Luis Arraez has stopped making strikeouts

The last time Luis Arraez had a strikeout was August 10, a full month ago. He also had a strikeout the day before that. As of Tuesday morning, Arraez has played in 42 of the Padres' 46 games in the second half of the season, and has struck out exactly twice. No other qualified player has had fewer than 15 strikeouts since the All-Star break. Think about that for a moment. That means the player with the second fewest strikeouts has struck out 7 1/2 times more often than Arraez. Nearly 75% of qualified players have at least 30 strikeouts. Arraez has done that twice. Here's how that looks on a graph. Each bar represents a qualified player, and Arraez is the little green one on the far right. I've added a dashed line so you can get a sense of how far behind everyone else he is.

Arraez currently has 26 strikeouts on the season. If he can stay under 30, he would be just the ninth qualified player this century to do that, and the first since Jeff Keppinger in 2008. Even counting 2020, despite having been at bat 340 more times (and counting) than any other player this season, Arraez currently has fewer strikeouts than all but five of the 142 qualified players. Here's a chart of the entire 2024 season, just to round things out.

But let's focus again just on the second half. The Padres had 17 games left to play Tuesday morning when I ran a Stathead search to find which players in AL/NL history had the fewest strikeouts in the second half. Although the first All-Star Game was played in 1933, the data goes back to 1901, and I set a minimum of 180 batting appearances. (Since there is no break, I'm not sure exactly how Stathead breaks down those first 32 seasons, but we're more interested in the spirit of the thing anyway.) Including Arraez, 32 players have had no more than two strikeouts, 67 players have had no more than three strikeouts, 127 have had no more than four strikeouts, and 219 have had no more than five strikeouts. (All of the stats I use in this article are from Tuesday morning, but before I go any further, it's worth noting that in Tuesday night's game against the Mariners, Arraez hit 3-of-5 and did not have a strikeout.) Arraez has a chance to join a very, very short list, topped by John Dobbs, who in 1905 was the only player to not have a strikeout at all in the second half. And more importantly, he really knew how to rock a fisherman's sweater.

Could you look into those eyes – those strong, soulful eyes that have peered into the depths of so many cold and lonely nights and seen only the haunting shadow of despair – and throw strike three? No one could do that in the second half of the 1905 season.

The other takeaway from the list is how old the names on it are: Wee Willie Keeler, Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Shoeless Joe Jackson. If Arraez manages to avoid four more strikeouts over the next 17 games, he'll become only the second player since 1979 to join that list. The first player? Tony Gwynn, who had four strikeouts in 208 second batting appearances in 1993 while posting a crisp .400 batting average. Right now, Arraez has a career K%+ of 30, meaning he's had 70% fewer strikeouts than the average player over the course of his career. Our all-time lists show some players ahead of him, but we don't show actual strikeout totals for almost all of those players, so I don't trust their numbers too much. Of that group, the only number I really trust is Gwynn's 29. You may remember the screeching on talk radio earlier this season when Arraez was traded to San Diego. Some noted that Arraez's ending with the Padres was a fitting tribute to Gwynn, while others took offense at the comparison.

There's no denying that Gwynn was a better player. Arraez posted a wRC+ of 131 in both 2022 and 2023, the best of his career. Gwynn surpassed that mark in eight different seasons and finished his career with a wRC+ of 132. In his 41st season, he posted a wRC+ of 126, while the 27-year-old Arraez has yet to enter his decline phase. After all, Arraez never really had a defensive position, while Gwynn was a baserunning threat and a solid defender until knee problems slowed him down. However, let me remind you of the differences between their eras. The other pluses favor Arraez as Gwynn's rightful heir.

It may surprise you to learn that Arraez actually has a better batting average than Gwynn compared to his era. The biggest difference between the two is that Gwynn was more of a slugger. Just like Gwynn, Arraez is undoubtedly the best contact hitter of his era. However, contact is much, much harder to come by in this era. It probably shouldn't surprise us that Arraez had to sacrifice more power to achieve a comparable batting average than Gwynn did.

This is where it gets tricky. One could argue that the causes of Arraez's declining strikeout rate are also the causes of his performance regressing this season. First, his chase rate has taken a huge jump in each of the last two seasons. From 2019 to 2022, his chase rate has been stable at just over 24%. Last season, it rose to 31.8% and this season, it's risen to 35.6%. In two seasons, Arraez has fallen from the 78th percentile to the 10th. Normally, more chase would lead to more strikeouts, but Arraez is not normal, and his contact rate has increased enough both inside and outside the strike zone that he's still making more contact overall. Sports Info Solution has been tracking batting discipline since 2002, and the scatter plot below shows the data for all 3,366 qualified player seasons since then.

The two dots in the red circle represent Arraez in 2023 and 2024. Only six other players have ever made that much contact, and no one has done so while chasing anywhere near as often. As a result, Arraez is on pace to put the ball in play 616 times, the most since Statcast began tracking batted-ball events in 2015, and his walk rate has dropped even more dramatically than his strikeout rate.

That's not all. Because he's hitting more balls outside the strike zone, he's not hitting balls as hard as he used to. Last year, a BABIP of .362 masked that difference, this year it's .325. It's not hard to see why. When he swings at balls in the zone, his exit velocity is 88.8 mph. On throws outside the zone, it's 80.9, nearly 8 mph less. That's why Arraez's xwOBA of .332 is the lowest of his career. Having fewer strikeouts is great, but when you're also taking fewer walks and producing less on balls in play, it doesn't matter much. I have no idea if the Marlins or the Padres have tried to get Arraez to play more selectively. His talent for hitting the ball straight makes him a real underdog; It wouldn't shock me if they just let him do his thing because they don't want to get in his head and mess up his one weird trick.

Arraez hasn't just stopped getting strikeouts, though. Although his chase rate has increased from 34.6% in the first half to 37.8%, he's finally hitting enough to turn his season around. In the second half, he's running a wRC+ of 119, raising his season mark from 104 to 109. This will almost certainly be the third straight season that Arraez has the lowest strikeout rate in baseball, and it will very likely give him his third straight batting title. Additionally, he's only had a spectator strikeout twice all season. To date, 34 different players have had at least three spectator strikeouts in a game.

Finally, let's look at one of Arraez's two second-half strikeouts. Both came against the Marlins, who Arraez started the season with and who probably had a pretty good scouting report against him. I'm showing you the August 9 strikeout because it's a stunner. It came in the top of the eighth inning against George Soriano. Home plate umpire Scott Barry had a high strike zone all game and it seems Soriano was aware of it. Here's strike one:

This is a four-seamer that catches the ball high and far away in the very corner of the zone. It's a borderline strike, and when the pitcher gets the call, there's not much you can do but tip your hat. Here's the second pitch:

That's no longer borderline. That's a slider, and according to Statcast and the strike zone on the screen, he threw too far wide. How often do pitchers miss with a breaking ball above the zone and get a strike? Not often. As you can see, Arraez isn't particularly happy about falling behind 2-0 thanks to a borderline call followed by a bad call. At this point, he almost certainly feels like he has to grab anything because there's absolutely no reason to trust the umpire's strike zone. Here's strike three:

That's a check swing on a perfectly executed back foot slider. Personally, I'd argue that Arraez didn't get through, but either way, it's close.

Just to recap, we have a borderline strike in the corner, a missed call above the zone, and a borderline checked swing. That's a bad luck strikeout if ever there was one. Arraez would strikeout again the next day and then decide he's done with that kind of thing, possibly forever.