Plus: How is this player hitting over .500?
Luis Arraez is baseball's most fun contradiction.
He leads the Majors in batting average ... even though he rarely hits the ball hard. He leads the National League in OPS ... even though he even more rarely barrels the ball. Arraez is an elite hitter without doing two of the fundamental things hitters want to do to be successful: make hard contact, and drive the ball in the air.
Arraez, fresh off his first career batting title, has a .511 batting average in 2023. He also has a 25.6% hard-hit rate -- only 11 of his 43 batted balls have been hit 95 mph or harder, Statcast's threshold for hard contact. He has a hit in over half of his at-bats, even though under a quarter of those at-bats have ended with a hard-hit ball.
So how does he do it? How is Arraez such a great pure hitter without the hard contact to match the numbers on his stat sheet? Here are three reasons. |
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When Cody Bellinger won the 2019 NL MVP Award, which other two Dodgers players received votes? |
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