arraez pinch hit for an injured Jonathan Schoop on a 0-2 count in a one-run game in the ninth, fouled off five pitches from flamethrowing Edwin Díaz, and worked a walk. “One of the best at-bats you’ll ever see,” Twins broadcaster Roy Smalley said. Arraez was stranded at third, but Twins fans’ eyes were opened.

One way that scouts missed on Arraez was by hedging on his carrying tool—another may have been by discounting his drive. “Baseball people always ask me about his hitting abilities,” León says, “but I always have to mention that his mind has the same abilities as his bat. He’s very competitive. He has a ‘survivor makeup’ that players need to have to get to the major leagues.” That, León says, is sometimes the separator between a player’s physical profile and their final form.

Arraez, by some accounts, found the industry’s lack of faith disturbing, but he channeled his frustration with being passed over for promotions or left off lists into productive directions. He played extra winter ball. He hardened his body. He rehabbed his knee after a surgery that cost him most of the 2017 season. He did defensive drills, showing up early and leaving late. “He was a player with passion,” per Borrego, and that passion buffed out his flaws. The slights, Yanez says, were “helping him out to try harder. He wanted to prove people wrong.”

Now that he has, the question is whether that work created opportunities for other players or only for Arraez. It’s not unlike the debate about whether Ohtani’s superstardom will usher in more two-way play: Are we dealing with a unicorn or a potential template?

Borrego believes that thanks to Arraez, evaluators will be more scrupulous and credulous when it comes to contact-oriented hitters. “Luis is making a difference in a lot of eyes of front offices and scouts, … just like [Jose] Altuve did,” he says. “Nobody is scared to sign [5-foot-6 players] if you see the bat-to-ball skills. You are not gonna be afraid because you are gonna compare that player to Altuve.” Similarly, says Borrego, Arraez is “making people not underestimate guys like him.”

Longenhagen says that “anytime you fuck up, there’s room for reflection and resolve to improve.” Underrating Arraez has made him more mindful of his biases and more willing to take longer looks at players with unusual profiles or elite single skills. However, he notes, “For every Arraez and Steven Kwan, there are David Fletchers, Myles Straws, and Nick Madrigals who are just fine and [Willians] Astudillos and Ernie Clements who are a little less than that. And now there are Chandler Simpson, Nate Furman, Javier Vaz, William Bergolla, and many more who have shown similar statistical traits, and any one of them is probably more likely to be Tony Kemp than the second coming of Arraez. … It can be tough for the hit rate of these guys to truly come across when most of the baseball-watching world only sees the guys like this who pan out and [doesn’t] see the ones who plateau at Double-A.”

Manuel, too, thinks future Arraez-like (and Arraez-lite) players will always have to overcome teams’ generally rational preference for power and broadly distributed tools. “I don’t think he’ll be an inflection point,” he says. “I think he will be seen as an outlier. He will be seen as the exception that proves the rule. Maybe he’ll be a bigger example to players in Venezuela”—says Yanez: “He’s a big deal down there”—“but I don’t think he will change the way that front offices view the game.”

One school of thought contends that changes to scouting and player development over the past several seasons may make things even harder for an Arraez clone who’s trying to break into baseball today. Teams have cut back on in-person pro scouting, choosing to replace humans holding radar guns with cameras and computers. If a quality that cameras and computers can’t easily see is the secret to Arraez’s rise, then deprioritizing soft factors in favor of studying stats and footage from afar may cause teams to miss that special sauce.

“If you scout guys with the same skill set like Arraez, and you just do it only through data or video, he’s not going to stand out—forget about it,” Yanez says. “You need to go see him in person and not even in a tryout, because he’s not going to show you power in [batting practice]. So you got to see him in games.” Because León spent a lot of time around Arraez, Yanez continues, “He knew that the makeup was good, that he was a gamer, and [that] he’s always been used to handling pressure.”

The other concern about the impact of long-distance scouting on players like Arraez has to do with the tracking-derived data itself, which some say isn’t suited to assessing his strengths. “All the data misses him,” Manuel says. “All of it. … The things that he brings to the table are harder to quantify, except for that one glaring black-ink metric.” Borrego says the same: “When Arraez got to us, we didn’t have exit velo and launch angle. If we had that, probably we would have lost a really good player. I’m glad he came before all that.”

Metrics that valorize the hardest-hit balls don’t work so well for a player who isn’t really trying to hit the ball as hard as possible. However, this may just be a matter of reading the right leaderboards. “I would quibble a bit that Arraez doesn’t stand out on the metrics,” Paternostro says. Although Arraez rates poorly by Baseball Savant–popularized metrics such as hard-hit rate, max and average exit speeds, and barrel rate, those may just be the wrong stats to study. “If you drill down deeper, you will see a guy hitting a lot of 90 mph low line drives with incredible horizontal spray range,” Paternostro continues. “You can’t really defend him, … and we can actually model that some.”

Arraez doesn’t crush the ball often, but he doesn’t mishit it much either. (He almost never pops up.) He’s one of the best (or the best) in baseball at keeping the ball in the launch-angle sweet spot and in the so-called Arraez Zone, where even moderately well-struck liners tend to touch grass. And new Statcast bat-tracking data won’t just show how softly Arraez swings; it’ll also show how rarely he misses and why. Maybe metrics like those could save us from, say, obsessing over the 2019-21 Twins’ less talented high-contact, 20-something, sub-6-foot, multi-position player from Venezuela while disregarding Arraez.

MLB wants more hitters to have Arraez-esque results, so perhaps future rule changes will make players who share his approach even more marketable and appealing to teams. Batting average may have lost a lot of its traditional luster, but whatever WAR says, it’s still riveting to see someone wield their lumber like Arraez does—and there’s no such thing as an “empty average” over .350. “The talented players, they have new things to teach scouts,” León says. “We have to be open-minded to learn from the players with talent mentally and physically.” If those lessons sink in, then maybe the next Arraez—if there ever is one—can be a great player and a top prospect too.

Thanks to Kenny Jackelen of Baseball Reference and Ryan Nelson for research assistance.