Baseball has seen some significant change at the plate over the last 20 years.
The three true outcomes of home run, walk, or strikeout have taken over a majority of modern-day offense in the sport. Teams want to increase their lineup’s ability to hit the ball hard and over the fence, and it has come at the expense of making contact. The league-average strikeout rate climbed from 16.4 percent in 2005 to 24 percent in 2021, according to Baseball America. Most teams are encouraged to just pull the power to create a higher frequency of hard-hit balls.
The Minnesota Twins may have entered the modern era a little late. But they quickly shifted to that style since Derek Falvey and Thad Levine took over the front office after the 2016 season. Gone are the days of scrappy players and slap-hitters like Nick Punto, Jason Bartlett, and Luis Castillo rounding out a lineup card for a competitive baseball team.
The current front office has brought in high-power, high-strikeout hitters to add power to the lineup. We’re talking Logan Morrison, Nelson Cruz, Josh Donaldson, and Gary Sánchez. It didn’t always work out. Pair that with Miguel Sanó, and there’s a chance for many strikeouts to follow the home run potential. Even Byron Buxton tends to strike out, with a 28.9 percent career strikeout rate.
Home runs have always been valuable in baseball, although now they are more desirable than ever. However, there is also something to be said about the value of a player who just finds a way to take good at-bats and get on base.
The Twins have that player in Luis Arraez.
The utility player quickly earned his way into the lineup on the Bomba Squad Twins that went on to break the single-season home run record, edging out veteran Jonathan Schoop. Arraez only added four long balls to the team’s 307 home runs that year. But he earned his keep by becoming the perfect straight man to provide much-needed balance to the Twins lineup.
Arraez may not have power, but he brings a skill that any fan of the game can enjoy. He takes competitive at-bats and puts the ball in play. Arraez can have fans on the edge of their seats for every throw of a 10-pitch plate appearance and create excitement for a leadoff walk. While batting averages don’t hold as much weight anymore, Arraez has a career .315/.376/.406. slash line with a 115 wRC+ mark.
The Twins were middle of the pack in strikeouts last season with a 23.1 percent mark, tied for 14th in baseball. With a career 1.5 BB/K ratio, Arraez brings his value as a good balance to some of the higher strikeout-prone hitters like Sanó or Sánchez. According to Baseball Savant, he’s in the 100th percentile in both strikeouts and whiff rate. He has one of the most deliberate approaches at the plate in all of baseball.
It’s not bad to have high strikeout hitters in the lineup. Teams need those big bats to provide some authority in the middle of their order. A diverse group of approaches allows a team to be multifaceted in their run production, especially when the big hitters struggle to put the ball on the bat like the Twins were just a week ago.
The team sat below the .500 mark, and the offense was struggling to score runs. The Twins only scored 25 runs in the 10-game stretch starting at the Los Angeles Dodgers series going to last Friday’s game against the Chicago White Sox. Arraez was responsible for five runs during that period, recording three runs scored and two RBIs with a .343 OPB clip. There’s a reason he still finds ways to get penciled in the lineup even if he doesn’t have a true home defensively. He is that important to this team’s ability to create runs.
Last week’s numbers might not be overpowering, but he still finds ways to put the ball in play to make meaningful at-bats. Arraez is a contact hitter, but he doesn’t just make contact for the sake of putting the bat on the ball. It’s what separates Arraez from his former teammate Willians Astudillo.
La Tortuga also earned credibility as a hitter who could make contact. But more often than not, his contact was weak and led to outs. Astudillo couldn’t work the count either, with a 60 percent swing rate, and he was swinging at the first pitch 48 percent of the time. For contrast, Arraez swings at 42 percent of pitches and just 18 percent on the first one of an at-bat. A strikeout isn’t fun, but a lazy pop-up or weak ground ball doesn’t exactly move the needle for a lineup either. Arraez makes an impact by finding a way to make contact and working the count, providing value to the team that doesn’t show up in the stat sheet.
Arraez’s impact was on display this weekend. Buxton has obviously been the most significant factor in the lineup’s re-emergence over the last four games. Buxton put the Twins offense on his back on Sunday. He tied the game in the seventh inning and launched the longest walk-off home run in the Statcast era to sweep the White Sox. There’s no doubt that Buxton deserves the credit for doing things only he can do.
The immediate question after the home run was why Chicago opted to pitch to him with first base open late in the game? White Sox skipper Tony La Russa told reporters after the game he actually felt more comfortable attacking Buxton because Arraez was sitting in the on-deck circle.
“Any time you load the bases, you better have a significant advantage with the guy on deck,” he said. “Because you’re playing right into his hands, and [Arraez] on deck is a tough out. We had a better chance to do what Gio did to Buxton.”
We can debate whether or not La Russa was right to factor Arraez into his late-game strategy. La Russa’s logic was that Buxton is great, but he still strikes out at a 31 percent clip. All Arraez would have needed to do in that situation is do what he does best. He could tie or potentially win the game by slapping a single. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it still should be noted that a Hall of Fame manager was unwilling to even have Arraez come to the plate.
Luis Arraez has become a fan favorite in Minnesota, and it’s easy to see why. He might have been just a decade and a half off from becoming an icon of the piranha Twins of the early 2000s, but that doesn’t mean he’s less impactful. Whether it comes from his traditional slap-hitting or his entertaining at-bats with a head shake or two thrown in, Arraez has the makeup of a player who could be placed into any era and produce. In the current era of Twins baseball, Arraez is the perfect foil that takes the lineup to a different level.
