The well-scrutinized Luis Arraez-for-Pablo López trade might have been a necessary evil, but it feels evil nonetheless. It’s painful, and not just because Arraez has spent the first four months flirting with history. The pain goes beyond Arraez being a beloved fan-favorite. It’s not even that the Miami Marlins are winning with Arraez while the Minnesota Twins are hovering around .500, trying to hold on to win the saddest division race in MLB history.
It’s that Arraez is everything the Twins are not. He’s a line-drive-spraying, contact machine throwback in a hyper-optimized, three-true-outcome game. The man single-handedly counts for raising the entirety of the MLB’s batting average by about half a point. When the rest of the Twins go from being the Bomba Squad to the Mendoza Battalion, you’re going to miss Arraez. Especially when Minnesota’s far from efficient at playing the way they are.
Basically, Arraez is that meme where you want to go to McDonald’s, and Joey Gallo‘s 40%-and-rising strikeout rate and Max Kepler‘s (estimated) 800 weak grounders are the food Minnesota has at home.
Luckily for Twins fans, Edouard Julien‘s presence in the lineup has been like having a McDonald’s in your backyard.
In some ways, Julien looks a lot like Arraez. Both are lefty, bat-first, borderline positionless players. Coming through the minors, Julien showed off some contact chops, batting around .300 at Double- and Triple-A.
They’re very much not identical, though. Arraez is probably the most extreme bat-on-ball talent in the game. He’s on the higher end of swinging at pitches outside the zone, doing so 35% of the time. Arraez still manages to only swing at pitches he can hit, though, because he can hit anything. He makes contact on a whopping 92.9% of pitches he swings at that are outside the strike zone. The next-best hitter is Nick Madrigal, at 84.4%. That’s as extreme as it gets.
Meanwhile, Julien is a direct foil to Arraez’ hyper-aggressive style, getting his production on the strength of his extreme plate discipline. Juan Soto is the only player (minimum 150 plate appearances) who swings at fewer pitches outside the strike zone than Julien’s 18.7%. That sort of patience shouldn’t be as fun to watch as Arraez. Still, watching Julien hit is certainly fun in its own right. He’s about average when it comes to aggressiveness on pitches in the strike zone. However, that isn’t passivity. It appears he uses his batting eye to not call balls and strikes and draw walks, but to identify pitches he can square up.
It’s a fairly small sample size, but Julien’s made some of the best contact in baseball when his bat hits the ball. Julien is in the MLB’s top-20 in “Barrel” percentage. (A Barrel is a hard-hit ball whose exit velocity and launch angle suggests an expected batting average of .500 or more.) He’s putting great wood on 15.6% of his batted ball events so far. That’s comparable to star hitters like Mike Trout (16.3%), Ronald Acuña Jr. (15.7%), and Jorge Soler (15.6%).
The ball doesn’t quite explode off Julien’s bat the way it does for those guys, but his selectivity gives him opportunities to punch above his weight in terms of average and power. Julien has done just that over the last month, hitting .404 since June 20 with nine of his 23 hits going for extra bases. On the season, he’s just one of 20 hitters (alongside Arraez) hitting over .300, with a .308 mark over his 167 plate appearances.
Of those 20 .300 hitters, Julien makes a name for himself with his power. Julien’s .240 isolated power (slugging percentage minus batting average) puts him at fifth among that group, behind Shohei Ohtani, Mickey Moniak, Corey Seager, and Acuña In a fun bit of happenstance, the .300 hitter Julien’s power most lines up with was Team Canada teammate and mentor Freddie Freeman, who’s currently rocking a .237 ISO.
The question is: Is Julien magically appearing as an Arraez replacement too good to be true?
Immediately, there are two big-time red flags. The first is that Julien has struck out 53 times in 167 plate appearances, a 31.7% rate that’s destined to keep batting averages down. There are just 15 qualified batters who have struck out more than 30% of the time over the past five years. The ceiling on their batting average over the long term seems to be Brandon Marsh‘s .258. Most fall in somewhere between .220 and .250. That’s definitely not Arraez-like, even at the high end.
The other is the reason why his average is .308 today despite so many strikeouts: His sky-high .425 BABIP. If Julien can sustain the barreling skills he’s shown thus far, he might be able to have a very good and perhaps elite BABIP. But over the long-term, no one sees 42% of their balls in play land for hits. Using the last five years as a reference again, we see that BABIP tops out at .383 over the long haul. That player is Marsh again, which reinforces a fairly low batting average ceiling for Julien, should he keep striking out.
The good news is Julien has posted strong BABIPs at every level. Between AA and AAA (678 PAs), his BABIP sat at .392. That meshes well with the overall .387 mark Julien’s enjoyed at every level of professional ball, including the majors. This is only over three seasons, but the sample size represents nearly 800 batted balls. It feels safe to say that Julien is very good at this, even if regression is bound to arrive.
Which is why Julien and the Twins should hope that the other good sign present in this recent hot streak is for real: cutting down on strikeouts. Since June 20, he has only 17 strikeouts in 63 PAs, which is a much-improved 27.0 K%. Is that a touch on the high end? Sure. But Julien can thrive with that, as we’re clearly seeing now.
Pitchers are adjusting to Julien’s batting eye by refusing to throw him balls. He’s probably not swinging at them anyway, so what’s the point? As such, he’s seeing the highest percentage of strikes (49.2%) in baseball since June 20. Julien’s adjusting back, increasing his aggressiveness in response to the juicier offerings he’s seeing. His overall swing percentage rose from about 38.7% to 46.1%. Furthermore, his ability to make contact has only improved, both on pitches inside and outside of the zone.
As Julien racks up more experience, we’ll get a better sense of who he actually is. We know that it isn’t going to be Arraez, but if the Julien we’ve seen so far this year is for real, nobody should care. The lefty kinda-sorta second-baseman we have at home is productive, powerful, and perhaps best of all: actually fun to watch. It’s a rare bright spot in the lineup, and he’s forcing the Twins to find ways to get his bat involved.
